Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

But even these bits drift away from me, even now after I’ve conjured them. It’s because they don’t fit anywhere, so I can’t keep them still, can’t connect and possess them. They make only for a jagged fuzz of a past and a father getting old and eating giblets in Florida.

My life, what I’ve lived so far, crumbles across its very center and the pieces float off a slight distance and just stay there, jigsawed, glueless, and dead.

My heart is raucous as a tea kettle. I have stopped by Gerard’s with Chinese food for a quick chow-down. I eat and rant at the same time, sitting cross-legged on the floor against the couch. I pointlessly hurl throw pillows across the room. “What are you doing?” he asks. “Throwing cushion to the winds?” I curl my lip. I tell him I want to pretend. I want to pretend there’s such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.

“Endurance is a country in Central America,” says Gerard. “It has nothing to do with love. As for requited, that has nothing to do with anything. Except, my dear, you and me.” He extends a long, curving arm. He kisses me. I say good night, I have to go, I have to go home and make honey milk.

Gerard walks me out to my car. It’s dark already, and the night sky is beautiful and cold. Gerard points up to it. “You see the sky?” he sings to the tune of an old Herb Alpert song. “The sky’s in love with you …”

I hold up the tail end of an egg roll. I look Gerard straight in the beard. “I am a wok,” I say, “I am an island.” Then I get in my car and drive away.

Darrel has keys, I hear the jangle and thud downstairs, and soon he has slipped into bed beside me.

“Did you say something?” he asks. He glides his hand down the side of my ribcage.

“No. Why?”

“I thought you said something.”

“No,” I say. “Did you?”

“No,” he says.

This morning I get up to correct papers and it’s still dark outside, the streetlights still on. I put some water on for coffee, then wander out into the living room. I glance out the front window, and there’s a woman in slippers and a robe standing in the middle of the street, grinning and waving at me as if she’d been standing there all night just waiting for me to look out and find her. I shut the curtains, terrified, then peek out again to see if she’s still there. She is and gives me a glorious, gregarious wave. She sees me, recognizes me, knows me — how does she know me? Oh my god. I walk to the kitchen and back. I peek out again. Only the frozen gray street — she has vanished.

The greatest number of accessory mammae was reported in 1866 by Neugebauer, who found ten in one woman.

Many images of Diana, the virgin goddess, portray her as polymastic, having over a dozen breasts. They look like clusters of tropical fruit; she doesn’t look too displeased but then she’s a goddess why the hell should she.

Tonight Gerard plays at the Ramada in the Nickelodeon Lounge, a space lit with dusky rose lights, the ceilings dangling coleus and mingy philodendra and spidery antique fans which are motionless and probably don’t work. With a small stack of student poems, I sit in one of the booths that line the far wall. The upholstery is a sort of crooked Aztec, the table waxy polyurethaned cherry. Gerard is at the piano up front in a coral-hued spotlight, swaying from side to side, fingers dribbling along the keyboard while he chats exuberantly at the audience, various members of which look up occasionally from their veal cutlets and fried mushrooms to nod, clap, or laugh with their mouths full. I give him a subtle wave and a broad wink, and he smiles, armlessly directing one of his jokes my way: “What did one lady cannibal say to the other lady cannibal? ‘I don’t know what to make of my husband these days. Could I borrow a recipe?’ ”

The audience likes it, likes the idiocy of all this, though one woman near me has glanced down at her stroganoff and complained, “Please, not while we’re eating.” Gerard begins singing the Cabaret medley, his high notes occasionally strained and misshapen. When he gets to the song “Married,” he stops singing for a moment, his hands continuing in some bland arpeggios, and he says, “My wife: She’s one in a million. I just have to make sure she doesn’t find out.” A large white-haired man to my left, part of a two-couple foursome, guffaws loudly, then gets swatted in the arm by the woman next to him. Gerard smiles at me and moves quickly on through to the end of the song, the musical-comedy bliss of marriage. Gerard has never had a wife. Sometimes I think he knows too many philanderer and lady cannibal jokes to ever have one. “What did one lady cannibal say to the other lady cannibal?” he’s now asking. “ ‘Boy, is my husband in hot water!’ ” He bangs out some loud chords, there are some amused groans. Another lady cannibal joke is about how to make a husband stew. With onions.

I’m not sure why he feels so brutalized, or why he’s directing so many of these my way. Perhaps this is my self-centeredness, my failure to really know Gerard.

He finishes up the Cabaret medley. I applaud vigorously, and he nods, says thank you, keeps playing. He is trying to appear tireless. He creeps a ways into a Louis Armstrong song—“I went down to St. James infirmary / Met my baby there / Saw her laid out on the table / So sweet, so cold, so bare”—and then quickly moves into a Fats Waller tune, “Keeping Out of Mischief Now,” a weird, dark wit to the juxtaposition. This song is pretty, and Gerard sings it with his eyes closed, his electrically haloed face raised toward the ceiling, a religious painting in bright colors on black velvet. I think for a brief, glowy moment that even though people are getting up and heading for the salad bar, loading up with pickled beets, pickled corn, pickled beans — kidney, string, wax — that they appreciate Gerard, that he really is talented, that in some endless way I too will always be in love with him.

The song is over, but his fingers still linger on the keyboard, a salad-bar tinkle.

At the break the spotlight goes off and he comes over and sits at my booth. “More freshman poems?” He riffles quickly through the pile, a polite curiosity.

“Yeah, I keep thinking of leaving them at the salad bar. Next to the croutons, like an alternative lettuce.”

Gerard smiles wearily, then buries his face in his hands, a pianist’s hands, leathered trees of knobs, dour veins, branches of fingers. I reach over and touch his forearm. He feels embarrassed working here. The salad bar gets to him.

“I can’t come out,” he says, not removing his hands. “Not for at least ten minutes.”

I feel superfluous, a giant, wet flesh match in a sweater I just bought on sale this afternoon. “Okay,” I say, and we sit there, silent, sad, his shoulders heaving twice, his face vanished into his palms until finally, a long finally, he wipes his hands down slowly off his face and though pink-eyed and sleepy, he looks all right again. He has used up most of his ten minutes, and the spotlight has come back on, and no one is in it, a signal that Gerard’s break is over.

I take Gerard’s hand. “ ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?’ ”

“Shit,” says Gerard, glancing over his shoulder. He picks up my empty drink and chugs it back. The ice cubes knock against his teeth and upper lip. “ ‘Churl,’ ” he says, putting the glass back down with a clunk. “ ‘Drunk all and left no friendly drop to help me out?’ ”

When we are depressed, we quote Shakespeare, to put things in perspective. Between us we know about five lines, which limits our perspective.

“How come you’re always Juliet and I’m always Romeo?” I moan.

“That, my dear,” says Gerard, getting up, “is the question of the century. We shall take it up anon.”