Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

bar, a dank, noisy dive called Sparky’s, where he used to go just after Marilyn left him. When he was married he never drank, but after he was divorced, he used to come in even in the mornings for beer, toast, and fried side meat. All his tin-penny miseries and chickenshit joys would lead him once again to Sparky’s. Those half-dozen times he had run into Marilyn at a store—this small town!—he had felt like a dog seeing its owner. Here was the person he knew best in life, squeezing an avocado and acting like she didn’t see him.
Oh, here I am, oh, here I am!
But in Sparky’s, he knew, he was safe from such unexpected encounters, and after any such unexpected encounters he had often come here. He could sit alone and moan to Sparky. Some people consulted Marcus Aurelius for philosophy about the pain of existence. Ira consulted Sparky. Sparky himself didn’t actually have that much to say about the pain of existence. He mostly leaned across the bar, drying a smudgy glass with a dingy towel, and said, “Choose life!” then guffawed.
    “Bourbon straight up,” said Ira, picking the bar stool closest to the TV so that war news would be hardest to watch from there. Or so he hoped. He let the sharp, buttery elixir of the bourbon warm his mouth, then swallowed its neat, sweet heat. He did this over and over, ordering drink after drink, until he was lit to the gills. At which point he looked up and saw there were other people gathered at the bar, each alone on a chrome-and-vinyl stool, doing the same. “Happy Easter,” Ira said to them, lifting his glass with his left hand, the one with the wedding ring still jammed on. “The dead shall rise! The dead are risen! The damages will be mitigated! The Messiah isback among us squeezing the flesh—that nap went by quickly, eh? May all the dead arise! No one has really been killed at all—OK, God looked away for a second to watch some
I Love Lucy
reruns, but he is back now. Nothing has been lost. All is restored. He watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps!”
    “Somebody slap that guy,” said the man in the blue shirt at the end.

THE JUNIPER TREE

The night Robin Ross was dying in the hospital, I was waiting for a man to come pick me up—a man she had once dated, months before I began dating him—and he was late and I was wondering whether his going to see her with me was even wise. Perhaps I should go alone. Her colleague ZJ had called that morning and said, “Things are bad. When she leaves the hospital, she’s not going home.”
    “I’ll go see her tonight,” I said. I felt I was a person of my word, and by saying something I would make it so. It was less like integrity perhaps and more like magic.
    “That’s a good idea,” ZJ said. He was chairman of the theater department and had taken charge, like a husband, since Robin had asked him to; his tearfulness about her fate had already diminished. In the eighties he had lost a boyfriend to AIDS, and now all the legal and medical decision-making these last few months, he said, seemed numbingly familiar.
    But then I found myself waiting, and soon it was seven-thirty and then eight and I imagined Robin was tired and sleeping in her metal hospital bed and would have more energy in the morning. When the man I was waiting for came, I said, “You know? It’s so late. Maybe I should visit Robin in the morning when she’ll have more energy and be more awake. The tumor presses on the skull, poor girl, and makes her groggy.”
    “Whatever you think is best,” said the man. When I told himwhat ZJ had said, that when Robin left the hospital, she wasn’t going home, the man looked puzzled. “Where is she going to go?” He hadn’t dated Robin very long, only a few weeks, and had never really understood her. “Her garage was a pigsty,” he had once said. “I couldn’t believe all the crap that was in it!” And I had nodded agreeably, feeling I had won him; my own garage wasn’t that great, but whatever. I had