Lorrie Moore - Like Life

“Rudy, I went to a realtor today.”

Probably in their marriage she had been too dreamy and inconsistent. For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

“Again?” Rudy sighed, ironic but hurt. Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks. You had to learn the sleight-of-hand, the snarling dog, the Hail Marys and hoops of it! Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him. He’d had faith in that — abracadabra! But eventually the deadliness set in again. Could you live in the dead excellence of a thing — the stupid mortar of a body, the stubborn husk love had crawled from? Yes, he thought.

The television flashed on automatically, one of the government ads: pretty couples testifying to their undying devotion, undying bodies. “We are the Undying,” they said, and they cuddled their children, who had freckles that bled together on the cheeks, and toys with glassy button eyes. Undying , the commercials said. Be undying. “I can’t bear it,” Mamie said. “I can’t bear the brother and sister of us. I can’t bear the mother and son of us. I can’t bear the Undying commercials. I can’t bear washing my hair in dishwashing liquid, or doing the dishes in cheap shampoo, because we’re too broke or disorganized or depressed to have both at the same time.” Always, they’d made do. For toilet paper they used holiday-imprinted napkins — cocktail napkins with poinsettias on them. A big box of them, with a tray, had been sent to Rudy by mistake. For towels they used bath mats. For bath mats more poinsettia napkins. They bought discount soaps with sayings on the label like Be gentle and you need not be strong. “We’re camping out here, Rudy. This is camping!” She tried to appeal to something he would understand. “My work. It’s affecting my work. Look at this!” and she went over to a small drawing table and held up her half-finished sketch of Squanto planting corn. She’d been attempting a nuclear metaphor: white man learning to plant things in the ground, which would later burst forth; how the white man had gotten carried away with planting. “He looks like a toad.”

“He looks like a catcher for the Boston Red Sox.” Rudy smiled. Would she smile? He grew mock-serious: “The faculties of discernment and generosity are always at war. You must decide whether you will be muse or artist. A woman cannot be both.”

“I can’t believe you,” she said, staring accusingly around their apartment. “This is not life. This is something else,” and the whole ill-lit place stared back at her, hurt, a ditzy old beauty parlor flunking someone else’s math.

“Forget this Squanto thing,” he said, looking compassionate. “I’ve got an idea for you. I’ve thought about it all day: a children’s book called Too Many Lesbians. ” He began motioning with his arms. “Lesbians in bushes, lesbians in trees … Find the lesbians …”

“I’m going out for some air,” she said, and she grabbed her coat and flew out the door. It was evening already, zinc gray and chill, the puddles freezing on the walks in a thin glaze. She hurried past the shivering Rosies at the corner, hurried six blocks in a zigzag to look at the bird feeder again. Visit a place at night, she knew, and it was yours.

When she reached it, the house was dark, holding its breath, soundless so as not to be discovered. She pressed her face against the gate, the hard cilia of its ironwork, and sighed, longing for another existence, one that belonged to a woman who lived in a house like this, the lovely brow of its mansard roof, thoughtful with rooms. She felt a distrust of her own life, like those aerospace engineers reluctant to fly in planes of their own design, fearing death by their own claptrappery.

The bird feeder stood tall as a constable. There were no birds.

“YOU SHOULD never leave. You just always come back,” whispered Rudy. A tourist in your own despair , he had once said. It was the title of one of his paintings. One of a snarling dog leaping over a sofa.

She stared through the small window by their bed, a strip of sky and one dim star, an asterisk to take her away briefly to an explanation — the night bragging a footnote. He held her, kissed her. Here in bed was when he seemed to her not to be doing imitations of other people. After fifteen years, she had seen all the imitations — friends, parents, movie actors — until it was a little scary, as if he were many different people at once, people to turn to, not in distress, but like a channel on television, a mind gone crazy with cable. He was Jimmy Stewart. He was Elvis Presley. “When you were growing up, were your parents funny?” she asked him once.

“ My parents? You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “I mean, once in a while they memorized something.” He was Dylan on the harmonica. Lifelike; absolutely lifelike. He was James Cagney. He was some musical blend he called Smokey Robinson Caruso.

“Don’t you think we’d have beautiful children?” Rudy now pleaded, sleepily, his hand smoothing the bangs off her brow. “They’d be nervous and insane,” she murmured.

“You’re strung out about your health.”

“But maybe they’d also be able to do imitations.”

Rudy kissed her throat, her ears, her throat again. She had to spit daily into a jar she kept in the bathroom, and to visit the clinic regularly, bringing the jar.

“You think we don’t love each other anymore,” he said. He was capable of tenderness. Though sometimes he was rough, pressing himself upon her with a force that startled her, wanting to make love and kissing her meanly against the wall: come on, come on ; though his paintings had grown more violent, feverish swirls of men in business suits sodomizing animals: this is my statement about yuppies, OK? ; though in coffee shops he often lorded over her spells of sorrowful boredom by looking disgusted while she blinked soggily into her lunch — here without his clothes on, with her face open to him, he could be a tender husband. “You think that, but it’s not true.” Years ago she had come to know his little lies, harmless for the most part and born of vanity and doubts, and sometimes fueled merely by a desire to hide from things whose truth took too much effort to figure out. She knew the way he would tell the same anecdotes from his life, over and over again, each time a little differently, the exaggerations and contradictions sometimes having a particular purpose — his self-portrait as Undiscovered Genius — and sometimes not seeming to have one at all. “Six inches from the door was an empty shopping cart jammed up against the door,” he told her once, and she said, “Rudy, how can it be six inches from the door but also jammed up against it?”

“It was full of newspapers and tin cans, stuff like that. I don’t know.”

She couldn’t even say when the love between them had begun to sicken, how long it had been gasping drearily over its own grave of rage and obligation. They had spent over a third of their lives together — a third, like sleep. He was the only man who had ever, even once, claimed to find her beautiful. And he had stuck with her, loved her, even when she was twenty and in terrified thrall to sex, not daring to move, out of politeness or was it timidity. He had helped her. Later she learned to crave the drugged heart of sex, the drugs at the core of it: All the necessary kissing and fussing seemed only that — necessary — to get to the drugs. But it had all been with Rudy, always with him. “Now we are truly in cahoots,” she exulted, the day they were married at the county clerk’s.