Lorrie Moore - The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

"Merry Christmas to Bert!" Sofie shouted. The tin was now empty.

"Yes, Merry Christmas to Bert!" said Aileen. She shoved the tin back into her pocket. Then she and Sofie raced back into the house, to get warm.

Jack was in the kitchen, standing by the stove, still in his pajamas. He was pouring orange juice and heating buns.

"Daddy, Merry Christmas to Bert!" Sofie popped open the snaps of her snowsuit.

"Yes," said Jack, turning. "Merry Christmas to Bert!" He handed Sofie some juice, then Aileen. But before she drank hers, Aileen waited for him to say something else. He cleared his throat and stepped forward. He raised his glass. His large quizzical smile said, This is a very weird family. But instead, he exclaimed, "Merry Christmas to everyone in the whole wide world!" and let it go at that.

it's a chilly night, bitter inside and out. After a grisly month-long court proceeding, Bill's good friend Albert has become single again — and characteristically curatorial: Albert has invited his friends over to his sublet to celebrate New Year's Eve and watch his nuptial and postnuptial videos, which Albert has hauled down from the bookcase and proffered with ironic wonder and glee. At each of his three weddings, Albert's elderly mother had videotaped the ceremony, and at the crucial moment in the vows, each time, Albert's face turns impishly from his bride, looks straight into his mother's camera, and says, "I do. I swear I do." The divorce proceedings, by contrast, are mute, herky-jerky, and badly lit ("A clerk," says Albert): there are wan smiles, business suits, the waving of a pen.

At the end, Albert's guests clap. Bill puts his fingers in his mouth and whistles shrilly (not every man can do this; Bill himself didn't learn until college, though already that was thirty years ago; three decades of ear-piercing whistling — youth shall not always be wasted on the young). Albert nods, snaps the tapes back into their plastic cases, turns on the lights, and sighs.

"No more weddings," Albert announces. "No more divorces. No more wasting time. From here on in, I'm just going to go out there, find a woman I really don't like very much, and give her a house."

Bill, divorced only once, is here tonight with Debbie, a woman who is too young for him: at least that is what he knows is said, though the next time it is said to his face, Bill will shout, "I beg your pardon!" Maybe not shout. Maybe squeak. Squeak with a dash of begging. Then he'll just hurl himself to the ground and plead for a quick stoning. For now, this second, however, he will pretend to a braver, more evolved heart, explaining to anyone who might ask how much easier it would be to venture out still with his ex-wife, someone his own age, but no, not Bill, not big brave Bill: Bill has entered something complex, spiritually biracial, politically tricky, and, truth be told, physically demanding. Youth will not be wasted on the young.

Who the hell is that?

She looks fourteen!

You can't be serious!

Bill has had to drink more than usual. He has had to admit to himself that on his own, without any wine, he doesn't have a shred of the courage necessary for this romance.

("Not to pry, Bill, or ply you with feminist considerations, but, excuse me — you're dating a twenty-five-year-old?"

"Twenty-four," he says. "But you were close!")

His women friends have yelled at him — or sort of yelled. It's really been more of a cross between sighing and giggling. "Don't be cruel," Bill has had to say.

Albert has been kinder, more delicate, in tone if not in substance. " Some people might consider your involvement with this girl a misuse of your charm," he said slowly.

"But I've worked hard for this charm," said Bill. "Believe me, I started from scratch. Can't I do with it what I want?"

Albert sized up Bill's weight loss and slight tan, the sprinkle of freckles like berry seeds across Bill's arms, the summer whites worn way past Labor Day in the law school's cavernous, crowded lecture halls, and he said, "Well then, some people might think it a mishandling of your position." He paused, put his arm around Bill. "But hey, I think it has made you look very — tennisy."

Bill shoved his hands in his pockets. "You mean the whole kindness of strangers thing?"

Albert took his arm back. "What are you talking about?" he asked, and then his face fell in a kind of melting, concerned way. "Oh, you poor thing," he said. "You poor, poor thing."

Bill has protested, obfuscated, gone into hiding. But he is too tired to keep Debbie in the closet anymore. The body has only so many weeks of stage fright in it before it simply gives up and just goes out onstage. Moreover, this semester Debbie is no longer taking either of his Constitutional Law classes. She is no longer, between weekly lectures, at home in his bed, with a rented movie, saying things that are supposed to make him laugh, things like "Open up, doll. Is that drool?" and "Don't you dare think I'm doing this for a good grade. I'm doing this for a beautiful grade." Debbie no longer performs her remarks at him, which he misses a little, all that effort and desire. "If I'm just a passing fancy, then I want to pass fancy," she once said. Also, "Law school: It's the film school of the nineties."

Debbie is no longer a student of his, so at last their appearance together is only unattractive and self-conscious-making but not illegal. Bill can show up with her for dinner. He can live in the present, his newly favorite tense.

But he must remember who is here at this party, people for whom history, acquired knowledge, the accumulation of days and years is everything — or is this simply the convenient shorthand of his own paranoia? There is Albert, with his videos; Albert's old friend Brigitte, a Berlin-born political scientist; Stanley Mix, off every other semester to fly to Japan and study the zoological effects of radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Stanley's wife, Roberta, a travel agent and obsessive tabulator of Stanley's frequent flyer miles (Bill has often admired her posters: step back in time, come to Argentina says the one on her door); Lina, a pretty visiting Serb teaching in Slavic Studies; and Lina's doctor husband, Jack, a Texan who five years ago in Yugoslavia put Dallas dirt under the laboring Lina's hospital bed so that his son could be "born on Texan soil." ("But the boy is a total sairb" Lina says of her son, rolling her lovely r's. "Just don't tell Jack.")

Lina.

Lina, Lina.

Bill is a little taken with Lina.

"You are with Debbie because somewhere in your pahst ease some pretty leetle girl who went away from you," Lina said to him once on the phone.

"Or, how about because everyone else I know is married."

"Ha!" she said. "You only believe they are married."

Which sounded, to Bill, like the late-night, adult version of Peter Pan —no Mary Martin, no songs, just a lot of wishing and thinking lovely thoughts; then afterward all the participants throw themselves out the window.

And never, never land?

Marriage, Bill thinks: it's the film school of the nineties.

Truth be told, Bill is a little afraid of suicide. Taking one's life, he thinks, has too many glitzy things to offer: a real edge on the narrative (albeit retrospectively), a disproportionate philosophical advantage (though again, retrospectively), the last word, the final cut, the parting shot. Most importantly, it gets you the hell out of there, wherever it is you are, and he can see how such a thing might happen in a weak but brilliant moment, one you might just regret later while looking down from the depthless sky or up through two sandy anthills and some weeds.

Still, Lina is the one he finds himself thinking about, and carefully dressing for in the morning — removing all dry-cleaning tags and matching his socks.