The Best American Short Stories 2014 (24 page)

 

I walked down the long hallway, where a pair of glass doors led to the playground. There were several classes out there, and for a few moments I didn't see him. It was a hot day, the sky big and white over their heads, and the children seemed to be running in spurts, and then resting. Their voices rose to sharp, brief crescendos, mimicking this frantic movement. Then I saw Jack in the sandbox, still playing with Ava.

Sometimes I imagine a different child, although I've never admitted it to Drew. The one I picture is active and sun bronzed, a little wild maybe, a big eater and a hard sleeper. Not crazy about books, except for the kind that identifies types of construction vehicles or dinosaurs. It would've been unlikely for Drew and me to have a kid like that, but there was something about Jack's position, crouched so intently over whatever imaginary game they were playing, that disappointed me. Suddenly he looked up: someone had called his name. I watched him stand up and make his way toward the barrels, where, sure enough, one bare leg hung out of the rectangular opening, the foot dangling in an army-green Keen.

There was no explicit rule about parents on the playground, but we were obviously meant to wait and show ourselves to the children when the school day was finished. I thought they probably had only ten or fifteen minutes left. I glanced back at the exit, where Drew had finished with whatever conversation he'd been conducting and disappeared. Then I stepped out onto the playground and identified myself as Jack D.'s mom to the teachers on duty. Both of them nodded distractedly, each one shading her eyes with her left hand. I headed toward Ava and Jack, who had reached the barrel and were negotiating. It pleased me that Ava was pretty in such a conventional way: long blond hair and large, round blue eyes, slightly too close together, like one of those molded plastic dolls. It occurred to me, absurdly, that she could protect him.

“This is only for the good guys,” I heard Jack H. say, as I came up behind them.

“We're bad guys!” said Ava, not getting it.

“I'm not a bad guy,” my Jack said, with disgust.

“How old are you?” Jack H. asked, ignoring Ava.

Lie now, I thought, but Jack gave his age correctly.

“I'm five,” Jack H. said. “I had my bouncy-castle party. Ava was invited, and Henry—but not you.”

Jack started to climb the ladder to the barrel. The other Jack stuck out his leg: “NO.” Then he looked up and saw me. My Jack turned around, and his surprise was replaced almost immediately by pleasure.

“I'm a little early today.” I realized that I'd been thinking of them as older than they were when I saw the twin expressions of envy on the faces of the other two children.

“He can't come in,” said Jack H. My Jack looked at me.

“Why not?” I asked.

“You have to say a secret.”

“I have a secret,” my Jack said.

Jack H. ignored him. “Ava, you can.” Ava scampered up the ladder: a turncoat in butterfly socks.

“I have a secret,” I said. Jack H. considered this.

Ava laughed. “Let Jack's mommy come in.”

“Only four kids in the barrel.”

“And one mommy!”

“There's three kids,” my Jack corrected. But when he climbed the ladder, the other Jack didn't stop him. All three children peered out at me from the rectangular opening. My Jack was smiling broadly. On the other side of the playground, the teachers were distributing balls from a nylon sack.

The inside of the barrel was dim, even warmer than outside. The air was thick with glittery bits of dust. You sat with your feet at the lowest point, your back resting against the wooden curve. It was intimate and uncomfortable. The children looked at me with wonder.

“You go first,” Ava said.

“I'll go last,” I said.

This made sense to Jack H. “Ava goes first, she's youngest.”

“I have two dogs!”

“That's not a secret,” the two Jacks chorused together.

Ava examined the lace on her socks.

“Jack, you're next.”

Jack looked at me. “Daddy has a girlfriend,” he said.

“Barbie has a girlfriend,” Ava said. “It's Ken.”

“Now me,” said Jack H. “I had a wart, but the doctor burned it right off.”

“Now the mommy!” Ava exclaimed.

“Your turn, Mommy.”

“I can fly,” I said. “I couldn't always, but I can now.”

Jack H. was already shaking his head. “Nobody can.”

“I know,” I said. “That's why it's so strange.”

My Jack looked at me nervously. “Is that a story?”

“No.”

“Fly,” said Ava.

“I don't know if I can do it now,” I said. “It only happens when I'm doing mom stuff—taking care of the house and cooking and things.”

“Do mom stuff,” Ava said. “Do something for Jack.”

Jack put his leg over mine and undid his sneakers. “Velcro my shoes.”

I thought of Drew in the sunlight, one hand in his graying hair. I thought of the smile on his perfect mouth, which is also Jack's. Brilliant needles of light came through the cracks between the boards, streaking our arms and legs. I reached down and fastened my son's shoe, breathing deeply at the same time. The barrel smelled powerfully of cedar. There was a moment of perfect quiet, when even the voices outside on the playground seemed to fall away. Suddenly Ava screamed:

“She did it! I saw it!”

Both Jacks turned to correct her, but the expression on Ava's face was so genuinely awed that neither one of them spoke. She was so convincing—so convinced—that they both looked back at me, questioning.

“What's going on in there?”

One of the teachers was standing underneath the barrel on the other side, where we couldn't see her.

Jack H. put his finger to his lips. “Don't tell,” he said. “Say you're coming out.”

My Jack and Ava obeyed. “I'm coming out!”

“Time to line up,” the teacher said.

Jack H. descended the ladder first, then Ava, and finally my Jack.

“See you upstairs.” I didn't whisper these words because I thought that would implicate me further. I planned to tell the teacher that the kids had invited me in. Then I would take her aside and say I was getting a divorce. I would tell her how I didn't like to say no to any of Jack's requests and that I knew I was being too indulgent. I thought it would be almost no effort to cry, if I could do it without being detected by Jack.

But the teacher never came around to the opening of the barrel. She had moved off, presumably to corral more children, and so I sat there looking at my phone, which did not have any new messages. I stared at a picture of Jack inside a giant soap bubble at the Discovery Science Center until the children's voices got fainter. Finally I could tell that they were inside the building. I waited until two-forty, five minutes before pickup, before I climbed out of the barrel. Now I had my story down perfectly, and I thought I could do it convincingly without crying. I was almost disappointed by the time I got upstairs, to realize that no one had even seen me.

FROM
Granta

 

T
HE NAME PAUL THOMPSON
won't mean any more to you than my name would, but if you'd been around the bluegrass scene in New York some thirty years ago, you would have heard the stories. Jimmy Martin had wanted to make him a Sunny Mountain Boy, but he'd refused to cut his hair. He'd turned Kenny Baker on to pot at Bean Blossom and played a show with Tony Trischka while tripping on acid. Easy to believe it all back then. The first time I actually saw him he was onstage, wearing a full-length plaster cast on his—give me a second to visualize this—his left leg, holding himself up by a crutch in each armpit, playing mandolin with only his forearms moving. And someone had Magic-Markered the bottom of the cast to look like an elephantine tooled-leather cowboy boot. This was at an outdoor contest in Roxbury, Connecticut, in 1977, the summer I turned eighteen. The band I'd come with had finished its two numbers, and we were behind the stage, putting instruments in cases, when Paul kicked off “Rawhide.” I heard our mandolin player say, “OK, we're fucked.”

His band—older longhairs, except the fiddle player, a scary guy with a marine buzzcut—won first prize, as they had the year before. But we placed second, and he lurched over to me on his crutches and said he'd liked the way I'd sung “Over in the Gloryland.” It was
Paul Thompson
saying this. I suppose I was a good singer, for a kid just out of high school; I thought of Christian songs simply as genre pieces in those days, but I had the accent down. I said, “Thanks, man,” and refrained from embarrassing myself by complimenting him back. We ended up singing a few songs together out by the cars—I remember him braced up against somebody's fender—and I think it surprised him that I knew so much Louvin Brothers stuff: “Too Late,” “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow,” “Are You Afraid to Die?” I let him sing Ira's tenor parts; now that he'd stopped smoking, he said, he could get up there in the real keys. He was taller than me, and his cheekbones made him look like a hard-luck refugee in a Dust Bowl photograph; he had white hairs in his sideburns, though he must only have been in his thirties. He told me he'd broken the leg playing squash; naturally I thought it was a joke.

We'd both come up from the city that afternoon, me in a van with the banjo player in my band and his wife and kids, Paul driven by his girlfriend. As we were packing up, he asked me how I was getting back, and could I drive stick. The girlfriend got pissed at him, he said, and went off on the back of somebody's motorcycle, and now here he was up in East Buttfuck, Connecticut, and no way to get himself home. His car turned out to be an old TR6, with so much clutter behind the seats we had to tie my guitar to the luggage rack with bungee cords; all the way back to New York he played the Stanley Brothers on ninety-minute cassettes he'd dubbed from his LP collection. We didn't talk much—I had to wake him up to ask directions once we hit the West Side Highway—but I did note that he said
man
dolin, not mando
lin
, and I've taken care to say
man
dolin ever since.

He lived in a big old building on West End around 86th; because it was Saturday night I had no trouble finding a space on his block. He said he'd figure out some way to deal with the car on Monday. Did I want to come up, have a few more tunes, smoke some dope? He hadn't given
that
up. But it was late to be taking my guitar on the subway, and I already had enough of a Paul Thompson story to tell.

 

Most of us were just weekend pickers, and only little by little did you learn about other people's real lives. Our banjo player taught calculus at Brooklyn College; the fiddler in Paul's band (the one native southerner I ever ran across in New York) managed a fuel-oil business in Bay Ridge; another guy you saw around, good Dobro player, was a public defender. I was working in a bookstore that summer before starting NYU, where I planned to major in English. And Paul Thompson turned out to be a science writer at
Newsweek
. One day I saw him in the subway at Rockefeller Center, and I had to think a minute to figure out where I knew him from: he was wearing a blue oxford shirt and a seersucker blazer, with jeans and cowboy boots. Somebody told me he'd published a novel when he was in his twenties, which you could still find at the Strand.

A couple of years later, Paul brought me into his band when their lead singer moved to California, and we also played some coffeehouses as a duet, calling ourselves the Twofer Brothers. I went to the University of Connecticut for graduate school but I drove down to the city a couple of times a month, and every so often Paul would put the band back together for some party where they'd place hay bales around the room. After these gigs we'd go up to his place, get high and listen to music, or drink and talk books. He told me he loved “Jimmy Hank” and gave me a copy of
The Ambassadors
from his collection of pristine old Signet paperbacks; it had a price of fifty cents. By then I'd decided to specialize in the nineteenth century, and I resented Jimmy Hank for his review of
Our Mutual Friend
— “poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion.” But I've still got that book: the cover illustration shows a top-hatted gent seen from behind in a cafe chair, with wineglass and cane. I imagine it'll be on my shelves, still unread, when I die.

While I was finishing my dissertation, I got married to the first woman I'd ever lasted with for more than a month. Diane, I might as well admit, was my student when I was a TA, and why bother trying to extenuate it, all these years later, by telling you that we started sleeping together only after the semester was over? Or that in our History-of-Us conversations, we could never decide who'd made the first move? She'd go to festivals and parties with me to be the cool girlfriend with the cut-off jeans, and we promised each other that when we got out of married-student housing we'd live in the country somewhere, in a house full of books, no TV, and raise our own food. I'd grown up in Park Slope, but my father was an old folkie—he used to hang around Washington Square in the fifties—and when I was twelve or thirteen I began listening to his LPs and fixating on the photos of ruined grampaws on their falling-down porches; even the mean, sad bluegrass guys in business suits and Stetsons, holding thousands of dollars' worth of Martins and Gibsons, had been posed by abandoned shacks in the mountains. Everybody in our little scene thought of themselves as secret country boys. My old banjo player, the one I rode up to Roxbury with, quit his teaching job and moved to the Northeast Kingdom, where I hear he makes B-string benders in his machine shop and plays pedal steel in a country band. Our bass player left the East Village for Toast, North Carolina, to sit at the feet of Tommy Jarrell. Even my father, in his bourgie-folkie way. He was an engineer at Con Edison for thirty years; when he retired he and my mother built a solar house up near Woodstock.