Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

“I think he’s cute.”

Gerard doesn’t say anything.

“I guess I’ll have dinner with him. What do you think?”

Gerard still doesn’t say anything, doesn’t give me even a look. He has a hangover, gulps orange juice like a dying plant. He also has a cold, and has pulled the hood of his sweat shirt up over his head and tied it. “You look like the Little League version of The Seventh Seal ,” I say. “How was the gig last night?” I was part of the first generation to grow up on television. I’ve learned how to change channels, switch stations, search through the snow for a new program.

“The Ramada,” Gerard says. “Rough place.”

“Gerard, are you okay?”

“Last night,” he says, “I got two requests from people moving through the salad bar: the theme from Chariots of Fire and the theme from Rocky . Plus, the Ramada has a chimpanzee tune their piano. It breaks my heart.”

“Why don’t you quit that place, Gerard? You don’t really need the money that badly, do you?”

With two fingers he picks up a spoon by its middle and twiddles it up and down, a fast, stainless seesaw. “You know when I first wanted to be a professional musician?”

“When the fifteen-year-old moss in your navel started talking back.”

Gerard scowls, it isn’t funny. I trust his assessments of my jokes. When his eyebrows come together in a single quick caterpillar, I know it’s dumb. When he falls helplessly back against the booth, says “Christ, Benna,” and laughs out loud with a sort of pain, I know it’s still dumb. But I use it in class.

“It was when I first met this aging hippie on the beach. I was just out of the ninth grade and had nothing to do. He was ten years out of graduate school and had nothing to do. His name was Buff. I went back with him to this old ramshackle beach house with creaky plank floors all covered with orange peels and sand. He had an old Steinway upright and he sat down and played and I thought he was God, man, I did. He could do everything from Kabalevsky to “Moon River.” I never saw him after that. I went home and convinced my mother to rent a piano. We were the only ones in our building with a piano. I even tried to change my name to Buff, but it didn’t catch on. Everyone at the school still kept calling me Gerard.”

“Imagine that.”

“Am I boring you?”

“No.”

“At any rate, the point is, well, if you promise not to laugh …”

“I promise,” I say, planning a guffaw for no matter what he says. I am, essentially, a fourteen-year-old.

“I want to sing opera. I’m trying to figure out how I can swing it.”

The guffaw doesn’t materialize. I just stare at him, the anxious hope of his cheek and eye muscles. I see his vision switch eyes, one eye now going off slightly to one side.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Gerard, I think, does have a nice tenor voice, but so does my father. So does my Uncle Bob.

“Do you think I’m crazy?”

“It’s not that, Gerard. It’s just that, well, you’re thirty-three years old.”

“No,” he smiles. “ You’re thirty-three years old. I’m thirty-two.” He has a face like a parking meter.

I slump, sigh loudly, look at the table, play with my spoon. “Gerard,” I say, syllables deliberate, tidy as needlepoint. “We should talk about this. Want to have dinner tonight?”

I do some reading at the library and then, noticing it’s almost time for George to be let out of school, dash off to pick up a few groceries and get home before she does. When I get in, however, she is already home sprawled out on the living-room sofa, her babies dress on again, wrinkled and untied. “George, my goodness, how come you’re home so early?”

“I don’t feel so good,” she says.

“You don’t feel very well ?” I ask, pedagogy in me like a burglar. “What’s wrong, honey? Is it your stomach?” I put my things down on the piano bench and go sit next to her, stroke her hair. She is flushed red and her hair is in damp strings against her temples. I press my wrist to her forehead and can feel she is hot.

“Do I have a temperature?” she asks.

“Yup,” and though she is big and six-and-a-half already, I pick her up, legs dangling, lug her upstairs to her room, to her white room splotched pink with animals and dolls. I help her take off her dress, then tuck her into bed with just her slip on. I pull the shades. I sit on the bed’s edge, in the dark, rosy lap of the afternoon. I hold her hand.

“Was school okay? Was it the nurse that sent you home?”

George nods. “She had to fill out a form first. Then the nurse’s aide drove me.” Her fingers knead the satin edge of the blanket. “Mom,” she whispers. “What was my father’s name?”

I’m always startled when she asks about him. Once she asked me where he went after I’d “laid him off and he went and got killed.” I was stunned at her phrasing and simply said, “He went to Heaven,” though I’ve never believed it for a minute.

“What do you mean? His name was Mr. Carpenter.”

“No, but what was his first name?”

And here I hesitate. She has a fever. She shouldn’t ask about these things, she shouldn’t think, she should sleep. I pull the quilt up over her. “I’ve invited Gerard over for dinner tonight. But I’ll bring you up some of what we’ve had, and I’ll make sure he stands in the doorway and says hi.” George has always liked Gerard. “In the meantime, Miss Sickie, you get some rest.”

“But what was his name?” she whimpers. Sleep is pulling on her face.

I pause for a long time. “George. It was George,” I say.

“George Carpenter? Like me?”

“Yes,” I say, and it makes me sad, though I can see her smile a little, seeming to find something nice in this news, this new news. The sing-song of an ambulance on the street hollers and fades. I sit there and say nothing. I watch George. I watch George’s eyes close.

I make a special kind of macaroni and cheese. It has three kinds of cheese and doesn’t turn out quite right, but Gerard doesn’t seem to mind, although he doesn’t want seconds. I give him some more anyway. He is talking about amateur competitions at the Met; applications to voice programs; the voice teacher he has now, a guy named Gil who has one arm; trying to sing Loggins and Messina at the Holiday Inn while the football game on the TV over the bar drowns him out. I try to listen fairly. I don’t want necessarily to discourage him. He says he has always loved Verdi and Puccini, Buff had tempted him astray, he needs to be in touch with serious music. “At least what you’re doing,” he says, “has something to do with what you’re serious about, something to do with poetry.”

My mouth is full of macaroni. I try not to choke. “What I’m doing,” I say between swallows, “has very little to do with poetry.” And the remark, the truth of it, sits there in front of me, shivering, like a funny old Italian man with no clothes, like a tepid macaroni from my lips.

“Gerard and I have decided to go out dancing for an hour or so,” I whisper to Georgianne. I have brought her juice and a small cup of pasta and placed them on the night table without turning on the light. She is mumbling something in her sleep. She turns toward me, eyes closed, and puts her face against my hand. I brush her dark hair off her forehead. She is not as feverish as before. “Mrs. Kimball is downstairs if you need anything. I’ll give you more aspirin when I get back.” Mrs. Kimball does crossword puzzles, eats Kraft caramels, and wears tangelo-colored pantsuits. She has a constant crinkle about her, perhaps from the Dacron or the caramel wrappers. She has a terrific red mouth, a huge crocket of a nose, and one very serious strawberry mole. She loves my daughter. She adores her.