Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore

no stranger to the parasitic mixings of art and commerce, literature and the rich. “Hedge funds and haiku!” he’d exclaimed to his wife, Suzy—and yet such mixings seemed never to lose their swift, stark capacity to appall. The hustle for money met the hustle for virtue and everyone washed their hands in one another. It was a common enough thing, though was there ever enough soap to cut the grease? “That’s what your lemon is for,” Suzy would say, pointing at the twist in the martini he was not supposed to drink. Still, now and again, looking up between the crabmeat cocktail and the palate-cleansing sorbet sprinkled with fennel pollen dust, he felt shocked by the whole thing.
    “It’s symbiosis,” said Suzy as they were getting dressed to go. “Think of it being like the krill that grooms and sees for the rock shrimp. Or that bird who picks out the bugs from the rhino hide.”
    “So we’re the Seeing Eye krill,” he said.
    “Yes!”
    “We’re the oxpeckers.”
    “Well, I wasn’t going to say that,” she said.
    “A lot in this world has to do with bugs,” said Bake.
    “Food,” she said. “A lot has to do with grooming and food. Are you wearing that?”
    “What’s wrong with it?”
    “Lose the— What are those?”
    “Suspenders.”
    “They’re red.”
    “OK, OK. But you know, I never do that to you.”
    “I’m the sighted krill,” she said. She smoothed his hair, which had recently become a weird pom-pom of silver and maize.
    “And I’m the blind boy?”
    “Well, I wasn’t going to say that either.”
    “You look good. Whatever it is your wearing. See? I say nice things to
you
!”
    “It’s a sarong.” She tugged it up a little.
    He ripped off the suspenders. “Well, here. You may need these.”
    They were staying at a Georgetown B and B to save a little money, a town house where the owner-couple left warm cookies at everyone’s door at night to compensate for their loud toddler, who by 6:00 a.m. was barking orders and pointing at her mother to fetch this toy or that. After a day of sightseeing—all those museums prepaid with income taxes; it was like being philanthropists come to investigate the look of their own money—Suzy and Bake were already tired. They hailed a cab and recited the address of the event to the cabbie, who nodded and said ominously, “Oh, yes.”
    Never mind good taste, here at this gala even the usual diaphanous veneer of seemliness had been tossed to the trade winds: the fund-raiser for
Lunar Lines Literary Journal
— 3
LJ
as it was known to its readers and contributors; “the magazine” as it was known to its staff, as if there were no others—wasbeing held in a bank. Or at least a former bank, one which had recently gone under, and which now sold squid-ink orecchiette beneath its vaulted ceilings, and martinis and grenache from its former teller stations. Wood and marble were preserved and buffed, glass barriers removed. In the evening light the place was golden. It was cute! So what if subtle boundaries of occasion and transaction had been given up on? So what if this were a mausoleum of greed now danced in by all? He and Suzy had been invited. The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame.
    The invitation, however, to this D.C. fund-raiser seemed to Bake a bit of a fluke, since
Man on a Quarter, Man on a Horse
, Bake’s ill-selling biography of George Washington (in a year when everyone was obsessed with Lincoln, even the efficiently conflated Presidents’ Day had failed to help his book sales), would appear to fit him to neither category of guest. But
Lunar Lines
, whose offices were in Washington, had excerpted a portion of it, as if in celebration of their town. And so Bake was sent two free dinner tickets. He would have to rub elbows and charm the other guests—the rich, the magazine’s donors, who would be paying five hundred dollars a plate. Could he manage that? Could he be the court jester, the town clown, the token writer