The Best American Short Stories 2014

by Jennifer Egan

  “What a surprise,” Gordy said. “Nice to see you.”

  “Nice to see you,” I echoed.

  “I’d rise, but I took Viagra and now I can’t get my leg to move,” Franklin said. He had settled on this as the joke of the day.

  “Professor Chadwick?” Gordy said. “Franklin Chadwick, right? Gordon Miller. I was president of Latin Club.”

  “That’s right!” Franklin said. “And back then, we were both in love with the same girl!”

  Gordy blushed and took a step back. “That’s right. Good to see you. Sorry to interrupt.” He was not wearing a wedding ring. He turned and strode back toward the faraway table.

  “Why did you say that?” I asked. “You were never in love with me. You were always flirting with Louisa Kepper. You paid her to cut your grass so you could stare at her in shorts and work boots. She knew it too.”

  “I wasn’t in love with you, but now it seems like I should have been, because where are they now? Who keeps in touch? I never hear, even when a poem is published. It was just a job, apparently. Like a bean burrito’s a bean burrito.”

  “Here you go, three beers. Should I pour for you?” the waiter asked.

  “I’ll take mine in the bottle,” Franklin said, reaching up. The waiter handed him the bottle.

  “Yes, thank you,” I said. The waiter poured two-thirds of a glass of beer and set the bottle beside my glass. “Lunch is coming,” he said.

  “I’ll tell you what I’d like: a shot of tequila on the side.”

  “We only have a beer and wine license. I’m sorry,” the waiter said.

  “Then let me have a glass of red wine on the side,” Franklin said.

  “OK,” the waiter said.

  “Take it easy with the drinking. I’ve got to get you back in one piece,” I said. “Also, I don’t want to feel like an enabler. I want us to have a good time, but we can do that sober.”

  “‘Enabler’? Don’t use phoney words like that. They’re ugly, Maude.”

  I was startled when he used my name. I’d been “Champ” in his poetry seminar. We were all “Champ.” The biggest champ had now published six books. I had published one, though it had won the Yale Series. We didn’t talk about the fact that I’d stopped writing poetry.

  “I hope you understand that he and I”—he tilted his head in the direction of my ex-husband—“had a man-to-man on the telephone, and I told him where we’d be eating today.”

  “I wonder what he is doing here. I thought he lived in Santa Fe.”

  “Probably got tired of all the sun, and the turquoise and coyotes. Decided to trade it in for snow, and a gray business suit and squirrels.”

  “Did you see if she had a wedding ring on?” I asked.

  “Didn’t notice. When I’m with one pretty girl, what do I care about another? Though there’s that great story by Irwin Shaw, ‘The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.’ I don’t suppose anyone even mentions Irwin Shaw anymore. They might, if only he’d thought to call his story ‘The Amazingly Gorgeous Femme Fatales Provoke Envy and Lust as Men Go Mad.’” He turned to the waiter, who’d appeared with the bean burrito and the chicken enchilada I’d ordered.

  “Sir, will you find occasion to drop by that table in the corner and see if the lady is wearing a wedding ring?” Franklin said quietly into the waiter’s ear.

  “No problem,” the waiter said. He put down the plates. He lifted two little dishes of sauce from the tray and put them on the table. “No joke, my brother José is the cook. I hope you like it. I’m getting your wine now.”

  The first bite of enchilada was delicious. I asked Franklin if he’d like to taste it. He shook his head no. He waited until the waiter returned with the glass of wine, then took a big sip before lifting his burrito, or trying to. It was too big. He had to pick up a fork. He didn’t use the knife to cut it, just the fork. I’d studied him for so long, almost nothing surprised me anymore, however small the gesture. I had a fleeting thought that perhaps part of the reason I’d stopped writing was that I studied him, instead. But now I was also noticing little lapses, which made everything different for both of us. I liked the conversational quirks, not the variations or the repetitions. Two months ago, when I’d visited, bringing fried chicken and a bottle of his favorite white wine, Sancerre (expensive stuff), he’d told me about the receptionist, though that time he’d told me she’d had the surgery in Denmark.

  The waiter came back and made his report: “Not what I’d call a wedding ring. It’s a dark stone, I think maybe amethyst, but I don’t think it’s a wedding ring, and she has gold rings on two other fingers, also.”

  “We assume, then, she’s just wearing rings.”

  The waiter nodded. “You want another glass of wine, just let me know.”

  “He and I had a man-to-man last night and he promised to keep me supplied,” he said. “I told you the guy with the Messerschmitt gets drug deliveries? Thugs that arrive together, like butch nuns on testosterone. Two, three in the morning. Black guys, dealers. They’re all How-ya-doin’-man best friends with the receptionist. That’s the night guy. Hispanic. Had a breakdown, lives with his brother. Used to work at Luxor in Vegas.”

  “Take a bite of your burrito,” I said, and instantly felt like a mother talking to her child. The expression on his face told me he thought I was worse than that. He said nothing and finished his wine. There was a conspicuous silence.

  “Everything good?” the waiter said. He’d just seated a table of three men, one of them choosing to keep on his wet coat. He sat at the table, red-nosed, looking miserable.

  Leaning forward to look, I’d dropped my napkin. As I bent to pick it up, the waiter appeared, unfurling a fresh one like a magician who’d come out of nowhere. I half expected a white bird to fly up. But my mind was racing: there’d been a stain on Franklin’s sock. Had he stepped in something on the way to the restaurant, or was it, as I feared, blood? I waited until the nice waiter wasn’t looking and pushed back the tablecloth enough to peek. The stain was bright red, on the foot with the unfastened Velcro.

  “Franklin, your foot,” I said. “Does it hurt? I think your foot is bleeding.”

  “My feet don’t feel. That’s the problem,” he said.

  I pushed back my chair and inspected the foot more carefully. Yes, a large area of the white sock was bloody. I was really frightened.

  “Eat your lunch,” he said. “And I’ll eat mine. Don’t worry.”

  “It might . . . it could be a problem. Has this ever happened before?”

  He didn’t answer. He was now using both his fork and knife to cut his burrito.

  “Maybe I could run to CVS and find some bandages. That’s what I’ll do.”

  But I didn’t move. I’d seen a drugstore walking to the restaurant, but where? I could ask the waiter. I’d ask the waiter and hope he didn’t know why I was asking. He might want to be too helpful, he might insist on walking us to a cab, I might not get to eat my lunch, though the thought of taking another bite revolted me now. I’d wanted to say something meaningful, have what people think of as a lovely lunch. Were we going to end up at the hospital? Wasn’t that what we were going to have to do? There was a fair amount of blood. I got up, sure that I had to do something, but what? Wouldn’t it be sensible to call his doctor?

  “Everything OK?” the waiter said. I found that I was standing in the center of the room, looking over my shoulder toward the table where Franklin was eating his lunch.

  “Fine, thank you. Is there a drugstore nearby?”

  “Right across the street,” he said. “Half a block down.”

  “Good. OK, I’m going to run to the drugstore,” I said, “but maybe you shouldn’t bring him anything else to drink until”—and then I fainted. When my eyes opened, my ex-husband was holding my hand, and the pretty woman was gazing over his shoulder, as the waiter fanned me with a menu. The man in the wet wool coat was saying my name—everyone must have heard it when Franklin yelped in surprise, though he couldn’t
rise, he saw it with his eyes, my toppling was unwise . . .

  “Hey, Maude, hey hey, Maude,” Wet Coat was saying. “OK, Maude, you with us? Maude, Maude? You’re OK, open your eyes if you can. Can you hear me, Maude?”

  Franklin, somehow, was standing. He shimmered in my peripheral vision. There was blood on the rug. I saw it but couldn’t speak. I had a headache and the thrumming made a pain rhyme: He couldn’t rise / He saw it with his eyes. And it was so odd, so truly odd that my ex-husband was holding my hand again, after one hundred years away, in the castle of Luxor. It all ran together. I was conscious, but I couldn’t move.

  “We had sex under the table, which you were kind enough to pretend not to observe, and she’s got her period,” Franklin said. I heard him say it distinctly, as if he was spitting out the words. And I saw that the waiter was for the first time flummoxed. He looked at me as if I could give him a clue, but damn it, all I was managing to whisper was “OK,” and I wasn’t getting off the floor.

  “The color’s coming back to your face,” my ex-husband said. “What happened? Do you know?”

  “Too much sun and turquoise,” I said, and though at first he looked very puzzled, he got my drift, until he lightened his grip on my wrist, then began lightly knocking his thumb against it, as if sending Morse code: tap, tap-tap, tap. He and the pretty woman stayed with me even after I could stand, after the waiter took me into his brother’s office and helped them get me into an armchair. For some reason, the cook gave me his business card and asked for mine. My ex-husband got one out of a little envelope in my wallet and handed it to him, obviously thinking it was as strange a request as I did. “She didn’t have nothing to drink, one sip of beer,” the waiter said, defending me. “She saw blood, I don’t know, sometimes the ladies faint at the sight of blood.”

  “He’s such a crude old coot,” my ex-husband said. “I should be impressed with your loyalty, but I never knew what you saw in him.”

  Savannah the receptionist came for Franklin, and he went to the hospital—but not before paying the bill from a wad of money I didn’t know he was carrying, and not before taking a Mexican hat off the wall, insisting that he was “just borrowing it, like an umbrella.”

  “There might be an Indian uprising if we stop him,” the waiter’s brother said to him. “Let him go.” He called out to Franklin, “Hey, pard, you keep that hat and wear it if they storm the Alamo.”

  I thought about that, and thought about it, and finally thought José hadn’t really meant anything by it, that a little shoplifting was easy to deal with, especially when the culprit announced what he was doing.

  With the worried transgendered woman beside him, and Franklin holding her arm, it was amazing that he could shuffle in a way that allowed him to bend enough to kiss my cheek. “Awake, Princess,” he said, “and thank God our minions were all too smart to call an ambulance.”

  He refused dialysis and died at the end of April, which, for him, certainly was the cruelest month. I spoke to him the day after I fainted in the restaurant, and he told me they’d put leeches on his foot; the second time, several weeks later, he was worried that it might have to be amputated. “You’re the ugly stepsister who crammed my foot into the slipper,” he said. “And time’s the ugly villain that made me old. I was a proper shit-kicker in my Luccheses. I would have had you under the table back in the day. But you’re right, I never loved you. Maybe you’ll find something to write about when I’m dead, because you sure aren’t kicking your own shit while I’m still alive.”

  If you can believe it, that Christmas I got a card from the Mexican restaurant, signed by staff I’d never even met. It could have been a crib sheet for remembering that painful day: a silver Christmas tree with glitter that came off on my fingertips and some cute little animals clustered at the base, wearing caps with pompoms and tiny scarves. A squirrel joined them, standing on its haunches, holding sheet music, as Santa streaked overhead, Rudolph leading the way. Rudolph. What had become of Rudolph?

  There was no memorial service that I heard of, though a few people called or wrote me when they saw the obituary. “Was he still full of what he called ‘piss and vinegar’ up to the end? You kept in touch with him, didn’t you?” Carole Kramer (who’d become a lawyer in New York) wrote me. I wrote her back that he’d had to give up his cowboy boots, but I could assure her he was still full of piss and vinegar, and didn’t say that it was an inability to piss that finally killed him, and that he’d drunk himself to death, wine, vinegar, it didn’t really matter.

  He’d mentioned squirrels the last day I’d seen him, though, so now when I saw them I paid more attention, even if everyone in Washington thought of them as rats with bushy tails. I even bought one a roasted chestnut on a day I was feeling sentimental, but the squirrel dropped it like it was poison, and I could see from the gleam in the eye of the guy cooking the nuts that he was glad I’d gotten my comeuppance.

  Then winter ended and spring came, and I thought, even if I don’t believe there’s a poem in anything anymore, maybe I’ll write a story. A lot of people do that when they can’t seem to figure out who or what they love. It might be an oversimplification, but they seem to write poetry when they do know.

  T. C. BOYLE

  The Night of the Satellite

  FROM The New Yorker

  WHAT WE WERE ARGUING about that night—and it was late, very late, 3:10 A.M. by my watch—was something that had happened nearly twelve hours earlier. A small thing, really, but by this time it had grown out of all proportion and poisoned everything we said, as if we didn’t have enough problems already. Mallory was relentless. And I was feeling defensive and maybe more than a little paranoid. We were both drunk. Or, if not drunk, at least loosened up by what we’d consumed at Chris Wright’s place in the wake of the incident and then at dinner after and the bar after that. I could smell the nighttime stink of the river. I looked up and watched the sky expand overhead and then shrink down to fit me like a safety helmet. A truck went blatting by on the interstate, and then it was silent, but for the mosquitoes singing their blood song, while the rest of the insect world screeched either in protest or accord, I couldn’t tell which, thrumming and thrumming, until the night felt as if it were going to burst open and leave us shattered in the grass.

  “You asshole,” she snarled.

  “You’re the asshole,” I said.

  “I hate you.”

  “Ditto,” I said. “Ditto and square it.”

  The day had begun peaceably enough, a Saturday, the two of us curled up and sleeping late, the shades drawn and the air conditioner doing its job. If it hadn’t been for the dog, we might have slept right on into the afternoon, because we’d been up late the night before, at a club called Gabe’s, where we’d danced, with the assistance of well rum and two little white pills Mallory’s friend Mona had given her, until we sweated through our clothes, and the muscles of our calves—my calves, anyway—felt as if they’d been surgically removed, hammered flat, and sewn back in place. But the dog, Nome—a husky, one blue eye, one brown—kept laying the wedge of his head on my side of the bed and emitting a series of insistent whines, because his bladder was bursting and it was high time for his morning run.

  My eyes flashed open, and, despite the dog’s needs and the first stirrings of a headache, I got up with a feeling that the world was a hospitable place. After using the toilet and splashing some water on my face, I found my shorts on the floor where I’d left them, unfurled the dog’s leash, and took him out the door. The sun was high. The dog sniffed and evacuated. I led him down to the corner store, picked up a copy of the newspaper and two coffees to go, retraced my steps along the quiet sun-dappled street, mounted the stairs to the apartment, and settled back into bed. Mallory was sitting up waiting for me, still in her nightgown but with her glasses on—boxy little black-framed things that looked like a pair of the generic reading glasses you find in the drugstore but were in fact ground to the optometrist’s specifications and which she wore a
s a kind of combative fashion statement. She stretched and smiled when I came through the door and murmured something that might have been “Good morning,” though, as I say, the morning was all but gone. I handed her a coffee and the Life section of the newspaper. Time slowed. For the next hour there were no sounds but for a rustle of newsprint and the gentle soughing suck of hot liquid through a small plastic aperture. We may have dozed. It didn’t matter. It was summer. And we were on break.

  The plan was to drive out to the farmhouse our friends Chris and Anneliese Wright were renting from the farmer himself and laze away the hours sipping wine and maybe playing croquet or taking a hike along the creek that cut a crimped line through the cornfields, which rose in an otherwise unbroken mass as far as you could see. After that, we’d play it by ear. It was too much trouble to bother with making dinner—and too hot, up in the nineties, and so humid the air hung on your shoulders like a flak jacket—and if Chris and Anneliese didn’t have anything else in mind, I was thinking of persuading them to join us at the vegetarian place in town for the falafel plate, with shredded carrots, hummus, tabbouleh, and the like, and then maybe hit a movie or head back over to Gabe’s until the night melted away. Fine. Perfect. Exactly what you wanted from a midsummer’s day in the Midwest, after the summer session had ended and you’d put away your books for the three-week respite before the fall semester started up.

  We didn’t have jobs, not in any real sense—jobs were a myth, a rumor—so we held on in grad school, semester after semester, for lack of anything better to do. We got financial aid, of course, and accrued debt on our student loans. Our car, a hand-me-down from Mallory’s mother, needed tires and probably everything else into the bargain. We wrote papers, graded papers, got A’s and B’s in the courses we took, and doled out A’s and B’s in the courses we taught. Sometimes we felt as if we were actually getting somewhere, but the truth was, like most people, we were just marking time.