Lorrie Moore - Like Life

“When ya going back to New York?” he asked, and because it was in less than four weeks, she said, “Oh, I forget.”

Pinky got out of bed. He was naked and unselfconscious, beautiful, in a way, the long, rounded lines of him, the stark cliff of his back. He went over to the VCR, fumbled with some cassettes in the dark, holding each up to the window, where there was a rainy, moony light from the street, like a dream; he picked up cassette after cassette until he found the one he wanted.

It was a tape called Holocaust Survivors , and the title flashed blood red on the television screen, as if in warning that it had no place there at all. “I watch this all the time,” said Pinky, very quietly. He stared straight ahead in a trance of impassivity, but when he reached back to put an arm around Odette, he knew exactly where she was, slightly behind one of his shoulders, the sheet tight across her chest. “You shouldn’t hide your breasts,” he said, without looking. But she stayed like that, tucked close, all along the tracks to Treblinka, the gates to Auschwitz, the film lingering on weeds and wind, so unbelieving in this historical badlands, it seemed to want, in a wave of nausea and regret, to become perhaps a nature documentary. It seemed at moments confused about what it was about, a confusion brought on by knowing exactly.

Someone was talking about the trucks. How they put people in trucks, with the exhaust pipes venting in, how they drove them around until they were blue, the people were blue, and could be shoveled out from a trapdoor. Past some barbed wire, asters were drying in a field.

When it was over, Pinky turned to her and sighed. “Heavy stuff,” he said.

Heavy stuff? Her breathing stopped, then sped up, then stopped again. Who on earth was entitled to such words?

Who on earth? She felt, in every way it was possible to feel it, astonished that she had slept with him.

SHE WENT OUT with him again, but this time she greeted him at his own door, with a stiff smile and a handshake, like a woman willing to settle out of court. “So casual,” he said, standing in the doorway. “I don’t know. You East Coast city slickers.”

“We got hard hearts,” she said with an accent that wasn’t really any particular accent at all. She wasn’t good at accents.

When they slept together again, she tried not to make too much of it. Once more they watched Holocaust Survivors , a different tape, out of sequence, the camera still searching hard for something natural to gaze upon, embarrassed, like a bloodshot eye weary and afraid of people and what they do. They set fire to the bodies and to the barracks , said a voice. The pyres burned for many days.

Waves lapped. Rain beaded on a bulrush. In the bathroom she ran the tap water so he couldn’t hear as she sat, ill, staring at her legs, her mother’s legs. When had she gotten her mother’s legs? When she crept back to his bed, he was sleeping like a boy, the way men did.

In the morning she got up early and went to the closest thing there was to a deli and returned triumphantly with bagels and lox. Outside, the town had been museum dead, but the sky was lemony with sun, and elongations of light, ovals of brightened blue, now dappled Pinky’s covers. She laid the breakfast out in them, and he rolled over and kissed her, his face waxy with sleep. He pointed at the lox. “You like that sort of stuff?”

“Yup.” Her mouth was already full with it, the cool, slimy pink. “Eat it all the time.”

He sighed and sank back into his pillow. “After breakfast I’ll teach you some Yiddish words.”

“I already know some Yiddish words. I’m from New York. Here, eat some of this.”

“I’ll teach you tush and shmuck. ” Pinky yawned, then grinned. “And shiksa. ”

“All the things a nice Jewish boy practices on before he marries a nice Jewish girl. I know those.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

She refused to look at him. “I don’t know.”

“ I know,” said Pinky, and he stood up on the bed, like a child about to bounce, toweringly naked, priapic. She could barely look. Oh, for a beaded bulrush. A train disappearing into a tunnel. “You’re falling in love with me!” he exclaimed, gazing merrily down. She still had her coat on, and had stopped chewing. She stared, disbelievingly, up at him. Sometimes she thought she was just trying to have fun in life, and other times she realized she must be terribly confused. She narrowed her eyes. Then she opened her mouth wide so that he could see the train wreck of chewed-up bagel and lox.

“I like that,” said Pinky. “You’re onto something there.”

HER POEMS, as she stated in letters to friends in New York, were not going well; she had put them on the back burner, and they had fallen behind the stove. She had met this guy. Something had happened to the two of them in a cave, she wasn’t sure what. She had to get out of here. She was giving her final reading to the library patrons and matrons in less than three weeks, and that would pretty much be it. I hope you are not wearing those new, puffy evening dresses I see in magazines. They make everyone look like sticky buns. It is cold. Love, Odette.

LAIRD WAS CURIOUS. He kept turning his head sideways during the sit-ups. “So you and Pinky hitting it off?”

“Who knows?” said Odette.

“Well, I mean, everyone’s had their difficulties in life; his I’m only a little aware of. I thought you’d find him interesting.”

“Sure, anthropologically.”

“You think he’s a dork.”

“Laird, we’re in our forties here. You can’t use words like dork anymore.” The sit-ups were getting harder. “He’s not a dork. He’s a doofus. Maybe. Maybe a doink. ”

“You’re a hard woman,” said Laird.

“Oh, I’m not,” pleaded Odette, collapsing on the rubber mat. “Really I’m not.”

AT NIGHT he began to hold her in a way that stirred her deeply. He slept with one hand against the small of her back, the other capped against her head, as if to protect her from bad thoughts. Or, perhaps, thoughts at all. How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her brain stepping out for whole days, whole seasons, her work shrinking to limericks. She would open her mouth before the library fellowship people, and out would come: There once was a woman from … Someone would rush to a phone booth and call the police.

But perhaps you could live only from the neck down. Perhaps you could live with the clothes you were taking off all piled on top of your head, in front of your face, not just a sweater with a too-small neck but everything caught there — pants, shoes, and socks — a crazed tangle on your shoulders, in lieu of a head, while your body, stark naked, prepared to live the rest of its life in the sticks, the boonies, the fly-over, the rain. Perhaps you could. For when she slept against him like that, all the rest of the world collapsed into a suitcase under the bed. It was the end of desire, this having. Oh, here oh here she was. He would wrap himself around her, take her head like an infant’s into his hand and breathe things to her, her throat her chest, in his beginning to sleep. Go to sleep, go to sleep with me.

IN THE MORNING she warmed her arms over the blue zinnias of the gas jets and heated water for coffee and eggs. Over the newspaper, she pretended she and Pinky were Beatrice and Benedick, or Nick and Nora Charles, which is what she always pretended in a love affair, at least for a few days, until the evidence overwhelmed her.