by Lorrie Moore
"Somebody slap that guy," said the man in the blue shirt down at the end.
STORIES FROM Birds of America (1998)
* * *
Willing
How can I live my life without committing an act with a giant scissors?
joyce carol oates, "An Interior Monologue"
in her last picture, the camera had lingered at the hip, the naked hip, and even though it wasn't her hip, she acquired a reputation for being willing.
"You have the body," studio heads told her over lunch at Chasen's.
She looked away. "Habeas corpus," she said, not smiling.
"Pardon me?" A hip that knew Latin. Christ.
"Nothing," she said. They smiled at her and dropped names. Scorsese, Brando. Work was all playtime to them, playtime with gel in their hair. At times, she felt bad that it wasn't her hip. It should have been her hip. A mediocre picture, a picture queasy with pornography: these, she knew, eroticized the unavailable. The doctored and false. The stand-in. Unwittingly, she had participated. Let a hip come between. A false, unavailable, anonymous hip. She herself was true as a goddamn dairy product; available as lunch whenever.
But she was pushing forty.
She began to linger in juice bars. Sit for entire afternoons in places called I Love Juicy or Orange-U-Sweet. She drank juice and, outside, smoked a cigarette now and then. She'd been taken seriously—once—she knew that. Projects were discussed: Nina. Portia. Mother Courage with makeup. Now her hands trembled too much, even drinking juice, especially drinking juice, a Vantage wobbling between her fingers like a compass dial. She was sent scripts in which she was supposed to say lines she would never say, not wear clothes she would never not wear. She began to get obscene phone calls, and postcards signed, "Oh yeah, baby." Her boyfriend, a director with a growing reputation for expensive flops, a man who twice a week glowered at her Fancy Sunburst guppy and told it to get a job, became a Catholic and went back to his wife.
"Just when we were working out the bumps and chops and rocks," she said. Then she wept.
"I know," he said. "I know."
And so she left Hollywood. Phoned her agent and apologized. Went home to Chicago, rented a room by the week at the Days Inn, drank sherry, and grew a little plump. She let her life get dull-dull, but with Hostess cakes. There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went "What?" Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, "Wha—?" It had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, "There you go." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.
Still, she was a minor movie star, once nominated for a major award. Mail came to her indirectly. A notice. A bill. A Thanksgiving card. But there was never a party, a dinner, an opening, an iced tea. One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time. Their sadnesses occurred in isolation, lurched and spazzed, sent them spinning fizzily back into empty, padded corners, disconnected and alone.
She watched cable and ordered in a lot from a pizza place. A life of obscurity and radical calm. She rented a piano and practiced scales. She invested in the stock market. She wrote down her dreams in the morning to locate clues as to what to trade. Disney, her dreams said once. St. Jude's Medical. She made a little extra money. She got obsessed. The words cash cow nestled in the side of her mouth like a cud. She tried to be original—not a good thing with stocks—and she began to lose. When a stock went down, she bought more of it, to catch it on the way back up. She got confused. She took to staring out the window at Lake Michigan, the rippled slate of it like a blackboard gone bad.
"Sidra, what are you doing there?" shrieked her friend Tommy long distance over the phone. "Where are you? You're living in some state that borders on North Dakota!" He was a screenwriter in Santa Monica and once, a long time ago and depressed on Ecstasy, they had slept together. He was gay, but they had liked each other very much.
"Maybe I'll get married," she said. She didn't mind Chicago. She thought of it as a cross between London and Queens, with a dash of Cleveland.
"Oh, please" he shrieked again. "What are you really doing?"
"Listening to seashore and self-esteem tapes," she said. She blew air into the mouth of the phone.
"Sounds like dust on the needle," he said. "Maybe you should get the squawking crickets tape. Have you heard the squawking crickets tape?"
"I got a bad perm today," she said. "When I was only halfway through with the rod part, the building the salon's in had a blackout. There were men drilling out front who'd struck a cable."
"How awful for you," he said. She could hear him tap his fingers. He had made himself the make-believe author of a make-believe book of essays called One Man's Opinion, and when he was bored or inspired, he quoted from it. "I was once in a rock band called Bad Perm," he said instead.
"Get out." She laughed.
His voice went hushed and worried. "What are you doing there?" he asked again.
her room was a corner room where a piano was allowed. It was L-shaped, like a life veering off suddenly to become something else, ft had a couch and two maple dressers and was never as neat as she might have wanted. She always had the do not disturb sign on when the maids came by, and so things got a little out of hand. Wispy motes of dust and hair the size of small heads bumped around in the corners. Smudge began to darken the moldings and cloud the mirrors. The bathroom faucet dripped, and, too tired to phone anyone, she tied a string around the end of it, guiding the drip quietly into the drain, so it wouldn't bother her anymore. Her only plant, facing east in the window, hung over the popcorn popper and dried to a brown crunch. On the ledge, a jack-o'-lantern she had carved for Halloween had rotted, melted, froze, and now looked like a collapsed basketball—one she might have been saving for sentimental reasons, one from the big game! The man who brought her room service each morning—two poached eggs and a pot of coffee—reported her to the assistant manager, and she received a written warning slid under the door.
On Fridays, she visited her parents in Elmhurst. It was still hard for her father to look her in the eyes. He was seventy now. Ten years ago, he had gone to the first movie she had ever been in, saw her remove her clothes and dive into a pool. The movie was rated PG, but he never went to another one. Her mother went to all of them and searched later for encouraging things to say. Even something small. She refused to lie. "I liked the way you said the line about leaving home, your eyes wide and your hands fussing with your dress buttons," she wrote. "That red dress was so becoming. You should wear bright colors!"
"My father takes naps a lot when I visit," she said to Tommy.
"Naps?"
"I embarrass him. He thinks I'm a whore hippie. A hippie whore."
"That's ridiculous. As I say in One Man's Opinion, you're the most sexually conservative person I know."
"Yeah, well."
Her mother always greeted her warmly, puddle-eyed. These days, she was reading thin paperback books by a man named Robert Valleys, a man who said that after observing all the suffering in the world—war, starvation, greed—he had discovered the cure: hugs.
Hugs, hugs, hugs, hugs, hugs.
Her mother believed him. She squeezed so long and hard that Sidra, like an infant or a lover, became lost in the feel and smell of her—her sweet, dry skin, the gray peach fuzz on her neck. "I'm so glad you left that den of iniquity," her mother said softly.
But Sidra still got calls from the den. At night, sometimes, the director phoned from a phone booth, desiring to be forgiven as well as to direct. "I think of all the things you might be thinking, and I say, 'Oh, Christ.' I mean, do you think the things I sometimes think you do?"
"Of course," said Sidra. "Of course I think those things."
"Of course! Of course is a term that has no place in this conversation!"
When T
ommy phoned, she often felt a pleasure so sudden and flooding, it startled her.
"God, I'm so glad it's you!"
"You have no right to abandon American filmmaking this way!" he would say affectionately, and she would laugh loudly, for minutes without stopping. She was starting to have two speeds: Coma and Hysteria. Two meals: breakfast and popcorn. Two friends: Charlotte Peveril and Tommy. She could hear the clink of his bourbon glass. "You are too gifted a person to be living in a state that borders on North Dakota."
"Iowa."
"Holy bejesus, it's worse than I thought. I'll bet they say that there. I'll bet they say 'Bejesus.'"
"I live downtown. They don't say that here."
"Are you anywhere near Champaign-Urbana?"
"No."
"I went there once. I thought from its name that it would be a different kind of place. I kept saying to myself, 'Champagne, urbah na, champagne, urbah na! Champagne! Urbana!'" He sighed. "It was just this thing in the middle of a field. I went to a Chinese restaurant there and ordered my entire dinner with extra MSG."
"I'm in Chicago. It's not so bad."
"Not so bad. There are no movie people there. Sidra, what about your acting talent?"
"I have no acting talent."
"Hello?"
"You heard me."
"I'm not sure. For a minute there, I thought maybe you had that dizziness thing again, that inner-ear imbalance."
"Talent. I don't have talent. I have willingness. What talent?" As a kid, she had always told the raunchiest jokes. As an adult, she could rip open a bone and speak out of it. Simple, clear. There was never anything to stop her. Why was there never anything to stop her? "I can stretch out the neck of a sweater to point at a freckle on my shoulder. Anyone who didn't get enough attention in nursery school can do that. Talent is something else."
"Excuse me, okay? I'm only a screenwriter. But someone's got you thinking you went from serious actress to aging bimbo. That's ridiculous. You just have to weather things a little out here. Besides. I think willing yourself to do a thing is brave, and the very essence of talent."
Sidra looked at her hands, already chapped and honeycombed with bad weather, bad soap, bad life. She needed to listen to the crickets tape. "But I don't will myself," she said. "I'm just already willing."
she began to go to blues bars at night. Sometimes she called Charlotte Peveril, her one friend left from high school.
"Siddy, how are you?" In Chicago, Sidra was thought of as a hillbilly name. But in L.A., people had thought it was beautiful and assumed she'd made it up.
"I'm fine. Let's go get drunk and listen to music."
Sometimes she just went by herself.
"Don't I know you from the movies?" a man might ask at one of the breaks, smiling, leering in a twinkly way.
"Maybe," she'd say, and he would look suddenly panicked and back away.
One night, a handsome man in a poncho, a bad poncho—though was there such a thing as a good poncho? asked Charlotte—sat down next to her with an extra glass of beer. "You look like you should be in the movies," he said. Sidra nodded wearily. "But I don't go to the movies. So if you were in the movies, I would never have gotten to set my eyes on you."
She turned her gaze from his poncho to her sherry, then back. Perhaps he had spent some time in Mexico or Peru. "What do you do?"
"I'm an auto mechanic." He looked at her carefully. "My name's Walter. Walt." He pushed the second beer her way. "The drinks here are okay as long as you don't ask them to mix anything. Just don't ask them to mix anything!"
She picked it up and took a sip. There was something about him she liked: something earthy beneath the act. In L.A., beneath the act you got nougat or Styrofoam. Or glass. Sidra's mouth was lined with sherry. Walt's lips shone with beer. "What's the last movie you saw?" she asked him.
"The last movie I saw. Let's see." He was thinking, but she could tell he wasn't good at it. She watched with curiosity the folded-in mouth, the tilted head: at last, a guy who didn't go to the movies. His eyes rolled back like the casters on a clerk's chair, searching. "You know what I saw?"
"No. What?" She was getting drunk.
"It was this cartoon movie." Animation. She felt relieved. At least it wasn't one of those bad art films starring what's-her-name. "A man is asleep, having a dream about a beautiful little country full of little people." Walt sat back, looked around the room, as if that were all.
"And?" She was going to have to push and pull with this guy.
"And?" he repeated. He leaned forward again. "And one day the people realize that they are only creatures in this man's dream. Dream people! And if the man wakes up, they will no longer exist!"
Now she hoped he wouldn't go on. She had changed her mind a little.
"So they all get together at a town meeting and devise a plan," he continued. Perhaps the band would be back soon. "They will burst into the man's bedroom and bring him back to a padded, insulated room in the town—the town of his own dream—and there they will keep watch over him to make sure he stays asleep. And they do just that. Forever and ever, everyone guarding him carefully, but apprehensively, making sure he never wakes up." He smiled. "I forget what the name of it was."
"And he never wakes up."
"Nope." He grinned at her. She liked him. She could tell he could tell. He took a sip of his beer. He looked around the bar, then back at her. "Is this a great country or what?" he said.
She smiled at him, with longing. "Where do you live," she asked, "and how do I get there?"
"i met a man," she told Tommy on the phone. "His name is Walter."
"A forced relationship. You're in a state of stress—you're in a syndrome, I can tell. You're going to force this romance. What does he do?"
"Something with cars." She sighed. "I want to sleep with someone. When I'm sleeping with someone, I'm less obsessed with the mail."
"But perhaps you should just be alone, be by yourself for a while."
"Like you've ever been alone," said Sidra. "I mean, have you ever been alone?"
"I've been alone."
"Yeah, and for how long?"
"Hours," said Tommy. He sighed. "At least it felt like hours."
"Right," she said, "so don't go lecturing me about inner resources."
"Okay. So I sold the mineral rights to my body years ago, but, hey, at least I got good money for mine."
"I got some money," said Sidra. "I got some."
walter leaned her against his parked car. His mouth was slightly lopsided, paisley-shaped, his lips anneloid and full, and he kissed her hard. There was something numb and on hold in her. There were small dark pits of annihilation she discovered in her heart, in the loosening fist of it, and she threw herself into them, falling. She went home with him, slept with him. She told him who she was. A minor movie star once nominated for a major award. She told him she lived at the Days Inn. He had been there once, to the top, for a drink. But he did not seem to know her name.
"Never thought I'd sleep with a movie star," he did say. "I suppose that's every man's dream." He laughed—lightly, nervously.
"Just don't wake up," she said. Then she pulled the covers to her chin.
"Or change the dream," he added seriously. "I mean, in the movie I saw, everything is fine until the sleeping guy begins to dream about something else. I don't think he wills it or anything; it just happens."
"You didn't tell me about that part."
"That's right," he said. "You see, the guy starts dreaming about flamingos and then all the little people turn into flamingos and fly away."
"Really?" said Sidra.
"I think it was flamingos. I'm not too expert with birds."
"You're not?" She was trying to tease him, but it came out wrong, like a lizard with a little hat on.
"To tell you the truth, I really don't think I ever saw a single movie you were in."
"Good." She was drifting, indifferent, no longer paying attention.
He hitched his arm be
hind his head, wrist to nape. His chest heaved up and down. "I think I may of heard of you, though."
Django Reinhardt was on the radio. She listened, carefully. "Astonishing sounds came from that man's hands," Sidra murmured.
Walter tried to kiss her, tried to get her attention back. He wasn't that interested in music, though at times he tried to be. "'Astonishing sounds'?" he said. "Like this?" He cupped his palms together, making little pops and suction noises.
"Yeah," she murmured. But she was elsewhere, letting a dry wind sweep across the plain of her to sleep. "Like that."
he began to realize, soon, that she did not respect him. A bug could sense it. A doorknob could figure it out. She never quite took him seriously. She would talk about films and film directors, then look at him and say, "Oh, never mind." She was part of some other world. A world she no longer liked.
And now she was somewhere else. Another world she no longer liked.
But she was willing. Willing to give it a whirl. Once in a while, though she tried not to, she asked him about children, about having children, about turning kith to kin. How did he feel about all that? It seemed to her that if she were ever going to have a life of children and lawn mowers and grass clippings, it would be best to have it with someone who was not demeaned or trivialized by discussions of them. Did he like those big fertilized lawns? How about a nice rock garden? How did he feel deep down about those combination storm windows with the built-in screens?
"Yeah, I like them all right," he said, and she would nod slyly and drink a little too much. She would try then not to think too strenuously about her whole life. She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic—drink, don't drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.
