The Best American Short Stories® 2011

by Geraldine Brooks

  "We're doing better than last year," I answered.

  "I've been telling everyone in the Land of Moo about the Republicans trying to shut you down. I'm going to assemble an army of cheeseheads for your defense."

  "Thank you, Peter. That's thoughtful."

  Peter started mixing all the food on his plate: schnitzel, potato, creamed spinach, kraut.

  "So, what about trying my shrink?" I said. "She's good. I wouldn't lie to you."

  The old Peter would have cued up his German psychiatrist impersonation, drawing the attention of everyone around us, but the new Peter just stared at his mixed-up food. "She might be good, but how far is she from Kenosha, the epicenter of the theatrical world?"

  "She's here in the city, and that would be good for you."

  He agreed to call her and then told me about his great-uncle, who, after undergoing electroshock, became obsessed with licking copper objects. I wanted him to ask about me, to ask about Carlos, who was moving out of my apartment in gradual increments and breaking my heart in painful slow motion. I'd have to find someone else to complain to.

  "Listen, though," said Peter, "I'm on the mend. If I had more serious roles again, that might do it. I mean, I was never a comedian, and that's what they're asking me to do."

  As much as I didn't believe his optimism, I was glad he wasn't giving up. I constantly pictured him hanging himself from the closet rod of his cold little apartment, or drinking something medieval and poisonous. Maybe I'd just watched his Romeo too many times.

  "I've got an offer for you," I said. I'd thought about it in the car on the way there, and decided I couldn't ask him. I decided it several times, in fact, but now here it was, coming out of my mouth. "I want you to do some on-air work for me." He nodded, eyes wide, as he mashed his food and listened to me explain the project: in cooperation with the Art Institute, we'd commissioned twenty local poets and authors to write short works relating to the museum's crown jewels—a mystery writer casting one of the little Thorne rooms as a crime scene, a Pulitzer-winning poet extolling Picasso's man with the blue guitar in sonnet. The poems and stories would hang beside the art, and my job was to find actors to read them aloud at the gala opening and then record them for NPR and for the museum audio tour that people could rent with headphones. My brilliant idea had launched a two-year nightmare of collaboration with a hateful little man I'd come to call Institute Steve, and somehow I'd ended up in charge of the reading part. "It's December thirtieth, if your show is done. The thing is," I said, grabbing for the only available out, "the other actors might be people you knew."

  "People I know, Drew." His face stilled itself long enough to shoot me one of his complicated, devastating looks: part annoyance, part sarcasm, part glee that he'd caught me saying what I really thought. "I'll do it, if you don't think I'd embarrass you."

  And so the Rubicon was crossed.

  He left with Dr. Zeller's business card in his pocket and both of our leftovers in Styrofoam boxes. He was eating plenty despite his meager paycheck because he got free food at the dinner theater, but every night he had to choose between chicken à la king and Lake Superior whitefish.

  I stayed behind to pay the bill, and as I waited for the busboy to come back, I pressed my cheek to the dirty, cold glass of the window beside me. I felt like I needed to wake myself up. I had just risked my career on his ability to be Peter again, to jump back into himself, and I strongly doubted he could do it.

  The next time we met for dinner was before the Art Institute event. I had more important things to do, but I'd been in earlier to see that my interns were on task, and I wanted to make sure Peter was ready and calm. The Berghoff was right around the corner, and I knew neither of us would get a chance to eat the shrimp and strawberries at the reception. He'd been down a couple of weeks before to record at the studio, and I'd been relieved at how good he was, at least without an audience. I'd invited him over then for dinner with Carlos, who was still hanging around to see what further damage he could inflict on my psyche, but Peter had an audition in Milwaukee with the Kinnickinnick Players for The Night of January Sixteenth. He hadn't gotten the part.

  Tonight Peter looked skinnier and pale and had a soft stubble he might have been growing for insulation, the way he sat there in his coat and hat, his jaw shaking against the cold. To put it delicately, he looked like a few friends I had in the 1980s who are not with us anymore. I got the waitress to bring us some tea as soon as we sat down. He held the cup, letting it warm his hands, but didn't drink any. It was all over the news that the Berghoff would be closing in a couple of months. We'd stood outside in the cold for forty minutes just to get a table. People around us were taking pictures, touching the menus as if they were the faces of dying lovers.

  "I went to your shrink," he said. "Twice. You didn't tell me she was beautiful. Like Juliette Binoche. And we're very optimistic." He was warming up enough to lay his woolly hat on the table.

  "Great," I said. I couldn't keep from staring at how his brow and cheekbones stuck out sharply from his face, how his skin stretched over them, shiny and translucent. He went on and on about the therapy, about opening himself up to pain, about finding his core. I barely listened.

  "So, how's Carlos?" he said once we'd ordered dessert.

  It was too late in the meal, and he was too far behind on the story. "Not great, but you know," I said, confident he didn't care enough to press further. To be safe, though, I changed the subject. I said, "So, I had a dream about the Berghoff last night. I was running around downtown, trying to give everyone vitamin shots because of this disease I'd exposed them to. It was wartime, with tanks in the streets, and if people didn't get these shots they were going to die. I had to find everyone I ever slept with and get them to come to the Berghoff to get this shot. So I'm knocking on doors, but people have moved, and by the time I find Carlos he tells me he won't take the shot, he'd rather die. He's lying there in the snow, dying, and he goes, 'You can't save them all, Drew.' And I woke up screaming. I mean, what the hell is that?"

  "Dreams don't mean anything," he said. "I used to believe they did, but they really don't. Random synapses." As I signed the bill, he dug into his apple tart like someone just rescued from the wilderness, his eyes wide with the wonder of sugar and crust. He chewed so fast it looked like his teeth were chattering. He gestured behind me with a jerk of his eyes, and I turned to look at the next table, pretending to get something out of my jacket pocket. I assumed he meant the teenage girl with a roll of fat hanging over the back of her low jeans. She was with her parents. "What would you do?" he said. His mouth was full of tart.

  Sometime after high school, the game had evolved away from musicians and actors, and we (or at least Peter) had begun obsessing about leaping into regular people's lives, about how to fool their families. I was tired of it after twenty-five years, but this wasn't the day to put him in a bad mood. "Okay. Pretend to get sick so I don't have to go to school, and spend the whole time doing aerobics. I could get fifteen pounds off, at least. Do I get to be myself again after?"

  "Presumably."

  "Then I finish reading Proust."

  Peter took a sip from his root beer, and I noticed his hand shaking. I wondered briefly if it was Parkinson's, if the whole personality shift was that easy to explain—but Peter was such a hypochondriac, he'd have thought of that already. "You're so fucking boring," he said. "I'd run that fat little ass right into the street right now and see if I could stop traffic. I'd see how many laws I could break."

  "You could do it right now," I said. "You could run out there and just ruin your life. Nothing stopping you."

  He put his napkin on his plate and stood up. "I thought that's what the museum was for."

  As we entered the front doors of the Art Institute, the last regular museum visitors of the night were bundling past the stone lions and out into the cold. "Did you ever read that book when you were a kid?" Peter said as we walked through the emptying halls. "The one where the kids run away and
live in the Met?"

  "And they bathe in the fountain," I said.

  "That's my new plan. I want to camp out under some dinosaur bones and just..." He let his sentence trail off, as if the suits of armor we were passing would explain the rest. I imagined them as a hundred failed geniuses, hiding behind the glass, starved down to thin, steel exoskeletons. They knew what he meant.

  We stopped at the Chagall windows, stood for a minute in the warmth of their thick blue light, then headed into the special exhibit hall. I left Peter staring at a messy Klee while I talked to Lauren, my boss, who had hated the idea of this event from the time I brought it up two years before and was waiting for everything to fall apart. Her overplucked little eyebrows arched up her forehead as she asked me why half the writers weren't there yet. I went to check on the champagne, and once the evening started moving I lost track of Peter among the tablecloths and microphones and whining interns, and finally among the rush of people and coats. Half were Art Institute supporters with vintage bracelets or Frank Lloyd Wright neckties, and half were NPR junkies with professor haircuts. Some might have been both, God bless them.

  I knew I should have introduced Peter to the other actors, told him where to be, but leaving him alone was my small way of shaking him by the shoulders, of telling him to grow up. When I saw him again, he was talking to one of the actresses he knew from Chicago Shakespeare, a woman who'd just returned from off-Broadway and chopped her hair short. She was laughing at something he said, and he was teetering back and forth on his feet, as if he might at any second lose a lifelong battle with gravity. He was laughing too, but the way his skin stretched on his jaws, he looked deathly.

  I took the microphone and welcomed everyone, but my voice could never command a room; people still milled and talked and jostled for position. I introduced the five actors, and it wasn't until they came and stood beside me that I noticed Peter still had his puffy green coat on, his hands shoved down in its pockets. I wondered if he was punishing me for leaving him alone, or if he was so thin under there that he didn't want to frighten people. In high school, he would take his shirt off at every opportunity, claiming it was hot out at sixty degrees. I'd assumed back then that his dark skin was from Italian genes, but now I saw it must have just been the sun.

  The two other men were dressed in sleek sweaters, and the two women wore silk blouses and pants. Audition outfits, like Peter used to have dozens of. He looked now as if we'd found him on the street at the last minute.

  We started with the first painting, Caillebotte's Paris Street, Rainy Day, and the short-haired actress read a brief story by Stuart Dybek called "Rainy Day Chicago." When she finished, the crowd moved across the gallery to a tiny Picasso, where one of the men read a poem called "Triangle Woman." We'd pulled a miracle, getting the Art Institute to move so many of its own crowd-pleasers into one exhibit; they'd wanted to highlight lesser-known works, things they would pull from some vault, but most of the writers had agreed to the commission only if they could choose the painting. We'd asked the writers to e-mail us their wish lists, and Nighthawks topped almost every one. It was something about the loneliness, the coffee, the silence—everyone wanted to lay private claim to that one desolate corner of the universe. In the end, no one got it because it was on loan in New York. How could this one object embody loneliness, I wondered, when people crowded shoulder to shoulder around it, shared it, traded it, paraded it around? If Hopper's little coffee counter was lonely, it was in the way a prostitute was lonely. Or an actor.

  I had a hard time paying attention, and I stood there thinking how flat the readers all were, how little grace they showed compared to Peter in his prime. He played Edgar in Lear one summer up in Evanston, in the park by the beach. He was beautiful in a red shirt, and his voice made every line sound like something you'd been on the verge of remembering, if you'd only had time.

  Peter's first reading was for my least favorite story, as well as my least favorite painting in the entire museum. A very young, way-too-hip fiction writer from Bucktown named Sam Demarr had e-mailed us that the only painting he felt like writing on was "the one with the giant gum." I'd actually loved it as a child—that enormous pack of gum floating over the city skyline. Now I hated how the gum hovered there, out of proportion. It had nothing to do with the city below it, no shared color palette, the garish green wrapper rendering the brown skyline drab and uniform. On one of our first dates, Carlos and I had stood there joking that it was based on a true story, the Giant Gum Crash of '72. Since then, I'd always thought of the gum as about to land, to flatten the unsuspecting workers below, so I'd found it particularly funny that the story Sam Demarr had submitted was called "The Gum Flew Away." Demarr himself was standing there at the side of the room in dirty khakis, smirking at his wineglass.

  Peter pulled a tube of papers from his coat pocket and unrolled it so he could read the top one. The other actors held theirs in the black folders we'd sent them in. "First, all the gum flew off," he read, "leaving Chicago in its spearmint dust. Then the department stores floated away." Aside from the fact that his papers were visibly shaking, Peter sounded like himself, strong-voiced and in full control of the English language. This story suited his flat, ironic delivery. I'd chosen it for him specifically because it was monochromatic and free from dialogue. "The hot dog stands were next," I heard him say. For all my daydreaming about finding myself stranded onstage, this was the closest I'd come to feeling as if it were my own energy propelling an actor, as if when I stopped focusing, the whole thing would fall apart. Peter was gesturing around now, with the still-shaking papers, backing toward the wall and away from the old ladies in the front row. Even his legs were bouncing, and it finally occurred to me that maybe it was drugs making his limbs and voice and eyes jump around like that. It didn't seem like something he'd do, but who was I, anymore, to say what Peter would do?

  And then as he read the line about the mayor launching himself off the Hancock tower, Peter actually put the back of his hand against the painting and swept it up the canvas. The gasp from the crowd was so loud and so high that I couldn't tell where it stopped and the alarm started. A security guard I'd barely noticed trotted from the room, and another stepped forward, speaking into a radio. Peter froze, and I could feel his stomach flip. I could feel the sweat sticking the papers to his hand. The alarm was turned off, and people started talking quietly.

  "And this is why we didn't broadcast live," Lauren whispered beside me. She was glaring at me as if I'd done it myself. The institute coordinators were talking in a cluster while two guards and a woman in a suit came hurrying in, asking Peter to step aside so they could inspect the painting for damage.

  The crowd just looked embarrassed, all touching their faces but waiting politely for the reading to resume. Sam Demarr seemed to find the whole thing hilarious. Peter had stepped aside, but he was still up there in front of everyone, the only movement coming from his eyes, which jumped around liquidly, looking for their chance to leap free from his face once and for all. One of the guards talked with him in what should have been a whisper, but everyone could hear. He asked for his name, his driver's license, copied everything down on a big clipboard. If the guard took any notice of the waiting audience at all, it was as an audience for his own fine performance.

  And I thought, maybe that's what I would have done, if I'd leapfrogged up there into Peter's body, if I needed to get away before anyone realized I was a fraud: I'd hit the painting and make the show stop. But Peter had his lines right there, and he knew what to do.

  It was a good five minutes before the woman in the suit stepped away from the painting and signaled that we could continue. She stayed there, though, in the corner of the room, frowning. I assumed she'd have a long night of paperwork ahead of her now, a lot of calls to make. I felt bad for her.

  I took the mike again and said, with a big fundraising grin, "Now you've seen what fine security your contributions support!" Lauren was at the front of the crowd, shaking her head at
me over and over to show how disappointed she was, as if I hadn't gotten the message yet. "We're going to try that one again." I waited for a meek laugh from the audience and then turned toward the actors. Peter looked at me with those blank, jumpy eyes. He hadn't done it on purpose, or at least he didn't think he had. He looked like he didn't even recognize me, like I was just another blurred member of his audience, watching and breathing and waiting for him to fail. I'm still not sure what I felt, standing there. Maybe I felt my heart break, or maybe I felt Peter's heart break. When you've known someone that long, when you formed yourself around his personality, back when you were just a fourteen-year-old lump of clay, isn't it really the same thing? Aren't his heart and your own somehow conjoined? Perhaps that's what I could never explain to Carlos: ours was a kind of first love that wasn't aimed at each other, but somehow out at the world. We were forever side by side on the chapel bench, watching the show. Peter whispered something to the short-haired actress and handed her his papers. He held up his open hands to the audience in apology, ten pale, bony fingers, then walked around the people and out of the exhibit.

  "The Gum Flew Away," the woman read, the clarity of her voice a reassurance, a wiping away. "By Sam Demarr. First, all the gum flew off, leaving Chicago in its spearmint dust. Then the department stores floated away."

  I thought of following Peter out. I'd done it so many times before, chasing him down as he stormed from a party, calling his name five times until he finally turned to look at me, tear-streaked or red-faced on the wet sidewalk. "He didn't mean it," I'd usually say, or "You're just drunk," or "We all love you." I never said that I did. Just all of us, meaning everyone at the party, everyone he'd ever met, everyone who'd ever seen him from across the street. It wasn't true anymore; the world didn't love him, just I did, and I had the feeling that even if I could say that, it wouldn't be enough. And even if it were, then what? What would I do with that responsibility? And now Lauren, who was still my boss if I was lucky, was finally shooting me a look of conspiratorial relief. "Actors," said her face. "I know," said mine.