Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“Yes.”

“Do you believe an entire country could be a spiritual mistake?”

“Yes.”

And though he continued never to express a single word of love for me, not in any of his several languages, I could not take a hint. Let the hint be written across the heavens in skywriting done by several planes — I was dense. Even skywriting, well, it wasn’t always certain: it might not cover the whole sky, or some breeze might smudge it, so who could really say for sure what it said? EVEN SKYWRITING WOULDN’T HAVE WORKED! Several years later, I would wonder why I had thought my feelings for this man were anything but a raw, thrilling, vigilant infatuation. But I still had called them love. I was in love. I had learned the Portuguese and the Arabic for love , but all for naught. At night in his apartment bedroom, with only the little red eyes of his stereo and phone and laser printer to light up the dark, he told me in a sighing way how I was his only friend, how he had just moved here in January after his business in New York fell apart — a delivery business that took things to and from New Jersey and Queens in a white van painted NO PACKAGE TOO SMALL. After 9/11, his van could no longer make it through the tunnels and bridges in a timely fashion. As a brown man, he was constantly pulled aside and fleeced for drugs. One by one, he lost clients. Packages did not arrive quickly enough. And by December he had sold the panel truck to a white man and with the money was registering online for classes out here. “I thought I would go back to school a little.”

I liked the way he said “a little.” “Why out here?” I asked him.

“Good question!” he said. Some friends in New York had recommended it. “Besides, there are no tunnels for everyone to be terrified of.”

“No, no terrorism. What you have to worry about here is— corn mold !”

“You are a farmer’s daughter,” he said.

“Did you have any green card issues, running that business?”

“Green card?”

Neither one of us really knew how that worked.

“Immigration status and all that.”

“Oh, no. No problem there. How do you think Mohamed Atta got in? It’s easy. Hasta la vista, baby.”

“I wonder if Mohamed Atta ever said ‘Hasta la vista,’ ” I said now.

“Oh, I’m sure he did,” Reynaldo said quite seriously.

And then he would turn me over and begin to massage me, his fingers made of some kind of steel, and like the cracker and digger used to splay open a lobster his hands dug in. The muscles of my back and neck and legs slid apart, and even my feet seemed to spread like the bones of a fan. When I would reciprocate he would say, “Take your long guitar nails and scratch my back,” and so I would.

“Where does it itch?” I would ask.

“Uh, yes, over there.”

“Don’t do that there-over-there thing. You’ve gotta say up, down, left, or right.”

“Copy,” he said, and then, “Yeah, right there, right in there, a little back and over …”

“See, no, don’t do that back-and-over stuff.”

“I said ‘right.’ ”

“But not the directional right. I’m not a psychic. The itch travels. But the—”

“—witch does not?”

“Yeah, the witch does not …”

“Ah, but she is lovely.”

Most everything was beyond words, in a plateau of pleasure and pain that lifted out the tongue and stomped it on the floor.

On the other hand, for him I seemed just a diversion. After lovemaking he would turn on his back and stretch and proclaim his relaxation.

“Relaxed? You just feel relaxed — that’s it?”

“Oh, no,” he said, turning to look at me. “I also see fireworks and Jesus flying by in a cape and all that.”

“Good!” I would let him mock me. I would find any time, any moment, any excuse to get on my Suzuki and zoom over to him. I would go bareheaded, letting my hair whip stick-straight in the wind. I had stopped wearing my helmet in all things, though I would sometimes don a muslin headscarf to keep my hair out of my teeth, and would walk into his apartment wearing it. He thought I’d called it “Muslim” rather than “muslin.” He would place his hands on my head as if he were blessing me. “You could have my child,” he would whisper, and I would hum and nod and say “OK.” But it was Mary-Emma, whom I already loved, whom I would imagine us having, we would have her, and love her, her giggle, her smile, her caramel skin. And sometimes it was true: the three of us would go out together, and we were like a family. If he had loved me, or even if he’d just have said so, I would have died of happiness. But it didn’t happen. So I didn’t die of happiness. Words for a tombstone: SHE DIDN’T DIE OF HAPPINESS.

Wednesday nights Sarah’s group still congregated and the remarks once again quickly wafted upward toward the attic nursery. The laundry chute conducted them even more than the staircase: maybe the words just climbed the stairs themselves, not even halting on the landings. The voices were alternately operatic, vaudevillean, sybillant, and tedious. Sometimes what sounded like singing was mockery. Sometimes what sounded like mockery was a request for food. Sometimes comments sounded seasick, or shopworn, or shot down, or like a station on the radio.

“The healthcare system and the school system and social security have to have means testing. It has to be the reverse of the way it’s been: poor people in, rich people out.”

“This whole racial blindness thing. These people who insist they don’t notice what color other people are. These parents who come to pick up their kids at daycare and pretend they’ve never noticed Jared’s skin. I wanna say, ‘Honey, if you’re racially blind like you say, that’s something of a handicap. Let me give you a cane! You’ll notice, by the way, that it’s white. Or maybe, since you’re colorblind, you won’t.’ ”

“The phrase race card , as in ‘playing the race card,’ where did that come from?”

“O.J.”

“Before that, I think.”

“ Race card— what the hell does that even mean? Another white idea.”

“Hey, as I said, we white people had a lot of bright ideas.”

“A black person can’t accuse a white person of playing the race card, as the white race card is played every day.”

“In fact, it’s not really even a card. It’s more like a deck.”

“It’s more like the whole game.”

“Do you know Alta?”

“She’s an awful fake poet. Oops — did I say that?”

“I do feel I know a whole lot about her body just by reading her work.”

“Oh, her work is so fake, that’s not even her body.”

“A poet with a body double.”

“I would like a body double — just for grocery shopping.”

“Do you get those looks in the aisles when you’re with your kid? That look that says I see you’ve been messing around with colored people — we hope you’re paying cash. ”

“I think I know what you mean.”

“The suspiciousness.”

“And the suspiciousness of religion, too. I find that antiblack.”

“Don’t get me started on Islam.” It was the don’t-get-me-started-on-Islam person.

“What is the purpose of busing? They bus in the poor black kids and then segregate them anyway, sticking them in the basement, in the shop classes.”

“Were you here last week? Or was it longer ago that we were already talking about that?”

“When I first brought Kaz in to have him tested, to see whether he should be entering school as a first-grader or a kindergartner? I sat outside the room listening while this lady gave him some crazy-ass test that went ‘ Foot is to shoe as blank is to muff. ’ He was five years old! How’s he supposed to know what a muff is?”