Lorrie Moore - The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

He falls asleep, and by the time the boat returns to the wharf, ten thousand anesthesiologists have invaded the town. There are buses and crowds. "Uh-oh. Look out. A medical convention," says Mack to Quilty. "Watch your step." At a turquoise kiosk near the pier, he spots more missing-children posters. He half-expects to see himself and Quilty posted up there, two more lost boys in America. Instead, there is a heartbreaking nine-year-old named Charlie. There is a three-year-old named Kyle. There is also the same kid from Denny's up north: Seth, age five.

"Are they cute?" asks Quilty.

"Who?" says Mack.

"All those nice young doctors," says Quilty. "Are they good-looking?"

"Hell if I know," says Mack.

"Oh, don't give me that," says Quilty. "You forget to whom you are speaking, my dear. I can feel you looking around."

Mack says nothing for a while. Not until after he's led Quilty over to a cafe for some chicory coffee and a beignet, which he feeds pieces of to Guapo. The people at the table next to them, in some kind of morbid theatrical contest, are reading aloud obituaries from the Times-Picayune . "This town's wacko," says Mack. Back at the hotel, someone in the next room is playing "The Star-Spangled Banner" on the kazoo.

They speed out the next day — across the incandescent olive milk of the swamps, leafless, burned trees jutting from them like crosses. "You're going too fast," says Quilty. "You're driving like goddamn Sean Penn!" Mack, following no particular route, heads out toward the salt marshes: grebes, blackbirds, sherbet-winged flamingos fly in low over the feathery bulrushes. It is all pretty, in its bleak way. Lone cattle are loose and munching cordgrass amid the oil rigs.

"Which way are we going?"

He suddenly swings north toward Memphis. "North. Memphis." All he can think of now is getting back.

"What are you thinking of?"

"Nothing."

"What are you looking at?"

"Nothing. Scenery."

"Hot bods?"

"Yeah. Just saw a great cow," says Mack. "And a not-bad possum."

when they are finally checked into the Peabody Hotel, it is already late afternoon. Their room is a little stuffy and lit in a strange, golden way. Mack flops on the bed.

Quilt)', beginning to perspire, takes his jacket off and throws it on the floor. "Y'know: what is wrong with you?" he asks. "What do you mean, me? What is wrong with you?" "You're so distracted and weird."

"We're traveling. I'm sight-seeing. I'm tired. Sorry if I seem distant."

"'Sight-seeing.' That's nice! How about me? Yoo-hoo!" Mack sighs. When he goes on the attack like this, Quilty tends to head in five miserable directions at once. He has a brief nervous breakdown and shouts from every shattered corner of it, then afterward pulls himself together and apologizes. It is all a bit familiar. Mack closes his eyes, to sail away from him. He floats off and, trying not to think of Lou, briefly thinks of Annie, though the sudden blood rush that stiffens him pulls at his stitches and snaps him awake. He sits up. He kicks off his shoes and socks and looks at his pickled toes: slugs in a box.

Quilty is cross-legged on the floor, trying to do some deep-breathing exercises. He is trying to get chi to his meridians — or something like that. "You think I don't know you're attracted to half the people you see?" Quilty is saying. "You think I'm stupid or something? You don't think I feel your head turn and your gaze stop everywhere we go?"

"What?"

"You're too much," Quilty finally says to Mack.

" I'm too much? You are! You're so damn nervous and territorial," Mack says.

"I have a highly inflamed sense of yard," says Quilty. He has given up on the exercises. "Blind people do. I don't want you sticking your hitchhiker's thumb out over the property line. It's a betrayal and an eyesore to the community!"

"What community? What are you talking about?"

"All you sighted people are alike. You think we're Mr. Magoo! You think I'm not as aware as some guy who paints water towers and's got cysts on his dick?"

Mack shakes his head. He sits up and starts to put his shoes back on. "You really go for the juggler, don't you?" he says.

"Juggler?" Quilty howls. " Juggler ? No, obviously, I go for the clowns."

Mack is puzzled. Quilty's head is tilted in that hyperalert way that says nothing in the room will get past him. "Juggler," Mack says. "Isn't that the word? What is the word?"

"A juggler," says Quilty, slowly for the jury, "is someone who juggles."

Mack's chest tightens around a small emptied space. He feels his own crappy luck returning like a curse. "You don't even like me, do you?" he says.

"Like you? Is that what you're really asking?"

"I'm not sure," says Mack. He looks around the hotel room. Not this, not any room with Quilty in it would ever be his home.

"Let me tell you a story," says Quilty.

"I don't like stories," Mack says.

It now seems to have cost Mack so much to be here. In his mind — a memory or a premonition, which is it, his mind does not distinguish — he sees himself returning not just to Tapston but to Kentucky or to Illinois, wherever it is Annie lives now, and stealing back his own-blooded boy, whom he loves, and who is his, and running fast with him toward a car, putting him in and driving off. It would be the proper thing, in a way. Other men have done it.

Quilty's story goes like this: "A woman came to my office once very early on in my practice. Her case was a simple divorce that she made complicated by greed and stubbornness, and she worked up quite a bill. When she got the bill, she phoned me, shouting and saying angry things. I said, 'Look, we'll work out a payment plan. One hundred dollars a month. How does that sound?' I was reasonable. My practice was new and struggling. Still, she refused to pay a cent. I had to take out a loan to pay my secretary, and I never forgot that. So, five years later, that very same woman's doctor phones me. She's got bone cancer, the doctor says, and I'm one of the only German Jews in town and might have the same blood type for a marrow transfusion for her. Would I consider it, at least consider having a blood test? I said, 'Absolutely not,' and hung up. The doctor called back. He begged me, but I hung up again. A month later, the woman died."

"What's your point?" says Mack. Quilty's voice is flying apart now.

"That that is the truth about me," he says. "Don't you see—"

"Yes, I fucking see. I am the one here who does the seeing! Me and Guapo."

He pauses for a long time. "I don't forgive anybody anything. That is the point."

"Y'know what? This whole thing is such a crock," says Mack, but his voice is thin and diffident, and he finishes putting on his shoes, but without socks, and then grabs up his coat.

Downstairs, the clock says quarter to five, and a crowd is gathering to watch the ducks. A red carpet has already been rolled out from the elevator to the fountain, and this makes the ducks excited, anxious for the evening ritual, their clipped wings fluttering. Mack takes a table in the back and orders a double whiskey with ice. He drinks it fast — it freezes and burns in that great old way: it has been too long. He orders another. The pianist on the other side of the lobby is playing "Street of Dreams": "Love laughs at a king/Kings don't mean a thing" the man sings, and it seems to Mack the most beautiful song in the world. Men everywhere are about to die for reasons they don't know and wouldn't like if they did — but here is a song to do it by, so that life, in its mad belches and spasms, might not demolish so much this time.

The ducks drink and dive in the fountain.

Probably Mack is already drunk as a horse.

Near the Union Avenue door is a young woman mime, juggling Coke bottles. People waiting for the ducks have gathered to watch. Even in her white pancake makeup, she is attractive. Her red hair is bright as a daylily and through her black leotards her legs are taut as an archer's bow.