The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  “And so, like a fool, I went off my medication,” Gertrude is saying. “You know how they say that when you start to feel better, that’s a sign the meds are working?”

  “Sure,” says Jim, even though he hasn’t been on antidepressants for years and they never seemed to work for him anyway.

  “Well, I thought, I’m obviously cured, so I don’t need to take them at all! Brilliant, wasn’t I?”

  “You’re on them now, right?”

  “Sure,” she says. Then, when he relaxes: “No, you idiot! I’m drinking heavily, I’m ranting like a lunatic—but a happy lunatic, mind you. No, I did not start taking my meds again.”

  “Yet,” he says, the chain saw whizzing closer. “Right?”

  She doesn’t seem to have heard him. “I quit my job. That’s a big surprise, isn’t it?” The last Jim knew, she had some office job in Baltimore that sounded so dull he could never remember what exactly it entailed. “What would you be doing tonight if you were at home? Grading spelling tests? How are the little sixth-grade cretins?”

  “Seventh grade,” he says. “They’re fine. And tonight I’ll be missing an aldermen meeting.” He was hoping to impress her with this, but she smirks and raises an eyebrow. The main item on the agenda is whether a law should be passed requiring cats to wear leashes, but he doesn’t mention this. “And Jeannie is taking Claudia to judo. She’s an orange belt.”

  “That’s it?” says Gertrude. “I would’ve thought at least green by now.”

  He’s wondering if he should remind her about California, about what happened the last time she went off her meds—or at least, the last time he had to rescue her because she went off her meds—but something has occurred to him. “You said you had a guidebook in your purse.”

  She nods.

  “You had a guidebook. You planned to have a nervous breakdown in the South of France! Because if you’re going to have a nervous breakdown, that’s certainly the place to do it!”

  “I planned to go on vacation in the South of France,” she says. “But I got to Marseille and then I just couldn’t stop crying. I was staying in this nice hotel and I just had to get the hell away, but where? I went downstairs and told them to call a taxi, and then I got in, crying, in my pajamas, and said, ‘Take me to Monte Carlo!’ I obviously didn’t think it would cost seven hundred euros. I put it on my credit card, so I’m thinking when I report it stolen, I can say it was stolen that night. Then I don’t have to pay it.” She smiles, showing her small, perfect teeth.

  “I gave you my phone to call the credit-card company. You haven’t done it yet?”

  She shrugs. “Let whoever has it have a little fun. I’ll just say, ‘Whoops, I didn’t realize it was missing, my bad.’ ”

  Gertrude waves her hand in the air as if swatting insects. After a few uncomfortable moments of this (Jim briefly wonders if she’s having some kind of fit), the waiter appears: long nose, scowling face, white apron. “Encore!” Gertrude says, holding up her half-empty glass of beer, and the waiter scowls, a little more heartily, and goes away.

  Jim is picking at his lunch; they both ordered moules frites, which have turned out to be mussels and French fries. The black shells clatter unappetizingly in the bowl; the mussels are surprisingly shriveled and dry, even with the white-wine sauce. Everything seems parched and dried out, especially him. He takes a sip of the sparkling water he ordered by accident—he’d meant to just get water-water, but when he said, “Water?” this is what the waiter brought him: a huge green bottle of Perrier which is probably going to cost as much as Gertrude’s beer. A fool and his money, he thinks, should not go to France.

  The meals cost eleven euros each, the beers six, the Perrier six. Jim peels away euros and tries to ignore the panic in his chest. More clichés occur to him: fish out of water, is that what he and Gertrude are? Or maybe, he thinks—as Gertrude downs the last of her fourth beer and wipes her chin with the back of her hand—out of the frying pan, into the fire. That might apply, too.

  —

  Ted wants to go sightseeing after all. “There’s a Russian Orthodox church,” he says, studying the guidebook. “And a Chagall museum. And what about Old Town?”

  “It’s full of pickpockets,” she says. “We should go there.” They are sitting at a café in the Place Masséna, and even though she isn’t particularly fond of tuna, Elodie has ordered the salade niçoise because she’s in Nice and Ted is paying. She pokes at an anchovy.

  “We should go because you look innocent and I look…what?”

  She regards him, his chubby, ruddy face; his cheap cowboy boots. “You look like a fool,” she says, and he grins as if she’s just told him he looks like a movie star. American men like to be insulted, she has realized; it makes them want to impress you. French men would never stand for being called a fool; her father would have slapped her mother for saying such a thing.

  Ted takes out the foldout map and regards it, frowning. “We’ll take the bus to the Chagall museum. Whaddya say?”

  It’s so hot that everything—her water glass, the sky, the tourists with their shopping bags, Ted’s face—looks coated with grease, thick and shimmery. “Fine,” she says. “Pourquoi pas? Allons-y,” she adds, because he likes it when she says things he can’t understand.

  —

  “Nice used to be Italy,” Gertrude says. “And I used to be sane.”

  They are walking through Old Town, where the street signs are in both French and Italian. The buildings seem aglow with inner fires of yellow, pink, sepia, ochre—colors from an ancient palette. The air smells of sausage and spices; the cafés are crowded with people eating moules frites (why do the French like those so much?) and drinking white wine. Gertrude rushes ahead and Jim thinks of a toddler he saw in the Philadelphia airport, straining against her fuzzy leash while her mother cried, “Slow down, Tasha!” After a moment he sees his sister, her face buried in a bouquet of sunflowers while a frowning woman in a green apron looks on.

  “Do you want to go back to Johns Hopkins?” Jim says to Gertrude, who still has her face buried in the flowers. The green-apron woman is saying something that sounds very insistent, so Jim grabs Gertrude’s arm and she turns to him, her face flushed. She looks almost beautiful. “Do you want me to take you there when you get back, so you can sign yourself in? Do you want me to sign you in?” She spent six months there many years ago and came out looking as if she’d been slapped, her eyes too wide and bright, saying, “I think that did me a lot of good.”

  Now she regards him with an expression he can’t identify, a kind of confused joy. Then she’s gone, plowing into the crowded alleys, heading in between the pink and yellow buildings.

  Keep an eye on Gertrude, he thinks, and jogs after her.

  —

  The huge paintings in the Musée Marc Chagall are like the fever dreams of sick children: women with flowers for bodies, flying through the air, bare breasted, under swan wings; crimson horses curled up with violet goats and golden birds; elongated men and women tilting their heads, smiling; big-eyed, long-lashed horse-people; humans and beasts in red and violet, floating through an indigo sky.

  When Elodie was seven, her mother presented her with a copy of Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, and Elodie smudged all the mirrors in their house with her nose and fingers, trying to push her way through to that other world. Now she is standing just as close to one of the paintings. She feels certain someone will stop her, but no one does.

  Her mother was Irish and Catholic; what would she think of these angels and saints and pits of fire? She would love them. When they went to the Louvre all those years ago, her mother grabbed Elodie’s hand so hard the bones had cracked. They were staring at The Raft of the Medusa, a wall-sized painting of roiling sea and what seemed to Elodie (once she knew the story behind the painting) pretty healthy-looking castaways starving to death on the raft. “It’s so beautiful,” her mother said. “Or maybe not beautiful. Moving.” She didn’t mention that th
e castaways were going to become cannibals. Years later, when Elodie learned this gruesome historical fact, she was oddly delighted.

  This museum is nothing at all like the Louvre. The walls are white and sunlight seems to pour in from everywhere to cast a glow upon the huge paintings: no morbid sea-grays here, no sallow browns. There are no crowds of schoolchildren or rucksacked teenagers, either; just a few other tourists—a Japanese couple, a stout German family—moving silently through the bright, open rooms.

  She finds Ted in the stained-glass auditorium, standing in the glowing indigo light with his head cast down in a way that makes it seem, at first, as if he’s praying. There are three windows, decreasing in size, all dark blue with swirls and diagonals of red, green, gold. She can make out what looks like a tiny goat in the second window, a gold-headed angel in the third.

  “Are these all from the Bible?” she says to Ted, who is reading about the windows in the guidebook instead of actually looking at them.

  “Yep,” he says without looking up. “Out there is Old Testament. In here is supposed to be the Creation of the World. So what does this mean?” He points to a brochure that’s written in French. “Sense dessousse?”

  “Sens dessus dessous. Le monde renversé de Chagall,” she reads. “The upside-down world of Chagall. Topsy-turvy.”

  “Huh,” he says.

  The Japanese couple has come in, openmouthed and reverent, and are staring at the glowing panels and murmuring to each other. Elodie is glad she doesn’t know what they’re saying. She can imagine it’s: Let’s float away on a cloud of fire, my goat-faced man, my winged, flower-bodied woman….

  Of course, they’re probably just asking each other where they want to eat dinner, or if they changed enough money.

  Ted has taken off his left boot and sock and is rubbing his foot.

  “What are you doing?” she hisses.

  “My feet ache,” he says. “What?”

  “Nothing,” she says.

  Later, in the gift shop, she manages to sneak a magnet into her pocket. As she does so she feels a strange twinge that she first identifies as fear—the shop lady just looked her way—and then realizes is actually shame.

  Outside the sky has clouded and the air is cooler. At the bus stop the Japanese couple is staring into a laminated map. “Here,” Elodie says, tossing the magnet in the air for Ted to catch.

  —

  There was one summer at the beach with Gertrude, when Claudia was a baby: Jeannie carrying Claudia, the diaper bag slung over her shoulder, her tank top askew, hair falling out of its clip. Jim was laden with beach towels, a shovel—though Claudia was too young for shoveling—suntan lotion, beach ball. He and Jeannie were sniping at each other, hot and tired, the sand too warm and deep, each step an effort. And Gertrude far behind them. She called, “Wait up, please.” She was walking slowly, her sandals in her hand, wearing a black sundress, her hair in a bun, looking so…empty was the thought that came to Jim. Unburdened, though not in a good way.

  He had thought, Good, she’s okay. He’d said this later to Jeannie, when they were having lunch at a picnic table, their feet freshly rinsed in the cold water fountains lining the beach. “She seems fine, doesn’t she?” he’d said. Gertrude had gone to the restroom, Jeannie was holding Claudia on her lap. Jeannie was sunburned, her freckles glowing across her cheeks.

  “She’s good with Claudia,” Jeannie said, but then she frowned when Jim suggested leaving Claudia with Gertrude in the hotel so that they could go out dancing that night. “Never mind,” he said quickly, and leaned over to kiss his wife on the mouth, his daughter on her warm forehead. He wondered if he should have ever told his wife about what had happened all those years ago in California, Gertrude living on the streets of Long Beach. How when he found her after a month of searching, she didn’t remember his name.

  Less than a year after the day at the beach, Gertrude was in the Johns Hopkins psych unit: She’d been almost hit by a car, wandering a dark stretch of road. She’d told the cop who stopped for her that she was running from aliens.

  At least there are no aliens this time, thank God, Jim thinks, following his sister through the crowded alleys of Old Nice, clotted with gift shops: the T-shirt stands (PARIS in sparkles: Claudia would love that), the shops selling lavender soap, ceramic cicadas squawking in windows, postcards, pottery, linens. Gertrude is standing in front of an orange-and-red cicada the size of a small cat and is waving her hand over it to make it squawk.

  Souvenir, he thinks: One of the few French words he knows. Jim’s cell phone vibrates in his pocket: a text message from Jeannie. Good news. leash ordnce passed. Taking C to judo tonight. Mkg slpy jos. Miss you.

  Cat leashes, sloppy joes, spelling tests to grade: A foreign jail would certainly cure him of ennui (another French word!), but he knows this won’t happen, that he won’t get caught. He is sharp-witted, fast, clear-headed, adrenaline a clarifying tonic, his blood on fire. A stranger in a strange land, he thinks, and tucks a burlap sack of lavender into his pocket.

  —

  Elodie’s parents met in Nice, her mother on vacation with her parents and her father there on business; they were all staying at the Hotel Negresco and, according to Elodie’s mother, kept making eyes at each other over dinner at the Chantecler restaurant. Jacques was thirty-two and Maura was nineteen, heading to nursing school in Dublin, having left a lovesick boyfriend behind in Killarney. There were secret, late-night meetings in the hotel bar, kisses under the chandelier in the salon and on benches along the Promenade. Letters and phone calls were exchanged, and four months later they were married (a civil ceremony in the mairie in Aix-en-Provence) and living in the apartment on the Cours Mirabeau.

  —

  On her first night with Ted, Elodie informed him that she had a brother who had drowned, a father involved in the Corsican Mafia, a mother who threw herself in front of a train. She stole this last part from a book, but Ted apparently hadn’t read it. She told him she’d run away because she had witnessed a murder, but she didn’t have to make up anything about that because Ted didn’t ask. He didn’t seem impressed by any of it, even the part about the Corsican Mafia—the part which, according to Elodie’s mother, was true. Elodie supposed that was more interesting than a husband who had grown tired of you and preferred the young girls he met on business trips.

  Maura had never been warm-blooded, never learned much French, and never had the courage to leave a man who didn’t love her—except in that very final way. Two of Jacques’s girlfriends had come to the funeral. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” one of them said to Elodie in a thick Italian accent, and the look on her face made Elodie realize that her father had told the girl that Elodie had been the one to find her mother hanging. It hadn’t occurred to Elodie to leave until then, but two days later she was hitchhiking on the boulevard extérieur.

  Sometimes she still thinks: If he wanted to find me, he would have by now.

  Sometimes she wonders what would happen if her father turned around and saw her vanishing in a crowd, slapping the empty place where his wallet used to be.

  “Old Town?” Ted says now. “For the pickpocketing?”

  “Let’s go in the Negresco,” Elodie says. “The salon is supposed to be nice.”

  “We’ll pretend we’re tourists,” Ted says, and grabs her hand.

  —

  “What would we do in Nice,” Jim asks Gertrude as they walk back along the palm-lined streets, “if we were rich?”

  A silver train whooshes past, nearly silent; a fountain erupts in a square. High above them stand smooth blue-white statues of men kneeling, arms at their sides. They are passing what seems to be a horseshoe, a hundred feet tall. This town is like a hallucination. Jim fingers the bag of lavender in his pocket and wonders if this is what it’s like for Gertrude: a temporary madness you want to cling to, just a little longer.

  “How rich?” she asks.

  “Movie-star rich.”

  “We’d stay at the Neg
resco, we’d go out on a yacht. We’d probably drink champagne that costs more than your house.”

  “The Negresco,” he says. “It sounds like a cookie.”

  “One of the fanciest cookies in the world,” she says. “We’ll be lucky if they let us in the front door.”

  “We can try,” he says.

  —

  Elodie can’t actually imagine her parents standing under the crystal dome of the salon, staring up at the chandelier—that is, until Ted informs her, reading from the guidebook, that the chandelier was commissioned for Tsar Nicholas II. “You know,” he says, “the one who got shot during the Russian Revolution. So he never got his chandelier.” They stand side by side, gazing up, and Elodie finds herself wondering if her teenage mother knew the chandelier was a gift for doomed royalty.

  But of course she knew: Jacques would have told her; he loved a tragic story and so did she, and that was probably why she first let him kiss her, half-hoping the crystals would come crashing down around them because that would be so romantic.

  A middle-aged couple, both wearing T-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops, has entered the salon and is staring at a life-size sculpture of a shiny yellow woman with her arms in the air and her one leg kicked out behind her. Maybe she’s supposed to be dancing, but to Elodie she looks as if she’s teetering on the edge of something, trying not to fall. The middle-aged woman pantomimes the sculpture: her arms in the air, one leg behind her, and sure enough she does teeter a little, until her husband grabs her by the arm—a little forcefully, it seems to Elodie—and says something that makes the woman burst out laughing.

  “The bedspreads here are mink,” Elodie says to Ted, suddenly remembering something her mother had mentioned long ago. But Ted has wandered off; he’s already halfway around the circle of the salon, past the pillars and the red brocade wall hangings, the paintings of thin-lipped men in shiny waistcoats posing before their horses; their ladies wear big bonnets with pastel ribbons caught in an invisible wind. He pauses near the man and woman—who are now also staring up at the chandelier—then catches Elodie’s eye and makes a face. She has no idea what this is supposed to mean.