Lorrie Moore: Anagrams

“I don’t pressure you,” I said. I have a lump in my breast, I wanted to say but didn’t. Maybe I will die.

“Yes, you do. You’re like one of those ladies that just keeps coming over to say, ‘Can I help you?’ ”

I stared at his square chin, his impossibly handsome unshaven chin and then I looked off at the Mary Cassatt print on the wall, mother bathing child, why did I own such a thing, and it was at that moment I really truly understood that he was in love with Susan Fitzbaum.

Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.

Gerard kept repeating himself. “You’re like one of those ladies that just keeps coming up to you—‘Can I help you, this is nice, let me know’—over and over and over. You won’t leave me the hell alone.”

I thought about this. Finally I said very quietly, “But you’re in the store, Gerard. If you don’t like it, get out of the goddamn store.”

Gerard picked up a magazine and hurled it across the room; then, without looking further for his keys, he left early for his gig at The Smokey Fern.

I was not large enough for Gerard. I was small, lumpy, anchored with worry, imploded. He didn’t want me, he wanted Macy’s; like Aeneas or Ulysses, he wanted the anonymity and freedom to wander purchaseless from island to island. I could not be enough of the world for him. A woman could never be enough of the world, I thought, though that was what a man desired of her, though she flap her arms frantically trying.

Eleanor had said she was staying home to watch The Sound of Music , so I stayed in and read the abortion chapter in my women’s health book. On TV I watched a nature documentary. It was on animal species who, due to a change in the landscape, begin to produce unviable eggs, or are chased into the hills.

I wandered into Gerard’s apartment and fetched back some of my stuff that had ended up there: shoes, dishes, magazines, silverware. It was like some principle of physics: Things flowed naturally back and forth between the two apartments until the maximum level of chaos was reached. I had his can opener, but he had my ice-cube trays. It was as if our possessions were embarked upon some osmotic, conjugal exchange, a giant french kiss of personal effects, which had somehow left us behind.

On Monday I met Eleanor for breakfast at Hank’s. I wanted to discuss hopeful things: the job in New York, how she might feel about coming with me. Perhaps she could start up a reading group there. I would promise not to die of Globner’s Disease.

“We should stop smoking cigarettes. Do you wanna stop smoking cigarettes?” said Eleanor as soon as I sat down.

Despite my degenerating health, I enjoyed them too much. They were sororal. “But they’re so cysterly,” I said, and stuck out a breast. No idiocy was too undignified for me. I might as well have sat in a corner and applied Winstons directly to my lymph nodes, laughing and telling terrible jokes.

Eleanor’s mouth formed a small, tough segment of a smile. “I have something to tell you, Benna.”

Something to do with cysterly ; I said, “What?”

“Benna, I asked Gerard to go to bed with me.”

I was still smiling, inappropriately, and my breast was still stuck out a bit. “So, when was this?” I said. I pulled back my breast, realigned my torso. Something between us had suddenly gone pale and gray, like a small piece of meat one dislodges hours late from between the teeth. I lit up a cigarette.

“Saturday night.” Eleanor’s face looked arranged in anxiety, the same face she used when reading Romeo’s speech to the County Paris he’s just killed: O, give me thy hand / One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book . She looked pink and beseeching, though essentially she looked the same, as people do despite the fact they have begun to turn into monsters and are about to tell you something that should require horns or fangs or vaulted eyebrows but never apparently does.

“I thought you said you were staying in to watch The Sound of Music ,” I said in the same voice I always used when blowing cigarette smoke out my nostrils.

“I, uh, ended up not doing that. I went to see Gerard play instead. He said you’d had a fight, Benna.”

And suddenly I knew this was only a half-truth. Suddenly I knew there’d been more than this. That there always had been.

“Benna, I thought at first we were kidding,” she continued. She kept saying my name. “I sat down next to him and said, ‘Hey, let’s ruin a beautiful friendship—’ ”

“You hated each other,” I insisted.

“—and he said, ‘Sure why not?’ and Benna, I’m convinced he thought at first he was kidding …”

Kidding? That was what my Mary Cassatt print was a picture of. A woman with kids.

“Benna, I’m sure it’s not …”

Eleanor’s skin was smooth and poreless. Her hair was frosted golden like some expensive, marbley wood. I wanted her to stop saying my name.

“But you didn’t actually sleep together, did you?” I asked, though it sounded pathetic, like a tiny Hans Christian Andersen character.

Eleanor stared at me. Her eyes started to fill with water. She felt sorry for me. She felt sorry for herself. I could feel my heart wither like a hand. I could feel the lump in my breast rise into my throat, from where perhaps it had fallen to begin with.

“Oh, Benna, he’s such a shit.” They did hate each other. That was why she was telling me this: We all hated each other. “I’m so sorry, Benna. He’s such a shit. I knew he would never tell you.”

She was fat. She didn’t know anything about music. She was a child. She still received money from her parents in Doc Country. No animal is as problematic in captivity as the elephant , I thought meanly, like an aerobics teacher who watches too much PBS. Every year around the world at least one zookeeper is killed .

Something in Eleanor now began crumbling and biting. “How long do you think I could have been a sounding board for the two of you, Benna?”

This was horrible. This was the sort of thing you read about in magazine advice columns. O, give my thy hand / One writ with me in sour Ms. Fortune’s book .

“… I deserved a love affair, and instead I was spending all of my time being envious of you. And you never noticed me. You never even noticed I’d lost weight.” She knew nothing about music. She knew none of the pieces from The Turning Point .

“Don’t you see, sisterhood has to be redefined,” she was saying. “There are too few men in the world. It’s a heterosexual depression out there!”

What I finally managed to say, looking at the Heimlich Maneuver poster, was, “So, is this what’s called sociobiology ?” She smiled weakly, hopefully, and I started to laugh, and then we were both laughing, teary-eyed, our faces falling into our arms on the table, and that’s when I took the ketchup bottle and cracked it over her head. And then I got up and wobbled out, my soul numb as a crossed leg, and Hank yelled something at me in Greek and rushed out from behind the counter over to Eleanor who was sobbing loudly and would probably need stitches.

For nine days Gerard and I didn’t speak to each other. Through the walls I could hear him entering and exiting his apartment, and presumably he could hear me, but we didn’t speak. On the very first day I had refused to answer his knock.

I went out at night to all the really bad movies in Fitchville and just sat there. Sometimes I brought a book and a flashlight.

I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.