Lorrie Moore - The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

There was noise in the pub.

Blank is to childhood as journey is to lips.

"Right," said Mrs. Mallon, looking into her stout in a concentrated, bright-eyed way. She had never been courted before, not once in her entire life, and now she blushed, ears on fire, lifted her pint, and drank.

i tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. I tell them it's the body's reaching, bringing air to itself. I tell them that it's the heart's triumph, the victory speech of the feet, the refinement of animal lunge and flight, the purest metaphor of tribe and self. It's life flipping death the bird.

I make this stuff up. But then I feel the stray voltage of my rented charisma, hear the jerry-rigged authority in my voice, and I, too, believe. I'm convinced. The troupe dismantled, the choreography commissions dwindling, my body harder to make limber, to make go, I have come here for two weeks — to Pennsylvania Dutch country, as a "Dancer in the Schools." I visit classes, at colleges and elementary schools, spreading Dance's holy word. My head fills with my own yack. What interior life has accrued in me is depleted fast, emptied out my mouth, as I stand before audiences, answering their fearful, forbidding German questions about art and my "whorish dances" (the thrusted hip, the sudden bump and grind before an attitude) . They ask why everything I make seems so "feministic."

"I think the word is feministical" I say. I've grown tired. I burned down my life for a few good pieces, and now this.

With only one night left, I've fled the Quality Inn. (creamed chicken on waffle $3.95 reads the sign out front. How could I leave?) The karaoke in the cocktail lounge has kept me up, all those tipsy and bellowing voices just back from the men's room and urged to the front of the lounge to sing "Sexual Healing" or "Alfie." I've accepted an invitation to stay with my old friend Cal, who teaches anthropology at Burkwell, one of the myriad local colleges. He and his wife own a former frat house they've never bothered to renovate. "It was the only way we could live in a house this big," he says. "Besides, we're perversely fascinated by the wreckage." It is Fastnacht, the lip of Lent, the night when the locals make hot fried dough and eat it in honor of Christ. We are outside, before dinner, walking Cal's dog, Chappers, in the cold.

"The house is amazing to look at," I say. "It's beat-up in such an intricate way. Like a Rauschenberg. Like one of those beautiful wind-tattered billboards one sees in the California desert." I'm determined to be agreeable; the house, truth be told, is a shock. Maple seedlings have sprouted up through the dining room floorboards, from where a tree outside has pushed into the foundation. Squirrels the size of collies scrabble in the walls. Paint is chipping everywhere, in scales and blisters and flaps; in the cracked plaster beneath are written the names of women who, in 1972,1973, and 1974, spent the night during Spring Rush weekend. The kitchen ceiling reads "Sigma power!" and "Wank me with a spoon."

But I haven't seen Cal in twelve years, not since he left for Belgium on a Fulbright, so I must be nice. He seems different to me: shorter, older, cleaner, despite the house. In a burst of candor, he has already confessed that those long years ago, out of friendship for me, he'd been exaggerating his interest in dance. "I didn't get it," he admitted. "I kept trying to figure out the story . I'd look at the purple guy who hadn't moved in awhile, and I'd think, So what's the issue with him ?"

Now Chappers tugs at his leash. "Yeah, the house." Cal sighs. "We did once have a painter give us an estimate, but we were put off by the names of the paints: Myth, Vesper, Snickerdoodle. I didn't want anything called Snickerdoodle in my house."

"What is a Snickerdoodle?"

"I think they're hunted in Madagascar."

I leap to join him, to play. "Or eaten in Vienna," I say.

"Or worshiped in L.A." I laugh again for him, and then we watch as Chappers sniffs at the roots of an oak.

"But a myth or a vesper — they're always good," I add.

"Crucial," he says. "But we didn't need paint for that."

Cal's son, Eugene, is seven and has cystic fibrosis. Eugene's whole life is a race with medical research. "It's not that I'm not for the arts," says Cal. " You're here; money for the arts brought you here. That's wonderful. It's wonderful to see you after all these years. It's wonderful to fund the arts. It's wonderful; you're wonderful. The arts are so nice and wonderful. But really: I say, let's give all the money, every last fucking dime, to science."

Something chokes up in him. There can be optimism in the increments, the bits, the chapters; but I haven't seen him in twelve years and he has had to tell me the whole story, straight from the beginning, and it's the whole story that's just so sad.

"We both carried the gene but never knew," he says. "That's the way it works. The odds are one in twenty, times one in twenty, and then after that, still only one in four. One in sixteen hundred, total. Bingo! We should move to Vegas."

When I first knew Cal, we were in New York, just out of graduate school; he was single, and anxious, and struck me as someone who would never actually marry and have a family, or if he did, would marry someone decorative, someone slight. But now, twelve years later, his silver-haired wife, Simone, is nothing like that: she is big and fierce and original, joined with him in grief and courage. She storms out of PTA meetings. She glues little sequins to her shoes. English is her third language; she was once a French diplomat to Belgium and to Japan. "I miss the caviar" is all she'll say of it. "I miss the caviar so much." Now, in Pennsylvania Dutchland, she paints satirical oils of long-armed handless people. "The locals," she explains in her French accent, giggling. "But I can't paint hands." She and Eugene have made a studio from one of the wrecked rooms upstairs.

"How is Simone through all this?" I ask.

"She's better than I am," he says. "She had a sister who died young. She expects unhappiness."

"But isn't there hope?" I ask, stuck for words.

Already, Cal says, Eugene has degenerated, grown worse, too much liquid in his lungs. "Stickiness," he calls it. "If he were three, instead of seven, there'd be more hope. The researchers are making some strides; they really are."

"He's a great kid," I say. Across the street, there are old Colonial houses with candles lit in each window; it is a Pennsylvania Dutch custom, or left over from Desert Storm, depending on whom you ask.

Cal stops and turns toward me, and the dog comes up and nuzzles him. "It's not just that Eugene's great," he says. "It's not just the precocity or that he's the only child I'll ever have. It's also that he's such a good person. He accepts things. He's very good at understanding everything."

I cannot imagine anything in my life that contains such sorrow as this, such anticipation of missing someone. Cal falls silent, the dog trots before us, and I place my hand lightly in the middle of Cal's back as we walk like that through the cold, empty streets. Up in the sky, Venus and the thinnest paring of sickle moon, like a cup and saucer, like a nose and mouth, have made the Turkish flag in the sky. "Look at that," I say to Cal as we traipse after the dog, the leash taut as a stick.

"Wow," Cal says. "The Turkish flag."

"you're back, you're back!" Eugene shouts from inside, dashing toward the front door as we step up onto the front porch with Chappers. Eugene is in his pajamas already, his body skinny and hunched. His glasses are thick, magnifying, and his eyes, puffed and swimming, seem not to miss a thing. He slides into the front entry-way, in his stocking feet, and lands on the floor. He smiles up at me, all charm, like a kid with a crush. He has painted his face with Merthiolate and hopes we'll find that funny.