Lorrie Moore: Bark: Stories

“You’re ‘not allowed to hit them’?” He could see she had now made some progress with her wine.

“I’m from Kentucky,” she said.

“Ah.” He drank from his water glass, stalling.

She chewed thoughtfully. Merlot was beginning to etch a ragged, scabby line in the dead skin of her bottom lip. “It’s like Ireland but with more horses and guns.”

“Not a lot of Jews down there.” He had no idea why he said half the things he said. Perhaps this time it was because he had once been a community-based historian, digging in archives for the genealogies and iconographies of various ethnic groups, not realizing that other historians generally thought this a sentimental form of history, shedding light on nothing; and though shedding light on nothing seemed not a bad idea to him, when it became available, he had taken the human resources job.

“Not too many,” she said. “I did know an Armenian family growing up. At least I think they were Armenian.”

When the check came, she ignored it, as if it were some fly that had landed and would soon be taking off again. So much for feminism. Ira pulled out his state-workers credit card and the waitress came by and whisked it away. There were, he was once told, four seven-word sentences that generally signaled the end of a relationship. The first was “I think we should see other people.” (Which always meant another seven-word sentence: “I am already sleeping with someone else.”) The second seven-word sentence was, reputedly, “Maybe you could just leave the tip.” The third was “How could you again forget your wallet?” And the fourth, the killer of all killers, was “Oh, look, I’ve forgotten my wallet, too!”

He did not imagine they would ever see each other again. But when he dropped her off at her house, walking her to her door, Zora suddenly grabbed his face with both hands, and her mouth became its own wet creature exploring his. She opened up his jacket, pushing her body inside it, against his, the pumpkin-colored silk of her blouse slid upon his shirt. Her lips came away in a slurp. “I’m going to call you,” she said, smiling. Her eyes were wild, as if with gin, though she had only been drinking wine.

“OK,” he mumbled, walking backward down her steps, in the dark, his car still running, its headlights bright along her street.

He was in her living room the following week. It was beige and white with cranberry accents. On the walls were black-framed photos of her son, Bruno, from all ages, including now. There were pictures of Bruno lying prone on the ground. There were pictures of Bruno and Zora together, he hidden in the folds of her skirt, and she hanging her then-long hair down into his face, covering him completely. There he was again, leaning in between her knees, naked as a cello. There were pictures of him in the bath, though in some he was clearly already at the start of puberty. In the corner stood perhaps a dozen wooden sculptures of naked boys she had carved herself. “One of my hobbies, which I was telling you about,” she said. They were astounding little things. She had drilled holes in their penises with a brace and bit to allow for water in case she could someday sell them as garden fountains. “These are winged boys. The beautiful adolescent boy who flies away. It’s from mythology. I forget what they’re called. I just love their little rumps.” He nodded, studying the tight, sculpted buttocks, the spouted, mushroomy phalluses, the long backs and limbs. So: this was the sort of woman he’d been missing out on not being single all these years. What had he been thinking of staying married for so long?

He sat down and asked for wine. “You know, I’m just a little gun-shy romantically,” he said apologetically. “I don’t have the confidence I used to. I don’t think I can even take my clothes off in front of another person. Not even at the gym, frankly. I’ve been changing in the toilet stalls. After divorce and all.”

“Oh, divorce will do that to you totally,” she said reassuringly. She poured him some wine. “It’s like a trick. It’s like someone puts a rug over a trapdoor and says, ‘Stand there.’ And so you do. Then boom.” She took out a hashish pipe, lit it, sucking, then gave it to him.

“I’ve never seen a pediatrician smoke hashish before.”

“Really?” she said, with some difficulty, her breath still sucked in.

The nipples of her breasts were long, cylindrical, and stiff, so that her chest looked somewhat as if two small sink plungers had flown across the room and suctioned themselves there. His mouth opened hungrily to kiss them.

“Perhaps you would like to take off your shoes,” she whispered.

“Oh, not really,” he said.

There was sex where you were looked in the eye and beautiful things were said to you, and then there was what Ira used to think of as yoo-hoo sex: where the other person seemed spirited away, not quite there, their pleasure mysterious and crazy and only accidentally involving you. “Yoo-hoo?” was what his grandmother always called before entering a house where she knew someone but not well enough to know whether they were actually home.

“Where are you?” Ira said in the dark. He decided in a case such as this he could feel a chaste and sanctifying distance. It wasn’t he who was having sex. The condom was having sex and he was just trying to stop it. Zora’s candles on the nightstand were heated to clear pools in their tins. They flickered smokily. He would try not to think about how before she had even lit them and pulled back the bedcovers he had noticed the candles were already melted down to the size of buttons, their wicks blackened to a crisp. It was not good to think about the previous burning of the bedroom candles of a woman who had just unzipped your pants. Besides, he was too grateful for the fact of those candles — especially with all those little wonder boys in the living room. Perhaps his whitening chest hair would not look so white. This was what candles were made for: the sad, sexually shy, out-of-shape, middle-aged him. How had he not understood this in marriage? Zora herself looked ageless, like a nymph with her short hair, although once she got Ira’s glasses off, she became a blur of dim and shifting shapes and might as well have been Dick Cheney or Lon Chaney or Lee Marvin or the Blob, except that she smelled good and but for the occasional rough patch had the satiny skin of a girl.

She let out a long, spent sigh.

“Where did you go?” he asked again anxiously.

“I’ve been right here, silly,” she said and pinched his hip. She lifted one of her long legs up and down outside the covers. “Did you get off?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Did you get off?”

“ ‘Get off’?” Someone else had once asked him the same question, when he’d stopped in the jetway to tie his shoe after debarking from a plane.

“Have an orgasm? With some men it’s not always clear.”

“Yes, thank you, I mean, it was — to me — very clear.”

“You’re still wearing your wedding ring,” she said.

“It’s stuck, I don’t know why—”

“Let me get at that thing,” she said and pulled hard on his finger, but the loose skin around his knuckle bunched up and blocked it.

“Ow,” he finally said. His skin was abraded.

“Perhaps later with soap,” she said. She lay back and swung her legs up in the air again.

“Do you like to dance?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” she said.

“I’ll bet you’re a wonderful dancer,” said Ira.

“Not really,” she said. “But I can always think of things to do.”

“That’s a nice trait.”

“You think so?” she asked, and she leaned in and began tickling him.

“I don’t think I’m that ticklish,” he said.