Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

A different story? “I don’t like stories,” said Mack. “I like food. I like car keys.” He paused. “I like pretzels.”

“Okaaaay,” said Quilty, tracing the outline of his own shoulder and then Mack’s.

“You do this a lot, don’t you?” asked Mack.

“Do what? Upgrade in the handyman department?”

“Bring into your bed some big straight guy you think’s a little dumb.”

“I never do that. Never have.” He cocked his head to one side. “Before.” With his flat almond-shaped fingertips, he played Mack’s arm like a keyboard. “Never before. You are my big sexual experiment.”

“But you see, you’re my big sexual experiment,” insisted Mack. In his life before Quilty, he could never have imagined being in bed with a skinny naked guy wearing sunglasses. “So how can that be?”

“Honey, it bes .”

“But someone’s got to be in charge. How can both of us survive on some big experimental adventure? Someone’s got to be steering the ship.”

“Oh, the ship be damned. We’ll be fine. We are in this thing together. It’s luck. It’s God’s will. It’s synchronicity! Serendipity! Kismet! Camelot! Annie, honey, Get Your Fucking Gun!” Quilty was squealing.

“My ex-wife’s name is Annie,” said Mack.

“I know, I know. That’s why I said it,” said Quilty, trying now not to sigh. “Think of it this way: the blind leading the straight. It can work. It’s not impossible.”

In the mornings, the phone rang too much, and it sometimes annoyed Mack. Where were the pretzels and the car keys when you really needed them? He could see that Quilty knew the exact arm’s distance to the receiver, picking it up in one swift pluck. “Are you sans or avec ?” Quilty’s friends would ask. They spoke loudly and theatrically — as if to a deaf person — and Mack could always hear.

“Avec,” Quilty would say.

“Oooooh,” they would coo. “And how is Mr. Avec today?”

“You should move your stuff in here,” Quilty finally said to Mack one night.

“Is that what you want?” Mack found himself deferring in ways that were unfamiliar to him. He had never slept with a man before, that was probably it — though years ago there had been those nights when Annie’d put on so much makeup and leather, her gender seemed up for grabs: it had been oddly attractive to Mack, self-sufficient; it hadn’t required him and so he’d wanted to get close, to get next to it, to learn it, make it need him, take it away, make it die. Those had been strange, bold nights, a starkness between them that was more like an ancient bone-deep brawl than a marriage. But ultimately, it all remained unreadable for him, though reading, he felt, was not a natural thing and should not be done to people. In general, people were not road maps. People were not hieroglyphs or books. They were not stories. A person was a collection of accidents. A person was an infinite pile of rocks with things growing underneath. In general, when you felt a longing for love, you took a woman and possessed her gingerly and not too hopefully until you finally let go, slept, woke up, and she eluded you once more. Then you started over. Or not.

Nothing about Quilty, however, seemed elusive.

“Is that what I want? Of course it’s what I want. Aren’t I a walking pamphlet for desire?” asked Quilty. “In Braille, of course, but still. Check it out. Move in. Take me.”

“Okay,” said Mack.

Mack had had a child with Annie, their boy, Lou, and just before the end, Mack had tried to think up words to say to Annie, to salvage things. He’d said “okay” a lot. He did not know how to raise a child, a toothless, trickless child, but he knew he had to protect it from the world a little; you could not just hand it over and let the world go at it. “There’s something that with time grows between people,” he said once, in an attempt to keep them together, keep Lou. If he lost Lou, he believed, it would wreck his life completely. “Something that grows whether you like it or not.”

“Gunk,” Annie said.

“What?”

“Gunk!” she shouted. “Gunk grows between people!”

He slammed the door, went drinking with his friends. The bar they all went to — Teem’s Pub — quickly grew smoky and dull. Someone, Bob Bacon, maybe, suggested going to Visions and Sights, a strip joint out near the interstate. But Mack was already missing his wife. “Why would I want to go to a place like that,” Mack said loudly to his friends, “when I’ve got a beautiful wife at home?”

“Well, then,” Bob said, “let’s go to your house.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

And when they got there, Annie was already gone. She had packed fast, taken Lou, and fled.

Now it is two and a half years since Annie left, and here Mack is with Quilty, traveling: their plan is to head through Chicago and St. Louis and then south along the Mississippi. They will check into bed-and-breakfasts, tour the historic sights, like spouses. They have decided on this trip now in October in part because Mack is recuperating from a small procedure. He has had a small benign cyst razored from “an intimate place.”

“The bathroom?” asked Quilty that first day after the surgery, and reached to feel Mack’s thick black stitches, then sighed. “What’s the unsexiest thing we can do for the next two weeks?”

“Go on a trip,” Mack suggested.

Quilty hummed contentedly. He found the insides of Mack’s wrists, where the veins were stiff cords, and caressed them with his thumbs. “Married men are always the best,” he said. “They’re so grateful and butch.”

“Give me a break,” said Mack.

The next day, they bought quart bottles of mineral water and packets of saltines, and drove out of town, out the speedway, with the Resurrection Park cemetery on one side and the Sunset Memories Park cemetery on the other — a route the cabbies called “the Bone Zone.” When he’d first arrived in Tapston, Mack drove a cab for a week, and he’d gotten to know the layout of the town fast. “I’m in the Bone Zone,” he used to have to say into the radio mouthpiece. “I’m in the Bone Zone.” But he’d hated that damn phrase and hated waiting at the airport, all the lousy tips and heavy suitcases. And the names of things in Tapston — apartment buildings called Crestview Manor, treeless subdivisions called Arbor Valley, the cemeteries undisguised as Sunset Memories and Resurrection Park — all gave him the creeps. Resurrection Park! Jesus Christ. Every damn Hoosier twisted words right to death.

But cruising out the Bone Zone for a road trip in Quilty’s car jazzed them both. They could once again escape all the unfortunateness of this town and its alarming resting places. “Farewell, you ole stiffs,” Mack said.

“Good-bye, all my clients,” cried Quilty when they passed the county jail. “Good-bye, good-bye!” Then he sank back blissfully in his seat as Mack sped the car toward the interstate, out into farm country, silver-topped silos gleaming like spaceships, the air grassy and thick with hog.

“I’d like to make a reservation for a double room, if possible,” Mack now shouts over the noise of the interstate traffic. He looks and sees Quilty getting out of the car, leaving Guapo, feeling and tapping his way with his cane, toward the entrance to McDonald’s.

“Yes, a double room,” says Mack. He looks over his shoulder, keeping an eye on Quilty. “American Express? Yes.” He fumbles through Quilty’s wallet, reads the number out loud. He turns again and sees Quilty ordering a soda but not finding his wallet, since he’d given it to Mack for the call. Mack sees Quilty tuck his cane under his arm and pat all his pockets, finding nothing there but a red Howe Caverns handker-chief.