Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“The English are simultaneously critical and stiffly uncomplaining — a stage Americans bypassed altogether, having gone from a dullard’s stoicism to a neurotic’s whining in less than half a century.”

“That is such a bullshit answer.”

“I’m part of an Islamic charity for Afghan children. That is all. They think I’m part of a cell. I’m not. If anyone asks you, if they question you when I’m gone, please tell them that I’m not.”

There was no room in this conversation for “What about us?” The conversational space had suddenly filled with other creatures. Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.

“You are Brazilian. What kind of cell would you be part of? A bikini wax cell?” I had once found a copy of a lingerie catalog in his pile of newspapers. When I picked it up and looked closely, the address label bore my own name. On one of the few occasions I’d had him over he had apparently taken it from my apartment, unbeknownst to me, perhaps to look at the bosomy models. Now that he was apparently leaving for London, all kinds of things I had refused to think about for very long came blowing back as if by dusty gusts aimed to tear up the eyes.

“I’m not Brazilian.”

“You’re not?” Of course he wasn’t. Why hadn’t I figured that out? Where were the bossa novas? Why did he not know a single phrase of “The Girl from Ipanema”?

“About that I lied.”

“Why? Where are you from?” Perhaps he would turn out to know the words to “Kashmiri Love Song,” my favorite song by Rudolph Valentino. My hands were truly pale! Even if he did not love them by the Shalimar. My heart tapped against my chest like fingers on a tabletop.

“Hoboken, New Jersey.”

“Hoboken? Like Frank Sinatra?”

He snickered a little, a look of hard pedantry in his eyes. “Even the very first revolution in America was conducted from New Jersey.”

“Gambling and disease. Right from the start. Are we doing American history?” I looked at his familiar and beautiful face. He was leaving me as mysteriously as he had first appeared. An agony. The exit like the entrance — but reversed. A palindrome: gut-tug.

“You are an innocent girl — though you are not pure. But still, I believe you are innocent. Especially for a Jew. That is good.”

“A Jew?”

“Yes.” This pronouncing voice did not sound like him, and he could see that I could hear that and seemed to give me a small, quick breaking-character smile meant to slip out and be received by me beneath this script of departure.

“That means you aren’t going to tell me anything more, are you.” I began to twist the bottom hem of my T-shirt into a coil. In life, as in movies, one sometimes could mistake a robot for a living being. “What’s happened to your voice? You’re speaking without contractions. How can you be from New Jersey?”

“When you find out who you are, you will no longer be innocent. That will be sad for others to see. All that knowledge will show on your face and change it. But sad only for others, not for yourself. You will feel you have a kind of wisdom, very mistaken, but a mistake of some power to you and so you will sadly treasure it and grow it.”

“How about if I first just find out who you are.” I had been the minibar — and not the minbar — in this temporary room of lodging. It was BYOB and I had brought the beer. “You are a haddi: some sort of jihadist.”

“It is not the jihad that is the wrong thing. It is the wrong things that are the wrong things.”

“Thank you, holy warrior, for the Islamofascist lecture.”

“As Muhammad said, we do not know God as we should.”

“And whose fault is that? That’s not yours or mine! Maybe God has not stepped forward enough. Maybe God has not done a sufficient job of meet-and-greet.”

I suddenly felt like an old Indian chief, one who sees that the world has changed irrevocably, and that the younger generation would never know the old one, even the strongest, slumped on their horses at the end of some trail. But if Reynaldo could feel the uncertainty of his own path, perhaps we could feel our despair together. Despite everything, I had not thought of him as irretrievably religious. He would not eat a bratwurst, but who could blame him? The hot ones snapped with fat when you bit in. The cold ones were death itself …

“I didn’t know you had all this blasphemy in you,” he said. Was that a smile?

“Yeah, well, sometimes the creation exceeds the creator. You know? A computer can beat a chess champion, a son can outsmart a father.” I would not get into Frankenstein. “Maybe the Bible, with its vain, wailing God, is telling us that the creation, too, is more divine than the Creator. Look at that! I’ve said that and not been smote!”

“Sometimes these things take time,” he said.

“The smoting?”

“Sure. Everything.”

“Great.” And then I added, “How about a kinder, gentler jihad?”

“One must listen to God.”

“Well, God should speak up. He mumbles.”

“He has made us his messengers.”

“How nice for him that he has his own staff and some out-of-town offices.”

“We are his sheep—”

“I didn’t mean that kind of staff.”

“—as well as his wolves.”

“That sounds really, really complicated.”

“Mankind is the source of all suffering.”

“And the source of all God.” I had crossed a line. “But as I said, the creation is often greater than what created it.” Hubris or intelligent design?

He was silent, with a smile that wasn’t a smile. I found myself falling toward him, as if the rush of feeling tearing through me could magically be made into useful affection: perhaps if I tried to kiss him — but he pulled away. And then slowly I got up, stepped back, one careful step at a time as he spoke. My crab-apple branch had fallen near him.

“There are a billion Muslims in the world,” he said.

“So, what? I should be able to find another one?”

He fixed me with a powerful stare. He had that ability to summon up great concentration in his face and eyes. “There is that possibility.” For a moment pity for us both glistened his eyes. “You can’t get blood from a stone,” he said sadly. Referring, I supposed, to love. It was an expression he liked and had used before with me.

“Yes, you can,” I said. I was always trying.

“You can?”

“One can. You can.”

“How is that done?”

“You go to a quarry.”

“A quarry?”

“Yeah, if you go to a quarry there is always some body that’s been dumped there.”

He laughed.

“The Koran doesn’t prohibit you from laughing at gruesome humor?” I would mock him a little — why not?

“No,” he said.

“In every book there’s a lot of white spaces—”

“Silences …”

“So who knows what’s going on, really, between the lines? All those meaningful silences!”

But then, feeling he was being mocked, he let his face go bloodlessly stony, and suddenly he looked finally and completely packed up and gone. Locating the living him would be like finding a miner in a collapsed mine: I could drill and dig and shine lights into various passageways, but the likelihood of my seeing him again, at least as he once was, well, the chances were not that good.

“You avoid a lot of difficult things in conversation,” I said.

“I hope so!”

“You lied to me,” I said finally.

“A lie to the faithless is merely a conversation in their language.”

This sounded like one of the many fortune cookie fortunes marking time in the pages of my books. “I was never faithless to you.”

“Not in your definitions, no.”