Lorrie Moore - The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

She would park the car right off Delancey Street; there would be a spot across the street from the hotel with the Pepsi sign and hotel in lights beneath. All night, sirens would keen, and traffic would whoosh and grind its way down Houston, down Canal, toward the Holland Tunnel — a bent sign to which aimed straight at her window. She would get up in the morning and go for sundries; at the corner bodega the clerk would mis-press the numbers on the register, and the toothpaste would ring up at $2,000. "Two thousand dollars!" the clerk would howl, standing back and looking at Odette. "Get a real toothpaste!" From a long distance, and at night, a man would phone to say, doubtfully, "I should come visit on Valentine's," history of all kinds, incongruous and mangling itself, eating its own lips.

If she had spurned gifts from fate or God or some earnest substitute, she would never feel it in that way. She felt like someone of whom she was fond, an old and future friend of herself, still unspent and up ahead somewhere, like a light that moves.

dennis's ex-wife had fallen in love with a man she said was like out of a book. Dennis forgot to ask what book. He was depressed and barely dating. "I should have said to her, 'Yeah, and what book?'" Dennis was always kicking himself on the phone, not an easy thing, the tricky ouch of it. His friend Mave tended to doodle a lot when talking to him, slinky items with features, or a solitary game of tick-tack-toe. Sometimes she even interrupted him to ask what time it was. Her clock was in the other room.

"But you know," Dennis was saying, "I've got my own means of revenge: If she wants to go out with other men, I'm going to sit here and just let her."

"That's an incredibly powerful form of revenge," said Mave. She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth. When she was on the phone she often had to improvise Dennis's face from a window: the pug nose of the lock, the paned eyes, the lip jut of the sill. Or else she drew another slinky item with features. People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane.

They met for dinner at some sort of macrobiotic place, because Dennis had recently become obsessed. Before his wife left him, his idea of eating healthy had been to go to McDonald's and order the Filet-o-Fish, but now he had whole books about miso. And about tempeh. Mostly, however, he had books about love. He believed in studying his own heart this way. Men were like that, Mave had noticed. They liked to look in the mirror. For women, mirrors were a chore: Women looked, frowned, got out equipment, and went to work. But for men mirrors were sex: Men locked gazes with their own reflections, undressed themselves with their eyes, and stared for a shockingly long time. Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn't possibly be a bad thing.

This month Dennis was reading books written supposedly for women, titles like Get Real, Smarting Cookie, Get Real and Why I Hate Myself . "Those books are trouble," said Mave. "Too many well-adjusted people will endanger the arts in this country. To say nothing of the professions." She studied Dennis's flipped-over tie, the soft, torn eye of its clipped label. "You choose to be healthy, and you leave too many good people behind."

But Dennis said he identified, that the books were amazing, and he reached into the book bag he now carried with him everywhere and read passages aloud. "Here," he said to Mave, who had brought her own whiskey to the place and was pouring it into a water glass from which she had drunk all the water and left only the ice. She had had to argue with the waitress to get ice. "Oh, no — here," Dennis said. He had found another passage from Why I Hate Myself and started to read it, loud and with expression, when suddenly he broke into a disconsolate weep, deep and from the belly. "Oh, God, I'm sorry."

Mave shoved her whiskey glass across the table toward him. "Don't worry about it," she murmured. He took a sip, then put the book away. He dug through his book bag and found Kleenex to dab at his nose.

"I didn't get like this on my own," he said. "There are people responsible." Inside his bag Mave could see a news magazine with the exasperated headline: ETHIOPIA: WHY ARE THEY STARVING THIS TIME?

"Boredom is heartless," said Dennis, the tears slowing. He indicated the magazine. "When the face goes into a yawn, the blood to the chest gets constricted."

"Are you finished with my drink?"

"No." He took another gulp and winced. "I mean, yes," and he handed it back to Mave, wiped his mouth with a napkin. Mave looked at Dennis's face and was glad no one had broken up with her recently. When someone broke up with you, you became very unattractive, and it confirmed all the doubts that person had ever had about you to begin with. "Wait, just one more sip." Someone broke up with you and you yelled. You blistered, withered, and flushed. You apologized to inanimate objects and drank when you swore you wouldn't. You went around humming the theme to Valley of the Dolls , doing all the instruments even, lingering on the line about gotta get off, gonna get, have to get .… It wasn't good to go out on that kind of limb for love. You went out on a limb for food, but not for love. Love was not food. Love, thought Mave, was more like the rest rooms at the Ziegfeld: sinks in the stalls, big deal. Mave worked hard to forget very quickly afterward what the men she went out with even looked like. This was called sticking close to the trunk.

"All yours," said Dennis. He was smiling now. The whiskey brought the blood to his face in a nice way.

Mave looked down at her menu. "There's no spaghetti and meatballs here. I wanted to order the child's portion of the spaghetti and meatballs."

"Oh, that reminds me," said Dennis, shaking a finger for emphasis. With his books away and the whiskey in him, he seemed more confident. "Did I tell you the guy my wife's seeing is Italian? Milanese, not Brooklyn. What do you suppose that means, her falling in love with an Italian?"

"It means she's going to feel scruffy all the time. It means that he will stare at all the fuzzies on her shirt while she is telling him something painful about a childhood birthday party nobody came to. Let's face it: She's going to start to miss the fact, Dennis, that your hair zooms out all over the goddamn place."

"I'm getting it cut tomorrow."

Mave put on her reading glasses. "This is not a restaurant. Restaurants serve different things from this."

"You know, one thing about these books for women, I have to tell you. The whole emphasis on locating and accepting your homosexual side is really very powerful. It frees and expands some other sort of love in you."

Mave looked up at him and smiled. She was drawn to the insane because of their blazing minds. "So you've located and accepted?"

"Well, I've realized this. I like boys. And I like girls." He leaned toward her confidentially. "I just don't like berk !" Dennis reached again for Mave's whiskey. "Of course, I am completely in the wrong town. May I?" He leaned his head back, and the ice cubes knocked against his teeth. Water beaded up on his chin. "So, Mave, who are you romancing these days?" Dennis was beginning to look drunk. His lips were smooth and thick and hung open like a change purse.

"These days?" There were little ways like this of stalling for time.