Lorrie Moore - Like Life

“Why are you always talking with your hands?” asked Pinky. “You think you’re Jewish?”

She glared at him. “You know, that’s what I hate about this part of the country,” she replied. “Everyone’s so repressed. If you use your body in the least way while you’re talking, people think you’re trying out for a Broadway show.”

“Kiss me,” he said, and he closed his eyes.

On a weekday Pinky would be off to his office, to work on another farm bankruptcy or a case of animal abuse. “My clients,” he said wearily. “You would never want to go out to eat with them. They come into my office reeking of cowshit, they lean back in the chair, set their belly out like that, then tell you about how some Humane Society bastard gave them a summons because their goat had worms.” Across his face there breathed a sigh of tragedy. “It’s a sad thing not to have clients you can go out to eat with.” He shook his head. “It’s a sad thing, a goat with worms.”

There was something nice about Pinky, but that something was not Nick Charles. Pinky was more like a grave and serious brother of Nick’s, named Chuck. Chuck Charles. When you had parents who would give you a name like that, there was nothing funny anymore.

“What do you write poems about?” he asked her once in the middle of the night.

“Whores,” she said.

“Whores,” he repeated, nodding in the dark.

She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W ’s. When she’d ask him how he liked them, he would say, “Fine. I’m on page …” and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages he’d accomplished that day. “The Wadsworth is a little too literaturey for me.”

“Wordsworth,” she corrected. They were in his kitchen, drinking juice.

“Wordsworth. Isn’t there a poet named Wadsworth?”

“No. You’re probably thinking of Longfellow. That was his middle name.”

“Longfellow. Now who’s he again?”

“How about Leaves of Grass ? What did you think of the poems in there?”

“OK. I’m on page fifty,” he said. Then he showed her his gun, which he kept in his kitchen in a leather case, like a trombone. He kept a rifle, he said, in the basement.

Odette frowned. “You hunt?”

“Sure. Jews aren’t supposed to hunt, I know. But in this part of the country it’s best to have a gun.” He smiled. “ Bavarians , you know. Here, try it out. Let me see how you look with a gun.”

“I’m afraid of guns.”

“Nothing to be afraid of. Just heft it and look down the top of the barrel and line up the sights.”

She sighed, lifted the gun, pressed the butt hard against her right shoulder, and aimed it at the kitchen counter. “Now, see the notch in the metal sticking up in the middle of your barrel?” Pinky was saying. “You have to get the bead in the middle of the notch.”

She closed her left eye. “I can feel the urge coming on to blow away that cutting board,” she said.

“Gun’s not loaded. Probably not till spring. Turkey season. Though I’ve got tags for deer.”

“You hunt turkeys?” She put the gun down. It was heavy.

“You eat turkey, don’t you?”

“The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They’re different. They’ve signed on the dotted line.” She paused and sighed again. “What do you do, go into a field and fire away?”

“Kind of. You try to catch them midflight. You know, I should take you deer hunting. It’s the last two days, this weekend, and I’ve got tags. Have you ever been?”

“ Pulease ,” she said.

IT WAS COLD in the woods. She blew breath clouds, then rings of cigarette smoke, into the dead ferns. “It’s nice out here. You don’t suppose we could just watch nature instead of shoot it.”

“Without hunting, the deer would starve,” said Pinky.

“So maybe we could just cook for them.” They had brought along a bottle of Jim Beam, and she twisted it open and took a swig. “Have you ever been married?”

“Once,” said Pinky. “God, what, twenty years ago.” He quickly shouldered his rifle, thinking he heard something, but no.

“Oh,” she said. “I wasn’t going to ask, but then you never said anything about it, so I thought I’d ask.”

“How about you?”

“Not me,” said Odette. She had a poem about marriage. It began, Marriage is the death you want to die , and in front of audiences she never read it with much conviction. Usually she swung her foot back and forth through the whole thing.

She looked down at her chest. “I don’t think orange is anyone’s most flattering color,” she said. They were wearing blaze-orange hats and vests. “I think we look like things placed in the middle of the road to make the cars go around.”

“Shhhh,” said Pinky.

She took another swig of Jim Beam. She had worn the wrong kind of boots — gray, suede, over the knees, with three-inch heels — and now she studied them with interest. One of the heels was loose, and mud was drying on the toes. “Tell me again,” she whispered to Pinky, “what makes us think a deer will cross our path?”

“There’s a doe bed not far from here,” whispered Pinky. “It attracts bucks.”

“Bucks, doe — thank God everything boils down to money, I always say.”

“During mating season the doe constructs a bed for herself, and then she urinates all around the outside of it. That’s how she gets her mate.”

“So that’s it,” murmured Odette. “I was always peeing in the bed.”

Pinky’s gun suddenly fired into the trees, and the noise filled the woods like a war, spilling to the ground the yellowing needles of a larch.

“Ahhhhhh!” Odette screamed. “What is going on?” Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn’t a big boom sound. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Damn!” shouted Pinky. “I missed!” He stood up and went crashing through the underbrush.

“Oh, my God!” cried Odette, and she stumbled after him, snapping the same twigs underfoot, ducking the same barbed wire. “Where are we going?”

“I’ve only wounded the deer,” Pinky called over his shoulder. “I’ve got to kill it.”

“Do you have to?”

“Keep your voice down,” said Pinky.

“Fuck you,” said Odette. “I’ll wait for you back where we were,” but there was a sudden darting from a bush behind her, and the bleeding deer leaped out, in a mournful gallop, its hip a crimson gash. Pinky raised his gun and fired, catching the deer in the neck. The air shimmered in the echo, and the leaves fell from a horse chestnut. The deer’s legs buckled, and when it tipped over, dead in some berry bushes, its eyes never blinked but stayed lidless and deep, black as outer space.

“I’ll leave the entrails for the hawks,” Pinky said to Odette, but she was not there.

• • •

Oh, the ladies come down from the Pepsi Hotel

Their home has no other name

than the sign that was placed

like a big cola bell: Pepsi-Cola Have a Pepsi Hotel.

Only a few of Odette’s poems about whores rhymed — the ones she’d written recently — but perhaps the library crowd would like those best, the anticipation of it, knowing what the next word would be like though not what it would be ; stanza after stanza, it would be a combination of comfort and surprise an audience might appreciate.

The local library association had set up a lectern near the windows of the reference room and had arranged chairs in rows for about eighty people. The room was chilly and alarmingly full. When Odette read she tried to look out past the faces, toward the atlases and the biographical dictionaries. She tugged on the cowl of her sweater and pulled it up over her chin between poems. She tried to pretend people’s heads were all little ears of corn, something a dance instructor had once told her ballet class to do when she was seven and they had had to dance before the parents.