“All his tin-penny miseries and chicken shit joys would lead him once again to Sparky’s.”
Ira has been divorced for six months after fifteen years of marriage, so he takes up psycho-dating. Lorrie Moore says he can’t work his wedding ring off. Yet when it slips off in a hot bath he puts it on again.
The writer who most reminded me of Lorrie Moore is Ali Smith, similar in their love of wordplay. You find yourself loving individual sentences, paragraphs and phrases: Are Man Ray and Ray Charles related? May is an indecisive month.
Six months divorced and lonely so Ira allows his best friends with to set him up with Zora, divorced for eleven years. She’s a stunner. Ira will observe after getting to know “Z” (Like Zorro, it’s how she signs her notes.) that there should be a law to prevent the mentally ill from being too good-looking.
For his second dinner at Zora’s, he asks if there is anything he should get and is told to bring his own chair, together with four or five food items including wine and salad. He doesn’t stay over and leaves with his chair and salad bowl.
One of her two chairs will be occupied by Bruno, sixteen years old and socially dysfunctional. Zora tells Ira that her son is between social groups when Ira asks if he has any friends.
Zora comes over to Ira’s place for his birthday, Bruno’s along. She brings a cake, the first present she’s ever given Ira. But when it’s time to leave she takes the cake back with her because it’s Bruno’s favorite. Zora and her son wrestle on Ira’s couch…they’re likely to wrestle anywhere, play footsie under the dining table, can’t keep their hands off each other. Ira drinks his bourbon.
The backdrop to the lamentations of Ira is the war in Iraq. Ira has driven to an intersection where protesters have held up signs to honk if you support peace. All the cars start honking and no one moves. An ineffectual gridlock, both politically and traffic-wise? Moore calls it gorgeous.
When Ira’s friend Michael asks how the relationship with Zora is going he says “Great. Just great. In fact, do you perhaps know any other single women?” Chaplinesque Ira is always forbearing, acting the gentleman, perhaps overcompensating because ex-wife Marilyn said he barked at people. Is it lonely for a character when only the reader gets your jokes?
“Debarking” is the first story in Bark by Lorrie Moore, available in the militant month of March from Knopf. I received a galley from the publisher. The sentences of Lorrie Moore feel like they are part of a tennis match. I think of her periods as tennis balls, her sentences as nets, Lorrie Moore doing a victory jump over the tremulous barrier between her and her readers.
