100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  He could hear the radio playing softly in the kitchen, where Marian was ironing. He stared a while longer at the paper in front of him, then gathered up all of the papers, turned off the lamp, and walked out to the kitchen.

  “Finished, love?” Marian said with a smile. She was sitting on a tall stool, ironing one of Robert’s shirts. She sat the iron up on its end as if she’d been waiting for him.

  “Damn it, no,” he said with an exaggerated grimace, tossing the papers on the table. “What the hell the Franklins come by here for anyway?”

  She laughed; bright, pleasant. It made him feel better. She held up her face to be kissed, and he gave her a little peck on the cheek. He pulled out a chair from the table and sat down, leaned back on the legs and looked at her. She smiled again, and then lowered her eyes.

  “I’m already half-asleep,” he said.

  “Coffee,” she said, reaching over and laying the back of her hand against the electric percolator.

  He nodded.

  She took a long drag from the cigarette she’d had burning in the ashtray, smoked it a minute while she stared at the floor, and then put it back in the ashtray. She looked up at him, and a smile started at the corners of her mouth. She was tall and limber, with a good bust, narrow hips, and wide, gleaming eyes.

  “Ralph, do you remember that party?” she asked, still looking at him.

  He shifted in the chair and said, “Which party? You mean that one two or three years ago?”

  She nodded.

  He waited a minute and asked, when she didn’t say anything else, “What about it? Now that you brought it up, honey, what about it?” Then: “He kissed you after all, that night, didn’t he? . . . Did he try to kiss you, or didn’t he?”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said. “I was just thinking about it and I asked you; that’s all.”

  “Well, he did, didn’t he? Come on, Marian, we’re just talking, aren’t we?”

  “I’m afraid it’d make you angry, Ralph.”

  “It won’t make me angry, Marian. It was a long time ago, wasn’t it? I won’t be angry . . . Well?”

  “Well, yes,” she said slowly, “he did kiss me a few times.” She smiled tentatively, gauging his reaction.

  His first impulse was to return her smile, and then he felt himself blushing and said defensively, “You told me before he didn’t. You said he only put his arm around you while he was driving.”

  He stared at her. It all came back to him again; the way she looked coming in the back door that night; eyes bright, trying to tell him . . . something, he didn’t hear. He hit her in the mouth, at the last instant pulling to avoid her nose, knocked her against the table where she sat down hard on the floor. “What did you do that for?” she’d asked dreamily, her eyes still bright, and her mouth dripping blood. “Where were you all night?” he’d yelled, teetering over her, his legs watery and trembling. He’d drawn back his fist again but already sorry for the first blow, the blood he’d caused. “I wasn’t gone all night,” she’d said, turning her head back and forth heavily. “I didn’t do anything. Why did you hit me?”

  Ralph passed his open hand over his forehead, shut his eyes for a minute. “I guess I lost my head that night, all right. We were both in the wrong. You for leaving the party with Mitchell Anderson, and I for losing my head. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” she said. “Even so,” she grinned, “you didn’t have to knock hell out of me.”

  “I don’t know—maybe I should’ve done more.” He looked at her, and then they both had to laugh.

  “How did we ever get onto this?” she asked.

  “You brought it up,” he said.

  She shook her head. “The Franklins being here made me think of it, I guess.” She pulled in her upper lip and stared at the floor. In a minute she straightened her shoulders and looked up. “If you’ll move this ironing board for me, love, I’ll make us a hot drink. A buttered rum: now how does that sound?”

  “Good.”

  She went into the living room and turned on the lamp, bent to pick up a magazine by the endtable. He watched her hips under the plaid woolen skirt. She moved in front of the window by the large dining room table and stood looking out at the street light. She smoothed her palm down over her right hip, then began tucking in her blouse with the fingers of her right hand. He wondered what she was thinking. A car went by outside, and she continued to stand in front of the window.

  After he stood the ironing board in its alcove on the porch, he sat down again and said, when she came into the room, “Well, what else went on between you and Mitchell Anderson that night? It’s all right to talk about it now.”

  Anderson had left Harris less than two years ago to accept a position as Associate Professor of Speech and Drama at a new, four-year college the state was getting underway in southwestern California. He was in his early thirties, like everyone else they knew; a slender, moustached man with a rough, slightly pocked face; he was a casual, eccentric dresser and sometimes, Marian had told Ralph, laughing, he wore a green velvet smoking jacket to school. The girls in his classes were crazy about him, she said. He had thin, dark hair which he combed forward to cover the balding spot on the top of his head. Both he and his wife, Emily, a costume designer, had done a lot of acting and directing in Little Theater in the Bay Area before coming to Eureka. As a person, though, someone he liked to be around, it was something different as far as Ralph was concerned. Thinking about it, he decided he hadn’t liked him from the beginning, and he was glad he was gone.

  “What else?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’d rather not talk about it now, Ralph, if you don’t mind. I was thinking about something else.”

  “What?”

  “Oh . . . about the children, the dress I want Dorothea to have for next Easter; that sort of thing. Silly, unrelated things. And about the class I’m going to have tomorrow. Walt Whitman. Some of the kids didn’t approve when I told them there was a, a bit of speculation Whitman was—how should I say it?—attracted to certain men.” She laughed. “Really, Ralph, nothing else happened. I’m sorry I ever said anything about it.”

  “Okay.”

  He got up and went to the bathroom to wash cold water over his face. When he came out he leaned against the wall by the refrigerator and watched her measure out the sugar into the two cups and then stir in the rum. The water was boiling on the stove. The clock on the wall behind the table said 9:45.

  “Look, honey, it’s been brought up now,” he said. “It was two or three years ago; there’s no reason at all I can think of we can’t talk about it if we want to, is there?”

  “There’s really nothing to talk about, Ralph.”

  “I’d like to know,” he said vaguely.

  “Know what?”

  “Whatever else he did besides kiss you. We’re adults. We haven’t seen the Andersons in . . . a year at least. We’ll probably never see them again. It happened a long time ago; as I see it, there’s no reason whatever we can’t talk about it.” He was a little surprised at the level, reasoning quality in his voice. He sat down and looked at the tablecloth, and then looked up at her again. “Well?”

  “Well,” she said, laughing a little, tilting her head to one side, remembering. “No, Ralph, really; I’m not trying to be coy about it either: I’d just rather not.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Marian! Now I mean it,” he said, “if you don’t tell me, it will make me angry.”

  She turned off the gas under the water and put her hand out on the stool; then sat down again, hooking her heels over the bottom step. She leaned forward, resting her arms across her knees. She picked at something on her skirt and then looked up.

  “You remember Emily’d already gone home with the Beattys, and for some reason Mitchell had stayed on. He looked a little out of sorts that night to begin with. I don’t know, maybe they weren’t getting along . . . But I don’t know that. But there were you and I, the Franklins, and Mitchell Ander
son left. All of us a little drunk, if I remember rightly. I’m not sure how it happened, Ralph, but Mitchell and I just happened to find ourselves alone together in the kitchen for a minute. There was no whiskey left, only two or three bottles of that white wine we had. It must’ve been close to one o’clock because Mitchell said, ‘If we hurry we can make it before the liquor store closes.’ You know how he can be so theatrical when he wants? Softshoe stuff, facial expressions . . . ? Anyway, he was very witty about it all. At least it seemed that way at the time. And very drunk, too, I might add. So was I, for that matter . . . It was an impulse, Ralph, I swear. I don’t know why I did it, don’t ask me, but when he said, ‘Let’s go’—I agreed. We went out the back, where his car was parked. We went just like we were: we didn’t even get our coats out of the closet. We thought we’d just be gone a few minutes. I guess we thought no one would miss us . . . I don’t know what we thought . . . I don’t know why I went, Ralph. It was an impulse, that’s all that I can say. It was a wrong impulse.” She paused. “It was my fault that night, Ralph, and I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done anything like that, I know that.”

  “Christ!” the word leaped out. “But you’ve always been that way, Marian!”

  “That isn’t true!”

  His mind filled with a swarm of tiny accusations, and he tried to focus on one in particular. He looked down at his hands and noticed they had the same lifeless feeling as they did when he woke up mornings. He picked up the red pencil lying on the table, and then put it down again.

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “You’re angry,” she said. “You’re swearing and getting all upset, Ralph. For nothing, nothing, honey! . . . There’s nothing else.”

  “Go on.”

  “What is the matter with us anyway? How did we ever get onto this subject?”

  “Go on, Marian.”

  “That’s all, Ralph. I’ve told you. We went for a ride . . . We talked. He kissed me. I still don’t see how we could’ve been gone three hours; whatever it was you said.”

  He remembered again the waiting, the unbearable weakness that spread down through his legs when they’d been gone an hour, two hours. It made him lean weakly against the corner of the house after he’d gone outside; for a breath of air he said vaguely, pulling into his coat, but really so that the embarrassed Franklins could themselves leave without any more embarrassment; without having to take leave of the absent host, or the vanished hostess. From the corner of the house, standing behind the rose trellis in the soft, crumbly dirt, he watched the Franklins get into their car and drive away. Anger and frustration clogged inside him, then separated into little units of humiliation that jumped against his stomach. He waited. Gradually the horror drained away as he stood there, until finally nothing was left but a vast, empty realization of betrayal. He went into the house and sat at this same table, and he remembered his shoulder began to twitch and he couldn’t stop it even when he squeezed it with his fingers. An hour later, or two hours—what difference did it make then?—she’d come in.

  “Tell me the rest, Marian.” And he knew there was more now. He felt a slight fluttering start up in his stomach, and suddenly he didn’t want to know any more. “No. Do whatever you want. If you don’t want to talk about it, Marian, that’s all right. Do whatever you want to, Marian. Actually, I guess I’d just as soon leave it at that.”

  He worked his shoulders against the smooth, solid chairback, then balanced unsteadily on the two back legs. He thought fleetingly that he would have been someplace else tonight, doing something else at this very moment, if he hadn’t married. He glanced around the kitchen. He began to perspire and leaned forward, setting all the legs on the floor. He took one of her cigarettes from the pack on the table. His hands were trembling as he struck the match.

  “Ralph. You won’t be angry, will you? Ralph? We’re just talking. You won’t, will you?” She had moved over to a chair at the table.

  “I won’t.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  She lit a cigarette. He had suddenly a great desire to see Robert and Dorothea; to get them up out of bed, heavy and turning in their sleep, and hold each of them on a knee, jiggle them until they woke up and began to laugh. He absently began to trace with his finger the outline of one of the tiny black coaches in the beige tablecloth. There were four miniature white prancing horses pulling each of the tiny coaches. The figure driving the horses had his arm up and was wearing a tall hat. Suitcases were strapped down on top of the coach, and what looked like a kerosene lamp hung from the side.

  “We went straight to the liquor store, and I waited in the car till he came out. He had a sack in one hand and one of those plastic bags of ice in the other. He weaved a little getting into the car. I hadn’t realized he was so drunk until we started driving again, and I noticed the way he was driving; terribly slow, and all hunched over the wheel with his eyes staring. We were talking about a lot of things that didn’t make sense . . . I can’t remember . . . Nietzsche . . . and Strindberg; he was directing Miss Julie second semester, you know, and something about Norman Mailer stabbing his wife in the breast a long time ago, and how he thought Mailer was going downhill anyway—a lot of crazy things like that. Then, I’ll swear before God it was an accident, Ralph, he didn’t know what he was doing, he made a wrong turn and we somehow wound up out by the golf course, right near Jane Van Eaton’s. In fact, we pulled into her driveway to turn around and when we did Mitchell said to me, ‘We might as well open one of these bottles.’ He did, he opened it, and then he drove a little farther on down the road that goes around the green, you know, and comes out by the park? Actually, not too far from the Franklins’ . . . And then he stopped for a minute in the middle of the road with his lights on, and we each took a drink out of the bottle. Then he said, said he’d hate to think of me being stabbed in the breast. I guess he was still thinking about Mailer’s wife. And then . . . I can’t say it, Ralph . . . I know you’d get angry.”

  “I won’t get angry, Marian,” he said slowly. His thoughts seemed to move lazily, as if he were in a dream, and he was able to take in only one thing at a time she was telling him. At the same time he noticed a peculiar alertness taking hold of his body.

  “Go on. Then what, Marian?”

  “You aren’t angry, are you? Ralph?”

  “No. But I’m getting interested, though.”

  They both had to laugh, and for a minute everything was all right. He leaned across the table to light another cigarette for her, and they smiled at each other; just like any other night. He struck another match, held it a while, and then brought the match, almost to burn his fingers, up under the end of the cigarette that protruded at an angle from his lips. He dropped the burned match into the ashtray and stared at it before looking up.

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t know . . . things seemed to happen fast after that. He drove up the road a little and turned off someplace, I don’t know, maybe right onto the green . . . and started kissing me. Then he said, said he’d like to kiss my breast. I said I didn’t think we should. I said, ‘What about Emily?’ He said I didn’t know her. He got the car going again, and then he stopped again and just sort of slumped over and put his head on my lap. God! It sounds so vulgar now, I know, but it didn’t seem that way at all then. I felt like, like I was losing my innocence somehow, Ralph. For the first time—that night I realized I was really, really doing something wrong, something I wasn’t supposed to do and that might hurt people. I shouldn’t be there, I felt. And I felt . . . like it was the first time in my life I’d ever intentionally done anything wrong or hurtful and gone on doing it, knowing I shouldn’t be. Do you know what I mean, Ralph? Like some of the characters in Henry James? I felt that way. Like . . . for the first time . . . my innocence . . . something was happening.”

  “You can dispense with that shit,” he cut in. “Get off it, Marian! Go on! Then what? Did he caress you? Did he? Did he try to feel you up, Mari
an? Tell me!”

  And then she hurried on, trying to get over the hard spots quickly, and he sat with his hands folded on the table and watched her lips out of which dropped the frightful words. His eyes skipped around the kitchen—stove, cupboards, toaster, radio, coffeepot, window, curtains, refrigerator, breadbox, napkin holder, stove, cupboards, toaster . . . back to her face. Her dark eyes glistened under the overhead light. He felt a peculiar desire for her flicker through his thighs at what she was leading up to, and at the same time he had to check an urge to stand up yelling, smash his fist into her face.

  “‘Shall we have a go at it?’ he said.”

  “Shall we have a go at it?” Ralph repeated.

  “I’m to blame. If anyone should, should be blamed for it, I’m to blame. He said he’d leave it all up to me, I could . . . could do . . . whatever I wanted.” Tears welled out of her eyes, started down her cheeks. She looked down at the table, blinked rapidly.

  He shut his eyes. He saw a barren field under a heavy, gray sky; a fog moving in across the far end. He shook his head, tried to admit other possibilities, other conclusions. He tried to bring back that night two years ago, imagine himself coming into the kitchen just as she and Mitchell were at the door, hear himself telling her in a hearty voice, Oh no, no; you’re not going out for liquor with that Mitchell Anderson! He’s drunk, and he isn’t a good driver to boot. You’ve got to go to bed now and get up with little Robert and Dorothea in the morning . . . Stop! Stop where you are.

  He opened his eyes, raised his eyebrows as if he were just waking up. She had a hand up over her face and was crying silently, her shoulders rounded and moving in little jerks.

  “Why did you go with him, Marian?” he asked desperately.

  She shook her head without looking up.