The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (30 page)

I knew I should have introduced Peter to the other actors, told him where to be, but leaving him alone was my small way of shaking him by the shoulders, of telling him to grow up. When I saw him again, he was talking to one of the actresses he knew from Chicago Shakespeare, a woman who'd just returned from off-Broadway and chopped her hair short. She was laughing at something he said, and he was teetering back and forth on his feet, as if he might at any second lose a lifelong battle with gravity. He was laughing too, but the way his skin stretched on his jaws, he looked deathly.

I took the microphone and welcomed everyone, but my voice could never command a room; people still milled and talked and jostled for position. I introduced the five actors, and it wasn't until they came and stood beside me that I noticed Peter still had his puffy green coat on, his hands shoved down in its pockets. I wondered if he was punishing me for leaving him alone, or if he was so thin under there that he didn't want to frighten people. In high school, he would take his shirt off at every opportunity, claiming it was hot out at sixty degrees. I'd assumed back then that his dark skin was from Italian genes, but now I saw it must have just been the sun.

The two other men were dressed in sleek sweaters, and the two women wore silk blouses and pants. Audition outfits, like Peter used to have dozens of. He looked now as if we'd found him on the street at the last minute.

We started with the first painting, Caillebotte's
Paris Street, Rainy Day
, and the short-haired actress read a brief story by Stuart Dybek called "Rainy Day Chicago." When she finished, the crowd moved across the gallery to a tiny Picasso, where one of the men read a poem called "Triangle Woman." We'd pulled a miracle, getting the Art Institute to move so many of its own crowd-pleasers into one exhibit; they'd wanted to highlight lesser-known works, things they would pull from some vault, but most of the writers had agreed to the commission only if they could choose the painting. We'd asked the writers to e-mail us their wish lists, and
Nighthawks
topped almost every one. It was something about the loneliness, the coffee, the silence—everyone wanted to lay private claim to that one desolate corner of the universe. In the end, no one got it because it was on loan in New York. How could this one object embody loneliness, I wondered, when people crowded shoulder to shoulder around it, shared it, traded it, paraded it around? If Hopper's little coffee counter was lonely, it was in the way a prostitute was lonely. Or an actor.

I had a hard time paying attention, and I stood there thinking how flat the readers all were, how little grace they showed compared to Peter in his prime. He played Edgar in
Lear
one summer up in Evanston, in the park by the beach. He was beautiful in a red shirt, and his voice made every line sound like something you'd been on the verge of remembering, if you'd only had time.

Peter's first reading was for my least favorite story, as well as my least favorite painting in the entire museum. A very young, way-too-hip fiction writer from Bucktown named Sam Demarr had e-mailed us that the only painting he felt like writing on was "the one with the giant gum." I'd actually loved it as a child—that enormous pack of gum floating over the city skyline. Now I hated how the gum hovered there, out of proportion. It had nothing to do with the city below it, no shared color palette, the garish green wrapper rendering the brown skyline drab and uniform. On one of our first dates, Carlos and I had stood there joking that it was based on a true story, the Giant Gum Crash of '72. Since then, I'd always thought of the gum as about to land, to flatten the unsuspecting workers below, so I'd found it particularly funny that the story Sam Demarr had submitted was called "The Gum Flew Away." Demarr himself was standing there at the side of the room in dirty khakis, smirking at his wineglass.

Peter pulled a tube of papers from his coat pocket and unrolled it so he could read the top one. The other actors held theirs in the black folders we'd sent them in. "First, all the gum flew off," he read, "leaving Chicago in its spearmint dust. Then the department stores floated away." Aside from the fact that his papers were visibly shaking, Peter sounded like himself, strong-voiced and in full control of the English language. This story suited his flat, ironic delivery. I'd chosen it for him specifically because it was monochromatic and free from dialogue. "The hot dog stands were next," I heard him say. For all my daydreaming about finding myself stranded onstage, this was the closest I'd come to feeling as if it were my own energy propelling an actor, as if when I stopped focusing, the whole thing would fall apart. Peter was gesturing around now, with the still-shaking papers, backing toward the wall and away from the old ladies in the front row. Even his legs were bouncing, and it finally occurred to me that maybe it was drugs making his limbs and voice and eyes jump around like that. It didn't seem like something he'd do, but who was I, anymore, to say what Peter would do?

And then as he read the line about the mayor launching himself off the Hancock tower, Peter actually put the back of his hand against the painting and swept it up the canvas. The gasp from the crowd was so loud and so high that I couldn't tell where it stopped and the alarm started. A security guard I'd barely noticed trotted from the room, and another stepped forward, speaking into a radio. Peter froze, and I could feel his stomach flip. I could feel the sweat sticking the papers to his hand. The alarm was turned off, and people started talking quietly.

"And this is why we didn't broadcast live," Lauren whispered beside me. She was glaring at me as if I'd done it myself. The institute coordinators were talking in a cluster while two guards and a woman in a suit came hurrying in, asking Peter to step aside so they could inspect the painting for damage.

The crowd just looked embarrassed, all touching their faces but waiting politely for the reading to resume. Sam Demarr seemed to find the whole thing hilarious. Peter had stepped aside, but he was still up there in front of everyone, the only movement coming from his eyes, which jumped around liquidly, looking for their chance to leap free from his face once and for all. One of the guards talked with him in what should have been a whisper, but everyone could hear. He asked for his name, his driver's license, copied everything down on a big clipboard. If the guard took any notice of the waiting audience at all, it was as an audience for his own fine performance.

And I thought, maybe that's what I would have done, if I'd leapfrogged up there into Peter's body, if I needed to get away before anyone realized I was a fraud: I'd hit the painting and make the show stop. But Peter had his lines right there, and he knew what to do.

It was a good five minutes before the woman in the suit stepped away from the painting and signaled that we could continue. She stayed there, though, in the corner of the room, frowning. I assumed she'd have a long night of paperwork ahead of her now, a lot of calls to make. I felt bad for her.

I took the mike again and said, with a big fundraising grin, "Now you've seen what fine security your contributions support!" Lauren was at the front of the crowd, shaking her head at me over and over to show how disappointed she was, as if I hadn't gotten the message yet. "We're going to try that one again." I waited for a meek laugh from the audience and then turned toward the actors. Peter looked at me with those blank, jumpy eyes. He hadn't done it on purpose, or at least he didn't think he had. He looked like he didn't even recognize me, like I was just another blurred member of his audience, watching and breathing and waiting for him to fail. I'm still not sure what I felt, standing there. Maybe I felt my heart break, or maybe I felt Peter's heart break. When you've known someone that long, when you formed yourself around his personality, back when you were just a fourteen-year-old lump of clay, isn't it really the same thing? Aren't his heart and your own somehow conjoined? Perhaps that's what I could never explain to Carlos: ours was a kind of first love that wasn't aimed at each other, but somehow out at the world. We were forever side by side on the chapel bench, watching the show. Peter whispered something to the short-haired actress and handed her his papers. He held up his open hands to the audience in apology, ten pale, bony fingers, then walked around the people and out of the exhibit.

"The Gum Flew Away," the woman read, the clarity of her voice a reassurance, a wiping away. "By Sam Demarr. First, all the gum flew off, leaving Chicago in its spearmint dust. Then the department stores floated away."

I thought of following Peter out. I'd done it so many times before, chasing him down as he stormed from a party, calling his name five times until he finally turned to look at me, tear-streaked or red-faced on the wet sidewalk. "He didn't mean it," I'd usually say, or "You're just drunk," or "We all love you." I never said that
I
did. Just all of us, meaning everyone at the party, everyone he'd ever met, everyone who'd ever seen him from across the street. It wasn't true anymore; the world didn't love him, just I did, and I had the feeling that even if I could say that, it wouldn't be enough. And even if it were, then what? What would I do with that responsibility? And now Lauren, who was still my boss if I was lucky, was finally shooting me a look of conspiratorial relief. "
Actors
," said her face. "I know," said mine.

It hit me like a wall of cold water that I wouldn't see Peter again, that he'd avoid my calls until he drifted to another city to try again and fail. Someone would hire him at a third-tier regional theater on the basis of his résumé, and he'd last one show, if that. He probably wouldn't know how to give up.

After the readings, I propped myself up at the microphone and said my bit about membership and shortening the pledge drive with early donations, and Institute Steve said something I couldn't follow in his nasally little whine, and I got a drink in my hand. It was cold enough outside that I wanted to drink just so I wouldn't feel the bone chill on the way home. I chatted up as many people as I could stomach over the wine and shrimp. People didn't want to talk to me, though. What they wanted was to meet the actors, these instant, small celebrities who had become important merely by commanding attention for twenty minutes and possessing nice faces. "I saw you in
Phaedra
at the Court," a woman said to one of the actresses, who smiled graciously. "It was just gorgeous. You wore that red dress. Tell me your name again."

Another woman asked the actor who'd read the Stuart Dybek piece to sign her program. She didn't seem to notice Dybek himself standing a few feet away, laughing with a friend and wiping his glasses on his tie. If the actor found the request strange he didn't show it, signing his name on the margin of the paper. Peter would have written something like "Peter Torrelli is
fabulous.
Love and kisses, Pablo P." Or the old Peter would have, the one who knew magic.

I felt the wine go to my head, and I felt relief that the whole thing was over. I drank more wine to shut out the suspicion that I was glad Peter had left. I got through the next hour and walked out into the cold, relieved to be drunk and half expecting to find Peter there on the sidewalk, eighteen years old and scribbling in ballpoint pen on the knee of his khakis. He was gone, and there were just people waiting for buses and people waiting for taxis, everybody waiting to leave.

It was like that after our kiss sophomore year, the way I stood frozen thirty seconds and then ran after him into the cold night, one of my duck boots untied, my left palm bleeding in parallel paper-cut stripes. He was gone, and I'd stood under the school's archway entrance looking to see his breath in the air, thinking it would tell me which way he went. I thought,
If he ran back inside I'll follow him, and I'll kiss him again. If he got a cab, there's nothing I can do.

He
had
found a cab that night, as he probably had now. Or maybe he'd slouched all the way down Adams, his parka blurring him into the frozen crowd, the crowd sweeping him onto the train, the train shooting him up north and off the face of my earth.

This is the way it happens: First, my friend floats away, leaving Chicago in his dust. Then he leaves me—no breath above the concrete, no voice in the air to catch and hold so I can jump into him, so I can steer him back. Then the Berghoff closes, and the radio stations all shut down. The school chapel folds its benches and windows and flies away. The frozen sidewalks peel up like strips of gum. The skyscrapers drift like icebergs into the lake, up the St. Lawrence and out to sea. The citizens grab for something to save, but it's all too cold to touch. The mayor holds a press conference. "We can't save it all," he says.

In a month, they've all forgotten. Standing in the empty streets of their empty city, the people look up and say to no one in particular, "Something used to be here, something beautiful and towering that overshadowed us all, and it seemed very important at the time. And now look: I can't even remember its name."

FROM
Granta

T
HE AD SHOULD HAVE SAID
,
For rent, six-room hovel. Quarter-filled Mrs. Butterworth's bottle in living room, sandy sheets throughout, lingering smell.

Or,
Wanted: gullible tenant for small house, must possess appreciation for chipped pottery, mid-1960s abstract silk-screened canvases, mouse-nibbled books on Georgia O'Keeffe.

Or,
Available June 1—shithole.

Instead, the posting on the website called the house at 55 Bayberry Street old and characterful and sunny, furnished, charming, on a quiet street not far from the college and not far from the ocean. Large porch; separate artist's studio. Not bad for the young married couple, then, Stony Badower and Pamela Graff, he thirty-nine, redheaded, soft-bellied, long-limbed, and beaky, a rare and possibly extinct waterbird; she blond and soft and hotheaded and German and sentimental. She looked like the plump-cheeked naughty heroine of a German children's book having just sawed off her own braids with a knife. Her expression dared you to teach her a lesson. Like many sentimentalists, she was estranged from her family. Stony had never met them.