The Best American Short Stories 2014 (5 page)

Saying very little, we sat together on the plane, touching hands occasionally. Not loving him, I moved him temporarily into my condo and took him around Seattle and showed him how to use its public transportation system and located a job for him in a deli. Together we found him a twelve-step program for drug addicts in recovery.

He lives nearby in an apartment I hunted down for him, and we have gone on with our lives. I call him almost every night, whether I am here or away on business. Slowly, he is taking charge of his life. It seems a shame to say so, but because the light in his soul is diminished, the one in mine, out of sympathy, is diminished too. I cry occasionally, but unsentimentally, and we still take pleasure in bickering, as we always have. His inflammations still cause him pain, and he moves now with small steps like an old man, but when I am in town I bring him dinners from Trader Joe's and magazines from the drugstore, and one night he brought over a sandwich for me that he himself had made at the deli. As I bit into the rye bread and corned beef, he watched me. “You like it?” he asked.

“It's fine,” I said, shrugging. “Sauerkraut's a bit thick.”

“That's how I do it,” he said crossly, full of rehab righteousness.

“And I like more Russian dressing than this.” I glanced out the window. “Moon's out,” I said. “Full, I think. Werewolf weather.”

He looked at it. “You never see the moon,” he said, “until you sit all night watching it and you see how blindly stupid and oafish it is. I used to talk to it. My whole autobiography. Looked like the same moon I saw in Africa, but it wasn't. Never said a damn word in return once I was here. Over there, it wouldn't shut up.”

“Well, it doesn't have anything to say to Americans,” I remarked, my mouth full. “We're beyond that. Anything on TV?”

“Yeah,” he said, “junkie TV, where people are about to die from their failings. Then they're rescued by Dr. Phil and put on the boat to that enchanted island they have.” He waited. I got the feeling that he didn't believe in his own recovery. Or in the American project. Maybe we weren't really out of the woods.

“OK, here's what I want you to do,” he said. “I want you to call up Benny Takemitsu and tell him that I owe him some money.” He laughed at the joke. Even his eyes lit up at the prankster aspect of making amends and its bourgeois comforts. “Tell him I'll pay him eventually. I'll pay him ten cents on the dollar.”

“That's a good one.”

“Hey, even Plato was disappointed by the material world. Me too.”

“Gotcha.”

“Pour me a drink,” he commanded. I thought I knew what he was going to do, so I gave him what he wanted, some scotch with ice, despite my misgivings.

“Here's how you do it,” he said, when he had the scotch in his hand. “Remember what they did in Ethiopia, that ceremonial thing?” He slowly upended the drink and emptied it out on my floor, where it puddled on the dining room tile. “In memory of those who are gone. In memory of those down below us.”

It felt like a toast to our former selves. I looked out at the silent moon, imagining for a moment that he would be all right after all, and then I remembered to follow along. You're supposed to do it outside, on the ground, not in a building, but I inverted my beer bottle anyway. The beer gurgled out onto the dining room floor, and I smiled as if something true and actual had happened, this import-ritual. Quinn smiled back, triumphant.

FROM
Granta

 

“T
HERE'S NO COPYRIGHT
on titles,” he said. “It wouldn't be a good idea, probably, to call something
Death of a Salesman
, but you could do it.”

“I wanted to see the play, but it was sold out. Tickets were going for $1,500 at the end of the run. I did get to New York and go to the Met, though, and paid my two dollars to get in.”

“Two dollars is nicer than one dollar,” he said.

“Ah! So you do care what people think!”

“Don't talk like you're using exclamation points,” he said. “It doesn't suit people who are intelligent. You've been fighting your intelligence for a long time, but exclaiming is the coward's way of undercutting yourself.”

“Cynicism's better?”

“I wonder why I've created so many adversaries,” he said, then did a good Randy Travis imitation. “I got friends in . . . high places . . .”

“Maker's Mark interests you more than anyone, every time. We used to come see you and we have a burning desire to talk to you, to pick your brain, find out what to read, make you smile, but by the end of every evening, it's clear who's your best friend.”

“But pity me: I have to pay for that best friend. We don't have an unlimited calling plan.”

“How can you still have so much ego involved that you hate it that my father's company pays for my cell phone and doesn't—what? Send someone to come rake your leaves for free?”

“The super does that. He doesn't have a rake, though. He refuses to think the maple's gotten as big as it has. Every year, he's out there with the broom and one black garbage bag.”

“Made for a good poem,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said seriously. “I was wondering if you'd seen it.”

“We all subscribe to everything. Unless we're as broke as I'd be without my daddy, as you so often point out.”

“If the maple starts to go, the super will be thrilled, and as a good citizen, I promise to chop and burn the wood in the WBF, not let it be made into paper. Paper is so sad. Every sheet, a thin little tombstone.”

“How's Rudolph?”

“Rudolph is energetic again, since the vet's found a substitute for the pills that made him sleep all the time. I envied him, but that's what the old envy: sleep.”

“Is this the point where I try to convince you seventy isn't old?”

“I've got a better idea. I'm about to turn seventy-one, so why don't you get Daddy to fly you here and we can celebrate my birthday at the same restaurant where Egil Fray shot the bottle of tequila, then offered the bartender a slice of lime as it poured down from the top shelf like a waterfall. Egil was funny.”

Egil, back in college, had been the star student of our class: articulate; irreverent; devoted to books; interested in alcohol, bicycling, Italian cooking, UFOs, and Apple stock. He'd been diagnosed bipolar after he dove off the Delaware Memorial Bridge and broke every rib, his nose, and one wrist, and said he was sorry he'd had the idea. That was years ago, when he'd had insurance, when he was still married to Brenda, when everybody thought he was the brightest boy, including his doctors. He'd gotten good with a slingshot—none of that macho shooting the apple off the wife's head—but he'd caused a significant amount of damage, even when taking good aim. He was finishing medical school now.

I said, “I wonder if that's a sincere wish.”

“It would be great,” he said, and for a second I believed him, until he filled in the details: “You'd be in your hotel room on your cell phone, and I'd be here with my man Rudy, talking to you from the Princess phone.”

He really did have a Princess phone, and he was no more wrong about that than Egil had been about Apple. Repairmen had offered him serious money for the pale blue phone. His ex-wife (Carrie, his third, the only one I'd known) had asked for it officially, in court papers—along with half his frequent-flyer miles, from the days when he devotedly visited his mother in her Colorado nursing home.

“You know, it would be good to see you,” I said. “I can afford a ticket. What about next Monday? What are you doing then?”

“Getting ready for Halloween. Looking in every drawer for my rubber fangs.”

“Can't help you there, but I could bring my Groucho glasses and mustache.”

“I'll take you to the finest new restaurant,” he said. “My favorite item on the menu is Pro and Pros. It's a glass of prosecco and some very delicious hard cheese wrapped in prosciutto. Alcoholics don't care about entrées.”

“Then we go dancing?” (We
had
gone dancing; we had, we had, we had. Everyone knew it, and every woman envied me.)

“I don't think so, unless you just wanted to dance around the floor with me held over your head, like Mel Fisher on the floor of the ocean with his buried treasure, or a goat you'd just killed.”

“You live in Philadelphia, not Greece.”

“There is no more Greece,” he said. “They fucked themselves good.”

Pretty soon thereafter, he had a coughing fit and my boyfriend came into the kitchen with raised eyebrows meant to ask: Are you sleeping with me tonight? And we hung up.

 

I took the train. It wasn't difficult. I got a ride with a friend to some branch of Metro going into Washington and rode it to Union Station. Then I walked forever down the train track to a car someone finally let me on. I felt like an ant that had walked the length of a caterpillar's body and ended up at its anus. I sat across from a mother with a small son whose head she abused any time she got bored looking out the window: swatting it with plush toys; rearranging his curls; inspecting him for nits.

The North 34th Street station was familiar, though the photo booth was gone. We'd had our pictures taken there, a strip of them, and we'd fought over who got them, and then after I won, I lost them somehow. I went outside and splurged on a cab.

Since his divorce, Franklin had lived in a big stone building with a curving driveway. At first, as the cab approached, I thought there might be a hitching post, but it turned out to be a short man in a red vest with his hair slicked back. He took an older man's hand, and the two set off, waved forward by the cabbie.

This was great, I thought; I didn't have to worry about parking, I'd gotten money from a cash machine before the trip and wouldn't have to think about that until I ran short at the end of the month, and here I was, standing in front of the imposing building where my former teacher lived. Inside, I gave the woman behind the desk his name and mine. She had dark purple fingernails and wore many bracelets. “Answer, hon, answer,” she breathed into her phone, flicking together a couple of nails. “This is Savannah, sending you her ‘answer' jujus.”

Finally he did pick up, and she said my name, listened so long that I thought Franklin might be telling her a joke, then said, “All right, hon,” hung up, and gave me a Post-it note with 303 written on it that I hadn't asked for. I sent him Royal Riviera pears every Christmas, books from Amazon, Virginia peanuts, and hell, it wasn't the first time I'd visited, either. I knew his apartment number.

Though the hallway looked different. That was because (I was about to find out) someone very rich had been irritated at the width of the corridors and had wanted to get his antique car into his living room, so he'd paid to widen the hallway, which had created a God-awful amount of dust, noise, and inconvenience.

It was funnier in Franklin's telling. We clinked shot glasses (mine brimming only with white wine), called each other Russian names, and tossed down the liquor. If everything we said had been a poem, the index of first lines would have formed a pattern: “Do you remember,” “Tell me if I remember wrong,” “There was that time,” “Wasn't it funny when.”

When I looked out the window, I saw that it had begun to snow. Rudolph had been the first to see it, or to sense it; he'd run to the window and put his paws on the ledge, tail aquiver.

“I hated it when I was a kid and this happened. My mother made me wear my winter jacket over my Halloween costume and that ruined everything. Who's going to know what gender anybody is supposed to be under their Barbour jacket, let alone their exact identity?”

“The receptionist,” he said, “is a guy who became a woman. He had the surgery in Canada because it was a lot cheaper. He had saline bags put in for tits, but then he decided flat-chested women were sexy, so he had them taken out. I asked for one, to put in a jar, but no go: you'd have thought I was asking for a fetus.”

The bottle of bourbon was almost full. We might be sitting for a long time, I realized. I said, “Let's go get something to eat before the snow piles up. How far would we have to go to get to that restaurant?”

“You're afraid if we stay here, I'll have more to drink and try to seduce you.”

“No, I'm not,” I said indignantly.

“You're afraid I'll invite Savannah to come with us and give us all the gory details. Savannah is a former Navy SEAL.”

“If you like it when I speak in a monotone, don't tell me weird stuff.”

“Listen to her! When the only buttons I ever push are for the elevator. I don't live by metaphor, woman. Don't you read the critics?”

He kicked his shoes out from behind the footstool. Good—so he was game. His ankles didn't look great, but at least they were shoes I'd have to get on his feet, not cowboy boots, and they seemed to have sturdy treads. I knelt and picked up one foot, opened the Velcro fastener, and used my palm as a shoehorn. His foot slid in easily. On the other foot, though, the arch, as well as the ankle, was swollen, but we decided it would work fine if the fastener was left open. It was a little problem to keep the Velcro from flipping over and fastening itself, but I folded the top strap and held it together with a big paper clip, and eventually we got going.

“An old man like me, and I've got no scarf, no hat, only gloves I bought from a street vendor, the same day I had a roasted chestnut and bought another one for a squirrel. I can tell you which one of us was happier.” He was holding the crook of my arm. “Only you would take me out in the snow for a meal. Promise me one thing: you won't make me watch you make a snowball and throw it in a wintry way. You can make an anecdote of that request and use it later at my memorial service.”