The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2016 (retail) (epub)

  My scribbled-in Middlemarch stayed on the nightstand by the twin bed, and I had hung my clothes in the closet, but that didn’t mean I felt at home in the room, with its dresser whose bottom drawer was jammed with photos. What did it mean that this drawer, alone in all the house, had not been systematically sorted? Near the bottom of the slag heap was an envelope of tintypes: from a background of stippled tarnish gazed a poetic boy, doleful eyes and stiff upright collar, and I wanted to take it to him and say Look, you in 1843, but that would prove I’d been riffling through the drawer, and even if he hadn’t said not to, I wasn’t sure it was all right. His childhood was there, his youth, the face of the first author’s photo. Houses and cities before this one. His women, too, and I dealt them out across the floor, a solitaire of faces, wildly unalike: I wanted to know their stories. No doubt I did know pieces, from his work, but here they were, real, and I would have listened to them all if I could, I would have asked each one How did it end? When he was writing he would sometimes knock and come in and rummage through the pictures, whose haphazardness replicated memory’s chanciness. As with memory there was the sense that everything was there, in the drawer—just not readily findable. Disorder is friendly to serendipity, was that the point? When he found what he wanted he didn’t take it back to his desk but stayed and studied it, and when he was done dropped it casually back into the hodgepodge. If I opened the drawer after he’d gone there was no way to guess which photo he’d been holding.

  —

  There were things that happened in sex that felt like they could never be forgotten. Recognitions, flights of soul-baring mutual exposure, a kind of raw ravishment that seemed bound to transform our lives. But, sharing the setting of so many hours of tumult—the bed—and tumult’s instruments—our two bodies—these passages lacked the distinctness of event and turned out to be, as far as memory was concerned, elusive. And there was sadness in that, in coming back to our same selves. By midsummer, something—maybe the infuriating inescapability of those selves, maybe an intimation of the monotonousness sex could devolve into, if we kept this up—caused us to start turning sex into stories. Sex with me as a boy, the one and only boy who ever caught his eye, a lovely apparition of a boy he wanted to keep from all harm, but who one day was simply gone, sex as if he was a pornographer and I was a schoolgirl who began, more and more, to conjure long-absent emotions, tenderness, possessiveness, even as the schoolgirl became more and more corrupt, telling sly little lies, the sex we would have if after ten years’ separation we saw each other across a crowded room, sex as if I had just learned he’d been unfaithful to me with one of his exes, sex as if I was unfaithful, the sex we would have if we broke up and after ten years ended up in the same Paris hotel for some kind of writers’ event, a book signing maybe, and sometimes it was his book and sometimes it was mine, sex with me in the stockings and heels of a prostitute, with him as a cop, me as a runaway desperate for shelter, with him as a woman, with the two of us as strangers seated near each other on a nightlong flight.

  These games always began the same way. Ceremonious, the invitation, somber and respectful in inverse proportion to the derangement solicited. What if you are. What if I am. We never talked about this, and though either could have said Let’s not go there, neither of us ever declined a game described by the other. The inventing of parts to play was spontaneous, their unforeseeableness part of the game’s attraction, but a special mood, an upswell of lurid remorse, alerted me whenever I was about to say And then after forever we see each other again. In these scenarios where we had spent years apart, the lovely stroke was our immediate, inevitable recognition of each other—not, like other emotions we played at, a shock, not a wounding excitement, but an entrancing correction to loss. All wrongs set right. And we look at each other. And it’s like—

  —

  While he wouldn’t drink any coffee that wasn’t made from freshly ground Italian dark roast (which I had never tried before) and he had a taste for expensive chocolate, he seemed mostly indifferent to food and never cooked. What had he done when he was alone? Was it just like this, cereal, soup from cans, microwaved enchiladas? Should I try to make something—would that feel, to him, to me, ominously wife-y? He liked bicycling to the farmer’s market and would come back with the ripest, freshest tomatoes. He taught me to slather mayonnaise across sliced bakery bread, grinding black pepper into the bleeding exposed slices before covering them with the top slice, taking fast bites before the bread turned sodden, licking juice from wrists and fingertips, the tomatoes still warm from basking in their crates at the farmer’s market, their taste leaking acid-bright through the oily mayonnaise blandness, the bread rough in texture, sweet in fragrance. There was at least a chance he’d never told any other lover about tomato sandwiches. After weeks of not caring what I ate, I had found something I couldn’t get enough of, and as soon as I finished one sandwich I would make another, waiting until he was out to indulge, and it didn’t matter how carefully I cleared away all traces of my feast, he could tell, he was quick with numbers and probably counted the tomatoes.

  Really the little house was saturated with his vigilance; there was no corner I could narrate from. When I went elsewhere, tried working in a café (not his) for example, it was as if the house was still with me, its atmosphere extending to the little table where I sat with my books and my legal pad and my cup of coffee with cream and two teaspoons of brown sugar stirred in, and even the music in the coffee shop, which should have had nothing to do with him, caused me to wonder whether he was thinking of me and wanted me to come home or whether he was relieved to have an afternoon to himself, and whether the onset of irritation was inevitable in love, and if it was how people could stand their lives; but look, everyone at the tables around me was standing their life, and I had more than most, I was in love. With him, and that was extraordinary, it was surreal—naturally it required adaptation, but I ought to rejoice, day by day, in the revision asked of me, I ought to get a handle on my moods. Two hours had passed; I gave up trying. He was sitting with Billy on Billy’s front steps and greeted me by saying, “Everest redux.” Billy said, “Can I have a kiss for luck? Leaving for Kathmandu early in the a.m. Oh and forgot to tell you”—turning to him—“Delia’s going to house-sit. I don’t want to be distracted on the icefall by visions of Fats”—his skinny, hyper Border collie—“wasting away in some kennel. Only good vibes. Last year when I got up into the death zone I hallucinated my grandmother.” Deepening his Texas drawl: “ ‘Time you git back home.’ Actually one of the Sherpas looked a whole lot like her. Brightest black eyes. See right through bullshit, which you want in a Sherpa or grandma. I lied a lot when I was little, like practice for being in the closet. So, Delia. Fats loves her. So, she’ll be staying here.” He said, “Always smart not to leave a house empty,” but I knew Billy was curious if I would show that I minded, because Delia was his most recent ex, the lover before me, and thinking only good vibes, right, I said, “Fats will be happy,” and kissed Billy on his sunburned forehead.

  —

  I gave up on the coffee shop but when I tried writing in the afternoons in the guest bedroom, sitting up in the twin bed with a legal pad on my knees, he would wander in and start picking up various objects, my traveling alarm clock, my hairbrush, and I would drop the legal pad and hold out my arms. Maybe because he was becoming restless, or was troubled by what looked, in me, like the immobilizing onset of depression, he talked me into going running and that was how we spent our evenings now, on an oval track whose cinders were the real old-school kind, sooty black, gritting under running shoes. If there had been a meet that weekend the chalk lines marking the lanes were still visible, and the infield was grass, evenly mown, where he liked, after running, to throw a football, liked it even more than he ordinarily would have because football figured in the novel he was writing about two brothers whose only way of connecting with each other was throwing a football back and forth, and he needed the sense impressions of long shadows
across summer grass and the Braille of white x’s stitched into leather to prompt the next morning’s writing. When he held a football his tall, brainy self came together, justified. Pleasantly dangerous with the love of competition, though all there was to compete with at the moment was me. When he cocked his arm back and took a step, tiny grasshoppers showered up. The spiral floated higher, as if the air was tenderly prolonging its suspension, and took its time descending. The thump of flight dead-ending against my chest as I ran pleased me. He had trouble accepting that I could throw a spiral, though he might have known my body learned fast. I couldn’t throw as far, and he walked backward, taunting for more distance. Taunting I took as a guy-guy thing; my prowess, modest as it was, made me an honorary boy, and was sexy. One bright evening as I cocked my arm back he cried Throw it, piggy! Shocked into grace I sent a real beauty his way, and with long-legged strides he covered the grass and leaped, a show-offy catch tendered as apology before I could call down the field What?, but I was standing there understanding: piggy was a thing he called me to himself, that had slipped out. In my need and aimlessness and insatiability I was a pale sow. How deluded I had been, believing I was a genius lover no excess could turn repellent. The next morning I woke up sick, ashamed that wherever he was in the house he could hear me vomiting, and when I said I wanted a hotel room he told me a tenant had moved out from one of his units and I could have the key.

  —

  These studio units, five of them, occupied the shabby one-story stucco box that stood between his house and the street. Flat-roofed cinder block painted a sullen ochre, this building was a problem factory. Termites, leaks, cavalier electrical wiring. With his tenants he was on amiable terms, an unexpectedly easygoing landlord. The little box I let myself into had a floor of sky-blue linoleum—sick as I was, that blue made me glad. The space was bare except for a bed frame and mattress where I dropped the sheets and towels he’d given me. The hours I spent in the tiny bathroom were both wretched and luxurious in their privacy; whenever there was a lull in the vomiting I would lock and unlock the door just to do so. Now he is locked the fuck out. Now I let him back in. Now out forever. After dark I leaned over the toy kitchen sink and drank from the faucet. It was miraculous to be alone. There was a telephone on the kitchen’s cinder-block wall, and as I looked at it, it rang. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. I slept in the bare bed and woke scared that my fever sweat had stained the mattress; it was light; that day lasted forever, the thing sickness does to time. His knocking woke me; he came in all tall and fresh from his shower. Having already worked his habitual four hours. First he made the bed; with the heel of his hand he pushed sweaty hair from my face; I was unashamed, I could have killed him if he didn’t make love to me. “I’ll check in on you tomorrow,” he said. I barely kept myself from saying Do you love me. Do you love me. Nausea helped keep me from blurting that out; the strenuousness of repressing nausea carried over into this other, useful repression. “I’m so hungry,” I said instead. “Can you bring me a bowl of rice?” In saying it I discovered that the one thing I could bear to think of eating was the bowl of rice he would carry over from his house. I needed something he made for me. When I woke it was night. Cool air and traffic sounds came through the picture window, and seemed to mean I was going to be able to live without him. Now and then the phone began to ring and I let it ring on and on. Sometime during that night I went through the cupboards. I sat cross-legged on the floor with a cup of tea and ate stale arrowroot biscuits from the pack the tenant had forgotten, feeling sick again as I ate. It didn’t matter that I knew that very well, and even understood it; the bowl of rice was now an obsession. It seemed like the only thing I had ever wanted from him, though in another sense all I had done since staring at him that first time was want things from him. In the morning while it was still dark he let himself in—of course there was a master key—with nothing in his hands, and when we were through making love he said, “You’re going to bathe, right?” Then I was alone without a bowl of rice, cross-legged on the kitchen floor with the cup of tea I’d made and the last five arrowroot biscuits, locked deep in hunger, realizing that because the hunger felt clear and exhilarating, with no undertow of nausea, that I was either well or about to be. I called and made a reservation on a flight to New Mexico that had one seat left.

  —

  When the taxi pulled up before dawn he was sitting on the curb, his back to me, a tall man in a child’s closed-off pose, ignoring the headlights that shone on him. Against black asphalt the hopping gold-gashed dot dot dot was the last flare-up of his tossed cigarette. I thought, and came close to saying You don’t smoke. He stood up and said, “I won’t try to stop you,” and it was another blow, not to be stopped.

  —

  In the novel he wrote about that time I wasn’t his only lover. House-sitting next door, the narrator’s sensible, affectionate ex affords him sexual refuge from the neediness of the younger woman he’d believed he was in love with, whose obsession with him has begun to alarm him. Impulsively, after the first time they slept together, she left her husband for him. How responsible did that make him, for her? He understands, as she doesn’t seem to, that there’s nothing unerring about desire. At its most compelling, it can lead to a dead end, as has happened in their case. This younger, dark-haired lover keeps Middlemarch on her nightstand, and riffling through the book one night while she’s sleeping the narrator finds the naked photograph of the Chinese woman whose devotion he had foolishly walked away from and he thinks, I could get her back. She lives not very far away, and I would have heard if she got married—people can’t wait to tell you that kind of thing about an ex. Here the novel takes a comic turn, because now he needs to break up with two women, his house-sitting ex, likely to go okay, and, a more troubling prospect, this girl inexplicably damaged by their affair, turned from a promising actress whose raffishly seductive Ophelia had gotten raves into a real-life depressive who hasn’t gone on a single audition. He needs to rouse her from her depression, to talk to her frankly, encouragingly. A tone he can manage, now, because of what he hopes for. Tricky to carry off, the passage where, tilting the picture to catch what little light there is, he falls in love—the novel’s greatest feat, also the one thing I was sure had never happened. I don’t mean the novel was true, only that the things in it had happened. The likelier explanation was, he’d gone into the guest bedroom while I was out. Farfetched, his coming into the room while I slept—why would he?—though I could see why he wanted, thematically, the juxtaposition of sleep and epiphany, and how the little scene was tighter for suspense about whether the dark-haired lover would wake up.

  —

  Twelve years later, on our way home from the funeral of a well-loved colleague who had lived in Berkeley, two friends and I stopped in a bookstore. Between the memorial service and the trip out to the cemetery the funeral had taken most of the day. Afterward we had gone to dinner, and except for the driver we were all a little drunk and, in the wake of grieving funeral stiltedness and the tears we had shed, trying to cheer each other up. Death seemed like another of Howard’s contradictions: His rumbling, comedic fatness concealed an exquisite sensibility, gracious, capable of conveying the most delicate illuminations to his students or soft-shoeing around the lectern, reciting In Breughel’s great picture The Kermess. If Howard’s massiveness was bearish, that of his famous feminist-scholar wife was majestic, accoutred with scarves, shawls, trifocals on beaded chains, a cane she was rumored to have aimed at an unprepared grad student in her Dickinson seminar—My Soul had stood—a Loaded Gun, David said; Josh corrected, My Life, with the affable condescension that, David’s grin said, he’d been hoping for, since it made Josh look not so Zen after all. Josh was lanky, mild, exceedingly tall, with an air of baffled inquiry and goodwill I attributed to endless zazen, David sturdy, impatient, his scorn exuberant, the professional vendettas he waged merciless. It was David I told my love affairs to, and when I had the flu it was David who came over, fed Leo his supper,
and read aloud. Through the wall I could hear David’s merry showed their terrible claws till Max said “BE STILL!” followed by Leo’s doubtful Be still!

  That evening of the funeral one of us suggested waiting out rush hour in the bookstore and we wandered through in our black clothes, David to philosophy, Josh to poetry, me to a long table of tumbled sale books on whose other side—I stared—he stood with an open book in his hand, looking up before I could turn away, the brilliant dark eyes that had held mine as I came over and over meeting mine now without recognition, just as neutrally looking away, the book in his hand the real object of desire, something falsely assertive and theatrical in the steadiness of his downward gaze that convinced me he had been attracted to me not as a familiar person but as a new one, red-haired now, in high heels, in head-to-toe black, a writer with three books to my name, teaching at a university a couple of hours away, single mother to a solemn, intuitive toddler who spoke in complete sentences, light of my life, though he wasn’t going to get to hear about my son, wasn’t going to get a word of my story, and in the inward silence and disbelief conferred by his not knowing who I was there was time for a decision, which was: Before he can figure out who he’s just seen, before, as some fractional lift of his jaw told me he was about to, he can look up and meet your eyes again and know who you are, before before before before before before before before he can say your name followed by I don’t believe it, followed by I always thought I’d see you again, look away. Get out. Go. And I did, and though behind me where I stood on the street corner the bookstore door opened now and then and let people out none of them was him. Person after person failed to be him. He hadn’t known me. I had known him—did that mean I had been, all along, the real lover? What we had should have still burned both of us. If it had been real, if we had gone as deep as I believed we had, he could never have failed to recognize me. After a while my friends came out carrying their bags, and David told me, “This is the first time I’ve ever seen you leave a bookstore empty-handed, ever,” and we pulled our gloves on, telling each other taking a little time had been a good idea, and our heads were clear now, and we could make the drive home. Of course, that was when he came out the door—long-legged, striding fast. Pausing, fingers touched to his lips, then the upright palm flashed at me—a gesture I didn’t recognize, for a second, as a blown kiss—before he turned the corner.