Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

I glance at his newspaper. “What’s happening in the world? Do we still exist?”

We don’t talk about Thursday night — another undiscussable, like Darrel’s war, or Gerard’s long ago restaurant: We leave them alone. There’s still something tense between us, but it’s tense like hope.

Gerard folds the newspaper. “Do you suppose this planet is hell and we’ve all been sent here from somewhere else because we fucked up, and we don’t realize it?”

I smile. This is how we talk when we’re happy. When we’re depressed we spout forth irrepressibly about our love lives.

I look at the paper again. The human race is dying. We are all dying and we are sitting up in our beds smoking cigars and making dying jokes, an impressively, compulsively vaudevillian species. Monkeys with spiff.

“The coffee’s like mop water today. I don’t know what happened.” Usually Hank’s serves the kind of coffee that makes you talk real fast and then sends you knocking around the room, breaking things.

“And look at these eggs,” says Gerard. Yolk has bled and dried all over the plate. Gerard always likes his yolks cooked more. “I hate them when they’re all embryonic like this. The waitress is new. The last time she walked by here I said, ‘Excuse me, could I also have some Band-Aids for these?’ and she just walked away.” Yolk has dried into Gerard’s beard like wax.

“Who wants to tell me what a sonnet is?” asked the teacher. “Lucy?”

“No, it’s Joyce.”

“Really? Gee, my seating chart says Lucy. Oh, I see. Lucy Joyce Brondoli. Why are you called by your middle name? Is there a long story to that?”

Lucy Joyce Brondoli shrugged and spoke slowly, in a diffident deadpan. “The dog was named Lucy, so they had to call me Joyce.”

“The dog was there before you and got your name?”

“I forget.”

“I don’t understand. Why did they name both you and the dog Lucy?”

“I guess they liked the name. A sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter ending in a couplet and the rhyme scheme before that goes ABAB,CDCD,EFEF. Like that. Shakespeare wrote a lot of them.”

“But why didn’t they just call the dog Joyce? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I get sidetracked,” I tell Eleanor. We slurp coffee together in the lounge. “I get fascinated. I think people spend most of their lives just trying to adjust to their names. When you’re eighteen months old, you learn what it is, one of those huge, immutable abstractions in life, and from there on in it’s all recovery from the shock and indignity of it.” My father had wanted another boy after Louis. He was hoping for a Benjamin. That’s partly how I became Benna. The other part involved my mother who, in looking through a book called Names for Your Child , became very distressed to see that if you were a boy your name usually meant “Almighty One,” and if you were a girl you were probably “a wee, faithful thing of the woods.” My mother didn’t want me hanging around in the woods. “Well, Nick,” she said to my father in the hospital, “looks like we have a little Benna .” Which was the beginning of a lot of confusion. My father sometimes called me Ben, complicating my childhood in the obvious ways. And in the second grade I got thirty valentines, all with my name spelled differently, everything from Bean to Donna. No one could get it right.

“My name was always such a hideosity I finally had to take up yoga to relax,” says Eleanor. I smile, slurp, and accidentally burn my tongue. “You know,” says Eleanor, “if I were to write a book, it would be filled with women sitting around having lunch, talking like this — about God and diaphragms and Middlemarch . After every lunch they’d all take out their compacts at the table and reapply their lipstick together. What yould you write?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’d call it Split Infinitives and load it up with a lot of divorces. Then at the end I’d have it be like To the Lighthouse , where all human life is suddenly lifted up out of the book and vanished, only an old house at the end, with English weeds tapping at the glass.”

Eleanor nods and smiles. “That’s depressing.”

“Yeah, I guess if it was too depressing I’d add a knock-knock joke.”

At night it’s cold and I sit out on the steps of my front porch, listen to the leaves drop, like the beginning of rain. I suck on my cigarette, its false restorative, the dry papery sponge, the sucking finger of love. I exhale in the direction of the streetlight and what I see, what is formed, is a sort of halo, a luminous flower, splayed ghostly starfish! for a moment and then it floats off into the hydrangea. I repeat this, breathing on my cigarette, blowing upward into the light: At night all ghosts, all angels, haloes, luminous flowers are this nicotined dust against the streetlamp.

When I told my husband I hated him, we hadn’t been married long at all. It was when he was taking my picture with his new camera, narrowing his eyes, adjusting the shutter speed, posing me at various angles until my smile felt aching and absurd. We were in the living room. He had asked me to take my shirt off and I’d obliged. I’d been standing there by the mantel awhile and it was getting cold, the hairs on my arms standing on end, my nipples erect. “Got your high beams on,” said my husband, like a college kid, camera to his face. Finally he pulled the camera away from his eyes. “Light’s bad,” he mumbled and walked off without taking the shot. Stunned and topless, I followed him into the dining room where he began taking pictures of the porcelain monkey-head lamp my Aunt Wyn had sent us for our wedding. “The light’s hitting this great,” said my husband. “The reading’s perfect.” His camera was clicking away.

“The monkey-head lamp?” I said. I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it. Three times before, my husband had asked me to pose with various articles of clothing removed. Once in the bedroom wearing only boots and one of his ties. Once in the bathroom with a red towel draped strategically to miss one breast. Once in the kitchen in just my bra. And today. I did this because I loved him, I supposed, but maybe I did it because I’d grown up in a trailer and guessed that this is what people did in houses, that this is what houses were for. I’m not sure. Maybe I did it because I had only five pages of a dissertation on Miltonic echoes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s literature. Each time my husband had never actually taken the picture. He had put the camera to his face, squinted his eyes, bared his teeth, and grown dissatisfied. This day, however, this day of the monkey-head lamp would be the last. I stood there, naked from the waist up, fury spreading up from my gut into my face, as fury does, and when my husband turned around with only a vaguely apologetic half-smile, I punched him in the neck. “I hate you,” I said, and then went back into the living room and put on my shirt. I turned around, buttoning, and he was standing by the sofa, wide-eyed, the camera hanging from its long black strap, resting against his torso like a dark, outsized belly button, like an insect that had crawled into his abdomen and was poking its head out to look around.

“The litter bag on our honeymoon was bad enough,” I said. We had driven to Cape Hatteras. He had made me put the car litter bag in my pocketbook so it wouldn’t stink up the rented Plymouth. I have always felt that life was simply a series of personal humiliations relieved, occasionally, by the humiliations of others. But compared to my husband I had no imagination with which to fight back, with which to construct indignities. “This is the last draw,” I said. From the time I was a child I always thought people were saying “draw” not “straw.” “I despise you.” I walked toward the front door. I was going for a walk.