The Best American Short Stories 2013 (19 page)

He smiles a slow, pleased smile and nods his head. “And how did you guess?” he says, and seems delighted at her knowledge. She holds out her hand politely, as she has been taught, and bobs a little curtsy, as he shakes it with enthusiasm. “And you are S.P.,” he says, for he knows her, of course, knows all about her.

Then she remembers a moment when she was quite little, before her sisters were born, or perhaps she has seen a photograph of the moment with her father, who is, unusually, kneeling beside her in the grass in a panama hat and her mother is kneeling behind in her flowered dress. And she remembers how her father had said at that moment, “You are my Special Person, my S.P.,” and she realizes that that is what her name means. And she is a Special Person, she thinks, as she shakes the Magic Man’s hand, the best in the class at reading, the only one whose little pipe-cleaner man reached the top of the ladder.

“Would you like to come with me to play with my little boy?” the Magic Man asks her in a kind, soft voice.

S.P. hesitates for a moment because she does remember her mother telling her never, never to go off with strange men, but the Magic Man is not a stranger to her, after all, and he has somehow thought of exactly what she would like to do. Of course, the Magic Man knows everything everyone thinks and wishes and can make it all come true, if he wants it to. Still, she says nothing, just looking up at him and then through the trees and down the bank, back across the lawn, where she can still see her mother, who looks rather small and far away, lying beside the pool on the chaise longue. Then she looks back at the Magic Man, who takes off his sunglasses so that she can see he has blue eyes, which glitter like gems, and a rather pointed nose, and thin lips.

He says, “My little boy has no one to play with, and he’s very lonely. You are a lucky girl with your two sisters, after all.” S.P. nods her head and feels sorry for his little boy, who is all alone when, it is true, she has her two sisters to play with, though there are times like the present moment when she is happy to be rid of them.

“Where is your little boy?” she asks warily, and he waves his hand in the direction of the changing rooms, where the bathrooms are too, which is where she was going anyway.

The mother is thinking of the conversation she had with her own mother, to whom she mistakenly confided in a moment of desperation on Christmas Day. Her mother could not see why she can’t just get up and leave her husband, why she goes on having babies with him. Her mother sees things in an entirely practical way.

“What’s important here, it seems to me, is money. And you are the one with the means! So just kick the bastard out! Throw his fancy clothes out the window! What purpose does he serve, in the end? You’re still young and pretty and . . .” her mother said, but she interrupted.

“But I have three children! And besides, Mother, I’m in love with him, and I know he’s really in love with me. He keeps telling me that he feels so awful about it all, so guilty, that this girl—she’s only nineteen—feels so guilty too. He says the guilt is giving him an ulcer and that he’s just gone one last time to see her, to say goodbye, and then he’ll come back to me and the children.”

Her mother looked at her with something like pity in her eyes. “At Christmastime! He’s gone off to see this girl at Christmas?”

“That’s not important to him! He’s not interested in
Christmas
,” she said scornfully, which is exactly how and what her husband had said to her when she expressed the same sentiments. She added, as he had too, “Truly, I believe he loves me.”

“I don’t understand how you can call that love! How can you hurt someone you love!” her mother said impatiently.

“But he doesn’t
want
to hurt me. He can’t help what has happened. He just fell irresistibly in love with this girl.”

“Magically? With the wave of a wand?” her mother asked with a sneer.

“And he’s such an extraordinary man. Such a good writer! He’s taught me so much about so many things! I’ve read so many books because of him: Camus, Balzac, and Flaubert—all the wonderful French writers. I see the world in an entirely different way because of him. And he’s so charming, so intelligent, such a good listener, so much fun! . . .”

“There’s a time to cut your losses. If you miss one bus, jump on the next, I always say,” her mother said impatiently, and then got up and poured herself a gin and tonic.

“Come, I will take you to him,” the Magic Man says, talking in the flat way people talk in this country. And it seems quite right to her that she would meet the Magic Man out here in this wonderfully sunny place, which is both strange and familiar to her, with all the bright flowers and the brilliant blue sky and the sun. The sun is making her feel a little dizzy, and her head spins, so she lets the Magic Man take her hand, and she follows him through the trees going toward the changing huts, though she wonders why his little boy would have remained in the thatched-roofed changing rooms and is not by his side.

At the thought of it, Sandra decides she’d like something to drink herself and beckons to a waiter who is standing nearby. He comes over to her now, walking fast across the lawn in a starched white uniform, which rustles as he moves. She says she would like a cup of tea, and some cool drinks for her little girls—and perhaps some cake and a few tea sandwiches? “We’ll have a little tea party, when S.P. gets back, shall we?” she asks the little ones, who look up at her and nod their heads enthusiastically. What a nice idea! To hell with her diet! And surely it is teatime? She looks at her watch and wonders where S.P. is.

“Tea for three?” the waiter asks.

“No, actually for four,” she says. “I’m waiting for my eldest girl.” Then she asks the waiter if, by any chance, he has seen her little girl, a barefoot eight-year-old in a pink bikini. She went to the bathroom a while ago, but surely she should be back by now?

The African waiter shakes his head gravely and says he has not seen her. He suggests the mother might want to look for her little girl. He warns her, “A lot of
skelms
around here, madam,” using the local word for a bad man.

“Surely not, in this lovely place, this beautiful hotel?” the mother says, alarmed, and lifts her hands in the air, looking up at the waiter, who shakes his head and clucks his tongue doubtfully at her words. She thinks of her sister’s bitter words about this country and her surgeon husband, and she does wonder why it is taking S.P. so long to come back. Is it possible that she might, after all, have got lost? She decides to take the waiter’s advice. She asks the nice waiter if he would mind watching her baby girl and Alice for a minute while she goes to find her eldest.

“Not at all, madam,” he says, and sits down in the grass close beside her little ones.

The Magic Man has her by the hand and is leading her toward one of the changing huts, the one for men. He tells her to wait a moment, and he goes inside first for some reason, perhaps to tell his little boy she is coming. She waits a minute, and then he beckons for her to follow him. Now she hesitates, but he smiles his mysterious, magical smile and raises his eyebrows and flashes his glittering blue eyes in a way that seems to suggest so many good things up ahead. So she goes in and looks around to find the little boy, who will be blond and blue-eyed like the Magic Man, she supposes.

“Can you see him?” the Magic Man says, as if it is a game or perhaps a task, as in the fairy tales, where something has to be accomplished before one wins the prize. She looks carefully at the wooden benches and under the benches, at the whitewashed walls, and even up at the beams that line the conical thatched roof, where the little boy might have flown, after all. Perhaps he’s a Magic Boy too. But there is no little boy there, or not one she can see. There is only the quiet of the still, sunlit afternoon and a smell in the changing rooms of damp and wet and the Magic Man, who stands grinning at her.

The mother lumbers up the bank, sweating in the heat, looking around. Where on earth is S.P? The mother can feel the tears coming into her eyes. What has happened to her child?

She had so hoped somehow that returning home, being out here with her mother and her sister, would help her in her unhappiness, but she can see that nothing has changed at all. The mother looks around this beautiful garden and remembers the one where she and her sister had played as little girls with such freedom. She remembers that feeling of something, she realizes, that she has so sadly and dramatically lost: a sense of the infinite possibilities of things, the giddy belief in her own omnipotence.

She lifts her eyes to the beauty of the fine, fernlike leaves of the jacaranda tree and feels terribly alone. This whole trip out here without her husband has been a mistake. She has simply given him the freedom to be with his girl. What was she thinking? And now S.P. has mysteriously disappeared too.

“Where is your little boy?” she asks, and the Magic Man lifts his shoulders and his hands and opens his eyes wide with surprise. “Where on earth has he gone? The naughty boy! Well, let’s look in here,” he says, taking her by the hand and leading her toward one of the stalls in the bathroom. “But this is the men’s bathroom,” she says. “I’m not supposed to go in there,” S.P. says, drawing back.

“But he must be hiding in there. He’s playing hide-and-seek, and he wants you to find him. Do you think you can find him?” the Magic Man whispers, and smiles his mysterious smile again and chuckles. So she enters the stall with Proppy, but there is no little boy there. Could he be an invisible boy?

But when she looks up into the Magic Man’s face, she can see now that this is not so. The Magic Man’s face has changed. He’s looking at her differently, with an expression of expectation. She can see he has been telling her stories, like her mother does about her father going to Brussels. His name is not Proppy at all, and there is no little boy, she realizes, in the same way she realized once that there were not always happy endings in real life as there are in the fairy tales. She remembers saying to her mother, heartsick with disappointment, “But you mean there are not always happy endings like in the fairy tales?” Her heart is thumping so hard now, she feels as if the gray cement floor is shaking beneath her bare feet.

She bites her lip, trying not to cry, and looking at the door to the stall, which the man has not locked.

Instead, he stands with his back to it, leans against it, and folds his arms, which are strong and sunburned. He wears a short-sleeved white shirt, and she can see the line on his skin where the sunburn ends and the shirtsleeve begins, where the skin is white. He has a yellow pencil in his pocket and the sunglasses, which peep out. She looks down at his long white socks, which are turned over at the top, and then back at his face.

He stares at her in a strange yet familiar way, and she understands for the first time that he cannot do any magic at all, that on the contrary, she’s the one who has to do some magic for him, that, like her own mother, it is he who needs her to help him. Indeed, he says quite politely, “You’re such a pretty little girl. You have such pretty brown eyes and such pretty brown hair, but I don’t like that pink swimsuit. I don’t like it at all. I wonder if you would mind very much taking it off for me, please? Or would you like me to help you take it off?”

She considers calling out for her mother, but decides that she would never hear her, and the bathroom is empty and silent. There is no one else nearby. She listens to the silence of the afternoon and tries not to cry, her lips trembling and her breath coming in great gulps of air.

The man says, with some impatience now, “I’m waiting.” Then she reaches up behind her back and starts to undo the top of her two-piece, the top with the little roses where her breasts are supposed, one day, to be. He keeps on looking at her, his eyes now very bright, grinning at her. “Good,” he says, “go on,” and slowly she lets the top drop to the cement floor. Then she takes off the bottom part and slips it down her legs.

Why is her husband not here with her, the mother thinks angrily, and clenches her fists. She would like to hit him, as her sister’s husband repeatedly hits her when she has said something that annoys him. She is suddenly and for the first time in a rage with her husband. She thinks of him wearing the broad-brimmed hat that he has taken to wearing to cover his balding head and grinning his wide, self-satisfied grin. She has a big photo of him grinning like that on her piano in the living room.

Years later, she will remember that moment of rage at the man who was once her husband, and she will feel the rage again, but not as much rage as she will feel at herself.

Now she goes into the women’s changing rooms, calling her child’s name, and then into the area with the toilets. But all the stalls are empty, the pink doors gaping open. There is no one here at this hour of day. All she can hear is the dripping of a tap. Still, she hopes the child is somewhere nearby. “S.P., darling? Where on earth are you?” she calls out into the emptiness, but there is no response, only the echo of her own words. Could the child who reads so well possibly have made a mistake and gone into the men’s changing rooms, she wonders, her heart beginning to thud in her ears.

Standing naked before the man, S.P. weeps silently, the tears falling down her cheeks, for he looks very serious now and as if he were thinking about something else. He looks absent, like her father does when he mows the lawn. And he is also opening up his tennis shorts and doing something odd to himself down there, moving his hands back and forth. She doesn’t want to look at that; it is making her feel very sick, and she is afraid she might vomit on the floor. Instead, she keeps her gaze fixed on the door, the chink of light behind the man, and wonders if she could somehow quickly slip through his legs, as he seems very busy and preoccupied doing whatever it is he is doing now. Through her tears, she glances at the man’s face, which is rather red and sweaty, as he strains to do something that seems to be difficult for him.