Lorrie Moore - Bark - Stories

Linda made a stern, effortful smile, struggling to cut something with her knife. Was it meat? Was it poultry? It was consoling to think that, for a change, the rich had had to pay a pretty penny for their chicken while his was free. But it was not consoling enough . “If you don’t think I as a woman know a thing or two about prejudice, you would be sadly mistaken,” Linda said.

“Hey, it’s not that easy being a man, either,” said Bake. “There’s all that cash you have to spend on porn, and believe me, that’s money you never get back.”

He then retreated, turned toward his left, toward Suzy, and leaned in. “Help me,” he whispered in her ear.

“Are you charming the patrons?”

“I fear some object may be thrown.”

“You’re supposed to charm the patrons.”

“I know, I know, I was trying to. I swear. But she’s one of those who keeps referring to Brocko as Barama.” He had violated most of Suzy’s dinner talk rules already: no politics, no religion, no portfolio tips. And unless you see the head crowning, never look at a woman’s stomach and ask if she’s pregnant . He had learned all these the hard way.

But in a year like this one, there was no staying away from certain topics.

“Get back there,” Suzy said. The sculptor was tapping Suzy on the arm again.

He tried once more with Linda Santo the evil lobbyist. “Here’s the way I see it — and this I think you’ll appreciate. It would be great at long last to have a president in the White House whose last name ends with a vowel.”

“We’ve never had a president whose last name ended with a vowel?”

“Well, I don’t count Coolidge.”

“You’re from what part of Chicago?”

“Well, just outside Chicago.”

“Where outside?”

“Michigan.”

“Isn’t Michigan a long way from Chicago?”

“It is!” He could feel the cold air on the skin between his socks and his pant cuffs. When he looked at her hands they seemed frozen into claws.

“People talk about the rock-solid sweetness of the heartland, but I have to say: Chicago seems like a city that has taken too much pride in its own criminal activity.” She smiled grimly.

“I don’t think that’s true.” Or was it? He was trying to give her a chance. What if she was right? “Perhaps we have an unfulfilled streak of mythic hankering. Or perhaps we don’t live as fearfully as people do elsewhere,” he said. Now he was just guessing.

“You wait, my friend, there are some diabolical people eyeing that Sears Tower as we speak.”

Now he was silent.

“And if you’re in it when it happens, which I hope you’re not, but if you are, if you are, if you are, if you’re eating lunch at the top or having a meeting down below or whatever it is you may be doing, you will be changed. Because I’ve been there. I know what it’s like to be bombed by terrorists — I was in the Pentagon when they crashed that plane right down into it and I’ll tell you: I was burned alive but not dead. I was burned alive . It lit me inside. Because of that I know more than ever what this country is about, my friend.”

He saw now that her fingernails really were plastic, that the hand really was a dry frozen claw, that the face that had seemed intriguingly exotic had actually been scarred by fire and only partially repaired. He saw how she was cloaked in a courageous and intense hideosity. The hair was beautiful, but now he imagined it was probably a wig. Pity poured through him: he’d never before felt so sorry for someone. How could someone have suffered so much? How could someone have come so close to death, so unfairly, so painfully and heroically, and how could he still want to strangle them?

“You were a lobbyist for the Pentagon?” was all he managed to say.

“Any faux pas?” asked Suzy in the cab on the way back to the B and B, where warm cookies would await them by their door, and snore strips on their nightstand.

“Beaucoup faux,” said Bake. He pronounced it foze . “Beaucoup verboten foze. Uttering my very name was like standing on the table and peeing in a wineglass.”

“What? Oh, please.”

“I’m afraid I spoke about politics. I couldn’t control myself.”

“Brocko is going to win. His daughters will like it here. All will be well. Rest assured,” she said, as the cab sped along toward Georgetown, the street curbs rusted and rouged with the first fallen leaves.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

He was afraid to say more.

He did not know how much time he and Suzy might even have left together, and an endgame of geriatric speed dating — everyone deaf and looking identical: “What? I can’t hear you? What? You again? Didn’t I just see you?”—all taking place midst bankruptcy and war, might be the real circle of hell he was destined for.

“Don’t ever leave me,” he said.

“Why on earth would I do that?”

He paused. “I’m putting in a request not just for on earth , but for even after that.”

“OK,” she said, and squeezed his meaty thigh. At least he had once liked to think of it as meaty.

“I fear you will soon discover some completely obvious way to find me less than adequate.”

“You’re adequate,” she said.

“I’m adequate enough.”

She kept her hand there on his leg, and on top of hers he placed his, the one with the wedding ring she had given him, identical to her own. He willed all his love into the very ends of his fingertips, and as his hand clasped hers he watched the firm, deliberate hydraulics of its knuckles and joints. But she had already turned her head away and was looking out the window, steadily, the rest of the ride back, showing him only her beautiful hair, which was gold and flashing in the passing streetlamps, as if it were something not attached to her at all.

The grumblings of their stomachs were intertwined and unassignable.

“Was that you or was that me?” she would ask in bed, and Dench would say, “I’m not sure.” They lay there in the mornings, their legs moving at angles toward one another, not unlike the elms she could see through the window outside, the high branches nuzzling in the late March breeze, speaking tree to tree of the thrilling weather. Her dreams of eating meals full of meat, which caused her teeth to gnash in the night — surely a sign of spring — left the insides of her cheeks bloody and chewed, one saliva gland now swelled to the size of a raisin.

Shouldn’t they be up and about already? Morning sun shot across the ceiling in a white stripe of paint. She and Dench were both too young and too old for this close, late-morning, bed-bound life, but their scuttled careers — the band, the two CDs, the newsletter (turned e-letter turned abandoned cyber-litter) on how to simplify your life (be broke! ), the driving, the touring, the scrambling, the foraging in parks for chives and dandelions, the charging up of credit cards, the taking pictures of clothes and selling them on eBay (“Wake up!” she used to exclaim to him in the middle of the night, sitting up in bed, “wake up and listen to my ideas !”) — had led them here, to a nine-month sublet that allowed pets. Still in their thirties, but barely, they had bought themselves a little time. So what if her investments these days were in pennies, wine corks, and sheets of self-adhesive Forever stamps? These would go up in value, unlike everything else. Beneath her bed was a shoe box of dwindling cash from their last gig, where they’d gotten only a quarter of the door. She could always cut her long, almost Asian hair again, as she had two years ago, and sell it for a thousand dollars.