Lorrie Moore - Like Life

They met for dinner at some sort of macrobiotic place, because Dennis had recently become obsessed. Before his wife left him, his idea of eating healthy had been to go to McDonald’s and order the Filet-o-Fish, but now he had whole books about miso. And about tempeh. Mostly, however, he had books about love. He believed in studying his own heart this way. Men were like that, Mave had noticed. They liked to look in the mirror. For women, mirrors were a chore: Women looked, frowned, got out equipment, and went to work. But for men mirrors were sex: Men locked gazes with their own reflections, undressed themselves with their eyes, and stared for a shockingly long time. Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn’t possibly be a bad thing.

This month Dennis was reading books written supposedly for women, titles like Get Real, Smarting Cookie, Get Real and Why I Hate Myself. “Those books are trouble,” said Mave. “Too many well-adjusted people will endanger the arts in this country. To say nothing of the professions.” She studied Dennis’s flipped-over tie, the soft, torn eye of its clipped label. “You choose to be healthy, and you leave too many good people behind.”

But Dennis said he identified, that the books were amazing, and he reached into the book bag he now carried with him everywhere and read passages aloud. “Here,” he said to Mave, who had brought her own whiskey to the place and was pouring it into a water glass from which she had drunk all the water and left only the ice. She had had to argue with the waitress to get ice. “Oh, no — here,” Dennis said. He had found another passage from Why I Hate Myself and started to read it, loud and with expression, when suddenly he broke into a disconsolate weep, deep and from the belly. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

Mave shoved her whiskey glass across the table toward him. “Don’t worry about it,” she murmured. He took a sip, then put the book away. He dug through his book bag and found Kleenex to dab at his nose.

“I didn’t get like this on my own,” he said. “There are people responsible.” Inside his bag Mave could see a newsmagazine with the exasperated headline: ETHIOPIA: WHY ARE THEY STARVING THIS TIME?

“Boredom is heartless,” said Dennis, the tears slowing. He indicated the magazine. “When the face goes into a yawn, the blood to the chest gets constricted.”

“Are you finished with my drink?”

“No.” He took another gulp and winced. “I mean, yes,” and he handed it back to Mave, wiped his mouth with a napkin. Mave looked at Dennis’s face and was glad no one had broken up with her recently. When someone broke up with you, you became very unattractive, and it confirmed all the doubts that person had ever had about you to begin with. “Wait, just one more sip.” Someone broke up with you and you yelled. You blistered, withered, and flushed. You apologized to inanimate objects and drank when you swore you wouldn’t. You went around humming the theme to Valley of the Dolls , doing all the instruments even, lingering on the line about gotta get off, gonna get, have to get. … It wasn’t good to go out on that kind of limb for love. You went out on a limb for food, but not for love. Love was not food. Love, thought Mave, was more like the rest rooms at the Ziegfeld: sinks in the stalls, big deal. Mave worked hard to forget very quickly afterward what the men she went out with even looked like. This was called sticking close to the trunk.

“All yours,” said Dennis. He was smiling now. The whiskey brought the blood to his face in a nice way.

Mave looked down at her menu. “There’s no spaghetti and meatballs here. I wanted to order the child’s portion of the spaghetti and meatballs.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” said Dennis, shaking a finger for emphasis. With his books away and the whiskey in him, he seemed more confident. “Did I tell you the guy my wife’s seeing is Italian? Milanese, not Brooklyn. What do you suppose that means, her falling in love with an Italian?”

“It means she’s going to feel scruffy all the time. It means that he will stare at all the fuzzies on her shirt while she is telling him something painful about a childhood birthday party nobody came to. Let’s face it: She’s going to start to miss the fact, Dennis, that your hair zooms out all over the goddamn place.”

“I’m getting it cut tomorrow.”

Mave put on her reading glasses. “This is not a restaurant. Restaurants serve different things from this.”

“You know, one thing about these books for women, I have to tell you. The whole emphasis on locating and accepting your homosexual side is really very powerful. It frees and expands some other sort of love in you.”

Mave looked up at him and smiled. She was drawn to the insane because of their blazing minds. “So you’ve located and accepted?”

“Well, I’ve realized this. I like boys. And I like girls.” He leaned toward her confidentially. “I just don’t like berls. ” Dennis reached again for Mave’s whiskey. “Of course, I am completely in the wrong town. May I?” He leaned his head back, and the ice cubes knocked against his teeth. Water beaded up on his chin. “So, Mave, who are you romancing these days?” Dennis was beginning to look drunk. His lips were smooth and thick and hung open like a change purse.

“These days?” There were little ways like this of stalling for time.

“These right here.”

“Right here. These. I’ve been seeing Mitch again a little.”

Dennis dropped his forehead into his palm, which had somehow flown up from the table, so that the two met midair in an unsightly smack. “Mitch! Mave, he’s such a womanizer!”

“So I needed to be womanized. I was losing my sheen.”

“You know what you do? You get all your boyfriends on sale. It’s called Bargain Debasement. Immolation by desire.”

“Look, you need to be womanized, you go to a womanizer. I don’t take these things seriously anymore. I make it a point now to forget what everybody looks like. I’m being Rudolf Bing. I’ve lost my mind and am traipsing around the South Seas with an inappropriate lover, and I believe in it. I think everybody in a love affair is being Rudolf Bing anyway, and they’re vain to believe otherwise.… Oh, my God, that man in the sweater is feeling his girlfriend’s lymph nodes.” Mave put away her reading glasses and fumbled around in her bag for the whiskey flask. That was the thing with hunger: It opened up something dangerous in you, something endless, like a universe, or a cliff. “I’m sorry. Rudolf Bing is on my mind. He’s really been on my mind. I feel like we’re all almost like him.”

“Almost like Bing in love,” said Dennis. “ What a day this has been. What a rare mood I’m in. ” Mave was in a long sip. “I’ve been listening to that Live at Carnegie Hall tape too much.”

“Music! Let’s talk about music! Or death! Why do we always have to talk about love?”

“Because our parents were sickos, and we’re starved for it.”

“You know what I’ve decided? I don’t want to be cremated. I used to, but now I think it sounds just a little too much like a blender speed. Now I’ve decided I want to be embalmed, and then I want a plastic surgeon to come put in silicone implants everywhere. Then I want to be laid out in the woods like Snow White, with a gravestone that reads Gotta Dance. ” The whiskey was going down sweet. That was what happened after a while, with no meal to assist — it had to do the food work on its own. “There. We talked about death.”

“That’s talking about death?”