The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Margot was wrong. I felt that even as she spoke. But watching her, sitting squarely in her sense of reality, speaking confidently as she reached for the salt and lavishly poured it on whatever she was eating, I was reassured. I felt her love for me. Even though she was angry with me too. She took the occasion to tell me how angry she was, and had been for years. “You treat people like entertainment,” she said. “You joke and you prod just to see which way they’ll jump and how far. You pick at their hurt spots. You delectate pain. It doesn’t sound like this girl has a case legally, but honestly, I can understand why she’s mad. You didn’t touch her, did you? I mean, sexually?”

  I had not. Just sometimes on the shoulder, or around the waist. Maybe on the knee or the hip. Affection. Not sex. “I so don’t want Carolina to find out,” I said. “She hates male oppression. Hates it.”

  And Margot laughed. Laughed. “Did you really just say that?” she said. “You?”

  I said, “I’m concerned for my wife.”

  She stopped laughing. She said, “If it wasn’t sexual, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

  “But it could be made to sound sexual. Or just—​she claims it cost her months of therapy bills.”

  Margot laughed again, more meanly—​I’m not sure at whom.

  “I’d like you to keep quiet about this,” I said. “I mean, don’t tell anyone. Not even Todd.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  M.

  I didn’t tell that many people about him reaching between my legs. When I did, I told it as a funny story and mostly people laughed. But once someone, I don’t remember who, said, “Why would you want to have a friendship with someone like that?” And I said something like, “Well, he was very persistent and he can be a lot of fun.” Which was true. But that was not why I came to love him as a friend.

  For months the friendship was almost entirely one-way, consisting of short, frothy emails from him, professional invitations, and phone calls to “check in.” I didn’t initiate anything until almost three months after our first dinner, and there was nothing frothy about the occasion. My boyfriend had left me for a girl in her twenties, my boss had been fired for publishing a memoir that she knew was a fraud, and my building was going co-op and I couldn’t afford it. I was trying to get to my therapist’s office when the subway groaned brokenly, stopped, grew dark, then hot, then seemed to die completely. Everyone on it was trapped, coughing, shifting, and muttering in the hot darkness for nearly half an hour before the thing reanimated enough to creep into the next station, where we were released to stampede up the stairs and fight over cabs. I lost that fight, and the loss was one ounce of pressure too many. I called my therapist to cancel and then called a friend, who, incredulous at hearing me sob on the phone over a missed therapy appointment during work hours, said, “I’m busy!” and hung up.

  It was all stressful, but scarcely enough to explain how I felt—​as though a trapdoor had opened and I had fallen through it into scalding chaos, clutching at supports that came off in my hands, plunging, and transforming, as I did, into a mindless thing, a receptacle of fear and pain. Terrified by the sight of people moving all around me with energy and purpose, I sat down on the sidewalk and leaned my head against the wall of the nearest building. I sat there for some minutes, waiting for my heart to slow, and while I did I thought of Quin. I don’t know why. But when my heart had calmed sufficiently, I called him. He picked up quickly and brightly. I don’t remember everything about the conversation, only that I said I was sick and worthless and “everybody” knew it. “Who is everybody?” Quin asked. “Just people,” I said, “people I know.” “How do you know they feel that way?” he asked. “Did they tell you?” “No,” I said. “They didn’t. But I can tell. I can just tell.” When Quin spoke again, it was with surprising feeling. “I don’t know who these people are,” he said, “or why you would care about their opinion. But there is nothing sick or worthless about you. You are a lovely spirit.” And, just like that, I stopped falling. The world and all the people racing through it became recognizable again. I was speechless with gratitude. “Don’t bother with the subway,” he said. “Take a taxi to my office. I’ll wait for you downstairs. We’ll go and have tea.” And we did. There was no touching or talk about sex. We had tea and he listened to me and held my gaze with soft, attentive eyes.

  Q.

  If people could see the emails between my accusers and me, I believe they would be very surprised. My wife says, over and over, how “stupid” I was to send personal emails with any hint of flirtation from a company account. She never sends any personal communication from her work server, no matter how perfectly platonic. But though I seldom engage with her when she’s off on this tear, I believe that these emails are my best defense, even when they are a tiny bit sexy. Because they show mutuality, pleasure, even gratitude—​friendship.

  Caitlin Robison was my friend for eleven years. Yes, she was, for a time, an employee. She was even, to some degree, a protégé. But she was ultimately a friend. She came to parties at my home. She met my wife and child.

  When Caitlin Robison came to work for us, she was twenty-four, a plain, dour young lady with a drab haircut (dirty blond) and a sexless style that I enjoyed teasing her about. I could sense that she was irritated by the teasing, but she was a good sport, which made me like her. Which she must’ve known, because within months she was teasing me back, calling me “straight fairy,” “fop,” and “buttercup”—​saucy! She showed unexpected spunk, and when she tossed one of these cute mots over her shoulder, it made her angular ass seem somehow more round.

  And she knew I was right. When she finally decided to do something about her hair, she asked me, “So what do you think would look good?” She said it tauntingly, but I could see that it was a serious question, and so I answered it. She took my suggestion and her appearance improved by at least three points. Which was probably why, when I offered to accompany her on a shopping trip, she agreed very enthusiastically.

  We didn’t go anyplace expensive, she didn’t make enough in her assistant’s position, and anyway, I prefer the charm of discount retail, even for myself sometimes. I’m a bargain hunter, and, I discovered, so was she. Out of the office, as she pawed through sales racks and discount bins, her inner electricity switched on, and I could feel her motor. She was ambitious, this girl, vain, and so practical that there was something squalid about it: this squalor was her sexiness. “How does this look?” she’d ask over and over, of some tight T-shirt or pencil skirt, and I would say, “Turn around, let me see.” The fun of it was in her eyes as she searched my reaction and took her cues, and in the opinions she began to express. It was years ago, so I can’t say that I remember what they were (except that she loved old Ally McBeal episodes and could quote from some that were very sexual), but I remember their flavor. She talked about the man she was dating. I told her about my courtship of Carolina, our wedding. Afterward I sent her an email that said, “You plus me equals magic elixir!” And she answered, “Delicious!”

  M.

  We evolved this funny ritual, Quin and I. I am slightly afraid to fly and I went through a long period when I was very afraid. It was during this period that I began calling Quin every time I boarded a plane. I would ask him if he thought this flight would be all right, and he would say, “Let me tune in.” There would be a pause, a sometimes lengthy one. And then he would say, “You’ll be fine, Margot!” or “I think you’ll be okay.” If I couldn’t reach him, I’d leave a message on his voicemail, and he almost always got back to me before the plane took off. On the rare occasion that he didn’t, I would, on landing, receive a voicemail assuring me, “You’re safe, love. Call me when you land.” Once when I couldn’t reach him I called Todd, the man I married, instead. Quin was outraged. “You called him? He doesn’t know anything about planes!”

  This was what he most liked: to give advice about the strange, small things that can sit oddly close to a person�
��s heart and sometimes press against it painfully. I could call him at any time, and if at all possible, he would drop whatever he was doing to give me advice about whether or not to confront a friend about something that was bothering me, whether or not I should wear a particular style of makeup to a particular party, whether or not one of my husband’s friendships meant that he was disloyal toward me. These conversations never took long, because Quin’s advice was instantaneous, confident, and broadly philosophical.

  I was not the only person who had this kind of relationship with him. I’d meet him at a restaurant, and he’d be getting off the phone with a woman who was crying about her husband’s infidelity. I’d go to the theater with him and he’d tell me that some girl was texting, wanting his opinion about something that her date had said. I went to his office and found him amid a crowd of girls, one of them weeping and crying, “Oh, Quin, I feel so humiliated!” And in front of everyone, he advised her. Exactly what he advised, I don’t recall. But I do remember the open, unashamed weeping, the placidity of the other women, the strength of Quin’s voice, the room filled with sun, as if this were a sanctuary where every feeling might be aired and resolved.

  Before the shit hit the fan, when I was feeling angry at Quin, I would sometimes look back on that moment and remember that feeling of openness, sunlight, and unashamed emotion. I would remember too the strange fun of our conversations about sex, him cajoling me to tell him about what I’d done or liked to do, me usually refusing to say but sometimes, for some reason, giving in. For example, on a long, boring train trip, he asked me if, during oral sex, it was important who came first and why. This turned into a longer conversation than you’d expect, and even though I was careful with my language, in the middle of it a roughly groomed older woman turned around in her seat and grinned broadly at me. I remembered talking to him on the phone before a party at his luxurious Central Park apartment, where I would, for the first time, meet his fashionista wife and their rich friends. I was worried about what to wear, and he said, “Anything you choose will be perfect. You’re coming to the home of someone who loves you.” I remembered him once talking about his daughter, Lucia, who was, at six, doing wonderfully adult drawings and writing poems that caused her to stand out even at the school for the gifted at which she was enrolled. We were in a taxi, and in the middle of the conversation he asked if he could put his head in my lap. I said, “Okay,” and he did. He said, “There aren’t many people I trust enough to do this with.” It wasn’t sexual. I didn’t pet his head or anything. He just lay across the seat with the back of his head on my thigh and quoted from his little girl’s poems. It was nice.

  There were many moments like that, not to mention his ready professional and emotional support, for me and even for Carter, my fatherlessly depressed twelve-year-old nephew from Albany. During one particularly discouraging visit from the kid—​I was single then, and did not know what to do with an angry twelve-year-old male—​Quin spontaneously swooped in and commandeered the boy, taking him on an inspired tour of the Arms and Armor display at the Met, with a side trip to a video-game arcade. “He is cool,” Carter said.

  Remembering those things, I would ask myself, Why am I so angry?

  That was before. After the shit hit the fan, I looked back again at that moment of sanctuary in his office and contemplated: more than half of the women who were there had signed the endlessly circulating online petition, given interviews, demanded that Quin be fired, sought damages, made threats to boycott any company that would dare to hire him. They were angry too.

  Q.

  It’s true that I like to brag and I like to tease. And Margot, though very free in her view of sexuality, can be a bit morally stringent. I remember teasing Margot by telling her that I’d convinced a woman I’d just met, during a layover in Houston, to share with me what she thought about while making herself come. An amusing silence emanated from the phone, and then: “She didn’t slap the shit out of you?”

  “No,” I answered pleasantly. “I was very polite. I led into it slowly. I was just about to get on my flight, we’d had a nice talk, she’d told me a lot about herself. It was just, you know, ships in the night, we won’t see each other again, so . . .”

  “I still don’t understand why she didn’t smack you.”

  “I can tell you why. She was a big woman, huge. Married to a professional football player—​she’d told me that. I’m several inches shorter than she is, thin as a mantis, a pipsqueak. I’m in no way a threat to her.”

  Margot was silent; I could feel that her special brand of morality was offended by my ridiculous provocation. I could also feel her curiosity.

  “And so many people, if they are honest, really want to answer those questions. You just have to ask in the right way.”

  “So she told you?”

  “Yes. She told me.”

  Caitlin was a tease too; that was part of our connection. I prefer not to speak of myself; it’s generally not necessary. Most people are starved for perceptive questions and the chance to discover their own thoughts. This is especially true of young women, who are expected to listen attentively to one dull, self-obsessed man after another. Caitlin was different. Where was it—​at a book party at some nightclub or gallery chosen to convey a glamour that publishing rarely, or actually never, has—​that she raised a glass of something pink to her mauve-tinted mouth and said, “You never say anything about yourself. You deflect.”

  “Not true,” I replied. “I’m an open book.”

  “Bullshit.” She smiled.

  “Ask anything you like!”

  There is some memory static here, possibly in the form of hors d’œuvres offered by one of those handsome rental waiters who trail bruised dignity in their wake; perhaps she took so long choosing nothing that I thought she’d dropped the thread. But then she spoke seriously.

  “How can I get to know you better?”

  I was truly surprised and I answered without thinking. “How does a woman ever get to know a man?”

  She looked so confused that I waited only a beat to answer for her: “Flirt with me a little more.”

  Her face abruptly froze. And then some people interrupted us, and our conversation ended with her expression wonderfully stuck on pause. It was either later that night or after some near-identical “event” that we shared a taxi and I asked her, “Don’t you agree that sex is at the core of personality?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “People are complicated.”

  This was one reason that I liked Margot better. She was one of the few people who answered that question with an unhesitating yes. As did Sharona, from a completely different point of view. But Sharona was different in every way.

  M.

  The first time I was consciously mad at Quin was over something so trifling that I felt I was crazy. We were sitting down to a dinner party; he was, between snippets of table talk, texting advice to some girl who was upset because the guy she’d been dating wanted to see other women. “Do you think she should give him his freedom or say no, not allowed?” he asked me.

  I said that I didn’t know, that I didn’t know her.

  “I told her I’m asking Margot Berland, editor of Healing the Slut Within. She loves that book!”

  I said, “I don’t know her.”

  Food was passed around; conversations started. Quin answered a question from someone sitting across from us, then looked back down at his phone and addressed me sideways. “But you don’t have to know her—​it’s an obvious question! Your boyfriend wants to see other people—”

  “After how long?”

  “It’s been a few weeks.”

  “Weeks? I’d dump him.”

  “Okay, I’m telling her, ‘Margot Berland says—’ ”

  “No, don’t!”

  “Why not? It would mean a lot to her that you—”

  “It’s her life—​she should figure it out herself!”

  Quin slipped his phone back into his pocket.
“I already told her.”

  I sat there, inexplicably furious. Inexplicably because I’d been amused by and watched other people be amused by these—​what a ridiculous word and how accurate it is!—​microaggressions ever since I’d known Quin.

  And so many people had been amused, and not only from the publishing world. He gave huge parties two or three times a year, lighthearted, thrilling affairs that mixed people from the art world, movies, fashion, criticism, literature, medicine, and, more rarely, local politics. He’d occasionally invite a beautiful woman he’d met on the street that day and she would actually show up—​stunned and stunning girls, barely out of their teens, from Eastern Europe or Ethiopia, who barely spoke English but somehow trusted that this strange, slender man was worth their time. You never knew whom you’d sit next to—​a handsome young hotshot running a phony pharmaceutical concern, a desiccated artist down on her luck, an elegant literary lady from Iceland—​or what he or she might say. There was one regular, a young woman who wrote for an online art magazine; Quin had apparently invited her after she’d smacked him in the face a couple of times with a fly swatter, which she carried with her for a precise purpose—​that is, to swat men who irritated her. When she came to the door the first time, Quin’s wife, Carolina, greeted her warmly: “Oh, Miss Swatter, so nice to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you!” And sure enough, the lady had brought her flyswatter with her; throughout the evening she repeatedly swatted Quin in his own home, to his red-faced, beatific delight.