Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

Now she stood with Beyerbach in the empty classroom. “Thank you so much,” she said in a hushed way. “I’m sure they all got quite a lot out of that. I’m very sure they did.”

He said nothing, but smiled at her gently.

She shifted her weight from one leg to the other. “Would you like to go somewhere and get a drink?” she asked. She was standing close to him, looking up into his face. He was tall, she saw now. His shoulders weren’t broad, but he had a youthful straightness to his carriage. She briefly touched his sleeve. His suitcoat was corduroy and bore the faint odor of clove. This was the first time in her life that she had ever asked a man out for a drink.

He made no move to step away from her, but actually seemed to lean toward her a bit. She could feel his dry breath, see up close the variously hued spokes of his irises, the grays and yellows in the blue. There was a sprinkling of small freckles near his hairline. He smiled, then looked at the clock on the wall. “I would love to, really, but I have to get back to the hotel to make a phone call at ten-fifteen.” He looked a little disappointed — not a lot, thought Agnes, but certainly a little.

“Oh, well,” she said. She flicked off the lights and in the dark he carefully helped her on with her jacket. They stepped out of the room and walked together in silence, back down the corridor to the front entrance of the hall. Outside on the steps, the night was balmy and scented with rain. “Will you be all right walking back to your hotel?” she asked. “Or—”

“Oh, yes, thank you. It’s just around the corner.”

“Right. That’s right. Well, my car’s parked way over there. So I guess I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon at your reading.”

“Yes,” he said. “I shall look forward to that.”

“Yes,” she said. “So shall I.”

The reading was in the large meeting room at the Arts Hall and was from the sonnet book she had already read, but it was nice to hear the poems again, in his hushed, pained tenor. She sat in the back row, her green raincoat sprawled beneath her on the seat like a leaf. She leaned forward, onto the seat ahead of her, her back an angled stem, her chin on double fists, and she listened like that for some time. At one point, she closed her eyes, but the image of him before her, standing straight as a compass needle, remained caught there beneath her lids, like a burn or a speck or a message from the mind.

Afterward, moving away from the lectern, Beyerbach spotted her and waved, but Stauffbacher, like a tugboat with a task, took his arm and steered him elsewhere, over toward the side table with the little plastic cups of warm Pepsi. We are both men, the gesture seemed to say. We both have bach in our names. Agnes put on her green coat. She went over toward the Pepsi table and stood. She drank a warm Pepsi, then placed the empty cup back on the table. Beyerbach finally turned toward her and smiled familiarly. She thrust out her hand. “It was a wonderful reading,” she said. “I’m very glad I got the chance to meet you.” She gripped his long, slender palm and locked thumbs. She could feel the bones in him.

“Thank you,” he said. He looked at her coat in a worried way. “You’re leaving?”

She looked down at her coat. “I’m afraid I have to get going home.” She wasn’t sure whether she really had to or not. But she’d put on the coat, and it now seemed an awkward thing to take off.

“Oh,” he murmured, gazing at her intently. “Well, all best wishes to you, Onyez.”

“Excuse me?” There was some clattering near the lectern.

“All best to you,” he said, something retreating in his expression.

Stauffbacher suddenly appeared at her side, scowling at her green coat, as if it were incomprehensible.

“Yes,” said Agnes, stepping backward, then forward again to shake Beyerbach’s hand once more; it was a beautiful hand, like an old and expensive piece of wood. “Same to you,” she said. Then she turned and fled.

For several nights, she did not sleep well. She placed her face directly into her pillow, then turned it some for air, then flipped over to her back and opened her eyes, staring at the far end of the room through the stark angle of the door frame toward the tiny light from the bathroom which illumined the hallway, faintly, as if someone had just been there.

For several days, she thought perhaps he might have left her a note with the secretary, or that he might send her one from an airport somewhere. She thought that the inadequacy of their good-bye would haunt him, too, and that he might send her a postcard as elaboration.

But he did not. Briefly, she thought about writing him a letter, on Arts Hall stationery, which for money reasons was no longer the stationery, but photocopies of the stationery. She knew he had flown to the West Coast, then off to Tokyo, then Sydney, then back to Johannesburg, and if she posted it now, perhaps he would receive it when he arrived. She could tell him once more how interesting it had been to meet him. She could enclose her poem from The Gizzard Review . She had read in the newspaper an article about bereavement — and if she were her own mother, she could send him that, too.

Thank God, thank God, she was not her mother.

Spring settled firmly in Cassell with a spate of thundershowers. The perennials — the myrtle and grape hyacinths — blossomed around town in a kind of civic blue, and the warming air brought forth an occasional mosquito or fly. The Transportation Commission meetings were dreary and long, too often held over the dinner hour, and when Agnes got home, she would replay them for Joe, sometimes bursting into tears over the parts about the photoradar or the widening interstate.

When her mother called, Agnes got off the phone fast. When her sister called about her mother, Agnes got off the phone even faster. Joe rubbed her shoulders and spoke to her of carports, of curb appeal, of asbestos-wrapped pipes.

At the Arts Hall, she taught and fretted and continued to receive the usual memos from the secretary, written on the usual scrap paper — except that the scrap paper this time, for a while, consisted of the extra posters for the Beyerbach reading. She would get a long disquisition on policies and procedures concerning summer registration, and she would turn it over and there would be his face — sad and pompous in the photograph. She would get a simple phone message—“Your husband called. Please phone him at the office”—and on the back would be the ripped center of Beyerbach’s nose, one minty eye, an elbowish chin. Eventually, there were no more, and the scrap paper moved on to old contest announcements, grant deadlines, Easter concert notices.

At night, she and Joe did yoga to a yoga show on TV. It was part of their effort not to become their parents, though marriage, they knew, held that hazard. The functional disenchantment, the sweet habit of each other had begun to put lines around her mouth, lines that looked like quotation marks — as if everything she said had already been said before. Sometimes their old cat, Madeline, a fat and pampered calico reaping the benefits of life with a childless couple during their childbearing years, came and plopped herself down with them, between them. She was accustomed to much nestling and appreciation and drips from the faucet, though sometimes she would vanish outside, and they would not see her for days, only to spy her later, in the yard, dirty and matted, chomping a vole or eating old snow.

For Memorial Day weekend, Agnes flew with Joe to New York, to show him the city for the first time. “A place,” she said, “where if you’re not white and not born there, you’re not automatically a story.” She had grown annoyed with Iowa, the pathetic thirdhand manner in which the large issues and conversations of the world were encountered, the oblique and tired way history situated itself there — if ever. She longed to be a citizen of the globe!