The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (11 page)

The man in the pink sweater was upon him. His lips were wet in a way that made her wonder if his lunch had just been interrupted. The man looked at her husband, then at her, and then back at her husband. "We leave now," he said, relying, for the moment, on his presence as reason enough to leave. Her husband refused to look at the man. Instead he shook his head and muttered, "I paid my seven euros. I'm seeing the synagogue. Not leaving." The man in the pink sweater, who seemed both covetous of and frightened by the opportunity to use force, was then summoned by David. They spoke in hushed, spiralingly fast Italian. David's opinion, whatever that might be, seemed to win the day. The man in the pink sweater shook his head while David made another phone call. Soon enough, the hatless police officer from the corner cubicle outside entered the synagogue—and, oddly, crossed himself.

At the sound of the door opening, her husband turned. At the sight of the approaching, expressionless officer, he sighed. "Come on," he said to her. His tone was light; she could nearly hear his mind rearranging what had just happened into nothing more than an amusing misunderstanding. "Let's get thrown out of the synagogue together at least."

He stuck out his hand: his old trick. She took the hand and walked with him past the officer. As the box of daylight at the end of the synagogue aisle grew larger and brighter, she was surprised by how quiet it was—and she knew this, this sound, this sound of different hopes collapsing, of separate divinities forming, of exclusion, of closed doors, of one story's end.

FROM
Tin House

Y
OUR FRIENDS ARE PRETENDING
to be all kinds of stuff, and your special job is to call them on it. Drew says he's going straight to law school. After practicing a while, he'll run for state senator. Then U.S. senator. Eventually, president. He lays all this out the way you'd say, "After Modern Chinese Painting I'll go to the gym, then work in Bobst until dinner," if you even made plans anymore, which you don't—if you were even in school anymore, which you aren't, although that's supposedly temporary.

You look at Drew through layers of hash smoke floating in the sun. He's leaning back on the futon couch, his arm around Sasha. He's got a big, hey-come-on-in face and a head of dark hair, and he's built—not with weight-room muscle like yours, but in a basic animal way that must come from all that swimming he does.

"Just don't try and say you didn't inhale," you tell him.

Everyone laughs except Bix, who's at his computer, and you feel like a funny guy for maybe half a second, until it occurs to you that they probably only laughed because they could see you were
trying
to be funny, and they're afraid you'll jump out the window onto East Seventh Street if you fail even at something so small.

Drew takes a long hit. You hear the smoke creak in his chest. He hands the pipe to Sasha, who passes it to Lizzie without smoking any.

"I promise, Rob," Drew croaks at you, holding in smoke, "if anyone asks, I'll tell them the hash I smoked with Robert Freeman Junior was excellent."

Was that "Junior" mocking? The hash is not working out as planned: you're just as paranoid as with pot. You decide, no, Drew doesn't mock. Drew is a believer—last fall, he was one of the die-hards passing out leaflets in Washington Square and registering students to vote. After he and Sasha got together, you started helping him—mostly with the jocks, because you know how to talk to them. Coach Freeman, aka your pop, calls Drew's type "woodsy." They're loners, Pop says—skiers, woodchoppers—not team players. But you know all about teams; you can talk to people on teams (only Sasha knows you picked NYU because it hasn't had a football team in thirty years). On your best day you registered twelve team-playing Democrats, prompting Drew to exclaim, when you gave him the paperwork, "You've got the
touch
, Rob." But you never registered yourself, that was the thing, and the longer you waited, the more ashamed of this you got. Then it was too late. Even Sasha, who knows all your secrets, has no idea that you never cast a vote for Bill Clinton.

Drew leans over and gives Sasha a wet kiss, and you can tell the hash is getting him horny because you feel it too—it makes your teeth ache in a way that will only let up if you hit someone or get hit. In high school you'd get in fights when you felt like this, but no one will fight with you now—the fact that you hacked open your wrists with a box cutter three months ago and nearly bled to death seems to be a deterrent. It functions like a force field, paralyzing everyone in range with an encouraging smile on their lips. You want to hold up a mirror and ask, How exactly are those smiles supposed to help me?

"No one smokes hash and becomes president, Drew," you say. "It'll never happen."

"This is my period of youthful experimentation," he says, with a sincerity that would be laughable in a person who wasn't from Wisconsin. "Besides," he says, "who's going to tell them?

"I am," you say.

"I love you too, Rob," Drew says, laughing.

Who said I loved you?
you almost ask.

Drew lifts Sasha's hair and twists it into a rope. He kisses the skin under her jaw. You stand up, seething. Bix and Lizzie's apartment is tiny, like a dollhouse, full of plants and the smell of plants (wet and planty), because Lizzie loves plants. The walls are covered with Bix's collection of Last Judgment posters—naked, babyish humans getting separated into good and bad, the good ones rising into green fields and golden light, the bad ones vanishing into mouths of monsters. The window is wide open, and you climb onto the fire escape. The March cold crackles your sinuses.

Sasha climbs out on the fire escape a second later. "What are you doing?" she asks.

"Don't know," you say. "Fresh air." You wonder how long you can go on speaking in two-word sentences. "Nice day."

Across East Seventh Street, two old ladies have folded bath towels on their windowsills and are resting their elbows on them while they peer down at the street below. "Look there," you say, pointing. "Two spies."

"It makes me nervous, Bobby," Sasha says. "You out here." She's the only one who gets to call you that; you were Bobby until you were ten, but according to your pop it's a girl's name after that.

"How come?" you say. "Third floor. Broken arm. Or leg. Worst case."

"Please come in."

"Relax, Sash." You park yourself on the grille steps leading up to the fourth-floor windows.

"Party migrate out here?" Drew origamis himself through the living room window onto the fire escape and leans over the railing to look down at the street. From inside, you hear Lizzie answer the phone—"Hi, Mom!"—trying to fluff the hash out of her voice. Her parents are visiting from Texas, which means that Bix, who's black, is spending his nights in the electrical engineering lab where he's doing his PhD research. Lizzie's parents aren't even staying with her—they're at a hotel. But if Lizzie is sleeping with a black man in the same city where her parents are, they will just
know.

Lizzie pokes her torso out the window. She's wearing a tiny blue skirt and tan patent leather boots that go up higher than her knees. To herself, she's already a costume designer.

"How's the bigot?" you ask, realizing with chagrin that the sentence has three words.

Lizzie turns to you, startled. "Are you referring to my mother?"

"Not me."

"You can't talk that way in my apartment, Rob," she says, using the Calm Voice they've all been using since you got back, a voice that leaves you no choice but to see how hard you have to push before it cracks.

"I'm not." You indicate the fire escape.

"Or on my fire escape."

"Not yours," you correct her. "Bix's too. Actually, no. The city's."

"Fuck you, Rob," Lizzie says.

"You too," you say, grinning with satisfaction at the sight of real anger on a human face. It's been a while.

"Calm down," Sasha tells Lizzie.

"Excuse me? I should calm down?" Lizzie says. "He's being a total asshole. Ever since he got back."

"He's been back two weeks," Sasha says. "That's not very long."

"I love how they talk about me like I'm not here," you observe to Drew. "Do they think I'm dead?"

"They think you're stoned."

"They're correct."

"Me too." Drew climbs the fire escape until he's a few steps above you and perches there. He takes a long breath, savoring it, and you take one too. In Wisconsin, Drew has shot an elk with a bow and arrow, skinned it, cut off the meat into sections, and carried it home in a backpack, wearing snowshoes. Or maybe he was kidding. He and his brothers built a log cabin with their bare hands. He grew up next to a lake, and every morning, even in winter, Drew swam there. Now he swims in the NYU pool, but the chlorine hurts his eyes and it's not the same, he says, with a ceiling over you. Still, he swims there a lot, especially when he's troubled or stressed or in a fight with Sasha. "You must've grown up swimming," he said when he first heard you were from Florida, and you said, Of course. But the truth is you've never liked the water—something only Sasha knows about you.

You lurch from the steps to the other end of the fire escape platform, where a window looks into the little alcove where Bix's computer lives. Bix is in front of it, dreadlocks thick as cigars, typing messages to other graduate students that they'll read on their computers, and reading messages they send back. According to Bix, this computer-message-sending is going to be
huge
—bigger than the telephone. He's big on predicting the future, and you haven't really challenged him—maybe because he's older, maybe because he's black.

Bix jumps at the sight of you looming outside his window in your baggy jeans and football jersey, which you've taken to wearing again, for some reason. "Shit, Rob," he says, "what are you doing out there?"

"Watching you."

"You've got Lizzie all stressed out."

"I'm sorry."

"So get in here and tell her that."

You climb in through Bix's window. There's a Last Judgment poster hanging right over his desk, from the Albi Cathedral. You remember it from your Intro to Art History class last year, a class you loved so much you added art history to your business major. You wonder if Bix is religious.

In the living room Sasha and Lizzie are sitting on the futon couch, looking grim. Drew is still out on the fire escape. "I'm sorry," you tell Lizzie.

"It's okay," she says, and you know you should leave it there—it's fine, leave it alone, but some crazy engine inside you won't let you stop: "I'm sorry your mom is a bigot. I'm sorry Bix has to have a girlfriend from Texas. I'm sorry I'm an asshole. I'm sorry I make you nervous because I tried to kill myself. I'm sorry to get in the way of your nice afternoon..." Your throat tightens up and your eyes get wet as you watch their faces go from stony to sad, and it's all kind of moving and sweet except that you're not completely there—a part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking, Good, they'll forgive you, they won't desert you, and the question is, which one is really "you," the one saying and doing whatever it is, or the one watching?

You leave Bix and Lizzie's with Sasha and Drew and head west, toward Washington Square. The cold spasms in the scars on your wrists. Sasha and Drew are a braid of elbows and shoulders and pockets, which presumably keeps them warmer than you. When you were back in Tampa, recovering, they took a Greyhound to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration and stayed up all night and watched the sun rise over the Mall, at which point (they both say) they felt the world start to change right under their feet. You snickered when Sasha told you this, but ever since, you find yourself watching strangers' faces on the street and wondering if they feel it too; a change having to do with Bill Clinton or something even bigger that's everywhere—in the air, underground—obvious to everyone but you.

At Washington Square you and Sasha say goodbye to Drew, who peels off to take a swim and wash the hash from his head. Sasha's wearing her backpack, heading for the library.

"Thank God," you say. "He's gone." You can't seem to
stop
talking in two-word sentences now, even though you'd like to.

"Nice," Sasha remarks.

"I'm kidding. He's great."

"I know."

Your high is wearing off, leaving a box of lint where your head should be. Getting high is new for you—your
not
getting high was the whole reason Sasha picked you out the first day of classes last year, in Washington Square. Blocking your sun with her henna-red hair, smart, quick eyes looking at you from the side rather than head-on. "I'm in need of a fake boyfriend," she said. "Are you up for it?"

"How about your real one?" you said.

She sat down beside you and laid things out: in high school, back in L.A., she'd run away with the drummer for a band you'd never heard of, left the country and traveled alone in Europe and Asia—never even graduated. Now, a freshman, she was almost twenty-one. Her stepfather had pulled every string to get her in here. Last week he'd told her he was hiring a detective to make sure she "toed the line" on her own in New York. "Someone could be watching me right now," she said, looking across the square, crowded with kids who all seemed to know each other. "I feel like someone is."

"Should I put my arm around you?"

"Please."

You've heard somewhere that the act of smiling makes people feel happier; putting your arm around Sasha made you want to protect her. "Why me?" you asked. "Out of curiosity."

"You're cute," she said. "Plus, you don't look druggy."

"I'm a football player," you said. "Was."

You and Sasha had books to buy; you bought them together. You visited her dorm, where you caught Lizzie, her roommate, mugging approval when your back was turned. At five thirty you were both loading your cafeteria trays, you going heavy on the spinach because everyone says football muscle turns to Jell-O when you stop playing. You both got your library cards, went back to your dorms, then met at the Apple for drinks at eight o'clock. It was packed with students. Sasha kept glancing around, and you figured she was thinking about the detective, so you put your arm around her and kissed the side of her face and her hair, which had a nice burned smell, the not-realness of it all relaxing you in a way you'd never managed to be with girls at home. At which point Sasha explained Step Two: each of you had to tell the other something that would make it impossible for you ever to really go out.