Lorrie Moore - Bark - Stories

“I’ve got it,” he said and with both hands placed each trigger finger on either side of his head. “That do it?”

Laughter in the midafternoon night. The daylilies in the Plexiglas table vase had already called it a day.

“Veterinarians really have it down,” she said. “It’s so much more humane than human medicine — especially the endgame. They’ve got the right injections. No bad morphine dreams.”

“That’s why I’m getting my little puppy suit ready,” he said.

“Ho ho.”

“If you’re suicidal,” he said slowly, “and you don’t actually kill yourself , you become known as ‘wry.’ ”

He had headaches that could be debilitating, but he had always hid in his apartment when they came on so she had never seen how crippling they were. Two years later, when he had a chip implanted in his head — a headache cure, experimental, cutting-edge, but who could not think of The Manchurian Candidate ? — she would go visit him, bring him lunch, listen to him joke about his shaved-off hair and the battery pack implanted in his chest. Someone, it seemed, was experimenting with him, but he did not say who, precisely. He was susceptible to charming leaders and group activities despite his remarks about sheep. He was also simultaneously stoical about all. Still later, when the chip was removed, sloppily, and the trembling that had begun in that café overtook the entirety of him, leaving him frail, unsteady, leaning on a cane, filling out retirement forms—“apparently I was in the control group and the control group does not experience the experiment”—she would drive up to see him in one of the cottages in the veterans’ lakeside compound in the northern part of the state. But the woman at the reception desk always said, “He’s just not seeing people today.” Uniformed guards would check her car at the security gate, and once when she got home she found one of the guards’ cell phones in her trunk. Mostly, if allowed, she would walk the grounds and seek out his cottage — he had his own, like a high-ranking officer, so his GS number was probably substantial. Still there was no response, even though he had replied by e-mail that yes it would be good to see her. He never answered the door the four times she had gone to see him and the nine times each that she had knocked.

“By the way,” he added now, “make sure I don’t have one of those ostensibly green funerals where they put the unpreserved body on view on a giant heap of ice in someone’s blazingly sunny backyard. I want a church. Also? I have my music picked out.”

“OK.”

“Just plug my iPod into some speakers in the front of the chapel.”

“Positioned to Genius?” A compliment, forehanded, she thought. They were so rare in life and even less often believed.

He acknowledged it with a nod, respecting her effort. “Oh,” he said, “Shuffle will do.”

Her own iPod would be an embarrassment: Forbidden Broadway , Sting, French for Dummies .

She looked around at the café’s brass-rimmed tables and the waxy caned chairs. Then she looked back at Tom. He was in a state of pain and worry she had never seen him in before. Back in their once-shared hometown, through the years, first when he was married, then when she was married, they had looked for each other across rooms, hovered near each other at parties, for years they had done it, taut and electrified, each stealthily seeking the other out and then standing close, wineglasses in hand, spellbound by their own eagerly mustered small talk. She would study the superficially sleepy look his face would assume, atop his still-strapping figure, the lowered lids and wavy mouth, and emanating from behind it all his laserlike concentration on her. The more a lovely secret was real the less you spoke of it. But as the secret came to evanesce, as soon as it threatened to go away on its own accord, the secret itself grew frantic and indiscreet — as a way to hang on to its own fading life.

Now they had gotten lucky at long last and neither of them was married anymore — though anything that was at long last, and that had involved such miserable commotion, was unlikely to be truly lucky. They had arranged this rendezvous in faraway France, and neither of them knew its meaning, for its meaning had not been determined out loud. “Is this a date, or independent contractors in semi-prearranged collision?” he had asked just last night, and then spring rain had poured down upon them, shining the concrete, dripping off both their eyeglasses, which they removed, and she had kissed him.

A private car now pulled up at the curb.

“Good God,” he said, “the car came so fast.”

“Keep eating. That comes first. Eat whatever you can. The car can wait.”

She could see he had no appetite but was force-feeding, pushing the food in as if it were a job. Small bites of the lamb. “People are indeed sheep,” he said now, chewing. “Stupid as sheep. Actually with sheep at least one of them is always smart and the others just turn their brains off and follow. ‘What’s Maurie doing now?’ they ask each other. ‘Where is Maurie going, let’s follow!’ The flock is the organism.”

“Like the military,” she said.

He swallowed with some difficulty and at first did not say anything. “Yeah. Occasionally. Civ-Mil has never worked properly as a unit.” He pulled a bay leaf out of his couscous. “Bay leaves are bullshit,” he said, flinging it down on his plate.

“What will you do with the rest of your time here?” he asked, rounding up the remaining food with his fork, pushing it into small piles, with rivulets and valleys.

“I’ll find things,” she said. “But it will not be the same without you.”

He put his fork down and grabbed her hand, which put a knot in her chest.

“Remember: never drink alone,” he said.

“I don’t,” she said. “I usually drink with MacNeil-Lehrer.” She assumed he would call her when he got to D.C.

He withdrew his hand, fumbled with his wallet, threw cash down on the table, and grabbed his suitcase.

They got up together and walked to his car. The blue-bereted driver got out and opened the door for him. Tom tossed the bag in the back and turned to her, about to say something, then changed his mind and just got in. When the door shut, he lowered his window.

“I don’t know how to say this,” he said, “but, well — keep me in mind.”

“How could I not?” she said.

“That’s something I don’t ask, ma chère.” She lowered her head, and he pressed his lips to her cheek for a very long moment.

“May our paths cross again soon,” she said, stepping back. And then like a deaf person she made a little gesture of a cross with the index fingers of each of her hands, but it came out like a werewolf ward-off sign. Inept even at sign language. A Freudian slip of the dumb. As the car began to roll away, she called out, “Have a good flight!” His head turned and bent toward her one last time.

“Hey, I’ve got all my liquids packed in my unchecked bag,” he shouted, not without innuendo. She flung one palm quickly to her mouth to blow a kiss, but the car took a quick right down the Rue du Bac. A kiss blown — in all ways. But she could see him lift his left hand quickly at the window, like a karate chop that was also a salute, as the car merged and disappeared into the fanning traffic.

Years earlier, at a Christmas party of a mutual friend, their spouses both out on the wintry summer porch smoking, she had found herself next to him, in the kitchen, jiggling the open bottles of wine to see which one might not yet be empty. The day before, along with a photo of prizewinning gingerbread houses on display at the mall, he had sent her an e-mail: “I just took three Adderall and made these for you.” In the next room Bob Dylan was singing “Gotta Serve Somebody.”