Lorrie Moore - Like Life

“I’m flying in to visit you this weekend,” announced Zoë.

“I was hoping you would,” said Evan. “Charlie and I are having a party for Halloween. It’ll be fun.”

“I have a costume already. It’s a bonehead. It’s this thing that looks like a giant bone going through your head.”

“Great,” said Evan.

“It is, it’s great.”

“Alls I have is my moon mask from last year and the year before. I’ll probably end up getting married in it.”

“Are you and Charlie getting married? ” Foreboding filled her voice.

“Hmmmmmmnnno, not immediately.”

“Don’t get married.”

“Why?”

“Just not yet. You’re too young.”

“You’re only saying that because you’re five years older than I am and you’re not married.”

“ I’m not married? Oh, my God,” said Zoë. “I forgot to get married.”

Zoë had been out with three men since she’d come to Hilldale-Versailles. One of them was a man in the Paris municipal bureaucracy who had fixed a parking ticket she’d brought in to protest and who then asked her to coffee. At first she thought he was amazing — at last, someone who did not want Heidi! But soon she came to realize that all men, deep down, wanted Heidi. Heidi with cleavage. Heidi with outfits. The parking ticket bureaucrat soon became tired and intermittent. One cool fall day, in his snazzy, impractical convertible, when she asked him what was wrong, he said, “You would not be ill-served by new clothes, you know.” She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars. She flicked an ant from her sleeve.

“Did you have to brush that off in the car?” he said, driving. He glanced down at his own pectorals, giving first the left, then the right, a quick survey. He was wearing a tight shirt.

“Excuse me?”

He slowed down at a yellow light and frowned. “Couldn’t you have picked it up and thrown it outside?”

“The ant? It might have bitten me. I mean, what difference does it make?”

“It might have bitten you! Ha! How ridiculous! Now it’s going to lay eggs in my car!”

The second guy was sweeter, lunkier, though not insensitive to certain paintings and songs, but too often, too, things he’d do or say would startle her. Once, in a restaurant, he stole the garnishes off her dinner plate and waited for her to notice. When she didn’t, he finally thrust his fist across the table and said, “Look,” and when he opened it, there was her parsley sprig and her orange slice, crumpled to a wad. Another time he described to her his recent trip to the Louvre. “And there I was in front of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa , and everyone else had wandered off, so I had my own private audience with it, all those painted, drowning bodies splayed in every direction, and there’s this motion in that painting that starts at the bottom left, swirling and building, and building, and building, and going up to the right-hand corner, where there’s this guy waving a flag, and on the horizon in the distance you could see this teeny tiny boat.…” He was breathless in the telling. She found this touching and smiled in encouragement. “A painting like that,” he said, shaking his head. “It just makes you shit.”

“I have to ask you something,” said Evan. “I know every woman complains about not meeting men, but really, on my shoots, I meet a lot of men. And they’re not all gay, either.” She paused. “Not anymore.”

“What are you asking?”

The third guy was a political science professor named Murray Peterson, who liked to go out on double dates with colleagues whose wives he was attracted to. Usually the wives would consent to flirt with him. Under the table sometimes there was footsie, and once there was even kneesie. Zoë and the husband would be left to their food, staring into their water glasses, chewing like goats. “Oh, Murray,” said one wife, who had never finished her master’s in physical therapy and wore great clothes. “You know, I know everything about you: your birthday, your license plate number. I have everything memorized. But then that’s the kind of mind I have. Once at a dinner party I amazed the host by getting up and saying good-bye to every single person there, first and last names.”

“I knew a dog who could do that,” said Zoë, with her mouth full. Murray and the wife looked at her with vexed and rebuking expressions, but the husband seemed suddenly twinkling and amused. Zoë swallowed. “It was a Talking Lab, and after about ten minutes of listening to the dinner conversation this dog knew everyone’s name. You could say, ‘Bring this knife to Murray Peterson,’ and it would.”

“Really,” said the wife, frowning, and Murray Peterson never called again.

“Are you seeing anyone?” said Evan. “I’m asking for a particular reason, I’m not just being like mom.”

“I’m seeing my house. I’m tending to it when it wets, when it cries, when it throws up.” Zoë had bought a mint-green ranch house near campus, though now she was thinking that maybe she shouldn’t have. It was hard to live in a house. She kept wandering in and out of the rooms, wondering where she had put things. She went downstairs into the basement for no reason at all except that it amused her to own a basement. It also amused her to own a tree. The day she moved in, she had tacked to her tree a small paper sign that said Zoë’s Tree.

Her parents, in Maryland, had been very pleased that one of their children had at last been able to afford real estate, and when she closed on the house they sent her flowers with a Congratulations card. Her mother had even UPS’d a box of old decorating magazines saved over the years, photographs of beautiful rooms her mother used to moon over, since there never had been any money to redecorate. It was like getting her mother’s pornography, that box, inheriting her drooled-upon fantasies, the endless wish and tease that had been her life. But to her mother it was a rite of passage that pleased her. “Maybe you will get some ideas from these,” she had written. And when Zoë looked at the photographs, at the bold and beautiful living rooms, she was filled with longing. Ideas and ideas of longing.

Right now Zoë’s house was rather empty. The previous owner had wallpapered around the furniture, leaving strange gaps and silhouettes on the walls, and Zoë hadn’t done much about that yet. She had bought furniture, then taken it back, furnishing and unfurnishing, preparing and shedding, like a womb. She had bought several plain pine chests to use as love seats or boot boxes, but they came to look to her more and more like children’s coffins, so she returned them. And she had recently bought an Oriental rug for the living room, with Chinese symbols on it she didn’t understand. The salesgirl had kept saying she was sure they meant Peace and Eternal Life , but when Zoë got the rug home, she worried. What if they didn’t mean Peace and Eternal Life? What if they meant, say, Bruce Springsteen. And the more she thought about it, the more she became convinced she had a rug that said Bruce Springsteen , and so she returned that, too.

She had also bought a little baroque mirror for the front entryway, which she had been told, by Murray Peterson, would keep away evil spirits. The mirror, however, tended to frighten her , startling her with an image of a woman she never recognized. Sometimes she looked puffier and plainer than she remembered. Sometimes shifty and dark. Most times she just looked vague. You look like someone I know , she had been told twice in the last year by strangers in restaurants in Terre Haute. In fact, sometimes she seemed not to have a look of her own, or any look whatsoever, and it began to amaze her that her students and colleagues were able to recognize her at all. How did they know? When she walked into a room, how did she look so that they knew it was her? Like this? Did she look like this? And so she returned the mirror.