The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  Eliciting this information isn’t difficult. The one question he asks her is how many years she had to go to school to become a professor. She says, “How many after high school or how many total?”

  “After high school,” he says, and she says, “Nine.”

  Without consulting her, he orders them a second round, and after finishing it Nell is the drunkest she’s been since she was a bridesmaid in her friend Anna’s wedding, in 2003: she’s wall shiftingly drunk. She says, “Okay, give me my license now.”

  Luke grins. “How ’bout I walk you to your room? Be a gentleman and all.”

  “That’s subtle,” she says. Does he know what subtle means? (It’s not that she’s unaware that she’s an elitist asshole. She’s aware! She’s just powerless not to be one. Also, seriously, does he know what subtle means?) She says, “Is hitting on passengers a thing with you or should I feel special?”

  “What makes you think I’m hitting on you?” But he’s still grinning, and it’s the first thing he’s said that a man she’d want to go out with would say. (How will she ever, in real life, meet a man she wants to go out with who wants to go out with her? Should she join Match? Tinder? Will her students find her there?) Then Luke says, “Just kidding, I’m totally hitting on you,” and it’s double the exact right thing to say—he has a sense of humor and he’s complimenting her.

  She says, “If you give me my license, you can walk me to my room.”

  “Let me walk you to your room, and I’ll give you your license.”

  Is this how the heroines of romance novels feel? They have, in air quotes, no choice but to submit; they are absolved of responsibility by extenuating circumstances. (Semi-relatedly, Nell was once the first author on a paper titled “Booty Call: Norms of Restricted and Unrestricted Sociosexuality in Hookup Culture,” a paper that, when she last checked Google Scholar, which was yesterday, had been cited thirty-one times.)

  Nell charges the drinks to her room, and in the elevator up to the seventh floor he is standing behind her, and presses his face between her neck and shoulder and it feels really good; when they are configured like this, it’s difficult to remember that she’s not attracted to him. Inside her room—the pretense that he is merely walking her to the door has apparently dissolved—they make out for a while by the bathroom. (It’s weird, but not bad-weird, to be kissing a man other than Henry. She has not done so for eleven years.) Then they’re horizontal on the king-size bed, on top of the white down comforter. They roll over a few times, but mostly she’s under him. Eventually, he unbuttons and removes her blouse, then her bra, then pulls off his ridiculous hooded shirt. (Probably, if she were less drunk, she’d turn out the light on the nightstand.) He’s taller and thinner than Henry, and he uses his hands in a less habitually proficient but perhaps more natively adept way. He smells like some very fake, very male kind of body wash or deodorant. Intermittently, she thinks of how amused her friend Lisa, who’s an economics professor, will be when she texts her to say that she had a one-night stand with the shuttle driver. Though, for it to count as a one-night stand, is penetration required? Will penetration occur? Maybe, if he has a condom.

  He’s assiduously licking her left nipple, then her right one, then kissing down her sternum, though he stops above her navel and starts to come back up. She says, “Keep going,” and when he raises his head to look at her she says, “You’re allowed to go down on me.” This is not a thing she ever said to Henry. Although he did it—not often but occasionally, in years past—neither of them treated it like a privilege she was bestowing.

  Luke pulls down her pants and her underwear at the same time. He has to stand to get them over her ankles. From above her, he says, “Wow, you haven’t shaved lately, huh? Not a fan of the Brazilian?”

  Which might stop her cold if he were a person whose opinion she cared about, a person she’d ever see again. She knows from her students that being mostly or completely hairless is the norm now, unremarkable even among those who consider themselves ardent feminists, and it occurs to her that she may well be the oldest woman Luke has ever hooked up with.

  The funny, awful part is that she did shave recently—she shaved her so-called bikini line this morning in the shower, because she had seen online that the hotel has a pool and had packed her bathing suit, which in fact is not a bikini. Lightly, she says to Luke, “You’re very chivalrous.”

  Their eyes meet—she’s perhaps three percent less hammered than she was down in the lobby, though still hammered enough not to worry about her drunkenness wearing off anytime soon—and at first he says nothing. Then, so seriously that his words almost incite in her a genuine emotion, he says, “You’re pretty.”

  With her cooperation, he tugs her body toward the foot of the bed, so that her legs are dangling off it, then he kneels on the floor and begins his ministrations. (Being eaten out by the shuttle driver! While naked! With the lights on! In Kansas City! Lisa is going to find this hilarious.) Pretty soon, Nell stops thinking of Lisa. Eventually, wondrously, there is the surge, then the cascade. Though she doesn’t do it, it crosses her mind to say “I love you” to Luke. That is, in such a situation she can understand why a person would.

  He is next to her on the bed again—he’s naked, too, though she doesn’t recall when he removed the rest of his clothes—and she closes her eyes as she reaches for his erection and starts moving her hand. In spite of the impulse to declare her love, she’s still not crazy about the sight of him. She says, “I’ll give you a blow job, but I want my license first. For real.”

  He doesn’t respond, and she stops moving her hand. She says, “Just get it and put it on the bedside table. Then we can quit discussing this.”

  In a small voice, he says, “I don’t have it.”

  Her eyes flap open. “Seriously?”

  “I checked the van, but it wasn’t there.”

  “Are you kidding me?” She sits up. “Then what the fuck are you doing here?”

  He says nothing, and she says, “You lied to me.”

  He shrugs. “I wish I had it.”

  “Are you planning to, like, sell it?” Who do people sell licenses to? she wonders. Underage kids? Identity thieves?

  “I told you, I don’t have it.”

  “Well, it’s not like you have any credibility at this point.”

  After a beat, he says, “Or maybe you didn’t really lose it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She will reflect on this moment later, will reflect on it extensively, and one of the conclusions she’ll come to is that, with more self-possession, he could have recalibrated the mood. He could have done a variation on the thing he did in the bar, when he teased her for assuming he was hitting on her and then admitted he was hitting on her. If he had been more confident, that is, or presumptuous, even—if he’d jokingly pointed out her glaring and abundant complicity. But her life has probably given her far more practice at presumption than his has given him. And, in reality, he looks scared of her. His looking scared makes her feel like a scary woman, and the feeling is both repugnant and pleasurable.

  Quietly, he says, “I swear I don’t have it.”

  “You should leave,” she says, then adds, “Now.”

  Again when they look at each other, she is close to puncturing the theatrics of her own anger—certainly she is not oblivious of the non-equitability of their encounter ending at this moment—but she hasn’t yet selected the words that she’ll use to cause the puncture. As drunk as she is, the words are hard to find.

  “I thought we were having fun.” His tone is a little pathetic and also a little accusing. “You had fun.” It’s his stating what she has already acknowledged to herself, what she was considering acknowledging to him, that definitively tips the scales the wrong way.

  “Get out,” she says.

  In her peripheral vision, as she looks down at her bare legs, she can see him stand and dress. Her heart is beating rapidly. Clothed, he folds his arms. If he’d re
ached down and touched her shoulder . . . If he’d sat back down next to her . . .

  “Eleanor,” he says, and this is the first and only time he uses her name, which of course is her real name, though not one that anybody who knows her calls her by. “I wasn’t trying to trick you. I just wanted to hang out.”

  She says nothing, and after a minute he walks to the door and leaves.

  Her headache lasts until midafternoon on Saturday, through the budget meeting, the meeting about the newly proposed journal, the discussion of where to hold future conferences after the ones that are scheduled for 2016 and 2017. She suspects that some of her colleagues are hungover, too, and she’d likely be hungover, anyway, without the additional drinks she had with Luke, so it’s almost as if the Luke interlude didn’t occur—as if it were a brief and intensely enjoyable dream that took a horrible turn. And yet, after she wakes from a pre-dinner nap, the meetings are a blur and the time with Luke is painfully vivid.

  Nell rises from bed and splashes cold water on her face. She wants days and weeks to have passed, so that she can revert to being her boring self, her wronged-by-her-partner, high-road self; she wants to build up the capital, if only in her own mind, of not being cruel. She no longer thinks that she’ll tell Lisa anything.

  Which means that when, while dressing to meet her colleagues for dinner, she finds her driver’s license in the left pocket of her jacket the discovery only amplifies her distress. The lining of the jacket’s left pocket is ripped, which she knew about, because a dime had been slipping around inside it since last spring. But she hadn’t realized that the hole was large enough for a license to pass through.

  When she was a sophomore in high school, the father of a kind and popular classmate died of cancer. Nell didn’t know the boy well, and she wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to write him a condolence note. He came back to school after a week, at which point she hadn’t written one. It seemed like perhaps it was too late. But, a few days later, she wondered, had it been too late? Weeks later, was it too late? Months? She occasionally still recalls this boy, now a man who is, like her, nearly forty, and she wishes she had expressed compassion.

  This is how she will feel about Luke. She could have summoned him back on Friday night. She could have called him on Saturday, after finding the license. She could have texted him on Sunday, or after she returned to Madison. However, though she thinks of him regularly—she thinks of him especially during the Republican debates, then during the primaries, the caucuses, the convention, and the election (the election!)—she never initiates contact. She does join Match, she goes to a salon and gets fully waxed, she starts dating an architect whom she didn’t meet on Match, who is eight years older than her, pro women’s pubic hair, and appalled by how readily a gender-studies professor will capitulate to arbitrary standards of female beauty. Nell finds his view to be a relief personally, but intellectually a facile and unendearing failure of imagination.

  Sometimes, when she’s half asleep, she remembers Luke saying, You’re pretty, how serious and sincere his voice was. She remembers when his face was between her legs, and she feels shame and desire. But by daylight it’s hard not to mock her own overblown emotions. He didn’t have anything to do with her losing the license, no, but it’s his fault that she thought he did. Besides, he was a Trump supporter.

  JESS WALTER

  Famous Actor

  FROM Tin House

  I looked around the party: forty or so people clustered in threes and fours, pretending not to look at the Famous Actor (even here in Bend, we know not to go goony around celebrities), but no one went more than four or five seconds without stealing a glance at him. Nobody but me seemed to notice what his right elbow was up to.

  After a few minutes, he stopped elbow-fucking me and turned so that we were face-to-face. It was weird staring into those pale blues, eyes I’d known for years, eyes I’d seen in, what, fifteen or sixteen movies, in a couple of seasons of TV, staring out from magazine covers. He muttered something I couldn’t quite hear.

  I leaned in. “I’m sorry—what?”

  “I said . . .” he bent in closer, so that his mouth was inches from my left ear “. . . the universe is an endless span of darkness occasionally broken by moments of unspeakable celestial violence.”

  I was pretty sure that wasn’t what he’d said.

  He laughed as if he recognized what an insane thing that was for someone to say. “You ever think shit like that at parties?”

  I tend to think about crying at parties, or if someone might be trying to kill me. But I didn’t say that. I don’t very often say what I think.

  “Hey,” he said, “this is going to sound like a line, but . . . do you maybe want to get out of here?”

  He was right. It did sound like a line.

  And I did want to get out of there.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I disliked him from the moment I decided to sleep with him.

  In one of his first movies, Fire in the Hole, he plays a scared young soldier. I can’t even remember which war but it’s not Vietnam. It’s maybe one of the gulf wars, or Afghanistan, or something. It’s a truly awful movie, but somehow too earnest to really hate. Still, you know you’ve made a bad war movie when they don’t even show it on TNT. At the time he was cast, the Famous Actor was still known as the kid from the Disney Channel. I think the role in that war movie was supposed to launch him as an adult actor. But you got the sense that people watched the movie thinking, Wait, what’s the kid from The Terrific Todd Chronicles! doing carrying a rifle, for Christ’s sake. Still, I guess it did turn him into a real adult actor because he started doing more movies after that.

  We made our way through the party. He didn’t ask how it was that I didn’t need to tell anyone that I was leaving. I was glad I didn’t have to explain that I wasn’t actually invited to the party.

  There were a few people I knew outside and I wondered what they would say about him leaving with me. The Famous Actor climbed in the passenger seat of my Subaru. He sat on my makeup bag, held it up, then tossed it into the back seat. He had a small hiker’s backpack with him, which he sat at his feet. “Must be weird to go to a party in Bend, Oregon, and end up leaving with me,” he said.

  I shrugged. “There’s always a party at that house. Everybody knows about it.”

  “No, I didn’t mean the party. I just meant this probably wasn’t how you figured your Friday night would go.”

  “This is my Wednesday,” I said. I explained that I had Mondays and Tuesdays off from the coffee shop, so I always thought of Fridays as my Wednesdays. He looked at me as if he couldn’t tell if I was crazy or if I was fucking with him. It’s hard to explain, but I can make myself distant, make my face as blank as possible.

  “Huh, funny,” he said. He stared out the window as I drove. He hadn’t buckled his seat belt and my car bonged at him.

  “You know that thing I said at the party—about the universe being an endless span of darkness? It was really a comment on how it gets old, everyone looking at you like you’re going to say something profound. Sometimes I play off that expectation by saying something totally crazy.” He laughed at himself. “You know?” My car bonged at him again.

  When he dies in Fire in the Hole, you can tell it’s meant to be the emotional peak of the movie. The soldiers are walking through this destroyed city and a sniper’s bullet zips into the spot where his neck meets his chest, just above his body armor. He slaps at the wound like he’s been stung by a wasp, and only then does he seem to realize what’s happening to him. That he’s dying. It should be a profound moment. Those tuna-blue eyes get all wide and he frantically reaches around his back to feel whether the bullet has gone all the way through. His line is something like, Sarge! Did it go through? Did . . . it . . . go through? And then he just falls over. It’s hard to say what’s wrong with it, but it became one of those unintentional laugh lines. Like: Sure, war is hell, but it’s nothing compared to Terrific Todd’s acting.


  He pulled a cigarette pack from his pocket. “You mind?” Natural Spirits. Naturally. I can’t remember the last time I dated a guy who didn’t smoke Natural Spirits. Every guy in Bend smokes them. He blew the smoke to the roof of the car, which answered by bonging at him again about his seat belt.

  The Famous Actor explained that he’d been making a movie nearby—I knew this, of course; everyone knew they were filming a postapocalyptic movie called The Beats in the high desert, and we all knew the cast. Someone had told the Famous Actor that Bend was known for its rock-climbing, so he’d called a climbing guide and they’d gone bouldering that day. Then the guide invited him to the party.

  I knew the dick-guide he’d called. Wayne Bolls. Wayne’s website is covered with pictures of celebrities he’s climbed with, like he’s some old New York dry cleaner. Starfucker Tours, we call it in Bend. We put the climber in climbing.