It must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring. She felt the season's mockery--such inexplicable desolation, such sludge in the heart. She could almost burst--could one burst with joylessness? What she was feeling was too strange, too contrary, too isolated for a mere emotion. It had to be a premonition--one of being finally whisked away after much boring flailing and flapping and the pained, purposeless work that constituted life. And in spring, no less: A premonition of death. A rehearsal. A secretary's call to remind of the appointment.
Of course, it had always been in the spring that she'd discovered her husband's affairs. But the last one was years ago, and what did she care about all that now; there had been a parade of flings.
In the end, they'd made her laugh:
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha
Holding fast to her little patch of marital ground, she'd watched as his lovers floated through like ballerinas or dandelion down, all of them sudden and fleeting, as if they were calendar girls ripped monthly by the same mysterious calendar-ripping wind that hurried time along in old movies. Hello! Goodbye! Ha! Ha! Ha! What did Ruth care now? Those girls were over and gone. The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take things too personally.
"You assume they're over and gone," said her friend Carla, who, in Ruth's living room, was working on both her inner child and her inner thighs, getting rid of the child but in touch with the thighs; Ruth couldn't keep it straight.....
Of course, it had always been in the spring that she'd discovered her husband's affairs. But the last one was years ago, and what did she care about all that now; there had been a parade of flings.
In the end, they'd made her laugh:
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha
Holding fast to her little patch of marital ground, she'd watched as his lovers floated through like ballerinas or dandelion down, all of them sudden and fleeting, as if they were calendar girls ripped monthly by the same mysterious calendar-ripping wind that hurried time along in old movies. Hello! Goodbye! Ha! Ha! Ha! What did Ruth care now? Those girls were over and gone. The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take things too personally.
"You assume they're over and gone," said her friend Carla, who, in Ruth's living room, was working on both her inner child and her inner thighs, getting rid of the child but in touch with the thighs; Ruth couldn't keep it straight.....
-Lorrie Moore is the reason I know the term "gallows humor." Updike used it in reference to Moore's "You're Ugly, Too." In a Moore story, the heroine is often both dying and unhappy in love. (Moore rewrote "Real Estate" years later, in the guise of "Paper Losses," and if "Paper Losses" doesn't have the oomph of "Real Estate," it may be because the PL heroine isn't fighting terminal cancer. "Paper Losses" does have a detail I love and can't stop thinking about: As the desperate heroine chats on the phone with her friend, she "spreads peanut butter on a pretzel and begins eating it quickly." A killer gesture: As she feigns rational, adult behavior on the phone, she reveals her true self via the frantic consumption of a peanut-butter-laden pretzel. That detail--and particularly the adverb "quickly"--is enough to keep me afloat for the next week.)
-"Discovery is studying the same thing everyone else studies--and seeing something new." Lorrie Moore looks at springtime and has a novel idea: Misery among the tulips! A light has gone on: She can make use of this. ("People talk about hard work," says the contrarian Moore, "but work means nothing if you don't have inspiration. An idea for a story is like a one-night stand. It arrives and takes you over, and then it's gone.") In Moore's brisk and insane first-paragraph exposition, ennui becomes a creative force: "Could one burst with joylessness?" And then a fine show-don't-tell moment: What does it mean to be deeply depressed? It means pausing to consider the "boring flailing and flapping and the pained, purposeless work that constituted life." (To see Moore cataloguing these bleak thoughts--without judgment or sentimentality--is exhilarating. The reader feels "seen." Moore is unconcerned with being "nice" or "palatable." For this reason, she gave permission to an entire generation of young writers--particularly female writers--to explore terrain they otherwise might have ignored.)
-Moore is a poet whose theme is self-delusion. She takes as her starting point for "Real Estate" a quote from Bernstein's "Candide": "And yet of course these trinkets are endearing." (Cunegonde is lying to herself, and to the audience: The trinkets are more than endearing. Cunegonde is drowning in avarice. The trinkets are her life.) The stunning block of "Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!" in "Real Estate" is something Moore has never done before. It suggests to us that the protagonist is trying too hard. Methinks she doth protest too much. If the protagonist really were unmoved by her husband's infidelities, it's unlikely she would dwell on that feeble "Ha!" for line after line after line. (In the "New Yorker," the HA! was given a full paragraph. In book form, the HA! actually gets two full pages--plus change.)
-Here's why "Real Estate" is a prototype for "Paper Losses." In both cases, the narrator gives us sweeping, broad strokes at the start: "My heroine is unhappy, and she's unhappy because of a man." Then, to introduce new "energy," around three paragraphs down, Moore will give us a sidekick, an opinionated female friend. You could write a dissertation about Moore-ian female friends. They are maybe interchangeable. (Moore herself seems to poke fun at this trope in "Paper Losses," when she has that particular friend say, "I am just a voice on the phone, sipping some tea....") I especially like "Carla," in "Real Estate," because we learn more about Ruth's dementedness via Carla. Ruth looks at Carla and thinks: "She wanted to get rid of her inner child and get in touch with her inner thighs....or something like that...." Ruth's struggle to get the direct objects straight indicates that she really has gone over the edge. (Something similar happens in "Paper Losses," when the heroine pretends to be interested in her refrigerator, but we get access to her inner monologue: "He hasn't spoken to me or looked in my eyes in at least three months....Is this love?")
-Carla is a vehicle for Moore's sharp insights regarding subtext. "Carla liked to blurt out things and then say, OOPS, DID I SAY THAT? Or sometimes: YOU KNOW WHAT? LIFE IS SHORT. DUMPY, TOO, SO YOU'VE GOT TO DO YOUR BEST: NO EMPIRE WAISTS." It seems to me that no one is better than Moore at noting aggression where aggression has been sloppily hidden. "Oops, did I say that?" is a terrible thing to say, and it means many things separate from its surface-level meaning. One of the more damning things Moore observes, elsewhere, about a character: "She was the kind of person who would say THAT'S FUNNY--instead of laughing...."
-Throw caution to the wind. Say whatever pops into your head. Enjoy life's bottomless tragedies; laughing is almost always a wise strategy for coping. That's the lesson we get from Moore. Ballast for a lifetime.
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