Lorrie Moore - Like Life

“What is kale ? I don’t understand why they haven’t taken our order yet. I mean, it’s crowded now, but it wasn’t ten minutes ago. Maybe it was the ice thing.”

“You know what else my wife says about this Italian? She says he goes around singing this same song to himself. You know what it is?”

“ ‘Santa Lucia.’ ”

“No. It’s the ‘Addams Family’ theme song: Their house is a museum, when people come to see-um …”

“Your wife tells you this?”

“We’re friends.”

“Don’t tell me you’re friends. You hate her.”

“We’re friends. I don’t hate her.”

“You think she’s a user and a tart. She’s with some guy with great shoes whose coif doesn’t collapse into hairpin turns across his part.”

“You used to be a nice person.”

“I never was a nice person. I’m still a nice person.”

“I don’t like this year,” said Dennis, his eyes welling again.

“I know,” said Mave. “Eighty-eight. It’s too Sergio Mendes or something.”

“You know, it’s OK not to be a nice person.”

“I need your permission? Thank you.” This was what Dennis had been doing lately: granting everyone permission to feel the way they were going to feel regardless. It was the books. Dennis’s relationship to his own feelings had become tender, curatorial. Dismantling. Entomological. Mave couldn’t be like that. She treated her emotional life the way she treated her car: She let it go, let it tough it out. To friends she said things like “I know you’re thinking this looks like a ’79, but it’s really an ’87.” She finally didn’t care to understand all that much about her emotional life; she just went ahead and did it. The point, she thought, was to attend the meager theater of it, quietly, and not stand up in the middle and shout, “Oh, my God, you can see the crew backstage!” There was a point at which the study of something became a frightening and naive thing.

“But, Dennis, really, why do you think so much about love, of someone loving you or not loving you? That is all you read about, all you talk about.”

“Put the starving people of the world together in a room, and what you get is a lot of conversation about roast beef. They should be talking about the Napoleonic Code?” At the mention of roast beef, Mave’s face lit up, greenish, fluorescent. She looked past Dennis and saw the waitress coming toward their table at last; she was moving slowly, meanly, scowling. There was a large paper doily stuck to her shoe. “I mean …” Dennis was saying, looking pointedly at Mave, but Mave was watching the waitress approach. Oh, life, oh, sweet, forgiven for the ice … He grabbed Mave’s wrist. There was always an emergency. And then there was love. And then there was another emergency. That was the sandwiching of it. Emergency. Love. Emergency. “I mean, it’s not as if you’ve been dozing off,” Dennis was saying, his voice reaching her now, high and watery. “I mean, correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ve been having this conversation alone.” He tightened his grip. “I mean, have I?”

ALL THE MOVIES that year were about people with plates in their heads: Spirits from another galaxy gather in a resort town at night, taking over the townspeople — all but the man with the plate in his head. Or: A girl with a plate in her head wanders a city beach, believing she is someone else. Evidence washes up on shore. There are sailors. Or: A woman dreams of a beautiful house in which no one lives, and one day she passes the actual house — a cupola, gables, and a porch. She walks up to it, knocks on the door, and it is opened slowly by her! a woman who is a twin of herself, grinning. She has a plate in her head.

Life seemed to have become like that. It had burst out of itself, like a bug.

In February a thaw gave the city the weepy ooze of a wound. There were many colds, people coughing in the subways. The sidewalks foamed to a cheese of spit, and the stoops, doorways, bus shelters were hedged with Rosies — that is what they were called — the jobless men, women, children with gourd lumps or fevers, imploring, hating eyes, and puffed lavender mouths, stark as paintings of mouths. The Rosies sold flowers: a prim tulip, an overflowing iris. Mostly no one bought any. Mostly it was just other Rosies, trading bloom for bloom, until one of them, a woman or a child, died in the street, the others gathering around in a wail, in the tiny, dark morning hours, which weren’t morning at all but night.

THAT YEAR was the first that it became illegal — for those who lived in apartments or houses — not to have a television. The government claimed that important information, information necessary for survival, might need to be broadcast automatically, might need simply to burst on, which it could do. Civilization was at stake, it was said. “Already at the stake,” said others, who had come to suspect that they were being spied on, controlled, that what they had thought when they were little — that the people on the television could also see you — now was true. You were supposed to leave it plugged in at all times, the plastic antenna raised in a V — for victory or peace, no one could say.

Mamie lost sleep. She began to distrust things, even her own words; too much had moved in. Objects implanted in your body — fillings, earrings, contraceptives — like satellite dishes, could be picking up messages, substituting their words for yours, feeding you lines. You never knew. Open your mouth, it might betray you with lies, with lackadaise, with moods and speak not your own. The things you were saying might be old radio programs bounced off the foil of your molars, or taxi calls fielded by the mussely glove of your ear. What you described as real might be only a picture, something from Life magazine you were forced to live out, after the photography, in imitation. Whole bodies, perhaps, could be ventriloquized. Approximated. You could sit on the lap of a thing and just move your lips. You could become afraid. You could become afraid someone was making you afraid: a new fear, like a gourmet’s, a paranoid’s paranoia.

This was not the future. This was what was with you now in the house.

Mamie lived in a converted beauty parlor storefront — a tin ceiling, a stench of turpentine, and extra sinks. At night her husband, a struggling painter, moody and beer-breathed, lay sleeping next to her, curled against her, an indifferent whistle in his nose. She closed her eyes. What all to love in the world , went a prayer from her childhood. What all to love?

The lumber of his bones piled close.

The radiator racked and spitting. Heat flapping like birds up the pipes.

SHE REMAINED AWAKE. On nights when she did sleep, her dreams were about the end of life. They involved getting somewhere, getting to the place where she was supposed to die, where it was OK. She was always in a group, like a fire drill or a class trip. Can we die here? Are we there yet? Which way can it possibly be?

Or else there was the house dream. Always the house dream, like the movie of the dream of the house. She would find a house, knock on the door, and it would open slowly, a wedge of dark, and then stop, her own profile greeting her, hanging there midair like a chandelier.