Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

I had not mopped or swept the floors in months. I had used paper towels when there was a spill and hoped that eventually the entire apartment floor would get wiped up this way. This method of cleaning the floor, in patches, I imagined was like writing a poem every day until you eventually said everything about the human condition there was to be said. But it didn’t really work that way, even in poetry: grimy corners remained while certain floorboards got burnished to a slippery hellish gleam. Sometimes, when out of paper towels, I would use one of the wipes I often packed in my backpack for Mary-Emma, and I would start with the counters and work down: it seemed I could clean almost an entire room with just one — that was the sort of delusional housekeeping I was becoming a devotee of.

Not one person asked me about Reynaldo, which made me realize just how private and isolated our affair had been. Temporary and vanished. Like Brigadoon with headscarves. My own emotions felt a disgrace. There was apparently no indication left of me in his apartment — except the blood — and no one came knocking on my door. I felt as blue as the lips of a fish, which was really just a line from a song I had going through my head. “The grass don’t care / the wind is free / the prairie — once a sea — don’t sing no song for me.” Bad grammar was totemic for bass player grief.

What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling, and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feelings might take on actual physical form, like those sad fish lips, a mouth speared into a gasping silence, or worse. I swung my hair and slapped the face of my bass like Jaco Pastorius, squinting the neck into a fretless blur; perhaps one day I would dig those frets out with a file and fill them with epoxy, too.

Sometimes I would awake too early in my bed and would feel my foot flap beneath the sheets, and I wouldn’t know at first that it was mine. I felt only the movement of the cool sheet, and it felt like someone else was there, in the bed with me, but I would quickly turn to see there was no one; it was always just me. At night before I fell asleep I was not above staring at the phone. Are you there? Yes. Are you falling asleep? Not really. How many fingers am I holding up?

In reality, no one asked me any questions whatsoever. No one said a word, except Sarah.

“Did you see in the papers the story about this student who disappeared? They found blood in his apartment but they don’t know whose.”

“Really,” I said.

“This wasn’t the guy who was taking pictures of Emmie, was it? Or a friend of his?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You see, that’s the problem: Not that I know of. There’s room for possibility.”

Her look at me was a darting thing. I just stared at her without seeing all that much, and I must have looked crazy with unhappiness, because she then came up to me and smoothed my sweater sleeve and petted my arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m going on like this.”

“It’s OK,” I said. It was quasi OK.

She returned to her theme menus. Invasive Species Night: the mustard-vine gnocchi; the steamed zebra mussels; the soup of wild carrot and wild parsnip; the salad of chicory, mustard garlic, fig buttercup, watercress, and burdock. Napkins of human hair! Well, that I just invented, piping up to amuse her, but she said, “Hmm. Yum.” And then there was Endangered Species Night: wild rice and free-range bison; American eel gratin and Chanticleer chicken with short and thick parsnips. Eating endangered species made some ecological sense, she claimed — if it was tasty and grew popular, people would save it? — but I wasn’t paying complete attention. The general idea was that food always survived. I wondered.

“I’m off to the Mill!” Sarah would shout up the stairs. I could see the edge of her white jacket.

“Ciao, Mama!” Mary-Emma would shout down. She was saying so many words these days. “I feepy,” she said when she wanted to go to bed. She loved to watch old Esther Williams movies, which I brought her from the university library, but they either revved her up or wore her out.

“OK. Let’s go.”

“I die,” she said.

“Well, someday. But not for a very long time.”

“I die into the pool!” And she took a flying leap onto her new futon, which Sarah had just bought to transition her out of the crib.

Twice, back in my apartment, the phone rang, and when I went to answer it there was just all this terrible noise: muffled speech, electronic moaning, whooshing sounds of water. “Hello?” I cried repeatedly into the mouthpiece. But I heard only eerie underwater groans. The caller ID on our Radio Shack phone said “cellular call,” nothing more. Dialing star-69 gave me nothing. Later, comically and perhaps correctly, I imagined it was Reynaldo’s cell phone, that he still had me on speed dial and accidentally bumped the keypad and was taking me into the bathroom with him. Some bathroom somewhere. Probably it was flushing noises I was hearing. Or maybe he was on the other side of the world in a hot zone and his phone was trying to blow up something — it wasn’t called a cell phone for nothing — and the secret blow-up code had instead misdialed and reached romantic interference: me.

I began to miss Murph. All I needed was her company, a sense of her presence again. Every day I felt that if she would somehow come back into my life, things would be brighter.

And then astonishingly, she did. As if I’d wished it on a lucky penny: at this perfect time for me, Murph returned, which if it had been earlier would have been a slight bummer as I had recently been using her stuff, bullshit things like her “hair ionizer,” which I had imagined had made my hair shine and took the static out, and her mister — a “handsome mister,” I used to call it — which lightly sprayed mineral water on your face. But as brokenhearted as I felt now, I was using nothing, just letting static electricity streak my hair across my teeth! I had let my face crumble to sand. And then I just walked in one afternoon and there she was, sitting on the couch. She’d arrived the same day as the xylophone and had herself just wheeled it in off the porch.

“This is cool,” she said, pointing at it.

“Hi!” I exclaimed. I dropped my books and hugged her. I was so happy to see her.

“Yes.” She smiled.

“Are you? High?”

“Yup.”

“As a kite?”

“As the Hubble!” She looked tired. “I feel like a veteran.”

“Of highness?”

“No.”

“Of what, then? Hineyness?” Ritual ribaldry was part of the Muwallahin Sufic way, if I remembered correctly.

“A veteran of the gender wars.”

“Yeah, well, me, too. But I’m afraid those were never declared.”

“Fucking do-nothing Congress! And we never got a parade or anything!”

“We’ve got marching bands,” I said, pointing in the direction of the stadium.

“That’s not a parade,” she said.

“It’s a quasi parade.”

She and her boyfriend had also broken up. “He put me in the freezer,” she cried, “and didn’t even have the decency to chop me up first!” And so together we stayed in our apartment, smoking cigarettes and making up tunes for our grief. “He played me like a yard sale lute! If he calls here, give him the tone, man.”

But he never did.

“Do you realize,” I said, “that when women have orgasms scans show large parts of their brains go completely absent on the screen?”

“Yes, well, that corresponds with my anecdotal research in the field.”

“Mine, too.”

I would get out my bass, though the strap was always slipping—“Wait, let me put this strap on,” I invariably said, and Murph would cry, “Hoo-hee!” There wasn’t an innuendo anywhere she couldn’t be the first to locate and illumine with her hoots.