Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

Before he left in the morning, she said, “Just don’t sleep with her.”

“Sidra,” he said, scolding her for lack of trust or for attempted supervision — she wasn’t sure which.

That night, he didn’t come home. She phoned and phoned and then drank a six-pack and fell asleep. In the morning, she phoned again. Finally, at eleven o’clock, he answered.

She hung up.

At 11:30, her phone rang. “Hi,” he said cheerfully. He was in a good mood.

“So where were you all night?” asked Sidra. This was what she had become. She felt shorter and squatter and badly coiffed.

There was some silence. “What do you mean?” he said cautiously.

“You know what I mean.”

More silence. “Look, I didn’t call this morning to get into a heavy conversation.”

“Well, then,” said Sidra, “you certainly called the wrong number.” She slammed down the phone.

She spent the day trembling and sad. She felt like a cross between Anna Karenina and Amy Liverhaus, who used to shout from the fourth-grade cloakroom, “I just don’t feel appreciated .” She walked over to Marshall Field’s to buy new makeup. “You’re much more of a cream beige than an ivory,” said the young woman working the cosmetics counter.

But Sidra clutched at the ivory. “People are always telling me that,” she said, “and it makes me very cross.”

She phoned him later that night and he was there. “We need to talk,” she said.

“I want my key back,” he said.

“Look. Can you just come over here so that we can talk?”

He arrived bearing flowers — white roses and irises. They seemed wilted and ironic; she leaned them against the wall in a dry glass, no water.

“All right, I admit it,” he said. “I went out on a date. But I’m not saying I slept with her.”

She could feel, suddenly, the promiscuity in him. It was a heat, a creature, a tenant twin. “I already know you slept with her.”

“How can you know that?”

“Get a life! What am I, an idiot?” She glared at him and tried not to cry. She hadn’t loved him enough and he had sensed it. She hadn’t really loved him at all, not really.

But she had liked him a lot!

So it still seemed unfair. A bone in her opened up, gleaming and pale, and she held it to the light and spoke from it. “I want to know one thing.” She paused, not really for effect, but it had one. “Did you have oral sex?”

He looked stunned. “What kind of question is that? I don’t have to answer a question like that.”

“ You don’t have to answer a question like that . You don’t have any rights here!” she began to yell. She was dehydrated. “You’re the one who did this. Now I want the truth. I just want to know. Yes or no!”

He threw his gloves across the room.

“Yes or no,” she said.

He flung himself onto the couch, pounded the cushion with his fist, placed an arm up over his eyes.

“Yes or no,” she repeated.

He breathed deeply into his shirtsleeve.

“Yes or no.”

“Yes,” he said.

She sat down on the piano bench. Something dark and coagulated moved through her, up from the feet. Something light and breathing fled through her head, the house of her plastic-wrapped and burned down to tar. She heard him give a moan, and some fleeing hope in her, surrounded but alive on the roof, said perhaps he would beg her forgiveness. Promise to be a new man. She might find him attractive as a new, begging man. Though at some point, he would have to stop begging. He would just have to be normal. And then she would dislike him again.

He stayed on the sofa, did not move to comfort or be comforted, and the darkness in her cleaned her out, hollowed her like acid or a wind.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said, something palsied in her voice. She felt cheated of all the simple things — the radical calm of obscurity, of routine, of blah domestic bliss. “I don’t want to go back to L.A.,” she said. She began to stroke the tops of the piano keys, pushing against one and finding it broken — thudding and pitchless, shiny and mocking like an opened bone. She hated, hated her life. Perhaps she had always hated it.

He sat up on the sofa, looked distraught and false — his face badly arranged. He should practice in a mirror, she thought. He did not know how to break up with a movie actress. It was boys’ rules: don’t break up with a movie actress. Not in Chicago. If she left him , he would be better able to explain it, to himself, in the future, to anyone who asked. His voice shifted into something meant to sound imploring. “I know” was what he said, in a tone approximating hope, faith, some charity or other. “I know you might not want to.”

“For your own good,” he was saying. “Might be willing …” he was saying. But she was already turning into something else, a bird — a flamingo, a hawk, a flamingo-hawk — and was flying up and away, toward the filmy pane of the window, then back again, circling, meanly, with a squint.

He began, suddenly, to cry — loudly at first, with lots of ohs , then tiredly, as if from a deep sleep, his face buried in the poncho he’d thrown over the couch arm, his body sinking into the plush of the cushions — a man held hostage by the anxious cast of his dream.

“What can I do?” he asked.

But his dream had now changed, and she was gone, gone out the window, gone, gone.

It was a fear greater than death, according to the magazines. Death was number four. After mutilation, three, and divorce, two. Number one, the real fear, the one death could not even approach, was public speaking. Abby Mallon knew this too well. Which is why she had liked her job at American Scholastic Tests: she got to work with words in a private way. The speech she made was done in the back, alone, like little shoes cobbled by an elf: spider is to web as weaver is to blank . That one was hers. She was proud of that.

Also, blank is to heartache as forest is to bench.

But then one day the supervisor and the AST district coordinator called her upstairs. She was good, they said, but perhaps she had become too good, too creative , they suggested, and gave her a promotion out of the composing room and into the high school auditoriums of America. She would have to travel and give speeches, tell high school faculty how to prepare students for the entrance exams, meet separately with the juniors and seniors and answer their questions unswervingly, with authority and grace. “You may have a vacation first,” they said, and handed her a check.

“Thank you,” she said doubtfully. In her life, she had been given the gift of solitude, a knack for it, but now it would be of no professional use. She would have to become a people person.

“A peeper person?” queried her mother on the phone from Pittsburgh.

“People,” said Abby.

“Oh, those,” said her mother, and she sighed the sigh of death, though she was strong as a brick.

Of all Abby’s fanciful ideas for self-improvement (the inspirational video, the breathing exercises, the hypnosis class), the Blarney Stone, with its whoring barter of eloquence for love — O GIFT OF GAB, read the T-shirts — was perhaps the most extreme. Perhaps. There had been, after all, her marriage to Bob, her boyfriend of many years, after her dog, Randolph, had died of kidney failure and marriage to Bob seemed the only way to overcome her grief. Of course, she had always admired the idea of marriage, the citizenship and public speech of it, the innocence rebestowed, and Bob was big and comforting. But he didn’t have a lot to say. He was not a verbal man. Rage gave him syntax — but it just wasn’t enough! Soon Abby had begun to keep him as a kind of pet, while she quietly looked for distractions of depth and consequence. She looked for words. She looked for ways with words. She worked hard to befriend a lyricist from New York — a tepid, fair-haired, violet-eyed bachelor — she and most of the doctors’ wives and arts administrators in town. He was newly arrived, owned no car, and wore the same tan blazer every day. “Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink,” said the bachelor lyricist once, listening wanly to the female chirp of his phone messages. In his apartment, there were no novels or bookcases. There was one chair, as well as a large television set, the phone machine, a rhyming dictionary continuously renewed from the library, and a coffee table. Women brought him meals, professional introductions, jingle commissions, and cash grants. In return, he brought them small piebald stones from the beach, or a pretty weed from the park. He would stand behind the coffee table and recite his own songs, then step back and wait fearfully to be seduced. To be lunged at and devoured by the female form was, he believed, something akin to applause. Sometimes he would produce a rented lute and say, “Here, I’ve just composed a melody to go with my Creation verse. Sing along with me.”