Lorrie Moore - The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

"He's a sexist pig," said Eleanor.

"Maybe he's just a latent necrophiliac," I said, realizing afterward that probably they were the same thing.

"Lust for dust," shrugged Eleanor. "Into a cold one after work."

So we never had the ritual of discussion, decision, and apartment hunting. It was simply that the Indian couple across the hall broke their lease and Gerard suddenly said during the Carson monologue one night, "Hey, maybe I'll move in there. It might be cheaper than the forest."

We had separate rents, separate kitchens, separate phone numbers, separate bathrooms with back-to-back toilets. Sometimes he'd knock on the wall and ask through the pipes how I was doing. "Fine, Gerard. Just fine."

"Great to hear," he'd say. And then we'd flush our toilets in unison.

"Kinky," said Eleanor.

"It's like parallel universes," I said. "It's like living in twin beds."

"It's like Delmar, Maryland, which is the same town as Delmar, Delaware."

"It's like living in twin beds," I said again.

"It's like the Borscht Belt," said Eleanor. "First you try it out in the Catskills before you move it to the big time."

"It's living flush up against rejection," I said.

"It's so like Gerard," said Eleanor. "That man lives across the hall from his own fucking heart."

"He's a musician," I said doubtfully. Too often I made these sorts of excuses, like a Rumpelstiltskin of love, stickily spinning straw into gold.

"Please," cautioned Eleanor, pointing at her stomach. "Please, my B.L.T."

these are the words they used: aspirate, mammogram, surgery, blockage, wait . They first just wanted to wait and see if it was a temporary blockage of milk ducts.

"Milk Duds?" exclaimed Gerard.

"Ducks!" I shouted. "Milk ducks!"

If the lump didn't go away in a month, they would talk further, using the other three words. Aspirate sounded breathy and hopeful, I had always had aspirations; and mammogram sounded like a cute little nickname one gave a favorite grandmother. But the other words I didn't like. " Wait ?" I asked, tense as a yellow light. " Wait and see if it goes away? I could have done that all on my own." The nurse-practitioner smiled. I liked her. She didn't attribute everything to "stress" or to my "personal life," a redundancy I was never fond of. "Maybe," she said. "But maybe not." Then the doctor handed me an appointment card and a prescription for sedatives.

There was this to be said for the sedatives: They helped you adjust to death better. It was difficult to pick up and move anywhere, let alone from life to death, without the necessary psychic equipment. That was why, I realized, persons in messy, unhappy situations had trouble getting out: Their strength ebbed; they simultaneously aged and regressed; they had no sedatives. They didn't know who they were, though they suspected they were the browning, on-sale hamburger of the parallel universe. Frightened of their own toes, they needed the bravery of sedatives. Which could make them look generously upon the skinny scrap of their life and deem it good, ensuring a calmer death. It was, after all, easier to leave something you truly, serenely loved than something you really and frantically didn't quite. A good dying was a matter of the right attitude. A healthy death, like anything — job promotions or looking younger — was simply a matter of "feeling good about yourself." Which is where the sedatives came in. Sedate as a mint, a woman could place a happy hand on the shoulder of death and rasp out, "Waddya say, buddy, wanna dance?"

Also, you could get chores done.

You could get groceries bought.

You could do laundry and fold.

Gerard's Dido and Aeneas was a rock version of the Purcell opera. I had never seen it. He didn't want me going to the rehearsals. He said he wanted to present the whole perfect show to me, at the end, like a gift. Sometimes I thought he might be falling in love with Dido, his leading lady, whose real name was Susan Fitzbaum.

"Have fun in Tunis," I'd say as he disappeared off to rehearsals. I liked to say Tunis . It sounded obscene, like a rarely glimpsed body part.

"Carthage, Benna. Carthage. Nice place to visit."

"Though you, of course, prefer Italy."

"For history? For laying down roots? Absolutely. Have you seen my keys?"

"Ha! The day you lay down roots…" But I couldn't think of how to finish it. "That'll be the day you lay down roots," I said.

"Why, my dear, do you think they called it Rome ?" He grinned. I handed him his keys. They were under an Opera News I'd been using to thwack flies.

"Thank you for the keys," he smiled, and then he was off, down the stairs, a post-modern blur of battered leather jacket, sloppily shouldered canvas bag, and pantcuffs misironed into Mobius strips.

during rehearsal breaks he would phone. "Where do you want to sleep tonight, your place or mine?"

"Mine," I said.

Surely he wasn't in love with Susan Fitzbaum. Surely she wasn't in love with him.

eleanor and iaround this time founded The Quit-Calling-Me-Shirley School of Comedy. It entailed the two of us meeting downtown for drinks and making despairing pronouncements about life and love which always began, "But surely…" It entailed what Eleanor called, "The Great White Whine": whiney white people getting together over white wine and whining.

"Our sex life is disappearing," I would say. "Gerard goes to the bathroom and I call it 'Shaking Hands with the Unemployed.' Men hit thirty, I swear, and they want to make love twice a year, like seals."

"We've got three more years of sexual peak," says Eleanor crossing her eyes and pretending to strangle herself. "When's the last time you guys made love?" She tried looking nonchalant. I did my best. I sang, " 'January, February, June, or July,'" but the waitress came over to take our orders and gave us hostile looks. We liked to try to make her feel guilty by leaving large tips.

"I'm feeling pre-menstrual," said Eleanor. "I was coerced into writing grant proposals all day. I've decided that I hate all short people, rich people, government officials, poets, and homosexuals."

"Don't forget gypsies," I said.

"Gypsies!" she shrieked. "I despise gypsies!" She drank chablis in a way that was part glee, part terror. It was always quick. "Can you tell I'm trying to be happy?" she said.

Eleanor was part of a local grant-funded actor-poets group which did dramatic and often beautiful readings of poems written by famous dead people. My favorites were Eleanor's Romeo soliloquies, though she did a wonderful "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." I was a crummy dancer with no discipline and a scorn for all forms of dance-exercise who went from one aerobics job to the next, trying to convince students I loved it. ("Living, acting, occurring in the presence of oxygen!" I would explain with concocted exuberance. At least I didn't say things like "Tighten the bun to intensify the stretch!" or "Come on, girls, bods up.") I had just left a job in a health club and had been hired at Fitchville's Community School of the Arts to teach a class of senior citizens. Geriatric aerobics.

"Don't you feel that way about dancing?" Eleanor asked. "I mean, I'd love to try to write and read something of mine , but why bother. I finally came to that realization last summer reading Hart Crane in an inner tube in the middle of the lake. Now there's a poet."

"There's a poet who could have used an inner tube. Don't be so hard on yourself." Eleanor was smart, over-thirty, over-weight, and had never had a serious boyfriend. She was the daughter of a doctor who still sent her money. She took our mutual mediocrity harder than I did. "You shouldn't let yourself be made so miserable," I attempted.