The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  The cigarette didn’t taste quite as good as she remembered, but the papery softness between her fingers was nice, and she welcomed the lightheadedness that came slowly. “Your wife doesn’t like you smoking, you know,” Vega said.

  He frowned. “Well, it’s got nothing to do with her.”

  When she asked him for another, he looked satisfied. Now she saw not the young man, but the boy he must have been—in his mouth and his eyes there were traces of a willful child. His thin hair sat stiffly on his head and she wanted to reach out and pat it down.

  She brushed her teeth vigorously before climbing into bed with Henry. In the morning, she told him about the smoking anyway. To his patient “Do you think that was a good idea, Vega?” she only shrugged.

  But that wasn’t the end. A few weeks later she drove by a small park not far from the village and spotted Gordon sitting on a bench, cigarette poised between his lips, both of his hands placed formally on his legs. A light drizzle was falling. Before she could change her mind, Vega turned into the small car lot next to the park. She found an umbrella in the back seat and approached the bench. Beyond where Gordon sat there was a plastic jungle gym. A child squirmed in his mother’s arms, pleading for another turn down the slide. Finally the mother relented and watched her triumphant son run up the slick ladder.

  Vega shivered. Mr. Lippincott didn’t look up when she greeted him, but he slid his hands slowly along his thighs and she took this as a sign that he recognized her. She sat down next to him and extended the umbrella over his head. “Do you need a ride, Gordon? Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

  He was far away. She waited for him to look at her and acknowledge, in some small way, their moment under the oak the other night. Finally, he started to stand. She offered her arm, but he managed fine without her. As she was pulling onto their road, she turned to look at his profile in the passenger seat.

  “Do you have a cell phone, Gordon? You can call me, next time you get stuck.”

  “Cell phone? What for?” He explained that walking was his doctor’s idea, but he hated walking one way and coming back the same exact way. So, sometimes he ended up wandering too far and had to rest a good hour before he found strength for the return. That’s when Vega mentioned a nice path she’d discovered that meandered around the lake. “It slopes in a few places, but nothing too steep. It’s pretty.”

  “Well,” he said, when they were idling in his driveway. “Thank you for the ride.”

  The next day, he knocked on their back door. “I’m ready now,” he said. “For the walk.” And instead of blanching at the abrupt invitation, as she might have expected herself to, she grabbed her parka, called out to Henry that she was stepping outside, and closed the door behind her.

  After that, they walked regularly, every afternoon during the week at four, unless Vega had a deadline that interfered.

  Sometimes Henry boiled tea and stood at the kitchen window. So he could watch Vega and Gordon embarking down the footpath that led first toward the lake and then veered off into a patch of wood. Gordon’s suit jacket, usually unbuttoned, flapped in the wind, and his pajama bottoms clung indecorously to his crotch. Vega’s compact frame, shifting slowly below the latticework of brittle branches and sunlight, looked ghostly. Henry was surprised to see his wife, always so quick and impatient in her daily routines, taking careful steps at the old man’s side.

  He loved her so much that it was okay to think certain things, as a rhetorical exercise. For example, he wondered sometimes, if he hadn’t found Vega when he did, ten years ago, if he came across her now for the first time, would she still manage to captivate him? He was a couple of months out of college, without a job, without an apartment, wallowing in his own shiftlessness, when they met. She was leaving in two months on a journalism fellowship to Romania, after which she’d promised to meet him in New York. Their first kiss was in his parents’ basement. He told his friends that she was intense. What he meant was that she wasn’t afraid to ask a question directly, and nothing anyone could say seemed to make her flinch. Not even that unbelievable story she extracted one evening from the bartender on 86th, who hobbled around on a prosthetic leg. When Vega had asked him how he’d injured himself, he looked briefly like he was going to evade her question with a joke. Then he wiped his hands on his towel, folded his elbows on the bar, and told them—told Vega, Henry was just a bystander—his story. Which was this: four years before, having failed to convince at least half a dozen surgeons to saw off his healthy leg, he took a lifelong obsession to be an amputee into his own hands. He froze his limb in a cooler of dry ice as long as he could stand it, and then called 911. Though Henry was incredulous, Vega believed every word, including the bartender’s claim that he had absolutely no regrets.

  After her fellowship ended, she took an extra two months to see the rest of Europe. Eventually, she did meet up with Henry in the city, and later they found an apartment together. She spilled into his world, bled into his clothes, and stained his skin. With time, though, he saw what he hadn’t been able to see right away: that she would leave for long stretches, turn into herself for days. She never faltered in the ritualistic ways of couples, a hand rubbing a shoulder, fingers exploring the nape of a neck. But her gaze grew distant, less direct, and she lay awake in bed for hours at night. If he tried to reach her then, to pull her back with his desire, she recoiled as though he were violating some agreement. He learned to accept that Vega was a proposition. He could have her, shroud himself in her good looks and borrow her passion and her brand of fearlessness, but in return he wouldn’t ask about her silences.

  Now there was something new. Since leaving the city, Vega was having inexplicable episodes of disorientation. Her face would go sallow and she’d grip his arm tightly. This happened at the supermarket, even at home. Henry researched and printed up a diagnostic list of symptoms for panic attacks. He talked with her about it. She agreed to see a doctor but never made an appointment. She started going on these lake walks with Mr. Lippincott, with the old man, the two of them disappearing down the footpath. And Henry started having dreams that he was looking for his wife in crabby caves under the lake. He worried that if he could properly assemble everything in his head, wrap his mind around all of Vega, there might be reason to think she might really, physically, vanish for good one day. He waited for the packed suitcase on the bed, the note on the credenza, and felt, more urgently than he had imagined he could, the desire for a baby.

  Where they lived now, the smallest excursion brought new risks. Vega went out for the mail one day and saw Mr. Jenkins from across the street on a gurney, his eyes wide and alert, but his body limp and ineffectual as an EMT lifted him into an ambulance. She stepped out to pick her dill and saw frail Mrs. Wallsterson, folded over the railing like a banana peel as she climbed her front steps. She stopped at the pharmacy for stamps and overheard Mrs. Height asking for more steroids for her cancer.

  When she reported these things to Henry, he would shake his head sadly. Sometimes he shared similar observations. But he had no trouble returning to the shopping list in front of them or the unedited manuscript on the computer screen. She didn’t fault him, but for her it was harder.

  Sweet, but not terribly interesting—that’s what she’d thought, dismissively, the night she first met Henry, at a party. He was introduced to her as the friend from the suburbs who was crashing on the couch. He wore khaki pants and a polo shirt. He held a napkin under his beer. He was, that awful phrase, clean cut. And easy to talk to. He asked a lot of questions about her, and when she answered, he looked right at her. Meanwhile, her eyes drifted, searching out someone grumpier, more aloof—more mysterious, she thought. Henry didn’t say or do anything that night that made a powerful impression on her, but over the next couple of months she found herself accepting his invitations to go out—the first time because why not, and after that because … because on their first date he had gripped her forearm so firmly as they crossed an intersection that it actually hurt.
The gesture had stunned her. She rode back to Jersey with him one night, to his parents’ house, and they kissed in the basement like furtive teenagers. Her friends called him naïve and simple, and she found herself defending him. He wasn’t those things, but he lived by a secular faith that he could keep himself and those he cared about safe. And despite what she’d believed for years about herself—that she was unshakably independent, empathetic with strangers but cruel and indifferent to those she was intimate with—she found herself moved by the idea. No one was more surprised than she was. Except for, perhaps, Henry himself. And at some point, Vega’s unlikely reaction to Henry’s attention—the very fact that she didn’t anticipate falling for anyone like him—became more exciting, more arousing to her than the adventures she could have with a man who was uncaring, unkind. She thought she would forget about him when she went to Romania, but he was the first person she called when she returned.

  In the early years of their relationship she would occasionally have a passing concern. Had she tricked herself into falling in love with Henry? Had she merely inverted one set of expectations for another? But she didn’t worry much anymore about her love for him; time had successfully argued against her doubts. Still, as they got older, her husband’s protective manner affected her less and less. Her anxiety had worsened since they left the city. Sometimes this anxiety was diffuse, like a dull headache. Other times it was overwhelming and sharp. Once, the two of them were waiting in line at the supermarket, their cart brightly loaded with tomatoes, detergent, peanut butter. Henry was talking about an irksome writer resisting fixes on an article, while she shifted their groceries onto the conveyor belt. There was no one thing that could have caused it, but the air in the room reconfigured suddenly, enlarging certain discrete facts to an oppressive size and pitch: the familiar thickness of Henry’s voice, the beep of the barcode scanner, the pointed finger of the woman in line, disciplining her daughter, and the ripe, earthy smell of tomatoes. It was enough to make her gag.

  “Henry, stop. Just stop for a second,” she heard herself saying, because she couldn’t ask the mother or the checkout clerk to stop. By the time Henry had guided her outside, one hand on the small of her back, the other pushing the cart, she was better. But it was only a matter of time before that feeling, the knowledge that something was coming for her—and for Henry too, coming for them both—would return.

  Henry helped Cynthia prune her bushes one weekend and after that she spread the word that he was “handy.” Other single old ladies and widows in the village began calling on him for assistance with odd jobs—setting up a new computer in order to email a grandson or replacing a dead bulb. He did not in fact consider himself a handy man, or even a man who really liked to roll up his sleeves. But he didn’t mind these odd jobs they found for him to do. They always served him cake and coffee or tea afterward. Or they insisted on making him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And it was so easy to make them laugh! He’d flex his arm and make a little joke about his overpowering strength and they girl-giggled. Oh, it was pathetic, blushing at the flattery of old women. Vega would have teased him. But she wasn’t there. And besides, flirting was a good way to avert his eyes from some of those living rooms and kitchens.

  For the most part, the homes he saw fell into two categories. Some were excruciatingly clean, the fear of bacteria and viruses sitting in for the fear of death. Mrs. Height, who had just finished a round of chemo, kept fresh paper towels on every surface that a guest might come into contact with: the armrests of a chair, the top of an end table, the seat of her toilet. She asked Henry to gather up and throw away any that he touched at the end of his visits. Other homes were layered with the dust and sour stench of a life gathered under one roof. These homes were cluttered with tarnished mirrors and milk-glass containers filled with stale candies.

  But the women cheered him with their modest flirtations and touched him with their gratitude. They looked almost teary-eyed when he stood, ready to leave. They never forgot to mention how lucky and appreciative Cynthia was to have him next door. He found himself developing a mild protectiveness toward Mrs. Lippincott, and when she complained to him that her husband’s breathing was getting worse and worse because he was smoking more and more, he offered to talk to Vega. It was wrong, Mrs. Lippincott said—and Henry agreed—that Vega was smoking with him. Vega’s reply was that she only smoked with Gordon sometimes. She was getting him walking, and wasn’t that a good thing? But Henry felt sorry for Cynthia. He sensed a sadness in her that Vega seemed unwilling to recognize.

  He went to talk with her one afternoon, when his wife and Gordon were taking their walk. She didn’t seem at all surprised to see him—pleased, rather, as if she’d been waiting for someone. She wore a jumpsuit with a pattern of yellow daisies on the breast pocket, and a plastic barrette clasping together a few gray hairs above her ear. A line of pink lipstick teetered across her thin lips. He thought of a child’s sincerest efforts to color within the lines.

  He recalled that she had asked him to fix a squeaky hinge on the medicine cabinet.

  “Don’t worry about that now,” she said. “Come have tea with me.”

  He followed her to the kitchen. She was very short, and Henry guessed she probably came up to Gordon’s elbow. He wondered if Gordon wasn’t stooped from years of bending to hug and kiss her, and then thought of Vega, a few inches shorter than he was, and hoped—foolishly, he knew—that his own body would start to curve over the years.

  She took his mug to the table. She herself was not having any. He sat next to her.

  She patted him on the knee and then folded her hands on the table. The sun threw long bars of light across the cabinets. A small sapphire stone on her finger refracted the light, but the band was swallowed up in the creases between her knuckles.

  Henry asked after Gordon’s health.

  “Better this week.”

  “That’s good.”

  He could tell she didn’t want to talk about the emphysema. “He’s just, well, you know, he’s always been Gordon. He does things his own way,” she said.

  “I know a little about that,” Henry said tentatively, unsure where her thoughts were headed. He wondered if it made sense to put a hand on her shoulder. “Is there something else?”

  She let her hands fall into her lap. She drew her shoulders together, took a deep, shaky breath, and said, “It’s been years since … now he goes on these walks every afternoon. He didn’t used to. He always hated me for nagging him to walk. I always said—” She paused and then sat up a little, fortified by her frustration. “I’d ask him, ‘Gordon, want to take a walk today by the lake, together? It’s nice out,’ I’d say, ‘it’ll be good for you.’ And now of course he walks with your wife every day and I’m grateful, because it is good for him, even though they do smoke. But I don’t know where they go. And, well, I always wanted us to walk together.”

  “Mrs. Lippincott,” Henry said, softly. He decided it was okay to touch her shoulder. Her smallness surprised him.

  “You’re a nice man, Henry,” she said. “A good husband, I bet. Your wife is lucky.” He felt an immense pity that he didn’t want to feel, for Mrs. Lippincott, for himself.

  Before he left, she pulled out a small envelope from her purse and handed it to him. It was an invitation to the annual Labor Day dance at the community center, featuring Live! The Funky Monkey Jazz Quartet.

  “Bring your wife, too,” she said. “Everyone is hoping you’ll both go.”

  Vega knew that Henry was worried about her. And that he didn’t know what to think about her afternoon walks with Gordon. The old man wasn’t as sweet or solicitous as his wife. He probably cared for nothing as much as he cared for his cigarettes. But Vega thought there was something honest there. Better than the old people buzzing and twittering in the community center Wednesday nights. As though it weren’t true their hearts could stop at any moment.

  She decided not to tell Henry about the time she and Gordon took a break from thei
r walk, stopping to rest on a stone bench near the lake. Thanksgiving was behind them at this point, Christmas still a few weeks ahead. A few neighbors with helpful and available children had strung lights across the backyard trees and set up mechanical reindeer, for the benefit of those across the lake. But in the thin daylight the effect was more broken and sad, and as she took this in Vega thought she could feel Gordon next to her thinking the same. She turned so that he could light her cigarette and he cupped his hand around hers, to block the wind. She inhaled deeply, his rough hand still touching hers. When she pulled away, she saw that he was eyeing her chest.

  She was wearing a scarf wrapped around her neck, a snug parka. Underneath, a loose silk blouse. She hesitated only a moment. “Here,” she said, and unzipped her jacket. She took his hand and guided it under her parka, over her right breast. His fingers tightened; he squeezed her like a child might squeeze a ball. This made her smile. She wanted to give him more.

  It was December, cold, but she unbuttoned the top of her blouse and shifted her bra up, revealing both breasts. Gordon watched with a cigarette dangling in one hand. Then he raised his other hand back to her right breast and ran his thumb over her nipple, till it hardened. A silent sigh escaped his shoulders. He tugged on the silk of her blouse. She reached up and touched the crown of his head. His hair was stiff, as she’d imagined.

  That was it. Their conversations never went too far. She didn’t confide much in him, though occasionally she would ask questions, easy questions. He was born in upstate New York, and he had been an engineer for decades, but he’d always wanted to be an architect. He had one child, a son, who lived in Florida. Mostly, she just liked watching him inhale—the recklessness of it.