The Best American Short Stories 2018

by Roxane Gay

  This feeling of being stuck persisted, and Curtis was horrified by it. When the long set of lovers’ rock ended and released them, he averted his eyes from the sapphire dress going loose again between Lena’s thighs. He knew of nothing else to do but go back to the bar and order another drink, and when she followed him there he ordered one for her as well. It was what anyone in the role of her phantom would do. Her drink was cooled by a sculpted sphere of ice that had the look of perfection and permanence, a little moon displayed in glass. When Lena drank she did so deeply, and the moon slid, and it wet the tip of her nose. Curtis’s drink had no ice. When he took it up he tilted it so the liquor fell just short of his lips and he could inhale its heat before drinking.

  What did she see when she looked at him? Added weight had rounded his face, and a beard darkened it. His hair had receded above the temples so that a blunt arrow pointed down at his nose. What would Marvin look like now if he were alive?

  Curtis avoided Lena’s eyes, hoping the rest of their time together would pass like this—in silence. He tried to lose himself in the music that was playing, but it wouldn’t permit him access; its borders were dense, its patterns impossible to predict.

  “I know who you are,” Lena said. “You.”

  Curtis was overcome with a feeling that by entering this place he had once known, he had also elected for so much more. He sat and was helpless. Everything around him—the music, the carnal laughter, the spinning stellar lights—all of it was a frenzy. He’d forgotten this basic truth, that freedom was a wilderness.

  There was no place for them to go. He explained that he was living with his mother for a little while, listened as Lena said that her son was at home. Then she surprised Curtis by suggesting they get a room. Just for a couple of hours, she said. She was lonely. It wasn’t all that late yet. The nightclub itself would be open until four, and her son knew not to expect her home until after that. He’d already be asleep anyway, and she’d still wake up before he did. “All that boy’s worried about is having his breakfast ready in the morning,” she said. She told him she made pancakes and bacon on Sundays.

  Curtis hadn’t expected the drinks to be so expensive, so only six dollars remained in his pocket. His dignity would have been one reason to tell Lena no. Andre was another, but he was a reason to say yes too. Getting mixed up in her night wasn’t the best way to get closer to the boy, but it might be the only way. “I spent all the money I had on me,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” Lena said. “I got it.”

  Their motel was called the Galaxy Inn. A strange smell hung in the air of their room, which was nearly as small as his cell had been. A coat of silver paint had been recently applied to the walls, but there was something else, an organic pungency. Little effort had been made to mask the presence of former occupants. There were useless dials on the walls, mysterious blinking lights. Curtis felt trapped in some television show from the 1960s, a science fiction program he watched in syndication as a child.

  Lena lay next to Curtis with her back to him. She was abruptly calm, abruptly still. He couldn’t even hear the sound of her breathing. He’d been surprised by her wildness, which exceeded his. The rough sheet covered her to the waist, displaying her long neck and the slick coins of her spine. Curtis felt the urge to yank the spine out of her, to scatter those coins all over the bed and catch a true glimpse of her inner workings under the room’s dimmed bulbs of winey light.

  “I should go soon,” Lena said. “See about my son.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  She sat up. “Andre?”

  “That boy’s asleep. You got time.”

  She studied his face. “What’s in that head of yours?”

  Curtis shrugged and made himself hold her hand. “Come on, tell me a little something.”

  Lena began hesitantly, but her initial vague description of her son eventually turned into a long complaint about her challenges with him, how easily she seemed to make him upset. He was a good child, she said, but their relationship was worsening and it was difficult to manage things on her own. “It’s not just that he’s a teenager,” she said. “It’s more than that.”

  “He’s probably just girl-crazy,” he said.

  “Uh-uh, I don’t think so,” she said, and went on, speaking with more kindness about him now.

  When she was done, Curtis insisted on giving his view of things. The question of obedience was on his mind, but nothing he said was profound. Still, Lena listened to everything he said and seemed thoughtful when he fell silent again.

  “You know,” she told him, “if it was my boy you were interested in, there were easier ways than sniffing after my behind. You could’ve just walked up to him on the street and told him who you were.”

  Curtis straightened against the headboard. To him that sounded like the most difficult thing in the world. “I was just looking out for Marvin’s people, that’s all.” He felt embarrassed, a little angry. “I know it’s not the usual way,” he added.

  Lena shook her head. “Look at you,” she said. “I know you been gone, but you not invisible. People talk. I got eyes.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Long enough to think plenty on whether to do anything about it.”

  Curtis gestured at the blinking walls of the room, a tired old version of the future. He gestured down at the bed. “This what you decided to do about it?”

  “Well, you were there, sniffing as usual,” Lena said. “I had my notions, and you just happened to be the one. I knew you were safe. And I figured you’d go along with it.”

  He yanked off the sheet and exposed the full nakedness of his body. He sprang from the bed and glared down at her.

  “I’m all done with that,” she told him, “so you can put it away now.”

  “I’m not somebody you know,” Curtis said. “I never was.”

  She rubbed the edge of the sheet between her fingers. “Look, I’m gonna go. You can stay the rest of the night if you want, if you don’t want to sleep at your mama’s house.” She rose from the bed and watched him for a few moments, frowning. “You don’t know me either,” she said, and began to dress.

  Curtis left not long after Lena did. No need to stay and stare at a dead end. Night was starting to drain from the edges of the sky, but he didn’t go directly to his mother’s house. Walking restored him when he was upset, helped him regain his focus, even before he went to prison, and now he savored it much more, despite the times he was harassed by cops. As adolescents he and Marvin would often stay out late, sometimes until dawn, romping all over Brooklyn. Marvin preferred walking or taking the bus to the half-blind underground careening of the subway. He liked taking different routes, preferring the slightest deviations or even dangerous blocks or neighborhoods to what he would have called the “same old, same old.” But he did like the promenade.

  When the two boys went there together and gazed out at the protruding jaw of the city, they spoke most openly of their desires. Marvin spoke as if the days and years to come were nothing but a cycle of restoration. “I’m gonna get my mother a house,” he’d always say. This was his favorite thing. Not only would he pay off her considerable debts, he would do this too. The house he imagined buying for her was like a place he’d already been in, stepping past furniture bought from her catalogs and out to the little vegetable garden she’d keep. Looking up with her past the white slats to the blue roof where the birds would be rebuilding their nest. “She wouldn’t want the birds there,” he said once. “But I do. They do all the things I like.”

  Marvin spoke of girls as if he weren’t a virgin, as if he knew a thing about the frightening business of female nudity and of sex, which Curtis understood was animal and floral: the odd nosing around, the smells and the sap, the near-violence of fingernails and coarse hair, the peeling back of language to a hard core, like the spiked stones of peaches the boys used to throw at stray dogs.

  Then, for reasons Curtis never understood, Marvin got stu
ck on the idea of Lena Johnson. He talked about her constantly, and soon the boys’ wanderings through the borough began to circle her old neighborhood, not far from where Curtis was walking now. There was the basketball court—still there, Curtis knew—where Marvin kept insisting they go, despite the busted rims.

  One spring day they saw her there. She came from across the street and began to stroll the sidewalk along the length of the court, lifting her hand to take languid pulls from a cigarette. Marvin raced over with an odd look on his face, his hands in loose fists. He was carrying little rocks swelled and blanched by the sun, as though he wanted to roll them at her like gifts through the openings in the chain-link fence. Curtis followed, smelling the opportunity for mischief. The boys caught up and then kept pace with Lena on their side, daylight flickering in their faces, blinking madly through the diamonds of the fence. The flashing light did not transfigure Lena’s appearance. She was still just a skinny girl with pointy elbows and spooky eyes, whose shirts and sweaters were always linted-up, whose flat ass made a pair of jeans droop and frown.

  When Marvin greeted her, she blew out the smoke that had been held in her lungs. She was inhaling from a joint, they realized, not one of her usual cigarettes. At school she was made fun of for having stale breath. Curtis laughed at these jokes, and Marvin used to laugh too.

  “My mama told me not to talk to strange boys,” she said without looking at either of them.

  “What? It’s me, Marvin Caldwell. From school.”

  “I know who you are. Don’t mean you not strange.”

  “But you talking to me anyway.”

  “Do you always do what your mama says?”

  And that was it. She kept going without another word and left Marvin standing with his long fingers clawed into the fence, exactly where Curtis was standing now. Marvin somehow turned what she’d said into a genuine mystery, one he considered, on that day and afterward, by wondering aloud about her life. Had anyone ever seen her mother at the school? Did they get along or did they argue all the time? Did they look alike? He let Curtis know how deeply he imagined her. As Lena became a real part of Marvin’s life, he talked less often to Curtis about her. And when they became a couple, Marvin hardly talked to him at all.

  Curtis got him to go on a walk, like they used to, one Sunday afternoon. When they were near Drummer’s Grove in Prospect Park, he confronted him. “We supposed to be boys,” he said.

  “Then be happy for me,” Marvin said.

  “I can’t even remember the last time we hung out.”

  The shaking of gourds decorated the sound of the drums. Marvin said, “You know how it is when people first get loved up.”

  “You don’t even talk to me no more.”

  Marvin laughed. “It’s not like that. You’re my boy. Trust. We’ll be good.”

  “So it’s just a phase?”

  “Oh, it’s real. Be happy I’m happy.”

  “But what about me?” Curtis said. The drumming got more layered and complex.

  “Okay, I see. You want it to be about you.”

  “I just can’t believe you let a bitch get between us,” Curtis said.

  Marvin stopped walking. He narrowed his eyes in the direction of the music. The head of a dancing man bopped up and down. Sounds from a wind instrument wove between those of the drums. “Don’t ever come out your mouth like that,” he said. “I’m serious.”

  “That’s what you did though.”

  Marvin closed his hands into fists and then opened them. Curtis watched them close and open, close and open. Marvin approached him, got so near their noses almost touched. Curtis breathed through his mouth.

  “I’m out, man,” Marvin said, and gripped him in a strong lengthy hug.

  Curtis let his arms hang limp at his sides, hands loose. As time passed, until the fire and the death, he kept his arms and hands that way, until he used them again to drink.

  When Curtis came in, his mother was asleep in the easy chair again, the glow from the television in the living room bluing her form, the canned laughter a kind of murmured grace. He didn’t switch off the old sitcom and he didn’t wake her. Instead he listened to her dogged breathing. On the small table beside her were peanut skins on a paper towel, orange peels, a cup with the dregs of tea. When Curtis stayed out until seven or eight in the morning, his mother would be awake when he got in, looking tired as she sipped strong coffee and stretched her sore back at the kitchen table. Otherwise she’d be where she was now, floating on the merest shallows of sleep. When he told her not to wait up for him, she said this was nothing; she’d been waiting for him to come home for twelve years.

  There was still a little time before sunrise. Curtis would often read in such circumstances; he’d become an avid reader of Walter Mosley’s novels in prison. But he liked the feeling of being near his mother now—he liked her when she was asleep—so he sat with a tall glass of water and forced his gaze onto the television screen. The off-hour commercials for ridiculous products held his attention better than the show itself. Despite his efforts, his body slumped against an arm of the sofa and he fell asleep.

  Curtis often slept during the day, even when he was in prison, so his dreams were full of light. At least, this was how he made sense of what happened. Each dream was a city of houses and water and clear sparkling glass. Every inhabitant wore white, against which their brown skin was beautiful. People smiled and held the hands of their lovers, their children, and their friends. The strange thing about these light-filled dreams was that Marvin never appeared, not a piece of him in the fragments Curtis could gather upon waking. He told himself that the grandness of the dreams—the pristine landscapes and spacious houses, the variety and richness of color—was a symbol of Marvin’s presence, or that the diffuse light, the kind you see in old paintings, was the gold of his friend’s fantasies. But he knew his claims were suspect. He was stung by Marvin’s disregard for his dream-life.

  It was not yet morning now, however, so his dream had a different character. Aside from the darkness of waking life seeping into it, there was the dim, gray shadow of the woman he’d hit with his car all those years ago. The woman sprang into the dream the same way she’d sprung out onto the street, and as she’d been that night, she was faceless, voiceless, and pale, gesturing woodenly at the edge of his vision. As she had been in the last few moments of her life, she was barely a smudge, nothing more than a faint mote in the air before suddenly looming. That night she seemed to fall upon the car like a burden dropped from the sky, and in the dream she acted the same way, flying at him, shocking him out of sleep. He jerked awake, shaken and afraid, with a metallic taste on his tongue. The taste offended Curtis, reminding him of the pit his mouth had become after Marvin’s death, in those months of heavy drinking.

  In the kitchen Curtis’s mother was spreading butter and cherry preserves on slices of toast. “Glad it’s Sunday,” she said. Her job at the hospital gave her Mondays and Tuesdays off, so she was on the cusp of her weekend. She pushed his breakfast plate across the table and got up to place more bread in the toaster and fork scrambled eggs from the pan on the stove. She was already dressed for work. A saltshaker pinned two folded twenty-dollar bills, the amount she’d leave for him a few times a week to eat lunch and get around as he searched for jobs. While waiting for the toast to pop up, his mother hummed old gospel songs, something she’d never done when Curtis was growing up. She must have learned them as a girl back in North Carolina, and now as she drew closer to her life’s other edge, the songs must have come back to her again.

  When she sat back down with her plate, she watched Curtis, nearly done with his eggs, toast, and sausage patties, before touching her own food.

  “Want some more?” she said.

  Curtis nodded and grunted yes.

  His mother gave him one of her hot triangles of toast and began to scrape some of the eggs from her plate onto his. “Go on and eat it, Curtis,” she said. “Shoot, I’m getting fat anyway. I need to start back wi
th my exercises.”

  Remembering his private vow, that his life was now for wondrous things, he accepted what ended up being almost all of his mother’s breakfast so he could see her lips closed and smiling and her eyebrows settle back down to a sensible height, so there would be the satisfaction of silence. It was true that she was getting round in the midsection, but he knew she would never return to her exercises, because she’d never started in the first place.

  Curtis felt her watching him eat the second portion of food. She’d be late for work if she didn’t leave right away. She was sixty and he wasn’t surprised by how old she was starting to appear. The visits she’d made upstate to the prison each month revealed the rhythms of her decline, and in the intervals he guessed accurately where and when age would touch her next. Her brown skin was somehow darkening. She had a soft pouch under her chin, and at the cheeks and around the eyes the skull was beginning to show itself behind her face. She was nothing to write home about anymore, but a man her age wouldn’t complain much. When she and Curtis’s father decided their relationship just wasn’t going to work, she was still a young woman, and quite pretty, but she made only halfhearted attempts at romance, as if she believed you got just one real try at it in life.

  Those energies she used in doting on Curtis, fussing over him the way it seemed Lena fussed over Andre. As soon as Curtis set his fork down on his plate, his mother snatched them up, along with her own, then went to the sink and began washing them.