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The Jewish Hunter
- University of Wisconsin Press
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j The Jewish Hunter Lorrie Moore T his was in a faraway land. There were gyms but no irony or coffee shops. People took things literally, without drugs. Laird, who wanted to fix her up with this guy, warned her beforehand in exercise class. “Look, Odette, you’re a poet. You’ve been in po biz for what—twenty years—” “Only fifteen, I’m sure.” She had just turned forty and scowled at him over her shoulder. She had a voice menopausal with whiskey, a voice left to lurch and ruin by cigarettes. It was without a middle range, low, with sudden cracks upward. “I hate that phrase po biz.” “Fifteen. All right. This guy’s not at all literary. He’s a farm lawyer . He gets the occasional flasher, or a Gypsy from the Serbo neighborhood in Chicago, but that’s as artistic as he gets. He’s dealing with farmers and farms. He wouldn’t know T. S. Eliot from, say, Pinky Eliot. He’s probably never even been to Minneapolis, let alone New York.” “Who’s Pinky Eliot?” she asked. They were lying side by side, doing these things where you thrust your arms between your raised knees, to tighten the stomach muscles. There was loud music to distract you from worries that you might not know anyone in the room well enough to be doing this in front of them. “Who the heck is Pinky Eliot?” “Someone I went to fourth grade with,” said Laird, gasping. “It was said he weighed more than the teacher, and she was no zipper, let me tell you.” Laird was balding, and in exercise class the blood rushed across his head, bits of hair curling above his ears like gift ribbon . He had lived in this town until he was ten, then his family had moved east to New Jersey, where she had first met him, years ago. Now he had come back, like a salmon, to raise his own kids. He and his wife had two. “Little and Moist,” they called them. “Look, you’re in the boonies here. You got your Pinky Eliot or you got your guy who’s never heard of Pinky or any Eliot.” She had been in the boonies before. To afford her apartment in New York, she often took these sorts of library fellowships: six weeks and four thousand dollars to live in town, write unpublishable poems, and give a reading at the library. The problem with the boonies was that nobody ever kissed you there. They stared at you, up and down, but they never kissed. 140 141 The Jewish Hunter Actually, once in a while you could get them to kiss. But then you had to leave. And in your packing and going, in tearing the seams, the hems, the haws, you felt like some bad combination of Odysseus and Penelope. You felt funny in the heart. “All right,” she said. “What is his name?” Laird sighed. “Pinky Eliot,” he said, thrusting his arms between his knees. “Somehow in this mangled presentation, I fear I’ve confused you.” Pinky Eliot had lost weight, though for sure he still weighed more than the teacher. He was about forty-five, with all his hair still dark. He was not bad-looking, elf-nosed and cat-eyed, though a little soccer ball-ish through the chin and cheeks, which together formed a white sphere with a sudden scar curling grayly around. Also, he had the kind of mustache a college roommate of hers used to say looked like it had crawled up to find a warm spot to die. They ate dinner at the only Italian restaurant in town. She drank two glasses of wine, the cool heat of it spreading through her like wintergreen. One of these days, she knew, she would have to give up dating. She had practiced declarations in the mirror. “I don’t date. I’m sorry. I just don’t date.” “I always kind of liked the food here,” said Pinky. She looked at his round face and felt a little bad for him and a little bad for herself while she was at it, because, truly, the food was not good:flavorlessbladdersofpastapassingastortellini;thecutletsmealy and drenched in the kind of tomato sauce that was unwittingly, defeatedly orange. Poor Pinky didn’t know a garlic from a Gumby. “Yes,” she said, trying to be charming. “But do you think it’s really Italian? It feels as if it got...