The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

by Lorrie Moore

  the first few weeks of living alone were difficult, but Harry got used to it in a way. "One year of living alone," said his old friend Dane in a phone call from Seattle, "and you're ruined for life. You'll be spoiled. You'll never go back." Harry worked hard, as he always had, but this time without even the illusion of company. This time there was just the voice of play and playwright in the bombed-away world of his apartment. He started not to mind it, to feel he was suited in some ways to solitude, to the near weightlessness of no one but himself holding things down. He began to prefer talking on the phone to actually getting together with someone, preferred the bodilessness of it, and started to turn down social engagements. He didn't want to actually sit across from someone in a restaurant, look at their face, and eat food. He wanted to turn away, not deal with the face, have the waitress bring them two tin cans and some string so they could just converse, in a faceless dialogue. It would be like writing a play, the cobbling in the night, the great cavity of mind that you filled with voices, like a dark pinata with fruit.

  "Tell me something wonderful," he said to Dane. He would lie on his bed, the phone cradled at his cheek, and stare lonesomely at the steeple made by the shadow of the bookcase against the wall. "Tell me that we are going to die dreamfully and loved in our sleep."

  "You're always writing one of your plays on the phone," said Dane.

  "I said, something wonderful. Say something about springtime."

  "It is sloppy and wet. It is a beast from the sea."

  "Ah," said Harry.

  Downstairs every morning, when he went to get the paper and head for a coffee shop, there was Deli, the hooker, always in his doorway. Her real name was Mirellen, but she had named herself Deli because when she first came to New York from Jackson, she had liked the name Delicatessen, seen it flashing all over in signs above stores, and though she hadn't known what one was, she knew the name was for her.

  "Mornin', Harry." She smiled groggily. She had on a black dress, a yellow short-sleeved coat, and white boots. Scabs of translucent gray freckled her arms.

  "Mornin', Deli," said Harry.

  Deli started to follow him a bit up the block. "Haven't seen your Breck woman around—how things be with you-all?"

  "Fine." Harry smiled, but then he had to turn and walk fast down Forty-third Street, for Deli was smart and sly, and in the morning these qualities made him nervous.

  It was the following week that the trucks started coming. Eighteen-wheelers. They came, one by one, in the middle of the night, pulled up in front of the 25 Cent Girls pavilion, and idled there. Harry began waking up at four in the morning, in a sweat. The noise was deafening as a factory, and the apartment, even with the windows closed, filled with diesel fumes. He put on his boots, over his bare feet, and threw on his overcoat, a coat over nothing but underwear and skin, and stomped downstairs.

  The trucks were always monstrous, with mean bulldog faces, and eyes of glassy plaid. Their bodies stretched the length of the block, and the exhaust that billowed out of the vertical stovepipe at the front was a demonic fog, something from Macbeth or Sherlock Holmes. Harry didn't like trucks. Some people, he knew, liked them, liked seeing one, thought it was like seeing a moose, something big and wild. But not Harry.

  "Hey! Get this heap out of here!" Harry shouted and pounded on the driver's door. "Or at least turn it off!" He looked up into the cabin, but nobody seemed to be there. He pounded again with his fist and then kicked once with his boot. Curtains in the back of the cabin parted, and a man poked his head out. He looked sleepy and annoyed.

  "What's the problem, man?" he said, opening the door.

  "Turn this thing off!" shouted Harry over the truck's oceanic roar. "Can't you see what's happening with the exhaust here? You're asphyxiating everyone in these apartments!"

  "I can't turn this thing off, man," shouted the driver. He was in his underwear—boxer shorts and a neat white vest.

  The curtains parted again, and a woman's head emerged. "What's happening, man?"

  Harry tried to appeal to the woman. "I'm dying up there. Listen, you've got to move this truck or turn it off."

  "I told you buffore," said the man. "I can't turn it off."

  "What do you mean, you can't turn it off?"

  "I can't turn it off. What am I gonna do, freeze? We're trying to get some sleep in here." He turned and smiled at the woman, who smiled back. She then disappeared behind the curtain.

  "I'm trying to get some sleep, too," yelled Harry. "Why don't you just move this thing somewhere else?"

  "I can't be moving this thing," said the driver. "If I be moving this thing, you see that guy back there?" He pointed at his rearview mirror, and Harry looked down the street. "I move and that guy be coming to take my spot."

  "Just turn this off, then!" shouted Harry.

  The driver grew furious. "What are you, some kind of mental retard? I already told you. I can't!"

  "What do you mean, you can't. That's ridiculous."

  "If I turn this mother off, I can't get it started back up again."

  Harry stormed back upstairs and phoned the police. "Yeah, right," said Sgt. Dan Lucey of the Eighteenth Precinct. "As if we don't have more urgent things in this neighborhood than truck fumes. What is your name?"

  "Harry DeLeo. Look," said Harry. "You think some guy blowing crack in a welfare hotel isn't having one of the few moments of joy in his whole life. I am the one—"

  "That's a pretty socially responsible thing to say. Look, mister. We'll see what we can do about the trucks, but I can't promise you anything." And then Officer Lucey hung up, as if on a crank call.

  There was no way, Harry decided, that he could stay in his apartment. He would die. He would get cancer and die. Of course, all the best people—Christ, Gershwin, Schubert, theater people!—had died in their thirties, but this did not console him. He went back downstairs, outside, in nothing but his overcoat thrown over a pajama top, and a pair of army boots with the laces flapping. He roamed the streets, like the homeless people, like the junkies and hookers with their slow children and quick deals, like the guys down from Harlem with business to transact, like the women with old toasters and knives in their shopping bags, venturing out from Port Authority on those occasions when the weather thawed. With his overcoat and pajama top, he was not in the least scared, because he had become one of them, a street person, rebellion and desperation in his lungs, and they knew this when he passed. They smiled in welcome, but Harry did not smile back. He wandered the streets until he found a newsstand, bought the Times, and then drifted some more until he found an all-night coffee shop, where he sat in a booth—a whole big booth, though it was only him!—and spread out his Times and circled apartments he could never ever afford. "1500 dollars; eik."

  He was shocked. He grew delirious. He made up a joke: how you could cut up the elk for meat during the winter, but in the months before you could never housebreak the thing. "Fifteen hundred dollars for a lousy apartment!" But gradually the numbers grew more and more abstract, and he started circling the ones for eighteen hundred as well.

  By March, Harry found himself gassed out of his apartment, roaming the streets, several nights a week. He went to bed full of dread and trepidation, never knowing whether this particular night would be a Truck Night or not. He would phone the landlord's machine and the police and shout things about lymphoma and emphysema and about being a taxpayer, but the police would simply say, "You've called here before, haven't you." He tried sounding like a different neighbor, very polite, a family man, with children, saying, "Please, sir. The trucks are waking the baby."

  "Yeah, yeah, yeah," said the police. Harry called the Health Department, the Community Board, the Phil Donahue people. He referred to Officer Lucey as Officer Lucifer and cited cancer statistics from the Science Times. Most of the time people listened and said they would see what they could do.

  In the meantime, Harry quit smoking and took vitamins. Once he even called Breckie in the middle of the night at h
er new apartment on the Upper West Side.

  "Is this an awkward time?" he asked.

  "To be honest, Harry, yes."

  "Oh, my God, really?"

  "Look, I don't know how to tell you these things."

  "Can you answer yes-or-no questions?"

  "All right."

  "Shit, I can't think of any." He stopped talking, and the two of them breathed into the phone. "Do you realize," he said at last, "that I have three plantar's warts from walking around barefoot in this apartment?"

  "Yes," she said. "I do now."

  "A barnacled sole. That's what I am."

  "Harry, I can't be writing your plays with you right now."

  "Do you recall any trucks hanging out in front of our building, running their engines all night? Did that happen when you were here, when we were living together, when we were together and living here so much in love?"

  "Come on, Harry." There was some muffled noise, the seashell sound of hand over mouthpiece, the dim din of a man's voice and hers. Harry hung up. He put on his Maria Callas records, all in a stack on the phonograph spindle, and left the apartment to roam the streets again, to find an open newsstand, a safe coffee shop that didn't put a maraschino cherry on the rice pudding, so that even when you picked it off its mark remained, soaked in, like blood by Walt Disney.

  When he trudged back to his apartment, the morning at last all fully lit, falsely wide-eyed and innocent, the trucks were always gone. There was just Deli in the doorway, smiling. "Mornin', Harry," she'd say. "Have a bad dream?"

  "You're up early," said Harry. Usually that was what he said.

  "Oh, is it daytime already? Well, I'm gonna get myself a real job, a daytime job. Besides, I've been listening to your records from upstairs." Harry stopped jangling his keys for a moment. The Callas arias sailed faintly out through the windowpanes. "Isn't that fag music, Harry? I mean, don't get me wrong. I like fag music. I really like that song that keeps playing about the VCR."

  "What are you talking about?" He had his keys out now, pointed and ready to go. But he kept one shoulder turned slightly her way.

  "V-C-R-err," sang Deli. "V-C-Dannemora." Deli stopped and laughed. "Dannemora! That girl's in Sing Sing for sure."

  "See you," said Harry.

  On his answering machine was a message from Glen Scarp. "Hey, Harry, sorry to call you so early, but hey, it's even earlier out here. And wasn't it lonesco who said something about genius up with the sun? Maybe it was Odets…" Odets? thought Harry. "At any rate, I'm flying into New York in a few days, and I thought we might meet for a drink. I'll phone you when I get in."

  "No," said Harry out loud. "No. No."

  But it was that very morning, after a short, cold rain, just after he'd opened the windows and gotten the apartment aired out, that the bathroom started acting up. The toilet refused to swallow, gurgling if Harry ran the kitchen faucet, and the tub suddenly and terrifyingly filled with water from elsewhere in the building. Somebody else's bath: sudsy water, with rusty swirls. Harry tried flushing the toilet again, and it rose ominously toward the rim. He watched in horror, softly howling the protests—"Ahhhh! UUUaahhh!"—that seemed to help keep the thing from overflowing altogether.

  He phoned the landlord, but no one answered. He phoned a plumber he found in the yellow pages, some place advertising High Velocity Jet Flush and Truck Mounted Rodding Machine. "Are you the super?" asked the plumber.

  "There is no super here," said Harry, a confession that left him sad, like an admission that finally there was no God.

  "Are you the landlord?"

  "No," said Harry. "I'm a tenant."

  "We charge two hundred dollars, automatic, if we visit," said the plumber, calmly. Plumbers were always calm. It wasn't just because they were rich. It had something to do with pipes and sticking your hands into them over and over. "Tell your landlord to give us a call."

  Harry left another message on his landlord's machine and then went off to a coffee shop. It was called The Cosmic Galaxy and was full of actors and actresses talking wearily about auditions and getting work and how useless Back Stage was, though they bought it faithfully and spread it out over the tables anxiously to read. "What I'm trying to put together here," he overheard one actress say, "is a look like Mindy and a sound like Mork." Harry thought with compassion how any one of these people would mutilate themselves to write a TV episode for Glen Scarp, how people are driven to it, for the ten thousand dollars, for the exposure, for the trashy, shameful love of television, whatever it was, and how he had held out for his play, for his beautiful secret play, which he had been mining for years. But it would be worth it, he believed. When he came triumphantly up from the mine, emerged with his work gorgeous and completed, he would be, he knew, feted with an orchestra, greeted big by a huge brass band—trumpeted!—for there were people who knew he was down there, intelligent people, and they were waiting for him.

  Of course, you could be down there too long. You could come up for air, all tired and sooty, and find only a man with a harmonica and a tin can, cymbals banging between his knees.

  On Tuesday the suds were gone. Harry pulled the drain closed so that nothing else could come rushing up. Then he washed in the kitchen sink, with a rag and some dish detergent, and went off again to The Cosmic Galaxy.

  But on Wednesday morning he woke once more to the sharp poison of diesel fumes in the apartment. He walked into his bathroom cautiously and discovered the tub full to the brim with a brackish broth and bits of green floating in it. Scallions. Miso soup with scallions. "What?" He checked the drain, and it was still closed. He left a message on his landlord's machine that went, "Hey, I've got vegetables in my tub," then he trudged out to a different coffee shop, a far one, on the very edge of the neighborhood, practically up by Lincoln Center, and ordered the cheeseburger deluxe, just to treat himself, just to put himself in touch with real life again. When he returned home, Deli was hovering in his doorway. "Mornin', Harry," said Deli.

  "Isn't it afternoon?" asked Harry.

  "Whatever," said Deli. "You know, Harry, I been thinking. What you need is to spend a little money on a girl who can treat you right." She inched seductively toward him, took his arm with one hand and with the other began rubbing his buttocks through his jeans.

  Harry shook her off. "Deli, don't pull this shit on me! How long have I known you? Every morning for five years I've come out of this building and seen you here, said hello. We've been friends. Don't start your hooker shit with me now."

  "Fuck you," said Deli. And she walked away, in a sinuous hobble, up to the corner to stand.

  Harry went upstairs to his apartment and slowly opened the door to his bathroom. He reached for the switches to the light and fan and turned them on in a single, dramatic flick.

  The tub. The miso soup was gone, but in its stead was a dark brown sludge, a foot deep, sulfurous and bubbled. "Oh, my God," said Harry. It was a plague. First suds. Then vegetables. Then darkness. He would get typhus or liver death. There would be frogs.

  He left another message on his landlord's machine, then he phoned Breckie and left one on hers: "I have half the Hudson River backed up into my tub. Sea gulls are circling the building. You are a doctor. Does this mean I could get a sad and fatal ailment?" He had Maria Callas singing in the background; he always did now whenever he phoned Breckie and left messages. "Also, I want to know how seriously involved you are with this guy. Because I'm making plans, Breck. I am."

  On Thursday, Glen Scarp called and Harry said yes. Yes, yes, yes.

  They met that Monday for drinks at the hotel where Scarp was staying. It was on East Fifty-seventh Street and had a long vaulted entrance, dreamy and mirrored, like Versailles, or a wizard's castle. Scarp was waiting for Harry at the end of the corridor, sitting on a velveteen bench. Harry knew it was Scarp by his look of inventory and indifference for everyone who came down the passageway until he got to Harry. Then he looked bemused. Harry proceeded painfully slow, in a worn-shoed lope, toward the be
nch. Velveteen spread to either side of Scarp, like hips.

  "Hello," said Harry.

  Scarp was a short man and stood quickly, aggressively, to greet a tall. "Harry? Glen Scarp. Good to meet you at last." He was not that much older than Harry, and took Harry's hand and shook it gingerly between both of his. This was California ginger, Hollywood ginger. This was the limp of flirtation, the lightness of promise. Harry knew this, of course, but knew this only in the way everyone did, which was knew it sort of.

  Scarp was wearing a diamond broach, a sparkly broccoli on his lapel, and Harry almost said, "Nice pin," but stopped himself. "Well, good to meet you, too," said Harry. "My whole life these days feels conducted on the phone. It's great to finally see the person behind the voice." This was not true, of course, and the lie of it trickled icily down his back.

  "Let's have a drink in here, shall we?" Scarp motioned toward the cocktail lounge, which was all ficus trees and chrome and suffused in a bluish light.

  "After you," said Harry, which was how he liked to do things.

  "Fabulous," said Scarp, who marched confidently in ahead of Harry, so that Harry got to see the back of Scarp's hair: long, sprayed, and waved as a waterfall.

  "I want to tell you again first of all how much I admire your work," said Scarp when they were seated and after they had ordered and Scarp had had a chance to push his sleeves up a bit and glance quickly down at his broach, a quick check.

  "I admire yours as well," said Harry. In reality he had never seen Scarp's TV series and had actually heard negative things about it. Supposedly it was about young professionals, and there were a lot of blenders and babies. But this, here, now, was not reality. This was reality's back room. It was called dealing. The key, Harry knew, once you got done with the flattery, was to be charming and quick. That is what these people liked: a good, quick story, a snappy line, a confessional anecdote with polish and perhaps a relative in it. Then they would talk money with you. They would talk ten, fifteen thousand an episode, but that was only starters. Sometimes there was more to be had than that. But Harry was after only a single episode. In and out, like a cold bath. That was all he wanted. In and out. A single episode couldn't hurt his soul, not really. His play would have to sit for a while, but when he returned to it, like a soldier home to his wife, he would be a wealthy man. He would move. He would move somewhere with fresh air, somewhere where Breckie lived.