The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  “It’s so great to get away from the bullshit,” he said. I guess the bullshit was Hollywood, and wealth and fame—pretty much everything that everyone else in the world completely craves. He took a long drag of that cigarette. “But hey, Bend’s a cool town, huh?”

  I nodded. That’s the worst thing about Bend. Its coolness. That and its size, how everyone thinks they know you.

  He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue. “For me it’s just a treat to be around normal people.”

  I made a noise that must’ve sounded like a laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” He took another drag of his cigarette. “I’m serious.” He seemed genuinely hurt. “I don’t see why people have so much trouble believing that famous people just want to be normal.”

  In his last movie, New Year’s Love Song, he is one of like a hundred celebrities paired off in parallel love stories. He was cast as the manager of a rock band that is doing a concert on New Year’s Day in New York. The band is supposed to be a modern-day Fleetwood Mac, I guess—two young guys and two young girls—but without the hard drugs or anything else that made Fleetwood Mac interesting. The cute singer is married to the drummer and, as the band’s tongue-tied manager, the Famous Actor needs to keep the press from finding out that they’re divorcing until after the concert—although they never really make it clear why that would matter. The singer is played by the girl from that Nickelodeon show You Can’t Fool Tara!—it was billed as a kind of Disney meets Nickelodeon thing; this was right after her whole sex-tape scandal, so the movie was meant to redeem her image or something. The movie ends with the Famous Actor’s band manager character stumbling out onstage in Rockefeller Plaza and telling the singer that he’s always loved her in front of, like, a jillion people. But here’s what I don’t get: Why do we find that romantic? Are men such liars that it’s a turn-on to have so many witnesses? It’s one of those movies that make you sad to be female, that make you want to stab yourself in the ovaries. It’s truly a hateful movie, but I was still teary at the end, in a completely involuntary way, the way crying babies are supposed to make women lactate. “I want to start every year from now on with you in my arms,” the Famous Actor says to the singer on the stage, in front of everyone in the world. There should be a German word for wanting to gouge out your own teary eyes.

  “I like your apartment,” the Famous Actor said. He walked around like someone sizing up a hotel room. He ran his hand along the spines of the books on my shelf and crouched in front of my albums. “Vinyl,” he said. “Cool.” When he got to a band he approved of, he would say the name. “Love this old Beck. Ooh, Talking Heads. Nice. The New Pornographers. Yes.”

  I put my keys on the kitchen table and looked through my mail. There was a late notice for a credit card bill, a late notice for a water bill, a solicitation for a fake college, and a postcard from my ex. The postcard showed some old 1960s tourist trap in Idaho called the Snake Pit. On the back he’d written, Expected to see you here. It’s this thing my ex and I have: we send each other old postcards with slights on them. I sent him one from Crater Lake on which I wrote: The second biggest a-hole in Oregon. We never really broke up; he just moved to Portland with his band. Not that we had this great relationship. He always said I needed help. I always said he was a pig who fucked any girl who would have him. But I’ll say this for him: he was not a liar. He told me all about it every time he strayed. He’d get back from some gig in Ashland or Eureka and say, “Dude, I got something to tell you.” After a while I’d get anxious even seeing his name on my phone because I thought he was going to tell me about some new girl he’d junked. But I couldn’t seem to break up with him. When he finally left for Portland I wasn’t sad, just more deadened, the way I get. Sometimes I think our real problem wasn’t his infidelity; it was his honesty.

  I think we sent old postcards to say—Hey. Still here. I wondered if he’d be jealous if he saw who was in my apartment.

  The Famous Actor plopped down on my couch. “It’s so great to just be in, like, a fucking apartment! Right? You know? A real place? With just, like . . . walls . . . and furniture and books and a TV and real posters and . . .” I wondered if he was going to name everything in my apartment, room by room: dresser, nightstand, alarm clock . . . toothbrush, antibacterial soap, Tampax . . .

  I opened my fridge. “You want a drink?”

  “I’m in recovery,” he said. “But you go ahead.” He held up his pack of Natural Spirits again. “This okay?” When I said it was, he lit up, took a deep pull of smoke, and let it go in the air. “No, this is really nice,” he said again. “Just what I needed.” He pulled a piece of tobacco off his tongue again. Or, actually, I suspect that he pretended to pull a piece of tobacco off his tongue. He leaned his head back onto the couch. “I just get so fucking tired of . . .”

  But he couldn’t seem to think of what it was that made him so fucking tired.

  In Amsterdam Deadly he plays a UN investigator who goes to The Hague to testify in the trial of a vicious African warlord. As soon as you see the cast you know he’s going to fall in love with the beautiful blond South African lawyer defending the warlord. The actress is that girl from My One True, and because she’s as American as Velveeta she got knocked pretty bad for her South African accent, which sounded like an Irish girl crossed with a Jamaican auctioneer. Still, she and the Famous Actor really do have chemistry. Watching that movie is like watching the two best-looking single people at a wedding reception; not a lot of drama about who’s going to fuck whom later. But if the romance in that movie is okay, the politics make no sense. The dialogue is like someone reading stories out of the New York Times. The Famous Actor has a speech near the end where he yells, “If the Security Council won’t pass this joint resolution then I will get these refugees across the border to the safe zone!” Not exactly Henry V. I think sometimes movies, like people, just try too hard.

  We had straight missionary paint-by-numbers sex: some foreplay, exactly enough oral to get us both going, then he pulled a condom out of that backpack he carried and rolled it over his dick. It was ribbed, which I could see he believed was thoughtful of him. There was nothing weird or obsessive or porny about the sex. Or particularly memorable. First sex is always kind of awkward, though; you don’t yet know what the other person likes. Everything’s basically in the right place, but it doesn’t feel right, or it takes a minute to find.

  First sex is like being in a stranger’s kitchen, trying all the drawers, looking for a spoon. There was one point where he was over me, his eyes closed, head back, weight on his arms like he was doing a pushup, and it was kind of weird—like, Oh, hey, look, Terrific Todd is boning someone. Oh wait, it’s me. But I shouldn’t make it sound like the sex was bad. It was fine. Really, the only disappointing thing was how much stomach fat the Famous Actor had—I mean, really, when you have that much money, how hard is it to do a few sit-ups? Of course that might have been intentional, too, part of his normalcy campaign.

  Afterward, we were lying on my bed naked and he was smoking another Natural Spirit. He smoked so many I wanted to buy stock in it. “That was great,” he said. “And thanks for not taking a selfie or anything weird like that.”

  I must’ve made a face like, Christ, are you kidding me?

  He sat up. “Oh, you’d be surprised how often that happens. I know actors who have, like, a contract they have women sign before they’ll have sex.” He named two actors of his generation, both of whom had been in movies with him. “I mean, can you imagine?” he asked. “Making a woman sign a contract before you fuck?”

  He offered me his cigarette. I took a small drag. Those organic cigarettes tasted a little like dog shit.

  “That’s the part I really don’t think people get.” He picked another fake tobacco bit off his tongue. “You know? About fame? How dispiriting it is, how dehumanizing? It’s like you’re this . . . product. Right? I mean: I’m not some product. I’m a fuckin’ person.” He slapped his little intentional belly fat. �
��Right? Why can’t people understand I’m just a regular guy?”

  “I think people understand that,” I said.

  In Big Bro, he plays a guy in a fraternity whose older brother is a Wall Street trader who shows up after his divorce to act out some Animal House fantasies, only to find that frats now are full of serious students. The actor who plays the Wall Street brother had recently left Saturday Night Live and you can really tell the difference between someone used to making live audiences laugh and someone who falls into a giant birthday cake and reads lines like, “Oh boy! Here we go again!” to a Disney laugh track. Still, Big Bro was the Famous Actor’s breakout. It must’ve made $200 million and it’s watchable in part because the Famous Actor seems so easygoing and likeable in it (in other words, exactly like no fraternity guy ever, in the history of the world). People saw him differently after that. I think when an actor exudes such charm we assume the character must be close to his real self. But there’s no reason to think that: he could just as easily be the selfish loser who raids his senile dad’s retirement account in Forty Reasons for Dying, for instance. We really want to like people, even famous people.

  It’s not really possible to sleep next to someone the first time you’ve had sex together. That’s something I’d like to take up with Hollywood if I ever get the chance: how they always cut from the kissing couple to them lying peacefully in bed postsex, snoozing with smiles on their faces. I’d like to grab some screenwriter by his ears: “Hey, you fuck a stranger and then try sleeping afterward!”

  We were lying there on our backs, staring at the ceiling. He was smoking another cigarette. Our legs were touching.

  “If you want me to go, I can call for a ride,” he said.

  “Only if you want to,” I said.

  “Cool,” he said. “Yeah, cool. I’ll stay. I like it here. It’s chill.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  He sniffed. “I think people would be surprised at how hard it is for someone like me to find a place where I can just . . . you know—be? Where there’s not some PA constantly buzzing around asking if I want a Sprite.”

  “You want a Sprite?”

  He laughed a little, took a pull of smoke, and when he started to reach for his mouth, I watched him closely. He looked like he was picking something off the end of his tongue again, but I’ll be damned if I saw any tobacco bits there. He looked right at me with those Pepsi-blue eyes.

  “Sometimes I daydream about hiding out someplace like this. Just saying ‘Fuck you’ to the fake industry stuff and just dropping the fuck out. Not tell anyone either, just chill in Bend, Oregon, for a month, go out to breakfast, rock-climb, maybe get a bike, read poetry in the park, go to parties like last night, hang out with someone cool like you? Know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said. I didn’t say the rest of what I was thinking, which was: Who doesn’t daydream of that, of not having a job or any worries, playing around all day, riding a bike and reading poetry and having sex? The difference is that most of us would fucking starve to death in a week.

  I started to imagine the Famous Actor hanging around my apartment for the next month like some unwanted houseguest. A month becoming two, and three, him smoking forty cartons of organic cigarettes and never finishing that book of poetry he was supposedly reading, me coming home every day to Terrific Todd marveling still at all the normal shit in my normal apartment—dish soap, spatula, salt pig, can opener!—that band of fat around his middle getting bigger and realer all the time.

  He leaned over, got his tennis shoe off the ground, put his cigarette out on its sole, and put the butt in the pocket of his jeans. Then he propped himself up on one elbow—the one that I had gotten to know so well earlier. “Hey, can I ask you a personal question?”

  Look, I don’t mean to go all double-standard feminist—I mean, I wasn’t some victim; I’d fucked him, too—but that seemed like such a guy thing to say right then. Hey, remember a few minutes ago my dick was inside you? Well, now I was wondering if we could talk.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “It’s just . . . I can’t get a read on you.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  I get that a lot from guys.

  Also, it wasn’t technically a question.

  “I just keep feeling like . . . I don’t know . . . like you think I’m . . . kind of a douchebag or something.”

  Also not a question.

  Toward the end of Big Bro, after this huge party where Snoop Dogg inexplicably shows up with a bunch of hookers, the rest of the frat pulls the Famous Actor’s character aside and tells him that his big brother has to go. He’s nearly gotten them all expelled and they’re all flunking classes and in danger of losing their fraternity charter. It’s probably the most moving scene in the movie, the Famous Actor telling his brother he’s got to leave. “Hey, Charlie, these are my brothers now,” the Famous Actor says, “but they’ll never be . . . my brother.” Chastened for his boorish behavior, the older brother slinks away sadly. Of course, he doesn’t really go away, but shows up three minutes later with Mark Cuban and Donald Trump to save the day at his brother’s oral presentation in his business class.

  “I don’t think you’re a douchebag,” I said to the Famous Actor.

  “No, I think you do.” He sat up higher.

  “It’s not that,” I said. “It’s just . . .” What are you supposed to say—after years of therapy to untangle your difficulty in forming relationships, your self-destructive behavior, the depressive periods and suicidal thoughts? And some narcissist expects you to pillow-talk it out?

  “Seriously,” he said, “I need you to tell me what you think of me.”

  What I thought of him? That his insecurity was infinite? Instead, after a minute, I said, “You’ll always be my brother.”

  You have to wonder how a movie like Big Bro 2 even gets made. In it, the younger brother has graduated from college and been hired by the older brother’s company, which has somehow morphed from a Wall Street firm in the first movie to a tech company in the second. They’re about to unveil this new kind of biocomputer, but an evil tech company called Gorgle wants to take over the brothers’ company, so the old SNL comedian has to gather all the old frat guys together to use their special skills to defeat—Ugh, you know, it actually hurts my head to even think of the plot of that movie. It’s like having to recount all the sexual positions your parents might have used in conceiving you. The best thing I can say about the second Big Bro is that the Famous Actor is barely in it, and only because he’s clearly fulfilling some line in a contract that required his presence in a sequel. The SNL guy’s career had stalled, and most of those frat guys would’ve starred in animal porn just to work again, but the Famous Actor had gone on to become the Famous Actor by then. He seems truly apologetic in the six or seven scenes he’s in—like, I’m sorry America. I really am sorry.

  He had that same sorry look on his face as he sat on the edge of the bed and looked back over his shoulder at me. “You know, I think you’re not being very generous.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I mean, maybe you’re the asshole. Did that ever occur to you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He turned away. “You can’t know how weird this fame shit is. It’s like you’re see-through. Everyone assumes they know everything about you, but you know what? Nobody knows a fucking thing about me!” He stood and rubbed his forehead. “Always trying to be what people want—after a while, it’s like you don’t even know how to trust yourself anymore. You’re always second-guessing, like, Wait, how do I talk again? Is this how I react to things or how I want people to see me react? And when no one’s watching, you feel totally fucked—like, Am I even here? You don’t know how hard that is—to not know yourself!”

  He really seemed to think famous people were the only ones who didn’t know themselves.

  “Then I meet someone like you, someone I might genuinely like, someone I don’t want to think that I’m a celebrity d
ickhead . . . and what do I do?” He laughed. “Act like a dickhead.”

  He walked across my tiny bedroom to my dresser. Behind a pile of clothes there was a picture of me with my sister, the last picture of us before she disappeared. He picked up the picture and stared at it. In the picture I’m eleven and Megan’s thirteen and we’re standing in front of the hammer ride at the county fair. We both have huge grins on our face and Megan’s giving the thumbs-up because we’re so proud of riding that scary ride together. Three months later she would run away from home. We never found out what happened to her, if her body is somewhere or if she’s working as a hooker in Alaska or whatever. She could be in the Taliban, or she could be in the circus, or she could be rotting in a field in Utah. That was the hardest thing for my parents—just never knowing. Our house was a tomb after that; my parents never the same. The Famous Actor stared at the picture a moment and then put it down. He turned and faced me.

  “So if I’ve been a little self-absorbed, I apologize.”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “It’s not fine.” He was getting worked up again. “You can’t just say, It’s fuckin’ fine and then keep acting like some zombie! You can’t fuckin’ do that! You have to give something back! You can’t just sit there in judgment thinking that I’m an asshole and not give me the chance to show you I’m not! I mean, am I asking too much? For a little human interaction!”

  “What’s my name?” I said.

  He stared at me for a few seconds. “Aw fuck,” he said.

  If I was trapped on an island or something and I could only have one movie to watch, but it had to be one of his movies, I’d choose Been There, Done That. It’s telling that my favorite of his movies is one where he’s just a supporting actor. I think it’s hard for even good actors to carry a whole movie. He’s great as the gay brother of the heroine, who has come back to her family’s home in 1980s Louisiana with her black boyfriend. He has several opportunities to go too broad with the gay brother, or go all AIDS-victim-TV-movie-of-the-week or something, but he’s really restrained. And when the gay brother ends up being the most racist person in the family, the Famous Actor turns in a really nuanced and smart performance. It’s even a little bit brave. I suspect it’s what happens when you work with a great director. But I also think there’s something deeper that he managed to find in himself in that movie.