The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012 Read online

  I met Anders when I was in graduate school at UCLA where I spent four fevered months in my second year writing a screenplay for him. In a moment of bravado, I sent it to him. And then, as if it were an elaborate, waking dream, he called a dozen weeks later and said that he loved it, he wanted to meet me, he was so flattered and impressed. I was twenty-seven, prematurely cynical about love, but then suddenly every woman I knew hated me.

  We met for lunch on Olvera Street, his bodyguard waiting outside on a chair the restaurant owner smilingly set by the entrance for him. I couldn’t speak for the first several minutes without laughing nervously. My face was flushed, my legs unreliable, my palms so sweaty my napkin became damp. I was terribly lonely and had wanly hoped for someone like him for a long time. It was why I had moved from Minneapolis to California—I had the same dream as millions of other hopeless people—to be discovered and declared worthy by someone far above me in stature.

  He was tall, taller than I was by several inches, and smelled like he had just stepped from his bath. His hair was longer than I had last seen it—in a film that had been released a couple of months earlier, one in which he had appeared naked and raving over a brother’s death—and he touched my arm several times as he told me that he already had a director and a couple of producers interested and they were probably going to film my screenplay if I would allow them to. They would buy it from me, of course, for a fair price. I shook my head, incredulous. “It’s a gift,” I said. “I couldn’t possibly make you pay for it.”

  He laughed. “If someone offers you money for your work, you take it. Rule number one. Maybe the only rule in L.A. Do you act, too?”

  I was smiling so hard that my face hurt. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said.

  He touched my arm again. People in the restaurant were leering at us. I could feel them trying to decide what was going on, who I was. How in the world had I arrived at this table? Why not them? “Really?” he said. “I thought everyone did.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was being ironic, but I didn’t think he was. “I’d rather direct,” I said, hoping he’d laugh. More than feeling his hands on me, I wanted to make him laugh. Other women, prettier ones, probably couldn’t, not being clever enough.

  Instead, he winked. “It’s always one or the other. Often both.”

  They paid forty-two thousand for my screenplay, more money than I had earned in a year, two years, probably, at that time in my life. The film, Two Things You Should Know, was a success. Later I learned that I could have gotten a lot more if I had tried to sell it through an agent, but Anders and his backers hadn’t really needed to pay me anything. The film made money, sold overseas to European and Asian distributors, won a few big awards in the U.S. Suddenly, I had become someone kind of important. I wrote a sequel a year or so later, Two More Things You Should Know, that wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t ever produced. By then, Anders was being sought out by the Italian-American directors he had always fantasized about working with.

  For a while, we were friends, nothing more, and met from time to time for lunch or dinner; we talked on the phone and went to parties where we knew we would see each other. I was in love with him from the beginning, more or less, but didn’t admit it to myself. I felt an immense, heart-heavy gratitude toward him; he was, it seemed, responsible for my life becoming what I had long hoped it would. He appeared to care about me, too, and not just because the film I had written for him was the first one in which most of the better-known critics took him seriously.

  I told myself that I didn’t want to get involved with him. I could see that he had every woman’s ardent attention wherever he appeared. From what I knew of him, he did not date any one woman for more than a few months. He was as restless as many famous men seem to be—there are so many options, so many willing participants. If you don’t feel the pressure to make one momentous choice, you don’t—it is easier to make a number of small choices, to keep making them.

  But I loved that he liked me, that he kept track of me, sent me gifts, called occasionally. I knew that it was better to be his friend than his short-lived lover. But after Two Things debuted, a year after he had finished filming it, he bought me an expensive German car because the film was such a remarkable success.

  After Anders delivered the car, he started to court me. I didn’t know it was a courtship, but to most others, especially to James, my depressive boyfriend, it was obvious. “You’re being obtuse,” he said. “Or else you’re just lying. I can’t believe you can’t see what he’s up to.”

  “He has so much money that I’m sure it’s not a big deal to buy me a car.”

  “No, probably not, but the gesture is the big deal. You don’t buy a car for someone you don’t expect something from in return. How often does he call you now?”

  I looked at him, feeling his unease, his desire to give up on me, but he didn’t want to, and I didn’t want him to either, not yet. His lips were very red right then, as if he’d been pressing them together hard. He was an attractive guy, a tall, sturdy man, and had played high-school basketball well, something he was still proud of. I liked his long limbs and solid frame, his tangled dark hair. I liked, too, that other women noticed him.

  “Not that often,” I said, which was a lie. Anders was calling me every few days. Sometimes he wanted me to read a script, which I always did, scorning most of them. But mostly he wanted to talk and flirt. He told me he didn’t know anyone else like me, and of course this was the best compliment I could imagine, aside from “I can’t live without you,” which of course he never said. “He’s just thanking me again for the screenplay.”

  “He paid you for it.”

  “He’s still just my friend.” I had never told him that I’d written the screenplay specifically for Anders. It would have been a stupid, possibly cruel, thing to do.

  James rolled his eyes. “If that’s what you want to call it.”

  9.

  He asked me to marry him when he was sitting next to Tom Petty on The Tonight Show sofa. Petty had just played two songs, talked to Jay for a few minutes, and then Anders came out wearing a beautiful shirt, one made of indigo linen that I had bought for him during a trip to Chicago a few months earlier. They talked for several minutes before Jay, with his friendly squinting smile, asked him about his love life. Anders smiled back and said, “Everything’s going well. But it’ll be even better if Emma, my girlfriend, says yes to my marriage proposal.”

  Jay looked at Anders, blinking several times, and said, “Have you asked her? Are you telling me that you asked her and she said she wasn’t sure?”

  Anders shook his head. “Actually, I’m asking her now. I hope she’s watching.”

  The audience started shrieking and hooting and kept it up until the producers broke for a commercial. I was over at my friend Jeanie’s house, another transplant from the Minneapolis area, and hadn’t been watching as attentively as I usually did when Anders appeared on TV (it was later, after I saw a recording of the program, that I memorized every detail of Jay and Anders’s exchange), but when I heard my name and realized what was going on, I started shaking so hard that Jeanie had to hold both of my hands for several minutes before getting up to pour us both a large glass of wine and then another. Very soon my cell phone began to ring without stopping for most of the night. Friends from home, my parents and other relatives, were calling to congratulate me, to weep and exclaim with me. I could not believe that he wanted to marry me and I suppose I should have paid attention to this disbelief, but who says no when someone you love, famous or no, asks you to marry him?

  Soon after his proposal, a few of my friends started to show their jealousy and doubt but tried to pass it off as bracing skepticism, meant only to make me think.

  One friend from home said, You’ll always have money now. What’s the point of you working anymore? Why don’t you go with him when he’s shooting his movies and try to have fun?

  A second friend said, What about all his gorgeous ex-girlfriends?
Is it really over with all of them? How would you even know for sure?

  A third friend said, Is he actually going to go home with you for Christmas and family reunions?

  Someone else, my brother’s girlfriend, said, Will it be an open marriage?

  10.

  Anders’s favorite childhood jokes:

  What did the dog say when its owner played too hard with it?

  Ruff ruff.

  Why don’t witches like to clean the floor?

  Because their broom sticks.

  For a while I thought that he didn’t take himself too seriously. After all, he could easily have ignored the script I’d sent to him, never bothered to meet me in person to tell me that he liked it and wanted to buy it. He could have had his agent contact me instead. He could have gotten swept up in the cult of his own fame and completely left everyday life behind.

  I suppose it was inevitable that he would meet another woman who interested him more than I did, one who did the same work he did, who understood all of the lurid fan mail and faraway meetings and the sheer exhaustion he felt on some days simply being who he was.

  11.

  James did not say that he hated me when I admitted to my feelings for Anders. For one thing, he was a little in awe of him. He might even have hoped that somehow he would benefit from my new, fantasy relationship, that I would feel guilty and ask Anders to go out of his way and introduce James to directors or casting agents. He was probably even more talented than Anders was, and for a while, I thought that he would succeed—it might have been on television rather than in film, but his success did not seem at all far-fetched. His depression, his self-sabotaging tendencies, his impatience and manic intensity, however, conspired to keep him from the success he had hoped for.

  This is something few people talk about in Hollywood, or anywhere else, despite how obvious it is: most people don’t succeed as actors simply because they can’t handle the near-constant rejection that confronts most beginners. Rejection is the relentless, powerful hazing that disables ninety-seven out of a hundred talented people. No one tells you that for your first two hundred auditions, you would be lucky to land one or two parts, minor ones at that. No one says this because it is stories like Anders’s that have convinced most of us that it should be easy, and if it isn’t, if you’re not immediately chosen and declared the next Cary Grant or Robert De Niro or Meryl Streep, then you’re just not good enough.

  12.

  Otik, the married man I started seeing after my divorce, never asked what it had been like for me to be with Anders, whether I expected to be as happy again, or as miserable. He did not care to know, nor did he seem concerned that his own life was not as glamorous as Anders’s, at least not in the same highly visible way. He was a dozen years older than I was, and, due in part to the close relatives and friends he had lost to various wars and self-destructive habits, he was unimpressed by the things that impress most of us.

  He said a few things at the beginning of our affair that I thought did have to do with Anders, though he was never named.

  “Certain events that happen to us,” he said, “we spend a lot of time trying to forget, or else we try to live as if they are about to happen again, even when we know they won’t.”

  Immediately I felt defensive. “I don’t live in the past,” I said.

  “That’s not what I’m saying, Emma. I don’t mean you in particular. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. My wife is dependent on me for things she believes I provide for her but I don’t. Half of what we see isn’t really there.”

  I didn’t believe she was as needy or as deluded as he made her sound. She ran a Montessori school and had been raising two children on her own before meeting Otik. She intimidated me with her direct gaze, her air of always knowing the answer before anyone else. “She seems very grounded to me,” I said.

  He shook his head. “She doesn’t have a lot of confidence in herself. She thinks that I keep her life from falling apart.”

  Along with Dostoyevsky, he idolized Milan Kundera. I think this was part of the problem. Not that I didn’t like Kundera too, but in addition to their celebratory sexiness, his books had a surreal fatalism to them, as did Otik himself, and sometimes when we were together, it seemed as if I were facing a grinning cement wall. “I don’t feel like that,” I said. “I know what you do and don’t provide for me.”

  “I’m not worried about you. Your sentimentality is well-disguised.”

  “Thanks.”

  He laughed. “That’s a compliment. Most people can’t wait for the chance to tell you what’s wrong with them.”

  13.

  As a lover, what was Anders like? Was I too nervous to enjoy it the first time? Or was it so extraordinary to be alone with him, naked in his embrace, that it was the best time of my life?

  These are a few of the questions my less discreet friends have asked.

  Whether or not they realize it, these are also the questions all the people who read celebrity magazines ask themselves about the featured couples as they turn the pages. What could it possibly be like for them …? Is each time always the best time?

  I have heard that a man in New York, a clever guy with social influence and connections, holds parties meant to seem like old-fashioned salons where he and his friends discuss questions such as, Do people who can afford it deserve to have more than one or two kids? Is sushi a big con? Is sex overrated?

  My answer to that last question is a qualified no. The actual physical rewards of sex, because they are so often inconsistent, probably are overrated, but its emotional heft, its implicit statement that another person desires you, possibly more than anyone else, if only in that moment, is, in a way, unrivaled. I loved sleeping with Anders because he was there—perilously close, and in those moments, no one else was as close to him as I was.

  The first time was at my home, not his, and I wasn’t ready for it, not amply perfumed or dressed in something ridiculous and remarkable. He came over unannounced, and it was raining and February and the previous day had been Valentine’s Day. He had sent me a card, and flowers, and four pounds of Swiss chocolate. He had been in New York that day, doing publicity for his latest project, apparently dateless. When he appeared at my front door, his hair was damp, his face tired but smiling; he asked if he could come in, if he could stay for a while, possibly for good?

  This isn’t real, I kept thinking all that night and the next morning. This is a joke, isn’t it?

  Kevin Wilson

  A Birth in the Woods

  HE HAD BEEN WARNED that there would be blood.

  Caleb’s mother had told him in their daily lessons, “No one is actually hurt. Blood doesn’t necessarily mean pain.” She showed him a drawing of a baby floating in space, connected to the placenta. “The baby may be bloody when it comes out, but it isn’t bleeding. We’ll wash him off, wash the sheets and towels, and you won’t even remember it.” Since his parents had decided that Caleb, six years old, would assist with the birth, he found an unending list of questions for his mother to consider. When he asked if there had been a lot of blood when he was born, his mother shook her head. “You were easy,” she said. “You were so easy.”

  His father whittled a block of wood into a duck for the unborn baby before he took his penknife and dug it into the tip of his thumb. When the blood rose to the surface of the skin and trickled down his father’s hand, Caleb looked away, nauseated. His father swung him around, softly, and held up the sliced thumb. “It’s just blood,” he said. “It gets out sometimes and that’s not the worst thing in the world.” Caleb held out his hand, and his father made a quick slice into the boy’s own thumb. When the blood bubbled up, Caleb and his father laughed. “Blood’s nothing to worry about,” his father said, and Caleb felt safe, another lesson learned. His father regarded the half-whittled duck, now streaked with brown-red blood, and threw it into the woods surrounding their cabin, the expanse of trees so dense for miles in every direction that it s
eemed to Caleb that no one else in the world existed. “Don’t show your mother what we’ve done,” his father said, and Caleb nodded. He wondered how long he would have to wait until he could retrieve the duck for himself.

  This was how Caleb was taught, by what was around, the things closest to him, which did not include other children or adults. When the potatoes had come into harvest, his mother had shown him how to use one to power a clock. She did not explain the principle behind this, seemed bored in fact by the particulars, and was intent only on showing Caleb the strangeness of the world. She sliced worms in half, and they watched for weeks as one of the halves grew into a new worm.

  “Does this work with people?” he asked.