The Best American Short Stories 2015

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  You couldn’t blame a man who had nothing for wanting everything he could get his hands on. This was pretty much what I thought on the bus ride back to the subway. Oh, I could blame him. I was spending an hour and a half to get there every week and an hour and a half to get back so he could entertain his ex? I was torn between being pissed off and my principles about being a good sport. Why had Boyd told me? The guy could keep his mouth shut when he needed to.

  Because he didn’t think he needed to. Because I was a good sport. What surprised me even more was how painful this was starting to be. I could imagine Boyd greeting Lynnette, in his offhand, Mr. Cool Way. “Can I believe my eyes?” Lynnette silky and tough, telling him it had been too long. But what was so great about Boyd that I should twist in torment from what I was seeing too clearly in my head?

  I was on the bus during this anguish. I wanted Boyd to comfort me. He had a talent for that. If you were insulted because some asshole at daycare said your kid’s shoes were unsuitable, if you splurged on a nice TV and then realized you’d overpaid, if you got fired from your job because you used up sick days and it wasn’t your fault, Boyd could make it seem hilarious. He could remind you it was part of the ever-expanding joke of human trouble. Not just you.

  When I got back to the apartment, Oliver was actually asleep in his bed—had Kiki drugged him?—and Kiki was in the living room watching the Cooking Channel on TV.

  “You watch this crap?” I said.

  “How was the visit?”

  “Medium. Who’s winning on Chopped?”

  “The wrong guy. But I have a thing for Marcus Samuelsson.” He was the judge who had a restaurant right in Harlem, a chef born in Ethiopia, tall and rangy and very good-looking. So, I wanted to ask Kiki and I almost did, is the whole fucking world about men?

  “Oliver spilled a lot of yogurt on the floor but we got it cleaned up,” she said.

  I wanted a drink, I wanted a joint. What was in the house? I found a very old bottle of Beaujolais in the kitchen and poured glasses for us both.

  “When does he get out?” Kiki asked.

  “They say January. He’s holding up OK.”

  “He has you.”

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but when you got divorced,” I said, “was it because one of you had been messing around with someone else?”

  “Whooh,” Kiki said, “where did that come from?”

  “Someone named Lynnette has been visiting Boyd.”

  Kiki considered this. “Could be nothing.”

  “So when you left Turkey, why did you leave?”

  “It was time.”

  I admired Kiki’s way of deciding what was none of your business, but it made you think there was business there.

  It was my bad luck that Con Ed got its act together the very next evening, so electricity flowed in the walls of Kiki’s home to give her light and refrigeration and to pump her water and the gurgling steam in her radiators. I called her to say Happy Normal.

  “Normal is overrated,” she said. “I’ll be so busy next week.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  Oliver hardly ever had sitters. He was in daycare while I went off to my unglamorous employment as a part-time receptionist at a veterinarian’s office (it paid lousy but the dogs were usually nice) and at night I took him with me if I went to see friends or Boyd, when I used to stay with Boyd. Sometimes Boyd had a cousin who watched him.

  “Oliver wants to say hi,” I told my aunt.

  “I love you, Great Kiki!” Oliver said.

  This didn’t move her to volunteer to sit for him another time, and I thought it was better not to ask again so soon.

  Oliver wasn’t bad at all on the next visit to Rikers. The weather was colder and he got to wear his favorite Spider-Man sweater, which Boyd said was very sharp.

  “Your mom’s looking good too,” Boyd said to Oliver.

  “Better than Lynnette?”

  I hadn’t meant to say any such whiny-bitch thing; it leaped out of me. I was horrified. I wasn’t as good as I thought I was, was I?

  “Not in your league,” Boyd said. “Girl’s nowhere near.” He said this slowly and soberly. He shook his onion head for emphasis.

  The rest of the visit went very well. Boyd suggested that Oliver now had the superpower to spin webs from the ceiling—“You going to float above us all, land right on all the bad guys”—and Oliver was so tickled he had to be stopped from shrieking with glee at top volume.

  “Know what I miss?” Boyd said. “Well, that, of course. Don’t look at me that way. But also I miss when we used to go ice skating.”

  We had gone exactly twice, renting skates in Central Park, falling on our asses. I almost crushed Oliver one time I went down. “You telling everyone you’re the next big hockey star?” I said.

  “I hope there’s still ice when I get out,” he said.

  “There will be,” I said. “It’s soon. Before you know it.”

  Kiki had now started to worry about me; she called more often than I was used to. She’d say, “You think Obama’s going to get this Congress in line? And how’s Boyd doing?”

  I let her know we were still an item, which was what she wanted to know. Why in God’s name would I ever think of splitting up with Boyd before I could at least get him back home and in bed again? What was the point of all these bus rides if I was going to skip that part?

  “You wouldn’t want me to desert him at a time like this,” I said.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “He’s not much of a criminal,” I said. “He was just a bartender selling on the side, not any big-time guy.” I didn’t have to tell her not to mention this to my father.

  “Anybody can be in jail, I know that,” Kiki said. “Hikmet was in jail for thirteen years in Turkey.”

  I thought she meant an old flame of hers but it turned out she meant a famous poet who was dead before she even got there. A famous Communist poet. She’d read all his prison poems.

  Boyd wasn’t in jail for politics, although some people claimed the war on drugs was a race war, and they had a point. My mom and dad were known to smoke dope every now and then, and was any cop stop-and-frisking them on the streets of Brookline?

  “So can I ask you,” I said, “were there drugs around when you were in Turkey?” What a blurter I was these days. “Were people selling hash or anything?”

  “Not in our circles. I hate that movie, you’ve seen that movie. But there was smuggling. I mean in antiquities, bits from ancient sites. People went across to the eastern parts, brought stuff back. Or they got it over the border from Iran. Beautiful things, really.”

  “It’s amazing what people get money for.”

  “If Osman had wanted to do that,” she said, “he wouldn’t have become a farmer. It was the farming that made me leave, by the way.”

  I was very pleased that she told me.

  “And he left off farming five years later,” she said. “Isn’t that ironic?”

  “It is,” I said.

  “I still write to Osman. He’s a great letter writer.”

  This was news. Did she have all the letters; how hot were they; did he e-mail too? Of course, I was thinking: Maybe you two should get back together. It’s a human impulse, isn’t it, to want to set the world into couples.

  “The wife he has now is much younger,” Kiki said.

  By December I’d gotten a new tattoo in honor of Boyd’s impending release. It was quite beautiful—a birdcage with the door open and a line of tiny birds going toward my wrist. Some people design their body art so it all fits together, but I did mine piecemeal, like my life, and it looked fine.

  Kiki noticed it when it was a week old and still swollen. She had just made supper for us (overcooked hamburgers but Oliver liked them) and I was doing the dishes, keeping that arm out of the water. Soaking too soon was bad for it.

  “And when Boyd is out of the picture,” Kiki said, “you’ll be stuck with this ink that won’
t go away.”

  “It’s my history,” I said. “My arm is an album.”

  “What if Boyd doesn’t like it?”

  “It’s for me,” I said. “All of these are mine.”

  “Don’t be a carpet,” she said.

  “You don’t really know very much about this,” I said, “if you don’t mind my saying.”

  Why would I take advice from a woman who slept every night alone in her bed, cuddling up with some copy of Aristotle? What could she possibly tell me that I could use? And she was getting older by the minute, with her squinty eyes and her short hair cut too close to her head.

  It was snowing the day Boyd got released from Rikers. I was home with Oliver when Claude went to pick him up. He didn’t want me and Oliver seeing him then, with his bag of items, with his humbling paperwork, with the guards leaning over every detail. By the time I got to view Boyd he was in our local coffee shop with Claude, eating a cheeseburger, looking happy and greasy. Oliver went berserk, leaping all over him, smearing his snowy boots all over Boyd’s pants. I leaped a little too. “Don’t knock me over,” Boyd said. “Nah, knock me over. Go ahead.”

  “Show him no mercy,” Claude said.

  Already Boyd looked vastly better than he had in jail, and he’d been out only an hour. “Can’t believe it,” he said. “Can’t believe I was ever there.” He fed french fries to Oliver, who pretended to be a dog. Boyd had his other hand on my knee. We could do that now. “Hey, girl,” he said. The snow outside the window gave everything a lunar brightness.

  The first night he stayed with me, after it took forever to get Oliver asleep in the other room, I was madly eager when we made our way to each other at last. How did it go, this dream—did we still know how to do this? Knew just fine, though there were fumbles and pauses, little laughing hesitations. I had imagined Boyd would be hungry and even rough, but no, he was careful; he looped around and circled back and took some byways before settling on his goal. He was trying, it seemed to me, to make this first contact very particular, trying to recognize me. I hadn’t expected this from him, which showed what I knew.

  At my job in the vet’s office my fellow workers teased me about being sleepy at the desk. They all knew my boyfriend had returned after a long trip. Any yawn brought on group hilarity. “Look how she walks, she hobbles,” one of the techs said. What a raunchy office I worked in. All I said was, “Laugh away, you’re green with envy.”

  I was distracted, full of wayward thoughts—Boyd and I starting a restaurant together, Boyd and I running off to Thailand, Boyd and I having another kid, maybe a girl, what would we name her, Oliver would like this—or would he? I lost focus while I was doing my tasks at the computer and had to put up with everyone saying how sleepy I was.

  Jail doesn’t always change people in good ways, but in Boyd’s case it made him quieter and less apt to throw his weight around. He had to find a new job (no alcohol). I was proud of him when he started as a waiter in a diner just north of our neighborhood, a big challenge to his stylish self. This was definitely a step down for him, which he bore grudgingly but not bitterly. After work his hair smelled of frying oil and broiler smoke. His home was not exactly with me—he was officially living at his cousin’s, since he no longer had his apartment—but he spent a lot of nights at my place. I liked the cousin (it was Maxwell, who had once babysat for Oliver) but he had a tendency to drag Boyd out to clubs at night. In my younger days I liked to go clubbing same as anyone, but once I had Oliver it pretty much lost its appeal. I had reason to imagine girls in teensy outfits throwing themselves at Boyd in these clubs, but it turned out that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Maxwell had a scheme for increasing Boyd’s admittedly paltry income. It had to do with smuggling cigarettes from Virginia to New York, of all idiotic ways to make a profit. Just to cash in on the tax difference. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” I said. “You want to violate probation?”

  “Don’t shout,” Boyd said.

  “Crossing state lines. Are you crazy?”

  “That’s it,” Boyd said. “No more talking. You always have opinions. Topic closed. Forget I said a word.”

  I didn’t take well to being shushed. I snapped at him and he got stony and went home early that night. “A man needs peace, is that too much to ask?”

  “You think I give a fuck?” I said.

  I was with Kiki the next day, having lunch near my office. She was checking up on me these days as much as she could, which included treating me to a falafel plate. I told her about the dog I’d met at my job who knew three languages. It could sit, lie down, and beg in English, Spanish, and ASL. “A pit-bull mix. They’re smart.”

  “You know what I think?” Kiki said. “I think you should go live somewhere where you’d learn another language. Everyone should, really.”

  “Someday,” I said.

  “I still have a friend in Istanbul. I bet you and Oliver could go camp out at her place. For a little while. It’s a very kid-friendly culture.”

  “I don’t think so. My life is here.”

  “It doesn’t have to be Istanbul, that was my place, it’s not everyone’s. There are other places. I’d stake you with some cash if you wanted to take off for a while.”

  I wasn’t even tempted.

  “It’s very good of you,” I said.

  “You’ll be sorry later if you don’t do it,” she said.

  She wanted to get me away from Boyd, which might happen on its own, anyway. I was touched and insulted both at once. And then I was trying to imagine myself in a new city. Taking Oliver to a park in Rome. Having interesting chats with the locals while I sat on a bench. Laughing away in Italian.

  My phone interrupted us with the ping that meant I was getting a text. “Sorry,” I said to Kiki. “I just need to check.” It was Boyd, and I was so excited that I said, “Oh! From Boyd!” out loud. Sorry, baby was in the message, and some other things that I certainly wasn’t reading to Kiki. But I chuckled in joy, tickled to death—I could feel myself getting flushed. How funny he could be when he wanted. That Boyd.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I just have to answer fast.”

  “Go ahead,” Kiki said, not pleasantly.

  I had to concentrate to tap the letters. It took a few minutes and I could hear Kiki sigh across from me. I knew how I looked, too girly, too jacked up over crumbs Boyd threw my way. Kiki was not glad about it. She didn’t even know Boyd. But I did—I could see him very distinctly in my mind just then, his grumbling sweetness, his spells of cold scorn, his bragging, his ridiculous illusions about what he could do, and the waves of tenderness I had for him, the sudden pangs of adoration. I was perfectly aware (or just then I was, anyway) that some part of my life with Boyd was not entirely real, that if I pushed it too hard a whole other feeling would show itself. I wasn’t about to push. I wanted us to go on as we were. A person can know several things at once. I could know all of them while still being moved to delight by him—his kisses on my neck, his way of humming to the most blaring tune, his goofing around with Oliver. And I saw that I was probably going to help him with the cigarette smuggling too. I was going to be in it with him before I even meant to be.

  I was going to ride in the car and count the cash; I was going to let him store his illegal cigarettes in my house. All because of what stirred me, all because of what Boyd was to me. All because of beauty.

  I had my own life to live. And what did Kiki have? She had her job making deals between the very rich and the very poor. She had her books that she settled inside of in dusty private satisfaction. She had her old and fabled past. I loved my aunt, but she must have known I’d never listen to her.

  When I stopped texting Boyd, I looked up, and Kiki was dabbing at her plate of food. “The hummus was good,” I said.

  “They say Saladin ate hummus,” she said. “In the eleven hundreds. You know about him, right? He was a Kurd who fought against the Crusaders.”

  She knew a lot. She was waiting for me to make som
e fucking effort to know a fraction as much. Saladin who? In the meantime—anyone looking at our table could’ve seen this—we were having a long and unavoidable moment, my aunt and I, of each feeling sorry for the other. In our separate ways. How could we not?

  ARIA BETH SLOSS

  North

  FROM One Story

  MY FATHER MADE it as far as Little Iceland. That was the name of the iceberg they found his notebook frozen into, interred like a fossil. At least that was the name written on one of the last pages of his notebook, under a sketch of what might or might not have been the iceberg. There was the question, in those days, of what to name. The impulse was to lay claim to each new fragment of the unknown. Label everything. But icebergs do as they please. They form and break so quickly, it is possible to claim one one day, only to watch it divide itself out of existence the next.

  What my mother said: we do what we can to make things stick.

  My father was an explorer. Every few years, he packed his things—clothes, boots, notebooks, tins of food—and kissed my mother goodbye. She watched from the steps of their cabin in northern Idaho as he hoisted his bag onto his shoulder and set off down the path to the main road. When he got to the gap in the trees where the path bent back like a hairpin, he stopped and waved, a figure no bigger than her thumb.

  He came close to dying enough times she stopped keeping track. Back then, people traveling to the places he did disappeared because of all kinds of things: exhaustion, hypothermia, trichinosis, bears. For a long time, my father was lucky. The things that went missing were largely expendable: food, sled dogs, scientific measuring tools whose cost got chalked up to an expedition’s overhead. Still, some things are irreplaceable. By his thirtieth birthday, the only fingers remaining on his left hand were his ring finger, index finger, and thumb.

  But my father was a stubborn man. He had an internal compass, he said. It just kept pointing north. Once, at my mother’s insistence, he went to see the local doctor in Coolin. The doctor frowned: “Strange,” he said, shaking the thermometer. “Let’s try that again.” But my father laughed and hopped down off the examining table. He’d always known ice ran through his veins, he said. It was only a matter of time before the rest of him froze.