Lorrie Moore: The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

"Who knows?" Ira asked.

"Yes — who knows."

"What's a Lent dinner?"

"We made it up. For Lent. We didn't really want to do Mardi Gras. Too disrespectful, given the international situation."

"So you're doing Lent. I'm unclear on Lent. I mean, I know what the word means to those of us of the Jewish faith. But we don't usually commemorate these transactions with meals. Usually there's just a lot of sighing."

"It's like a pre-Easter Prince of Peace dinner," Mike said slowly. "You're supposed to give things up for Lent. Last year, we gave up our faith and reason. This year, we're giving up our democratic voice and our hope."

Ira had already met most of Mike's goyisheh friends. Mike himself was low-key, tolerant, self-deprecating to a fault. A self-described "ethnic Catholic," he once complained dejectedly about not having been cute enough to be molested by a priest. "They would just shake my hand very quickly," he said. Mike's friends, however, tended to be tense, intellectually earnest Protestants who drove new, metallic-hued cars and who within five minutes of light conversation could be counted on to use the phrase "strictly within the framework of."

"Kate has a divorcee friend she's inviting," Mike said. "I'm not trying to fix you up. I really hate that stuff. I'm just saying come. Eat some food. It's almost Easter season and — well, hey, we could use a Jew over here." Mike laughed heartily.

"Yeah, I'll re-enact the whole thing for you," Ira said. He looked at his swollen ring finger again. "Yessirree. I'll come over and show you all how it's done."

ira's new house — though it was in what his real-estate agent referred to as "a lovely, pedestrian neighborhood," abutting the streets named after Presidents, but boasting instead streets named after fishing flies (Caddis, Hendrickson, Gold-Ribbed Hare's Ear Road) — was full of slow drains, leaky gas burners, stopped-up sinks, and excellent dust for scrawling curse words. Marilyn blows sailors . The draftier windows Ira had duct-taped up with sheets of plastic on the inside, as instructed by Homeland Security; cold air billowed the plastic inward like sails on a ship. On a windy day it was quite something. "Your whole house could fly away," Mike said, looking around.

"Not really," Ira said lightly. "But it is spinning. It's very interesting, actually."

The yard had already grown muddy with March and the flower beds were greening with the tiniest sprigs of stinkweed and quack grass. By June, the chemical weapons of terrorism aimed at the heartland might prove effective in weeding the garden. "This may be the sort of war I could really use!" Ira said out loud to a neighbor.

Mike and Kate's house, on the other hand, with its perfect lines and friendly fussiness, reeking, he supposed, of historical-preservation tax credits, seemed an impossible dream to him, something plucked from a magazine article about childhood memories conjured on a deathbed. Something seen through the window by the Little Match Girl! Outside, the soffits were perfectly squared. The crocuses were like bells, and the Siberian violets like grape candies scattered in the grass. Soon their prize irises would become gorgeously crested cockatoos along the side yard. Inside, the smell of warm food almost made him weep. With his coat still on, he rushed past Kate to throw his arms around Mike, kissing him on both cheeks. "All the beautiful men must be kissed!" Ira exclaimed. After he'd got his coat off and wandered into the dining room, he toasted with the champagne that he himself had brought. There were eight guests there, most of whom he knew to some degree, but really that was enough. That was enough for everyone. They raised their glasses with him. "To Lent!" Ira cried. "To the final days!" And, in case that was too grim, he added, "And to the Resurrection! May it happen a little closer to home next time! Jesus Christ!" Soon he drifted back into the kitchen and, as he felt was required of him, shrieked at the pork. Then he began milling around again, apologizing for the crucifixion. "We really didn't intend it," he murmured. "Not really, not the killing part? We just kind of got carried away? You know how spring can get a little crazy, but, believe me, we're all really, really sorry."

Kate's divorced friend was named Zora and was a pediatrician. Although no one else did, she howled with laughter, and when her face wasn't blasted apart with it or her jaw snapping mutely open and shut like a pair of scissors (in what Ira recognized as post-divorce hysteria: "How long have you been divorced?" he later asked her. "Eleven years," she replied), Ira could see that she was very beautiful: short black hair; eyes a clear, reddish hazel, like orange pekoe tea; a strong aquiline nose; thick lashes that spiked out, wrought and black as the tines of a fireplace fork. Her body was a mixture of thin and plump, her skin lined and unlined, in that rounding-the-corner-to-fifty way. Age and youth , he chanted silently, youth and age, sing their songs on the very same stage . Ira was working on a modest little volume of doggerel, its tentative title "Women from Venus, Men from — well — Penis."

Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people's charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself.

When it was directed at him, the person just seemed so totally nice . And so Zora's laughter, in conjunction with her beauty, doomed him a little, made him grateful beyond reason.

immediately, he sent her a postcard, a photograph of newlyweds dragging empty Spam cans from the bumper of their car. He wrote: Dear Zora, Had such fun meeting you at Mike's . And then he wrote his phone number. He kept it simple. In courtship he had a history of mistakes, beginning at sixteen with his first girlfriend, for whom he had bought at the local head shop the coolest thing he had then ever seen in his life: a beautifully carved wooden hand with its middle finger sticking up. He himself had coveted it tremulously for a year. How could she not love it? Her contempt for it, and then for him, had left him feeling baffled and betrayed. With Marilyn, he had taken the other approach and played hard to get, which had turned their relationship into a never-ending Sadie Hawkins Day, with subsequent marriage to Sadie an inevitable ruin — a humiliating and interminable Dutch date.

But this, the Spam postcard and the note, he felt contained the correct combination of offhandedness and intent. This elusive mix — the geometric halfway point between stalker and Rip van Winkle — was important to get right in the world of middle-aged dating, he suspected, though what did he really know of this world? The whole thing seemed a kind of distant civilization, a planet of the apings: graying, human flotsam with scorched internal landscapes mimicking the young, picking up where they had left off decades ago, if only they could recall where the hell that was. Ira had been a married man for fifteen years, a father for eight (poor little Bekka, now rudely transported between houses in a speedy, ritualistic manner resembling a hostage drop-off), only to find himself punished for an idle little nothing, nothing, nothing flirtation with a colleague, punished with his wife's full-blown affair and false business trips (credit-union conventions that never took place) and finally a petition for divorce mailed from a motel. Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife produce and star in a fabulous one of her own he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.