Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

The music blasting in the club sounded like pure racket, but this wasn’t new. While he liked some of the rap other boys listened to when they were growing up, Curtis was always drawn to older music, songs from the 1960s and ’70s. All right, old man. Marvin had a great time teasing him about this. Look at the old head tryna get his groove! He’d mock Curtis by bending over and holding his lower back, two-stepping with an imaginary cane.

Lena and her friends were already out there shaking their bodies, each with a drink in hand. Some new dances must have caught on from the music videos. As he watched, Curtis felt he was a man true to better times. He returned to the problem of Andre, how he’d manage to talk to the boy and what his first words would be. After a while, a tall man in a suit came up behind Lena and began to whisper in her ear. She laughed. Soon she had backed herself into him and they were fused in body and time. She pursed her lips and slapped her thigh with her free hand as they danced. Although he and Lena were the same age, thirty-five, Curtis was upset to see her carrying on like this. Feeling sorry for the boy and, somehow, for Marvin, he wished he had just gone to the promenade. He ordered another bourbon.

Lena and the man in the suit talked for a while at a different side of the bar. He had bought her another drink, but the smile was gone from her eyes. She seemed much less engaged now that they weren’t dancing. The man must have noticed this too. He tried to pull her back onto the dance floor, but she refused. The man tried a few more times and then his mouth turned cruel. He appeared to curse at Lena before he walked away.

She stood at the bar for a while, staring into her drink. Then she tossed it back, the entire pour, and drew from her purse a thin cigarette that looked cold in her brown fingers. She said something to one of the women she’d come in with and went past Curtis upstairs. For a moment it seemed that her gaze had fallen on him, but in places like this people’s eyes darted everywhere. He followed her. From the entrance, he saw her smoking out near the curb. Her coat was still checked inside and with her purse pinned under her arm she held herself, trembling against the cold. She dropped her cigarette and watched it smolder and die on the ground. She could have been some kind of bird staring down from a high perch, wings pinched against her blue body, refusing to fly.

“Hey playboy,” the bouncer said. “You leaving or what? It’s in or out, my man.”

As Lena took out another cigarette and began the drama of lighting it, Curtis walked back into the club. He stayed on the ground floor this time, where the music seemed not quite as loud. Sipping from his third bourbon, he thought about how easy it had been to go from his first to his third, and beyond, on the night the girl was struck by his car. Dismissing this, he wondered instead about what Andre was doing, if he too was taking advantage of his freedom or compounding the little tragedies of the night by sitting timidly at home. A boy his age should be in the world, seeing as much as he could claim or aspire to. He should be terrified by the new sensation of a girl’s modest breasts in his hands, by the new sensation of her hands in his jeans, not by thoughts of his mother in a short dress playing at youth out here in the drunkenness of night. They were thirty-five, yes, but they were old. The boy was still young and he had his father’s face. Curtis had gotten close enough to see that. His face was the same, but his fate wouldn’t be.

Curtis smelled the tobacco on her breath before he felt her cold hand on his shoulder.

“You might as well come on,” Lena said.

When he spun around on his barstool to look at her, she grabbed his drink and finished it in one swift motion. “Come on and dance with me,” she said.

He allowed her to lead him to the dance floor, less crowded than the one downstairs. He bent his knees, searching for their bodies’ fit—it turned out he hadn’t forgotten this, how to accommodate the body of a woman. They danced to old lovers’ rock. Her breasts were crushed against his ribs, his leg planted between hers. She held his shoulder and rode his hip. He touched a hand to her back and found skin there, exposed and sweaty.

She was clearly drunk, and he, with the bourbon at work in his blood, had the impression that he was anonymous to her. He wished he could vanish on the spot and leave her to her phantom, but something begged him to stay. It didn’t seem sexual—his body had yet to respond in that way to hers—so, he told himself, it had to be his obligation to the boy. But it felt like something more bewildering than an obligation. The yearning didn’t belong to him, and it didn’t belong to her either. It was beyond either of them, he felt, so it claimed them both. It was as though a bright delicate object they couldn’t see, some filament, were held between them, along the length of her sapphire dress stretched taut by his thigh, the spark of it hot where he carried her on his hip, moving her in the rhythm of his stationary stride, and they had no choice but to pull each other close, to preserve the object between them, otherwise it would drift free and fall and lose its light. The exhilaration of her breathing and her slim clutching thighs and her hand pulling on his shoulder were the forces she exerted on him, and he carried her with his hip and his knees bent and his back dimly aching, but all that mattered was the fragile wire pressed between them, lit by something they could neither face nor abandon.

This feeling of being stuck persisted, and Curtis was horrified by it. When the long set of lovers’ rock ended and released them, he averted his eyes from the sapphire dress going loose again between Lena’s thighs. He knew of nothing else to do but go back to the bar and order another drink, and when she followed him there he ordered one for her as well. It was what anyone in the role of her phantom would do. Her drink was cooled by a sculpted sphere of ice that had the look of perfection and permanence, a little moon displayed in glass. When Lena drank she did so deeply, and the moon slid, and it wet the tip of her nose. Curtis’s drink had no ice. When he took it up he tilted it so the liquor fell just short of his lips and he could inhale its heat before drinking.

What did she see when she looked at him? Added weight had rounded his face, and a beard darkened it. His hair had receded above the temples so that a blunt arrow pointed down at his nose. What would Marvin look like now if he were alive?

Curtis avoided Lena’s eyes, hoping the rest of their time together would pass like this—in silence. He tried to lose himself in the music that was playing, but it wouldn’t permit him access; its borders were dense, its patterns impossible to predict.

“I know who you are,” Lena said. “You.”

Curtis was overcome with a feeling that by entering this place he had once known, he had also elected for so much more. He sat and was helpless. Everything around him—the music, the carnal laughter, the spinning stellar lights—all of it was a frenzy. He’d forgotten this basic truth, that freedom was a wilderness.

There was no place for them to go. He explained that he was living with his mother for a little while, listened as Lena said that her son was at home. Then she surprised Curtis by suggesting they get a room. Just for a couple of hours, she said. She was lonely. It wasn’t all that late yet. The nightclub itself would be open until four, and her son knew not to expect her home until after that. He’d already be asleep anyway, and she’d still wake up before he did. “All that boy’s worried about is having his breakfast ready in the morning,” she said. She told him she made pancakes and bacon on Sundays.