The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

by Laura Furman

  “Why don’t you write about growing up in Bombay? That will distinguish you from the other applicants,” she had suggested.

  He hadn’t wanted to distinguish himself from the other applicants, or rather, he’d wanted to distinguish himself in a much more distinctive way. He had an alumni interview with an expatriate American consultant working for Arthur Anderson in Bombay; the interviewer, who was young, Jewish and from New York, said it was the best college essay he’d ever read.

  “Zu-bin.”

  It was at least a relief that he wasn’t hallucinating. She was standing below his window, holding a tennis racket. “Hey, Zubin—can I come up?”

  “You have to come around the front,” he said.

  “Will you come down and get me?”

  He put a shirt over his T-shirt, and then took it off. He took the glass of sambuca to the bathroom sink to dump it, but he got distracted looking in the mirror (he should’ve shaved) and drained it instead.

  He found Julia leaning against a tree, smoking. She held out the pack.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  She sighed. “Hardly anyone does anymore.” She was wearing an extremely short white skirt. “Is this a bad time?”

  “Well—”

  “I can go.”

  “You can come up,” he said, a little too quickly. “I’m not sure I can do antonyms now though.”

  In his room Julia gravitated to the stereo. A Brahms piano quartet had come on.

  “You probably aren’t a Brahms person.”

  She looked annoyed. “How do you know?”

  “I don’t,” he said. “Sorry—are you?”

  Julia pretended to examine his books. “I’m not very familiar with his work,” she said finally. “So I couldn’t really say.”

  He felt like hugging her. He poured himself another sambuca instead. “I’m sorry there's nowhere to sit.”

  “I’m sorry I’m all gross from tennis.” She sat down on his mattress, which was at least covered with a blanket.

  “Do you always smoke after tennis?” he couldn’t help asking.

  “It calms me down.”

  “Still, you shouldn’t—”

  “I’ve been having this dream,” she said. She stretched her legs out in front of her and crossed her ankles. “Actually it's kind of a nightmare.”

  “Oh,” said Zubin. Students’ nightmares were certainly among the things that should be discussed in the living room.

  “Have you ever been to New Hampshire?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been having this dream that I’m in New Hampshire. There's a frozen pond where you can skate outside.”

  “That must be nice.”

  “I saw it in a movie,” she admitted. “But I think they have them— anyway. In the dream I’m not wearing skates. I’m walking out onto the pond, near the woods, and it's snowing. I’m walking on the ice but I’m not afraid—everything's really beautiful. And then I look down and there's this thing—this dark spot on the ice. There are some mushrooms growing, on the dark spot. I’m worried that someone skating will trip on them, so I bend down to pick them.”

  Her head was bent now; she was peeling a bit of rubber from the sole of her sneaker.

  “That's when I see the guy.”

  “The guy.”

  “The guy in the ice. He's alive, and even though he can’t move, he sees me. He's looking up and reaching out his arms and just his fingers are coming up—just the tips of them through the ice. Like white mushrooms.”

  “Jesus,” Zubin said.

  She misunderstood. “No—just a regular guy.”

  “That's a bad dream.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said proudly. “I thought maybe you could use it.”

  “Sorry?”

  “In the essay.”

  Zubin poured himself another sambuca. “I don’t know if I can write the essay.”

  “You have to.” Her expression changed instantly. “I have the money—I could give you a check now even.”

  “It's not the money.”

  “Because it's dishonest?” she said in a small voice.

  “I—” But he couldn’t explain why he couldn’t manage to write even a college essay, even to himself. “I’m sorry.”

  She looked as if she’d been about to say something else, and then changed her mind. “Okay,” she said dejectedly. “I’ll think of something.”

  She looked around for her racket, which she’d propped up against the bookshelf. He didn’t want her to go yet.

  “What kind of a guy is he?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy in the ice—is he your age?”

  Julia shook her head. “He's old.”

  Zubin sat down on the bed, at what he judged was a companionable distance. “Like a senior citizen?”

  “No, but older than you.”

  “Somewhere in that narrow window between me and senior citizenship.”

  “You’re not old,” she said seriously.

  “Thank you.” The sambuca was making him feel great. They could just sit here, and get drunk and do nothing, and it would be fun, and there would be no consequences; he could stop worrying for tonight, and give himself a little break.

  He was having that comforting thought when her head dropped lightly to his shoulder.

  “Oh.”

  “Is this okay?”

  “It's okay, but—”

  “I get so tired.”

  “Because of the nightmares.”

  She paused for a second, as if she was surprised he’d been paying attention. “Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”

  “You want to lie down a minute?”

  She jerked her head up—nervous all of a sudden. He liked it better than the flirty stuff she’d been doing before.

  “Or I could get someone to take you home.”

  She lay down and shut her eyes. He put his glass down carefully on the floor next to the bed. Then he put his hand out; her hair was very soft. He stroked her head and moved her hair away from her face. He adjusted the glass beads she always wore, and ran his hand lightly down her arm. He felt that he was in a position where there was no choice but to lift her up and kiss her very gently on the mouth.

  “Julia.”

  She opened her eyes.

  “I’m going to get someone to drive you home.”

  She got up very quickly and smoothed her hair with her hand.

  “Not that I wouldn’t like you to stay, but I think—”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I’ll just get someone.” He yelled for the servant.

  “I can get a taxi,” Julia said.

  “I know you can” he told her. For some reason, that made her smile.

  In September she took the test. He woke up early that morning as if he were taking it, couldn’t concentrate, and went to Barista, where he sat trying to read the same India Today article about regional literature for two hours. She wasn’t the only one of his students taking the SAT today, but she was the one he thought of, at the eight forty subject change, the ten-o’clock break, and at eleven twenty-five, when they would be warning them about the penalties for continuing to write after time was called. That afternoon he thought she would ring him to say how it had gone, but she didn’t, and it wasn’t until late that night that his phone beeped and her name came up: JULIA: VERBAL IS LIKE S-SPEARE: PLAY. It wasn’t a perfect analogy, but he knew what she meant.

  He didn’t see Julia while the scores were being processed. Without the bonus he hadn’t been able to give up his other clients, and the business was in one of its busy cycles; it seemed as if everyone in Bombay was dying to send their sixteen-year-old child halfway around the world to be educated. Each evening he thought he might hear her calling up from the street, but she never did, and he didn’t feel he could phone without some pretense.

  One rainy Thursday he gave a group lesson in a small room on the first floor of the David Sassoon library. The library always reminded him o
f Oxford, with its cracked chalkboards and termite-riddled seminar tables, and today in particular the soft, steady rain made him feel as if he were somewhere else. They were doing triangles (isosceles, equilateral, scalene) when all of a sudden one of the students interrupted and said: “It stopped.”

  Watery sun was gleaming through the lead-glass windows. When he had dismissed the class, Zubin went upstairs to the reading room. He found Bradbury in a tattered ledger book and filled out a form. He waited while the librarian frowned at the call number, selected a key from a crowded ring, and, looking put-upon, sent an assistant into the reading room to find “All Summer in a Day” in the locked glass case.

  It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands.

  He'd forgotten that the girl in the story was a poet. She was different from the other children, and because it was a science fiction story (this was what he loved about science fiction) it wasn’t an abstract difference. Her special sensitivity was explained by the fact that she had come to Venus from Earth only recently, on a rocket ship, and remembered the sun—it was like a penny—while her classmates did not.

  Zubin sat by the window in the old seminar room, emptied of students, and luxuriated in a feeling of potential he hadn’t had in a long time.

  He remembered when a moment of heightened contrast in his physical surroundings could produce this kind of elation; he could feel the essay wound up in him like thread. He would combine the Bradbury story with the idea Julia had had, that day at the tank. Beauty was something that was new to you. That was why tourists and children could see it better than other people, and it was the poet's job to keep seeing it the way the children and the tourists did.

  He was glad he’d told her he couldn’t do it because it would be that much more of a surprise when he handed her the pages. He felt noble. He was going to defraud the University of California for her gratis, as a gift.

  He intended to be finished the day the scores came out and, for perhaps the first time in his life, he finished on the day he’d intended. He waited all day, but Julia didn’t call. He thought she would’ve gone out that night to celebrate, but she didn’t call the next day, or the next, and he started to worry that she’d been wrong about her verbal. Or she’d lied. He started to get scared that she’d choked—something that could happen to the best students, you could never tell which. After ten days without hearing from her, he rang her mobile.

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “I was going to call.”

  “I have something for you,” he said. He didn’t want to ask about the scores right away.

  She sighed. “My dad wants you to come to dinner anyway.”

  “Okay,” Zubin said. “I could bring it then.”

  There was a long pause, in which he could hear traffic. “Are you in the car?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Hold on a second?” Her father said something and she groaned into the phone. “My dad wants me to tell you my SAT scores.”

  “Only if you want to.”

  “Eight hundred math.”

  “Wow.”

  “And six-ninety verbal.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “Is this the Julia who was too distracted to do her practice tests?”

  “Maybe it was easy this year,” Julia said, but he could tell she was smiling.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Zubin!” (He loved the way she added the extra stress.) “I swear.”

  They ate coquilles St. Jacques by candlelight. Julias father lit the candles himself, with a box of old-fashioned White Swan matches. Then he opened Zubin's wine and poured all three of them a full glass. Zubin took a sip; it seemed too sweet, especially with the seafood. “A toast,” said Julia's father. “To my daughter the genius.”

  Zubin raised his glass. All week he’d felt an urgent need to see her; now that he was here he had a contented, peaceful feeling, only partly related to the two salty dogs he’d mixed for himself just before going out.

  “Scallops are weird,” Julia said. “Do they even have heads?”

  “Did any of your students do better?” her father asked.

  “Only one, I think.”

  “Boy or girl?”

  “What does that matter?” Julia asked. She stood up suddenly: she was wearing a sundress made of blue-and-white printed Indian cotton, and she was barefoot. “I’ll be in my room if anyone needs me.”

  Zubin started to get up.

  “Sit,” Julia's father said. “Finish your meal. Then you can do whatever you have to do.”

  “I brought your essay—the revision of your essay,” Zubin corrected himself, but she didn’t turn around. He watched her disappear down the hall to her bedroom: a pair of tan shoulders under thin, cotton straps.

  “I first came to India in 1976,” her father was saying. “I flew from Moscow to Paris to meet Julia's mom, and then we went to Italy and Greece. We were deciding between India and North Africa—finally we just tossed a coin.”

  “Wow,” said Zubin. He was afraid Julia would go out before he could give her the essay.

  “It was February and I’d been in Moscow for a year,” Julia's father said. “So you can imagine what India was like for me. We were staying in this pension in Benares—Varanasi—and every night there were these incredible parties on the roof.

  “One night we could see the burning ghats from where we were— hardly any electricity in the city, and then this big fire on the ghat, with the drums and the wailing. I’d never seen anything like that—the pieces of the body that they sent down the river, still burning.” He stopped and refilled their glasses. He didn’t seem to mind the wine. “Maybe they don’t still do that?”

  “I’ve never been to Benares.”

  Julia's father laughed. “Right,” he said. “That's an old man's India now. And you’re not writing about India, are you?”

  Writing the essay, alone at night in his room, knowing she was out somewhere with her school friends, he’d had the feeling, the delusion really, that he could hear her. That while she was standing on the beach or dancing in a club, she was also telling him her life story: not the places she’d lived, which didn’t matter, but the time in third grade when she was humiliated in front of the class; the boy who wrote his number on the inside of her wrist; the weather on the day her mother left for New York. He felt that her voice was coming in the open window with the noise of the motorbikes and the televisions and the crows, and all he was doing was hitting the keys.

  Julia's father had asked a question about India.

  “Sorry?” Zubin said.

  He waved a hand dismissively in front of his face. “You don’t have to tell me—writers are private about these things. It's just that business guys like me—we’re curious how you do it.”

  “When I’m here, I want to write about America and when I’m in America, I always want to write about being here.” He wasn’t slurring words, but he could hear himself emphasizing them: “It would have made sense to stay there.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I was homesick, I guess.”

  “And now?”

  Zubin didn’t know what to say.

  “Far be it from me, but I think it doesn’t matter so much, whether you’re here or there. You can bring your home with you.” Julia's father smiled. “To some extent. And India's wonderful—even if it's not your first choice.”

  It was easy if you were Julia's father. He had chosen India because he remembered seeing some dead bodies in a river. He had found it “wonderful.” And that was what it was to be an American. Americans could go all over the world and still be Americans; they could live just the way they did at home and nobody wondered who they were, or why they were doing things the way they did.

  �
�I’m sure you’re right,” Zubin said politely.

  Finally Julia's father pressed a buzzer and a servant appeared to clear the dishes. Julia's father pushed back his chair and stood up. Before disappearing into his study, he nodded formally and said something—whether “Good night,” or “Good luck,” Zubin couldn’t tell.

  Zubin was left with a servant, about his age, with big, southern features and stooped shoulders. The servant was wearing the brown uniform from another job: short pants and a shirt that was tight across his chest. He moved as if he’d been compensating for his height his whole life, as if he’d never had clothes that fit him.

  “Do you work here every day?” Zubin asked in his schoolbook Marathi.

  The young man looked up as if talking to Zubin was the last in a series of obstacles that lay between him and the end of his day.

  “Nahin, ” he said. “Mangalwar ani guruwar.”

  Zubin smiled—they both worked on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “Me too,” he said.

  The servant didn’t understand. He stood holding the plates, waiting to see if Zubin was finished and scratching his left ankle with his right foot. His toes were round and splayed, with cracked nails and a glaucous coating of dry, white skin.

  “Okay,” Zubin said. “Bas.”

  Julia's room was, as he’d expected, empty. The lights were burning and the stereo was on (the disc had finished), but she’d left the window open; the bamboo shade sucked in and out. The mirror in the bathroom was steamed around the edges—she must’ve taken a shower before going out; there was the smell of some kind of fragrant soap and cigarettes.

  He put the essay on the desk where she would see it. There were two Radiohead CDs, still in their plastic wrappers, and a detritus of pens and pencils, hairbands, fashion magazines—French Vogue, Femina and YM— gum wrappers, an OB tampon and a miniature brass abacus, with tiny ivory beads. There was also a diary with a pale blue paper cover.

  The door to the hall was slightly open, but the house was absolutely quiet. It was not good to look at someone's journal, especially a teenage girl’s. But there were things that would be worse—jerking off in her room, for example. It was a beautiful notebook with a heavy cardboard cover that made a satisfying sound when he opened it on the desk.