The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (29 page)

Peter told me this the next week over lunch. Actually, he told me many times, over many lunches in the following year, as if through the retelling he could undo something. We met every other Thursday at the Berghoff, where he'd have root beer and I'd have two pale ales and we'd both eat enormous plates of bratwurst and chicken schnitzel and noodles with butter sauce. We had set these lunches up two years earlier, very formally. We'd been in and out of touch for ages when we found ourselves alone on the living room futon of a boring party in Hyde Park, drunk, wondering aloud if knowing each other when we had acne was the reason we'd never dated as adults. We had kissed just once, sophomore year, when we stayed behind after a SADD meeting to pick up the leftover fliers. I didn't know he was gay. I hardly knew
I
was. He came over with the green fliers in a stack as if to hand them to me, but when I took hold of the papers he pulled them back and me with them. The only person I'd ever kissed before was a girl named Julie Gleason. Afterward he said, "You're pretty dense, aren't you." That was it. We didn't talk for two weeks, and then we were best friends again, before the paper cuts on my palm had even fully healed.

I had looked at him that night at the party—beautiful and grown up, with a beer bottle sweating against the leg of his jeans—and said, "I never see you anymore."

He said, "Yes, I'm slowly becoming invisible." Peter was the kind of guy who would try for any joke, any chance to flash his perfect orthodontia. Even when it wasn't funny, you had to appreciate the showmanship. And then he looked at me seriously, which was rare at the time. "We
should
get together and talk. I mean regularly, because I miss you. It would be like therapy." I should have known I would always be the therapist. I told him once that he was the Gatsby to my Nick Carraway. He flashed his teeth and said, "Yes, but I throw
much
wilder parties."

And like stupid little Nick, I ended up trying to fix things. If I hadn't spent American Lit distracted by Zach Moretti and his amazing forearms, I might have registered that these stories never end well.

Let me say, Peter had been brilliant. Chicago breeds its own stage stars who stay local even if they're good enough to go to New York, and he was one of them. When I saw his Hamlet at Chicago Shakespeare, all memories of Mel and Lord Larry vanished in a celluloid fog. He was the right age, the right build, and those eyes could turn like lightning from irony to terror. I wonder how that colored our friendship, that I saw him simultaneously as Peter and Hamlet. If nothing else, it made me more tolerant of his ramblings and neuroses.

After the night he froze up ("The Night of Which We Shall Not Speak," he called it whenever he spoke of it, which was constantly), he took sick leave for a week, then tried again. If anything, he was worse. He quit before they could fire him, and spent the next two months looking for work. He walked into each audition knowing everyone in the room had heard about his big dry-up. It couldn't have helped.

A few months later, Peter moved to southern Wisconsin and took a job doing dinner theater, and our lunches became less frequent. In late November 2005, almost a year after The Night of Which We Tended to Speak Obsessively, we sat near a window in the Berghoff and watched the year's first snow collect in the street. He told me about his new role as Bob Cratchit in something called
Let's Sing a Christmas Carol!
The director wanted British accents from everyone. Peter could do a perfect one, of course, but not without sinking further into the hollow cadences, the glazed eyes, the strangling sense of the ridiculous.

"Most of them sound southern, it's terrible," he said. He was on caffeine or something worse. He was literally bouncing on the springy seat of the booth. "The eleven o'clock number is, I shit you not, called 'God Bless Us, Every One.' Jesus Christ, you should hear it, it sounds like Scrooge drops by Tara for pecan pie." Every time I saw him he talked faster, as if he were running out of time. He still flashed the smile, but perfunctorily, as if displaying his incisors for the dentist.

When our food came, he finally asked me a question so he could stop talking and eat his schnitzel. "How's life in phone-a-thon land? Are you giving away thousands of tote bags?"

I worked in special events for NPR, and for several years before we officially reconnected, Peter and I would run into each other in the restaurants of the monstrous tourist trap on Navy Pier where Chicago Shakespeare and Chicago Public Radio both live. Once, after we'd drifted apart for a few months, our lunch parties at Riva joined together, and when someone introduced us and said we might hit it off, we started laughing so hard Peter dropped his wineglass.

"We're doing better than last year," I answered.

"I've been telling everyone in the Land of Moo about the Republicans trying to shut you down. I'm going to assemble an army of cheeseheads for your defense."

"Thank you, Peter. That's thoughtful."

Peter started mixing all the food on his plate: schnitzel, potato, creamed spinach, kraut.

"So, what about trying my shrink?" I said. "She's good. I wouldn't lie to you."

The old Peter would have cued up his German psychiatrist impersonation, drawing the attention of everyone around us, but the new Peter just stared at his mixed-up food. "She might be good, but how far is she from Kenosha, the epicenter of the theatrical world?"

"She's here in the city, and that would be good for you."

He agreed to call her and then told me about his great-uncle, who, after undergoing electroshock, became obsessed with licking copper objects. I wanted him to ask about me, to ask about Carlos, who was moving out of my apartment in gradual increments and breaking my heart in painful slow motion. I'd have to find someone else to complain to.

"Listen, though," said Peter, "I'm on the mend. If I had more serious roles again, that might do it. I mean, I was never a comedian, and that's what they're asking me to do."

As much as I didn't believe his optimism, I was glad he wasn't giving up. I constantly pictured him hanging himself from the closet rod of his cold little apartment, or drinking something medieval and poisonous. Maybe I'd just watched his Romeo too many times.

"I've got an offer for you," I said. I'd thought about it in the car on the way there, and decided I couldn't ask him. I decided it several times, in fact, but now here it was, coming out of my mouth. "I want you to do some on-air work for me." He nodded, eyes wide, as he mashed his food and listened to me explain the project: in cooperation with the Art Institute, we'd commissioned twenty local poets and authors to write short works relating to the museum's crown jewels—a mystery writer casting one of the little Thorne rooms as a crime scene, a Pulitzer-winning poet extolling Picasso's man with the blue guitar in sonnet. The poems and stories would hang beside the art, and my job was to find actors to read them aloud at the gala opening and then record them for NPR and for the museum audio tour that people could rent with headphones. My brilliant idea had launched a two-year nightmare of collaboration with a hateful little man I'd come to call Institute Steve, and somehow I'd ended up in charge of the reading part. "It's December thirtieth, if your show is done. The thing is," I said, grabbing for the only available out, "the other actors might be people you knew."

"People I know, Drew." His face stilled itself long enough to shoot me one of his complicated, devastating looks: part annoyance, part sarcasm, part glee that he'd caught me saying what I really thought. "I'll do it, if you don't think I'd embarrass you."

And so the Rubicon was crossed.

He left with Dr. Zeller's business card in his pocket and both of our leftovers in Styrofoam boxes. He was eating plenty despite his meager paycheck because he got free food at the dinner theater, but every night he had to choose between chicken à la king and Lake Superior whitefish.

I stayed behind to pay the bill, and as I waited for the busboy to come back, I pressed my cheek to the dirty, cold glass of the window beside me. I felt like I needed to wake myself up. I had just risked my career on his ability to be Peter again, to jump back into himself, and I strongly doubted he could do it.

The next time we met for dinner was before the Art Institute event. I had more important things to do, but I'd been in earlier to see that my interns were on task, and I wanted to make sure Peter was ready and calm. The Berghoff was right around the corner, and I knew neither of us would get a chance to eat the shrimp and strawberries at the reception. He'd been down a couple of weeks before to record at the studio, and I'd been relieved at how good he was, at least without an audience. I'd invited him over then for dinner with Carlos, who was still hanging around to see what further damage he could inflict on my psyche, but Peter had an audition in Milwaukee with the Kinnickinnick Players for
The Night of January Sixteenth.
He hadn't gotten the part.

Tonight Peter looked skinnier and pale and had a soft stubble he might have been growing for insulation, the way he sat there in his coat and hat, his jaw shaking against the cold. To put it delicately, he looked like a few friends I had in the 1980s who are not with us anymore. I got the waitress to bring us some tea as soon as we sat down. He held the cup, letting it warm his hands, but didn't drink any. It was all over the news that the Berghoff would be closing in a couple of months. We'd stood outside in the cold for forty minutes just to get a table. People around us were taking pictures, touching the menus as if they were the faces of dying lovers.

"I went to your shrink," he said. "Twice. You didn't tell me she was beautiful. Like Juliette Binoche. And we're very optimistic." He was warming up enough to lay his woolly hat on the table.

"Great," I said. I couldn't keep from staring at how his brow and cheekbones stuck out sharply from his face, how his skin stretched over them, shiny and translucent. He went on and on about the therapy, about opening himself up to pain, about finding his core. I barely listened.

"So, how's Carlos?" he said once we'd ordered dessert.

It was too late in the meal, and he was too far behind on the story. "Not great, but you know," I said, confident he didn't care enough to press further. To be safe, though, I changed the subject. I said, "So, I had a dream about the Berghoff last night. I was running around downtown, trying to give everyone vitamin shots because of this disease I'd exposed them to. It was wartime, with tanks in the streets, and if people didn't get these shots they were going to die. I had to find everyone I ever slept with and get them to come to the Berghoff to get this shot. So I'm knocking on doors, but people have moved, and by the time I find Carlos he tells me he won't take the shot, he'd rather die. He's lying there in the snow, dying, and he goes, 'You can't save them all, Drew.' And I woke up screaming. I mean, what the hell
is
that?"

"Dreams don't mean anything," he said. "I used to believe they did, but they really don't. Random synapses." As I signed the bill, he dug into his apple tart like someone just rescued from the wilderness, his eyes wide with the wonder of sugar and crust. He chewed so fast it looked like his teeth were chattering. He gestured behind me with a jerk of his eyes, and I turned to look at the next table, pretending to get something out of my jacket pocket. I assumed he meant the teenage girl with a roll of fat hanging over the back of her low jeans. She was with her parents. "What would you do?" he said. His mouth was full of tart.

Sometime after high school, the game had evolved away from musicians and actors, and we (or at least Peter) had begun obsessing about leaping into regular people's lives, about how to fool their families. I was tired of it after twenty-five years, but this wasn't the day to put him in a bad mood. "Okay. Pretend to get sick so I don't have to go to school, and spend the whole time doing aerobics. I could get fifteen pounds off, at least. Do I get to be myself again after?"

"Presumably."

"Then I finish reading Proust."

Peter took a sip from his root beer, and I noticed his hand shaking. I wondered briefly if it was Parkinson's, if the whole personality shift was that easy to explain—but Peter was such a hypochondriac, he'd have thought of that already. "You're so fucking boring," he said. "I'd run that fat little ass right into the street right now and see if I could stop traffic. I'd see how many laws I could break."

"You could do it right now," I said. "You could run out there and just ruin your life. Nothing stopping you."

He put his napkin on his plate and stood up. "I thought that's what the museum was for."

As we entered the front doors of the Art Institute, the last regular museum visitors of the night were bundling past the stone lions and out into the cold. "Did you ever read that book when you were a kid?" Peter said as we walked through the emptying halls. "The one where the kids run away and live in the Met?"

"And they bathe in the fountain," I said.

"That's my new plan. I want to camp out under some dinosaur bones and just..." He let his sentence trail off, as if the suits of armor we were passing would explain the rest. I imagined them as a hundred failed geniuses, hiding behind the glass, starved down to thin, steel exoskeletons. They knew what he meant.

We stopped at the Chagall windows, stood for a minute in the warmth of their thick blue light, then headed into the special exhibit hall. I left Peter staring at a messy Klee while I talked to Lauren, my boss, who had hated the idea of this event from the time I brought it up two years before and was waiting for everything to fall apart. Her overplucked little eyebrows arched up her forehead as she asked me why half the writers weren't there yet. I went to check on the champagne, and once the evening started moving I lost track of Peter among the tablecloths and microphones and whining interns, and finally among the rush of people and coats. Half were Art Institute supporters with vintage bracelets or Frank Lloyd Wright neckties, and half were NPR junkies with professor haircuts. Some might have been both, God bless them.