《Bark》Lorrie Moore

Paper Losses

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, she and Rafe seemed currently to be partners only in anger and dislike, their old lusty love mutated to rage.  It was both the shame and the demise of them that hate like love could not live on air.

No one ever said a man was now completely screwed 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 rocket were tall, plastic, penile-shaped things to which Rafe carefully shellacked authenticating military decals.  What had happened to the handsome hippie she had married?  He was prickly and remote, empty with fury.  A blankness had entered his blue-green eyes.  They stayed wide and bright but nonfunctional - 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 an wolf-whistled across his mute alienation, his pantomime of hate momentarily collapsed.  "Hey, cutie," he would 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.

She seldom saw him anymore when he got up in the morning and left for his office.  And when he came home from work, he would disappear down the basement stairs.  Nightly, in the anxious conjugal dusk that was now their only life together, after the kids went 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 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.

.... 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: to choose the best unhappiness.  An unwise move, good God, you could squander everything.

Wings

"I'm starting to lose confidence in you, Dench."  Losing confidence was more violent than losing love.  Losing love was a slow dying, but losing confidence was a quick coup, a floor that opened right up and swallowed.

She stabbed out her cigarette in a coffee cup, then, turning rubbed her hand down along Dench's sinewy biceps and across his tightly muscled stomach, feeling hounded back into his arms, which she had never really left, and now his arms' familiarity was her only joy.  You could lose someone a little but they would still roam the earth.  The end of love was one big zombie movie.

Subject to Search

"What is the thing you regret most in life?" he asked her, standing close.  There were perhaps a dozen empty bottles, and she and Tom methodically tipped every one of them upside down, held them up to the light, sometimes peering into them from underneath.  "Nothing but dead soldiers here," he murmured.  "I'd like to say optimistically that they were half full, not half empty, but these are just totally empty."

"Unless you have a life of great importance," she said, "regrets are stupid, crumpled-up tickets to a circus that has already left town."

His face went bright with amusement and drink. "Then what happens to the town?" he asked.

She thought about this.  "Oh, there's a lot of weather," she said, slowly.  "It snows.  It thunders.  The sun comes out.  People go to church and sit in the sanctuary and sometimes they see escaped clowns sitting in the back pews with their white gloves still on."

"Escaped clowns?" he asked.
"Escaped," she said. "Sort of escaped."
"Come in from the cold?" he inquired."
"Come in to sit next to each other."

He nodded with satisfaction. "The past is for losers, baby?"

"Kind of like that." She wasn't sure that she agreed, but she understood the power of such a thought.

His stance grew jaunty.  He leaned in close to her, up against the kitchen counter's edge.

"Do you ever feel that no one knows what you're talking about, that everyone is just pretending - except for me?"

She studied him carefully. "Yes, I do," she said. "I do."

"Ah," he replied, straightening his posture.  He clasped her hand: electricity burst into it when vanished as he let go.  "We're all suckers for a happy ending."

Thank You for Having Me

I place a deviled egg in my mouth and resisted the temptation to position it in front of my teeth and smile scarily, the way we had as children.  I chewed and swallowed and grabbed another one.  Soon no doubt I would resemble a large vertical snake who had swallowed a rat.  That rat Ben.  Snakes would eat a sirloin steak only if it was disguised behind the head of a small rodent.  There was a lesson somewhere in there and just a little more wine would reveal it.