A Gate at the Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

  At the end of the night, when the parents came up to fetch the kids, several asked their children how the evening had gone and the kids said “awesome” or “sucky”—there was no middle ground, nothing that wasn’t a thrill or a debacle. I loved the way the black women grabbed their boys and pulled them close. I loved the white dads carrying their black daughters up high. Only Mary-Emma with her little smile said nothing at all as one by one the children left her room. Downstairs, I heard Sarah’s voice alone with Edward in the kitchen.

  “You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones—and now you want to have sex?”

  Was I hearing things? Was this the grassroots whimpering of an important social movement, or was it a small, deep madness? If two things fell in the forest and made the same sound, which was the tree?

  I picked up Mary-Emma. With a clean wipe I dabbed at some chocolate near her mouth. “Go hug your mama,” I said, putting her back down and sending her dashing into the kitchen to interrupt them.

  I called “Good night” and slipped out the door. Out of politeness I left quickly to go live my life. I had not ridden my Suzuki but still put my hair in a scarf, as if I had. I was a sharmoota, with a hijab tied not properly, under the chin, but—a concession, the middle ground—behind, at the nape of my neck, like Grace Kelly in The Country Girl. Or was it Rear Window? I walked and walked and then, as in my recurrent dreams where I was flying but only a few inches off the ground, unambitiously but still airborne, I began slightly to run. On my way, I broke off a blossoming stem from a neighbor’s crab-apple tree and through the moist April night I made a brisk, hot beeline toward Reynaldo’s. I would put the stem in water when I got to his place.

  But when I got there something was wrong. There was no light coming from his windows. I climbed the stairs and tapped on his door. Uneasiness coursed through me, and finding the door unlocked, I slowly turned the knob and went in. I found him sitting in what had become an emptied darkened apartment, in the middle of the floor, with his laptop blazing its light up at him. It reminded me of the aluminum foil we would put on my mother’s old album covers in order to catch the sun in summer and burn the pallor from our faces. All the other furnishings were gone. Everything—the bed, the xylophone, the table. On the wall was a single poster, white letters on black: A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but a laughter more terrible than any sadness … I knew it was from the opening page of White Fang, a book I had read in seventh grade. I had never seen this hanging in his room before, though maybe now it simply stood out, being the only thing there besides Reynaldo himself and his laptop. He slammed the laptop cover down and looked up at me, or at least toward me. He was sitting on his prayer rug, which was facing east. I remember when I had thought it was a yoga mat, like my brother’s. I kicked off my shoes at the door, as he sometimes liked me to do, but I was not relaxed: my jackhammering heart was rising to my throat. The thought occurred to me that so much vibration might loosen my fillings.

  “Hello,” he said, unsmilingly and as if from a great bleak distance. He flashed the light from a key chain my way, then lay it on the floor where it was our only illumination. He glanced at my face and then away. There was a cup of tea on the floor beside him, and he picked it up and drank from it while looking at the wall. I had seen this exact same expression and movement before—where? (Edward. I’d seen it in him the very first day I met him.) In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love—the death of a man’s trying. It read as Haughty Fatigue. Like the name of a stripper. There was the sacredness, immersion, intrusion, and violence to the ordinary that preceded romantic love, and then there was Haughty Fatigue, the stripper, who stole it away.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. There was nothing to put the crab-apple branch in or on, and so I just stood there holding it. In its droop I could see it already beginning to fail, an aspect of flowers I had studied in paintings of them.

  “I’m moving to London,” he said. “I’ve had the xylophone sent to your apartment. It should show up there in a few days. Mary-Emma can play it there. And you, too, of course.”

  Was the Jack London poster a clue? A code? Everything had grown strange. Things between us were dissolving like an ice cube in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared. Thus would the whole world end, I’d been told.

  “I’m not part of a cell,” he said.

  “That never crossed my mind.” Though now it did. He had accepted some assignment. That must have been it. There was some manipulative mullah in his life—rumors abounded of quiet recruitment everywhere, though these were whispered and sometimes whispered as jokes. “Why London?”

  “The English are simultaneously critical and stiffly uncomplaining—a stage Americans bypassed altogether, having gone from a dullard’s stoicism to a neurotic’s whining in less than half a century.”

  “That is such a bullshit answer.”

  “I’m part of an Islamic charity for Afghan children. That is all. They think I’m part of a cell. I’m not. If anyone asks you, if they question you when I’m gone, please tell them that I’m not.”

  There was no room in this conversation for “What about us?” The conversational space had suddenly filled with other creatures. Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.

  “You are Brazilian. What kind of cell would you be part of? A bikini wax cell?” I had once found a copy of a lingerie catalog in his pile of newspapers. When I picked it up and looked closely, the address label bore my own name. On one of the few occasions I’d had him over he had apparently taken it from my apartment, unbeknownst to me, perhaps to look at the bosomy models. Now that he was apparently leaving for London, all kinds of things I had refused to think about for very long came blowing back as if by dusty gusts aimed to tear up the eyes.

  “I’m not Brazilian.”

  “You’re not?” Of course he wasn’t. Why hadn’t I figured that out? Where were the bossa novas? Why did he not know a single phrase of “The Girl from Ipanema”?

  “About that I lied.”

  “Why? Where are you from?” Perhaps he would turn out to know the words to “Kashmiri Love Song,” my favorite song by Rudolph Valentino. My hands were truly pale! Even if he did not love them by the Shalimar. My heart tapped against my chest like fingers on a tabletop.

  “Hoboken, New Jersey.”

  “Hoboken? Like Frank Sinatra?”

  He snickered a little, a look of hard pedantry in his eyes. “Even the very first revolution in America was conducted from New Jersey.”

  “Gambling and disease. Right from the start. Are we doing American history?” I looked at his familiar and beautiful face. He was leaving me as mysteriously as he had first appeared. An agony. The exit like the entrance—but reversed. A palindrome: gut-tug.

  “You are an innocent girl—though you are not pure. But still, I believe you are innocent. Especially for a Jew. That is good.”

  “A Jew?”

  “Yes.” This pronouncing voice did not sound like him, and he could see that I could hear that and seemed to give me a small, quick breaking-character smile meant to slip out and be received by me beneath this script of departure.

  “That means you aren’t going to tell me anything more, are you.” I began to twist the bottom hem of my T-shirt into a coil. In life, as in movies, one sometimes could mistake a robot for a living being. “What’s happened to your voice? You’re speaking without contractions. How can you be from New Jersey?”

  “When you find out who you are, you will no longer be innocent. That will be sad for others to see. All that knowledge will show on your face and change it. But sad only for others, not for yourself. You will feel you have a kind of wisdom, very mistaken, but a mistake of some po
wer to you and so you will sadly treasure it and grow it.”

  “How about if I first just find out who you are.” I had been the minibar—and not the minbar—in this temporary room of lodging. It was BYOB and I had brought the beer. “You are a haddi: some sort of jihadist.”

  “It is not the jihad that is the wrong thing. It is the wrong things that are the wrong things.”

  “Thank you, holy warrior, for the Islamofascist lecture.”

  “As Muhammad said, we do not know God as we should.”

  “And whose fault is that? That’s not yours or mine! Maybe God has not stepped forward enough. Maybe God has not done a sufficient job of meet-and-greet.”

  I suddenly felt like an old Indian chief, one who sees that the world has changed irrevocably, and that the younger generation would never know the old one, even the strongest, slumped on their horses at the end of some trail. But if Reynaldo could feel the uncertainty of his own path, perhaps we could feel our despair together. Despite everything, I had not thought of him as irretrievably religious. He would not eat a bratwurst, but who could blame him? The hot ones snapped with fat when you bit in. The cold ones were death itself …

  “I didn’t know you had all this blasphemy in you,” he said. Was that a smile?

  “Yeah, well, sometimes the creation exceeds the creator. You know? A computer can beat a chess champion, a son can outsmart a father.” I would not get into Frankenstein. “Maybe the Bible, with its vain, wailing God, is telling us that the creation, too, is more divine than the Creator. Look at that! I’ve said that and not been smote!”

  “Sometimes these things take time,” he said.

  “The smoting?”

  “Sure. Everything.”

  “Great.” And then I added, “How about a kinder, gentler jihad?”

  “One must listen to God.”

  “Well, God should speak up. He mumbles.”

  “He has made us his messengers.”

  “How nice for him that he has his own staff and some out-of-town offices.”

  “We are his sheep—”

  “I didn’t mean that kind of staff.”

  “—as well as his wolves.”

  “That sounds really, really complicated.”

  “Mankind is the source of all suffering.”

  “And the source of all God.” I had crossed a line. “But as I said, the creation is often greater than what created it.” Hubris or intelligent design?

  He was silent, with a smile that wasn’t a smile. I found myself falling toward him, as if the rush of feeling tearing through me could magically be made into useful affection: perhaps if I tried to kiss him—but he pulled away. And then slowly I got up, stepped back, one careful step at a time as he spoke. My crabapple branch had fallen near him.

  “There are a billion Muslims in the world,” he said.

  “So, what? I should be able to find another one?”

  He fixed me with a powerful stare. He had that ability to summon up great concentration in his face and eyes. “There is that possibility.” For a moment pity for us both glistened his eyes. “You can’t get blood from a stone,” he said sadly. Referring, I supposed, to love. It was an expression he liked and had used before with me.

  “Yes, you can,” I said. I was always trying.

  “You can?”

  “One can. You can.”

  “How is that done?”

  “You go to a quarry.”

  “A quarry?”

  “Yeah, if you go to a quarry there is always some body that’s been dumped there.”

  He laughed.

  “The Koran doesn’t prohibit you from laughing at gruesome humor?” I would mock him a little—why not?

  “No,” he said.

  “In every book there’s a lot of white spaces—”

  “Silences …”

  “So who knows what’s going on, really, between the lines? All those meaningful silences!”

  But then, feeling he was being mocked, he let his face go bloodlessly stony, and suddenly he looked finally and completely packed up and gone. Locating the living him would be like finding a miner in a collapsed mine: I could drill and dig and shine lights into various passageways, but the likelihood of my seeing him again, at least as he once was, well, the chances were not that good.

  “You avoid a lot of difficult things in conversation,” I said.

  “I hope so!”

  “You lied to me,” I said finally.

  “A lie to the faithless is merely a conversation in their language.”

  This sounded like one of the many fortune cookie fortunes marking time in the pages of my books. “I was never faithless to you.”

  “Not in your definitions, no.”

  “Is this where you go on about desiccated America? Don’t you understand? I agree with you!”

  He said nothing.

  “You’re not taking flying lessons, I hope!”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  A roll of toilet paper and two white pills shone from the windowsill near me as I backed away. “What are those?” I said, pointing at the pills. In my chest my heart had gone from the rapid flicking of a playing card on bike spokes to the loud erratic knock of a sneaker in a dryer.

  “They are for emergencies. And for cleanliness, obviously. The pills? They’re from Brazilian potatoes—two interests of yours.”

  “Really.”

  “Potatoes and Brazil.”

  “I understood what you meant.” Fear and sorrow flared up simultaneously like fires that put each other out. Feelings of any constructive sort deserted me. “As much as you want this world to end, it can’t. The seeds to everything are being stored, as we speak, in boxes in the permafrost of Norway.”

  “Who will find them?”

  “People will.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you’re right.”

  “You are?” On the other windowsill was a small package of tampons. “Why do you have those?”

  “In case of emergencies. Worst-case scenarios: they stanch wounds.”

  “Really.”

  “When they ask you to name my friends, you will have to say you don’t know, because you don’t know.”

  “I don’t know.” Why didn’t I know? “This kind of political and spiritual despair,” I said desperately, recalling something once heard on a Wednesday. “It’s mistaking a small world for a large one and a large one for a small.”

  He smiled but he kindly didn’t laugh. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Maybe. But maybe not.” These were the words of a child. But it didn’t mean they were untrue. “Perhaps you are being recruited by a plant. What if you are a victim of a scheme?”

  “What if I am the plant,” he said, feigning playfulness. “What if I am the scheme?”

  “Listen! The jihadist leaders—they don’t respect outsiders. They think these fervent recruits are all crazy, coming from another country as they do, and they use them and laugh at them.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “The Donegal don. On a day when you were absent.”

  “What?”

  “He knows Arabic and collects chatter. That’s what someone told me.”

  “He ‘collects chatter’! Listen to you!”

  I just stared at him, feeling this was it: that I would never see him again.

  “It is not the jihad that is the wrong thing,” he repeated. “It is not a war that is the wrong thing. It is the wrong things that are the wrong things.”

  It was like Gertrude Stein speaking from inside a burka. I continued to step backwards, and my bare toe hit something sharp, perhaps a tiny carpenter’s nail poking up from the floorboards. In a kind of yoga stance I lifted up my foot, which was bleeding. I squeezed and I could see blood drop darkly to the floor, though nothing was stuck inside. Lifting my foot, however, just seemed to cause it to drip more. There was that roll of toilet paper on the windowsill, and I hobbled over and ripped some off, wind
ing it around my toe.

  “Are you OK?” he asked, sounding almost like the sweet boy I knew him to be, deep down, although that part no longer mattered.

  “Yeah. It doesn’t hurt,” I said.

  “They think I’m part of a cell, but I’m not, I swear. I hope you will always believe that.”

  “In the name of Allah—oh, yes, I believe.”

  I put my shoes back on.

  It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.

  “In the name of Allah.”

  In the name of la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. I took off, out into the street, crying. I ran and ran and never turned around and no one came running after me. I ran past the Muslim Students’ League, a small house not far from Reynaldo’s, painted turquoise and white; a makeshift mosque of some sort, I knew, had been constructed in the back. Reynaldo himself had been part of a team that had helped paint it. At this time of night no one was in or near it at all; at times during the day I had seen it ominously busy. Nothing, I thought, should be busy. All should be slow and sparse. I ran past a block I usually took but that was being ripped up for sewage pipe replacement, and in the middle of the street was a municipal barricade with a sign that said ROAD CLOSED. Beneath it but still on the sign a graffiti artist had sprayed, in black, I love you. In the sky were starry poisons, like the hundred spiders that, throughout a human life span, are said to drop into one’s mouth, while sleeping with a dropped jaw. I ran north and north and north and could perhaps have run all the way to Canada, where, paralyzed with sadness and exhaustion, my arms and fingers would stiffen upward and I would, in one of grief’s mythic transformations, become a maple tree, my sappy tears cooked down to syrup for someone’s flapjacks.

  The interesting thing about a wound in the foot was that the pressure of just standing on it, not babying it, stanched the bleeding and healed the thing: Was that a robustly New Age truth or what? ROAD CLOSED I love you. When I got home I stripped naked and climbed into a filling tub, sat waist-deep in water and let loose with deeper weeping. The toilet paper I had wrapped around my toe was shredded and came off in milky wisps and fronds, floating all around in the water, and when I went under completely—to disappear, to clean, to alter my conscious state, whatever that was—the shreds swam toward my head and clung to my hair. When I could hold my breath no longer, I burst back up and saw that the warmth of the bath had caused my toe to start bleeding again, so that bright crimson swirled riotously through the water like life sprung free—though it was really a hello from death. I got out of the bath, wrapped myself in a towel, and then spun and spun, the towel falling away, my wet hair whipping droplets through the room, and I kept whirling until I felt neither death nor life but a kind of dizzying transport, which I was pretty sure wasn’t Sufism, or the radiant depths of my soul lifting from bottomland to lovely storm: it was more like low blood pressure combined with PE—something I’d experienced a lot as a child—a slight separation from the body, to serve as a reminder of what you were.