Like Life by Lorrie Moore Page A

as if he understood too clearly. “How about four-thirty. I’ll give you a call then.”
    “Fine,” said Harry. “I should know better then what my schedule’s like”—hestifled a cough—“for the evening.”
    “Exactly,” said Scarp. “Fabulous.”
    Harry kept his dirty clothes in a laundry bag at the bottom of his closet. He grabbed the bag up, crammed into it two other pairs of underwear, which had been floating around, and dashed across the street to the Korean laundromat with a large box of generic heavy-duty laundry detergent. He did his wash in an excited fashion, got pushy in claiming a dryer, went next door and ordered a fried egg sandwich to go, with ketchup, and ate it back at the laundromat, sitting on the window ledge, next to a pimp with a satin tie.
    At four-thirty, when Scarp called, Harry said, “All’s squared away. Just name the place.”
    This time they met at a restaurant called Zelda. Harry was wearing clean underwear and socks.
    “No one ever uses apostrophes anymore, have you noticed?” said Harry. He had been here before and had, in fact, said this before. “It makes restaurants sound like hurricanes.” Zelda specialized in eclectic Louisiana cooking. It served things like salmon fillets with macaroni and cheese, both with bones. Capes, ponchos, and little sundresses hung from the ceiling. It was strictly a crazed southern woman’s idea of a restaurant.
    Harry and Scarp sat in the bar section, near the piano, hemmed in on every side by potted plants.
    Scarp was fishing for descriptions. “There’s no—”
    “Business like show business!” burst out Harry.
    “Yes,” said Scarp, a little taken aback. He was dressed in jeans and a linen shirt. Again he wore a broach, this time of peridot and garnet, fastened close to the collar. He was drinking a martini.
    Harry wasn’t drinking. He’d ordered seltzer water and took big handfuls of mixed nuts from the bowl in front of him. He hadn’t had a cigarette since the trucks had startedcoming, and now he found himself needing something to put in his mouth, something to engage his hand on its journey up from the table and back down again. “So tell me about this thing you were shooting in New Jersey,” Harry began amiably, but a nut skin got caught in his throat and he began to choke, his face red and crumpling, frightening as a morel. Scarp pushed the seltzer water toward Harry, then politely looked away.
    “It’s a project that belongs to an old buddy of mine,” said Scarp. Harry nodded at him, but his eyes were tearing and he was gulping down seltzer. Scarp continued, pretending not to notice, pretending to have to collect his thoughts by studying objects elsewhere. “He’s doing this film about bourgeois guilt—you know, how you can be bourgeois and an artist at the same time …”
    “Really,” croaked Harry. Water filmed his eyes.
    “… but how the guilt can harrow you and how in the end you can’t let it. As Flaubert said, Be bourgeois in your life so that you may be daring in your art.”
    Harry cleared his throat and started to cough again. The nut skin was still down there, scratching and dry. “I don’t trust translations,” he rasped. He took an especially large swallow of seltzer and could feel the blood leave his face a bit. There was some silence, and then Harry added, “Did Flaubert ever write a play?”
    “Don’t know,” said Scarp. “At any rate, I was just shooting this one scene for my friend, since he was called away by a studio head. It was a very straightforward cute meet at a pedicurist’s. Have you ever had a pedicure?”
    “No,” said Harry.
    “You really have to. It’s one of the great pleasures of life.…”
    But I have had plantar’s warts. You have to put acid on them, and Band-Aids.…
    “Do you feel all right?” asked Scarp, looking suddenly concerned.
    “Fine. It’s just I quit smoking. Suddenly there’s all this air in my lungs. What’s a cute meat?”
    “Cute meet?