Lorrie Moore - Like Life

The gift, when Millie unwrapped it, had turned out to be a toaster — a large one that could toast four slices at once. She had never seen John come into the house with a package, and she had no idea when or where he had gotten it.

“Four slices,” she said to Hane, who never ate much bread. “What will we do with such a thing?”

Every night through that May and June, Millie curled against Hane, one of her hands on his hip, the smells of his skin all through her head. Summer tapped at the bedroom screens, nightsounds, and Millie would lie awake, not sleeping at all. “Oh!” she sometimes said aloud, though for no reason she could explain. Hane continued to talk about the Historical Jesus. Millie rubbed his shins while he spoke, her palm against the dry, whitening hair of him. Sometimes she talked about the garbage barge, which was now docked off Coney Island, a failed ride, an unamusement.

“Maybe,” she said once to Hane, then stopped, her cheek against his shoulder. How familiar skin flickered in and out of strangeness; how it was yours no matter, no mere matter. “Maybe we can go someplace someday.”

Hane shifted toward her, a bit plain and a bit handsome without his glasses. Through the window the streetlights shimmered a pale green, and the moon shone woolly and bitten. Hane looked at his wife. She had the round, drying face of someone who once and briefly — a long ago fall, a weekend perhaps — had been very pretty without ever even knowing it. “You are my only friend,” he said, and he kissed her, hard on the brow, like a sign for her to hold close.

THIS WAS IN a faraway land. There were gyms but no irony or coffee shops. People took things literally, without drugs. Laird, who wanted to fix her up with this guy, warned her beforehand in exercise class. “Look, Odette, you’re a poet. You’ve been in po biz for what — twenty years—”

“Only fifteen, I’m sure.” She had just turned forty and scowled at him over her shoulder. She had a voice menopausal with whiskey, a voice left to lurch and ruin by cigarettes. It was without a middle range, low, with sudden cracks upward. “I hate that phrase po biz. ”

“Fifteen. All right. This guy’s not at all literary. He’s a farm lawyer. He gets the occasional flasher, or a Gypsy from the Serbo neighborhood in Chicago, but that’s as artistic as he gets. He’s dealing with farmers and farms. He wouldn’t know T. S. Eliot from, say, Pinky Eliot. He’s probably never even been to Minneapolis, let alone New York.”

“Who’s Pinky Eliot?” she asked. They were lying side by side, doing these things where you thrust your arms between your raised knees, to tighten the stomach muscles. There was loud music to distract you from worries that you might not know anyone in the room well enough to be doing this in front of them. “Who the heck is Pinky Eliot?”

“Someone I went to fourth grade with,” said Laird, gasping. “It was said he weighed more than the teacher, and she was no zipper, let me tell you.” Laird was balding, and in exercise class the blood rushed across his head, bits of hair curling above his ears like gift ribbon. He had lived in this town until he was ten, then his family had moved east to New Jersey, where she had first met him, years ago. Now he had come back, like a salmon, to raise his own kids. He and his wife had two. “Little and Moist,” they called them. “Look, you’re in the boonies here. You got your Pinky Eliot or you got your guy who’s never heard of Pinky or any Eliot.”

She had been in the boonies before. To afford her apartment in New York, she often took these sorts of library fellowships: six weeks and four thousand dollars to live in town, write unpublishable poems, and give a reading at the library. The problem with the boonies was that nobody ever kissed you there. They stared at you, up, down, but they never kissed.

Actually, once in a while you could get them to kiss.

But then you had to leave. And in your packing and going, in tearing the seams, the hems, the haws, you felt like some bad combination of Odysseus and Penelope. You felt funny in the heart.

“All right,” she said. “What is his name?”

Laird sighed. “Pinky Eliot,” he said, thrusting his arms between his knees. “Somehow in this mangled presentation, I fear I’ve confused you.”

PINKY ELIOT had lost weight, though for sure he still weighed more than the teacher. He was about forty-five, with all his hair still dark. He was not bad-looking, elf-nosed and cat-eyed, though a little soccer ball — ish through the chin and cheeks, which together formed a white sphere with a sudden scar curling grayly around. Also, he had the kind of mustache a college roommate of hers used to say looked like it had crawled up to find a warm spot to die.

They ate dinner at the only Italian restaurant in town. She drank two glasses of wine, the cool heat of it spreading through her like wintergreen. One of these days, she knew, she would have to give up dating. She had practiced declarations in the mirror. “I don’t date. I’m sorry. I just don’t date.”

“I always kind of liked the food here,” said Pinky.

She looked at his round face and felt a little bad for him and a little bad for herself while she was at it, because, truly, the food was not good: flavorless bladders of pasta passing as tortellini; the cutlets mealy and drenched in the kind of tomato sauce that was unwittingly, defeatedly orange. Poor Pinky didn’t know a garlic from a Gumby.

“Yes,” she said, trying to be charming. “But do you think it’s really Italian? It feels as if it got as far as the Canary Islands, then fell into the water.”

“An East Coast snob.” He smiled. His voice was slow with prairie, thick with Great Lakes. “Dressed all in black and hating the Midwest. Are you Jewish?”

She bristled. A Nazi. A hillbilly Nazi gastronomical moron. “No, I’m not Jewish,” she said archly, staring him down, to teach him, to teach him this: “Are you ?”

“Yes,” he said. He studied her eyes.

“Oh,” she said.

“Not many of us in this part of the world, so I thought I’d ask.”

“Yes.” She felt an embarrassed sense of loss, as if something that should have been hers but wasn’t had been taken away, legally, by the police. Her gaze dropped to her hands, which had started to move around nervously, independently, like small rodents kept as pets. Wine settled hotly in her cheeks, and when she rushed more to her mouth, the edge of the glass clinked against the tooth in front that was longer than all the others.

Pinky reached across the table and touched her hair. She had had it permed into waves like ramen noodles the week before. “A little ethnic kink is always good to see,” he said. “What are you, Methodist?”

ON THEIR SECOND DATE they went to a movie. It was about creatures from outer space who burrow into earthlings and force them to charge up enormous sums on their credit cards. It was an elaborate urban allegory, full of disease and despair, and Odette wanted to talk about it. “Pretty entertaining movie,” said Pinky slowly. He had fidgeted in his seat through the whole thing and had twice gotten up and gone to the water fountain. “Just going to the bubbler,” he’d whispered.

Now he wanted to go dancing.

“Where is there to go dancing?” said Odette. She was still thinking about the part where the two main characters had traded boom boxes and it had caused them to fall in love. She wanted either Pinky or herself to say something incisive or provocative about directorial vision, or the narrative parameters of cinematic imagery. But it looked as if neither of them was going to.

“There’s a place out past the county beltline about six miles.” They walked out into the parking lot, and he leaned over and kissed her cheek — intimate, premature, a leftover gesture from a recent love affair, no doubt — and she blushed. She was bad at love. There were people in the world who were good at love and people who were bad at it. She was bad. She used to think she was good at love, that it was intimacy she was bad at. But you had to have both. Love without intimacy, she knew, was an unsung tune. It was all in your head. You said, “Listen to this!” but what you found yourself singing was a tangle, a nothing, a heap. It reminded her of a dinner party she had gone to once, where dessert was served on plates printed with French songs. After dinner everyone had had to sing their plate, but hers had still had whipped cream on it, and when it came her turn, she had garbled the notes and words, frantically pushing the whipped cream around with a fork so she could see the next measure. Oh, she was bad, bad like that, at love.