Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

“Children, children,” murmurs Albert.

“World War Two,” says Debbie. “Wasn’t that the war to end all wars?”

“No, that was World War One,” says Bill. “By World War Two, they weren’t making any promises.”

Stanley will not relent. He turns to Lina again. “I have to say, I’m surprised to see a Serbian, in a matter of foreign policy, attempting to take the moral high ground,” he says.

“Stanley, I used to like you,” says Lina. “Remember when you were a nice guy? I do.”

“I do, too,” says Bill. “There was that whole smiling, handing-out-money thing he used to do.”

Bill feels inclined to rescue Lina. This year, she has been through a lot. Just last spring, the local radio station put her on a talk show and made her answer questions about Bosnia. In attempting to explain what was going on in the former Yugoslavia, she said, “You have to think about what it might mean for Europe to have a nationalist, Islamic state,” and “Those fascist Croats,” and “It’s all very complicated.” The next day, students boycotted her classes and picketed her office with signs that read GENOCIDE IS NOT ‘COMPLICATED’ and REPENT, IMPERIALIST. Lina had phoned Bill at his office. “You’re a lawyer. They’re hounding me. Aren’t these students breaking a law? Surely, Bill, they are breaking a law.”

“Not really,” said Bill. “And believe me, you wouldn’t want to live in a country where they were.”

“Can’t I get a motion to strike? What is that? I like the way it sounds.”

“That’s used in pleadings or in court. That’s not what you want.”

“No, I guess not. From them, I just want no more motion. Plus, I want to strike them. There’s nothing you can do?”

“They have their rights.”

“They understand nothing,” she said.

“Are you okay?”

“No. I banged up the fender parking my car, I was so upset. The headlight fell out, and even though I took it into the car place, they couldn’t salvage it.”

“You’ve gotta keep those things packed in ice, I think.”

“These cheeldren , good God, have no conception of the world. I am well known as a pacifist and resister; I was the one last year in Belgrade, buying gasoline out of Coke bottles, hiding a boy from the draft, helping to organize the protests and the radio broadcasts and the rock concerts. Not them. I was the one standing there with the crowd, clapping and chanting beneath Milosevic’s window: ‘Don’t count on us.’ ” Here Lina’s voice fell into a deep Slavic singsong. “Don’t count on us. Don’t count on us.” She paused dramatically. “We had T-shirts and posters. That was no small thing.”

“ ‘Don’t count on us?’ ” said Bill. “I don’t mean to sound skeptical, but as a political slogan, it seems, I don’t know, a little …” Lame. It lacked even the pouty energy and determination of “Hell no, we won’t go.” Perhaps some obscenity would have helped. “Don’t fucking count on us, motherfucker.” That would have been better. Certainly a better T-shirt.

“It was all very successful,” said Lina indignantly.

“But how exactly do you measure success?” asked Bill. “I mean, it took time, but, you’ll forgive me, we stopped the war in Vietnam.”

“Oh, you are all so obsessed with your Vietnam,” said Lina.

The next time Bill saw her, it was on her birthday, and she’d had three and a half whiskeys. She exclaimed loudly about the beauty of the cake, and then, taking a deep breath, she dropped her head too close to the candles and set her hair spectacularly on fire.

What does time measure but itself? What can it assess but the mere deposit and registration of itself within a thing?

A large bowl of peas and onions is passed around the table.

They’ve already dispensed with the O. J. Simpson jokes — the knock-knock one and the one about the sunglasses. They’ve banned all the others, though Bill is now asked his opinion regarding search and seizure. Ever since he began living in the present tense, Bill sees the Constitution as a blessedly changing thing. He does not feel current behavior should be made necessarily to conform to old law. He feels personally, for instance, that he’d throw away a few First Amendment privileges — abortion protest, say, and all telemarketing, perhaps some pornography (though not Miss April 1965—never!) — in exchange for gutting the Second Amendment. The Founding Fathers were revolutionaries, after all. They would be with him on this, he feels. They would be for making the whole thing up as you go along, reacting to things as they happened, like a great, wild performance piece. “There’s nothing sacred about the Constitution; it’s just another figmentary contract: it’s a palimpsest you can write and write and write on. But then whatever is there when you get pulled over are the rules for then. For now.” Bill believes in free speech. He believes in expensive speech. He doesn’t believe in shouting “Fire” in a crowded movie theater, but he does believe in shouting “Fie!” and has done it twice himself — both times at Forrest Gump . “I’m a big believer in the Rules for Now. Also, Promises for Now, Things to Do for Now, and the ever-handy This Will Do for Now.”

Brigitte glares at him. “Such moral excellence,” she says.

“Yes,” agrees Roberta, who has been quiet all evening, probably figuring out airfare upgrades for Stanley. “How attractive.”

“I’m talking theoretical,” says Bill. “I believe in common sense. In theory. Theoretical common sense.” He feels suddenly cornered and misunderstood. He wishes he weren’t constantly asked to pronounce on real-life legal matters. He has never even tried an actual case except once, when he was just out of law school. He’d had a small practice then in the basement of an old sandstone schoolhouse in St. Paul, and the sign inside the building directory said WILLIAM D. BELMONT, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW: ONE LEVEL DOWN. It always broke his heart a little, that one level down . The only case he ever took to trial was an armed robbery and concealed weapon case, and he had panicked. He dressed in the exact same beiges and browns as the bailiffs — a subliminal strategy he felt would give him an edge, make him seem at least as much a part of the court “family” as the prosecutor. But by the close of the afternoon, his nerves were shot. He looked too desperately at the jury (who, once in the deliberation room, and in the time it took to order the pizza and wolf it down, voted unanimously to convict). He’d looked imploringly at all their little faces and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, if my client’s not innocent, I’ll eat my shorts.”

At the end of his practice, he had taken to showing up at other people’s office parties — not a good sign in life.

Now, equipped with a more advanced degree, like the other people here, Bill has a field of scholarly, hypothetical expertise, plus a small working knowledge of budgets and parking and E-mail. He doesn’t mind the E-mail, has more or less gotten used to it, its vaguely smutty Etch-A-Sketch, though once he found himself lost in the Internet and before he knew it had written his name across some bulletin board on which the only other name was “Stud Boy.” Mostly, however, his professional life has been safe and uneventful. Although he is bothered by faculty meetings and by the word text —every time he hears it, he feels he should just give up, go off and wear a powdered wig somewhere — it intrigues Bill to belong to academe, with its international hodgepodge and asexual attire, a place where to think and speak as if one has lived is always preferable to the alternatives. Such a value cuts down on regrets. And Bill is cutting down. He is determined to cut down. Once, he was called in by the head of the law school and admonished for skipping so many faculty meetings. “It’s costing you about a thousand dollars in raises every year,” said the dean.