Lorrie Moore - Bark - Stories

“Shut up and drink your beer.”

Where were the drugs?

She could see he felt sometimes that he could prey upon her insecurities and still be taken in and cared for by her. Was not the news always full of one beautiful young movie star after another thrown over for some younger and more beautiful movie star? What hope was there for ordinary women? He required a patroness but had mistakenly auditioned for her. If she possessed fewer psychic wounds than he had hoped for in a woman her age, or at least different ones, he would attempt to create some. But she was less woundable than he might think. She had not had a father who had to see a man about a horse. She in fact had a father who’d been killed by a car named after a horse. Along with her mother. A Mustang! How weird was that? Well, she had been a baby and hadn’t had to deal with it.

Her grandmother had almost never mentioned her mother. Or her father. They had been scurrying across a street to get home, holding hands, which had fatally slowed them down.

Where were the drugs?

Patience was a chemical. Derived from a mineral. Derived from a star. She felt she had a bit of it. But it was not always fruitful, or fruitful with the right fruit. Once she had found a letter in Dench’s coat — it was a draft in his writing with his recognizable cross-outs and it began, It has always been hard for me to say, but your love has meant the world to me . She did not read to the end but stuffed it back inside the coat pocket, not wanting to ruin things for him or the moving surprise of it for herself. She would let him finish his composing and choose the delivery time. But the letter never arrived or showed up for her in any manner whatsoever. She waited for months. When she finally asked about it, in a general way, he looked at her with derision and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Inside the old man’s house wide doorways led to shaded rooms, corridors to stairways to more corridors. Whole areas of the house were closed off with ivory quilts hung with clipped rings from fishing spears — to save on heating, she quickly surmised. There were stacks of reading material — a not uncozy clutter of magazines, some opened and abandoned, and piles of books, both new and used. On top of one was a dried-out spider plant that looked — as they used to say with blithe heartlessness of all their dying spider plants — like Bob Marley on chemo. She recognized the panic at even a moment’s boredom that all these piles contained, as well as the unreasonable hopefulness regarding time. In a far room she spied a piano, an old Mason & Hamlin grand, its ebony surface matte with dust, and wondered if it was tuned. Its lid was down and stacks of newspaper sat on top.

“Don’t mind the clutter, just follow me through it — the muffins are in the kitchen,” he said. She followed his swaying gait into the back of the house. Beneath the wisps of white hair his skull was shiny and his scalp had the large brown spots of a giraffe — if only they weren’t signs of looming death they would look appealing and whimsical and young people would probably want them — give me a liver spot! — as tattoos. Smaller versions freckled his hands. “I keep hoping this clutter is charming and not a sign of senility. I find myself not able to tell.”

“It’s like a bookstore or a thrift shop. That kind of clutter is always charming.”

“Really?”

“Perhaps you could go all the way and put little price tags on everything.” A shaming heat flushed her face.

“Ha! Well, that was partly the idea with the book nook out front. That I could put some of this to use. But feel free to add your own. All contributions welcome.” The muffins were store-bought ones he had reheated in a microwave. He had not really made them at all. “I shop sparingly. You never know how long you’ve got. I don’t even buy green bananas. That’s investing with reckless hope in the future.”

“Very funny.”

“Is it?” He was searching her face.

“Well, I mean … yes, it is.”

“Would you like some coffee, or do you want to just stick with your own?” He signaled with his head toward the paper cup she still held, with its white plastic top and its warted brown vest made of recycled paper bags. She looked on the counter and saw that it was instant coffee he meant, a jar of Nescafé near the stove. He turned the burner on, and gas flamed into the blue spikes of a bachelor’s button beneath the kettle.

“Oh, this is fine,” KC said. What did she care if Dench got no coffee today? He would prefer this mission of neighborly friendliness.

She sat down at Milt’s table and he placed the muffin on a plate in front of her. Then he sat down himself. “So tell me about yourself,” he said, then grinned wanly. “What brings you to this neighborhood?”

“Do I stand out that much?”

“I’m afraid you do. And not just because of those tattoos.”

She only had three. She would explain them all to him later, which was what they were for: each was a story. There was “Decatur” along her neck, the vow never to return there. There was also a “Moline” one along her collarbone — a vow never to return there. The “Swanee” along her left biceps was because she liked the chord ascension in that song, a cry of homesickness the band had deconstructed and electrified into a sneer. It was sometimes their encore. When there was one. It was also a vow never to return there. She mostly forgot about all these places until she looked into a mirror after a bath.

“My music career didn’t work out and I’m subletting here. I came back to this town because this is where I used to visit my grandmother in a nursing home when I was young. I liked the lake. And she was in a place that looked out onto it and when I went to see her I would go into a large room with large windows and she would race over in her wheelchair. She was the fastest one there with the chairs.”

He smiled at her. “I know exactly the place you mean. It’s got a hospice wing in it called Memory Station. Though no one in it can recall a thing.”

KC stuffed the muffin in her mouth and flattened its moist crenellated paper into a semicircle.

“What kind of music do you play? Is it loud and angry?” he asked with a grin.

“Sometimes,” she said, chewing. “But sometimes it was gentle and musing.” Past tense. Her band was dead and it hadn’t even taken a plane crash to do it because they hadn’t been able to afford to fly except once. “I’ll come by and play something for you sometime.”

His face brightened. “I’ll get the piano tuned,” he said.

There was that smell again, thawing with the final remnants of winter, in their walls. This was the sort of neighborhood where one would scarcely smell a rancid onion in a trash can. But now this strange meaty rot, with its overtones of Roquefort.

“What do you really think that is?’ ” KC asked Dench through the bathroom door. The change of seasons had brought new viruses and he was waterboarding himself with a neti pot.

“What?”

“The smell,” she said.

“I can’t smell anything right now — my nose is too congested.”

She peeked into the bathroom to see him leaning sideways with the plastic pot, water running down his lips and chin. “Are you disclosing national security secrets?”

“No fucking way!” he exclaimed. “The netis will never learn a thing from me.”

“You can take a book or leave it. There is a simple latch, no lock.” The honey-hued planes of the hutch, angled like a bird feeder, might indeed attract birds if it didn’t soon fill up with books and the clasp was not shut.

“Let’s see what you have in there already.” She moved in close to him. His waxy smell did not bother her.