"You're Ugly, Too"

Lorrie Moore is sometimes accused of using too many jokes in her stories, but it seems to me LM knows what she is doing. Life is sometimes unbearable, and one way people repress or bury this fact is through laughter. Moore says that a joke occurs when there's a sudden, brief release of tension; you hear the release in the sound the laughing person makes. It's almost like an expulsion, or exorcism.

In LM's work, a joke happens when "the politely unstated fact" suddenly becomes "the stated fact." A joke happens when the elephant in the room announces, "Hi! I am here!" For example, here is how an LM character responds when someone murmurs a platitude about *don't you just want your child to be happy* --?

"Happy? Not a priority. We just want him to be rich."

You laugh because many, if not all, parents really do have material comfort on their minds, even if just in a small way. LM has gone ahead and stated the unsayable.

"You're Ugly, Too" has many jokes. It centers on two set-piece jokes. The first is in the hands of the female protagonist: "A woman goes to the doctor, and the doctor says, I have bad news. You have terminal cancer. And the woman says, Well, don't I get a second opinion? And the doctor says, Sure, I guess. Here's a second opinion. You're dying--and you're UGLY, too."

The protagonist tries to tell this joke at a party, but the man she is with interrupts her. (This interruption is a metaphor for gender relations, a key theme in the story. The man is like a child; "he wanted to tell the joke on his own.") So the man begins--but the joke takes an unexpected turn.

"So I'm at the doctor, and he says, I have good news and I have bad news. Bad news? You're dying of cancer. Good news? You see that hot nurse out there? I finally f**ked her!"

The protagonist says, "That wasn't my joke. It wasn't my joke at all." She says this with a hint of accusation in her voice--and I love that reference to a tone of accusation. I love it because it's classic LM; we are not skilled at expressing our own meanings, we often don't even really know what we mean to say, and so our actual feelings and secrets seep out through "tones." The body is at odds with the choice of words. The accusation may be: You men believe that the sun rises and sets on a pair of plump, young breasts.

A beginning writer might use dialogue as a straightforward exchange of information, but in Moore, several things are generally happening at once. Neither side wins in the war between men and women. The narrator goes out several times with a man who becomes irritated in his car. "That ant? Why did you just flick it onto the seat of my car? Why couldn't you pick it up and throw it out the window?"

The protagonist becomes flustered--and she notices, from the corner of her eye, that her boyfriend is now admiring his own biceps as he drives. Instead of responding maturely, the protagonist sinks to the man's level: "Pick up the ant? The ant could have bitten me!!" (Which never happens.)

And the man becomes even more petulant and childish: "Yeah, right. Now that ant will lay eggs all over the inside of my car."

The retreat toward hysteria, the escalating absurdity--This vignette seems to say, to me at least, all you'd ever need to know about male/female relations.

A story does not need to end with a crisp resolution to a problem. It can end with a change in register; a new tilt; something that signals the central problem has become clearer, sharper, at the very least. Here's how Moore ends. The protagonist becomes more and more irritated with a new male date. (He tells her to wear more blue, and she says, "Hey, let me ask. Does the word FAG mean anything to you?")

Ultimately, the man says, "You career women. I shouldn't date you anymore," as if he is describing a race of automatons.

The woman responds by giving the man a hard shove, so that his beer spills all over Manhattan, and he almost falls from a high, high balcony.

He becomes enraged, and she replies, "Just kidding! I was only kidding!"

It's a brilliant twist, because, of course, we are never *only* kidding. A joke generally conceals a great deal of truth. Here, the protagonist has allowed her anger to bubble up, and its expression has almost become fatal.

One other thought about this great story: The protagonist has secured her academic job because her all-male department has decided it needs a woman."There's something lovely about a female coworker, the click of her heels, the faint trace of Obsession and sweat in the air." Then, Moore adds, as only Moore can, breezily: "Beyond all that, they'd recently had a sex discrimination lawsuit--and, well, it was time."

"It was time." As if hiring equitably were the same as putting on your pajamas, and brushing your teeth. "It was time."

If you haven't reread this story recently, it's a good way to spend a half-hour. The amount of depth packed into every sentence seems virtuosic. You end up thinking about Michael Phelps swimming in the Olympics. Anyway, that's what I thought about. More soon.

P.S. It's worth noting that the shove, at the end, is yet another male/female miscommunication--a final "dropped ball" between genders.

P.P.S. I'm fascinated by the violinist story. We get three versions. First, the female violinist begins truncating her practice sessions, despite being world-famous, to be present at her boyfriend's softball games. Eventually, she kills herself. Second version: The protagonist knows she can't share the suicide bit with her lovestruck sister, so she instead ends by saying, "My friend just really learned to love softball. I mean, you should have seen her." (The sister is nevertheless unnerved.) Third, final, true version: We learn that the violinist and her boyfriend had a fight about the violinist's touring schedule. "You think you're famous," says the boyfriend, "but you're not FAMOUS famous. No one in THIS TOWN knows you." Then he buys beers for everyone in the bar, except for the violinist. It's this tiny slice of meanness that really sends the violinist over the edge--that leads her to off herself. So much is conveyed by gesture--the nasty addition of an unnecessary adjective, the buying of beers. We also reveal ourselves through the details we choose, and choose not, to share in our stories. Moore is, as always, alert to the meanings beneath the surface--alert to the ways subtext becomes text, or at least awkward "half-text."

P.P.P.S. I also haven't talked about the sexy witches. They're not in the spirit of Halloween! The protagonist's brother-in-law arrives at a party, says, "Zoe! I'm so sorry I wasn't here to greet you!" then walks away and spends the rest of the evening speaking to the sexy witches. A master class in the gap between speech and thought. We believe our words represent us--but it's really our response to the sexy witches. The way we acknowledge the witches: That's what gives us away.

P.P.P.P.S. Chekhov said, All you need for a story is a He and She. And here you have Moore, folks. Proving Chekhov right. Again and again and again.