The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore (2 page)

"You're a biographer of Georges," she said, nodding and unmoved. Clearly she'd been hoping for Don DeLillo.

This provoked him. He veered off into a demented heat. "Actually, I've won the Nobel Prize."

"Really?"

"Yes! But, well, I won it during a year when the media weren't paying a lot of attention. So it kind of got lost in the shuffle. I won—right after 9/11. In the shadow of 9/11. Actually, I won right as the second tower was being hit."

She scowled. "The Nobel Prize for Literature?"

"Oh, for Literature? No, no, no—not for Literature." His penis now sat soft as a shrinking peach in his pants.

Suzy leaned in on his left and spoke across Bake's plate to Linda. "Is he bothering you? If he bothers you, just let me know. I'm Suzy." She pulled her hand out of her lap and the two women shook hands over his avocado. He could see Linda's nails were fake. Or, if not fake, something. They resembled talons.

"This is Linda," said Bake. "She's an evil lobbyist."

"Really!" Suzy said good-naturedly, but soon the sculptor was tapping her on the arm and she had to turn back and be introduced to the sculptor's son.

"Is it hard being a lobbyist?"

"It's interesting," she said. "It's hard work but interesting."

"That's the best kind."

"Where are you from?"

"Chicago."

"Oh, really," she said, as if he had announced his close connection to Al Capone. Anyone he ever mentioned Chicago to always brought up Capone. Either Capone or the Cubs.

"So you know the Presidential candidate for the Democrats?"

"Brocko? Love him! He's the great new thing. Honest. Practical. One of us! He's a writer himself. I wonder if he's here." Now Bake, as if in mimicry, turned and looked over both
his
shoulders.

"He's probably out with his terrorist friends."

"He has terrorist friends?" Bake himself had a terrorist friend. Midwesterners loved their terrorist friends! Who were usually balding, boring citizens still mythically dining out on the sins of their long-ago youth. They never actually killed anyone—at least not intentionally. They aged and fattened in the ordinary fashion. They were rehabilitated. They served their time. And, well, if they didn't, because
of infuriating class privilege that allowed them to just go on as if nothing had ever happened
, then they raised each other's children and got advanced degrees and gave back to society in other ways. He supposed. He didn't really know much about Chicago. He was actually from Michigan, but when going anywhere he always flew out of O'Hare.

"Uh, yeah. That bomber who tried to blow up federal buildings light here in this town."

"When Brocko was a kid? That sixties guy? But Brocko doesn't even like the sixties. He thinks they're so… sixties. The sixties took his mother on some wild ride away from him."

"The sixties
made
him, my friend."

Bake looked at her more closely. Now he could see she wasn't Asian. She had simply had some kind of plastic surgery: skin was stretched and draped strangely around her eyes. A botched eye job. A bad facelift. An acid peel. Whatever it was: Suzy would know exactly.

"Well, he was a young child."

"So he says."

"Is there some dispute about his age?"

"Where is his birth certificate?"

"I have no idea," said Bake. "I have no idea where my own is."

"Here is my real problem: this country was founded by and continues to be held together by people who have worked very hard to get where they are."

Bake shrugged and wagged his head around. Could he speak of people having things they didn't deserve, in a roomful of such people? Now would not be the time to speak of timing. It would be unlucky to speak of luck. She continued. "And if you don't understand
that
, my friend, then we cannot continue this conversation."

The sudden way in which the whole possibility of communication was now on the line startled him. "I see you've researched the founding of this country." He would look for common ground.

"I watched
John Adams
on HBO. Every single episode."

"Wasn't the guy who played George Washington uncanny? I did think Jefferson looked distractingly like Martin Amis. I wonder if Martin is here?" He looked over his shoulders again. He needed Martin Amis to get over here right now and
help
him.

Linda looked at him fiercely. "It was a great mini-series and a great reminder of the founding principles of our nation."

"Did you know George Washington was afraid of being buried alive?"

"I didn't know about that."

"The guy scarcely had a fear except for that one. You knew he freed his slaves?"

"Hmmmm."

She was eating; he was not. This would not work to his advantage. Nonetheless he went on. "Talk about people who've toiled hard in this country—and yet, not to argue with your thesis too much, those slaves didn't all get ahead."

"Your man Barama, my friend, would not even be in the running if he wasn't black."

Now all appetite left him entirely. The food on his plate, whatever it was, splotches of taupe, dollops of orange, went abstract like a painting. His blood pressure flew up; he could feel the pulsing twitch in his temple. "You know, I never thought about it before but you're right! Being black really
is
the fastest, easiest way to get to the White House!"

She said nothing, and so he added, "Unless you're going by cab, and then, well, it can slow you down a little."

Chewing, Linda looked at him, a flash in her eyes. She swallowed. "Well, supposedly we've already had a black president."

"We have?"

"Yes! A Nobel Prize-winning author said so!"

"Hey. Take it firsthand from me: don't believe everything that a Nobel prizewinner tells you. I don't think a black president ever gets to become president when his nightclub-singer mistress is holding press conferences during the campaign. That would be—a white president. Please pass the salt."

The shaker appeared before him. He shook some salt around on his plate and stared at it.

Now Linda made a stern, effortful smile, struggling to cut something with her knife. Was it meat? Was it poultry? It was consoling to think that, for a change, the rich had had to pay a pretty penny for their chicken while his was free. But it was not consoling
enough
. "If you don't think I as a woman know a thing or two about prejudice, you would be sadly mistaken," Linda said.

"Hey, it's not that easy being a man, either," said Bake. "There's all that cash you have to spend on porn? and believe me, that's money you never get back."

He then retreated, turned toward his left, toward Suzy, and leaned in. "Help me," he whispered in her ear.

"Are you charming the patrons?"

"I fear some object may be thrown."

"You're supposed to charm the patrons."

"I know, I know, I was trying to. I swear. But she's one of those who keeps referring to Brocko as 'Barama.'" He had violated most of Suzy's dinner-talk rules already: No politics, no religion, no portfolio tips.
And unless you see the head crowning, never look at a woman's stomach and ask if she's pregnant
. He had learned all these the hard way.

But in a year like this one, there was no staying away from certain topics.

"Get back there," Suzy said. The sculptor was tapping Suzy on the arm again.

He tried once more with Linda Santo the evil lobbyist. "Here's the way I see it—and this I think you'll appreciate. It would be great at long last to have a president in the White House whose last name ends with a vowel."

"We've never had a President whose last name ended with a vowel?"

"Well, I don't count Coolidge."

"You're from what part of Chicago?"

"Well, just outside Chicago."

"Where outside?"

"Michigan."

"Isn't Michigan a long way from Chicago?"

"It is!" He could feel the cool air on the skin between his socks and his pantcuffs. When he looked at her hands, they seemed frozen into claws.

"People talk about the rock-solid sweetness of the heartland, but I have to say: Chicago seems like a city that has taken too much pride in its own criminal activity." She smiled grimly.

"I don't think that's true." Or was it? He was trying to give her a chance. What if she was right? "Perhaps we have an unfulfilled streak of myth-making. Or perhaps we just don't live as fearfully as people do elsewhere," he said. Now he was just guessing.

"You wait, my friend, there are some diabolical people eyeing that Sears Tower as we speak."

Now he was silent.

"And if you're in it when it happens, which I hope you're not, but if you are, if you are, if you are, if you're eating lunch at the top or having a meeting down below or whatever it is you may be doing, you will be changed. Because I've been there. I know what it's like to be bombed by terrorists—I was in the Pentagon when they crashed that plane right down into it and I'll tell you: I was burned alive but not dead. I was burned
alive
. It lit me inside. Because of that I know more than ever what this country is about, my friend."

He saw now that her fingernails really were plastic, that the hand really was a dry frozen claw, that the face that had seemed intriguingly exotic had actually been scarred by fire and only partially repaired. He saw how she was cloaked in a courageous and intense hideosity. The hair was beautiful but now he imagined it was probably a wig. Pity poured through him: he'd never before felt so sorry for someone. How could someone have suffered so much? How could someone have come so close to death, so unfairly, so painfully and heroically, and how could he still want to strangle them?

"You were a lobbyist for the Pentagon?" was all he managed to say.

"any faux pas?"
asked Suzy in the cab on the way back to the B and B, where warm cookies would await them by their door, tea packets in the bath, their own snore strips on the nightstand.

"Beaucoup faux," said Bake. He pronounced it
foze
. "Beaucoup verboten foze. Uttering my very name was like standing on the table and peeing in a wineglass."

"What? Oh, please."

"I'm afraid I spoke about politics. I couldn't control myself."

"Brocko is going to win. All will be well. Rest assured," she said, as the cab sped along toward Georgetown, the street curbs rusted and rouged with the first fallen leaves.

"Promise?"

"Promise."

He was afraid to say more. He did not know how much time he and Suzy might even have left together, and an endgame of geriatric speed-dating—everyone deaf and looking identical; "What? I can't hear you? What? You again? Didn't I just see you?"—all taking place midst bankruptcy and war might be the real circle of hell he was destined for.

"Don't ever leave me," he said.

"Why on earth would I do that?"

He paused. "I'm putting in a request not just for
on earth
, but even for after that."

"OK," she said, and squeezed his meaty thigh. At least he had once liked to think of it as meaty.

"I fear you will someday decide I'm less than adequate," he said.

"You're adequate," she said, her hand still on his leg.

He cleared his throat. "I'm adequate
enough
."

She kept her hand there and on top of hers he placed his, the one with the wedding ring she had given him, identical to her own. He willed all his love into the very ends of his fingertips and watched as his hand clasped hers, studied the firm, deliberate hydraulics of its knuckles and joints. But she soon turned her head away and looked out the window, showing him only her beautiful hair, which was lit like gold by the passing streetlamps, as if it were something not attached to her at all.

although kit and rafe
had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no-nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke. Married for two decades of precious, precious life, Kit and Rafe seemed currently to be partners only in anger and dislike, their old, lusty love mutated to rage. It was both their shame and demise that hate (like love) could not live on air. And so in this, their newly successful project together, they were complicitous and synergistic. They were nurturing, homeopathic, and enabling. They spawned and raised their hate together, cardiovascularly, spiritually, organically. In tandem, as a system, as a dance team of bad feeling, they had shoved their hate center stage and shone a spotlight down for it to seize.
Do your stuff, baby! Who is the best? Who's the man
?

"Pro-nuke? You are? Really?" Kit was asked by her friends, to whom she continued, indiscreetly, to complain.

"Well, no." Kit sighed. "But in a way."

"Seems like you need someone to talk to."

Which hurt Kit's feelings, since she'd felt that she was talking to
them
. "I'm simply concerned about the kids," she said.

rafe had changed.
His smile was just a careless yawn, or was his smile just stuck carelessly on? Which was the correct lyric? She didn't know. But, for sure, he had changed. In Beersboro, one put things neutrally, like that. Such changes were couched. No one ever said that a man was now completely fucked-up. They said, "The guy has changed." Rafe had started to make model rockets in the basement.

He'd become
a little different
. He was something of a
character
. The brazen might suggest, "He's gotten into some weird shit." The rockets were tall, plastic, penile-shaped things to which Rafe carefully shellacked authenticating military decals. What had happened to the handsome hippie she'd married? He was prickly and remote, empty with fury. A blankness had entered his blue-green eyes. They stayed wide and bright but non-functional, like dime-store jewelry. She wondered if this was a nervous breakdown, the genuine article. But it persisted for months, and she began to suspect, instead, a brain tumor. Occasionally, he catcalled and wolf-whistled across his mute alienation, his pantomime of hate momentarily collapsed. "Hey, curie," he'd call to her from the stairs, after not having looked her in the eye for two months. It was like being snowbound with someone's demented uncle: should marriage be like that? She wasn't sure.