Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

“What about the Acropolis?” I am into the authentic partaking of foreign countries, not ever having been to one myself, unless marriage counts.

Darrel describes the Acropolis, and, yes, it sounds like marriage: high, stunning, stony, and old with a gift shop at the bottom. He goes on to talk about neolithic architectural sites, the ancient Epidauros amphitheater. I feel ordinary and ungrammatical, and as always blame the trailer, blame growing up in a trailer.

When dinner comes we eat it. I’m not concentrating. Why is it that I can’t quite describe or picture Darrel? I close my eyes for two seconds and try. Is it that I’m not paying attention? I think of him as tall and strong, but perhaps he’s not really. Does he have a mustache? I open my eyes quickly to check. No, he doesn’t.

“Do you feel okay?” asks Darrel.

“It’s the liar eggplant,” I say cryptically.

Darrel is looking at my teeth. “You have nice teeth,” he says.

Afterward, at home in my living room, we drink wine, but we don’t kiss. Behind him, like a movie screen, I see the war, the muck of the paddies, swoop of helicopters, the hollers and cries. I suppose that is why we do not kiss.

But perhaps the reasons are not large and public but small and personal. Perhaps it’s simply that I’m too unattractive, older, perhaps my body has forgotten how to do things, my lips no longer firm or flip, my nipples no longer pink as calamine, my tongue no longer newly, nimbly amphibious but a thick, thrashing fish-muscle. Now I’m middle-aged: hairs sprout, skin sags, my mouth grows stupid as a boot. How can I make it work? I try to think about Congress and about polyps: how they make currents with their lips in order to receive food.

Darrel is talking aesthetics, poetry, voice, my thesis, and at the mention of the last all I can think of is how my whole life all I’ve ever really wanted was for my small, bug-bite breasts to heave seductively up over the neckline of my shirt, like a scientific wonder. Perhaps one might learn it with practice, discipline, commands: Heave! Heave-ho! “Do you like Joan Baez?” Darrel is saying. “I think her voice is more beautiful than any other singer I can think of.” I burst into a medley of all the Joan Baez songs I know. Darrel sings an old army thing about Nixon, set to the tune of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

Our laughs grow louder and hazy. Soon we are kissing. Soon we are unbuttoning. I haven’t kissed or unbuttoned in a long time and it’s like, at long last, a meeting of friends, falling into a familiar, ineffable dance we’ve both learned elsewhere, long ago, but have revived here, a revival! perhaps like Agnes DeMille’s Oklahoma! something like that. It is as if our separate pasts were greeting each other, as if we were saying, This is how I have been with other people, this is how I would love you. If I loved you. Everything always seems to boil down to Rodgers and Hammerstein. Off you would go in the mist of day and all that.

“You know, I’m probably old enough to be—” but here I stop for a second. “I’m old enough to be older than you,” I whisper. “Don’t look at my body. Don’t say anything about it.”

Darrel smiles. “I wouldn’t dream of bringing it up at a time like this.”

And soon we are upstairs, pulling down the bedspread, something in us pounding and accommodated, a mashing of hips, a pressing of faces, a slow friction of limbs and chests and lips against the sheets, this argument that is sex. Sometimes his chest moves up from mine with a soft sucking sound from the damp, trapped space between our sternums — something wet and reluctant, like marine life or a heart that can’t stop beating no matter how it tries. We are gasping, quiet, in the dark, and then the wash of violet and night tornadoes through my legs and up behind my eyes, plumbs and spirals my spine, and I know if I can keep feeling like this I’ll be okay, if I can feel like this I’m not dead, I won’t die. Life is sad. Here is someone.

The next three Saturday nights we sleep together. They are full of chuckles and whispers and much munching about the neck and shoulders. They are sweet and gentle, not at all like my marriage, where my husband used to laugh and slap me on the back after I’d had an orgasm, like a buddy, like I’d just hit this crazy home run. I don’t remember feeling such relief at the start of an affair: I’m not afraid. It’s like the joy of meeting someone who knows your favorite cousin — everything proceeds from this momentous, bridging fact. Like two Maine license plates honking and waving on a California freeway: the warmth of shared exile; two ugly step-siblings meeting at a ball, smiling and waltzing and, having no fairy godmother, not having to rush off in a tizzy like Cinderella who was all jitters and economics, foot small as her bank account. We don’t have to rush home, we can dance all night, curfewless and happy, our feet warty and huge as skateboards.

“You’re out of your mind,” says Eleanor, not smiling. “Your professional position is precarious enough. Why jeopardize things further with another affair with another one of your students?”

“What do you mean, another ?” I ask warily. She has said it twice. I’ve noticed. “It’s not like I sleep around with my students. Look, you don’t know Darrel. He’s great. He’s the sort of guy who tells you just the edge of his whole tragic life story, then smiles and leans over and sniffs your hair.”

Eleanor shrugs. “It only matters how things look.”

“Now you sound like my husband, Mr. Photography.”

“To them , to them , it matters.” The invisible them. The them upstairs with offices and foot-long pens. Eleanor is exasperated with me. She goes out to get a drink of water and doesn’t come back.

When I pull into the driveway, it is late, five o’clock, and the Shubbys next door are having a happy-hour party. Despite the autumnal nip in the air, the guests have spilled out onto the front porch, shouting, dancing, waving cocktail glasses.

“Hey, Benna,” Mr. Shubby calls to me, as I get out of my car. “Come on over.”

“Thanks, but I really can’t,” I call back, though for a split second I consider going. What could it hurt? Some small talk about the New York Film Festival and what I do for a living? I’m not in the mood. I slam the car door and walk across my lawn which is already scaly with leaves. An orangey crimson is settling in all along the street. The cork-bark in the front is in a cold, deep blush.

“Okay, be that way,” Mr. Shubby shouts back. He’s being good-natured. He’s being the life of the party. My arms are full. I smile and shrug. Mrs. Shubby comes out on the porch and signals flirtatiously to her husband. “Irv, you’re needed in here to open a bottle.” She spies me on my own front steps, fumbling for keys. “Benna, dear, why don’t you come join us.” The “dear” is to make me feel like a girl, a foolish girl, an unwed mother.

“Thanks, really,” I say. “Maybe next time.” I find the keys and by this time the whole Shubby porch is waving and calling. “Join the party! Come on!”

“Can’t, sorry.” I slip inside my front door, close it, sink back against it. The party sounds now are distant, deeply buried rumbles and squeals, like something wrong with your car though you can’t figure out what.

The ants sniff and speed around the window frames. They are frightened: It’s October. Like all things without recourse, they scurry, veer off into the walls of their own overpopulation, their own destructiveness, looking for a way out.

Georgie has a note from the school nurse. She might need glasses. I’m supposed to take her to an eye doctor. “I can’t see, I can’t see,” she says, stumbling around the house, deliberately bumping into furniture, arms outstretched and groping stupidly. “Where am I, where am I? Is this the bathroom?” she says, staggering into the kitchen, her eyes squinted almost shut. I am mincing onion for Quick Chili, my own very personal recipe.