Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

I pull out student poems from my bag. I think about Gerard wanting to be an opera singer, his hunger to have something grander than this, the arrogance of a hunger.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” It’s Gerard, adjusting the microphone. A spotlight flips on and Gerard squints into it. That, too, wanders around like a searchlight, getting adjusted, and Gerard, along with Charlie by the speakers who is supposedly in charge of the lights, goes into some five-second Berlin Wall pantomime: expressions of chase and horror, arms thrown in the air. They laugh, then resume a more responsible mien.

“Good evening again, ladles and gentlespoons.” This time he strikes a few chords. “Welcome to the Dome Room”—two more, ascending tonics. “At the”—chord. “Holiday Inn”—big chord and glissando. I’ve seen him do this dozens of times. Usually he launches quickly into a lot of bad lady-cannibal jokes, prefaced by “Where’s the dome in this room? What a dome name.” At least, I console myself, he does this for money. Tonight he introduces himself: “I’m Gerard Maines. I know some of you were expecting Tammy Wynette, but these things happen.” Then he starts in with “Just You, Just Me,” his own jazz rendition, never looking at the keyboard. In front of me I have a poem about an alien. From another solar system. I have forbidden any poems about aliens, but sometimes students beg me—“Please, just one alien”—and they slip in. Now Gerard stops to banter with the audience: “What? You’re from where ? Belittle, New York? You would live in a town with a name like that?” The people up front by the piano are loving it, the good-natured ribbing, they are starved for it. It’s still a weeknight and the place isn’t that full — only every other table has someone at it. Mostly businessmen, some couples, a group of women in their early twenties, smiling hopefully at Gerard then turning and whispering to one another, hands to lips. Gerard often attracts women like this. They come up to him on breaks and at the end of the night to chat and gush and ask him questions about the way he sang a certain song and what he does during the day. Sometimes they come up to him in pairs, stand there, hands in pockets, bodies leaning, sunk into one hip. Other times they come individually, a gesticulative drink in one hand, undulating cigarette in the other. Often, he’s confided, he’s gone home to bed with one of them, both of them awaking the next day, never in love, not always remembering last names. There was one woman, however, Hermione Miller, only nineteen, who had kept calling him, crying, showing up naked on his doorstep holding lighted candles, breaking into his car and sleeping in the backseat. He would spend whole hours talking to her, calming her down. She insisted she loved him and would go mad without him or at least have a hard time grocery shopping. She would phone him at Carpet Town and keep him on the phone, pretending she was interested in something in a lilac shag. Finally she fell for another musician, someone who worked the Double Bubble Hour at Howard Johnson’s.

“When I was in high school,” said Gerard, “I was moral and virile and sweet and trying to change my name to Buff, and no one would have me. There wasn’t a girl in Queens who would look at me.”

I don’t really believe this. It’s all part of Gerard’s poor-boy-in-Queens mythologizing.

“Now I’m a carpet salesman in an upstate suburb, a rat playing the piano, drunk with operatic aspirations, and people I hardly know say they’re in love with me. Christ.” He paused. “Middle age is dangerous.”

“Middle age? Gerard, you’re a year younger than I am.”

“I know,” he said.

Gerard’s still on the first set. He has another drink coming. The waitress leaves it on the piano. Someone near me at the bar is eating Vaseline. He has a jar and a spoon and is just eating. I try not to stare. I try to turn my attention to the stuff I’ve brought. I try to find things to cross out or circle, so I can feel like a teacher, like someone who knows things. This afternoon I was listening to the kids out in front of the house — Isabelle Shubby and some others — playing games, that timeless legacy of hopscotch and jumping rhymes children bring to one another, mysteriously, without adults, and I wondered, Is there a secret world of knowledge that adults know, that gets passed on from one generation to the next, the way there is with children? I think not. I think you’re blurped out into the world, you get a few jumprope rhymes, and from there on in you’re on your own. Nobody tells you anything. Nobody shows you how.

“Hey, you in the back doing my taxes,” shouts Gerard into the microphone. I look up and he winks. “This is for you.” I wait to hear what it is. “I Want Money.” I nod and smile. I’m now part of Gerard’s act. A few people turn to look at me.

One of them is Maple up near the front. I didn’t see him come in and now we wave enthusiastically. Maple stands, says “Excuse me” to a few people in chairs, and attempts to make his way over to my table. It takes a while before he is sitting next to me.

“So, this is your song?” he says.

“Not really.” Growing up we always said “Not hardly,” and I find myself almost saying it now. We also said “kranz” instead of “crayons,” and began all sentences with “Anyways …”

“How’ve you been? Lots of work, I see.”

“Oh, yeah. How about you?”

“Gotta new job,” he says. “I’m a waiter at a veggie and granola place on Roosevelt. I’ll have more time for my dancing that way.”

“Be careful. You know you can never really trust people who don’t eat meat.”

Maple smiles. “It’s better than clerking at Howland’s.” He turns his profile to me. He has three amethysts in his ear. He combs back his hair with his fingers, eyeing the piano. “I’m worried about Gerard,” he says. “He’s drinking too much.” The music has stopped. Gerard’s on a twenty-minute break. I see him start to wend his way over here but get waylaid by a woman in red slacks.

I try to think. Is Gerard drinking too much? Am I? Have I really noticed? “You think so?” I ask. And the waitress brings over two glasses of white wine.

“This is from Gerard,” she says.

“You know he’s going to audition for opera companies?”

“Yeah, I know,” I sigh, all weariness and concern, and then neither of us says anything. We tap our fingers, gaze down, gaze off. “Do you realize,” I say at last, “that there’s a guy sitting at the bar eating Vaseline?”

In class the teacher was teaching poetic forms. She defined villanelle, sestina, limerick . Last night she had looked up terza rima in the dictionary; it followed tertiary syphilis , something she’d always suspected.

Saturday dinner with Darrel is at the Fitchville Souvlaki House, where Gerard and I first went years ago. There’s a permanent sign on the door that says CLOSE ON MONDAY, and I worry that somehow Darrel and I won’t be.

This is where Darrel wants to go. He likes the checked tablecloths, the accents flying around in the kitchen. You can hear them when someone pushes in or out of the door in back. I look around the place and wonder who all here’s on first dates.

We order recklessly. I’m not sure what we’re getting. Darrel tells me that the Greek name for stuffed grape leaves means liar eggplant.

“Personally,” I say, “I’ve never put much store by honesty. I mean, how can you trust a word whose first letter you don’t even pronounce?” I light a cigarette and try to look sophisticated. I am that afraid of the world. Really, I have never gotten out of Tomaston High.

Darrel smiles and says that before he was in Vietnam, he was in Italy for six months, a weird mix of orders, and, on leave for a week, he went to Greece, island-hopped, learned a few phrases, never slept at all. He describes things: some fishermen he met, a village woman, a disco on the beach.