The Best American Short Stories 2013

  “But I have three children! And besides, Mother, I’m in love with him, and I know he’s really in love with me. He keeps telling me that he feels so awful about it all, so guilty, that this girl—she’s only nineteen—feels so guilty too. He says the guilt is giving him an ulcer and that he’s just gone one last time to see her, to say goodbye, and then he’ll come back to me and the children.”

  Her mother looked at her with something like pity in her eyes. “At Christmastime! He’s gone off to see this girl at Christmas?”

  “That’s not important to him! He’s not interested in Christmas,” she said scornfully, which is exactly how and what her husband had said to her when she expressed the same sentiments. She added, as he had too, “Truly, I believe he loves me.”

  “I don’t understand how you can call that love! How can you hurt someone you love!” her mother said impatiently.

  “But he doesn’t want to hurt me. He can’t help what has happened. He just fell irresistibly in love with this girl.”

  “Magically? With the wave of a wand?” her mother asked with a sneer.

  “And he’s such an extraordinary man. Such a good writer! He’s taught me so much about so many things! I’ve read so many books because of him: Camus, Balzac, and Flaubert—all the wonderful French writers. I see the world in an entirely different way because of him. And he’s so charming, so intelligent, such a good listener, so much fun! . . .”

  “There’s a time to cut your losses. If you miss one bus, jump on the next, I always say,” her mother said impatiently, and then got up and poured herself a gin and tonic.

  “Come, I will take you to him,” the Magic Man says, talking in the flat way people talk in this country. And it seems quite right to her that she would meet the Magic Man out here in this wonderfully sunny place, which is both strange and familiar to her, with all the bright flowers and the brilliant blue sky and the sun. The sun is making her feel a little dizzy, and her head spins, so she lets the Magic Man take her hand, and she follows him through the trees going toward the changing huts, though she wonders why his little boy would have remained in the thatched-roofed changing rooms and is not by his side.

  At the thought of it, Sandra decides she’d like something to drink herself and beckons to a waiter who is standing nearby. He comes over to her now, walking fast across the lawn in a starched white uniform, which rustles as he moves. She says she would like a cup of tea, and some cool drinks for her little girls—and perhaps some cake and a few tea sandwiches? “We’ll have a little tea party, when S.P. gets back, shall we?” she asks the little ones, who look up at her and nod their heads enthusiastically. What a nice idea! To hell with her diet! And surely it is teatime? She looks at her watch and wonders where S.P. is.

  “Tea for three?” the waiter asks.

  “No, actually for four,” she says. “I’m waiting for my eldest girl.” Then she asks the waiter if, by any chance, he has seen her little girl, a barefoot eight-year-old in a pink bikini. She went to the bathroom a while ago, but surely she should be back by now?

  The African waiter shakes his head gravely and says he has not seen her. He suggests the mother might want to look for her little girl. He warns her, “A lot of skelms around here, madam,” using the local word for a bad man.

  “Surely not, in this lovely place, this beautiful hotel?” the mother says, alarmed, and lifts her hands in the air, looking up at the waiter, who shakes his head and clucks his tongue doubtfully at her words. She thinks of her sister’s bitter words about this country and her surgeon husband, and she does wonder why it is taking S.P. so long to come back. Is it possible that she might, after all, have got lost? She decides to take the waiter’s advice. She asks the nice waiter if he would mind watching her baby girl and Alice for a minute while she goes to find her eldest.

  “Not at all, madam,” he says, and sits down in the grass close beside her little ones.

  The Magic Man has her by the hand and is leading her toward one of the changing huts, the one for men. He tells her to wait a moment, and he goes inside first for some reason, perhaps to tell his little boy she is coming. She waits a minute, and then he beckons for her to follow him. Now she hesitates, but he smiles his mysterious, magical smile and raises his eyebrows and flashes his glittering blue eyes in a way that seems to suggest so many good things up ahead. So she goes in and looks around to find the little boy, who will be blond and blue-eyed like the Magic Man, she supposes.

  “Can you see him?” the Magic Man says, as if it is a game or perhaps a task, as in the fairy tales, where something has to be accomplished before one wins the prize. She looks carefully at the wooden benches and under the benches, at the whitewashed walls, and even up at the beams that line the conical thatched roof, where the little boy might have flown, after all. Perhaps he’s a Magic Boy too. But there is no little boy there, or not one she can see. There is only the quiet of the still, sunlit afternoon and a smell in the changing rooms of damp and wet and the Magic Man, who stands grinning at her.

  The mother lumbers up the bank, sweating in the heat, looking around. Where on earth is S.P? The mother can feel the tears coming into her eyes. What has happened to her child?

  She had so hoped somehow that returning home, being out here with her mother and her sister, would help her in her unhappiness, but she can see that nothing has changed at all. The mother looks around this beautiful garden and remembers the one where she and her sister had played as little girls with such freedom. She remembers that feeling of something, she realizes, that she has so sadly and dramatically lost: a sense of the infinite possibilities of things, the giddy belief in her own omnipotence.

  She lifts her eyes to the beauty of the fine, fernlike leaves of the jacaranda tree and feels terribly alone. This whole trip out here without her husband has been a mistake. She has simply given him the freedom to be with his girl. What was she thinking? And now S.P. has mysteriously disappeared too.

  “Where is your little boy?” she asks, and the Magic Man lifts his shoulders and his hands and opens his eyes wide with surprise. “Where on earth has he gone? The naughty boy! Well, let’s look in here,” he says, taking her by the hand and leading her toward one of the stalls in the bathroom. “But this is the men’s bathroom,” she says. “I’m not supposed to go in there,” S.P. says, drawing back.

  “But he must be hiding in there. He’s playing hide-and-seek, and he wants you to find him. Do you think you can find him?” the Magic Man whispers, and smiles his mysterious smile again and chuckles. So she enters the stall with Proppy, but there is no little boy there. Could he be an invisible boy?

  But when she looks up into the Magic Man’s face, she can see now that this is not so. The Magic Man’s face has changed. He’s looking at her differently, with an expression of expectation. She can see he has been telling her stories, like her mother does about her father going to Brussels. His name is not Proppy at all, and there is no little boy, she realizes, in the same way she realized once that there were not always happy endings in real life as there are in the fairy tales. She remembers saying to her mother, heartsick with disappointment, “But you mean there are not always happy endings like in the fairy tales?” Her heart is thumping so hard now, she feels as if the gray cement floor is shaking beneath her bare feet.

  She bites her lip, trying not to cry, and looking at the door to the stall, which the man has not locked.

  Instead, he stands with his back to it, leans against it, and folds his arms, which are strong and sunburned. He wears a short-sleeved white shirt, and she can see the line on his skin where the sunburn ends and the shirtsleeve begins, where the skin is white. He has a yellow pencil in his pocket and the sunglasses, which peep out. She looks down at his long white socks, which are turned over at the top, and then back at his face.

  He stares at her in a strange yet familiar way, and she understands for the first time that he cannot do any magic at all, that on the contrary, she’s the one who has to do some
magic for him, that, like her own mother, it is he who needs her to help him. Indeed, he says quite politely, “You’re such a pretty little girl. You have such pretty brown eyes and such pretty brown hair, but I don’t like that pink swimsuit. I don’t like it at all. I wonder if you would mind very much taking it off for me, please? Or would you like me to help you take it off?”

  She considers calling out for her mother, but decides that she would never hear her, and the bathroom is empty and silent. There is no one else nearby. She listens to the silence of the afternoon and tries not to cry, her lips trembling and her breath coming in great gulps of air.

  The man says, with some impatience now, “I’m waiting.” Then she reaches up behind her back and starts to undo the top of her two-piece, the top with the little roses where her breasts are supposed, one day, to be. He keeps on looking at her, his eyes now very bright, grinning at her. “Good,” he says, “go on,” and slowly she lets the top drop to the cement floor. Then she takes off the bottom part and slips it down her legs.

  Why is her husband not here with her, the mother thinks angrily, and clenches her fists. She would like to hit him, as her sister’s husband repeatedly hits her when she has said something that annoys him. She is suddenly and for the first time in a rage with her husband. She thinks of him wearing the broad-brimmed hat that he has taken to wearing to cover his balding head and grinning his wide, self-satisfied grin. She has a big photo of him grinning like that on her piano in the living room.

  Years later, she will remember that moment of rage at the man who was once her husband, and she will feel the rage again, but not as much rage as she will feel at herself.

  Now she goes into the women’s changing rooms, calling her child’s name, and then into the area with the toilets. But all the stalls are empty, the pink doors gaping open. There is no one here at this hour of day. All she can hear is the dripping of a tap. Still, she hopes the child is somewhere nearby. “S.P., darling? Where on earth are you?” she calls out into the emptiness, but there is no response, only the echo of her own words. Could the child who reads so well possibly have made a mistake and gone into the men’s changing rooms, she wonders, her heart beginning to thud in her ears.

  Standing naked before the man, S.P. weeps silently, the tears falling down her cheeks, for he looks very serious now and as if he were thinking about something else. He looks absent, like her father does when he mows the lawn. And he is also opening up his tennis shorts and doing something odd to himself down there, moving his hands back and forth. She doesn’t want to look at that; it is making her feel very sick, and she is afraid she might vomit on the floor. Instead, she keeps her gaze fixed on the door, the chink of light behind the man, and wonders if she could somehow quickly slip through his legs, as he seems very busy and preoccupied doing whatever it is he is doing now. Through her tears, she glances at the man’s face, which is rather red and sweaty, as he strains to do something that seems to be difficult for him.

  Then she hears her mother’s voice calling to her, wailing in a desperate way. “S.P.! Sweet Pea! Sweety Pie! Angel! Where are you, my most darling child?” The strange names echo in the stall mournfully, louder and louder, coming closer, but even then she knows, smart girl that she is, that her mother will not come and save her, will not throw open the unlocked door, that she will not find her standing there.

  Indeed, the man hears the voice too, and he stops doing whatever he was doing before. Now he puts his hands, sticky with some sort of white stuff, around her neck. He says in a whisper, “You must be quiet, very quiet, child, do you understand?”

  Years later, when her sister is dead, killed by her husband driving the car off the road, her child will tell her the whole story, about the man with the white shorts and how he put his hands around her neck and told her to be quiet, how he then turned from her and left her to run out weeping onto the lawn. She will see the garden that day and the tears shining in her sister’s large blue eyes and remember her unanswered cry for help.

  DAVID MEANS

  The Chair

  FROM Paris Review

  DAY AFTER DAY I went through the paternal motions, testing my son while he tested me, trying to teach him not only to do what I said, which seems like a given, but also to see and taste the world in certain ways, with an ideal in mind, a purified vision of the best way to live reduced to a rudimentary, five-year-old version: good eye contact with others, a sustained gaze, not just looking but giving an indication of having seen—a head nod—and maintained long enough to show respect and not too much fear. I wanted to be assured that he wouldn’t end up painfully shy. (He didn’t.) I feared he’d grow into one of those in-the-corner wallflower types, dainty and delicate, brooding, ponderous, sad as a young kid and then sullen when he hit the teenage years and then, as an adult, deeply depressed. (He didn’t.) I wanted him to open up to what was before him. So, I suppose, part of me—in the yard that afternoon, as I followed him up the hill—was happy that he was resisting my commands and remained slightly beyond reach. While of course, another part of me was ready to pounce on him as soon as he turned at the top and headed down to the retaining wall again.

  You’re in the chair little man, right now, get inside quick, the chair is waiting!

  I prefer a gentle pushing against my will—I was thinking in the yard that afternoon, as I got near the top of the hill. By the time I got to the top, he had turned and was jogging slowly north toward the Thompsons’ Scotch pines—the hiss, the high-up touch of wind in the crowns. Then he made a tight loop, wobbly with his legs in his jeans, with the cuffs rolled up, and his coat flapping (he refused to zip up, but I let that go), and, after glancing back at me, he pumped his arms up and down and screeched.

  To my right, the river beyond the wall stretched at least three miles across, with the ebb tide and the flood tide meeting in the center to form a sheen of calm. The autumnal brown and gold leaves on the Westchester side threw long reflections that blended with the sky. Ah, glorious, I thought. Ah, a lovely and perfect fall afternoon. The sublime nature of taking care of my boy on one more bygone day. There was a deep, submerged loneliness in my chest as I stood feeling the wind, which was lifting, growing firmer and stronger from the north, bringing with it the first hints of winter—along with the sound of the birds, who had flown deeper into the Thompsons’ trees. Oh, the beauty of knowing that on that day I’d instruct the boy on how to listen carefully and establish proper eye contact, and how to hold his little wee-wee straight when he peed into the bowl, and how to manage his fork and take care with his chewing. Part of the glory of the moment, I think I thought, was in the pristine clarity of the innumerable potential teaching moments—Christ, I still despise that phrase!—that would bloom in the next few hours, as the light waned and the wind continued to lift and the remaining leaves twisted loose from their stems and were brushed away, skittering across the lawn, lying there, waiting to be blown away by the crew who would arrive midmorning on Saturday, four or five men, and lean down into the roar as their earmuffs snuffed them into a different kind of solitude. Evening would fall, and the lights on the bridge and across the river would throw themselves onto the surface of the water, appearing one by one as the sky faded, and then, safely inside the house, I’d look out the window and feel the fantastic unleashing of the pure, frank wistfulness that used to come to me at that time of day, and I’d feel, ahead, the future in one form or another, without which I could not endure the task. At some point in the future we’d be alone in the house and Gunner would be off at college, or married, and days like that would be sucked into a vortex—what other way to think of it?—of retrospect, with just a few memories of day-to-day tending: car-seat buckling, food feeding, punctuated by more pointed memories of trauma: stitches in his brow (lacrosse), asthma attack (holding him through the night, his tiny chest heaving against my palm), his separation problems at the preschool (me in the window watching him clutch hold of the old scratched-up piano bench, his mouth wide open in a s
cream, his face bright red and shiny). It was only with that sense that I could survive those moments, I think I thought.

  Reaching the top of the yard, I became aware—in a kind of intuitive parenthood tracking mode—that I’d already given him one warning and release and another solid warning. It’s possible, I think I thought, that in the pleasure of running downhill, he had forgotten my first warning, which he never really let sink in, distracted by the sound of the birds in the trees (because he had turned to look at them), so that the second warning came to him as a first warning of sorts. I jogged behind him and kept the shadow/father distance and gave him space to decide what to do, wondering again if he’d just weave partway down, having absorbed my warning and then my second warning, which in theory nullified the first warning and showed my hypocrisy at not simply drawing the line and taking him inside, but figuring that another chance was warranted because it was possible that in his delight he simply forgot that first warning, but, on the other hand, I think I thought, this time he has at least two warnings echoing in his head, and so I held back on shouting to him again: if you run too close to the wall, it’s the chair. Instead, I stayed quiet and thought about how just that morning I had gone down and looked out the window at the river and thought it was strange that in the past two weeks Sharon had come home late each night, arriving after dinner, appearing in the driveway with perfectly fine excuses, saying the train was late, or there was traffic on the bridge. (Did she not know that I could see the bridge and the traffic, and looked at it in a habitual manner most days, glancing over there when I went down to the shore to examine the wall, worrying over the fact that it was crumbling, wondering how much weight the grass and sod and soil made pushing against the structure while, at the same time, worrying over the potential cost of repair, imagining the mason digging it all out, building some kind of temporary support wall, laying new rebar, framing it up, and then somehow getting a cement truck—Concrete, Sharon corrected me when I verbalized my worry one night. Not cement, it’s concrete—down into the yard?) Other excuses she gave included irate clients or long-winded partner conferences she had to attend because she was hell-bent on making partner as soon as possible. I’m hugely aware, I said, of the weird feeling I have about you and your work in relation to me and my position here as at-home caregiver, and sometimes I have to admit, I sit at the window and follow you to work in my imagination. Now don’t get me wrong, I cherish this time with Gunner and I’m happy to be doing this, but still, I feel strange about it at times, I said, while she pursed her lips and fixed me with her gaze, which included really fine, deep, dark, big eyes in a face that was smooth with lean cheekbones and a fine, fine nose. A fucking Helen of Troy face, I used to think. The kind of face that would start a war if you let it. And it did, eventually. I’d like to start a war, I used to think, seeing her face. I want to start something big and historic in her name. I want a monument to be built in honor of the torment her face creates in my fellow men. (I think I sensed—those mornings of window gazing—that she was being sucked into Manhattan. The pull of it was apparent to me in the jaunt, the sway of her hips as she skipped out to the car each morning. It appeared in the way she held her chin softly in her fingers, playing them out in a thoughtful manner as she listened to me describe my day while a slight—albeit graceful—incomprehension filled her eyes. All that beauty gave her a density that was prone to the pull of the city, I thought, I think.) Those mornings, with Gunner upstairs asleep—the soft sea-hiss snooze of his breath coming through the baby monitor—I sometimes had that deep, sensual foreboding that came when I thought too much about the short term and the way Gunner’s days, still fresh and new, his life just starting, stood logarithmically in relation to my own thirty years. A day was one small fragment of my life, and a day for him was a much larger piece of the pie. One day now is a big hunk of his five years on earth, I used to think, I think.