Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

“I’m sorry,” he said. I stopped and turned to look. He had kind of a vegetable glaze, the look, I imagined, potatoes got in their eyes. His neck was red. “Shoot me, if I’m such a shit. Shoot me.” And then, apparently, he became quite taken with the joke, and handed me the camera, dancing around in front of me, singing, “Shoot me, shoot me.”

“George,” I said. “You’re losing it.”

“Shoot me!” he persisted, and he started taking off his clothes. I grabbed the camera and took off out the front door, across the lawn; perhaps I would throw the camera away in a trash can somewhere. “Shoot me! Shoot me!” I could still hear George cry behind me, and I turned and he was bouncing up and down on the front porch, ludicrous in his underwear. “Shoot me!”

And I shot, and the picture I took and still have, shows him ducking back inside the house, one side of him still caught within the doorframe, half of a pale blurry body embedded forever in the long dark marrow of that entrance, deep inside unseen and grinning, a monkey-head lamp in perfect light, a present only an aunt could give.

· · ·

You cannot be grateful without possessing a past. That is why children are incapable of gratitude and why night prayers and dinner graces are lost on them. “Gobbles Mommy, Gobbles Grandpa …” George races through it. She has no reference points. As I get older the past widens and accumulates, all sloppy landlessness like a river, and as a result I have more clearly demarcated areas of gratitude. Things like ice cream or scenery or one good kiss become objects of a huge soulful thanks. Nothing is gobbled. This is a sign of getting old.

“Writing is a safari, dammit,” exclaimed the teacher. “It means going out there and spotting, nabbing, and bringing home to the cage of the page the most marvelous living stuff of the world.”

Timothy Robinson sat right in front of the teacher. He was doodling scenes from Conan in the margins of his notebook.

“But those cages are small and expensive,” the teacher continued, searched, groped, not knowing quite what she was talking about.

Conan’s pectorals were like concrete slabs and in Timothy Robinson’s margins Conan’s biceps and triceps had begun to make his arms look like large croissants. Now he suddenly was getting sunglasses. Now striped thighs.

“Don’t bring back any dim-witted mooses,” she said. “Don’t put a superfluous dumb cluck of a line in your poem.” She had used her lifeboat simile in the last class: A line is like a lifeboat — only a limited number of words get to go in it and you have to decide which word-lives are most valuable; the rest die.

It was ridiculous, but the only thing she could think of to say.

When no one said anything in response, she stared out into the center of the room and said, “So, Tim. How the fuck is Conan?”

· · ·

The small, dingy P&C by campus is unusually crowded and not just with jean-jacketed students buying beer, bananas, hamburger. There are even families in here, as if from some other neighborhood. Perhaps there’s a sale. The three available shopping carts by the door are gritty with black grease, spangled with lettuce bits like a rabbit’s cage. They are all jammed into each other, a copulation of stainless steel. I unhitch the one with the least grease but the most lettuce and proceed to wheel it into the mayhem. People are crashing into each other in the narrow produce aisle, scrambling zigzag for plastic bags.

“Excuse me,” says a male student in a white turtleneck. He doesn’t have a cart, only a beige knapsack of books over his shoulder. He isn’t interested in produce. “Excuse me,” he says to me again. “I saw you outside and followed you in here because I thought you were beautiful and I wanted to tell you that.”

“Oh, my god,” I say and turn away, suddenly startled into a weird sort of terror. I fumble with the cabbage heads. Who does this guy think he is? I try to glide voicelessly away.

“Are you a student here?” the guy persists.

I can feel myself pale, jittery, glaring at a point slightly to the left of one of his ears. His heart, I know, is all chutzpah and photography. “No, I’m an instructor.” I try to pronounce it like a baroness, but it comes out faltering and wrong. “Excuse me,” I say to the student, then squeeze past him, between a center-aisle mustard display and someone else’s cartload of dog food and frozen orange juice. I cross the aisle to the apples.

The student follows. “I hope I didn’t offend you,” he says. I keep my back to him, studying the apples. “My name is John. I’m an archaeology major,” he says, examining, I can tell, the tweed back of my thrift-shop man’s coat. I examine apple after apple, taking out my reading glasses, putting them on, and then peering out over them, saying, “Hmmmmm.” I pretend to be an apple scientist. I’m unable to tell him straight out to get lost.

“Well,” says John, finally. “Good-bye,” and he ambles away.

I remain at the apples, counting, counting. I can feel my face splotch with red, my mouth clamp into a hard line. I breathe deeply, run my hand through my hair, return to my cart and quickly wheel it around, head for the checkout line, like someone who needs desperately to be alone, to be in bed, to be taking a bath, somewhere far away, conjugating verbs, memorizing dynasties.

The ants are still trafficking around the place, seemingly undisturbed by the weather’s getting colder. Georgianne keeps singing her own misheard lyrics to a Bob Dylan song: “The ants are my friends / They’re blowing in the wind.” The crack has moved a few more inches, taking a slight upward turn like a kind of graph, an optimistic poll. The plumbing, however, is sluggish, acting up, the toilet slow and undignified, churning the toilet-paper, stewing, shredding things finer. This is what it’s like to live in a house.

Georgie has dinner and a bath, and Mrs. Kimball comes over and I say good night and drive over to Gerard’s apartment. We are going to have drinks there and then go off to the Dome Room at the Holiday Inn where he will play and I will sit in an elegant booth and mark up student poems all evening. And listen.

He is in the kitchen pouring bourbon over ice.

I pace idly about his apartment. Over his bed Gerard has placed a cheap gift-shop placard reading MISERY LOVES COMPANY. One of his Greece posters on the same wall is starting to come down. A tack is missing and the tape on the back is fuzzy with lint. “Hey, Gerard, where do you keep your tape? I’m going to fix your Kythera poster.”

“Try the drawer in the nightstand there,” he calls, making ice cube and glass noises.

I open the drawer. It’s crammed with a jumble of things — old sheet music, dice, masking tape, regular tacks, carpet tacks, unopened packages of condoms. I take out the masking tape. Gerard has come in with drinks and hands me one. I notice he has missed a belt loop. I slip the tape roll over my wrist like a bracelet and push the drawer shut with one hip.

“Cheers,” says Gerard, smiling.

“Go team go,” I say, former alternate cheerleader at Tomaston High. We drink slowly, deliciously. “Tell me, Gerard. Why is it that you keep your condoms in the same drawer as your carpet tacks and tape?”

Gerard slurps and swallows. “How else are you supposed to keep them on?” he says.

The Holiday Inn is more brightly lit than most places Gerard plays in. There are pink glassed candles on the tables, but the whole windowless place is a bright amberish yellow and the candles are merely gestures, splots of silly complementary colors, like decorator pillows. Gerard takes his drink, sips, places it on the piano up front. He has arranged for a free glass of chablis for me, and the waitress comes over, places it in front of me, smiles, goes away. I have connections. It’s all small town and rink-a-dink, but I have connections with celebrity.