Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

Miraculously, we became the best of friends, moving on to other romantic flailings, but having regular breakfasts at Hank’s, comparing sordid life-notes, having dinner, going disco-dancing for the exercise. (Although Gerard usually tries to meet women, his recent success rate hasn’t been wonderful and he has taken to greeting attractive disco women with the opener “Why have I never seen you before, and why will I never see you again?”) Often I go hear him play at one of the local cocktail places. I love Gerard, even if he is a lounge act.

The walls of The Grounded Star, the only disco in Fitchville, beat like a migraine. It is packed, even on a Thursday night. The music hurts my eyes for some reason, and I wonder if I’m getting old, somebody’s great-aunt at a disco. Perhaps soon I’ll have dyed hair and cheap black underwear you can see the shadow of through tight, peach-tone pants. I saw a woman like that yesterday. George was with me. “If you ever notice me starting to wear things like that,” I told her, “you have permission to send me away forever on a bus.” I am getting the thunder thighs of my Aunt Ivy. The lumpy oatmeal buttocks. When Georgianne is fourteen she will be embarrassed to be seen with me in public places like hosiery aisles and church. She will stand in the doorway of the bathroom, while I’m getting ready to go out, and will cluck her tongue and groan, “Oh, god, Mother ” and then show me how to wear make-up, hauling out her own slick tubes, unrecognizable gels, sneering at my dusty compacts, my fuddy-duddy wands.

The strobe-light show over the dance floor looks like something that could bring on epilepsy.

“Hey. Exercise. Good for you,” I grunt at the door, Tonto to Gerard’s masked stranger: He has put on silvery New Wave sunglasses. “You’re very cool,” I reassure him.

“You either have it, Benna, or you don’t,” he says.

We pay the five-dollar cover, take our two wooden nickels over to the bar and get two “free,” fancy German beers, which we glug theatrically from their bottles, our heads back, hands jammed into ass pockets, like juvenile delinquents. Before we are quite finished, Gerard puts his beer down on the bar, and for no reason but comedy, says “Excuse me” to the bewildered person next to him, grabs my arm and together we poke and strut our way out to the dance floor, which we locate mostly by noticing where the carpet underfoot gives way to wood. It is that crowded. We dance with our knees and elbows, all angles from the joints. We are warm and spinning in place, imitating each other’s movements: fake boxing, fake karate, fake roller derby. I look at Gerard: We are in charge; we are the best people here, whether we really are or not.

I accidentally step on someone’s foot and she turns around shrieking, “A cripple, you’ve made me into a cripple!”

“Sorry,” I call over the music.

The next song is a slow, hug-your-honey number. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” I shout at Gerard. He nods.

In the bathroom someone has written I WANT TO BE FUCKED.

Beneath it someone else has added, in a red, searing scrawl, YOU ARE FUCKED.

At the bar with Gerard, I glug more beer, warm, unfizzled, sweet. The room is pounding and airless. “You could die of White Shoulders poisoning in here,” says Gerard, absently gazing at a group of women by the dance floor, all pretty, all young. I look off in some other direction, but think I see someone I know smiling at me. I look away; it’s probably a student — I dread seeing students. I look back and someone else, a handsome black man in a white silk shirt, is standing next to me. It is Darrel, sans army greens.

“Darrel,” I say. “Hi.”

“Dr. Carpenter,” he says. Why do students do that? Add the oppressive and unprophetic Dr .

“Benna. Please. It’s Benna. Call me Benna. This is my friend Gerard. Gerard-Darrel, Darrel-Gerard.”

Gerard proffers a hand and shakes more warmly than he usually manages with strangers. Sometimes when new people enter the picture, he growls inside himself. Like a groundhog seeing his shadow, or like a thief, you see all of his features abscond, close, a window shade pulled down behind his face.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” says Darrel, turning toward me, “but would you like to dance?”

It’s another hug-your-honey number.

“Gee, I’m not sure.” I look at Gerard for advice. He nudges me gently, is probably winking at me behind his glasses.

“Go on,” he says quietly. “Go on, go on, go on.”

“All right, already.” I like saying that. It’s something I picked up in New York City, when I lived there. Like a sinus condition, or something on sale. I follow Darrel out onto the floor. It’s less crowded now, the lighting dimmed to a television blue, couples pressed close as toast. Darrel smiles, very tall, very much at ease here, lightly taking my waist and my right hand and moving me surefootedly around the small corner of floor that is, apparently, ours. Where are Darrel’s sneakers? He is wearing what my brother Louis used to call “hard shoes”—leather shoes. And a slick shirt, slippery and nice. It has a dry, sweet smell, like bubblegum and cedar.

Whenever I have danced this way with Gerard, it’s always been sort of a joke: I lead and he pretends to swoon. With Darrel, there’s no joking. I try to catch Gerard’s eye every 360 degrees. To be reassured? Encouraged? Gerard lifts his glasses up onto his head and flutters his eyelids at me. His eyebrows wriggle up and down, crazed and wooly. Maple has turned up here and the two of them are leaning lazily against the wood lip of the bar and talking. A couple to one side of them are watching Darrel and me dance. I turn back, look up at Darrel, and feel my heart fluttering. It’s a Tennessee Williams heart. A bad Tennessee Williams heart. I don’t know what to say. The music urges love on you like food. I say, “Well, waddya know. Here we are.” I shout it. I’m out of breath. My feet are like turtles, my armpits ponds.

Darrel grins, listening to the music, not saying anything. He spins me around, pulls me close, then steps back, then moves close again. What is this jazz? I grew up in the country, in a trailer. We did things like stand far apart and ripple our stomachs in and out.

When the song ends, moving subtly into a faster one, we let go and I wipe my palms on my jeans and say, “Well, Darrel, thanks for the dance.” I thrust my hand at him and he shakes it, warm and dry. I follow him off the dance floor. When he turns around to say good-bye, I gaze up at his sad laughlines, the lashes, the perfect keyboard of his teeth, and I say, “Let’s have dinner this week.”

“Absolutely,” says Darrel.

“He has a kind face,” I say to Gerard, riding home in his Datsun.

Gerard shrugs and then there is silence, the dark sky pricked with stars, dotted lines in the headlights pulled under and to the left of us, the black of trees running footlessly by. Gerard is speeding.

Finally he asks, “Why do you always sleep with your students?”

My vision leaves me for a minute, my brain grinds against my skull. I turn and glare at Gerard’s profile. “Fuck off, Gerard! I don’t always sleep with my students.” Gerard doesn’t say anything. We are approaching a stoplight. “Once. Once before, that’s all.” And only as I say it do I realize I’ve said “before.” “Goddamn it, Gerard. What are you trying to make me out to be? You know how many people I’ve slept with in my whole life? Six! Up until a year ago I could count them on one hand. I’ve had six lovers and I’m thirty-three years old, and I still send all of them Christmas cards and birthday cards. Still! And that’s even counting my husband and you , Gerard, which I think is rather generous of me.” Meanness flies around my brain like a spluttering balloon. “I don’t always sleep with my students.”