Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

The auditorium is only half-dark and half-full, mostly, I assume, with friends, parents, senior citizens who in the middle of Carmen’s arias squeak in their chairs, or readjust them loudly across the floor. The woman singing Carmen is a pale, wheat-haired woman named Dixie Seltzer. She tries to look seductively Spanish, but ends up steamily emoting like a Kansas housewife with the vapors. Gerard hasn’t really prepared me for the amateurishness of this production. Mediocrity alone never surprises me, but this particular example, unheralded by the usually shrewd and cynical Gerard, comes as a painful surprise, like a car accident. I’m probably being unkind. I adjust to my seat, slip off my coat, re-cross my legs. Perhaps it’s not all that bad. The rest of the audience seems to be enjoying it, smiling and applauding and glancing down at their programs to see who’s singing whom. Perhaps it’s just my unpreparedness for this that has made it seem so quickly awful, or perhaps it’s the Jewish mother in me, wanting only the best for Gerard (“My son! My son the musical genius is drowning!”). What the hell do I know about opera?

The lights go up. There will be three intermissions. The cast is allowed to meander the corridors, linger at the water fountain, chat pleasantly with relatives. An older man, strikingly white-haired and in a red turtleneck, brushes by me, in a hurry to leave. He has his car keys in his hand. “I for one am not sticking around for the rest,” he says to me meanly, stagily, because I am the nearest person at the moment. He stops and smiles at me, as if I’m supposed to agree. I look away. I look for Gerard, spot him by the stage door with his back to me, scurry up behind him and then give him a big hug. “You’re terrific,” I say, though I’ve hardly heard him sing a line yet. “Act two,” I remember him saying, “act two is where I turn into Placido Domingo.”

Gerard turns and beams. His eye wanders off to one side like a haywire satellite. “Thanks for coming. Let’s walk.” He takes my arm and we march loudly off down the corridor to the left. It’s one of those hallways with a long glass wall on one side. Outside it’s night and bushes. “I just need someone to pace with,” says Gerard, and our legs are close, brushing and in step, identical, like pals, like siblings. “Two siamese twins,” says Gerard. “Tragically joined at the hip.”

“I like this,” I say. “I’m absconding with the leading man. I think it’s something that with a little practice I could learn to do very well.” Gerard isn’t really listening. He seems nervous, a slight rose flush behind his forehead and eyes. “Are you nervous?” I ask. “You don’t really seem nervous.”

“There’s a guy in the audience from City Opera. It might be nice to impress him, you know, shake his hand backstage, all that gladhanding stuff. He’s got white hair and is wearing a red turtleneck — I saw him from the stage. Did you happen to notice him?”

“No.”

Gerard looks at me, clearly tense, this the ravage of ambition. “You think this is all bush league, don’t you?”

“No, of course not, Gerard.”

“Where’s my rose?” he grins.

“Damn. I forgot it. I’m sorry.” We have stopped walking. We are both looking at each other’s feet.

“Well,” says Gerard, looking up, hopeful as a fisherman. “I still say this is better than the Ramada. What’s wrong with your face?”

“Thanks a lot, Gerard.”

“No, I mean your cheek. It’s swollen.”

“My wisdom was removed. I told you about that.”

“That’s right,” he smiles. “Now I remember. You taking funny pills?”

“Yeah, but they’re never funny enough. This morning I told my students they were responsible for the Holocaust. They never looked up, just wrote it in their notebooks. I’ll buy you a drink after you kill that bitch Carmen.”

“I’ll need one,” he sighs, and then we walk back up the corridor. When we get to the stage door, the corridor is emptying and I take Gerard by the elbow and say, “Well, good luck!”

“I don’t believe in luck,” he says. “I believe in miracles.” He stops and tucks in his shirt. “That’s just part of my personality.”

The chorus is really the weakest element. It wobbles around and gets way ahead of the pianist. Gerard’s voice, for the most part, is clear and strong. He’s a fairly confident Don José and rarely looks at the score, until a bad note undoes him. I can see him redden, hesitate, lose his place, flounder back into his book.

Nonetheless, everyone loves the Flower Song, that song of the not-forgotten rose.

Gerard keeps insisting on buying the drinks. I have to fight and argue and end up having to say belligerent-sounding things to the waitress, who refuses to run a tab. “If I ever have kids,” he says, “I’m going to name them Methyl and Ethyl.” He toasts and swigs.

Something’s tired between Gerard and me. It’s as if we have disappointed each other into irritation; we have witnessed the other’s failures for too long, and it has made us cranky.

“You really thought it was okay?” asks Gerard again.

“Yes, Gerard, I thought it was okay.” I am on the verge of a sigh or a snap or a shout.

We try speaking of other things, of the decline of the world, how humanity is done for, how Gerard has been seeing Darrel around town with another woman, how Gerard thought I should know, and how Gerard seems a little too eager to tell me, how Gerard drinks way too much, and how Gerard felt our goddamned friendship was about truth and honesty, and how some things are better not to know or tell like for instance the man in the red turtleneck who left early because the whole production was a joke how’s honesty if you like honesty. And how I’m so volatile, and how it is that all this is happening, how I shouldn’t have to sit and listen to some drunk musician tell me about Darrel screwing around, and how sorry Gerard is, he really shouldn’t have said anything he just thought it would be for the best, and how Gerard is just a washed-up, no-talent Huck Finn or should we say Hack lounge act playing at everything and just because he’s drunk he’s pretending he’s hurt, don’t pretend you’re hurt, for godsakes he should just drink himself to death, and how I just don’t have the character for alcohol, it requires too much sweetness and commitment, and how Gerard should just go fuck himself, and how so should I.

And how did this happen? I never know how anything happens.

In the student union snack bar the teacher was scanning student blank verse — something different from blank student verse, she thought, but not that different. She looked up, gazed abstractedly out the window at the walk, that silly artificial promenade, that highway of undergraduate love, of sweet constitutionals. And then a student of hers named Darrel was suddenly strolling by out there with someone young and pretty and their bodies were touching, bowed slightly toward one another, and they drank from cans of Diet Pepsi as they walked. Perhaps they were having some political or intellectual discussion, thought the teacher. Perhaps this woman was a Marxist. You could always tell a Marxist: They wore the best clothes.

The teacher turned her gaze away, stared back down at the tabletop, near the edge, at something scratched into the wood. DROP ACID, it said. And then beneath it, in different writing, NO, TAKE IT PASS-FAIL.

· · ·

I have always wanted to grow old with someone, to be with someone through all of life, to lie under an electric blanket together, in the daytime, and compare operations.

Darrel is wearing a t-shirt that says APOCALYPSE PRETTY SOON. He places his hand on my crotch. “Nice place ya got here,” he says. I don’t smile. We’ve been talking about his future and now he’s trying to change the subject. I maneuver away, squirm on the sofa.