The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  It’s so terrible and so absurd. Absurd that I did certain things, yes. Absurd too that Caitlin holds a position that I helped her get and from that position accuses me of things that she was party to. Even more absurd, she is called “brave” for it. And finally, I find it just slightly absurd that what has hurt Carolina the most in all this, I suspect, is not a wound to her heart or even to her true dignity but to her social identity: she went from being the wife of a respected editor to being the wife of a pariah.

  “What kind of wife am I?” She screamed these words in the presence of one of my closest friends. “What kind of wife will I be for the cameras? At the court date? A loyal wife? A spiritual wife? A humiliated wife?” She screamed, my elegant, formidable Carolina, and my friend and I just sat there, gaping at her pain.

  “It’s me who has to call the lawyers,” she ranted, “and the publisher, who stabbed you in the back after you fell on your sword for him. It’s me who has to get on the phone and remind the hypocrite that without you he has no scapegoat, and without him we have no insurance.”

  “Can you countersue?” my friend suggested weakly. “Can you take the girl to court or—”

  “Are you kidding? Do you know how much that would cost? Do you know how much we’ve lost already?” But she at least stopped shouting. “I don’t care about the girl. I care about health insurance and survival for my family. I don’t care about vindication. I don’t want to win. I just want my family to be okay.”

  Terrible. Not absurd. Terrible. I feel it. I feel it every day. But I don’t think about it. It hurts too much to think about it. Instead I think about Sharona. I even wrote her a letter. I don’t know if I’ll send it. Margot said that it wouldn’t make any difference; if that’s true I might as well:

  I read in the amicus brief that you were among those offering your experience with me as an example of my abusive behavior. I am shocked and hurt by this. I never intended any pain or disrespect. I teased, maybe too much. But you must know how much I valued our friendship and respected you. I offered to include your boyfriend in our circle just to be in your presence. Please, Sharona, don’t be part of this. I’m not asking because I think it will affect the legal outcome—​I know that it won’t. I’m asking because it truly hurts me to have your name in any way connected with this. Please show me a fraction of the regard I feel for you.

  I was very tempted to add that Hortense, the sacred dressing-room girl, was adamantly not a part of the lawsuit, that she had even sent me a supportive note. (Which was especially meaningful considering that Hortense knew Caitlin; I wonder how that friendship is going?) But I didn’t.

  M.

  “You had a paddle in your office? Just lying around? I never noticed that.”

  “Oh, Margot, stop it. It was more like, I don’t know, a serving spoon or a spatula.”

  “And it just happened to be in your office. And you—”

  “We had a lunch date and she was half an hour late. I hate it when people are late. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’m very punctual.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “So I was a little bit annoyed, and almost to make the situation lighter, I said, ‘Don’t you think you should be punished for being late?’ And she said, ‘I guess so.’ So I said, ‘What should the punishment be?’ I had no idea what she’d say. She said—​no, she didn’t just say it—​she turned around and bent over.” He turned and showed me, his butt presented with knees and thighs pressed primly together. I think he even put his hands on his knees. “And she said, ‘A spanking.’ So I swatted her once with this butter knife—”

  “You said spatula.”

  “Whatever it was, I don’t remember. And then we went to lunch and had a great time. And now she’s saying that I beat and degraded her.”

  I face-palmed as I pictured it: the breezy ambiance of the office, the light words, the girl maybe tossing a little moue over her shoulder as she playfully presented her ass; perhaps she started at the stinging sensation, but then—​off to lunch and laughter! And then the silent subway ride home, across from a row of tired, distracted strangers staring at their phones, or just staring.

  “This is what I don’t understand. It was her idea—​no, it was my idea. But she more than went along with it. She didn’t have to stick her ass out. She didn’t have to do anything. None of them had to.”

  “Quin,” I said. “I would never say this in public. I wouldn’t say it to anybody but you. And maybe Todd. But listen. Women are like horses. They want to be led. They want to be led, but they also want to be respected. You have to earn it, every time. And they are as strong as fuck. If you don’t respect them, they will throw you off and prance around the paddock while you lie there bleeding. That’s what I think.”

  Q.

  Do I respect women? If I’m being truthful, I’m not sure I can answer generally and in all cases. But I can say this: I respect my wife. And I did not betray her.

  “I flirted. That’s all it was. I did it to feel alive without being unfaithful. I never—”

  “It would’ve been more dignified if you had,” Carolina replied. “It would’ve been more normal.”

  “It would be more dignified if I’d been unfaithful? Do you mean that?”

  She sat very straight, looking out our big, west-facing windows. Countless rectilinear shapes, silver and gray, rose in an abnormal sky of purplish clouds and freakishly pink light. An especially vertiginous beauty of glass and steel caught the sunset and turned orange.

  “You’re not even a predator,” she said quietly. “Not even. You’re a fool. A pinching, creeping fool. That is what’s unbearable.”

  M.

  I didn’t know most of the women who had spoken out against Quin. But I knew one, a novelist named Regina March, one of his minor discoveries from some years back. I’d seen her at Quin’s parties and liked her; she was a warm, opinionated forty-year-old, who, I remember, always hugged Quin goodbye. I was astonished to see that she was one of hundreds of women who’d signed the petition naming multiple “abusers” and demanding that no one ever hire them again; they specifically threatened to boycott any publishing house or media company that did hire one of them. Essentially, this intelligent, delightful woman was threatening the livelihood of the man who’d first published her!

  My astonishment must have shown when I saw her at a party; her face fell at the sight of me. Provoked by her guilty look, I slowly pursued her around the room, joined her in a three-way conversation, and politely awaited my moment. I didn’t have to wait long. As soon as the other woman walked away, she looked at me with emotional eyes and asked, “How is Quin? How is Carolina?”

  “As well as you would expect,” I said.

  “I think of them every day,” she said. “I’ve wanted to reach out but I—”

  “Reach out? You wanted to reach out? My God, Regina, why did you sign that thing?”

  She started to cry. She said that she hadn’t seen his name on the petition until after she’d signed it—​there were so many names—​and because it was online, she couldn’t unsign it. Maybe his name was added after she signed it? Because if she’d seen it she wouldn’t have done it! Could I tell him, could I tell Carolina, could I—​

  Q.

  After my case has been dismissed—​and I feel there is a good chance of that happening—​I want to make a statement. I’ll write a blog, maybe, or send something to the Times. Maybe I’ll just read it in court. The idea came to me late one night—​early morning, really, probably around four, when I woke with my heart so low in my chest that I could barely feel it. Carolina was next to me, and though I wanted to press against her for strength, I lay still. Her features were barely visible in the dark, but I saw the contours of her forehead, lips, nose, and cheek; these shapes expressed sadness and helplessness, but her curved shoulders and her neck declared animal determination to push through this shit. Carolina: the sacred figure behind the gaudy tapestry of my public life. Unable to help myself,
I moved closer and, coming into the area of her warmth, was flooded with relief and residual happiness. Then she moved, in her sleep, away from me.

  I thought, I’ve got to do something. I have to fight somehow. I could check in with old friends in London. Maybe the poison hasn’t spread there. Terrible to have to face my father, but . . . I rose and went into the living room and looked out at the park, with its deep vegetable greens and rough browns under the colorless sky. But I didn’t want to go to England; I wanted to stay here. A few cars moved sluggishly in the street; a horse-drawn carriage humped along at the curb. Sounds came up—​a garbage truck, a bus, something large beeping horribly as it turned, the gray noise of traffic. Horns, blaring and bright then soft around the edges, subsiding into the dominant gray. Beautiful from here—​the obedience to the grid, the vying against it. It gave me faith in myself. Words and music flowed freely in my mind, coming, it seemed, from a place of deep subterranean order, a place from which the signs and symbols of society draw their vitality. Buoyed by the ramshackle order of the waking city, I felt that all could be well, that I could make myself understood, and—​perhaps—​even make peace with those who had felt wronged by me.

  I sat down at my desk and wrote:

  I realize that the way I’ve carried myself in the world has not always been agreeable to those around me. I come from a generation that values freedom and honesty above politeness, and I have acted from those values, sometimes as a provocateur, even a trickster. Maybe I’ve gone too far sometimes, been too curious, too friendly, at times a little arrogant. But . . .

  From there, I didn’t know what to say. I found myself strangely distracted by memories of a visual artist who’d been a frequent guest at our parties, a sexy bird who’d recently dropped me a sweet email. I thought of a video she’d made of a man kneeling and barking at her command; she’d made him bark for a kiss (“Louder! More!”) until they both collapsed in fits of laughter. With some effort, I returned my feelings to my wife and to Lucia, who had awakened from a bad dream a couple of nights before and climbed into bed between us, wanting us both to hold her. But, even though it had happened recently, the memory felt distant and somehow made it harder to write the statement. I sat there for another hour, and still I did not know what else to say.

  “I think it would be good if you started with an apology.” That’s what Margot’s husband, Todd, suggested when I asked them for help with the statement. We’d had drinks and a discussion in their old-school Brooklyn apartment—​a warren of little rooms redeemed by an expansive kitchen that was charming, even with its broken molding and stained, sagging ceiling.

  “Apology for what? Being myself?”

  “For causing pain. I realize that some of them are overreacting or just jumping on a trend. But some of them must’ve been genuinely hurt and—”

  I love Todd. He is a kind and earnest man with slightly strange proportions—​small hands, delicate mouth, formidable shoulders, and a large and somehow senatorial head. I love him as a loyal dog to Margot’s skittish cat. But I am not a dog, and it won’t do for me to pretend that I am. “But I don’t believe they were hurt. They were maybe offended, but that’s different.”

  “But would they say they were hurt?”

  Margot didn’t give me time to answer. “I would say that you don’t understand why these people are saying these things when they acted like they were your friends and accepted favors from you.”

  “I don’t want to say, ‘I don’t understand.’ That’s weak and whining. And besides, I do understand.”

  “What do you understand?” she asked.

  What patronizing patience from my darling friend! Still, I answered calmly. “That this is the end of men like me. That they are angry at what’s happening in the country and in the government. They can’t strike at the king, so they go for the jester. They may not win now, but eventually they will. And who am I to stand in the way? I don’t want to stand in the way.”

  They looked at me with bleak respect.

  “They were my friends. I would still be friends with them. I miss them.”

  “Friends?” Margot really did sneer at the word. “That little bitch ruined your life!”

  “She did not ruin my life. I would never give her that power. She’s just a confused kid!”

  Again they looked, simply bleak this time.

  M.

  “He wants to be friends with them,” Todd said incredulously.

  “I know.”

  “He’s fucked,” Todd said.

  “I know.”

  “Imprisoned in a cloven pine.”

  “What?”

  “And in their most unmitigable rage into a cloven pine, within which rift imprisoned he didst painfully—”

  “Oh, stop, this isn’t Shakespearean, not even a little. And don’t compare the women to witches.”

  “Why?” He was doing the dishes as we spoke, and turned to look at me. “You just called one of them a little bitch.”

  He looked genuinely confused, so I just said, “I know,” and we dropped it.

  But his comparison wasn’t right. Ariel didn’t pinch Sycorax’s ass or tell her to bite his thumb. Ariel was punished for refusing to obey the witch’s commands; Quin was being punished for issuing commands. Or at least that was how the women had responded—​as if they had been given commands by someone who had the power to do so.

  This is where I don’t understand my own feelings. When I say to my colleagues that the women should have just told Quin to stop, that I had told him to stop and had made him stop, they inevitably tell me that the power was disproportionately his, and that even if in theory the women could have pushed back they should not be expected to, they shouldn’t have to. I get aggravated then and splutter about female agency versus infantilization, etc. I say, yes, he acted badly. I was angry at him too. But did he deserve to lose his job, his right to work, his honor as a human? Did he have to be so completely and utterly crushed? Couldn’t people have just made fun of him for being a dirty Jiminy Cricket and left it at that? (A sweet cricket, crossed with the wicked Foulfellow fox—​hi-diddle-dee-dee! )

  But there are other things I don’t say, can’t say. And this is where the heart pain comes. Subtle. But real.

  A few years ago Quin told me that a friend of his was experiencing recovered memories of childhood sex abuse. He was skeptical of this process and so tired of the subject that he found himself avoiding her. “Quin,” I told him. “If you care about her as a friend, suspend your skepticism. Even if it sounds like bullshit. This is important and she’s trusting you.” And to make him understand the strength of my feelings, I told him that I’d been abused as a five-year-old.

  “And you remember it?” he asked.

  “Not all of it. But I remember some of it very vividly. It was shocking, in every way. The powerful sensation of it. He didn’t hurt me physically, but it was like being stunned by a blow and then mesmerized. The sensation was too much, too strong for me at that age.”

  “Who was he?”

  “A friend of the family. I remember his large, dark shape. I don’t mean that his coloring was dark. There was a dark feeling about him that I could somehow see. A feeling of pain. I remember climbing in his lap and trying to comfort him.”

  “I’m sure you did comfort him. You must’ve been a little angel to him.”

  “Quin,” I said. “That’s a weird thing to say.”

  “Why? Children can be powerful. I’m sure you took away the pain for a little while.”

  “Not for long. He killed himself.”

  “Terrible. Still, I’m sure you helped him.”

  And then the conversation moved on. I didn’t feel anger. I don’t remember what I felt, exactly, except a strange, muted combination of incredulity and acceptance. It didn’t occur to me to say anything to him about it until much later. He didn’t remember the conversation, but he apologized anyway; he didn’t understand why I was upset. “I was just trying to find someth
ing positive in it,” he said. And I imagine that was true. But inside I stayed angry. At the same time, I still loved him. I still leaned on him for support and counsel. I was like the women who didn’t stop him and who acted like his friends even as they grew angrier and angrier. It wasn’t because he had more power than I did; that didn’t really matter. And it wasn’t because I’m like a horse. I don’t know why I behaved the way I did, and I kept doing it; he kept doing it. The little jabs and jokes he’d always made, artfully woven in with his habitual flattery, stung, like the bites of an invisible insect (“I think it’s interesting that you pay so much more attention to your appearance than you did even just five years ago”). And though I might once have easily brushed them away, suddenly I could not. Nor could I confront him. The conversation moved too quickly.

  Q.

  When I was nineteen, I had sex with a girl in the public restroom of a club, if you could call that dark, filthy noise pit a club, and we did then. I didn’t have to do much to make it happen, so little that I can barely remember. I remember her, though: her small, pretty face too stiff and blank, but her nearly perfect body full of strange, hard will. First I sat and she knelt (shirt pulled up, bra pulled down, amazing breasts popping out, crushed and lopsided), then I stood and she bent, offering herself over a public toilet. We were not alone, the dirty roar of the sound system came in and out with the suctioning door and people spewed into the porcelain pots, crashed around, and laughed in the rattling stalls. She almost ran out when we were done, and, feeling some vague remorse, I asked for her number, because I thought she might want that, though she didn’t seem to. I have a photo of a former girlfriend that was taken at the same club; it was taken right as someone pulled up her skirt to show that she wasn’t wearing underwear. Her eyes are lowered, her face is turned half defiantly, and her hand is fighting to pull her skirt back down, but she’s smiling, and it looks at first glance as if she were the one pulling up her own dress.