The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “Ready?” The gallery owner’s face was pinched and angular. “We open in five.”

  Tyler stuck his tag to the wall. Octopus VII. Steel, wire. Inquire for pricing. Each tentacle was a tight spiral of wires. The body was a cylinder of steel sheet metal he’d welded in place, then oxidized with vinegar and hydrogen peroxide. He hadn’t thought of a price; it had been a big deal just getting into a show with Kelsa. They’d just graduated. This was the beginning.

  A crowd filtered in—​all high-waisted jeans and vintage bomber jackets. Tyler sipped wine from a tiny cup and ate cubes of dill Havarti too quickly. Then the gallery owner appeared and introduced Tyler to an art collector with a necklace of bears carved from stones.

  “I’m inquiring about the price,” the woman said, smiling wide. “One thing—​could you bend some of these wires down? Can’t you just see it catching a sweater?”

  Tyler felt the wine rise to his face and clenched his jaw. He searched briefly for Kelsa. Wires catching a sweater? Fuck, no. He smirked and said sorry, no changes, the octopus was staying as is.

  “Shame. It’s a great piece,” the woman said, and turned to look at a ceramic vase shaped like a Venus flytrap. She wasn’t his audience. It didn’t matter—​he was twenty-five. There would be more sculptures, more shows—​there had to be.

  * * *

  The whole month of June smelled like sweat-stained sheets and Oreos. They sat in Tyler’s bed in the afternoon, watching cyclists out the window on Adeline Street, when Kelsa announced she was moving.

  “I can’t paint in the Bay Area now that school’s over,” she sighed.

  “What?” They’d moved their pieces out of the gallery just last week. Tyler hadn’t done any work the whole time the show was up; he’d barely even thought about it. But Kelsa was a mystery, a secret overachiever. Her wispy armpit hair was visible as she put on her bra.

  “I’m going to L.A.,” she said, gathering her knees to her chin. The bra was made of cotton patterned with tiny ice cream cones. “I can’t go to farmers’ markets all day and eat expensive sandwiches. I have to try to make something.” She touched his chest, tracing her finger over his concave sternum. He’d always had it. It made him look kind of scrawny and folded.

  “We never go to the farmers’ market,” said Tyler. He could see a tentacle of Octopus VII through the doorway, where it took up most of the shared living room.

  “But I feel like we would.” Kelsa combed her hair with her fingers. “Everything in L.A. is yellow and dry, like the apocalypse is happening early. I’m going to paint all the time. I found a place in Silver Lake.”

  “Sounds cool.” Tyler shifted, unsure if he should make a bigger deal out of this.

  “Well, I have to pack. I’m ride-sharing down on Thursday.” Kelsa pushed the blanket away. “Hit me up if you’re in L.A.”

  Kelsa put on her jeans and sweater with its paint-dipped sleeve. She was acting normal, exaggeratedly normal—​it didn’t make sense.

  “How long will you be down there?” Tyler said finally.

  Her eyebrows raised for a second, then she said, “I don’t know yet—​I’m just going. I’ll see you around, okay?” She said this with pressed lips, then leaned down, kissed Tyler’s forehead nonchalantly, and left.

  * * *

  “I can barely hear you, Ty,” barked his dad though the phone’s speaker, amplified by the curve of the cup holder.

  “I’m in the car,” Tyler said.

  “How’s that piece of junk holding up?” His dad chuckled drily. Tyler pictured him sitting on the back porch in Sonoma smoking an indulgent cigarette.

  “All right. I’m driving to L.A.”

  The old station wagon rumbled down I-5, past rectangular masses of cattle and the smog-obscured Sierras. Octopus VII was wedged in the back with the seats folded down, and a metallic tentacle poked behind Tyler’s headrest.

  “What the hell’s in L.A? I thought you’d have another show lined up in Oakland.”

  Tyler could almost hear him pacing. His dad, a writer who’d made money on his worst book, had encouraged Tyler’s art career, insisting he was better off making something tangible, not just a tortured jumble of ideas.

  “Ty? I can’t hear you.”

  “It’s like . . . apocalyptic down there,” Tyler said. “My lease was up; two of my housemates were leaving anyway. And this artist I know, Kelsa, she just moved there. She has gallery leads.”

  His dad laughed in a slap-on-the-back way, or maybe he was coughing. For the past few weeks, since Kelsa left, Tyler had felt half awake, face puffy and stupid. Kelsa had texted him pictures of romantically faded buildings and sand. Phrases like missing the fog up north. Last Tuesday an apartment building offset by a saturated sunset, captioned home: Silver Lake Blvd & Reno St. Friday a photo of her wearing a translucent, threadbare Talking Heads shirt. Right then he’d packed up his room and the octopus.

  “You have a place?”

  “Yeah, in Silver Lake. I’m subletting from some friend of Dave’s.”

  “Okay. You know the last of the trust is in your account?”

  “I know. I don’t need it.”

  Of course he needed the money. All he’d done in his life was an MFA at California College of the Arts and a modest range of drugs. What he really needed was to stop talking about it. It was embarrassing that his parents funded his artwork, considering the only good piece he’d made was Octopus VII.

  “Oh—​Ty, the article about your show came out in the East Bay Express. You look sharp with that octopus. Aunt Heidi asked if you’re making smaller ones. I told her, let him do his thing. But hey, there’s a market.”

  “Great.” His stomach turned at the thought of making another octopus that was better and different but also the same.

  “All right, Ty. Keep living the dream. Call when you get down there.” His voice sounded extra sad and raspy, like Springsteen singing “Glory Days.”

  “Sure.” Tyler hung up, took a swig from a bottle of warm water, and continued down the flat expanse of road.

  He arrived in Silver Lake late in the afternoon and the smog gave everything a filter of light static. The sun had washed out the signs for Korean restaurants and pet shops to ominous pastels. Here and there you’d see someone on the sidewalk—​a stumbling man, a woman jogging in neon-green pants. Tyler parked on a wide street. The guy’s tiny apartment was in a blue stucco building, third floor up a narrow staircase, and the space was mostly empty with a sharp odor of Windex. Tyler found a box in the bathroom with one razor and a pair of knockoff Ray Bans, plus books by the bare mattress: New Directions in Sound Editing; Recipes for the Microwave; Bukowski’s Love Is a Dog from Hell.

  Tyler installed Octopus VII in the center of the main room, letting the tentacles unfurl, some reaching into the air, some draping across the floor. For a minute he stood there, trying to find a better place for it, but with wires already snagging the carpet, it wasn’t worth it. He drank mineral-tinged water from the tap, put a coil of wire on the table in the corner. A pair of pliers. A pair of heavy-duty scissors. Opened the window and the dry air yawned in, smelling like the exhales of a thousand cars.

  The apartment was on Tularosa Drive, just blocks from where Kelsa said she lived. After he’d found the sublet, he almost told her, but then he figured why not just go, then invite her over. Kelsa was impulsive—​she’d be into it. He paced the room, wrote the text. Hey, I’m in Silver Lake right now. Want to hang out? Her abrupt move to L.A. must have been a suggestion for him to follow. She wasn’t good on the phone or over text; she was like a poet, each phrase short and ambiguous. It was better to see her in person. They made sense in person. She texted back: What? Tyler paused, trying to read this as excited or shocked. After several minutes she said, I’m free at 9ish. He texted her the address. Stared out the window at a pink billboard with the word THIS and the rest obscured by buildings.

  The sun went down, casting magenta streaks behind the billboard. A greasy taco fro
m the place down the street made the smell of beef settle into the carpet. With pliers, he bent a piece of wire into a rough shape, which ended up looking like a clothes hanger.

  Professor Yao had called Octopus VII accosting and masculine yet vulnerable. “A creature stripped bare of its flesh, straining against something,” he’d said. “Against social pressure? Pressure to fall into the crippling morass of the economy? Octopus VII is raw anatomy, motion, danger of feeling.” Yao had stepped in front of the sculpture, obscuring it, staring at Tyler through his oval glasses. “In your future work,” he continued, “I see total abstraction.”

  Tyler had nodded, like that’s what he meant all along. He could never have described it so well. And maybe Yao had a point—​Tyler had chosen the octopus for its constantly shifting shape, and finally he got the sculpture to look like it was twisting, thrashing, changing. It was after that critique that he’d first asked Kelsa out for a drink.

  A knock sent vibrations through the room, and Tyler met Kelsa at the door.

  “Hey.” She wore faded overalls, like she was playing a painter in a movie. She scanned the room, eyes hovering on Octopus VII. “Wait—​did you move here?”

  “I’m subletting,” he said, trying to catch some aspect of her in his hands. But there was a slippery tenseness about her and she kept turning to look around the room.

  “Um, yeah. I thought you were just in town. You brought this guy,” she said, dodging Tyler, touching a pale fingertip to one of Octopus VII ’s tentacles. “Are you going to show it down here?”

  “Maybe.” Tyler stepped behind her and held her waist, smelled deodorant and traces of turpentine. She turned, almost kissed him, then flinched, bracing cold palms on his collarbones.

  “It’s so weird that you just moved here,” she said. “Why would you move here?”

  “My lease was up in Oakland. I mean, why not? Your pictures made it look all right.”

  Kelsa paced the room, face sour, keeping a few feet between them. She twisted the silver ring on her right hand over and over. Tyler felt a vise turning on his shoulders.

  “I’m trying to stop doing that,” Kelsa said. “Texting people. Just to get a response.” She looked at the floor, ripped her thumbnail with her teeth. “It’s fucked up that I want validation all the time. Or company. I hope that’s not why you moved here.”

  “No, it was for that guy.” Tyler gestured to the sculpture. “He wanted to be closer to the ocean.”

  She looked at Tyler again, stepped closer, maybe to kiss him. Her eyes had dark half-moons underneath them, like she’d stayed up all night. She sighed hard. “Look, I want to hang out. Like, just talk.”

  She paced again, making it impossible to touch her. She never wanted to just talk. She was a kinetic person, that’s what she always said.

  “So I’m living alone now. It’s great—​I’m teaching myself how to cook. I can make eggs, brown rice, a bunch of things.”

  “Nice,” said Tyler. “I have a microwave in there. Might make some Hot Pockets.”

  Kelsa semi-smiled but kept pacing, threading her fingers in the overall straps. She pointed at the scissors on the worktable. “Hey, you know what? I have a job interview tomorrow and I need a haircut. Could you? You have scissors.”

  “What?”

  “Cut my hair.” She blushed, smirked. “I don’t know. It was an idea. Is this too weird? Maybe I should leave.”

  “No, sure, yeah. I’ll cut your hair.”

  She wet her hair under the bathtub tap, crouching on the floor. Tyler had agreed to this without thinking and his whole body had a heartbeat in it. Kelsa wrapped a towel around her shoulders and leaned against the sink, squinting into the mirror. “Just a trim,” she said.

  “I might fuck it up,” said Tyler, touching the hair. He tried to push the possibility of sex from his mind, focusing on Kelsa’s bitten fingernails tapping against the sink.

  “It looks like shit anyway. Take off two inches.”

  She seemed calmer now. Maybe she was just in a weird mood. He lifted a section of hair and smoothed it out, then snipped. It made a hssk sound and fell to the floor, becoming limp and material, no longer part of her body. He snipped again, in the front, making a sharper angle that hit at her chin. She grinned.

  “It feels lighter,” she said. “Keep going.”

  He kept smoothing the hairs and snipping. It was satisfying. “So what’s the job interview? I thought you were painting the apocalypse.”

  “Pinkberry—​the fro-yo.” She rolled her eyes. “All artists have a lame day job, right?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Tyler pictured himself washing pans at the taco place, getting yelled at in Spanish. “Have you done any new paintings?”

  “I will.”

  Tyler lifted and cut strands, so they hit at different lengths, pointing out her sharp chin and skinny neck. The pieces on the floor began to dry, expanding into blond whorls all over the chartreuse linoleum. When he was done, Kelsa fluffed her hair with the towel, smiled, whipped her head around.

  “You look hot,” said Tyler, feeling his mouth get tacky around the words.

  Kelsa’s chest retreated into her overalls. “I’m an idiot. I shouldn’t have asked you.”

  “What? It was pretty easy.”

  “No, it’s fine,” said Kelsa. “Look—​when I left, I thought we’d just be friends. I thought I said that, but maybe I didn’t. I’m trying to be independent. Just paint, focus on the work, not the whole eating-cookies-in-bed relationship thing.”

  Tyler’s heart skipped beats. She had left town, mumbled see you around with that distant look, like she was already remembering him fondly.

  “I get that,” he said. “I’m focusing on my work too.”

  “Exactly. Well, I have that interview first thing tomorrow. I should get out of here.” Kelsa took her purse and shuffled through the sea of hair. She stopped, framed in the doorway. “Let me know if you have any shows coming up.”

  “See you around,” Tyler said.

  He heard her sneakers slap down the stairwell, and from the bathroom he saw Octopus VII command the living room. With a hot swallow, he walked over and kicked the body, denting the metal, making a weak bang. He couldn’t imagine lifting it again, cramming it back into the car, and driving—​where? Back to the Bay Area to search Craigslist for one of the last cheap places? Sonoma to stay in his old bedroom on that depressing futon? He couldn’t imagine making sculptures in this carpeted apartment. But that’s what artists did. Felt terrible and made something out of it. He would feel like it, maybe if he got a little drunk. Yeah, fuck it, he’d stay the two months.

  Tyler found a broom in the bathroom closet and pushed the blond hair into a slippery pile. Tomorrow he could find sheet metal and tires to build something large and hard-edged. Knives tied together with wire. Maybe a giant, Richard Serra–style slab of rusted metal shaped like a shallow bowl where he could curl inside. He kept sweeping the hair, listening to moths buzz against the fluorescent light.

  * * *

  The first month stank of tacos, Hot Pockets, and Modelo. Mornings were Apple Jacks and generic milk. It was cathartic to eat a corner-store diet; it curbed the guilt he choked down every time he withdrew money from his bank account. A few times he sat at the worktable, bending a piece of wire with his bare hand until it hurt, and scrolling Facebook. People from school were starting to post small art: 8-by-10 prints of photos taken inside BART or tiny sculptures that could be shipped in flat-rate boxes. Sell-out art. He wasn’t ready for that shit. He could still feel it a little, wanting to make something; it was like being kind of horny, and it seemed like one of these days it could get so intense that he’d start bending wires into abstract shapes with the radio ricocheting off the walls.

  He made himself a Tinder profile, relying on shots of himself with greasy hair in the studio. Sitting on the beige carpet, he typed “L.A.-based artist” in his bio and felt disingenuous. The girls in his radius were tiny, athletic. He never saw
Kelsa in there, not that he wanted to. He was living alone, learning to hear the dumb sound of his thoughts.

  One day he got a call from the guy whose apartment he was subletting.

  “Hey man,” the guy yelled over traffic. “I don’t know if Dave told you, but I’m staying in Atlanta for a job on set.”

  “Cool.” Tyler paced around Octopus VII.

  “If you want to rent the place, it’s yours. You’re a sculptor, right? Are you using that badass worktable?” Tyler sat at the table, leaned his elbow on the smooth wood. He hadn’t really used it. But it would be his own worktable, his own apartment, far from his parents. The rent was decent. He’d just need a day job and he could swing it. “So can you stay? I’ll call the landlord right now. Would save me a huge hassle trying to find someone. Plus, L.A.—​you’ll do great things. It’s the land of kings.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, I’m just saying random shit.”

  “I’ll stay,” said Tyler. “Thanks, man.”

  That night he dragged himself to the taco place. The afternoon had been wasted over four beers and an Internet vortex. The grimy ATM in the corner blinked his balance. It was more than he should have, but it was burning fast. Waiting for his burrito, he scanned jobs on Craigslist on his phone. Hummus Republic hiring servers—​experience + fun attitude a must! He needed something blue-collar, entry-level, something that wouldn’t take over his identity, like gallery installation—​but the thought of running into Kelsa with a giant canvas, her face calm and righteous, made him want to punch a wall. Still, the haircut turned over and over in his mind, the hssk sound, the sea of blond on the floor, the way he made it fall at angles, reducing it to something better.

  * * *

  In September, on the hottest, most futile Tuesday, the billboard across the street changed. Tyler shifted around the room to get a better view of it. Between buildings, it read: L.A. MODERN COSMETOLOGY—​DO HAIR, LIVE THE DREAM. A close-cropped photo showed a man with black hair gelled into spikes. It was hilariously stupid. Tyler collapsed onto his chair, leaning far back, and opened his laptop. L.A. Modern’s website repeated the slogan in neon yellow on black. Five grand for a six-month fast-track course to get a license. With the last of his savings, he could barely pay rent for that long. But once you had the license, it would be a decent job—​mindless, but not washing dishes. He might even be good at it.