Lorrie Moore - Like Life

By March, Harry found himself gassed out of his apartment, roaming the streets, several nights a week. He went to bed full of dread and trepidation, never knowing whether this particular night would be a Truck Night or not. He would phone the landlord’s machine and the police and shout things about lymphoma and emphysema and about being a taxpayer, but the police would simply say, “You’ve called here before, haven’t you.” He tried sounding like a different neighbor, very polite, a family man, with children, saying, “Please, sir. The trucks are waking the baby.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said the police. Harry called the Health Department, the Community Board, the Phil Donahue people. He referred to Officer Lucey as Officer Lucifer and cited cancer statistics from the Science Times. Most of the time people listened and said they would see what they could do.

In the meantime, Harry quit smoking and took vitamins. Once he even called Breckie in the middle of the night at her new apartment on the Upper West Side.

“Is this an awkward time?” he asked.

“To be honest, Harry, yes.”

“Oh, my God, really?”

“Look, I don’t know how to tell you these things.”

“Can you answer yes-or-no questions?”

“All right.”

“Shit, I can’t think of any.” He stopped talking, and the two of them breathed into the phone. “Do you realize,” he said at last, “that I have three plantar’s warts from walking around barefoot in this apartment?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do now.”

“A barnacled sole. That’s what I am.”

“Harry, I can’t be writing your plays with you right now.”

“Do you recall any trucks hanging out in front of our building, running their engines all night? Did that happen when you were here, when we were living together, when we were together and living here so much in love?”

“Come on, Harry.” There was some muffled noise, the seashell sound of hand over mouthpiece, the dim din of a man’s voice and hers. Harry hung up. He put on his Maria Callas records, all in a stack on the phonograph spindle, and left the apartment to roam the streets again, to find an open newsstand, a safe coffee shop that didn’t put a maraschino cherry on the rice pudding, so that even when you picked it off its mark remained, soaked in, like blood by Walt Disney.

When he trudged back to his apartment, the morning at last all fully lit, falsely wide-eyed and innocent, the trucks were always gone. There was just Deli in the doorway, smiling. “Mornin’, Harry,” she’d say. “Have a bad dream?”

“You’re up early,” said Harry. Usually that was what he said.

“Oh, is it daytime already? Well, I’m gonna get myself a real job, a daytime job. Besides, I’ve been listening to your records from upstairs.” Harry stopped jangling his keys for a moment. The Callas arias sailed faintly out through the windowpanes. “Isn’t that fag music, Harry? I mean, don’t get me wrong. I like fag music. I really like that song that keeps playing about the VCR.”

“What are you talking about?” He had his keys out now, pointed and ready to go. But he kept one shoulder turned slightly her way.

“ V–C-R-err ,” sang Deli. “V–C-Dannemora.” Deli stopped and laughed. “Dannemora! That girl’s in Sing Sing for sure.”

“See you,” said Harry.

On his answering machine was a message from Glen Scarp. “Hey, Harry, sorry to call you so early, but hey, it’s even earlier out here. And wasn’t it Ionesco who said something about genius up with the sun? Maybe it was Odets.…” Odets? thought Harry. “At any rate, I’m flying into New York in a few days, and I thought we might meet for a drink. I’ll phone you when I get in.”

“No,” said Harry out loud. “No. No.”

But it was that very morning, after a short, cold rain, just after he’d opened the windows and gotten the apartment aired out, that the bathroom started acting up. The toilet refused to swallow, gurgling if Harry ran the kitchen faucet, and the tub suddenly and terrifyingly filled with water from elsewhere in the building. Somebody else’s bath: sudsy water, with rusty swirls. Harry tried flushing the toilet again, and it rose ominously toward the rim. He watched in horror, softly howling the protests—“Ahhhh! UUUaahhh!”—that seemed to help keep the thing from overflowing altogether.

He phoned the landlord, but no one answered. He phoned a plumber he found in the yellow pages, some place advertising High Velocity Jet Flush and Truck Mounted Rodding Machine. “Are you the super?” asked the plumber.

“There is no super here,” said Harry, a confession that left him sad, like an admission that finally there was no God.

“Are you the landlord?”

“No,” said Harry. “I’m a tenant.”

“We charge two hundred dollars, automatic, if we visit,” said the plumber, calmly. Plumbers were always calm. It wasn’t just because they were rich. It had something to do with pipes and sticking your hands into them over and over. “Tell your landlord to give us a call.”

Harry left another message on his landlord’s machine and then went off to a coffee shop. It was called The Cosmic Galaxy and was full of actors and actresses talking wearily about auditions and getting work and how useless Back Stage was, though they bought it faithfully and spread it out over the tables anxiously to read. “What I’m trying to put together here,” he overheard one actress say, “is a look like Mindy and a sound like Mork.” Harry thought with compassion how any one of these people would mutilate themselves to write a TV episode for Glen Scarp, how people are driven to it, for the ten thousand dollars, for the exposure, for the trashy, shameful love of television, whatever it was, and how he had held out for his play, for his beautiful secret play, which he had been mining for years. But it would be worth it, he believed. When he came triumphantly up from the mine, emerged with his work gorgeous and completed, he would be, he knew, feted with an orchestra, greeted big by a huge brass band — trumpeted! — for there were people who knew he was down there, intelligent people, and they were waiting for him.

Of course, you could be down there too long. You could come up for air, all tired and sooty, and find only a man with a harmonica and a tin can, cymbals banging between his knees.

On Tuesday the suds were gone. Harry pulled the drain closed so that nothing else could come rushing up. Then he washed in the kitchen sink, with a rag and some dish detergent, and went off again to The Cosmic Galaxy.

But on Wednesday morning he woke once more to the sharp poison of diesel fumes in the apartment. He walked into his bathroom cautiously and discovered the tub full to the brim with a brackish broth and bits of green floating in it. Scallions. Miso soup with scallions. “What?” He checked the drain, and it was still closed. He left a message on his landlord’s machine that went, “Hey, I’ve got vegetables in my tub,” then he trudged out to a different coffee shop, a far one, on the very edge of the neighborhood, practically up by Lincoln Center, and ordered the cheeseburger deluxe, just to treat himself, just to put himself in touch with real life again. When he returned home, Deli was hovering in his doorway. “Mornin’, Harry,” said Deli.

“Isn’t it afternoon?” asked Harry.

“Whatever,” said Deli. “You know, Harry, I been thinking. What you need is to spend a little money on a girl who can treat you right.” She inched seductively toward him, took his arm with one hand and with the other began rubbing his buttocks through his jeans.

Harry shook her off. “Deli, don’t pull this shit on me! How long have I known you? Every morning for five years I’ve come out of this building and seen you here, said hello. We’ve been friends. Don’t start your hooker shit with me now.”