Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

We played all the things I’d recently made up. Though in real life a boy’s love was a meager thing, we liked what a boy’s love could do in a poem or a song. “Driftless Dan, he had no plan / Prairie Pete, he got cold feet / Great Lake Jake was hard to take …” And so we would give back our own grieving songs of sorrow at love’s mystifying impersonations. We even had a song called “Mystifying Impersonation.” Also a sad, slow one titled “Why Don’t the Train Stop Here?” which Murph thought was too country; even when I changed the don’t to won’t , she found it unfocused, with its verse about a church turned into condos, though I liked that part best. “It’s like ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,’ ” I protested.

“It’s not,” she said. “Believe me. It’s not.” She knew how to speak without gentleness or malice, either one, and preferred my song “Everyone Is You — in Your Dreams,” based on something someone told me once about dreams, but also a defiant anthem to rally us against the narcissism of the betraying lover! Oh, yeah: impotent vengeance, baby, sing your song! What could be better than words that worked every which way? Who cared if the train stopped here or not? I would lay in the rhythm with my electric bass and she would throw herself into that xylophone with ecstasy and pain, a nearby cigarette perched on a saucer, sending out its smoke like the tiny campfire of two tiny prisoner squaws. Who knew she could play?

“It’s really just a toy,” she said. “Anyone can.”

“That’s not really true,” I said, unconvinced and impressed. Murph’s hands and arms moved up and down the keyboard with the undulating movements of a squirrel — sine and cosine interlocking. She would then suddenly stop and point at me with her right mallet, indicating that it was time for my solo, and I would let it rip — or try. Murph liked our collaborations better than such lone efforts by me as “Dog-Doo Done Up as Chocolates for My Brother,” and we seemed best on the rocking ones, like “Summer Evening Lunch Meat,” a song we had written, combining the most beautiful phrase in English with the ugliest, and therefore summing up our thoughts on love. “Summer evening” was what God had provided. “Lunch meat” was the hideous human body itself. When I lay the rhythm in with my bass, when I did it right, Murph could take over with the xylophone and it sounded great. Well, maybe not great. A little stupid, but sweet. “Let your bass-face shine!” she shouted. Probably my features were contorted in concentration and transport. In between the more rollicking stuff, in useful weariness, we found ourselves sailing even on our waltzy ballads:

Did you take off for Heaven

and leave me behind?

Darlin’, I’d join you

if you didn’t mind.

I’d climb up that staircase

past lions and bears ,

but it’s locked

at the foot of the stairs.

Are you in paradise

with someone who cares?

Oh, throw down the key to the stairs.

One can see shining steps

and think love is enough ,

Then sit at the bottom and wait.

The climb up to sweetness needs more than my love:

darlin’, please just open the gate …

Can someone just open the gate?

“I want to write something, too,” said Murph one evening, and because it was night, and because we’d had two beers apiece, she grabbed my bass and picked awkwardly away at a new song, written right there from scratch, from a four-stringed see-through, each of us making up a line and the other one supplying the next line, and so on.

Why did I let you make off with my head?

Now when I go out I pretend that you’re dead.

But if I glimpse you ,

don’t know what I’ll do ,

’ cause I’ve never been as crazy

’ bout someone as crazy as you.

Madness is sadness—

I loved you the most.

Now my future’s the house

for your lunatic ghost.

Why are the leaves still bright green

and the sky so damn blue?

Can’t they see I’m just crazy

’ bout someone as crazy as you?

She wanted to rhyme “don’t abhor us, that would bore us, just adore us” with—“Which is it?” she asked. “Is it clit oris or cli tor is?”

I didn’t know. Why didn’t I know? “It may depend on which you have,” I said.

To say all this made us laugh our heads off does not begin to express its consolations. Soon every night I’d get out my electric and we’d do every tune we knew how in easy keys of G-minor and E-minor, with riffs that were like climbing the same three stairs over and over. We started making up songs that had no choruses, just one cursed, merciless verse after verse, complaint like a flipping knife wandering around, debating, resting no place at all. In line after line, we tried to compose meaningful phrases with twinned endings: sinister to rhyme with minister, cubic with pubic, flatbread with flatbed, bearable reason with terrible treason, lucky with Kentucky —well, the songs angrily made no sense. We took turns, each of our verses sounding like the rhymes of stalkers bleakly drunk with love, a little hope like dust beneath our nails, from where we clawed, though all was flawed, still, now, our lives were shorn of plot, cuz baby you were all I got, waiting out here in the parking lot, beneath the stars, outside of bars, there I am, baby, there, there, idling in the fescue, waiting for your rescue, but you’re nowhere, why don’t you care that love is rare— my love is rare! — I’m going to drive to see … what you think about me.

We reached a point at which it was a good thing there was no chorus.

One night we got dressed in bag-lady clothes, got a shopping cart filled with beer, and went down by the railroad tracks just to howl like wolves. This was late-stage Sufism, mid to late.

“When we make our CD?” said Murph as we trudged back home, “we’ll put a razor blade right inside each and every one.”

“And those little bottles of gin,” I added. “And a pistol.”

“You’re great,” said Murph, putting her arm around me.

“Yeah, well, I feel like I’m headed for a future where I’m just every guy’s sister,” I bleated. “I think the fact that I read The Rules in Mandarin didn’t help any.”

Murph smiled, but what she said next was unsettling. She put her hands tenderly to my face and said, “Look at you! You’re nobody’s sister.”

Outside in the flowerbeds the yellow irises had unfurled in the sun with their lolling nectarine-pit tongues. There was a kind of ticking, humming all around, as if every living thing were contemplating bursting.

“I’m wondering why Emmie has been singing this particular song,” said Sarah, pointedly, in the kitchen. She had her chef’s hat on, the one that wasn’t a conventional toque but a brimless canvas cap.

“A song?”

“ ‘Prairie Pete, he got cold feet’?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I made that up.”

“That’s OK,” she said, as if I needed forgiving, which I could see I might.

“I’ve also been singing regular standards with her,” I added hopefully.

“Yes,” she said. “ ‘I Been Working on the Railroad.’ I’ve heard her sing that. There’s just two things I’m worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor.”

I wasn’t sure I was hearing things correctly. Her sense of humor was still not always explicit or transparent or of a finely honed rhythm, and it sometimes left me not in the same room with it but standing in the hall. The words “You’re serious?” flew out of my mouth.