A Gate at the Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

  By mid-December I’d registered for my spring semester classes, had found a part-time job as a barista in Starbucks, and was getting ready to go home for Christmas and then move back here more completely in January. It had not been that hard to find work, as reservists had been called up in preparation for war; shops and restaurants and computer stores were suddenly short-staffed. On the bulletin board inside the Starbucks door I saw a handwritten sign that read BASS PLAYER NEEDED FOR BAND, and I tore off one of the phone number flaps that were cut into the bottom like fringe and stuck it in my pocket.

  Meanwhile, I liked the whirring of hot milk into cups, the pumping of syrups, the listening to international music I’d never heard before. I learned to make art—peace signs, ferns, space alien heads resembling Munch’s The Scream—in the cappuccino foam. It was our job to be friendly, and people were friendly back. My hours were not boring. There were random spells of this and that, cast as if by a merciful clown-god. One morning, a woman in line paid for the coffee of the guy behind her, and then he turned around and paid for the customer behind him. And then that guy paid for the woman behind him, and it went on for about forty-five minutes until there was a lull and no one was in line at all. A quiet period of no customers broke the chain—but still: it was a piece of magic while it lasted.

  Outside the window of the shop, students had begun the protesting of Bush’s military buildup, his plot hatched with neo-con intellectuals who, like aging former members of a high school chess club, wanted a tournament they could win. They would sweep up pawns and swoop in with rooks. DON’T BOMB IRAQ read the student placards. “War is not the answer,” the protesters chanted, and “Not in our name,” whatever that one meant. On my breaks I went out and marched with them, decrying the juiced intelligence, or were we hailing the juste intelligence? My hearing may have dimmed from the espresso grinders and the hiss and gurgle of the steamer wands, and I wasn’t a hundred percent sure on the chants. Whichever. I was on the side of dissent and despair. On their breaks people came in and ordered holiday lattes. Anxiety, cold, and political disbelief we offset with gingerbread and common cause. Or so we imagined. I gave people free dirty chais and red-eyes, so-named for their extra shots of espresso. Or black-eyes—coffees with two shots, a drink we privately called a “dickwheeler,” not only because we imagined this is what such a drink could do, but because someone named Richard Wheeler had come in once and charged three of them on his credit card.

  Where would all of Bush’s soldiers come from? We wondered about this aloud. “Deployed means to have all your ploys removed,” we said. The former Starbucks manager, herself a National Guard weekend warrior, had already been taken. “I hear they’re looking at the middle schools,” joked one man bleakly. “Hey—eighth-graders are spry, and they like to win!” Afghanistan was already thought of as the good war, and I was told even by some who were marching for peace, when they learned, that my dead brother was a hero.

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Well,” I was warned, while people threw back their caffeine and put on their gloves, “no hero can bear up under too many reallys.”

  One evening the phone rang and Amanda said, “It’s for you.” Almost tenderly she handed me the receiver.

  I pulled the phone with its long cord into my bedroom and closed the door only partway, so as not to seem to have secrets that might disturb. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Tassie Keltjin, it’s Ed Thornwood!”

  “Oh!” I was too startled even to say hi.

  “I know this probably comes as a surprise to you. A little blast from the past.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But the not-too-distant past.”

  “No, not too.” Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed—they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  I would never really again know the answer to that question. I believed my life would never again be set up to know. “OK, I guess.”

  “Well, good. I’m OK myself, I guess.” I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t known to or how to. There was a long pause. “This is not the reason I’m calling, but I do think you should know that Sarah and I have split up.”

  A little later in life, when this time seemed distant and shrunken, and every friendship from it had dwindled, I would encounter many women with lives sadder than Sarah’s. Still, without much concentration, I could always get her weird story back—though it was stored dreamlike on my brain’s highest shelf—and I could make it seem the saddest of them all. It was like Madama Butterfly, except Sarah was also Pinkerton and Kate. The difference between opera and life, I’d noticed, was that in life one person played all the parts. Still, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, Sarah’s story. In the end I felt it belonged as much or more to Mary-Emma, whom, I realized, I had never stopped unconsciously to seek, riveted by little girls who would be her age in stores and malls and parks. I would do a double-take every time I saw some dark, lively girl of three or four or five or six—the years piled on. I would get close and look close, which is what I realized Sarah somewhere must surely be doing. And Bonnie. If she was alive. And even Lynette McKowen. Emmie! A little girl with four women wondering after her, looking for her, sort of, without her even knowing. That was love of the most useless kind, unless you believed in love’s power to waft in from a burning sky to the unseen grass it had designated as its beloved, unless you believed in the prayers of faraway nuns, unless you believed in miracles and magic, rapture and dice and Sufic chants and charms behind curtains and skillful clouds at smoky, unfathomable distances. Love and virtue—their self-conviction was an astonishing thing: a pantomime of wishes, a sham dream that made actual, detectable, dreamable dreams as real as rock. When I imagined all of these women with their hearts seeking and beaming their futile, worthless love through the air toward Mary-Emma, I pictured them all in a line, part search party, part refugee camp, and in my mind I set them on a path that went over hill and over dale and even on into meadows and trees. Of course I was with them. And because I was, and because it was all in my head anyway, to the parade I added Helen the pig, just to be picturesque. Plus Lucy, our nanny goat, as there should be some real kind of nanny. And just because I wanted to, I added Robert. To be with him a little, since I missed him and in my mind I could do as I pleased.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” I said. Sarah had once made me a mixed CD, full of songs she’d listened to when she was young, with lyrics about the wonder of the slowly perfecting world. A new day is dawning. My friends, we are changing. Ain’t it powerful … sunrise of a nation. The words seemed to have come from the medieval period of another planet.

  Love is the answer, said the songs, and that’s OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution; it wasn’t really even an answer, just a reply.

  “An inevitable thing, I guess,” said Edward. I could not think of him as Ed. “And really probably all for the best. She has gone back east—to New York this time.”

  Somehow I found this move of hers difficult to believe. I remember Sarah once saying, “To live in New York you have to have won the lottery and your parents have to have won the lottery and everyone has to have invested wisely.” She would also look at me very enigmatically and say, “In New York all the white babies have brown nannies. We’ve done the reverse. Give me five.”

  “New York City?” Where did I think she was going to go—Prairie du Chien? (A town only I was obsessed with as a bleak fate, since it meant not even “prairie dog” but “dog prairie.”) And then suddenly it seemed to me that New York was where half-Jewish people had to go and where I would go too someday. Even though, as Sarah once sa
id, on every corner they sold pretzels dotted with the kind of salt used here to de-ice driveways.

  “Yeah, well, don’t get me started,” he said.

  I knew that divorce was at a rate among everyone that it used to be only among movie stars. In marriage everyone had become a movie star. You wanted reality TV? There it was. What would be so wrong with arranged marriages? There the coldness was put in the parents’ hearts right up front rather than grown later, so unpleasantly, in the hearts of the lovers.

  “Listen, I got your number from the people at Starbucks who called here asking for a referral. I’ll have you know I sang your praises. To the skies. And so I thought I’d give you a call. Since I found myself thinking about you.”

  Could no kind of sorrow knock such ventures out of him?

  “Well, yes, thank you,” I said. For me, Edward’s voice seemed to come bearing the cries of so many others, unbeknownst to him. And when I tried to conjure his face it was the face of a mouse that as it scurried somehow left the trail of a snake.

  “The Starbucks manager who called me wanted to know whether you were clean and reliable! That made me laugh. I said of course that you were all that and a thousand things more.” I was silent and so he continued. “I don’t know what we would have done without you.”

  What was there to say? “Look what happened regardless”? We had entered a darkening wood.

  He continued, blindly. “There was much I came to understand about my heart last spring when you were in the house with us.”

  Had his research not helped him with the functioning of the human eye? With understanding the basic mechanisms of sight? Perhaps things were not going well at the lab!

  I said nothing merciful. I said nothing at all.

  He pushed on. “It’s strange how as you get older some of the things you learn come from young people. Young people do come along seeming to know more. You end up thinking, as a scientist, Good grief, evolution is true!”

  I withheld the encouraging chuckle I supposed he wanted.

  “With your help, and with others’, I’ve come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it’s a lot after all! Still, in the end, I imagine we will always look back and think: Too little, with too little in it. Because at the end the light’s dimming, of course. There is no such thing as wisdom—that is the only wisdom. But there is lack of wisdom. I try to remember that.”

  This assertion of paucity and barrenness he’d gleaned from me? This light show? This tra-la-la of no wisdom? What had I learned from him but that he believed, or had once believed, that boys should learn the hard way about the world?

  “Yes, well,” I said, “the truth shall set you free—and then what?”

  “Then what, indeed.” He cleared his throat. He had lost the if you wills perhaps, but now there were indeeds. Which seemed worse. “Well, I was wondering if you’d like to go out to dinner with me sometime,” he said.

  Sacrifice the children to propitiate some ancient god. There were a lot of gods and they all wanted something.

  “Dinner?” I asked. These days I ate little for meals: mostly a single bowl of red barley boiled to a swarm of slick, fat ticks. I would melt butter on the whole mess and eat it in front of the TV.

  “Yes. Dinner.”

  “Dinner?” I said again in disbelief. My grandmother, when asked once at her ninetieth birthday party what words of advice she would offer young people, given her particular perspective at the end of life, had at first simply scrunched up her face and said irritably, deafly, “What?” But she was just buying time. And when the question was restated she looked around at her whole family, the kids and grandkids, and said loudly, “Don’t get married!” We were stunned. It was if she had said, “Shoot to kill.” It was if she had said, “If you just shoot to wound, they get up and come at you again.” I used to think that those essentially happy and romantic novels that ended with a wedding were all wrong, that they had left out the most interesting part of the story. But now I’d gone back to thinking, no, the wedding was the end. It was the end of the comedy. That’s how you knew it was a comedy. The end of comedy was the beginning of all else.

  “Yes,” Edward said.

  The gothic knell of a wedding bell, the hangman’s rope grown straight out of the chest then looped like tasseling around the tables. Rat teeth raking the cake. Beauty could not love you back. People were not what they seemed and certainly not what they said. Madness was contagious. Memory served melancholy. The medieval was not so bad. Gravity was a form of nostalgia. There could be virtue in satirizing virtue. Dwight Eisenhower and Werner von Braun had the exact same mouths. No one loved a loser until he completely lost. The capital of Burma was Rangoon.

  My fortune cookies, too, had lost their frolic: Bury your unrealistic dreams or they will bury you.

  But not in bed.

  “Dinner?” I said again. Being oneself was no great accomplishment. It was not being oneself that was hard.

  Then he paused. “Perhaps this is too sudden of a phone call.” His voice had become weary and tart. “Too out of the blue for you, maybe.”

  Amanda came to the doorway of my room, poked her head in and mouthed, “Wanna split a pizza?”

  I nodded my head. Yes. She disappeared.

  The earth was not perfectly round but pear-shaped. And according to black hole experts, ninety percent of the universe is missing.

  Still, there was always a circus somewhere.

  “Dinner?” I repeated into the phone. My knuckles looked white as opals. O whatever-God, unprompt mom of all steps, still no forwarding address?

  Edward remained silent, as did I. What was I alive for? I would not always know or make it my troubled concern. For now I simply became aware of my own noisy breathing. Windy exhalations, I had been told, seemed louder on the phone than they actually were. Inevitably, winds had an unpredictable drama. Prevailing westerlies did not always prevail: sometimes things blew up from the south and created little eddies—little eddies!—of stewing weather. I slowly moved the receiver away from my face and it seemed to keep on going, floating toward the cradle, vaguely guided by my hand. Air rushed to cool my cheek. Outside, in the early night, it was already beginning to snow.

  Reader, I did not even have coffee with him.

  That much I learned in college.

  This Is a Borzoi Book

  Published by Alfred A. Knopf

  Copyright © 2009 by Lorrie Moore

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  All rights controlled and administered by EMI April Music Inc.

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Moore, Lorrie.

  A gate at the stairs : a novel/by Lorrie Moore.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-27321-5

  I. Title.

  PS3563.06225G37 2009 813′.54—dc22 2009003091

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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