The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “A present,” he said.

  “Who from?”

  “Not from. For. Somebody else. Somebody who failed to show up.”

  “A child.”

  He shook his big head. “Not a child. She must have lost her nerve. She was supposed to be here yesterday.”

  “Maybe she realized you were the kind of man who’d give a stuffed bunny to a grown woman.”

  He regarded me through the purple glasses. Amethyst, I thought. My birthstone. Soon I would be twenty-eight. “You are young to be so unkind,” he observed. “She collects stuffed animals.” He turned again to the rabbit and seemed to lose heart. “This is supposed to be a good one.”

  “What makes a good one?”

  “Collectible. But also it’s pleasant.” He plucked it from the chair and hugged it. “Pleasant to hug.”

  “Careful. It’s probably worth more uncuddled.” I put myself on the chair where the rabbit had been. I don’t know why I’d thought the chair might still be warm. He sat on the sofa, in the corner closest to me.

  “I thought you might be her,” he told me. “But you’re not old enough. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “Not nearly old enough.”

  “Do I look like her?”

  “Oh. I mean, I’m not sure.” He made the rabbit look out the window, and so I looked too, but the sheers were closed and all I perceived was light.

  “A listener,” I said. “A caller. You’re meeting somebody. Linda from Chattanooga!”

  “Not Linda from Chattanooga,” he said contemptuously. He put the rabbit beside him, as though aware of how silly he appeared.

  After a while he said, “Dawn from Baton Rouge.”

  I couldn’t remember Dawn from Baton Rouge. “What does she look like?”

  “I only know what she tells me.”

  “Should’ve asked for a picture.”

  He shrugged. “But: cold feet. So it doesn’t matter.”

  “And now you’ve invited me instead,” I said, and crossed my legs.

  “Oh god, no,” he said. “No, darling—”

  The endearment undid me. I was aware then of what I was wearing, a pair of old blue jeans but good ones, a thin black sweater that showed my black bra beneath. Alluring, maybe, to the right demographic, slovenly to the wrong one.

  “Sweetheart,” he said. He got up from the sofa. It was a complicated job: hands to knees and a careful raising of the whole impressive structure of him. “No, let’s have a drink.” He went to the minibar, which was hidden in a cherry cabinet and had already been unlocked, already plundered, already refreshed. Imagine a life in which you could approach a minibar with no trepidation or guilt whatsoever.

  He lifted a midget bottle of vodka and a pygmy can of bloody Mary mix; he didn’t know I’d ordered a bloody Mary because it was one of the only acceptable drinks before 10 A.M. He was a man who drank and ate what he wanted at any time of day.

  “We’ll toast to our betrayers,” he said.

  Because it was something he might say to a midnight caller, I said, “I thought we only ever betrayed ourselves.”

  “Sometimes we look for accomplices. No ice,” he said, turning to me. “To get through this, we’re gonna need some ice.”

  For a moment it felt as though we were in a jail instead of a reasonably nice hotel, sentenced to live out our days—​live out our days being another way to say hurtle toward death.

  * * *

  In those days it was easy to disappear from view. All the people who caused you pain: you might never know what happened to them, unless they were famous, as the radio shrink was, and so I did know, it happened soon afterward, before the snow had melted. He died of a heart attack at another hotel, and Evaline Robinson the Love of His Life flew from Chicago to be with him, and a guest host took over until the guest host was the actual host, and the show slid from call-in advice to unexplained phenomena: UFOs. Bigfoot. I suppose it had been about the unexplained all along. All the best advice is on the Internet these days anyhow. That person who broke my heart might be a priest by now, or happily gay, or finally living openly as a woman, or married twenty-five years, or all of these things at once, or 65 percent of them, as is possible in today’s world. It’s good that it’s possible. A common name plus my bad memory for faces: I wouldn’t know how to start looking or when to stop.

  * * *

  The minibar wasn’t equal to our thirsts. He sat so long, staring out the window, that I wondered whether something had gone wrong. A stroke. The start of ossification. Then, in a spasm of fussiness, he untucked his shirt.

  He said, “In another life—”

  “Yeah?”

  “I would have been a better man. How long?”

  “How long what?”

  “Was your relationship with whoever broke your heart.”

  “He didn’t break my heart.”

  “ ‘Was mean’ to you,” he said, with a playacting look on his face.

  I did the math in my head and rounded up. “A month.”

  “You,” he said in his own voice, which I understood I was hearing for the first time, “have got to be fucking kidding me.”

  It had actually been two and a half weeks. “Don’t say I’m young,” I told him.

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. “But someday something terrible will happen to you and you’ll hate this version of yourself.”

  “I don’t plan on coming in versions.”

  “Jesus, you are young.” Then his voice shifted back to its radio frequency, a fancy chocolate in its little matching, rustling, crenellated wrapper. “How mean was he?”

  “He was nice, right up until the moment he wasn’t.”

  “Well,” he said. “So. You’re making progress. Wish him well.”

  “I wish him well but not that well.”

  But that wasn’t true. I wanted them both dead.

  “The only way forward is to wish peace for those who have wronged you. Otherwise it eats you up.”

  I wished him peace when I thought he was doomed.

  * * *

  How can it be that I felt like this, over so little? It was as though I’d rubbed two sticks together and they’d detonated in my lap.

  * * *

  “I bet you have a nice bathtub,” I said.

  “You should go look.”

  I got myself a dollhouse bottle of bourbon. At some point he’d had ice delivered, in a silver bucket, with tongs. I’d never used tongs before. I’ve never used them since. The serrations bit into the ice, one, two, five cubes, and I poured the bourbon over, a paltry amount that mostly didn’t make its way to the bottom of the glass, it just clung to the ice, so I got another. The bathroom was marble—​marble, crystal, velvet, it would be some years before hotels stopped modeling opulence on Versailles. There was a phone on the wall by the toilet. I ran a bath and got in. This was what I needed, not advice or contradiction, not the return of the person who’d broken my heart, because I would not be able to trust any love that might have been offered. It took me a long time, years, to trust anyone’s.

  The door opened, and another tiny bottle of whiskey came spinning across the floor.

  “Irish is what’s left,” said the radio shrink through the crack of the door.

  “You’re a good man,” I said. “You are one. If you’re worried that you’re not.”

  Then he came in. He was wearing his cowboy boots and slid a little on the marble. Now he looked entirely undone. In another version of this story, I’d be made modest by a little cocktail dress of bubbles, but no person who really loves baths loves bubble baths, nobody over seven, because bubbles are a form of protection. They keep you below the surface. They hide you from your own view. He looked at me in his bathtub with that same disappointed expression: just like you to bathe in your birthday suit.

  “I have some advice for you,” I said to him.

  “Lay it on me,” he said.

  “Lay it on me. How old are you?”r />
  He shook his head. “What’s your advice?”

  “You should call your callers ‘Caller.’ Like, ‘Are you there, Caller?’ ”

  “They like to be called by name.”

  “Overly familiar,” I said.

  “That’s your advice.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He was sitting on the edge of the tub. The ice in his glass, if there’d ever been any, had melted. I had no idea what he might do. Kiss me. Put a hand in the water. His eyebrows had peaks. Up close his mustache was even more impressive. I’d never kissed a man with a mustache. I still haven’t. It’s not that I’m not attracted to men with mustaches, but that men with mustaches aren’t attracted to me.

  “Can I have your maraschino cherry?” I asked.

  “No maraschino cherry.”

  “I love maraschino cherries. All kinds. Sundae kinds, drink kinds, fruit cocktail. Tell me to change my life,” I said to him, and put a damp hand on his knee.

  “I won’t tell you that.”

  “But I need someone to tell me.”

  He put down his glass beside the little bottle of shampoo. Such a big hotel. So many minuscule bottles. “You must change your life,” he said.

  “Good, but I’m going to need some details.”

  “I keep sitting here, I’m going to fall into the water.” He stood up. “You know where to find me.”

  * * *

  There isn’t a moral to the story. Neither of us is in the right. Nothing was resolved. Decades later, it still bothers me.

  * * *

  No way to tell how much later I awoke, facedown in the bath, and came up gasping. I’d fallen asleep or I’d blacked out. It was though the water itself had woken me up, not the water on the surface of me, which wasn’t enough, not even the water over my face, like a hotel pillow, up my nose, in my lungs, but the water that soaked through my bodily tissues, running along fissures and ruining the texture of things, till it finally reached my heart and all my autonomic systems said, Enough, you’re awake now, you’re alive, get out.

  That was one of the few times in my life I might have died and knew it. I fell asleep in a bathtub at twenty-seven. I was dragged out to sea as a small child; I spun on an icy road at eighteen, into a break in oncoming traffic on Route 1 north of Rockland, Maine, and astonishingly stayed out of the ditch; I did not have breast cancer at twenty-nine, when it was explained to me that it was highly unlikely I would, but if I did, it was unlikely, it would be fatal, almost never at your age, but when at your age, rapid and deadly.

  Those are the fake times I almost died. The real ones, neither you nor I ever know about.

  The radio shrink would have said, I guess she died of a broken heart, and I would have ended my life and ruined his, for no reason, just a naked, drunk, dead woman in his room who’d got herself naked, and drunk, and dead.

  But I wouldn’t see the radio shrink again. I was gasping and out of the tub, and somebody was knocking on the bathroom door. I don’t know why knocking—​the door was unlocked—​but the water was sloshing onto the floor, the tap was on, it couldn’t have been on all this time, and I’d soon learn that it was raining into the bathroom below, I had caused weather, and the radio shrink had packed up and left and hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign outside his room and paid for mine. Dawn from Baton Rouge was a disembodied voice again, but the redheaded woman, Eileen, she was here, slipping across the marble, tossing me a robe, turning off the tap, tidying up my life.

  “You’re all right,” she said. I could feel her name tag against my cheek. “You should be ashamed of yourself, but you’re all right now.”

  * * *

  I would like to say that this was when my life changed. No. That came pretty quick, within weeks, but not yet. I would like to say that the suggestion of kindness took. That I went home and wished everyone well. That I forgave myself and found that my self-loathing was the curse: forgiveness transformed me, and I became lovely. But all that would wait.

  He was wrong, the shrink: nothing truly terrible ever happened to me, nothing that would make me cry more than I did in those weeks of aftermath. I’m one of the lucky ones. I know that. I became kinder the way anybody does, because it costs less and is, nine times out of ten, more effective.

  * * *

  At some point it had snowed. The night prior, that morning. It had been hours since I’d been outside. The snow was still white, still falling, the roads marked by the ruts of tires. Soon the plows would be out, scraping down to the pavement. My clothing, left behind by the side of the tub, sopping wet, had been replaced with a stranger’s sweat suit, abandoned by some other guest at the Narcissus Hotel and found by Eileen, a stranger’s socks too, my own shoes and winter coat. I had to walk by the house of the couple who’d been necking everywhere, a story that seemed already in the past. By past, I mean I regretted it, I was already telling the story in my head. The woman I hadn’t been left for drove a little red Honda. There it sat in her driveway, draped in snow. That was all right. It was a common car in those days, and I saw it and its doppelgängers everywhere. Even now a little red Honda seems to have a message for me, though they look nothing like they used to. When will this be over, I wondered as I pushed through the drifts. The humiliation is what I meant. Everything else is over, and all that’s left are the little red Hondas.

  * * *

  You would recognize my voice too. People do, in the grocery store, the airport, over the phone when I call to complain about my gas bill. Your voice, they say, are you—?

  I have one of those voices, I always say. I don’t mind if they recognize me, but I’m not going to help them.

  * * *

  He kept telling me I had to be kind. Why? Why on earth? When life itself was not.

  SCOTT NADELSON

  Liberté

  FROM Chicago Quarterly Review

  In order to devote herself wholly to art, Louise Nevelson—​born Leah Berliawsky—​has left her marriage of thirteen years. She’s been drawing and painting since childhood, but at thirty-four she’s hardly more than a novice. She has never had a show of her work, has not yet discovered her medium. It will be many years before she’s famous for her massive monochromatic assemblages, considered a queen of modern sculpture. Famous too for her bold style—​colorful headscarves and enormous fake eyelashes—​and brash, uninhibited speech. When asked, in her late sixties, how she’s maintained such vitality for so long, she’ll reply, Why, lots of fucking, of course.

  In the early summer of 1933, however, she’s both unknown and relatively inexperienced with men. Since separating from her husband, Charles, a shipping executive whose family has oppressed her since their wedding—​wealthy and cultured Jews who cherish art and music but laugh at those who dream of making it—​she’s had only one affair. Her lover was another American businessman, whom she met on her first crossing to Europe a year ago, her first, that is, since emigrating from Russia at six years old. And though the newness of the affair excited her, as well as its illicit charge—​the businessman was married, his wife joining him in several weeks—​she found sleeping with him largely dispiriting. Like Charles, he was overly solicitous, asking constantly after her comfort. With both she has just barely glimpsed what she guesses to be the dark and thrilling possibilities of sex, the struggle and near violence of it, terror and triumph outweighing simple pleasure.

  She found her three months in Berlin, chaste while studying with Hans Hofmann, far more rewarding than those hours naked in a stranger’s cabin. And so now she decides to make another trip, this time planning to spend several months in Paris to learn contemporary technique. So at least she has told herself, though a part of her knows she may never return to New York. She will do whatever she must to become the artist she has long believed herself capable of becoming, no matter the sacrifices.

  * * *

  About leaving Charles, she feels little remorse. She was always honest with him, and he knew what she wanted when they married. If
he didn’t believe her when she confessed her ambition, that is his fault, not hers. He acquiesced to the separation with little argument, though she knows he is hoping she will soon come to her senses and return to him. Or, more likely, that she will find it too difficult to survive on her own, that his money, if not his love and loyalty, will draw her back. But unlike her shipboard lover, whose manufacturing interests were only mildly affected by the crash, Charles may not have money for long. His family’s business has suffered enormous losses over the past four years and is now on the verge of collapse. More than her own survival, she fears for his. What will Charles do with himself if he can no longer spend his time tracking shipments and accounts? What purpose will guide his days?

  Any discomfort caused by deserting her husband, however, is minor compared to the guilt she carries over abandoning her son. Myron—​who prefers to be called Mike—​is nine years old and bewildered by the changes thrust upon him. Last summer she sent him to stay with her parents in Maine, and though she tried to tell herself he’d be perfectly happy there, her mother spoiling him with her baking, her father, a builder, teaching him how to frame a house, she nevertheless imagined him smothered by the same boredom that had driven her to marry the first wealthy man she met, when she wasn’t yet twenty-one. At the time Charles lived on the twelfth floor of a building on Riverside Drive, and she believed it was the city she was marrying as much as the man, the opportunities such a move would afford her. If she’d known he would soon pack her off to the suburbs, to be surrounded by his brothers and sisters-in-law and cousins, who would judge every word she spoke, she would have refused his offer instantly, or so at least she tells herself now.