Lorrie Moore: A Gate at the Stairs

Somehow I found this move of hers difficult to believe. I remember Sarah once saying, “To live in New York you have to have won the lottery and your parents have to have won the lottery and everyone has to have invested wisely.” She would also look at me very enigmatically and say, “In New York all the white babies have brown nannies. We’ve done the reverse. Give me five.”

“New York City?” Where did I think she was going to go — Prairie du Chien? (A town only I was obsessed with as a bleak fate, since it meant not even “prairie dog” but “dog prairie.”) And then suddenly it seemed to me that New York was where half-Jewish people had to go and where I would go too someday. Even though, as Sarah once said, on every corner they sold pretzels dotted with the kind of salt used here to de-ice driveways.

“Yeah, well, don’t get me started,” he said.

I knew that divorce was at a rate among everyone that it used to be only among movie stars. In marriage everyone had become a movie star. You wanted reality TV? There it was. What would be so wrong with arranged marriages? There the coldness was put in the parents’ hearts right up front rather than grown later, so unpleasantly, in the hearts of the lovers.

“Listen, I got your number from the people at Starbucks who called here asking for a referral. I’ll have you know I sang your praises. To the skies. And so I thought I’d give you a call. Since I found myself thinking about you.”

Could no kind of sorrow knock such ventures out of him?

“Well, yes, thank you,” I said. For me, Edward’s voice seemed to come bearing the cries of so many others, unbeknownst to him. And when I tried to conjure his face it was the face of a mouse that as it scurried somehow left the trail of a snake.

“The Starbucks manager who called me wanted to know whether you were clean and reliable! That made me laugh. I said of course that you were all that and a thousand things more.” I was silent and so he continued. “I don’t know what we would have done without you.”

What was there to say? “Look what happened regardless”? We had entered a darkening wood.

He continued, blindly. “There was much I came to understand about my heart last spring when you were in the house with us.”

Had his research not helped him with the functioning of the human eye? With understanding the basic mechanisms of sight? Perhaps things were not going well at the lab!

I said nothing merciful. I said nothing at all.

He pushed on. “It’s strange how as you get older some of the things you learn come from young people. Young people do come along seeming to know more. You end up thinking, as a scientist, Good grief, evolution is true! ”

I withheld the encouraging chuckle I supposed he wanted.

“With your help, and with others’, I’ve come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it’s a lot after all! Still, in the end, I imagine we will always look back and think: Too little, with too little in it. Because at the end the light’s dimming, of course. There is no such thing as wisdom — that is the only wisdom. But there is lack of wisdom. I try to remember that.”

This assertion of paucity and barrenness he’d gleaned from me? This light show? This tra-la-la of no wisdom? What had I learned from him but that he believed, or had once believed, that boys should learn the hard way about the world?

“Yes, well,” I said, “the truth shall set you free — and then what?”

“Then what, indeed.” He cleared his throat. He had lost the if you will s perhaps, but now there were indeed s. Which seemed worse. “Well, I was wondering if you’d like to go out to dinner with me sometime,” he said.

Sacrifice the children to propitiate some ancient god. There were a lot of gods and they all wanted something.

“Dinner?” I asked. These days I ate little for meals: mostly a single bowl of red barley boiled to a swarm of slick, fat ticks. I would melt butter on the whole mess and eat it in front of the TV.

“Yes. Dinner.”

“Dinner?” I said again in disbelief. My grandmother, when asked once at her ninetieth birthday party what words of advice she would offer young people, given her particular perspective at the end of life, had at first simply scrunched up her face and said irritably, deafly, “ What? ” But she was just buying time. And when the question was restated she looked around at her whole family, the kids and grandkids, and said loudly, “Don’t get married!” We were stunned. It was if she had said, “Shoot to kill.” It was if she had said, “If you just shoot to wound, they get up and come at you again.” I used to think that those essentially happy and romantic novels that ended with a wedding were all wrong, that they had left out the most interesting part of the story. But now I’d gone back to thinking, no, the wedding was the end. It was the end of the comedy. That’s how you knew it was a comedy. The end of comedy was the beginning of all else.

“Yes,” Edward said.

The gothic knell of a wedding bell, the hangman’s rope grown straight out of the chest then looped like tasseling around the tables. Rat teeth raking the cake. Beauty could not love you back. People were not what they seemed and certainly not what they said. Madness was contagious. Memory served melancholy. The medieval was not so bad. Gravity was a form of nostalgia. There could be virtue in satirizing virtue. Dwight Eisenhower and Werner von Braun had the exact same mouths. No one loved a loser until he completely lost. The capital of Burma was Rangoon.

My fortune cookies, too, had lost their frolic: Bury your unrealistic dreams or they will bury you.

But not in bed.

“Dinner?” I said again. Being oneself was no great accomplishment. It was not being oneself that was hard.

Then he paused. “Perhaps this is too sudden of a phone call.” His voice had become weary and tart. “Too out of the blue for you, maybe.”

Amanda came to the doorway of my room, poked her head in and mouthed, “Wanna split a pizza?”

I nodded my head. Yes. She disappeared.

The earth was not perfectly round but pear-shaped. And according to black hole experts, ninety percent of the universe was missing.

Still, there was always a circus somewhere.

“Dinner?” I repeated into the phone. My knuckles looked white as opals. O whatever-God, unprompt mom of all steps, still no forwarding address?

Edward remained silent, as did I. What was I alive for? I would not always know or make it my troubled concern. For now I simply became aware of my own noisy breathing. Windy exhalations, I had been told, seemed louder on the phone than they actually were. Inevitably, winds had an unpredictable drama. Prevailing westerlies did not always prevail: sometimes things blew up from the south and created little eddies— little eddies! — of stewing weather. I slowly moved the receiver away from my face and it seemed to keep on going, floating toward the cradle, vaguely guided by my hand. Air rushed to cool my cheek. Outside, in the early night, it was already beginning to snow.

Reader, I did not even have coffee with him.

That much I learned in college.