The Best American Short Stories 2015 (15 page)

“Don't get up,” she said. “From now on, let's do a phone call. Or e-mail.”

“I really hate e-mail,” I said, “for personal stuff. Please sit down. We can solve this.”

She sat down. Irrationally elated, I ordered a bottle of wine.

“This is a bad idea,” Elida said.

“Why? We can talk. How are the ripsaw and the welders?” Elida knew my nicknames for her mother and sisters.

“Ha!” She clinked my glass. “What was I again?”

“The polisher!”

“I don't really mind that,” she said. “It's in my line of work, really. I miss you. Maybe we should have an affair where we see each other only by day and never sleep together, you know, at night.”

She was speaking whimsically, but we proceeded to do exactly that. We were extremely happy for ten months. To be sure, I felt bad about lying to Laurene, but she noticed nothing. She made few demands, seemed happy enough with my company, and continued to barbecue, even in December. Meanwhile, Valery had left for college, and Elida and I were meeting in our old condominium, overlooking the poisoned brown waters of the Mississippi.

Then one afternoon we were dressed, sipping tea, looking out at the river, when Valery dropped her suitcase inside the door. She was astonished to see us sitting there. She gaped silently for a moment, then clumped down the hall in her big snow boots.

Elida gave me an oddly insolent look. You can live with a person, have an affair with a person, and still suddenly see an unfamiliar flash, like the belly of a fish in the shallows, there and gone. She had known exactly when our daughter would arrive home.

Valery screamed when she saw the untucked covers on our bed, the scattered pillows. She clumped back into the living room.

“How long has this been going on?”

We told her. She began to sob.

“All this time? How selfish! Mean! I could have had you both together. Instead, I've been trying to get used to you apart. I was facing the facts and then . . .”

She pressed her mittened hands to her temples as if to keep her head from flying apart. We all started crying and, for a while, felt miserable. Then Elida snorted, and we burst into hysterical laughter.

It was decided that I would come clean and leave Laurene Schotts. Elida and I would remarry. Although it was strange, the idea gave me an enormous sense of rightness. Things were falling into balance. My elation continued all the way back to Laurene's and my house on Interlachen Boulevard, in Hopkins, facing the golf course. A beautiful stone house, with creamy painted walls, a wet bar in the basement, and a vast screening room for movie-viewing parties. Sitting in my car and looking up the flagstone walk, I thought of the pallet on the floor of the condominium's walk-in closet. I would regret leaving this lavish, comfortable house, bought with Laurene Schotts's money. I would regret leaving Laurene too, the silent comfort of her presence every night.

Laurene pitched a majolica vase, then a framed photograph of us in Peru. She threw a few other breakable objects at the wall and, at last, hefted a crystal unicorn she'd had since the age of ten.

“You'll regret throwing that,” I said. “Please don't. I'm so sorry!”

“Dad was right!”

Tears rolled down her face onto her collar, wetting her throat.

I was stricken. I couldn't stop apologizing. Never before had I seen her truly upset or sad.

“Dad was right,” she said again. “He said you were after the money. He didn't trust you—a former bit-part actor. He begged me to make you sign a pre-nup, but I said, ‘No, you're so wrong! He's the one!'”

Because I had little money, and because money hadn't figured into my first marriage, except for the problem of not having it, I was until that moment unaware that this had even been discussed. I put it out of my mind and didn't think about it until a month later. I had moved out of Laurene's house into a studio apartment. I continued to see Elida only during the day. I wasn't quite ready for the walk-in closet.

“Are you crazy?” Elida said, putting down her teacup one afternoon, after I'd told her the proposed terms of my divorce. “That family is worth more than a hundred million! You could get a settlement. They'd never even miss it.”

I waved her off, but every time I thought about how handy, how fantastic it would be to have money, I wavered. With my nonprofit salary, I could barely afford to soundproof Valery's old bedroom. I told myself that I'd keep my pride and sleep on the closet floor. I'd walk away without a cent. But I didn't, of course.

We bought the condominium next door and removed two walls. This gave us an easy path into a large room, where I set up a huge screen. Before it, we arranged several couches of immense size and comfort. I slept there in grateful quiet. I didn't take Laurene for that much, comparatively speaking, and the Schotts family was relieved. Still, they hated me enough to threaten for a while to get me fired.

One night, Elida surprised me by playing the montage of clips she'd made for my birthday years earlier. It was worse, somehow, seeing it on that giant screen bought with Laurene's money. There I was, my trivial works captured for the ages. I hadn't noticed, when I first viewed the movie, that Elida had made of those fleeting cameos and set pieces a sort of narrative.

“Man of a Thousand Glimpses” started out with crowd scenes, me here, me there, the nice-looking, unobtrusive bystander reading a newspaper, glancing up at the sound of a gunshot, the man crossing a street, exiting a bakery, jumping into his car, uncoiling a hose to water his lawn. Next, a better man appeared, somewhat older, more heroic: I ran toward a river with a child in my arms; I was a soldier dragging his buddy to safety; I lowered a dog in a basket from a burning building, addressed people through a bullhorn, rushed into waves, and dived toward despairing arms. After that, I became a good father, inflated bicycle tires, opened refrigerator doors, lay back smiling in my late-night-shopper's easy chair, had my waist measured, drove several carloads of screaming kids to sports matches. Small wonder I then got a pounding headache, clutched my jaw, my leg, my heart, wincing in agony. Next there came a turning point, which had been much applauded at the first viewing: I smoked a cigarette in a cheap motel, a beautiful woman silhouetted in the shower behind me. Afterward, ruined, I poured myself drink after drink, ordered a third martini, fell off a barstool, crawled under a table and licked a woman's ankle. I sank even lower—stuck a gun in a teller's face, took cash from the drawer of a fast-food register. I palmed an apple from a pile, stole a moped, a diamond bracelet, a newspaper. These crimes kept me tossing in bed. I stared at ceilings, my eyes luminous, hollow with glare, haunted by ghosts, by women, by hallucinations. Sleepless, I got clumsy. I was hit by a car, crushed by a falling girder, devoured by a live volcano, axed, mauled, infected with bubonic plague. I was identified several times, in liverish-green morgue light, by stricken, dignified women. It was shocking the way I just kept on dying, physically, then mentally. A wreck of a man, I leaped from a bridge, a window. I parked on train tracks and drank deeply from a flask. I smiled at the swiftly approaching lights and laughed soundlessly.

The End.

Elida left. I played the movie over and over. How dark was my narrative! Why had Elida killed me off, instead of letting me rescue dogs at the end? This downward trajectory gave me a moral chill. I decided that I had not only wasted my life but had acted ignobly in taking money from Laurene. Although Elida and I had made Valery happy, and I'd thought I was contented with Elida, I knew now, as I'd known before, the nature of her true feelings for me.

I destroyed the movie. It would be years before anyone noticed that my long-ago birthday gift had disappeared and I was once again dispersed into the confetti of B movies, failed TV sitcoms, and clumsy commercials. No one would ever have the cruel patience to assemble my life glimpse by glimpse again.

When the holidays came around, I insisted that we stay at the house in Golden Valley. Why not? I had already counted a million holes in a million ceiling tiles.

The first night at Elida's parents' house, we all had a mirthful, loving dinner, then did the dishes together. Elida's relatives had easily absorbed me back into the family, where my role, though peripheral, was also vital, because I was Valery's father.

After we turned in and Elida fell asleep beside me, I lay on my back waiting. It usually took her an hour or so to really get going, but her sisters and her mother had already begun. Valery and a girl cousin had sneaked a bottle of wine into their sleeping bags and were now drifting off next door.

The real snoring hit with abrupt ferocity. The orderly, mechanical regularity of the metalworking shop had been abandoned. Now it was more like a pack of wolves snarling over a kill. I closed my eyes. On my mental screen I saw lions driving the wolves—or hyenas, maybe—into the veld. On a hill overlooking the bloody feast, a baboon whooped. For many hours, I elaborated on the vivid images that accompanied the soundtrack: a lioness worrying the leg off a carcass, two others fending off a male, raking his ribs with teeth and claws, while their cubs mock-fought nearby. At last, I dropped off.

In the deepest part of the night, I woke. Although Elida's snarls had calmed to the loud, gurgling purr of a big cat digesting prey meat, I came to in a sick sweat, shaking. Perhaps my imagined scenario had triggered some terror from my evolutionary past. I had dreamed that I was the hunted animal, thrown to earth, being eaten alive. The tearing of my flesh, the snap of jaws wrestling at my bones, the blissful lapping as my throat opened—all this seemed absolutely real to me. It took some time for me to understand that Elida's body had not been satiated on mine, that she wasn't purring because she'd swallowed my heart.

BEN FOWLKES

FROM
Crazyhorse

W
ALLACE WENT ALL
the way to Florida to fight a Brazilian middleweight he'd never heard of for ten thousand dollars. That's what it had come to.

The Brazilian's name was Thiago something, but everyone called him Cavalo. From what Wallace had gathered, it had something to do with a movie or a TV show that only Brazilian people knew about. No one cared enough to explain it any more than that and anyway Wallace wasn't overly interested. Everything he needed to know about the guy's game he could tell just from looking at him. He had shoulders that looked welded on, a neck that existed mostly in theory. The kind of guy who'd be hell on wheels in a street fight.

“If you take him down, flatten him out, and feed him some elbows,” Coach Vee said, “my guess is he'll start thinking of all the other places he'd rather be.”

Wallace said he got the message.

“Good,” Coach Vee said. “Because I don't feel like repeating it all night.”

Right off Cavalo clipped the top of Wallace's head with a glancing left hook. It felt like someone had thrown a phone book at his head and just missed. A follow-up right set off flashbulbs behind his eyes. Enough of this, Wallace decided.

The last thing he remembered was backing Cavalo up against the cage and seeing the Brazilian set his feet. There, Wallace thought. He dropped for the double-leg. The next instant he was looking into Coach Vee's face. It seemed to hover all alone in a field of light. He was saying something to Wallace, but the sounds didn't quite match up with the movement of his lips.

“I said just stay down, relax for a second,” Coach Vee said.

Wallace asked him what he meant by
stay
down. They were both standing up.

Coach Vee winced at him.

“Oh,” Wallace said, lifting his head up to look around. “Fuck me.”

One ear felt like it was plugged up with wax. The other rang with a high metallic whine. Somewhere off where he couldn't see, Cavalo and his coaches were singing in Portuguese. It took him a second to understand that the field of light around Coach Vee's face was coming from the ceiling.

“Head kick,” Coach Vee told him later, back at the hotel. “Caught you right as you were changing levels.”

There were two narrow beds in the hotel room. Wallace sat on one and Coach Vee sat on the other. They were both drinking Miller High Life tallboys. A movie with Denzel Washington was on the TV.

“Caught you flush too.”

Wallace thanked him for clarifying that part.

The left side of his head felt like it had been dug out with a spoon. He pressed the beer can to his temple but it was nowhere near cold enough to do anything. On the TV Denzel was yelling at some guys in a submarine.

“Timed it really well, is the thing,” Coach Vee said. “Right as you were coming in. Bang.”

“What are you, his publicist now?” Wallace said. He took a big gulp of his beer. It tasted of aluminum. It was shit.

“Hey,” Coach Vee said. “You asked how it happened.”

Had he? Wallace didn't remember. He tried to trace the conversation back to its beginning but couldn't. Then he tried to remember where they'd gotten the beers and he couldn't do that either. It was like trying to reel yourself in on a rope only to get halfway there and realize it'd been cut. He knew this happened to some guys after a knockout, but it had never happened to him. He'd never been knocked all the way out before. Not like that. Not
out
-out. Now that he had, he couldn't recommend the experience.

They flew back to San Diego the next day. Five hours vacuum-packed into coach seats. Wallace pretended to sleep so he didn't have to watch the stewardesses willing themselves not to stare at the giant bruise on the side of his head. Coach's wife picked them up at the airport and gave Wallace a ride down to his place in Imperial Beach. She asked once how Florida was and when no one said anything neither did she. They drove most of the way like that.