Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

“What should we get Grampup for Christmas?” I ask her.

“Get him …” She pauses, giving this great consideration. Her face looks profound and little in her new spectacles. “Get him some plates.”

“Plates?”

“Get him … get him a new car.”

“He doesn’t need a new car. He never drives over thirty-five.” Slow for a fireman; he’s retired. “ I need a new car, not him.” My car is now one of those cars that will never go sixty except over a cliff.

Georgianne gets up, trudges over, sits on the edge of my chair. She is a heap of layers: tights, dress, sweater, coat. I put one arm inside her coat, around her waist, hold her. She presses her face close, her glasses knocking into my cheekbone. “Give him a big kiss!” she says, and gives me a juicy smack right near my eye, saliva getting in it, my little whimper-whamper, my Christmas elf, my mush-tush.

It is December tenth, a new moon. The phone rings and it’s not Darrel, it’s Maple. “Gerard’s in the hospital,” he says.

“Oh my god.” I sink into a nearby chair and switch the receiver to my other ear. My whole life I can think only of car accidents. “He was drunk, wasn’t he?”

“Probably,” sighs Maple. “He slipped in his tub and cracked his head open and broke a rib. It sounds appalling, but it’s serious.”

Gerard apparently had lain in his bathroom in and out of consciousness for about ten hours. Merrilee, the human Playboy magazine, discovered him there when she stopped by, after a fight, with a contrite, Yuletide loaf of zucchini bread. It is all ludicrous enough to begin with, but to have Merrilee in on it in such an heroic fashion seems preposterous, suited only to the fact of the tub, not to the gravity of the injuries, wrappings, tubes, round-the-clock watch at Methodist Central.

“You can’t go in there,” a nurse whispers loudly to Maple and me in the corridor. I am pulling open the Intensive Care Unit door.

“I’m Gerard Maines’s brother,” says Maple.

“I’m Gerard’s wife,” I add.

The nurse, head floor supervisor Sheila Simpson, smiles at me. “His wife’s already been here.”

“Merrilee, that bitch,” I whisper to Maple, and bit my thumb cuticle.

“Come back tomorrow,” smiles Sheila Simpson. “During visiting hours. He’s already doing much better, and we may move him out of I.C.U. tomorrow.”

Maple’s face mirrors my relief. “That’s good news,” he says.

“Sure is,” she says.

“Tomorrow,” I repeat dumbly.

“Yes,” she says. “Now why don’t you go on home. It’s six-thirty. You’re missing the real news.” She chuckles. She is not funny. I stand on my tiptoes and try to sneak a peek through the small window on the I.C.U. door and think I see Gerard lying there asleep, something plastic jammed up his nose.

George is watching Dan Rather and eating cheeze popcorn out of a bag. “Is Gerard gonna die?” she turns and asks; she has the face of an old, worried Yugoslavian woman, binging on popcorn. An airliner has exploded over St. Louis. The scribblings on Madame Charpentier have formed a dark, circular splot, like a black ball of string between her breasts, and horrid black shapes all over her face, like a catcher’s mask.

“No,” I say, and in my heart I take back everything mean I’ve ever said about God.

In class the teacher put her elbows on the desk and talked into her fists.

“We all have ways of erasing ourselves,” she said, and then passed out photocopies of “Modern Love,” “Because I could not stop for Death,” and several poems by Anne Sexton. She never had been able to organize her courses well.

The hospital is all purposeful white bustle and smells more strongly than last night of soup and rubber and isopropyl alcohol. I have found Gerard’s room number from the main desk downstairs and am checking out the plastic-wood plaques over all the doorways to figure out if I’m headed in the right direction. I turn a corner and finally locate 262. “Excuse me,” blurts an orderly trying to wheel a cart quickly by me. I’ve stepped out in front of him like a dazed woman.

“Sorry,” I say.

The door is heavy, knobless, and ajar. I push it open further and glance around. A white-gowned Gerard, no plastic up his nose and no beard, is propped against pillows and staring straight ahead. His head, neck, and back are in some sort of traction, part swingset, part backpack. His skull is wrapped in gauze. His arms, thin and bare, are attached to I.V. tubes like a marionette.

I step all the way in. “Hey, Q-tip head, you’ll do anything for a free meal, won’t you?”

Gerard glances up slowly, like someone with a huge headache. I imagine his head has stitches in it like a baseball. He looks fragile, smooth chin and all cheeks, boyish without his beard. He grins weakly and I can see that one of his front teeth is chipped at a diagonal. “A body in motion tends to need some rest,” he says. He has a bruise and scratch on the left side of his face. I lean over and kiss him. His lips are dry, swollen lavender with cracks of red. I can taste the slightly metallic taste of blood. I want to tell him how very sorry I am. I want to make up with everyone. When I get home, I’m going to phone Darrel. “Benna,” Gerard says, his voice gone soft and husky. “I’m glad you’re here. Have a seat.”

I drag one from over by the partition, behind which is an old man reading a magazine. “Don’t mind me,” calls the old man.

“Don’t mind him,” says Gerard.

I sit down and cross my legs. Gerard looks smaller and smaller to me, fading in and out like a quasar. “Do you hurt?”

“Not really. I’m just a little dizzy. They’re probably not going to keep this apparatus on for very long. I’m okay. Maple was in earlier.”

“Yeah, I know. We arranged it that way, splitting up our visiting slots. We’re a two-act show.”

“Even Merrilee came.” He smiles, lost.

I attempt a skeptical, quizzical face, then let go of it. “Thank god for Merrilee, huh. Thank god for the staples in life.” I am thinking here of the zucchini bread, though the centerfold does, of course, come to mind.

“I don’t know what happened. One minute I was unlocking my apartment door, the next I’m here.”

“They shaved your beard.”

“ I did that in my drunken stupor, somewhere between the front door and the tub. Not too many razor cuts even. I truly am an amazing fellow. In case you didn’t know.”

I put my palm to his face. He badly needs another shave. “The new Gerard,” I say, not coming up with anything better. “I brought some books to read to you.”

“I already know Habakkuk by heart.”

“I know, I know.” Gerard’s right eye is wandering off to one side, as it does when he’s tired, a lost Ping-Pong ball. The tooth makes him look like a pirate or a street kid. I look down at my lap; I’ve brought Turkish Fairy Tales and Alice in Wonderland . Perhaps my problem is that I try to turn everyone into a child.

“How’s lover boy?” asks Gerard. His eyes close for a moment. The question is teasing, like a brother, but the face is weary, like an old person visited insincerely by a young one. Maybe I’m not handling the visit energetically enough and am tiring him out. I dance the books around as if they’re playthings. I try to distract him. “Zoopty-doopty-doo,” I sing loudly, for a joke.

“How is he?” Gerard says again.

“Well. I think I blew it. It didn’t work out.” I realize that that is how everyone puts it: It didn’t work out . Like something that refused to exercise, to exert itself aerobically.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” says Gerard, opening his eyes. He tries to sit up more, but it hurts.