Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

Uh-oh , as Mary-Emma would say.

“Are you a virgin?” he had asked.

“Yes,” I said. That he couldn’t tell already, that it wasn’t spelled out all over my face and demeanor, thrilled me. To be funny, I rolled my head with a harlot’s abandon and purred, “I am.” I fell back, the way a cooked onion slid apart, in all its layers, when bit.

Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states. I noted that criminals as well as the insane tended to give off a palpable, vibrating allure, a kind of animal magnetism that kept them loved by someone. How else could they survive at all? Someone had to hide them from the authorities! Hence the necessity and prevalence of sex appeal for people who were wild and on the edge.

If only I could have dated someone who was both insane and criminal. If only I could have dated the criminally insane! I could have doubled my fun and entered the purest, highest exhilarating erotic and narcotic trance! and if I’d lived to tell the tale, perhaps come to my senses sooner. I was in a fused condition of ecstasy and retrospective rue almost always, and from the beginning. “I love you,” I would say, and he said nothing at all. But no shame rose in me to rescue or silence me. “I love you,” I said again. And then I added, “Is there an echo in here?”

“There is,” he would say, smiling. His teeth were the color of cream. His gums the pale lox pink of a winter tomato. He wore wrapped around his neck a black-and-white scarf — a print I thought of as Middle Eastern, though it could have been a Navajo tablecloth, for all I knew.

“Yeah, I thought so.” I would tenderly smooth the strands of hair off my own face, myself.

I had told Murph that I had a crush on a South American and while I was out she called from her boyfriend’s one night and sang into the phone machine: “Pedro Pedro bo bedro, banana fanna fo fedro, fee fie mo medro …”

His name was Reynaldo, and as the snow melted, I began to bring Mary-Emma — in her Radio Flyer wagon or in her stroller — on walks to his apartment. To bring him a present — a doughnut or Danish or a hot mocha — I would stop in the market on the way there, in a section of town where there were actual black people shopping (unlike the Wednesday-night rumors of such). Some would look at me, then at Mary-Emma, and then at me again and smile. They seemed to be welcoming me into the community. Some would say hi to Mary-Emma. There were only a few bits of unpleasantness from women. Two black women and one white one scowled at me: I was a tramp. For some black women I clearly had encroached upon their men and produced this baby; besides, what did I know about bringing up an African-American child in this world? (Nothing.) To the white woman I was a whoring girl messing around with anyone. This was all said in looks, so the truth could not be uttered, but I saw again and again what it was simply to walk into a store for a doughnut and have a wordless racial experience.

But mostly black people were smiling and warm to us. Everyone loved a beautiful baby, no matter what.

“Hey, sweetie!” they said. And Mary-Emma would smile or hide her face in her own shoulder.

Once, I thought I saw Sarah’s car following us, but when I turned saw nothing.

When I brought Mary-Emma, Reynaldo and I did not kiss or touch at all in front of her, but often I returned to his place with her after having left his bed for work just that morning, wanting badly to see him again soon and right away. It was neither near nor far — one could get there in twenty-five minutes without much trouble, and when we arrived he was very kind to us both. He loved the doughnuts. He loved that particular mocha coffee. He was taking a photography class and took pictures of us with a new digital camera he had just bought — we said “cheese” in three languages, and then “keys” and then “please,” and when we were not paying attention he would suddenly sneak up and snap our picture from the side. Or freeze us in the frame, I should say. Digital cameras were still new, and seemed magical, as right in the moment he could have you look through the frames and say which picture you wanted. He made me some strong Brazilian morning tea, to last the whole day, and poured juice for Mary-Emma. She poked around and got into things, but he had a real xylophone, which he let her play, with both the soft cotton-dampened mallets and the harder wood ones with their zingier sound, and it all delighted her. She struck hard and with every note turned to look at me with amazement. “Here, let me show you,” Reynaldo would say, and he would take two sticks per hand and bounce them around on what I thought of as a double-decker keyboard. She seemed to love Reynaldo because he was attentive and appreciative, and perhaps because he was brown (the colorblindness of small children was a myth; she noticed difference and sameness, with almost equal interest; there was no “Dilemma of Difference” as my alliteration-loving professors occasionally put it; there was no “Sin of the Same”), but she also loved him because of that xylophone. He played the only American song he knew, a folk one with verse upon verse of wide water and longing and woe, one that ended “… like the summer dew.” And then he was very quiet, saying, “Shouldn’t it be ‘like the summer does ’?”

“Where have you been?” asked Sarah.

“What do you mean?” There was something in her voice I’d not really heard before. I wondered if this was her restaurant voice. Not as sharp as the coulis-and-quenelles voice. But perhaps a beef-cheek-and-parsnip-gnocchi voice.

“I was driving home and I saw you on Maple Avenue coming from what seemed quite far away. And Edward told me he’s seen you headed the other way, fast as can be, Emmie in the stroller and you just zipping along God knows where to.”

“I’m sorry. Should I not take her for walks?”

I’d never felt accused before. Perhaps I had never been accused before. I had, however, never been responsible for very much before, not really, and had little practice in having my actions observed and found lacking. Well, once, in ninth grade, I had tried out for cheerleading. But could that even count? When I went to fly into the air with one knee up, one leg back, one hand on my hip — a stag jump, it was called — I’d come down in a heap and the observing was quickly over.

Sarah’s voice softened. “Oh, of course you should.” And then she seemed to let go of the topic entirely — just let it drop and skitter — and so I didn’t say any more on the matter right then.

——

With my new money — Sarah had already given me a raise — I bought a used Suzuki 125 motor scooter, which I kept on the front porch and rode to classes or to Reynaldo’s, and a bedside reading lamp I ordered from a catalog. The catalog showed a man sleeping peacefully while his model-wife read a book in soft but focused light. In real life, however, the light was so intense that that same man would have had to wear sunglasses. He would have had to set up a little pup tent on his side of the bed. The lamplight was as bright as the noon sun, and as I studied next to him, Reynaldo could not sleep. Yet another pretty picture of love I’d not questioned, just bought. I turned off the light and fell behind in my reading.

It seemed now that the town had started to throw off the monochromatic winter to reveal its bright lunatic pajamas beneath. Though the robins had not yet reappeared, cardinals were whistling their mating songs. The remaining snowbanks were made dingy with rain. Only once did a late light snowfall blanket the town with a deathly quiet — a quick reminder before the winter left for good — an amuse-bouche , a mignardise , a déjà vu , a je reviens: I had dropped French long ago. Au printemps! The evaporating snow left the sky a lurid yellow at night. The streetlights shone off the remaining drifts, and for a few days all remained milky and low.