Lorrie Moore - Like Life

Death , said her husband, Rudy. He kept a small hatchet under the mattress, in case of intruders. Death. Last year she had gone to a doctor, who had looked at her throat and a mole on her back, studying them like Rorschachs for whatever he might see in them. He removed the mole and put it floating in a pathologist’s vial, a tiny marine animal. Peering in at her throat, he said, “Precancer”—like a secret or a zodiac sign.

“ Pre cancer?” she had repeated quietly, for she was a quiet woman. “Isn’t that … like life ?” She was sitting, and he was standing. He fumbled with some alcohol and cotton balls, which he kept on the counter in kitcheny-looking jars, the flour and sugar of the medical world.

He took her wrist and briefly squeezed. “It’s like life, but it’s not necessarily life.”

THERE WAS a wrought-iron fence all around and a locked gate, but it was the bird feeder she remarked first, the wooden arms, the open mouth of boards stuck up there on a single leg. It was nearing Valentine’s Day, an angry slosh of a morning, and she was on her way to a realtor, a different one this time, not far from the Fourth and Smith stop of the F train — from where you could see the Statue of Liberty. On her way, she had come upon a house with a bird feeder. A bird feeder! And a tree in front, a towering oak, over one hundred fifty years old. A grade school teacher had brought her class to it and now stood in front of it, pointing and saying, “A hundred and fifty years ago. Can anyone tell me when that was?”

But it was the bird feeder, initially: a cross with an angle-roofed shelter at the head — a naked scarecrow bedecked with horizontals like a Frank Lloyd Wright house, or an alpine motel, its wooden ledges strewn with millet seed. In the freckled snow below lay tiny condiment cups of peanut butter, knocked to the ground. A flibberty squirrel, hopping and pausing in spasms, lifted each cup to his nose and nibbled. On the feeder itself was a pair of pigeons — lidless, thick-necked, municipal gargoyles; but there, wasn’t that also a sparrow? And a grosbeak?

The house was a real house, one of the few left in New York. A falling-down Edwardian Gothic with a cupola, once painted a silvery gray and now chipping. There was a porch and latticework of carpenter’s lace — a house one would go to for piano lessons, if people still took piano lessons, a house invariably seized for a funeral home. It was squeezed between two storefronts — the realtor’s and a laundromat.

“You’re looking for a one-bedroom?” said the realtor.

“Yes,” said Mamie, though it suddenly seemed both too little and too much to ask for. The realtor had the confident hair and makeup of a woman who had lived forever in New York, a woman who knew ever so wearily how to tie a scarf. Mamie studied the realtor’s scarf, guessing the exact geometry of the folds, the location of the knot. If Mamie ever had surgery, scars in a crisscross up her throat, she would have to know such things. A hat, a scarf, a dot of rouge, mints in the mouth: Everyone in New York was hiding something, eventually.

The real estate agent took out an application form. She picked up a pen. “Your name?”

“Mamie Cournand.”

“ What ? Here. You fill this out.”

It was pretty much the same form she’d filled out previously at other agencies. What sort of apartment are you looking for; how much do you make; how do you make it …?

“What is children’s historical illustrator?” deadpanned the realtor. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I, uh, work on a series of history publications, picture books actually, for chil—”

“Free lance?” She looked at Mamie with doubt, suspicion, and then with sympathy to encourage candor.

“It’s for the McWilliams Company.” She began to lie. “I’ve got an office there that I use. The address is written here.” She rose slightly from her seat, to point it out.

The realtor pulled away. “I’m oriented,” she said.

“Oriented?”

“You don’t need to reach and point. This your home and work phone? This your age …? You forgot to put in your age.”

“Thirty-five.”

“Thirty-five,” she repeated, writing it in. “You look younger.” She looked at Mamie. “What are you willing to pay?”

“Urn, up to nine hundred or so.”

“Good luck,” she snorted, and still seated in her caster-wheeled chair, she trundled over to the file cabinet, lifted out a manila folder, flipped it open. She placed Mamie’s application on top. “This isn’t the eighties anymore, you know.”

Mamie cleared her throat. Deep in the back she could feel the wound sticking there, unhealed. “It hasn’t not been for very long. I mean, just a few years.” The awkward, frightened look had leaped to her eyes again, she knew. Fear making a child of her face — she hated this in herself. As a girl, she had always listened in a slightly stricken way and never spoke unless she was asked a question. When she was in college she was the kind of student sometimes too anxious to enter the cafeteria. Often she just stayed in her room and drank warm iced tea from a mix and a Hot Pot. “You live right over here?” The realtor motioned behind her. “Why are you moving?”

“I’m leaving my husband.”

The corner of her mouth curled. “ In this day and age? Good luck.” She shrugged and spun around to dig through files again. There was a long silence, the realtor shaking her head.

Mamie craned her neck. “I’d like to see what you have, at any rate.”

“We’ve got nothing.” The realtor slammed the file drawerand twisted back around. “But keep trying us. We might have something tomorrow. We’re expecting some listings then.”

THEY HAD BEEN married for fourteen years, living on Brooklyn’s south slope for almost ten. It was a neighborhood once so Irish that even as late as the fifties, kids had played soccer in the street and shouted in Gaelic. When she and Rudy first moved in, the area was full of Italian men who barely knew Italian and leaned out of the windows of private clubs, shouting “How aw ya?” Now Hispanic girls in bright leotards gathered on the corner after school, smoking cigarettes and scorning the streets. Scorning , said the boys. Artists had taken up residence, as well as struggling actors, junkies, desperate Rosies in the street. Watch out , went the joke, for the struggling actors.

Mamie and Rudy’s former beauty parlor now had a padlocked door and boarded front windows. Inside remained the original lavender walls, the gold metallic trim. They had built a loft at one end of the place, and at the other were bookcases, easels, canvases, and a drawing table. Stacked against the wall by the door were Rudy’s huge paintings of snarling dogs and Virgin Marys. He had a series of each, and hoped, before he died, before I shoot myself in the head on my fortieth birthday , to have a gallery. Until then he painted apartments or borrowed money from Mamie. He was responsible for only one bill — utilities — and on several occasions had had to rush out to intercept Con Ed men arriving with helmets and boots to disconnect the electricity. “Never a dull moment,” Rudy would say, thrusting cash into their hands. Once he had tried to pay the bill with two small still lifes.

“You don’t think about the real world, Rudy. There’s a real world out there.” There was in him, she felt, only a fine line between insanity and charm. “A real world about to explode.”

“You don’t think I worry about the world exploding ?” His expression darkened. “You don’t think I get tears in my eyes every fucking day thinking about those Rembrandts at the Met and what’s going to happen to them when it does?”