Lorrie Moore - The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

"I don't have those pills," said Eleanor. "Where do you get those pills?"

"I think what you do do in the community is absolutely joyous. You make people happy."

"Thank you, Miss Hallmark Hall of Obscurity."

"Sorry," I said.

"You know what poetry is about?" said Eleanor. "The impossibility of sexual love. Poets finally don't even want genitals, their own or anyone else's. A poet wants metaphors, patterns, some ersatz physics of love. For a poet, to love is to have no lover. And to live" — she raised her wine glass and failed to suppress a smile—"is to have no liver."

basically, i realized, I was living in that awful stage of life from the age of twenty-six to thirty-seven known as stupidity . It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight. Nonetheless you tried things out:

"Love is the cultural exchange program of futility and eroticism," I said. And Eleanor would say, "Oh, how cynical can you get," meaning not nearly cynical enough. I had made it sound dreadful but somehow fair, like a sleepaway camp. "Being in love with Gerard is like sleeping in the middle of the freeway," I tried. "Thatta girl," said Eleanor. "Much better."

on the community school's application form, where it had asked "Are you married?" (this was optional information), I had written an emphatic " No" and next to it, where it asked "To whom?" I'd written "A guy named Gerard." My class of senior citizens somehow found out about it and once classes got under way, they smiled, shook their heads, and teased me. "A good-humored girl like you," was the retrograde gist, "and no husband!"

Classes were held at night on the third floor of the arts school, which was a big Victorian house on the edge of downtown. The dance studio was creaky and the mirrors were nightmares, like aluminum foil slapped on walls. I did what I could. "Tuck, lift, flex, repeat. Tuck, lift, flex, now knee-slap lunge." I had ten women in their sixties and a man named Barney who was seventy-three. "That's it, Barney," I would shout. "Pick it up now," though I didn't usually mean the tempo: Barney had a hearing aid which kept clacking to the floor mid-routine. After class he would linger and try to chat — apologize for the hearing aid or tell me loud stories about his sister Zenia, who was all of eighty-one and mobile, apparently, as a bug. "So you and your sister, you're pretty close?" I asked once, putting away the cassettes.

"Close!?" he hooted, and then took out his wallet and showed me a picture of Zenia in Majorca in a yellow bathing suit. He had never married, he said.

The women mothered me. They clustered around me after class and suggested different things I should be doing in order to get a husband. The big one was frosting my hair. "Don't you think so, Lodeme? Shouldn't Benna frost her hair?" Lodeme was more or less the ringleader, had the nattiest leotard (lavender and navy stripes), was in great shape, could hold a V-sit for minutes, and strove incessantly for a tough, grizzly wisdom. "First the hair, then the heart,"

bellowed Lodeme. "Frost your heart, then you'll be okay. No one falls in love with a good man. Right, Barn?" Then she'd chuck him on the arm and his hearing aid would fall out. After class I would take a sedative.

there was a period where I kept trying to make anagrams out of words that weren't anagrams: moonscape and menopause; gutless and guilts; lovesick and evil louse . I would meet Eleanor either for a drink at our Shirley School meetings or for breakfast at Hank's Grill, and if I got there first, I would scribble the words over and over again on a napkin, trying to make them fit — like a child dividing three into two, not able to make it go.

"Howdy," I said to Eleanor when she arrived and flopped down. I had lovesick and evil sock scrawled in large letters.

"You're losing it, Benna. It must be your love life." Eleanor leaned over and wrote bedroom and boredom; she had always been the smarter one. "Order the tomato juice," she said. "That's how you get rid of the smell of skunk."

Gerard was a large, green-eyed man who smelled like baby powder and who was preoccupied with great music. I'd lie there in bed explaining something terrible and personal and he'd interrupt with, "That's like Brahms. You're like Brahms." And I'd say, "What do you mean, I'm old and fat with a beard?" And Gerard would smile and say, "Exactly." Once, after I'd shared with him the various humiliations of my adolescence, he said, "That's kind of like Stravinsky."

And I said, annoyed, "What, he didn't get his period until the ninth grade? At least it's consoling to know that everything that's happened to me has also happened to a famous composer."

"You don't really like music, do you?" said Gerard.

Actually, I loved music. Sometimes I think that's the reason I fell in love with Gerard to begin with. Perhaps it had nothing to do really with the smell of his skin or the huge stretch of his legs or the particular rhythm of his words (a prairie reggae, he called it), but only to do with the fact that he could play any instrument that had strings — piano, banjo, cello — that he composed rock operas and tone poems, that he sang pop and lieder. I was surrounded by music. If I was reading a newspaper, he would listen to Mozart. If I was watching the news, he'd put on Madame Butterfly , saying it amounted to the same thing, Americans romping around in countries they didn't belong in. I had only to step across the moat of the hallway and I would learn something: Vivaldi was a red-haired priest; Schumann crippled his hand with a hand extender; Brahms never married, that was the biggie, the one Gerard liked best to tell me. "Okay, okay," I would say. Or sometimes simply, "So?"

Before I met Gerard, everything I knew about classical music I'd gleaned off the sound track record of The Turning Point . Now, however, I could hum Musetta's Waltz for at least three bars. Now I owned all of Beethoven's piano concertos. Now I knew that Percy Grainger had been married in the Hollywood Bowl. "But Brahms," said Gerard, "now Brahms never married."

It's not that I wanted to be married. It's that I wanted a Marriage Equivalent, although I never knew exactly what that was, and often suspected that there was really no such thing. Yet I was convinced there had to be something better than the lonely farce living across town or hall could, with very little time, become.

Which made me feel guilty and bourgeois. So I comforted myself with Gerard's faults: He was infantile; he always lost his keys; he was from Nebraska, like some horrible talk show host; he had grown up not far from one of the oldest service plazas on I-80; he told jokes that had the words wiener and fart in them; he once referred to sex as "hiding the salami." He also had a habit of charging after small animals and frightening them. Actually, the first time he did this it was with a bird in the park, and I laughed, thinking it hilarious. Later, I realized it was weird: Gerard was thirty-one and charging after small mammals, sending them leaping into bushes, up trees, over furniture. He would then turn and grin, like a charmed maniac, a Puck with a Master's degree. He liked also to water down the face and neck fur of cats and dogs, smoothing it back with his palms, like a hairdresser, saying it made them look like Judy Garland. I realized that life was too short for anyone honestly and thoroughly to outgrow anything, but it was clear that some people were making more of an effort than others.

In my early twenties I got annoyed with women who complained that men were shallow and incapable of commitment. "Men, women, they're all the same," I said. "Some women are capable of commitment, some are not. Some men are capable of commitment and some are not. It's not a matter of gender." Then I met Gerard, and I began to believe that men were shallow and incapable of commitment.