The Prize

by Jill Bialosky

  Edward froze. It had been almost a year since Tess died. “It’s over,” he said, and tears welled in his eyes. He hadn’t confided to his friends and colleagues at the gallery much about his private life. No one did. There was an unspoken etiquette that once you entered the gallery nothing mattered but the work.

  “I’m sorry,” Holly said, tenderly. He nodded and, afraid he’d break, ducked into the men’s room. He couldn’t look himself in the mirror. When he came out, he avoided her. His darkness felt contagious.

  On Monday mornings by the water cooler Holly mentioned her volunteer work at the wildlife refuge in Connecticut. Once she’d wrested a jackrabbit’s leg from a trap; another time she mentioned puppies she was looking after at the sanctuary who were waiting for a home. She’d taken lessons at the stables in Central Park when she was young, and boarded her own horse at a barn near her parents’ country house in Connecticut. The best part of her week was volunteering for a program at the barn where as a form of therapy autistic kids interacted with the horses. Tom Drury, a childhood friend, owned the horse farm and had started the program. Pictures of the children riding at the barn were tacked up on the bulletin board above her desk.

  She took pleasure in the simplest things—a cappuccino and croissant for breakfast, for instance, delighted and sustained her throughout a dull morning of answering phones. It hadn’t occurred to him that some people considered pleasure to be a worthy ambition. He observed Holly like she was a foreign species, marveling at a life untouched, or so it seemed, by any need to prove herself.

  Every now and then a memory of Holly would pop into his head when he was drifting off to sleep. He didn’t know why. He pictured her leaning against the reception desk, teasing him for kissing up to Gertrude when he came in with her dry cleaning. She showed him photos of her favorite horse at the barn where she rode. Once she called him over with the curl of her finger when she caught him staring at her from behind his computer screen. “Let me give you some advice,” she said. “Stop trying so hard. Gertrude thinks the world of you,” and then a call came through and she turned back to the phones. She held some strange hypnotic power over him, perched at her desk answering phones when he walked into the gallery every morning, representing some unattainable idea of detached elegance. Her long neck and dark green eyes reminded him of a woman from a Modigliani painting.

  At an opening at the gallery he went to collect some prints from the storage room to show a client, and Holly said she’d help. In the elevator she surprised him by pushing the stop button, then thrust him against the glass in a spontaneous burst of excitement. They kissed. No one had ever thrown herself on him before. After the reception, they continued their buzz and went for drinks at a dive downtown with the others. All throughout the evening her eyes kept finding his and he felt a twinkle in his gut. Charlie slid into the booth next to Holly, and later, when Edward had gone to the bar to get another round, Charlie and Holly slipped out of the booth together to leave. He tugged on Holly’s sleeve.

  “Why don’t you stay for another,” he offered. “I’ll walk you home.”

  Holly turned to him. “I’m with Charlie,” she said. “Sort of,” and scooted out. She turned back to look at him when she was leaving to gauge his reaction. He was a little wasted by then and proceeded to get smashed.

  She had two free tickets to see Madame Butterfly at the Met and asked if he wanted to go. He assumed, because he wanted to, that Charlie was no longer in the picture. The idea of three hours in a cramped velvet seat in the middle of the row didn’t exactly thrill him, and he feared he’d forgotten the art of conversation during his long year of mourning, but didn’t want to give up the chance of spending an evening with her. Once the glittering lights lifted into the ceiling and the theater darkened and Puccini’s music tumbled into the dark hall he was swept up in the central drama of Butterfly and her tragic demise. The emotion of the performance gutted him and he choked up. Holly clutched his arm, which was resting between them. When the curtain fell she turned and looked at him with misty eyes.

  She invited him back to her apartment on the Upper West Side, a studio that was conspicuously small given that he’d imagined she had family funds—someone said her parents lived on Park Avenue and you could always tell a girl came from money by the understated but expensive clothes she wore and her pristine and manicured nails. She sat him down on the bed and slowly took off his tie. A woman hadn’t touched him since Tess. The opera was still in his head, the bells and gongs, the cries of grief and despair, and as he was pulled into the canyon of her, smelling the richness of her hair, touching the soft folds of her body, emotion overcame him. No, there, she said. Yes, right there. She had possessed him quickly. Afterward, alone in his apartment, he told himself he didn’t want to open himself to another woman. He couldn’t afford to get crushed. But there was her laughter, and the way she tossed back her head, and the shine in her eyes when she spotted him coming into the gallery.

  At the gallery, sometimes she came and sat next to him and asked him a question about the work of an artist they were showing. She’d listen patiently while he told her what he loved about a particular painting, transfixed by his zeal. It’s like the way I feel when I watch a horse take off, there is this beauty and intensity that is hard to describe. One night they went out for drinks with a bunch of others and Carrie Phillips, one of the gallerinas, mentioned that she was dating an investment banker.

  Edward turned to Holly. “That’s probably what you’re looking for.”

  She looked at him squarely. “That’s not what I’m into. My father’s sort of a bastard. He buys companies and then hundreds of people lose their jobs.”

  “So you and your father, you don’t get along?”

  “It’s complicated. I love Daddy. He’d do anything for me. It’s just that I don’t respect what he does. He’s angry because I refuse his money.”

  “Why do you refuse it?”

  “Would you want to be owned?” She rubbed her nose with a forefinger and he felt his stomach drop. “With you, it’s different. You love what you do.”

  The next Sunday he invited her to a Degas exhibit at the Met. They stopped to look at his Children on a Doorstep, in which four young children sit in a circle, and Holly said, “I love children. I want at least three.” She confided that she’d lost her twin sister when she was nine from a rare blood cancer. “It’s strange. Since Lizzie died I feel that there’s always someone following me. And at the same time, I have the feeling that someone is missing.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. They walked past a pastry shop, gazing into blueberry and strawberry tarts, her eyes full of hunger and joy. What is she so happy about? he thought when he left the flower shop where he’d gone to get a bouquet for her parents (they were going to visit them for Sunday brunch) and found her sitting on one of the benches on the sidewalk, her head tilted toward the sun, eyes closed, a grin on her face.

  At brunch it turned out that Holly’s father had known of Harold Darby. They had graduated from the same class at Princeton. “A brilliant man,” Frank Moore said, and shook his head. He sized Edward up—Edward had seen the gesture before—as if mental illness in the gene pool might be contagious. Then he cleared his throat.

  “Young man, is selling art something you plan to make your livelihood?”

  Edward had made a profit for the gallery by bringing in Swartzman and then two younger artists that followed. He nodded.

  “Passion is one thing, but don’t expect to make a living on it,” Frank Moore said, and poured them both a glass of sherry. Edward looked down at his scuffed loafers and then at his white shirt frayed at the cuffs, decade-old blazer, and unwashed jeans and felt himself shrink. Hanging on the living room wall were two side-by-side paintings—in the style of Renoir—of two small girls dressed identically. The faces in the portraits reminded him of the eerie feel of Diane Arbus’s figures. The girls were Holly and her twin, Lizzie, dressed in plaid skirts and knee socks. At the table, Mr
s. Moore sat rigid and bone-thin in the Louis XVI dining chair as if she were being held up by a coat hanger, straining for conversation. The cracks in her caked-on foundation made her face look like puzzle pieces pasted together. The room was cold and airless. He looked across at Holly, good-natured and pleasant—he didn’t know how she did it—and felt a sudden urge to take her away from them.

  “Daddy,” Holly said impatiently, “money isn’t everything.”

  “Clearly,” Frank Moore said, and cast his discerning eye on Edward.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Holly whispered. “Don’t mind him. He’s impossible.”

  She took Edward by the hand into her childhood bedroom wallpapered with horses and lured him to her canopy bed.

  “I don’t want their life.”

  She said she wanted to live in a little farmhouse in the country with her dogs and horses. Edward looked at her soulfully and kissed her delicious neck. She made him exceedingly happy, even though being happy caused him pain. Everything about her seemed to go against the tenor of his life but being with her, seeing her smile at him, made him feel like he was coming to life again. “Now that you’ve seen my horror show, tell me about something about you. You never talk about your parents,” she said.

  He told her how once he had gone to see his father teach his class on Romantic poetry and sat in the back row mesmerized by this person transformed from the slightly scattered and melancholy man he was at home into a dashing intellectual. And then he told her how after his father had gotten sick his eyes lost all their sheen. “They were gray and blank.”

  Holly looked up at him with her big green eyes. “You’re a little mixed-up too, aren’t you,” she said, lovingly.

  He squeezed her close.

  “We have a lot in common.”

  “Do we?” He stared at her with a confused look.

  “Loss, dum-dum,” she said.

  Holly caressed his face and the tension drained from his body. They messed around on her canopy bed, Holly aggressively fondling him (not that he minded) as if to get back at her father, and one thing led to another. Afterward, they went back into the kitchen and made mimosas. Frank Moore wandered in wearing silk slippers and a jacket with the family crest on his breast pocket, a caricature from an eighteenth-century novel come to life. “Mike Fountain says he’s waiting for you to graduate from law school. He wants you to join the firm.”

  “I guess he’s going to wait a long time, Daddy.” The spark of life shot through her like a cannonball.

  After her father left the room she said, “I feel like I’m always disappointing him. They don’t give me any space. It’s like they think they’re going to lose me, too.”

  Holly scooted him out close to five, saying she had tickets to a jazz concert. The tickets were for her and Charlie. “Charlie?” Edward said. “Are you still seeing him?”

  “Yeah. We still do stuff,” she said, and peered into his eyes as if she were looking for a response. He wondered if she was purposefully trying to make him jealous. He left feeling soiled by Frank Moore’s company and mad at himself for kissing up to him, unable to get the slope of his daughter’s perfect nose out of his head.

  The next morning Holly sat on her perch in the gallery, a flush on her face, pushing in phone buttons and connecting calls, when he entered the gallery. He walked past Holly at the reception desk and went into his cubicle and turned on his computer. A few minutes later he heard her laugh. He opened the Dunkin Donuts bag and washed down his unhappiness with four powdered donut holes and lukewarm coffee.

  That laugh! He could hear it again from his cubicle.

  One of the gallery’s artists was getting an award at the Academy of Arts and Letters and they were all going that night. He meandered over to the bar in the garden where they held the reception. Charlie and Holly came to join him, Holly a few inches taller than him, her arm locked in Charlie’s, watching others do turns around the room. Charlie was a little portly with thick wavy hair and had that sort of Pillsbury Doughboy innocence that some women seemed to like. He possessed a boldness of temperament and confidence that made Edward squirm with envy. Earlier that week one of his artists, a twenty-four-year-old wunderkind straight out of graduate school, had sold a painting to the Whitney and suddenly the four or five young artists who had received Rome fellowships flocked around Charlie. Edward was good at spotting talent—Swartzman and the few others in his stable had created ripples—but he was looking to nail the real deal and take the art world by storm.

  Julia Rosenthal was one of the Rome fellows. She sported a low-cut dress and high-heeled boots, a small bag hand-painted with flowers hanging from her delicate wrist. After Edward schmoozed with Julia and tucked his card into her palm, Charlie and Holly waltzed over, Holly in high golden sandals that laced up her ankles like the slippers of a Greek goddess, wearing a frothy thin dress.

  “I saw you talking to Julia Rosenthal. You gave her your card, man.” Charlie turned to Holly. “Looks like our boy is finally a player.”

  Holly tugged on his sleeve. “Who’s Julia Rosenthal?”

  Charlie pointed her out by the doorway. “She’s on everyone’s wait-and-see list.”

  Holly onced-over Julia and her face fell into a pout. She pressed Edward’s arm and looked at him carefully with liquid eyes.

  “Do you think she’s pretty?” Holly said. “You probably want to be with an artist, right?”

  He stumbled for a minute. “No, Holly, you’re who I want.”

  She grinned, showing her generous, sparkling teeth. “Of course I am.”

  Charlie eyed Peter Highland, another Rome fellow, in a small cluster next to them. “Excuse me,” he said, and maneuvered himself into their conversation. Peter was chatting with Lisel Miller, who covered art for the Observer.

  Holly hooked her arm in Edward’s. She leaned into him and whispered in his ear. “I feel as if I don’t really know you,” she said, surprising him. “And yet, I do.” She squeezed his hand, flirty and a little wasted.

  “It’s because you’re everything to me,” he said, because he’d been depleted and like an empty vase she was filling him again. He supposed it was true that he didn’t know her either, only what she let him see of her. What mattered was that he was no longer alone.

  SIX MONTHS LATER they were engaged. Raised in a modest home on a professor’s salary, he was nothing like Holly’s father, and while it irked Frank Moore, it thrilled Holly. Mr. Moore insinuated once at a dinner party, after Edward found himself in a mood to explain to one of their guests the meaning behind Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel on display at MOMA (it challenged assumptions about the meaning of art), that working at a gallery was for sensitive types. At their engagement dinner, Holly’s father took him to the bar and ordered them each a scotch.

  “You’re against them until you’re with them, if you know what I mean,” he said, clinking Edward’s glass. “Now give my daughter what she deserves and enough fussing over whether a piece of art is good or not. If it sells it’s good,” he said, and patted Edward’s back aggressively. Edward’s knee-jerk reaction was to compulsively rattle off the new deals he’d made as if he were still auditioning for the part of Holly’s husband, and he supposed he was. Around Mr. Moore he felt like a fraud. “Why don’t you just show him your bank statement,” Holly said, interrupting their conversation and rolling her eyes.

  On the way back from dinner he told himself he would tell Holly about Tess. Occasionally when he’d run into a mutual friend from college and her name was mentioned he felt like he was having an out-of-body experience. Why couldn’t he talk about it? It was like there was a pit in his throat.

  They walked arm in arm through the park to Holly’s apartment. She leaned into him and every few blocks stopped to kiss him. She moved with eagerness, alert and present, quick to brush off disappointments. Her optimism anchored her. He tried to formulate what he would say, but he didn’t know how to begin. He didn’t know how to explain it right, because he didn’t him
self quite understand how forcefully Holly had come to mean his very salvation. He couldn’t risk losing her—what if she thought less of him or would not want to marry someone who’d been married before? Holly was a purist. And what would Frank Moore think of him, his only daughter marrying a man who’d been scarred first by his father’s mental illness and then by this?

  He stopped at the Korean market and bought Holly a bouquet of wild daisies that made her blush with happiness, and they resumed their walk together, dodging the sidewalk gratings that he always feared would give way. He’d find another time; they had their whole lives. But as he neared her apartment he felt regret at not telling her.

  When they got to her doorstep she looked up at him. “What’s wrong, honey,” she said. “You look like there’s something you want to say.”

  He looked into her open, honest face and felt he didn’t deserve her. “Only how much I love you,” he said, unaware that the longer he waited, the longer Holly would feel in retrospect that her trust had been violated.

  THE WEDDING WAS at her father’s club in Connecticut. They honeymooned on St. Barths, an extravagant gift from Holly’s father that for once she accepted. When they arrived at the hotel they uncorked the complimentary bottle of champagne waiting in their room and made love on the bed. Holly asked Edward to promise that they would never take money from her father again. “I don’t want him controlling our lives,” she said, her head propped on her arm, looking at him with her steely, purposeful eyes.

  In the mornings they drank mimosas and took long walks to a secluded beach. “Let’s tell each other one thing we don’t know about each other,” Holly said, her coppery skin gleaming in a skimpy bikini. Her revelation: for the year after Lizzie died, she made herself throw up after she ate.

  “I told you. I couldn’t deal with pleasure.”