Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“Sounds good,” I said. “Is she napping now?”

“She is,” he said. And gave me one of those smiles again, full of craggy warmth and intelligent twinkle. I turned around to see once more if someone was behind me. And then he left.

When Noel came, noisily bursting through the back door with buckets of cleansers and sponges, I introduced myself.

“Just call me No elle ,” he said of himself. “When I was little they used to call me Noel, Noel, the toilet bowl. Although now I have thought of painting that on the side of my van. It might be good for business? I don’t know.”

“How long have you been working here?” I asked.

“Too long,” he sighed. “Though I love Sarah. She’s fabulous.”

“How about Monsieur?”

He sighed and leaned on his mop. “Gay men don’t like straight men.”

“Really?” I somehow doubted that.

“Why should they?”

I shrugged. “No reason.”

“Little Emmie’s a doll, isn’t she? I’m so thrilled for Sarah. I hope they’ll get a swing set out back for her.”

“That would be good,” I said.

“Today’s my birthday,” he added.

“Happy birthday. How old are you?” He looked somewhere in his thirties.

“Sixty,” he said. “It’s a biggie.”

“Well, you sure don’t look that!” Although even as I was saying it, beneath his dyed black hair I could see the leathery skin and rheumy eyes of age, or the fumes of harsh cleaning fluids, whichever it was.

“Actually, it’s not my birthday.”

“Oh,” I said.

I had read some Lewis Carroll — but clearly not enough.

“I’m just trying that out — it is coming up, so I’m trying it out on people.” A test. Perhaps it was a test of me as well. Still, I thought we could be friends. There was a nice kind of upstairs-downstairs vibe I was getting from him — we two could be the downstairs. Or was it upstairs? We would be the back stairs.

“Well, as I said, you don’t look sixty.”

He flung his hands at me. “Oh, don’t say that! It makes me feel worse, like you’re lying. Look! Emmie!” I turned and there she was, having awoken, rashy-cheeked and tumbleheaded. She’d made her way over the crib rails, down the stairs, past all the gates.

“Tassa!” she said, and ran and hugged my legs.

In Sufism I continued to sit next to the Brazilian. WHAT THE HELL IS THIS PROF SAYING? he wrote to me.

“He’s actually very smart,” I murmured back. “He’s talking about the four stages of the tariqa and their rituals. There’s a lot of piety, renunciation, and yearning for Paradise.”

Then he leaned toward me and whispered, “I can see you don’t join that easily in complaining. That’s a good quality. But so is joining easily.”

Walking out of the lecture hall he said to me, “Did you know it’s blackbird days— i giorni della merla ?”

“What is that? I’ve never heard of that.”

He studied me for a moment. “It’s a celebration of the white blackbird who has taken refuge in the chimney, which blackens him with soot. It celebrates the soot.”

“Interesting,” I said, thinking of Mary-Emma and other possible myths of the white blackbird.

“It’s Brazilian,” he said.

I nodded. My head filled with the renunciation of renunciation. And a yearning for yearning.

I began to dress for him, relying mostly on a new gray-brown sweater dress I had bought in a boutique downtown with my new wages, a store where the clerks were chicly eager to help and where each item of apparel was in a color called Peat or Pumice or some such word. There were subtleties of neutral hue I’d never encountered before: Pebble, Pecan, Portabella, Peanut, Platinum, Porcelain, Pigeon, Parmesan, Pavement, Parchment, Pearl, and, ah, Potato. There were the brighter colors, too. One could recite them all like a jump-rope rhyme. Paprika. Pinot, Persimmon! Pimento! Pomegranate, Pine! Poplar, Pistachio, Peacock, Petal Pink, Polar Peach, Pumpkin, Pepper, Plum, Pineapple. Periwinkle, Peridot, Primrose, Palm, Pea, Poppy, Puce. My new dress was in a shade called Oyster, which was a lot like Fig Gray, I noticed, and which I called Stick, since it was the color of a stick. Growing up far from the sea, what did I know of oysters? It was the same hue as a muddy russet potato before the potato was hosed off. I felt it made my eyes dark and my hair shine, but maybe the color appealed because unlike so much else I owned it was not a yellowish shade of green that threw itself in with the natural tinge of my teeth. On days I wore the dress, along with my water bra, the Brazilian was friendlier. Soon, and after an unfortunate but not totally annihilating laundering, I was calling the dress “shtick.” Did he not know these were not my real breasts, or not really? Did guys even bother to want to know? Girls were walking around wearing these soft protrusions and guys were just going “Do-dee-do” like Homer Simpson. Perhaps when God said, “Let there be light,” in the original and correct Bible, still undiscovered, he also said, “Let there be do-dee-do.” Thank you, God.

After class the Brazilian and I would walk out together. He was tall and long-limbed beside me, and my walking close to him, in matched stride with him, made me feel in possession of a prize. One time we made it all the way to a coffee shop, where I asked him whether he’d like to have coffee with me, and he said no.

“Coals to Newcastle and all that,” I said, flustered. “Why would a Brazilian drink coffee in America — don’t know what I was thinking.” I turned to go.

“I’d like a Coke,” he said.

“OK,” I said. “They have Pepsi in there. Is that all right?”

“OK,” he said. He had a smile that made you realize that some skulls contained an entire power plant set up in miniature inside, and the heat and electricity they generated spilled their voltage out through the teeth and eyes.

“Teach me some Portuguese,” I said over coffee and cola at a back table near a table of zines and flyers.

And what he taught me, phrases from little songs— Ahora voy a dormire, bambino, / Porque llevo el pijama: si! no! si! no! — I repeated and rehearsed at home and even taught Mary-Emma. They could have been Etruscan for all I knew. Negro, blanco, / Me gusta naranja! I learned much later it was actually Spanish with some Italian thrown in. Except for the words to “Happy Birthday,” none of it was Portuguese at all.

Thus began my protracted misunderstanding of Romance languages (in high school I had taken German with Frau Zinkraub; on the tops of all my quizzes I drew pictures of Panzer tanks with Hitler on top in a salute; I had tried Latin, but in situ there had been no one to speak it with — and so what was the point? I would do things like imagine ergonomic meant “thereforeish”). Romance languages eluded me both generally and specifically; nothing was as cryptic and ripe for misunderstanding as the physical language of a boy’s love. What was an involuntary grimace I took to be rapture. What was a simple natural masculine compulsion to be in, to tunnel and thrust, I saw as a tender desire to be sweetly engulfed and at least momentarily overpowered by another’s devoted attentions. What was an urgent, automatic back-and-forth of the body I thought of as the eternal romantic return of the lover. Kissing was not animal appetite but the heart flying up to the lips and speaking its unique attraction and deep eternal fondnesses in the only way it could. The juddering of climax, as involuntary as a death rattle, I took to be a statement of hopeless attachment. Why, I don’t know. I didn’t think of myself as sentimental. I thought of myself as spiritually alert.