Who Will Run the Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore Page A

write-up, was a homeless person, and this is his revenge on the pigeons who used to steal bread from his hands. After this installation opened, the gallery brochure informs us reassuringly, the artist received a grant.
    “Are you OK?” asks Marguerite, noticing my walk. “You have a tourist’s blister? You have one of those
underwear
blisters?”
    “It’s an old injury from the winter.” I begin to lie. “I slipped down the icy stairs at work.”
    “At the Historical Society?”
    “Yes,” I say. I cannot tell her the truth. Or can I?
Can I tell you the truth?
I might begin. And she might say,
Bien sûr
. And I would explain that, well, after weeks of fighting and months of door-slamming straight out of the most boisterous of farces, Daniel pushed me down the stairs.
    Non, tu blagues!
she’d say. And I would continue.
    Non, je ne blague pas!
Could I tell her? I was at a cocktail party with Daniel at Doctors’ Park, where his lab used to be. It always stank at Doctors’ Park, some war of septic and antiseptic, and I hated it there. He was flirting with a woman, and the woman’s husband turned to me and said in a rambunctious voice, “Well, your husband’s number at work iscertainly a number at work!” He was drunk and winked at me in a bitter way. Then he began to sing “Every Valley Girl shall be exalted,” something meant for his wife to hear. They were going to have a fight when they got home. When Daniel was finished flirting, I went up to him and said, “Let’s go. I need to eat.”
    “Why do you need to eat?” he asked, caught in the theater of stupid assertion that was starting to become our marriage.
    “Why do I
personally
need to eat?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Because, if I don’t eat,” I said angrily, “I’m going to throw up from drinking too much.”
    When we got home, I hurled my purse across the kitchen floor. “I think maybe I should go see Earl,” I said. Earl was Earl Gray, a matrimonial lawyer whom everyone in town called Mr. Tea. I believed myself to be unafraid of rupture. My engagement to Daniel had been years long and full of breakups.
    “Fine,” said Daniel, and we stood there, in the fluorescent light, greenish and out of our minds. I got sharp-tongued and judgmental, an unfortunate but necessary combination. In the beginning was the Word, and it was a reproachful one. “I can’t stand this,” I said finally, “not knowing what you do, with whom, what it means. I can’t live like this. It’s like living with a wolf in the cellar as a pet—except he’s not a pet, in fact he’s not even a wolf, he’s a nuclear power plant!” I was drunk. “One of those shoddily constructed ones!” I marched over and threw open the basement door in some kind of attempt at illustration if not proof. “How many other women have there been? I want to know the truth! The truth!”
    He was still and silent and sorry for me. Then he said, “I can’t tell you the truth.”“What do you mean you can’t tell me the truth? Why can’t you tell me?”
    “Because you’d be shocked,” said Daniel. A look of bemused surliness came over him. “Not
surprised
—just shocked.”
    I lunged. I swung at him with both fists, and he threw me off with such fury and determination that I stumbled backward, into the open stairwell to the basement, my feet hitting air, my whole body falling, pitching backward toward the wolf and the nuclear power plant, the world reeling, both slow and fast, a tiny rectangle of light with Daniel in it, and then just the dark space of the basement, the pummeling thud of the steps and my hip and head and shoes, scraping and sliding, and finally me at the cement bottom, on my side, in shock, saying “Whoops, wope, whoops.”
    Perhaps there was some bit of expectedness, foreseeability, in it; even bad behavior must fall within some unconscious expectation in order for it not to seem monstrous.
    Afterward, Daniel apologized and cried and visited me for hours every day in