A Gate at the Stairs (42 page)
Read A Gate at the Stairs Online
Authors: Lorrie Moore
“With your help, and with others’, I’ve come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it’s a lot after all! Still, in the end, I imagine we will always look back and think:
Too little, with too little in it
. Because at the end the light’s dimming, of course. There is no such thing as wisdom—that is the only wisdom. But there is lack of wisdom. I try to remember that.”
This assertion of paucity and barrenness he’d gleaned from me? This light show? This tra-la-la of no wisdom? What had I learned from him but that he believed, or had once believed, that boys should learn the hard way about the world?
“Yes, well,” I said, “the truth shall set you free—and then what?”
“Then what, indeed.” He cleared his throat. He had lost the
if you wills
perhaps, but now there were
indeeds
. Which seemed worse. “Well, I was wondering if you’d like to go out to dinner with me sometime,” he said.
Sacrifice the children to propitiate some ancient god. There were a lot of gods and they all wanted something.
“Dinner?” I asked. These days I ate little for meals: mostly a single bowl of red barley boiled to a swarm of slick, fat ticks. I would melt butter on the whole mess and eat it in front of the TV.
“Yes. Dinner.”
“Dinner?” I said again in disbelief. My grandmother, when asked once at her ninetieth birthday party what words of advice she would offer young people, given her particular perspective at the end of life, had at first simply scrunched up her face and said irritably, deafly,
“What?”
But she was just buying time. And when the question was restated she looked around at her whole family, the kids and grandkids, and said loudly, “Don’t get married!” We were stunned. It was if she had said, “Shoot to kill.” It was if she had said, “If you just shoot to wound, they get up and come at you again.” I used to think that those essentially happy and romantic novels that ended with a wedding were all wrong, that they had left out the most interesting part of the story. But now I’d gone back to thinking, no, the wedding
was
the end. It was the end of the comedy. That’s how you knew it was a comedy. The end of comedy was the beginning of all else.
“Yes,” Edward said.
The gothic knell of a wedding bell, the hangman’s rope grown straight out of the chest then looped like tasseling around the tables. Rat teeth raking the cake. Beauty could not love you back. People were not what they seemed and certainly not what they said. Madness was contagious. Memory served melancholy. The medieval was not so bad. Gravity was a form of nostalgia. There could be virtue in satirizing virtue. Dwight Eisenhower and Werner von Braun had the exact same mouths. No one loved a loser until he completely lost. The capital of Burma was Rangoon.
My fortune cookies, too, had lost their frolic:
Bury your unrealistic dreams or they will bury you
.
But not in bed
.
“Dinner?” I said again. Being oneself was no great accomplishment. It was not being oneself that was hard.
Then he paused. “Perhaps this is too sudden of a phone call.” His voice had become weary and tart. “Too out of the blue for you, maybe.”
Amanda came to the doorway of my room, poked her head in and mouthed, “Wanna split a pizza?”
I nodded my head.
Yes
. She disappeared.
The earth was not perfectly round but pear-shaped. And according to black hole experts, ninety percent of the universe is missing.
Still, there was always a circus somewhere.
“Dinner?” I repeated into the phone. My knuckles looked white as opals.
O whatever-God, unprompt mom of all steps, still no forwarding address?
Edward remained silent, as did I. What was I alive for? I would not always know or make it my troubled concern. For now I simply became aware of my own noisy breathing. Windy exhalations, I had been told, seemed louder on the phone than they actually were. Inevitably, winds had an unpredictable drama. Prevailing westerlies did not always prevail: sometimes things blew up from the south and created little eddies—
little eddies!
—of stewing weather. I slowly moved the receiver away from my face and it seemed to keep on going, floating toward the cradle, vaguely guided by my hand. Air rushed to cool my cheek. Outside, in the early night, it was already beginning to snow.
Reader, I did not even have coffee with him.
That much I learned in college.
This Is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2009 by Lorrie Moore
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
All rights controlled and administered by EMI April Music Inc.
All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moore, Lorrie.
A gate at the stairs : a novel/by Lorrie Moore.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-27321-5
I. Title.
PS
3563.06225
G
37 2009 813′.54—dc22 2009003091
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
.
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