The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  There was no blood, but it hurt the first time even though Boy 19 was gentle, and it was awkward for a few times after that. Then it got good. It changed the way you felt about Boy 19: now when you told him you loved him, you thought you meant it (before, it had just been an exciting thing to say to someone and to hear). It seemed to change the way he felt too—he was sleeker, more confident, a little more careless with you. You got more careful, anxious. Sometimes when you called him at night the phone rang and rang.

  That summer you went to France to be a waitress at a music festival, and he went to the uncle in Edinburgh again. You were living with a French family, finding your French was not as good as you’d thought it was, nor apparently was your voice; cowed by the jostling ambition at the festival; lonely, hungry, missing your parents, missing Boy 19. He wrote to you, but less often as the summer went along. He also called you occasionally, using what turned out to be, to your chagrin and the baffled outrage of your French hosts, a stolen credit card number. You were discovering love as inertia, and discovering that inertia could be something passionate and fierce, a stubborn persistence in adhering to a vantage point. At home, in your parents’ bedroom, there was a painting of a bowl of fruit; one day as a child you had looked at it and seen a face—two eyes, a nose, a mouth—and since then you had never been able to see the fruit bowl, only the face. Now, it seemed, no matter what he did or how he treated you, you could only see Boy 19 as the boy you loved.

  You were supposed to meet him in Paris for a few days at the end of the summer. He’d stopped calling you once the credit card fraud had been discovered, and you kept waiting for him to write and let you know when and where in Paris he wanted to meet, but no letter came. Did he still love you? Of course, he said when you were both back in America. Things had gotten complicated and busy, and he’d lost the address. Of course he’d wanted to see you. It had all just gotten away from him. Relax, why didn’t you?

  To be talked to that way. To have caused someone to talk to you that way. It was a chicken-or-egg question: which came first, your anxiety or his evasive brusqueness?

  Just tell me, you kept saying, and he said: There’s nothing to tell. He had bought a car and liked to drive it, very fast, up and down the East Coast. On this particular weekend, he had picked you up in New York and was driving you down to the house where his dead grandparents had summered in Maryland. Please, you said again, late that night at a rest stop in New Jersey, I know something’s wrong, just tell me. And he told you: He’d fallen in love with someone else. Your mouth was full of mashed potatoes, which you struggled to swallow. You cried, you asked questions, and he answered with a monosyllabic reticence that seemed partly an attempt (futile) at chivalry and partly self-importance. She taught the calisthenics class he had started taking last spring. No, nothing had happened back then—he’d noticed she was attractive, that’s all. She was forty-one. She rode a motorcycle. Divorced, with a nineteen-year-old son. Yes, he knew he and the son were the same age, and yes, he agreed it was a little weird. No, nothing had happened even now, but he could tell that it was going to. Then you were out in the parking lot and he had his arms around you—ssssh, ssssh, stop, it’s going to be all right—but you couldn’t stop, and you didn’t want him comforting you for this thing that he was the cause of; but without him there was no comfort; you clung to him and soaked him and scared the hell out of him, and scared the hell out of yourself, out there under this big dull sky in the sulphursmelling middle of nowhere.

  In the grandparents’ empty, cold house, you insisted on a guest room, not the big bedroom where he wanted you to stay with him; but then you fucked him on the narrow guest room bed, as if that could hold him or remind him of what he would be missing. It was a plea, and a deeper excursion into self-abasement; but you did it again in the morning. In between you stayed awake for most of the night, alone in the mothball-smelling guest room with its ancient silverygray carpet stained white in places by the old messes of long-dead pets, reading a warped, swollen paperback you found in a shelf, an account of soccer players surviving after a plane crash in the Andes by eating the flesh of their dead teammates. In the morning you had a headache and your eyeballs hurt from crying. You told him not to call you again. Even if nothing happened with the calisthenics teacher, you were through.

  You proved to yourself that you meant it by seducing Boy 22, an act that was barely premeditated; he was known as someone who had a lot of casual sex, and you went to his room one afternoon with an apple, took a bite, and then held it out so that he could take a bite. Afterward, you and the sheets were littered with black hairs. When you were dressed again and ready to leave, he said, “Well, it’s been real,” and you thought, yeah, exactly. Casual sex was too casual for you. It had been purely factual, like your old notions of insertions and angles, no longer alarming the way it would have been once, but also uninteresting. The job had gotten done, but you could do that job by yourself at your convenience without involving another person.

  This was where things stood when Boy 19 called you again. You’d been alone for several months by then. For the first time ever, you had no one in your sights. Your romantic education, at once so eventful and so tame, seemed exhaustive, complete. You couldn’t imagine, nor did you want, further permutations.8

  So you were surprised, but not otherwise moved—not angry, not thrilled (well, maybe a little gratified)—to hear from Boy 19 late in the fall of your sophomore year. He said he missed you. You asked about the calisthenics teacher, and he said yes, he’d been seeing her, but, he repeated, he missed you. Then he made a comparison between her and you that was crude and unsporting and morally bankrupt—you felt compelled to defend her, pointing out that she had given birth—but that also, shamefully, turned you on; and when he said again, lowering his voice almost to a whisper, that he missed you and wanted to see you again, you didn’t say yes, but you didn’t quite say no. There were more phone calls in the weeks after that, and eventually he came down to New York, and you went up to Boston once more.

  In some ways those were the best weekends you ever had with him: pleasant, free, a little melancholy, not looking forward or backward. You both knew you wouldn’t stay together.9 You spent the time in bed. Sometimes he would stroke your hair while you lay with your cheek against the hollow just below his rib cage. But sometimes he would say something that would make you wonder why you were doing this—why you had done any of it, all that yearning and energy and self-reproach spent on people who seemed central and then didn’t really figure at all, and why you were seeing him, even temporarily—like the time he said he would have to ask his analyst (he had started seeing one after you and he had broken up the first time) to explain why he was now able to let himself come in your mouth when, no matter how much he might have wanted to, he never could before. You were still lying next to him when he said it; you had never felt lonelier, but you could not figure out how to answer him: how to begin to say what you meant, or where it might end.

  EMILY CARROLL

  Our Neighbor’s House

  FROM Through the Woods

  INÉS FERNÁNDEZ MORENO

  TRANSLATED BY RICHARD V. MCGEHEE

  Miracle in Parque Chas

  FROM The Southern Review

  THAT NIGHT THE STREETS in the little barrio of Parque Chas reminded me more than ever of La Chacarita cemetery. Those modest little houses of Berlín and Varsovia Streets, their narrow windows and gray walls, no doubt corresponded to the marble and stone vaults of the neighboring cemetery. Houses a little smaller, of course, a little more silent, but essentially the same.

  Vault or small house, each had the same proud enclosure of private property, the same persistent desire for a front yard, the pot of flowers, the same respectful barrier at the entrance. Even the garden dwarfs and the dogs on the terraces maintained their relationship with certain figures of virgins or of guardian angels in the friezes of the mausoleums.

  I admit I was depressed.

  A few d
ays earlier I had found myself out of work, and the Brazilians were beating us, 1–0, in the final round of the Copa América. That’s what the voice of the commentator was telling me, drilling my brain through the earpieces of my Walkman. Maybe that’s why that cloud of funereal thoughts were arranging themselves to wear down my spirits, in the background, but uniformly in the direction of sadness and defeat.

  I arrived at Triunvirato Avenue, looking for an open stand to buy cigarettes, and I stopped in front of the display window of a store that sold household articles.

  A group of six or seven men was following the action of the game that appeared on the illuminated screens of several television sets. It always made me a little uneasy to see these solitary men; it’s easy to imagine them hungry, cold, suffering with a desire that attains only the crumbs of comfort. In spite of everything, within the deserted and dimly lit avenue, the group seemed an island of hope for humanity.

  I stood behind all of them, and, like them, I became mesmerized by the mute images on the screens. I had the doubtful advantage of sound, with the voice of the commentator detailing the movement of the players. That’s to say, the errors of our team and the devastating advance of the Brazilians.

  Suddenly the lights blinked, the screens faded to a final, luminous glow, and afterward they went completely black, leaving us disconsolate and gasping like puppies that had been pulled off a teat. I don’t know why, maybe because I was the one who had arrived last, all their faces turned toward me. I shrugged my shoulders, a little disconcerted.

  “A fuse must have blown,” I proposed.

  They kept looking at me. What did they want from me? I knew little or nothing about electricity.

  “Come on, man,” an old guy wearing a gray beret finally revealed the situation. “Since you’re still connected, tell us how the game is going.”

  As children we’ve all had the fantasy of being soccer commentators, we’ve all tried, at some time, to attain the impressive velocity necessary to follow the path of a ball and the players running after it. I don’t deny it. But to have myself launched like that to narrate, suddenly and without any preparation, that’s another story.

  Some of them advanced a step toward me; I didn’t know, at that point, whether with a menacing attitude or probably they were just trying to position themselves better. I looked at them. I saw in the front of the group a youngster with rings under his eyes, wrapped up in a green scarf, a heavyset, tough-looking man in a leather jacket, a light-complexioned man with a worn face and a folded newspaper under his arm . . .

  They were dejected men, punished sufficiently by the politicians, by the lack of work and of hope, by the clumsiness of our national team, and now, on top of everything else, by this unexpected power outage that left them again outside the game.

  It was a duty of solidarity to grab that ball.

  I began timidly to repeat the words of the commentator.

  “How well the Brazilian did it . . .” I said, “what precision . . . the indirect kick is for Carvalho . . . there comes so-and-so . . . and so-and-so . . . and so-and-so . . . the striker heads with the left side of his head . . . it’s a curving, centering shot . . . seeking the head of number nine . . . the ball’s in the area . . . there’s danger of a goal . . .”

  I had barely begun the account when I realized that my words, sluggish at the start, were heating up, as if they became determined and even reckless—one time a friend who studied acting had commented to me that a voice used publicly becomes animated as from an outside force; it falls in love with its own lullaby and ends up creating its own game.

  I was almost the first to be surprised when, instead of calling out the powerful goal by Gongalvez that put Brazil ahead, 2–0, I made the ball curve a few centimeters in the air and strike the crossbar.

  “The ball hits the crossbar . . .” I said, “incredible, gentlemen,” I added, “incredible . . . Argentina is saved miraculously from a new goal by the player from Rio de Janeiro.”

  My crowd sighed in relief and I kept on going. “There comes Lefty . . . he passes to Angelini . . . Angelini to Pedrete . . . Pedrete to Pascualito . . . Pascualito . . . Pascualitoooo.”

  Argentina’s offense would have continued its advance cleanly if it were not for Quindim, the Brazilian marker, a huge mulatto who slides over the field like an eel. “Quindim crosses to his right, engages Pascualito, takes the ball away and launches it far into the Argentine area . . .”

  It wasn’t so easy to change the direction in which my words were rolling. So I said, “Quindim on the right, tries to intercept . . . Pascualito feints right and left . . . the mulatto falls and rolls on the grass . . . and now nobody stops Pascualito, who arrives now to the goal area, shoots, and goooooal! goooooal! gooooooooooooooooooooooooal!!!! By Argentinaaaa!!!!” I cry, “that puts the score one to one with the Brazilians, greeeaaat Pascualito!!!” I note, “with a goal won sincerely through the emotion of obtaining the tie.”

  My crowd jumps for joy. The shouting grows until it shakes the unperturbed quiet of Triunvirato Avenue.

  The retired man pulls off his beret and swings it in an enormous arc, as if he wanted to salute the entire universe with it.

  The haggard kid in the scarf jumps onto the back of the big guy, who grabs his legs and whirls him around several times, piggyback. Farther back, a group of three or four hug each other and jump rhythmically. I, myself, run toward the corner with my arms over my head. A motorcyclist, infected by our enthusiasm, stops at the traffic light and blows his horn.

  The festivities quiet down as soon as I resume my commentary, but they persist in the shining eyes and expectant attitude of the group.

  With vertiginous anxiety, I understand that it all remains now in my hands, in my voice. That I can cause them to fall again into despair or make them live moments of glory.

  In the middle of the second half, with the impulse of the cold and our enthusiasm, we move along Triunvirato toward La Haya. I’m out in front, followed by the crowd of fans, recording with increasing professionalism the incredible turnaround of the Argentinean team.

  It’s enough for me to correct the announcer slightly. When he speaks of the confident advance “of the Brazilians,” I say, “of the Argentineans.” When he says, “Bertorto went to sleep on that pass,” I say, “Das Portas went to sleep.” When he says, “Uhhh how the Argentinean goalie let that shot go through!” I say, “Uhhh how the Brazilian goalie let that ball through!”

  A couple kissing slowly on La Haya joins the crowd of fans. On Berna Street an old man in a wheelchair comes to his door and applauds us. A man who’s walking two sausage dogs on the sidewalk of Berlín Street begins to follow us. A woman with uncombed hair and in house slippers runs along Varsovia and reaches us. Also two boys who are smoking a joint on Amsterdam. Like the piper of Hamelin, the harmonious and consistent exhibition of the Argentinean team proves to be an irresistible music.

  We arrive at the Plaza Éxodo Jujeño. Although summer is now in the past, there’s a reminiscence of jasmine in the air. Then I stop listening to the commentator, the one who had spoken only to me, with the arrogant and strident voice of someone who believes himself owner of the truth. I don’t need him. He irritates me with his common voice and his false goals. The members of my congregation listen only to my voice, they see by means of my words, they rise up and enjoy and fear, but only to return to jubilation because, like never before, the action adjusts itself to an intelligent and rigorous strategy: the forwards attack, the defenders defend, the goalkeeper saves goals.

  The Brazilian errors, on the other hand, multiply.

  They misdirect passes, they’re taken in by our fakes, they set up their back line badly, they miss two penalty kicks that should have been sure things . . .

  The Argentinean team perfects its technique; it becomes imaginative, they make plays—a shot between the legs of an opponent, a shot with the toe, a goal from midfield—that will be remembered for years. The goals, in this fiesta of greatne
ss, are almost unimportant and are made with startling regularity. We win 5–1.

  Neither the fog that descends on the Parque nor the weak glow from the streetlights is able to darken the joy. On the contrary, they bestow the dimension of a mysterious epic on the hugs, the unfurled jackets and scarves, the waving hands, on those who fall to their knees, cross themselves, kiss each other, and sing and dance.