Self-Help (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Lorrie Moore

  The elevator has a peculiar rattle, for all eight floors, like someone obsessively clearing her throat.

  When he finally gets the apartment door unlocked, he shows you into an L-shaped living room bursting with plants and gold-framed posters announcing exhibitions you are too late for by six years. The kitchen is off to one side—tiny, digital, spare, with a small army of chrome utensils hanging belligerent and clean as blades on the wall. Walk nervously around like a dog sniffing out the place. Peek into the bedroom: in the center, like a giant bloom, is a queen-sized bed with a Pennsylvania Dutch spread. A small photo of a woman in ski garb is propped on a nightstand. It frightens you.

  Back in the living room, he mixes drinks with Scotch in them. “So, this is it,” you say again with a forced grin and an odd heaving in your rib cage. Light up one of his cigarettes.

  “Can I take your coat?”

  Be strange and awkward. Say: “I like beige. I think it is practical.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” he says, handing you your drink.

  Try to decide what you should do:

  rip open the front of your coat, sending the buttons torpedoing across the room in a series of pops into the asparagus fern;

  go into the bathroom and gargle with hot tap water;

  go downstairs and wave down a cab for home.

  He puts his mouth on your neck. Put your arms timidly around him. Whisper into his ear: “There’s a woman, uh, another woman in your room.”

  When he is fast asleep upon you, in the middle of the night, send your left arm out slowly toward the nightstand like a mechanical limb programmed for a secret intelligence mission, and bring the ski garb picture back close to your face in the dark and try to study the features over his shoulder. She seems to have a pretty smile, short hair, no eyebrows, tough flaring nostrils, body indecipherably ensconced in nylon and down and wool.

  Slip carefully out, like a shoe horn, from beneath his sleeping body—he grunts groggily—and go to the closet. Open it with a minimum of squeaking and stare at her clothes. A few suits. Looks like beige blouses and a lot of brown things. Turn on the closet light. Look at the shoes. They are all lined up in neat, married pairs on the closet floor. Black pumps, blue sneakers, brown moccasins, brown T-straps. They have been to an expensive college, say, in Massachusetts. Gaze into her shoes. Her feet are much larger than yours. They are like small cruise missiles.

  Inside the caves of those shoes, eyes form and open their lids, stare up at you, regard you, wink at you from the insoles. They are half-friendly, conspiratorial, amused at this reconnaissance of yours, like little smiling men from the open hatches of a fleet of military submarines. Turn off the light and shut the door quickly, before they start talking or dancing or something. Scurry back to the bed and hide your face in his armpit.

  In the morning he makes you breakfast. Something with eggs and mushrooms and hot sauce.

  Use his toothbrush. The red one. Gaze into the mirror at a face that looks too puffy to be yours. Imagine using her toothbrush by mistake. Imagine a wife and a mistress sharing the same toothbrush forever and ever, never knowing. Look into the medicine cabinet:

  Midol

  dental floss

  Tylenol

  Merthiolate

  package of eight emory boards

  razors and cartridges

  two squeezed in the middle toothpaste tubes: Crest and

  Sensodyne

  Band-Aids

  hand lotion

  rubbing alcohol

  three small bars of Cashmere Bouquet stolen from a hotel

  On the street, all over, you think you see her, the boring hotel-soap stealer. Every woman is her. You smell Cashmere Bouquet all over the place. That’s her. Someone waiting near you for the downtown express: yup, that’s her. A woman waiting behind you in a deli near Marine Midland who has smooth, hand-lotioned hands and looks like she skis: good god, what if that is her. Break out in cold sweats. Stare into every pair of flared nostrils with clinical curiosity and unbridled terror. Scrutinize feet. Glance sidelong at pumps. Then look quickly away, like a woman, some other woman, who is losing her mind.

  Alone on lunch hours or after work, continue to look every female over the age of twelve straight in the nose and straight in the shoes. Feel your face aquiver and twice bolt out of Bergdorfs irrationally when you are sure it is her at the skirt sale rack choosing brown again, a Tylenol bottle peeking out from the corner of her purse. Sit on a granite wall in the GM plaza and catch your breath. Listen to an old man singing “Frosty the Snowman.” Lose track of time.

  “You’re late,” Hilda turns and whispers at you. “Carlyle’s been back here twice already asking where you were and if the market survey report has been typed up yet.”

  Mutter: “Shit.” You are only on the T’s: Tennessee Karma-Kola consumption per square dollar-mile of investment market. Figures for July 1980–October 1981.

  Texas—Fiscal Year 1980

  Texas—Fiscal Year 1981

  Utah.

  It is like typing a telephone directory. Get tears in your eyes.

  CLIENTS TO SEE

  1. Fallen in love(?) Out of control. Who is this? Who am I? And who is this wife with the skis and the nostrils and the Tylenol and does she have orgasms?

  2. Reclaim yourself. Pieces have fluttered away.

  3. Everything you do is a masochistic act. Why?

  4. Don’t you like yourself? Don’t you deserve better than all of this?

  5. Need: something to lift you from your boots out into the sky, something to make you like little things again, to whirl around the curves of your ears and muss up your hair and call you every single day.

  6. A drug.

  7. A man.

  8. A religion.

  9. A good job. Revise and send out resumes.

  10. Remember what Mrs. Kloosterman told the class in second grade: Just be glad you have legs.

  “What are you going to do for Christmas?” he says, lying supine on your couch.

  “Oh. I don’t know. See my parents in New Jersey, I guess.” Pause. “Wanna come? Meet my folks?”

  A kind, fatherly, indulgent smile. “Charlene,” he purrs, sitting up to pat your hand, your silly ridiculous little hand.

  He gives you a pair of leather slippers. They were what you wanted.

  You give him a book about cars.

  “Ma, open the red one first. The other package goes with it.”

  “A coffee grinder, why thank you, dear.” She kisses you wetly on the cheek, a Christmas mist in her eyes. She thinks you’re wonderful. She’s truly your greatest fan. She is aging and menopausal. She stubbornly thinks you’re an assistant department head at Karma-Kola. She wants so badly, so earnestly, to be you.

  “And this bag is some exotic Colombian bean, and this is a chocolate-flavored decaf.”

  Your father fidgets in the corner, looking at his watch, worrying that your mom should be checking the crown roast.

  “Decaf bean,” he says. “That’s for me?”

  Say: “Yeah, Dad. That’s for you.”

  “Who is he?” says your mom, later, in the kitchen after you’ve washed the dishes.

  “He’s a systems analyst.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Oh … they get married a lot. They’re usually always married.”

  “Charlene, are you having an affair with a married man?”

  “Ma, do you have to put it that way?”

  “You are asking for big trouble,” she says, slowly, and resumes polishing silver with a vehement energy.

  Wonder why she always polishes the silver after meals.

  Lean against the refrigerator and play with the magnets.

  Say, softly, carefully: “I know, Mother, it’s not something you would do.”

  She looks up at you, her mouth trembling, pieces of her brown-gray hair dangling in her salty eyes, pink silverware cream caking onto her hands, onto her wedding ring. She stops, puts a spoon down, lo
oks away and then hopelessly back at you, like a very young girl, and, shaking her head, bursts into tears.

  “I missed you,” he practically shouts, ebullient and adolescent, pacing about the living room with a sort of bounce, like a child who is up way past his bedtime and wants to ask a question. “What did you do at home?” He rubs your neck.

  “Oh, the usual holiday stuff with my parents. On New Year’s Eve I went to a disco in Morristown with my cousin Denise, but I dressed wrong. I wore the turtleneck and plaid skirt my mother gave me, because I wanted her to feel good, and my slip kept showing.”

  He grins and kisses your cheek, thinking this sweet.

  Continue: “There were three guys, all in purple shirts and paper hats, who kept coming over and asking me to dance. I don’t think they were together or brothers or anything. But I danced, and on ‘New York City Girl,’ that song about how jaded and competent urban women are, I went crazy dancing and my slip dropped to the floor. I tried to pick it up, but finally just had to step out of it and jam it in my purse. At the stroke of midnight, I cried.”

  “I’ll bet you suffered terribly,” he says, clasping you around the small of your back.

  Say: “Yes, I did.”

  “I’m thinking of telling Patricia about us.”

  Be skeptical. Ask: “What will you say?”

  He proceeds confidently: “I’ll go, ‘Dear, there’s something I have to tell you.’ ”

  “And she’ll look over at you from her briefcase full of memoranda and say: ‘Hmmmmmm?’ ”

  “And I’ll say, ‘Dear, I think I’m falling in love with another woman, and I know I’m having sex with her.’ ”

  “And she’ll say, ‘Oh my god, what did you say?’ ”

  “And I’ll say: ‘Sex.’ ”

  “And she’ll start weeping inconsolably and then what will you do?”

  There is a silence, still as the moon. He shifts his legs, seems confused. “I’ll … tell her I was just kidding.” He squeezes your hand.

  Shave your legs in the bathroom sink. Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition. Wives are like cockroaches. Also part of a great historical tradition. They will survive you after a nuclear attack—they are tough and hardy and travel in packs—but right now they’re not having any fun. And when you look in the bathroom mirror, you spot them scurrying, up out of reach behind you.

  An hour of gimlets after work, a quick browse through Barnes and Noble, and he looks at his watch, gives you a peck, and says: “Good night. I’ll call you soon.”

  Walk out with him. Stand there, shivering, but do not pout. Say: “Call you ‘later’ would sound better than ‘soon.’ ‘Soon’ always means just the opposite.”

  He smiles feebly. “I’ll phone you in a few days.”

  And when he is off, hurrying up Third Avenue, look down at your feet, kick at a dirty cigarette butt, and in your best juvenile mumble, say: “Fuck you, jack.”

  Some nights he says he’ll try to make it over, but there’s no guarantee. Those nights, just in case, spend two hours showering, dressing, applying makeup unrecognizably, like someone in drag, and then, as it is late, and you have to work the next day, climb onto your bed like that, wearing perfume and an embarrassing, long, flowing, lacy bathrobe that is really not a bathrobe at all, but a “hostess loungecoat.” With the glassed candle by your bed lit and burning away, doze off and on, arranged with excruciating care on top of the covers, the window lamp on in the living room, the door unlocked for him in case he arrives in a passionate flurry, forgetting his key. Six blocks from Fourteenth Street: you are risking your life for him, spread out like a ridiculous cake on the bed, waiting with the door unlocked, thinking you hear him on the stairs, but no. You should have a corsage, you think to yourself. You should have a goddamned orchid pinned to the chest of your long flowing hostess coat, then you would be appropriately absurd. Think: What has happened to me? Why am I lying like this on top of my covers with too much Jontue and mascara and jewelry, pretending casually that this is how I always go to bed, while a pervert with six new steak knives is about to sneak through my unlocked door. Remember: at Blakely Falls High, Willis Holmes would have done anything to be with you. You don’t have to put up with this: you were second runner-up at the Junior Prom.

  A truck roars by.

  Some deaf and dumb kids, probably let out from a dance at the school nearby, are gathered downstairs below your window, hooting and howling, making unearthly sounds. You guess they are laughing and having fun, but they can’t hear themselves, and at night the noises are scary, animal-like.

  Your clock-radio reads 1:45.

  Wonder if you are getting old, desperate. Believe that you have really turned into another woman:

  your maiden aunt Phyllis;

  some vaporish cocktail waitress;

  a glittery transvestite who has wandered, lost, up from the Village.

  When seven consecutive days go by that you do not hear from him, send witty little postcards to all your friends from college. On the eighth day, when finally he calls you at the office, murmuring lascivious things in German, remain laconic. Say: “Ja … nein … ja.”

  At lunch regard your cream of cauliflower soup with a pinched mouth and ask what on earth he and his wife do together. Sound irritated. He shrugs and says, “Dust, eat, bicker about the shower curtain. Why do you ask?”

  Say: “Gee, I don’t know. What an outrageous question, huh?”

  He gives you a look of sympathy that could bring a dead cat back to life. “You’re upset because I didn’t call you.” He reaches across the table to touch your fingers. Pull your hand away. Say: “Don’t flatter yourself.” Look slightly off to one side. Put your hand over your eyes like you have a headache. Say: “God, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he says.

  And you think: Something is backward here. Reversed. Wrong. Like the something that is wrong in “What is wrong with this picture?” in kids’ magazines in dentists’ offices. Toothaches. Stomachaches. God, the soup. Excuse yourself and hurry toward the women’s room. Slam the stall door shut. Lean back against it. Stare into the throat of the toilet.

  Hilda is worried about you and wants to fix you up with a cousin of hers from Brooklyn.

  Ask wearily: “What’s his name?”

  She looks at you, frowning. “Mark. He’s a banker. And what the hell kind of attitude is that?”

  Mark orders you a beer in a Greek coffee shop near the movie theater.

  “So, you’re a secretary.”

  Squirm and quip: “More like a sedentary,” and look at him in surprise and horror when he guffaws and snorts way too loudly.

  Say: “Actually, what I really should have been is a dancer. Everybody has always said that.”

  Mark smiles. He likes the idea of you being a dancer.

  Look at him coldly. Say: “No, nobody has ever said that. I just made it up.”

  All through the movie you forget to read the subtitles, thinking instead about whether you should sleep with Mark the banker. Glance at him out of the corner of your eye. In the dark, his profile seems important and mysterious. Sort of. He catches you looking at him and turns and winks at you. Good god. He seems to be investing something in all of this. Bankers. Sigh. Stare straight ahead. Decide you just don’t have the energy, the interest.

  “I saw somebody else.”

  “Oh?”

  “A banker. We went to a Godard movie.”

  “Well … good.”

  “Good?”

  “I mean for you, Charlene. You should be doing things like that once in a while.”

  “Yeah. He’s real rich.”

  “Did you have fun?”

  “No.”

  “Did you sleep with him?”

  “No.”

  He kisses you, almost gratefully, on the ear. Fidget. Twitch. Lie. Say: “I mean, yes.”

  He nods. Looks away. Says nothing.

  Cut up an old calen
dar into week-long strips. Place them around your kitchen floor, a sort of bar graph on the linoleum, representing the number of weeks you have been a mistress: thirteen. Put X’s through all the national holidays.

  Go out for a walk in the cold. Three little girls hanging out on the stoop are laughing and calling to strange men on the street. “Hi! Hi, Mister!” Step around them. Think: They have never had orgasms.

  A blonde woman in barrettes passes you in stockinged feet, holding her shoes.

  There are things you have to tell him.

  CLIENTS TO SEE

  1. This affair is demeaning.

  2. Violates decency. Am I just some scampish tart, some tartish scamp?

  3. No emotional support here.

  4. Why do you never say “I love you” or “Stay in my arms forever my little tadpole” or “Your eyes set me on fire my sweet nubkin”?

  The next time he phones, he says: “I was having a dream about you and suddenly I woke up with a jerk and felt very uneasy.”

  Say: “Yeah, I hate to wake up with jerks.”

  He laughs, smooth, beautiful, and tenor, making you feel warm inside of your bones. And it hits you; maybe it all boils down to this: people will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh.

  Don’t lose your resolve. Fumble for your list. Sputter things out as convincingly as possible.

  Say: “I suffer indignities at your hands. And agonies of duh feet. I don’t know why I joke. I hurt.”

  “That is why.”

  “What?”

  “That is why.”

  “But you don’t really care.” Wince. It sounds pitiful.

  “But I do.”

  For some reason this leaves you dumbfounded.

  He continues: “You know my situation … or maybe you don’t.” Pause. “What can I do, Charlene? Stand on my goddamned head?”

  Whisper: “Please. Stand on your goddamned head.”

  “It is ten o’clock,” he says. “I’m coming over. We need to talk.”

  What he has to tell you is that Patricia is not his wife. He is separated from his wife; her name is Carrie. You think of a joke you heard once: What do you call a woman who marries a man with no arms and no legs? Carrie. Patricia is the woman he lives with.