The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore by Lorrie Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

really, really sorry."
    Kate's divorced friend was named Zora and was a pediatrician. Although no one else did, she howled with laughter, and when her face wasn't blasted apart with it or her jaw snapping mutely open and shut like a pair of scissors (in what Ira recognized as post-divorce hysteria: "How long have you been divorced?" he later asked her. "Eleven years," she replied), Ira could see that she was very beautiful: short black hair; eyes a clear, reddish hazel, like orange pekoe tea; a strong aquiline nose; thick lashes that spiked out, wrought and black as the tines of a fireplace fork. Her body was a mixture of thin and plump, her skin lined and unlined, in that rounding-the-corner-to-fifty way.
Age and youth
, he chanted silently,
youth and age, sing their songs on the very same stage
. Ira was working on a modest little volume of doggerel, its tentative title "Women from Venus, Men from—well—Penis."
    Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people's charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself.
    When it was directed at him, the person just seemed so totally
nice
. And so Zora's laughter, in conjunction with her beauty, doomed him a little, made him grateful beyond reason.
     
    immediately, he sent her a postcard, a photograph of newlyweds dragging empty Spam cans from the bumper of their car. He wrote:
Dear Zora, Had such fun meeting you at Mike's
. And then he wrote his phone number. He kept it simple. In courtship he had a history of mistakes, beginning at sixteen with his first girlfriend, for whom he had bought at the local head shop the coolest thing he had then ever seen in his life: a beautifully carved wooden hand with its middle finger sticking up. He himself had coveted it tremulously for a year. How could she not love it? Her contempt for it, and then for him, had left him feeling baffled and betrayed. With Marilyn, he had taken the other approach and played hard to get, which had turned their relationship into a never-ending Sadie Hawkins Day, with subsequent marriage to Sadie an inevitable ruin—a humiliating and interminable Dutch date.
    But this, the Spam postcard and the note, he felt contained the correct combination of offhandedness and intent. This elusive mix—the geometric halfway point between stalker and Rip van Winkle—was important to get right in the world of middle-aged dating, he suspected, though what did he really know of this world? The whole thing seemed a kind of distant civilization, a planet of the apings: graying, human flotsam with scorched internal landscapes mimicking the young, picking up where they had left off decades ago, if only they could recall where the hell that was. Ira had been a married man for fifteen years, a father for eight (poor little Bekka, now rudely transported between houses in a speedy, ritualistic manner resembling a hostage drop-off), only to find himself punished for an idle little nothing, nothing, nothing flirtation with a colleague, punished with his wife's full-blown affair and false business trips (credit-union conventions that never took place) and finally a petition for divorce mailed from a motel. Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife produce and star in a fabulous one of her own he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.
    He received a postcard from Zora in return. It was of van Gogh's room in Aries. Beneath the clock face of the local postmark her handwriting was big but careful, some curlicuing in the "g"s and "f"s. It read,
Had such fun meeting you at Mike's
. Wasn't that precisely, word for word, what he had written to her? There was no "too," no emphasized
you
, just exactly the same words thrown back at him like some lunatic postal