The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Explaining to Clarence that the comedian my husband will likely go to prison for some time—​we no longer live in an age of plentiful female-tampering—​and that that incarceration will happen sooner rather than later. As for moi: I intend to go back to Mount Vernon and beg my dead mam’s forgiveness; Carpe noctum; you are our only hope. I have no friends, no family other than my daughters and their young. But Marquita can barely handle the boys she has bred. And Winifred won’t speak to me in a deeply known way. My youngest is likely gone forever, I say. Addled in some drug rehab or hospital for broken heads, or perhaps huddled under a bridge, exquisitely diaphanous—​I have no clue. She is gone. This is my debt, I tell him. One riotous day.

  Clarence shakes his head. Ma’am. Please calm yourself. I can call the cops.

  You must please take the child, Mr. Clarence. Police are not a necessary ingredient here.

  Please, ma’am. You are not yourself!

  Around us the rush of river surf hits the small cliffs of the path. God is somewhere, folded arms across his chest, angry toe tapping the tops of the clouds. I tell Clarence about Eboni. I tell him about the others. When he winces and touches my shoulder, I recoil: I tell him I belong in neither heaven nor hell, just in Mount Vernon, New York, where my elders lie. I am no one’s forgiveness. Perhaps I’ll buy a house in New Rochelle. Perhaps I’ll run into someone I once knew and sit on another slipcovered couch and whisper the Lord’s Prayer. I never did learn those words correctly, just faked my way through everything and did not once get my black butt beat.

  Clarence listens. Just let me call home, he eventually says.

  XLV.

  Do hours go by? I have no phone, no communication other than the moon that has been steadily grazing my shoulders and telling me to jump. I’m resting on a rock, like the girl on the can of White Rock soda. Baby finally asleep. If I don’t learn to miss him I will hate myself forever.

  Just then it’s Clarence again, now with a man by his side. A man who, after brief introductions, grips my own elbow, all courtly. The Mahogany Maidens would have been all aswoon! They would have asked him to hold their every part. Are you Clarence’s cousin, I ask. The man laughs. If that’s who you want me to be, he says back.

  Minutes later the men lead me to the car, the baby still fresh in their arms. Where is the pram, I wonder but do not ask aloud.

  But then we do not go to the car. Instead the men nod and then guide me fast toward Ogden Hall, eventually lighting at the bottom of a foothill leading up to the stage entrance. There is litter strewn everywhere, Coke bottles and crepe garlands and crumpled loose-leaf paper. The stage door cracks open and a seam of light scissors the dark—​it is then we see the outlines of two men fighting on the ground. One is pummeling the other, who is screaming, gibberish pleas. I have no desire to listen. The door closes partway and I can make out the further outline of a knife, a key, a finger, a fist. Perhaps I smell blood from where I am standing. You stay here where you safe, Junius says, lowering me by the arms onto a grassy tuffet. I turn my head away, ignore the screeching, the laughter of young people, the old man on the ground, sunken like a Norfolk naval ship, the crush of young leaves all around—​You damn repeated yourself one time too many, you black bastard!—​and I turn away, casting my eyes over treetops, toward the place I imagine the Emancipation Oak stands. I don’t blame you for wanting to cut all ties, I tell it. But please look out for this baby. He has to matter.

  Clarence and Junius scramble up the small hill to the fight but make no move, however, to break things up. They hold the infant between them as if it were a tiny gate to somewhere they’d never before considered.

  When, all those years ago, Mahalia Jackson walked up the aisle toward the door, I reached out to touch her sleeve. Of course, I didn’t get it; the wind of her walk sailed through me, like Velvet’s wedding veil before it hit the river. I knew enough not to beg Miss Jackson for another hymn, as the others in the auditorium were doing, stomping their feet under their seats. I knew enough, had understood briefly the importance of listening the first time. How had I lost that gift? We cannot exist by remaining greedy.

  Eboni is stamping down the hill, backlit by moonlight. Her fists are tight by her side—​she seems all greatness in her youthful march, her hair gone wild and free as it flutters in gangly strips atop her head—​I want to find out if that is true. Are you great? Have you always been great? Hoisting myself from the grass, I stand and wave. Her silhouette inches closer to mine. My arms open, I start to cry. This girl is going to meet me for the first time, even if she doesn’t yet know it.

  MARY GAITSKILL

  This Is Pleasure

  FROM The New Yorker

  M.

  I’d known Quin for maybe five years when he told me this story—​really not even a story, more like an anecdote—​about a woman he’d met on the street. Quin believed that he could perceive people’s most essential nature just by looking at them; he also believed that, in the same way, he could know what they most wanted to hear, or, rather, what they would most respond to. He was a little conceited about these supposed special abilities, and that was how the story began. He saw a melancholy-looking woman, a “former beauty,” as he put it, walking by herself in Central Park, and he said to her, “Aren’t you the gentle one!” She replied, “And aren’t you the perceptive one for seeing it!” After a few minutes of talk, he invited her to have tea with him. She agreed.

  He didn’t describe her further, other than to say that she was middle-aged and obviously lonely; she’d never been married, worked in P.R., had no children. Even without a visual description, my sense of her was vivid: her slender forearm and long hand, the outline of her cheek giving off a subtle glow as she leaned slightly forward, into his attention, her mind quickened by this odd and unexpected man. And he would be leaning toward her too. Quin was someone who imbibed people.

  They exchanged numbers. I asked him if he’d told her that he was about to get married and he said no, he hadn’t. He didn’t plan to call her. It was enough to feel the potential between them, stored away like a cell-phone video of something that had already happened. “She would like being hurt, but very slightly. She’d want affection more. You’d spank her with, I don’t know, a Ping-Pong paddle? And then touch her clit. This is pleasure.” He paused. “And this is pain.”

  When I repeated this story to my husband, he cracked up. We both did. For years after, apropos of nothing, one of us would croak, “This is pleasure”—​my husband would make a perverted face and pinch the air—​“And this is pain!” And both of us would crack up, just laugh our asses off. The whole thing was vaguely sadistic—​so vaguely that it was ridiculous; clearly no harm was done.

  “It wouldn’t be a good outcome for her,” Quin said. “She’s open-minded but sensitive. I’m engaged to a much younger woman, and there wouldn’t be any good place that it could go for her.”

  “She might’ve just wanted the experience,” I said, “if she was lonely.” I’m sorry to report that I said that. But I really thought it might be true.

  They did speak on the phone, finally; she called him. He told her then about his engagement. He said that he’d like her to consider him a kind of guardian angel, psychically watching out for her. Which added to the hilarity for my husband and me. Even though it also added to the secret sadism. I laughed, but I wondered: Did the woman know, even dimly, that she was being toyed with? Did she feel that there was something wrong with the encounter, the way you might feel a mysterious hair drawn across your cheek? Why did I think it was so funny? It seems strange to me when I look back on it now. Because I don’t want to laugh. I feel pain. Real heart pain. Subtle. But real.

  Q.

  Late at night I went to my office for the last time. I was not allowed to go there during business hours and I didn’t want to; it would have been unpleasant. The managing editor had instructed the security guard to let me in and see me out. Boxes had been packed and shipped already; before that, m
y wife had collected an envelope of emergency cash that I had left in a desk drawer. Even she didn’t want to set foot in the office; the one sympathetic associate editor agreed to meet her and hand off the envelope at a subway concession stand—​a pallid detail that serves only to underscore the level of revulsion Carolina feels about anything associated with my former professional life.

  Anyway, I’d come one last time, to collect an orchid that had somehow survived months of inept watering and to see if any other tiny thing had been left behind. And one had, actually two had—​though they were not that tiny, nor was I the one who had left them.

  The first thing was my nameplate, strangely still affixed to the wall outside my office door, importantly announcing the existence of the now nonexistent Quinlan M. Saunders. It seemed like a nasty joke, and it was the sharp-browed and maybe pretentious M, especially, that zinged me as I entered what had once been my office—​where the second surprise sat quietly on my desk: a cardboard cigarette packet, its original graphic covered by a pasted-on image of a very red apple on a white background and, on the other side, the words everyday = choices, positioned like a brand name, in red and pink letters. When one opened the packet, one found not cigarettes but five very small scrolls of paper arranged with painstaking symmetry. Unscrolled, they read, in plain black type, ugliness or beauty, truth or lies, courage or fear, kindness or cruelty, love or ____. The space for the last word on the last scroll was left blank. I didn’t have to look; I remembered it tenderly well—​as in when a doctor presses on your abdomen and asks, “Is it tender there?”

  Years ago I’d made this for a girl who still works in the row of offices opposite mine. A plain girl with short brown hair, bright eyes, and good coloring. Her body was thick-waisted but supple, with a peasant’s grace—​confident and humble both—​and a quiet poise, greater than that of most beauties. Her eyes took in the world with passive depth and the occasional flash of gentle humor. She was intelligent, more than she realized, and I wanted her to learn how to use her intelligence more actively.

  The cigarette packet came out of a hallway conversation we’d had about choices and opportunities. I spent several afternoons at my desk, piecing the little delicacy together in odd inactive moments. Strange and touching to remember the care I put into it, the sophistication and childishness, how I thought of it in her hands. I invited her to lunch to give it to her and, yes, I was right: when she saw it, that flash lit up not only her eyes but her entire face, and in that instant I became for her a magician who had given her an enchanted object. As if I were a magician, she listened to me tell her about herself: what she was like, what she needed, what she needed to correct. “We are going on a journey,” I said, and we did. At the end of it, she had awakened to her ambition and learned how to satisfy it. As time went on, there were other girls I liked flirting with more. But for years—​almost ten years—​I kept our friendship alive with daily compliments and periodic lunches. I still have a handwritten note from her saying that our lunches were the “glory” of her week.

  Now she had returned my gift not to me but to an empty room. Now she was one of my accusers.

  I dropped the packet in a wastebasket on my way out, but then, because I did not want to leave evidence of such bitter feeling behind me, I turned around to retrieve it. I meant to drop it into a trash can on the street. But instead I took it home and put it in a drawer where Carolina would not find it.

  M.

  I met Quin when he interviewed me for an assistant editor position, more than twenty years ago. At thirty-five, I was a little old for the job; I was coming from an East Village publication that was venerably outré, and was perhaps slow to realize that those two descriptors canceled each other out. Besides, it paid almost nothing, and I was looking forward to trading up. I had heard of Quin. I knew that he was English, from old-school wealth (father a banker, mother in organized charity), and that he was eccentric. Still, I was surprised by his appearance. He was at least forty, but he had the narrow frame and form of an elegant boy. His long brown hair fell over his brow in a juvenile style that was completely natural on him. His clothes were exquisite—​simply cut, neutral colors, but finely tailored, soft, perfectly draped, nothing to stand out except the long silk scarf he wore, nearly always, around his neck. Without being beautiful, he gave an unexpected impression of beauty—​but then he would subtly thrust out his jaw, with his lips parted so that his lower teeth were just visible, and his narrow face would look strangely insectile and predatory, like something with large mandibles.

  The interview was strange too, whimsical and then unexpectedly cutting. He asked a lot of questions that seemed irrelevant and personal, including whether or not I had a boyfriend. He used my name more often than he needed to, and with an oddly intimate intonation that, in combination with his British accent, seemed not only precise but proper. That proper quality was somehow confusing: when he interrupted me to say, “Margot? Margot, I don’t think your voice is your best asset. What is your best asset?” I was so discomfited and uncertain that I didn’t know whether to be offended or not. I don’t recall my reply, but I know that I answered abruptly and uncleverly, and then the interview was over.

  I got another, better job, but still, when Quin’s name came up in conversation, and it often did—​he had a reputation that was somewhat notorious, yet unclear, as if people didn’t know what to make of him, despite how long he’d been around—​I vividly remembered his voice and my discomfiture and wondered why the feeling had stayed with me. And then, maybe two years later, I met him again, at a book fair in D.C. I walked into some tricked-up rental location alone and saw him posing for a picture with two stylish young women, who were leaning on his shoulders, making funny faces and gangster hand signs. He was looking at the camera, not at me, but as soon as the picture was taken he excused himself and came over to me. His voice was different this time—​full of uncomplicated goodwill and so expansive that I thought he was drunk, which he wasn’t. He said that he was glad I was doing well, and, when I asked how he knew how I was doing, he said that he’d heard—​“You bought a book I wanted, only a confident person would go for that book, I’m sure you know which one I mean”—​but even if he hadn’t heard, he continued, he’d have been able to tell by looking at me. The room was filled with the swift-moving noise of personality; somewhere in the background was a cake, bottles, and flowers. The gangster girls gestured and grinned to each other delightedly. It all felt like a blessing.

  Back in New York, we met at a restaurant that had once been a meeting place for the artistic élite but was now frequented primarily by tourists and businesspeople. We were seated at a deep banquette; Quin told the waiter that he wanted to sit on the same side as me, so that we could talk more easily, and then he was there, with his place setting. I’m sure he didn’t say this right away, but in my memory he did: “Your voice is so much stronger now! You are so much stronger now! You speak straight from the clit!” And—​as if it were the most natural thing in the world—​he reached between my legs. “NO!” I said, and shoved my hand in his face, palm out, like a traffic cop. I knew it would stop him. Even a horse will usually obey a hand held in its face like that, and it outweighs a human by nearly a thousand pounds. Looking mildly astonished, Quin sat back and said, “I like the strength and clarity of your no.” “Good,” I replied.

  We ordered our meal. We talked about food. He again admired the novel I’d acquired, which had been turned down by every major house, including his, on the grounds that it was misogynistic (though, of course, we didn’t call it that). He assessed the other people in the room, imagining what they did for a living and whether or not they were happy. I was unwillingly fascinated, both by the detail of his speculations and by how accurate they seemed. He paid special attention to a stout Japanese man who was lustily eating alone, legs spread proudly, one hand bearing food to his mouth, the other a fist on his splayed thigh; Quin said that of all the people in the room (other than
me) this man was the one he’d most like to talk to, because he looked as though he were capable of “something great.” But the main thing I remember from that night was the expression on his face as he retreated from my upraised palm, the surprised obedience that was somehow grounded, more genuine than his reaching hand had been.

  I remember too a brief moment after dinner. He walked me home, and we said goodbye so warmly that a young man walking past smiled, as if touched by this middle-aged courtship. I went into my building and, halfway up the stairs, realized that I needed milk. I walked back out, to a corner deli. As I reached into the cooler for the milk, I glanced to my side and saw a funny man at the other end of the aisle, exploring his nose with a very large handkerchief, while his other hand rifled through a shelf. His posture was intensely stooped, as if physically manifesting some emotional contraction. I was very surprised to realize that it was Quin—​the posture was so radically unlike the elegant, erect stance I’d seen all night. He was so privately engrossed that he didn’t see me, and I felt compelled to leave without buying milk rather than let him know that I’d—​what? Seen him explore his nose?

  The next day he sent me flowers and the friendship began.

  Q.

  I told Margot and I told my brother; I did not tell my wife. Not at first. I still had hope that it would blow over, or at least be handled quietly, and my hope was not unfounded. At first the suit was not against me but against the publishing house, and all she wanted was a payment, which the company was prepared to make—​as long as she kept quiet about her complaints. Her complaints were petty, absurd—​which meant, as Margot pointed out, that they were almost impossible to keep quiet about. “How would you enforce that?” she asked. “How would you even know what she was talking about at cocktail parties? Where else would she talk about it? Rape is one thing, but it’s not like she can go to the media to report some weird thing you said years ago.”