by Mark Brazaitis
The first time one of Adrienne’s boyfriends ended the night in a dumpster was an accident. His name was Rupert, and besides his talent for riding a unicycle while wearing a Cat-in-the-Hat hat and his ability to speak spontaneously in rhyme, a quality Adrienne at first found charming, he wasn’t good for much. He drank plentifully, which turned his cherubic cheeks a devilish red, but at least he wasn’t a mean drunk.
One night, after he’d passed out in her queen-sized bed, Adrienne got an admittedly naughty idea. The expansive window next to the bed, which had never had a screen, was open. Wouldn’t it be funny if…? But she stopped herself from imagining what might follow the ellipsis. After all, her apartment was on the sixth floor.
But when, in the dead of night, Rupert turned over in his sleep and his booze breath poured into her startled nostrils, she gave him a gentle shove. Or perhaps it wasn’t so gentle because he rolled three times to his left. The third roll sent him out of the window.
Adrienne was mortified. She imagined Rupert’s last words: “I tumbled out of bed—and now I’m dead!” Thankfully, the dumpster below her window was full of trash—the garbage truck would be coming in the morning—and provided Rupert with a cushioned landing. Remarkably, he continued to sleep until Adrienne shouted, “There’s a rat at your feet, Rupert!” As a Cat-in-the-Hat impersonator, Rupert shouldn’t have been bothered by a rodent, but he shrieked before clawing his way out of the dumpster.
When he buzzed her apartment to be let in, she said she wouldn’t be able to tolerate his smell. She added, “And this seems as good a time as any to break up, Rupert. I hope you have a good life and a long shower.”
Adrienne’s next boyfriend was Stan, who’d moved to the city to become a comedian. She should have been skeptical of his talent when he introduced himself as “Stan the Man” and expected her to laugh. But she was looking for levity and hoped that a comic, however unfunny, would provide it.
Stan, who had a thin face and a bulging belly, liked to practice his routines in front of her. But she soon grew tired of listening to jokes about the Barber and the Bald Man and the Centipede and the Shoe Salesman. She tried to steer him to other subjects, but he followed her around her apartment, spewing jokes.
One evening, she said, “I’ve heard enough, thank you.”
“You’re a tough audience,” he said, “but I’ll win you over. Just wait and see.”
“I don’t want to wait or see. I want to go to bed. And I want you to go home.”
“One last joke.”
“The show’s over.”
“A fish walks into a bar.”
“Fish don’t walk,” she said. “But you should—right out of my apartment.”
She tried to seal herself off in her bedroom but couldn’t close the door in time. She feared he would assault her—with jokes. She could smell the contents of the dumpster, a mixture of the obsolete and gross. As she cowered against the headboard, pillows pressed to her ears, he sat cross-legged on the ledge of the open window. His booming voice penetrated her insufficient buffers. She contemplated calling the police. But an easier solution called to her. After casting aside her pillows, she gave Stan a soft shove, and down he fell. He landed on a discarded beanbag chair. The last laugh was hers.
Her next boyfriend, Eddie, was a social-media influencer who called himself as “an artist of improvisational invention.” He lived up to his self-proclaimed title. One night, he filled her apartment with flowers he’d made from Chinese food cartons. On another occasion, he made her tap-dancing shoes from an old leather purse and a handful of pennies. A week later, he gathered various objects from around her apartment—wine glasses, Coke cans, a Frisbee she hadn’t thrown in a decade—and used them as instruments to play a passable version of “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Sappy as it was, the song encapsulated her feelings toward him. She even told him so.
After a couple of weeks, however, Adrienne sensed that Eddie’s interest in her was fading. Wondering if he was sharing his talents with another woman, she checked his social-media sites, but the evidence was inconclusive. One evening, hoping to win back his affection, she fixed him—or tried to fix him—his favorite meal, but in her oven the eggplant’s deep purple turned a devastating black. Naturally, Eddie came to the rescue, improvising a meal out of tuna fish, angel hair pasta, and Cheez-Its. It was, of course, delicious. Half drunk on the wine they’d shared, she said, “Will you move in with me?”
He said, “I’ll give you an answer before dawn.”
Hours later, asleep beside him in her bed, she heard, as if in a dream, his boastful baritone: “Tonight I’m a combination sky diver and escape artist who whoops like a cowboy Yee haw!” His whooping grew progressively fainter until it was replaced by a resounding squish. She had an inkling of what had happened, and rolled over to her open window to confirm it.
Eddie stood triumphantly atop a discarded mattress in the dumpster. “What are you doing?” she called down to him.
He looked up and grinned. “Dropping out of your life.”
She noticed the cell phone in his hand. He was filming himself. He aimed the phone at her. “What would you like to say to our audience?”
“Don’t try this at home? You might break a bone as well as a heart?”
Eddie’s video of his window escape, which included a closeup of Adrienne sleeping (and snoring), went viral.
In subsequent days, strangers gawked at her, whistled at her, and asked outrageous questions of her. Surprisingly, she received overtures from half a dozen men and two women. Although it was clear where they’d seen her before, it wasn’t clear why they wanted to date her. When she inquired, they were evasive and equivocal, shy and incoherent. At last, one of them admitted to being a thrill-seeker.
“You want to jump into a giant garbage can?” she asked.
“Would it hurt my chances with you,” he asked, “if I confessed to an Oscar the Grouch fetish?”
“No,” she said, “because you never had a chance with me to begin with.”
At night, crowds gathered outside her open window, hoping another of her dates would leap into the trash. It was winter, and cold, but the temperature in her building was sauna-like. The radiators clanged like discordant bells. To save herself from heat stroke, she left her window open. Inevitably, someone in the crowd started a chant. One night’s refrain was especially crude: “Kiss her, jump her, diss her, dump her!”
She was too humiliated to shout, “I’m all alone, you assholes!”
More times than she would have admitted even to a close friend, she picked up her phone, intending to call her father. She wanted his consolation. She wanted him to recite the story he liked to tell of the life she was destined to live.
Her father had pulled the ultimate escape a year-and-a-half after she’d moved to the city, dying of a heart attack two weeks shy of his fifty-fifth birthday. He might as well have tumbled out of her window, the dumpster replaced with a black hole.
Adrienne had moved to the city to become an actress. Although she’d starred in half a dozen plays in college, her most notable professional role was the part of a semi-colon in an experimental drama called “Punctuation” staged in a shuttered office supply store. As the director who’d cast her said, “You’re almost beautiful enough and almost talented enough to succeed in this business.”
As she waited for her big break or her big breakdown, she waited tables at a 24-hour diner called Happyland. Its unhappy patrons included exhausted nannies and their sobbing charges; lonely widowers whose prolific coffee consumption didn’t prevent them from falling asleep on top of their soft-boiled eggs; and struggling street performers who paid their checks in coins. Adrienne had met all her boyfriends at Happyland. She would have done better at the minimum-security prison twenty blocks north.
In the wake of her unwelcome viral fame, she called her mother, who invited her to move back home. But the thought of holing up in her childhood bedroom inspired a vicious return of her teenage acne. She considered applying to graduate schools but doubted admissions officers would see her B.F.A. in acting as sufficient preparation for law school or a Ph.D. in psychology. She did, however, complete an application to be a roving drama instructor in the city’s public schools.
Adrienne expected the crowds outside her window to disappear. Although they grew smaller in number as the days passed, they remained. Eventually concluding she had no love life, they urged her to leap into the dumpster herself: “You were dumped, so jump, jump, jump!”
She decided to give them what they wanted. She hoped her one-woman show would jumpstart her stalled career.
One morning, she called in sick to work and spent the day shopping. Her most lavish purchases were a bold red dress and matching shoes. They pushed her credit beyond what she could afford to pay back. But what artist on the road to success doesn’t flirt with bankruptcy?
When evening arrived, she dressed and put on makeup. She was more stunning than she’d ever been—or more garish, anyway. With her phone, she filmed herself walking from her bathroom to her living room and from her living room to her bedroom. The window was open. She couldn’t hear any chants, but she believed they would commence as soon as the crowds saw her.
After sitting on her window ledge, her legs dangling into the air, she looked down. There was no one in the alley below. “Hello?” she called. But no one appeared. “Hello?” she called again. No one stirred—not even a rat.
She didn’t think all was lost. She could still record her leap and post it on all her social media sites. She gazed at the dumpster. It was empty. The trash pick-up schedule must have changed. Or she’d forgotten what day it was.
Should she jump anyway? There would be nothing to cushion her fall. She might break a leg. She might die. Was she willing to risk limb and life on the off chance that someone, somewhere, would see her video and cast her in something?
She lingered in the window, debating.
“Are you okay?”
It was a voice, a man’s, across the alley. He was leaning out of his window. Although what was in the room behind him—a table, a bookcase, a poster of a Frieda Kahlo painting on the wall—was illuminated, he was in shadow.
“Don’t jump,” the man said. “I’ll call for help.”
“Please don’t,” Adrienne said. “I’m an actress. I’m enacting a role.”
“The role of a suicide?”
“Ha, ha,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to do a curtain call, would I?”
In the subsequent silence, Adrienne heard an ambulance’s siren and a dog’s lonely howl. Lately, the city seemed so desolate. She remembered how excited she’d been when she first came to town. After her father helped her put together IKEA furniture until midnight, they celebrated her new life with a dinner of Chinese takeout and a bottle of Chilean wine.
Aside from attending his funeral, she hadn’t mourned him, thinking he’d want her to keep chasing her dream with relentless focus. He would have remained her biggest fan whether she was on the stage or on the unemployment line. About her comical parade of boyfriends, he would have said, “They aren’t worth crying over, so you might as well laugh.”
She laughed at the thought.
“What’s so funny?” the man in the window said.
“The past and the present,” she said. “Possibly the future as well.”
“Are you sure you’re okay? Why don’t we talk?”
“I’m communing with my father.”
“I don’t see him.”
“He’s calling from far away.”
“Long distance,” the man in the window said.
“The longest.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I have an audition tomorrow morning,” she said. “Interview, I mean. I’m interviewing to be a drama teacher.”
“Congratulations. Or do I say, ‘Break a leg’?”
“I’ll put off the broken leg for another day.”
She thanked him, and they said goodnight. Minutes later, lying in her bed, she said, “Tell me a goodnight story. And, please, give it a happy ending.”
She closed her eyes, waiting. When her father’s voice failed to fill the silence, she said, “All right. I’ll tell you a story. Are you listening? An actress fails to jump into a dumpster, thus ruining her career but saving her life. The end.” She laughed and cried and repeated the cycle until she fell asleep.
Mark Brazaitis is the author of nine books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and the novel American Seasons. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Sun, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Guernica, Under the Sun, Beloit Fiction Journal, Poetry East, USA Today, and elsewhere. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program and the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop.