The Books: “Like Life” – ‘Two Boys’ (Lorrie Moore)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Like Life by Lorrie Moore – another short story collection, her second, I believe. There are only eight stories here, but each one is a magnificently specific experience – nobody like Lorrie Moore. Her stories are always about the minutia (although sometimes there are big life-shaking moments) – and yet they add up to a much greater picture, an image of loss, love, the absurdity of being grown up, the necessity of putting-on-happy-face – and yet also the ridiculous-ness of the very same thing. I can’t quite explain it – all I know is that nobody quite writes like her. I can say a similar thing about Annie Proulx, whose short stories are heads and shoulders above pretty much everyone else writing now – but there the similarities end. Proulx’s stories are expansive, and filled with silence. Maybe there’s some wind. Or thunder. But most of all there is the silence. Lorrie Moore’s stories are filled with chatter. Inane, pretentious sometimes, heartbreaking, ridiculous – these people sound real to me. I have met them. And sometimes a nervous breakdown is NOT presaged with a long period of weeping and gloominess. Sometimes a nervous breakdown comes after a prolonged period of enforced cheer (sometimes self-enforced). Lorrie Moore writes about THAT.

The first story in this gorgeous collection is called ‘Two Boys’. A serious and rather nervous woman named Mary is seeing two men at the same time. For the first time in her life. Neither of them have names in the story – they are referred to as Number One and Number Two. Number One is married, on the way to being separated from his wife. Number Two is a bit more adrift, maybe more centered – but also a bit of a loser. He has no car, for example. Mary is not a seductress. She sits in the park by herself reading religious poetry, and has semi-disturbing conversations with the same 11 year old girl who hangs out in the park. Those conversations drift alongside her two relationships. There seems to be no connection, but of course there is. Mary is realizing that having two men just makes you twice as lonely, as opposed to twice as fulfilled. Her friends are all jealous, and send her postcards with notes on it like, “You hog!” Mary is sweet. She is not a nag, or a needy person. Not openly needy anyway. To make real demands of either Number One or Number Two is totally outside her character. So for now, she drifts from one to the other. Trying to walk steady, trying to read her poetry in between times, trying to still have a life.

Here’s an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Like Life by Lorrie Moore – ‘Two Boys’

IN THE PARK an eleven-year-old girl loped back and forth in front of her. Mary looked up. The girl was skinny, flat-chested, lipsticked. She wore a halter top that left her bare-backed, shoulder blades jutting like wings. She spat once, loud and fierce, and it landed by Mary’s feet. “Message from outer space,” said the girl, and then she strolled off, out of the park. Mary tried to keep reading, but it was hard after that. She grew distracted and uneasy, and she got up and went home, stepping through the blood water and ignoring the meat men, who, when they had them on, tipped their hair-netted caps. Everything came forward and back again, in a wobbly dance, and when she went upstairs she held on to the railing.

THIS WAS WHY she liked Boy Number Two: He was kind and quiet, like someone she’d known for a long time, like someone she’d sat next to at school. He looked down and told her he loved her, sweated all over her, and left his smell lingering around her room. Number One was not a sweater. He was compact and had no pores at all, the heat building up behind his skin. Nothing of him evaporated. He left no trail or scent, but when you were with him, the heat was there and you had to touch. You got close and lost your mind a little. You let it swim. Out in the middle of the sea on a raft. Nail parings and fish.

When he was over, Number Two liked to drink beer and go to bed early, whimpering into her, feet dangling over the bed. He gave her long back rubs, then collapsed on top of her in a moan. He was full of sounds. Words came few and slow. They were never what he meant, he said. He had a hard time explaining.

“I know,” said Mary. She had learned to trust his eyes, the light in them, sapphirine and uxorious, though on occasion something drove through them in a scary flash.

“Kiss me,” he would say. And she would close her eyes and kiss.

SOMETIMES in her mind she concocted a third one, Boy Number Three. He was composed of the best features of each. It was Boy Number Three, she realized, she desired. Alone, Number One was rich and mean. Number Two was sighing, repetitive, tall, going on forever; you just wanted him to sit down. It was inevitable that she splice and add. One plus two. Three was clever and true. He was better than everybody. Alone, Numbers One and Two were missing parts, gouged and menacing, roaming dangerously through the emerald parks of Cleveland, shaking hands with voters, or stooped moodily over a chili dog. Number Three always presented himself in her mind after a drink or two, like an escort, bearing gifts and wearing a nice suit. “Ah, Number Three,” she would say, with her eyes closed.

“I love you,” Mary said to Number One. They were being concupines together in his apartment bedroom, lit by streetlights, rescued from ordinary living.

“You’re very special,” he replied.

“You’re very special, too,” said Mary. “Though I suppose you’d be even more special if you were single.”

“That would make me more than special,” said Number One. “That would make me rare. We’re talking unicorn.”

“I love you,” she said to Number Two. She was romantic that way. Her heart was big and bursting. Though her brain was dying and subdividing like a cauliflower. She called both boys “honey”, and it shocked her a little. How many honeys could you have? Perhaps you could open your arms and have so many honeys you achieved a higher spiritual plane, like a shelf in a health food store, or a pine tree, mystically inert, life barking at the bottom like a dog.

“I love you, too,” said Two, the hot lunch of him lifting off his skin in a steam, a slight choke in the voice, collared and sputtering.