The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  The old woman was grinning up at him. “It’s just a cold,” she said, “so don’t get your hopes up.” He saw that the presents he’d brought were arranged in her lap, still wrapped in tissue paper. “And I wouldn’t have caught a cold at all, you know, if someone”—​and here she glanced up at the maid—​“hadn’t carried it home to me. Isn’t that right, Martine? Unless I picked it up by dipping my hand in the font last Sunday morning at church. You think that’s it, Martine? Do you? You think that’s likely?”

  The maid had wheeled her up to the coffee table, where she set the gifts down, one by one, and began unwrapping them, beginning with the Armagnac. “Ah,” she exclaimed when she’d torn off the paper, “perfect, just what a woman needs when she has a head cold. Fetch us two glasses, will you, Martine?”

  He wanted to protest—​he didn’t drink anymore and didn’t miss it either (or maybe he did, just a little)—​but it was easier to let the old woman take the bottle by the neck and pour them each a dose, and when she raised her glass to him and cried, “Bonne santé!” and drained it in a single swallow, he had no choice but to follow suit. It burned going down, but it clarified things for him. She was in a wheelchair. She had a head cold, which, no doubt, was merely the first stage of an infection that would invariably spread to her lungs, mutate into pneumonia, and kill her sooner rather than later. It wasn’t a mercenary thought, just realistic, that was all, and when she poured a second glass, he joined her again, and when she unwrapped the chocolates and set the box on the table before him, he found himself lifting one morsel after another to his lips, and if he’d ever tasted anything so exquisite in his life, he couldn’t remember it, especially now that the Armagnac had reawakened his palate. He’d never liked Gauloises—​they were too harsh—​preferring filtered American cigarettes, but he found himself accepting one anyway, drawing deeply, and enjoying the faint crepitation of the nicotine working its way through his bloodstream. He exhaled in the rarefied air of the apartment that was soon to be his, and though he’d intended to stay only a few minutes, he was still there when the church bells tolled the hour.

  What did they talk about? Her health, at least at first. Did he realize she’d never been sick more than a day or two in her entire life? He didn’t, and he found the news unsettling, disappointing even. “Oh,” she said, “I’ve had little colds and sniffles like this before—​and once, when my husband and I were in Spain, an episode of the trots—​but nothing major. Do you know something?”

  Flying high on the cognac, the sugar, the nicotine, he just grinned at her.

  “Not only am I hardly ever ill, but I make a point of keeping all of my blood inside my body at all times—​don’t you think that’s a good principle to live by?”

  And here he found himself straddling a chasm, the flush and healthy on one side, the aged, crabbed, and doomed on the other, and he said, “We can’t all be so lucky.”

  She was silent a moment, just staring into his eyes, a faint grin pressed to her lips. He could hear the maid off in the distance somewhere, a sound of running water, the faint clink of cutlery—​the apartment really was magnificent, huge, cavernous, and you could hear a pin drop. It was a defining moment, and Madame C. held on to it. “Precisely,” she said finally, took the cigarette from her lips, and let out a little laugh, a giggle, actually, girlish and pure.

  Three days later, when the sun was shining in all its power again and everything was sparkling as if the world had been created anew, he was hurrying down the street on an errand, a furtive cigarette cupped in one palm—​yes, yes, he knew, and he wouldn’t lie to his doctor next time he saw him, or maybe he would, but there was really no harm in having a cigarette every once in a while, or a drink either—​when a figure picked itself out of the crowd ahead and wheeled toward him on a bicycle, knees slowly pumping, back straight and arms braced, and it wasn’t until she’d passed by, so close he could have touched her, that he realized who it was.

  * * *

  For the first eighty-odd years of her existence, time had seemed to accelerate, day by day, year by year, as if life were a bicycle race, a kind of Tour de France that was all downhill, even the curves, but in the years after she’d signed the contract, things slowed to a crawl. Each day was a replica of the last, and nothing ever happened beyond the odd squabble with Martine and the visits from Monsieur R. At first he’d come every week or two, his arms laden with gifts—​liquor, sweets, cigarettes, foie gras, quiche, even a fondue once, replete with crusts of bread, marbled beef, and crépitements de porc—​but eventually the visits grew fewer and further between. Which was a pity, really, because she’d come to relish the look of confusion and disappointment on his face when he found her in such good spirits, matching him chocolate for chocolate, drink for drink, and cigarette for cigarette. “Don’t think for a minute you’re fooling me, monsieur,” she would say to him as they sat at the coffee table laden with delicacies, and Martine bustled back and forth from the salon to the kitchen and sometimes even took a seat with them and dug in herself. “You’re a sly one, aren’t you?”

  He would shrug elaborately, laugh, and throw up his hands as if to say, Yes, you see through me, but you can’t blame a man for trying, can you?

  She would smile back at him. She’d found herself growing fond of him, in the way you’d grow fond of a cat that comes up periodically to rub itself against your leg—​and then hands you twenty-five hundred francs. Each and every month. He wasn’t much to look at, really: average in height, weight, and coloring—​average, in fact, in every way, from the man-in-the-street look on his face to his side part and negligible mustache. Nothing like Fernand, who’d been one of the handsomest men of his generation, even into his early seventies, when, in absolutely perfect health and the liveliest of moods, he’d insisted on a second portion of fresh-picked cherries at a ferme-auberge in Saint-Rémy.

  She’d gotten sick herself, but she really didn’t care for cherries all that much and had eaten a handful at most. Fernand, though, had been greedy for them, feeding them into his mouth one after another, spitting the pits into his cupped palm and arranging them neatly on the saucer in front of him as if they were jewels, pausing only to lift the coffee cup to his lips or read her the odd tidbit from the morning paper, joking all the while. Joking, and the poison in him even then. He spent the next six weeks in agony, his skin drawn and yellow, the whites of his eyes the color of orange peels, and his voice dying in his throat, till everything went dark. It was so hard to understand—​it wasn’t an enemy’s bullet that killed him, wasn’t an avalanche on the ski slopes or the failure of an overworked heart or even the slow advance of cancer, but cherries, little round fruits the size of marbles, nature’s bounty. That had been wrong, deeply wrong, and she’d questioned God over it through all these years, but he had never responded.

  When she turned one hundred, people began to take notice. The newspaper printed a story, listing her among the other centenarians in Provence, none of whom she knew, and why would she? She was photographed in her salon, grinning like a gargoyle. Someone from the mayor’s office sent her a commendation, and people stopped her in the street to congratulate her as if she’d won the lottery, which, in a sense, she supposed she had. She really didn’t want to make a fuss over it, but Martine, despite having fractured her wrist in a fall, insisted on throwing a party to commemorate “the milestone” she’d reached.

  “I don’t want a party,” she said.

  “Nonsense. Of course you do.”

  “Too much noise,” she said. “Too many busybodies.” Then a thought came to her and she paused. “Will he be there?”

  “Who?”

  “Monsieur R.”

  “Well, I can ask him—​would you like that?”

  “Yes,” she said, gazing down on the street below, “I think I’d like that very much.”

  * * *

  He came with his wife, a woman with bitter, shining eyes she’d met twice before but whose name she coul
dn’t for the life of her remember, beyond “Madame,” that is. He brought a gift, which she accepted without enthusiasm, his gifts having become increasingly less elaborate as time wore on, and his hopes of debilitating her ran up against the insuperable obstacle of her health. In this instance he came forward like a petitioner to where she was seated on the piano stool preparatory to treating her guests to a meditative rendition of “Au clair de la lune,” bent formally to kiss her cheek, and handed her a bottle of indifferent wine from a vineyard she’d never heard of. “Congratulations,” he said, and though she’d heard him perfectly well, she said, “What?” so that he had to repeat himself, and then she said, “What?” again, just to hear him shout it out.

  There were thirty or more people gathered in the salon, neighbors mostly, but also the priest from the local church, a pair of nuns she vaguely recognized, a photographer, a newspaperman, and the mayor (an infant with the bald head of a newborn who’d come to be photographed with her so that his administration, which hadn’t even come into existence till three years ago, could take credit for her longevity). They all looked up at the commotion and then away again, as if embarrassed for Monsieur R., and there wasn’t a person in the room who didn’t know of the gamble he’d taken.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You can’t imagine how much your good wishes mean to me—​more even than the mayor’s.” And then, to the wife, who was looking positively tragic behind a layer of powder that didn’t begin to hide the creases under her eyes, “And don’t you fret, madame. Be patient. All this”—​she waved a hand to take in the room, the windows, and the sunstruck vista beyond—​“will be yours in just, oh, what shall we say, ten or fifteen years?”

  * * *

  If Marie-Thérèse had never been one to nag, she began to nag now. “Twenty-five hundred francs,” she would interject whenever there was a pause in their conversation, no matter the subject or the hour of the day or night, “twenty-five hundred francs. Don’t you think I could use that money? Look at my winter coat—​do you see this coat I’m forced to wear? And what of your daughters, what about them? Don’t you imagine they could use something extra?”

  Both their daughters were out of the house now, Sophie married and living in Paris with a daughter of her own and Élise in graduate school, studying art restoration in Florence, for which he footed the bill (tuition, books, clothing, living expenses, as well as a room in a pension on via dei Calzaiuoli, which he’d never laid eyes on and most likely never would). The apartment seemed spacious without them, and lonely—​that, too, because he missed them both terribly—​and without the irritation of their rock and roll it seemed more spacious still. If there’d been a time when he’d needed Madame C.’s apartment—​needed, rather than hungered for—​that time had passed. As Marie-Thérèse reminded him every day.

  It would be madness to try to break the contract at this point—​he’d already invested some three hundred thousand francs, and the old lady could drop dead at any minute—​but he did go to her one afternoon not long after the birthday celebration to see if he might persuade her to lower the monthly payment to the twenty-two hundred he’d initially proposed or perhaps even two thousand. That would certainly be easier on him—​he had his own retirement to think about at this point—​and it would mollify his wife, as least for the time being.

  Madame C. greeted him in the salon, as usual. It was a cold day in early March, rain at the windows and a chill pervading the apartment. She was seated in her favorite armchair, beside an electric heater, an afghan spread over her knees and a pair of cats he’d never seen before asleep in her lap. He brought her only cigarettes this time, though the maid had let slip that madame didn’t smoke more than two or three a day and that the last several cartons he’d given her were gathering dust in the kitchen cupboard. No matter. He took the seat across from her and immediately lit up himself, expecting her to follow suit, but she only gazed at him calmly, waiting to hear what he had to say.

  He began with the weather—​wasn’t it dreary and would spring never arrive?—​and then, stalling till the right moment presented itself, he commented on the cats. They were new, weren’t they?

  “Don’t you worry, monsieur,” she said, “they do their business in the pan under the bathroom sink. They’re very well behaved and they wouldn’t dream of pissing on the walls and stinking up your apartment. Isn’t that right?” she cooed, bending her face to them, her ghostly hands gliding over their backs and bellies as if to bless them.

  “Oh, I’m not worried at all, I assure you—​I like cats, though Marie-Thérèse is allergic to them, but there is one little matter I wanted to take up with you, if you have a moment, that is.”

  She laughed then. “A moment? I have all the time in the world.”

  He began in a roundabout way, talking of his daughters, his wife, his own apartment, and his changed circumstances. “And really, the biggest factor is that I need to start putting something away for my retirement,” he said, giving her a meaningful look.

  “Retirement? But you can’t even be sixty yet?”

  He said something lame in response, which he couldn’t remember when he tried to reconstruct the conversation afterward, something like It’s never too soon to begin, which only made her laugh.

  “You’re telling me,” she said, leaning forward in the chair. “Thanks to you, I’m all set.” She paused, studying him closely. “But you’re not here to try to renegotiate, are you?”

  “It would mean so much to me,” he said. “And my wife too.” And then, absurdly, he added, “She needs a new winter coat.”

  She was silent a moment. “You brought me an inferior bottle of wine on my birthday,” she said finally.

  “I’m sorry about that. I thought you would like it.”

  “Going on the cheap is never appealing.”

  “Yes, but with my daughter in graduate school and some recent reverses we’ve experienced at the office, I’m just not able”—​he grinned, as if to remind her they were on the same team—​“to give you all you deserve. Which is why I ask you to reconsider the terms—”

  She’d already held up the palm of one hand to forestall him. The cats shifted in her lap, the near one opening its jaws in a yawn that displayed the white needles of its teeth. “We all make bargains in this life,” she said, setting the cats down on the carpet beside her. “Sometimes we win,” she said, “and sometimes we lose.”

  * * *

  When she turned 110, she was introduced to the term supercentenarian, the meaning of which the newspaper helpfully provided—​that is, one who is a decade or more older than a mere centenarian, who, if you searched all of France (or Europe, America, the world), were a dime a dozen these days. Her eyes were too far gone to read anymore, but Martine, who’d recently turned seventy herself, put on her glasses and read the article aloud to her. She learned that the chances of reaching that threshold were one in seven million, which meant that for her to be alive still, 6,999,999 had died, which was a kind of holocaust in itself. And how did that make her feel? Exhausted. But indomitable too. And she still had possession of her apartment and still received her contractual payment of twenty-five hundred francs a month. One of the cats—​Tybalt—​had died of old age, and Martine wasn’t what she once was, but for her part Madame C. still sat at the window and watched the life of the streets pulse around her as it always had and always would, and if she couldn’t bicycle anymore, well, that was one of the concessions a supercentenarian just had to make to the grand order of things.

  Monsieur R. didn’t come around much anymore, and when he did, she didn’t always recognize him. Her mind was supple still even if her body wasn’t (rheumatism, decelerating heartbeat, a persistent ache in the soles of her feet), but he was so changed even Martine couldn’t place him at first. He was stooped, he shuffled his feet, his hair was like cotton batting, and for some unfathomable reason he’d grown a beard like Père Noël. She had to ask him to come very close so she could
make him out (what her eyes gave her now was no better than the image on an old black-and-white television screen caught between stations), and when he did, and when she reached out to feel his ears and his nose and look into his eyes, she would burst into laughter. “It’s not between you and me anymore, monsieur,” she would say. “I’ve got a new wager now.”

  And he would lift his eyebrows so she could see the exhaustion in his eyes, all part of the routine, the comedy, they were bound up in. “Oh?” he would say. “With whom?”

  Martine hovered. The pack of the cigarettes he always brought with him lay on the table before him, and a smoldering butt—​his, not hers—​rested in the depths of the ashtray. “You can’t guess?”

  “No, I can’t imagine.”

  “Methuselah, that’s who,” she would say, and break into a laugh that was just another variant on the cough that was with her now from morning till night. “I’m going for the record, didn’t you know that?”

  * * *

  The record-keepers—​the earthly record-keepers from the Guinness Brewery, that is, who were in their own way more authoritative than God, and more precise too—​came to her shortly after her 113th birthday to inform her that Florence Knapp, of the State of Pennsylvania in the United States of America, had died at 114, making her the world’s oldest living person. The apartment was full of people. The salon buzzed. There were lights brighter than the sun, cameras that moved and swiveled like enormous insects with electric red eyes, and here was a man as blandly handsome as a grade-A apple, thrusting a microphone at her. “How does it feel?” he asked, and when she didn’t respond, asked again. Finally, after a long pause during which the entire TV-viewing audience must have taken her for a dotard, she grinned and said, “Like going to the dentist.”