The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore (3 page)

She seldom saw him anymore when he got up in the morning and rushed off to his office. And when he came home from work he'd disappear down the basement stairs. Nightly, in the anxious conjugal dusk that was now their only life together, after the kids had gone to bed, the house would fill up with fumes. When she called down to him about this, he never answered. He seemed to have turned into some sort of space alien. Of course, later she would understand that all this meant that he was involved with another woman, but at the time, protecting her own vanity and sanity, she was working with two hypotheses only: brain tumor or space alien.

"All husbands are space aliens," her friend Jan said on the phone.

"God help me, I had no idea." Kit began spreading peanut butter on a pretzel and eating quickly. "He's in such disconnect. His judgment is so bad."

"Not on the planet he lives on. On his planet, he's a veritable Solomon. 'Bring the stinkin' baby to me now!'"

"Do you think people can be rehabilitated and forgiven?"

"Sure! Look at Louie North."

"He lost that Senate race. He was not sufficiently forgiven."

"But he got some votes."

"Yeah, and now what is he doing?"

"Now he's promoting a line of fire-retardant pajamas. It's a life!" She paused. "Do you fight about it?"

"About what?" Kit asked.

"The rockets back to his homeland."

Kit sighed again. "Yes, the toxic military-crafts business poisoning our living space. Do I fight? I don't fight, I just, well, O.K.—I ask a few questions from time to time. I ask, 'What the hell are you doing?' I ask, 'Are you trying to asphyxiate your entire family?' I ask, 'Did you hear me?' Then I ask, 'Did you hear me?' again. Then I ask, 'Are you deaf?' I also ask, 'What do you think a marriage is? I'm really just curious to know,' and also, 'Is this your idea of a well-ventilated place?' A simple interview, really. I don't believe in fighting. I believe in giving peace a chance. I also believe in internal bleeding." She paused to shift the phone more comfortably against her face. "I'm also interested," Kit said, "in those forensically undetectable dissolving plastic bullets. Have you heard of those?"

"No."

"Well, maybe I'm wrong about those. I'm probably wrong. That's where the Mysterious Car Crash may have to come in."

In the chrome of the refrigerator she caught the reflection of her own face, part brunette Shelley Winters, part potato, the finely etched sharps and accidentals beneath her eyes a musical interlude amid the bloat. In every movie she had seen with Shelley Winters in it, Shelley Winters was the one who died.

Peanut butter was stuck high and dry on Kit's gums. On the counter, a large old watermelon had begun to sag and pull apart in the middle along the curve of seeds, like a shark's grin, and she lopped off a wedge, rubbed its cool point around the inside of her mouth. It had been a year since Rafe had kissed her. She sort of cared and sort of didn't. A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: choosing the best unhappiness. An unwise move and, good God, you could squander everything.

the summons took
her by surprise. It came in the mail, addressed to her, and there it was, stapled to divorce papers. She'd been properly served. The bitch had been papered. Like a person, a marriage was unrecognizable in death, even when buried in its favorite suit. Atop the papers themselves was a letter from Rafe suggesting their spring wedding anniversary as the final divorce date. "Why not complete the symmetry?" he wrote, which didn't even sound like him, though its heartless efficiency was suited to this, his new life as a space alien, and generally in keeping with the principles of space-alien culture.

The papers referred to Kit and Rafe by their legal names, Katherine and Raphael, as if the more formal versions of them were the ones who were divorcing—their birth certificates were divorcing!—and not they themselves. Rafe was still living in the house and had not yet told her that he'd bought a new one. "Honey," she said, trembling, "something very interesting came in the mail today."

rage had its
medicinal purposes, but she was not wired to sustain it, and when it tumbled away loneliness engulfed her, grief burning at the center with a cold blue heat. At the funerals of two different elderly people she hardly knew, she wept in the back row of the church like a secret lover of the deceased. She felt woozy and ill and never wanted to see Rafe—or, rather, Raphael—again, but they had promised the kids this Caribbean vacation; it was already booked, so what could they do?

This, at last, was what all those high-school drama classes had been for: acting. She had once played the queen in
A Winter's Tale
, and once a changeling child in a play called
Love Me Right Now
, written by one of the more disturbing English teachers in her high school. In both of these performances, she had learned that time was essentially a comic thing—only constraints upon it diverted it to tragedy, or, at least, to misery. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde—if only they'd had more time! Marriage stopped being comic when it was suddenly halted, at which point it became divorce, which time never disturbed and the funniness of which was never-ending.

Still, Rafe mustered up thirty seconds of utterance in an effort to persuade her not to join him and the children on this vacation. "I don't think you should go," he announced.

"I'm going," she said.

"We'll be giving the children false hope."

"Hope is never false. Or it's always false. Whatever. It's just hope," she said. "Nothing wrong with that."

"I just don't think you should go."

Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage: a power grab. Who would be the dog and who would be the owner of the dog?

What bimbo did he want to give her ticket to?

(Only later would she find out. "As a feminist you mustn't blame the other woman," a neighbor told her. "As a feminist I request that you no longer speak to me." Kit replied.)

And months later, in the courtroom, where she would discover that the county owned her marriage and that the county was now taking it back like a chicken franchise she had made a muck of, forbidding her to own another franchise for six more months, with the implication that she might want to stay clear of all poultry cuisine for a much longer time than that, when she had finally to pronounce in front of the robed, robotic judge and a winking stenographer whose winking seemed designed to keep the wives from crying, she would have to declare the marriage "irretrievably broken." What second-rate poet had gotten hold of the divorce laws? She would find the words sticking in her throat, untrue in their conviction. Was not everything fixable? This age of disposables, was it not also an age of fantastic adhesives? Why "irretrievably broken" like a songbird's wing? Why not, "Do you find this person you were married to, and who is now sitting next to you in the courtroom, a total asshole?" That would suffice, and be more accurate. The words "irretrievably broken" sent one off into an eternity of wondering.

At this point, however, she and Rafe had not yet signed the papers. And there was still the matter of her wedding ring, which was studded with little junk emeralds and which she liked a lot and hoped she could continue wearing because it didn't look like a typical wedding ring. He had removed his ring—which did look like a typical wedding ring—a year before, because, he said, "it bothered him." She had thought at the time that he'd meant it was rubbing. She had not been deeply alarmed; he had often shed his clothes spontaneously—when they first met, he'd been something of a nudist. It was good to date a nudist: things moved right along. But it was not good trying to stay married to one. Soon she would be going on chaste geriatric dates with other people whose clothes would, like hers, remain glued to the body.

"What if I can't get my ring off?" she said to him now on the plane. She had gained a little weight during their twenty years of marriage, but really not all that much. She had been practically a child bride!

"Send me the sawyer's bill," he said. Oh, the sparkle in his eye
was
gone!

"What is wrong with you?" she said. Of course, she blamed his parents, who had somehow, long ago, accidentally or on purpose, raised him as a space alien, with space-alien values, space-alien thoughts, and the hollow, shifty character, concocted guilelessness, and sociopathic secrets of a space alien.

"What is wrong with
you
?" he snarled. This was his habit, his space-alien habit, of merely repeating what she had just said to him. It had to do, no doubt, with his central nervous system, a silicon-chipped information processor incessantly encountering new linguistic combinations, which it then had to absorb and file. Repetition bought time and assisted the storage process.

She was less worried about the girls, who were just little, than she was about Sam, her sensitive fourth grader, who now sat across the airplane aisle, moodily staring out the window at the clouds. Soon, through the machinations of the state's extremely progressive divorce laws—a boy needs his dad!—she would no longer see him every day; he would become a boy who no longer saw his mother every day, and he would scuttle a little and float off and away like paper carried by wind. With time, he would harden: he would eye her over his glasses, in the manner of a maître d' suspecting riffraff. He would see her coming the way a panicked party guest sees someone without a nametag. But on this, their last trip as an actual family, he did fairly well at not letting on.

They all slept in the same room, in separate beds, and saw other families squalling and squabbling, so that by comparison theirs—a family about to break apart forever—didn't look so bad. She was not deceived by the equatorial sea breeze and so did not overbake herself in the colonial sun; with the resort managers, she shared her moral outrage at the armed guards who kept the local boys from sneaking past the fence onto this white, white, beach; and she rubbed a kind of resin into her brow to freeze it and downplay the creases—to make her appear younger for her departing husband, though he never once glanced at her. Not that she looked that good: her suitcase had got lost and she was forced to wear clothes purchased from the gift shop—the words "La Caribe" emblazoned across every single thing.

On the beach, people read books about Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocide. This was to add seriousness to a trip that lacked it. One was supposed not to notice the dark island boys on the other side of the barbed wire, throwing rocks.

sam liked only
the trampoline and nothing else. There were dolphin rides, but he sensed their cruelty. "They speak a language," he said. "We shouldn't ride them."

"They
look
happy," Kit said.

Sam studied her with a seriousness from some sweet beyond. "They look happy so you won't kill them."

"You think so?"

"If dolphins tasted good," he said, "we wouldn't even know about their language." That the intelligence in a thing could undermine your appetite for it. That yumminess obscured the mind of the yummy as well as the mind of the yummer. That deliciousness resulted in decapitation. That you could understand something only if you did not desire it. How did he know such things already? Usually girls knew them first. But not hers. Her girls, Beth and Dale, were tough beyond her comprehension: practical, self-indulgent, independent five-year-old twins, a system unto themselves. They had their own secret world of Montessori code words and plastic jewelry and spells of hilarity brought on mostly by the phrase "cinnamon M&M's" repeated six times, fast. They wore sparkly fairy wings wherever they went, even over cardigans, and they carried wands. "I'm a big brother now," Sam had said repeatedly to everyone and with uncertain pride the day the girls were born, and after that he spoke not another word on the matter. Sometimes Kit accidentally referred to Beth and Dale as Death and Bale, as they, for instance, buried their several Barbies in sand, then lifted them out again with glee. A woman on a towel, one of those reading of genocide, turned and smiled. In this fine compound on the sea, the contradictions of life were grotesque and uninventable.

Kit went to the central office and signed up for a hot-stone massage. "Would you like a man or a woman?" the receptionist asked.

"Excuse me?" Kit said, stalling. After all these years of marriage, which
did
she want? What did she know of men—or women? "There's no such thing as 'men,'" Jan used to say. "Every man is different. The only thing they have in common is, well, a capacity for horrifying violence."

"A man or a woman—for the massage?" Kit asked. She thought of the slow mating of snails, hermaphrodites for whom it was all so confusing: by the time they had figured out who was going to be the girl and who was going to be the boy, someone came along with some garlic paste and just swooped them right up.

"Oh, either one," she said, and then knew she'd get a man.

Whom she tried not to look at but could smell in all his smoky aromas—tobacco, incense, cannabis—swirling their way around him. A wiry old American pothead gone to grim seed. His name was Dan Handler, according to the business card he wore safety-pinned to his shirt like a badge. He did not speak. He placed hot stones up and down her back and left them there. Did she think her belotioned flesh too private and precious to be touched by the likes of him?
Are you crazy
? The mad joy in her face was held over the floor by the massage-table headpiece, and at his touch her eyes filled with bittersweet tears, which then dripped out of her nose, which she realized was positioned perfectly by God as a little drainpipe for crying. The sad massage-hut carpet beneath her grew a spot. A heart could break. But perhaps, like a several-hearted worm, you could move on to the next one, then the next. The masseur left the hot stones on her until they went cold. As each one lost its heat, she could no longer feel it there on her back, and then its removal was like a discovery that it had been there all along: how strange to forget and then feel something only then, at the end. Though this wasn't the same thing as the frog in the pot whose water slowly heats and boils, still it had meaning, she felt, the way metaphors of a thermal nature tended to. Then he took all the stones off and pressed the hard edges of them deep into her back, between the bones, in a way that felt mean but more likely had no intention at all.