The Prize

by Jill Bialosky

  On the way back to the hotel he bumped into Savan.

  “How about a beer?” Savan said, and Edward agreed, glad for any company and to be taken out of his mood.

  They wandered into the hotel bar and sat on stools near the end and talked about some of the galleries and artists they had seen. “Do you ever wonder how we do it? Make a living out of what we do?” Savan shook his head. “It’s a fucking circus. You know Lyle Lewis, the artist who makes those metallic sculptures of superheroes? He was a stockbroker in his first life. Can you imagine what he puts me through? Sometimes I think I’m the luckiest guy on the planet and other times I think it will all disappear.”

  “Agreed,” Edward said, staring into his stein of dark beer.

  “At Reinstein, I feel closed in. I can’t make a decision without Reinstein breathing down my neck. I’m too old to answer to anyone. It’s his turf and he knows it. He wants me to be successful, but not too successful. Then I’m stepping on his toes.”

  “You’ll know when it’s time to make a move. You’re still young in this business.”

  “He’s a descendant of a banking dynasty in Vienna. He wears a hanky from Harrod’s in his breast pocket. Around him I freeze up. It’s like when you want to give it to a girl and then suddenly you can’t let your mind go.”

  “Well, I don’t exactly know,” Edward said.

  “Tell me. What do you think of Nate, really?”

  Edward decided to be discreet. His relationship with Agnes was too precious to breach her trust. “Nate’s great,” Edward said.

  “He’s a fucking egomaniac,” Savan said. They ordered another round, and to his surprise, Edward found himself having a good time.

  “You know, Savan, you have to tone it down sometimes. Be yourself. Don’t try so hard.”

  “I know,” Savan said. “My mother told me that when I was a kid.”

  “You don’t have to anymore. You’ve got a reputation now.”

  “You think so?”

  Edward nodded, though he thought to himself that it wasn’t quite the reputation he would want for himself.

  HE WAS IN a better mood when he returned to his room to prepare for the last dinner in Berlin. The group dined at the hotel restaurant and then Edward and Julia excused themselves, sliding out of the long booth, first one and then the other, saying they were tired and calling it a night. They went down the street to a bar in another hotel to have a drink.

  The hotel was opulent, with crystal chandeliers and gold trim on the ceilings and wall. Edward had spotted it on one of his walks alone. In the lounge a woman in a short cocktail dress with bleached hair wrapped on top of her head sat alone at a table. Another woman at a table in the corner, with thin, painted-on eyebrows, sipped a glass of champagne.

  “The women dress here,” Julia observed. She looked down at her simple light blue cashmere sweater, black skirt and heels, then excused herself and went to the women’s lounge. When she returned, she’d combed her hair and applied fresh lipstick.

  “They’re prostitutes,” he said to her, once she sat down.

  “Are you trying to make me uncomfortable?”

  “No.”

  She ran her hand through her hair several times. “Yes, you were,” she said and smiled.

  They had a drink and then another and the conversation began to flow more easily. After they exhausted several topics, Julia rearranged herself in her chair and looked at him carefully. “So we haven’t told our stories. Did you have a normal family with a mother and a father?”

  “Normal? I don’t know. My father was an English professor. He had a breakdown. He overdosed on lithium when I was away at college.” He looked down at his hands.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. That must have broken your heart.” She looked at him with enveloping eyes and leaned closer. “Have you ever been in therapy?”

  “No.” He looked at her uncomfortably and, suddenly exposed, or threatened, he sat taller in his chair.

  “I don’t know how you go through something like that and not need therapy. It’s the things we don’t like to think about that destroy us. I think everyone should be in therapy. It should be required, as part of one’s education, like having to take Western civilization or composition.”

  Was she serious?

  Then she broke out into laughter and he laughed too.

  “No, really,” she said, tenderly. “Sometimes you seem adrift. Almost as if you are not quite there.”

  “Adrift from what?” He took a sip from his glass and then another. He was suddenly interested in what she’d made of him.

  “From yourself, silly,” she said, and then laughed again so warmly that he did not consider whether he should be offended.

  “But what would I gain from it?”

  “Brilliance.”

  “You mean happiness?”

  “No.” She looked at her folded hands, took off her glasses, and placed them on the table. Her eyes looked naked and vulnerable without them. “Only those who live in the dark are happy.” They listened to the faint sound of music coming from the ceiling speakers; it was an opera he couldn’t quite place.

  “I don’t know. Do you think one person can make us happy? Roy and I both work all the time. I wish sometimes we’d cultivated more friends.”

  “You know what C.S. Lewis said about friendship. He said it was unnecessary, like philosophy and art. That it had no survival value but rather it ‘is one of those things which add value to survival.’ My father had that quote pinned up in his study.” He stopped to take a sip of his drink. “He was sick when I was in high school. His medication made him lethargic. He couldn’t read or write anymore. For him it was like a prison sentence. Sometimes he asked me to come into his study and read to him. It was hard to look at him. His fingers were stained with nicotine. He stopped shaving. It was awful.”

  “Poor man. What did you read him?”

  “Keats. Before he got sick he was working on a new book about the Romantics and ideas of immortality and selfhood. He was obsessed with Keats. I’ve been thinking about it. I think he related to his idealism. It was as if he was still longing for something.” He stopped and stared into Julia’s eyes. “It did break my heart,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry.” Julia leaned over and touched his arm.

  “Your turn,” Edward said.

  “My parents divorced when I was three. I never knew my father as a child. He moved to Los Angeles and got married again. And had two other children. They were more his than I was.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. He’s a son of a bitch.”

  “When you got that phone call at Strauss’s gallery, our first day here. Something happened. Do you want to talk about it?”

  Her face darkened. “Not now.”

  “You’re a mystery, you know that, right?”

  She smiled into her wineglass.

  “I’m glad you were on this trip,” he said.

  THEY SIPPED FROM their drinks, occasionally looking at the people at the tables around them and then back at each other. It was a luxury to be quiet with another person.

  “Since we’re telling our stories, there’s something else,” he said. “But first I need another drink.” He called the waiter over and asked for another round.

  “What is it?” she said, when the waiter had returned with their drinks.

  He took a long swallow. “I was married before I met Holly. I was twenty-two.” He’d never told anyone about his former wife, but telling a woman with no connection to his private life made him feel safe, as if by revealing it he were somehow letting himself off the hook, or exonerating himself. It was strange to think of his past, as if it belonged to another man.

  “Did you leave your first wife for Holly?”

  “It wasn’t like that.” He swirled his drink, knocking the ice against the glass. “Tess was my girlfriend in college. We moved to New York after we graduated. She wanted to get married and I guess I didn’t want to disappoint he
r. It was right after my father died. I wasn’t in a great place.”

  “Do you always do things that you don’t want to do just so you don’t disappoint others?”

  “I don’t know.” He thought for a moment. “No. That’s not it. I loved her. She was my first love.” A lump formed in his throat. “She was killed in an accident. It was almost twenty years ago.”

  “That’s so tragic.”

  “I don’t know why I wanted to tell you. I feel like I can tell you anything.”

  “You’re not happy? Is that it?” She folded her arms on the marble table and looked at him carefully.

  “Are you?” He pressed his back against the booth.

  “It depends what kind of happiness we’re talking about. For some, pain and pleasure are intertwined. I had that kind of relationship once. The kind where the intensity feels as if you’re going to burn out. You crave it and then you can’t take it.”

  “You’re not really answering my question.”

  “What’s the question? I’ve forgotten.”

  “Your husband. Does he make you happy?”

  She lifted her hand from her lap and reached for her wineglass. “I’m not sure we know each other well enough to tell those secrets,” she said.

  “I feel as if I know you.”

  “Do you?” Her face relaxed. “We should read Keats together. When we get back to New York. Then we can discuss the odes. That’s something I could never do with my husband.”

  He looked into her eyes and nodded his head and smiled. “I never told Holly about Tess. I don’t know why.”

  “You really do need to see a shrink,” she said.

  A man in a business suit approached the woman with the thin eyebrows at her table. He sat down, ordered a cocktail and another for her, and after their drink they both rose and climbed the winding, golden brocade staircase to the upper lobby of the hotel. Edward’s eyes met Julia’s. He paid the bill and they left.

  The cool air summoned both of them out of their interiors, and as they walked, their bodies occasionally brushing against each other, he felt remarkably unburdened. They strolled slowly, staring up at the buildings, stopping at a fountain, looking into shop windows, as if to prolong the evening.

  At the hotel desk they procured their individual keys and rode the elevator without speaking. Edward walked Julia to her room and they lingered in the dim doorway a minute and discussed the coming morning, the airport, returning home. He wasn’t quite ready to leave. He placed his hand against the doorframe next to her. He moved close and then stopped and looked into her eyes deeply and she returned the look. “I guess it’s time,” Julia said, to fill the awkwardness. She reached up and kissed him on the cheek. He felt for her hand and took it in his and he was glad she didn’t mind that he held it. “Well, I guess it’s time,” she said again. She slipped the key in the lock, turned to say good night, and before she went into her room, she stopped and turned back. “I like what you said about friendship. You know, C.S. Lewis. About it adding value to survival.”

  “Does that mean I’ll see you in New York?” Edward asked.

  She nodded.

  “Safe flight,” he said, before she closed the door.

  HE TURNED ON the light in his hotel room, walked past the mirror on the wall toward the bathroom, and stopped. He saw his own image and smiled at himself, first with pleasure, but then unease filled him and heat traveled up his neck. In all the years he’d been with Holly he’d never felt drawn to another woman. He kept thinking of Julia’s vulnerable eyes behind her glasses, and the way she scrunched up her eyebrows when something troubled her, her soft lips. He listened to the fan churning the air above him and the squeak of the metal frame of the bed when he turned on the mattress. He tried to put Julia out of his mind but bits and pieces of their conversation came to him. Even when he tried not to think of her, her scent and sound were with him. He awoke once in the middle of the night, unsure where he was, and panic filled him until he remembered.

  7 NEW YORK

  HIS FATHER HAD arranged an interview with a trustee of Amherst, an old friend from graduate school, to whom, because he hadn’t done well on the SATs, Edward attributed his college acceptance and the lingering sense that he was a fraud and with it the feeling that forever followed him—that he wasn’t deserving and intellectually equal to his peers. All summer before his freshman year, his father in and out of hospitals, he didn’t think he’d talked to anyone other than his parents. The last few days in August, his mother packed up his trunk and duffel while he sat on the bed in denial that he was leaving. He told her he’d defer for a year and help take care of his father, but she insisted he go. On the Greyhound bus, nauseated from the smell of gasoline fumes, he pressed his face against the window and watched New Haven fade into the distance. A gray bird soared skyward and a weight lifted off his chest, and for a few moments he experienced a flicker of happiness until guilt took hold.

  His first few weeks at Amherst, he couldn’t remember how to make conversation. His roommate, a stubby kicker from Minnesota, was either at practice or at the frat. They had nothing in common. When his roommate was out, Edward spent painful hours propped against the cement wall on his narrow bed feeling unsure of himself, afraid to come out of the dorm room for fear of bumping into another student and having nothing to say. To calm himself, he sometimes thought of his sexy English professor and jerked off. Alone in his room, an image came to him of his father lying lifeless on his bed miles away in New Haven, the glare from the light turning him into his pillow. The man who quoted lines from Keats and Wordsworth, threw a football with him in the backyard, read his English papers zealously correcting his grammar, had all but vanished. Edward went to the gym and kicked soccer balls against the wall.

  He met Tess in his art history class the second semester of his junior year. Occasionally he turned to look at her seated at the end of the row, wearing a snug Amherst T-shirt over her small chest, her hair in a high ponytail, and she returned his stare. He was impressed by how poised she looked in the lecture hall, while many of the other students were slumped in their seats, falling asleep. Sometimes he saw her in the library in one of the carrels by the window. Once she caught his eye, looked up, and smiled. Nothing was ever said between them, but he found himself remembering her when he was walking home from the library at night or after soccer practice or right before he fell asleep. In his memory he could make out the darkness of her brown eyes and her very white skin, and the way she moved her head up and down taking notes, and knew that she was extraordinary. But more profound was her voice, warm and alive and stirring with emotion when she raised her hand in class and spoke about the hues in Vermeer’s work or Rembrandt’s empathy. He mentioned her name to his buddy Chris Blake, trying to find out something about her. He’d heard that Chris and Tess had gone to the same high school in Michigan. “Her mom died from breast cancer when she was a kid. You didn’t know?” Edward didn’t, and knowing it moved him. He tried to find her in the library during study hall the next day, but once he saw her in the wooden carrel, underlining passages in a book, stroking her finger back and forth across her lips in concentration, he walked away. He spent his days going from class to the cafeteria to soccer practice, and his evenings shut in his dorm room getting stoned, listening to music, locked in a deeper interior fog of her. And then one day, when they were looking at slides in the auditorium, Tess leaned over in the darkness and asked his name. After class he walked her back to the house she shared with four roommates, and on Saturdays they met in the library to study and that became their routine. Afraid to make a move out of fear of being rebuffed, he resigned himself to their becoming close friends.

  Shortly after he received the phone call from his mother about his father’s death, dividing his life into before and after—she told him the details softly . . . when I came down in the morning the pill-box for the week was empty—he went to find Tess and she hugged him and said she’d drive him to New Haven for the funeral. In
the front seat with his fists clenched, he stared out the windshield smudged with bird droppings watching cars race past, aware his future had remarkably changed. His father gone? His mother a widow? Anxious thoughts paralyzed him. Tess popped in a cassette; she’d been listening to War and Peace for her lit class. “Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy.” Anthony Hopkins narrating Tolstoy resounded from the speaker of her Honda Civic as they traveled the highway.

  Once home, he went to his parents’ bedroom. On the nightstand beside his father’s side of the bed sat a half-empty glass of water and his father’s reading glasses. His father had always put a glass of water beside his bed before he went to sleep. The sight of it made him break down.

  At the funeral service, the dean of his father’s department gave a eulogy praising Harold Darby’s dedication, precision, and intellect, quoting from his books and reviews. One of his students, a heroin addict in recovery, approached the podium and talked about how Professor Darby had saved his life by turning him on to literature and offering him a window into the dark and contradictory nature of the soul. John Kincaid, his father’s closest colleague, took the podium and read from his father’s book on Keats and immortality. His parents were close with the Kincaids. Their daughter, Violet, with a wild head of frizzy hair she tried unsuccessfully to tame into a braid down her back, was a year younger than Edward and growing up the families had shared dinners and vacations together. Kincaid spoke about how all of Harold’s work was an attempt to understand existence and how he believed that art was the threshold of truth, offering the possibility of transcendence.