The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

by Laura Furman

  I should explain that it was one of those surreally springlike days at the tail end of winter, the kind of afternoon when you flirt with the mailman, the coffee-cart man, and the busboy when you long for a new pair of open-toed sandals and a good excuse to sit in a café all afternoon, ignoring your responsibilities and getting drunk. Well, we had one. There was catching up to be done—husbands, children, careers, in a nutshell.

  From the beginning, I was drinking rather fast. All the information sharing, I realized, was making me uneasy. I, who used to rattle off insou-ciantly all the good things that had happened to me, was guarded now. I had something to protect, it seemed. I held back, forming half-truths for every potential question Christie might pose—asking myself, “Will I tell her about that or not? Will I act as if everything's fine or will I level with her?”—while she grew expansive with me, as she now could. The family crest was not a joke; it was not a sham. In some little town in the former East Germany, the Bruewalds were evidently a big deal. “All the money was tied up in this castle in Saxony—this huge, horrible, dark, awful house—and, the minute Onkel Guenther died, Thomas and I looked at each other and we were like, ‘We’re selling!’ It was like, before he died we couldn’t mention it, and the minute we got the news we never looked back. It was a done deal.” They had sold the Schloss, auctioned the furniture, and inherited the lot, except, of course, for what was in trust for Hildie and Axel. (It had occurred to me that although Hildie still resembled her father, her appearance would be seen, later in life, as distinguishing; people would seek ownership of those peculiar looks, the way they would those of a rock star's eccentric-looking daughter. Only outsiders would make the obvious comments; insiders would know better.) In addition to the apartment on Fifth Avenue, the Bruewalds now owned a ski lodge in the Arlberg, a country house in New Jersey, and a mansion in Solln, which Christie described as “the Greenwich of Munich.”

  The sheer weight of the information had made me dizzy, but when she mentioned Greenwich I sat up and did her the one courtesy I could. I fed her the line. “That must be nice,” I said. “It must feel like home.” She drained her glass of wine, though she had already drained it once, and then she put it down and unexpectedly met my eye. She said, “You know, when we got the money I went out and got myself a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-an-hour shrink. I used to think I was a horrible person.” She wasn’t a horrible person, the shrink had told her; in fact, there was nothing wrong with her at all.

  We split a third glass of wine and then a fourth, making the waiter laugh. During the fourth, I told her why I had been loitering outside her building—not hoping to get something out of it, just wanting to ante up with something real of my own. Christie laughed, the way you laugh at something you don’t quite believe, and at first I interpreted her incredulity as an attack—that's how defensive I felt. “Oh, for Christ's sake!” she said. “You’ve got to be kidding!” I stared stonily at the table, the way I do when I’m both drunk and mortally offended. “No, no—listen. Thomas is on the board, and they owe him a big favor. This is no problem, no problem at all. Don’t believe what they say about the liquid assets. It's just a way of keeping people out. Anyway,” she said, “I’ll tell them about your Mayflower ancestor.”

  “I told you about our Mayflower ancestor?” I said.

  “Of course you did!” She smiled. “The first time we met.”

  There was nothing I could do but turn red and finish the wine. Christie went to the bathroom, and I sat there flipping a matchbook over and over in my hand. I had an anticipatory feeling, as if I were waiting for a date to return, as if we might be planning to go back to her deluxe pad and make out on her and Thomas's king-size bed. People had always said that Christie had a great body, and that's the kind of body it was—firm, relentlessly fit, and offered up as a commodity for others to comment on. In the early nineties, she had been an aerobics queen, logging two, three hours a day at the gym; now, of course, she was into yoga and Pilates, but, “to tell you the truth,” she’d confessed earlier in the afternoon, “I kind of miss the screaming and the jumping up and down.”

  We had moved to the city at the same time—ten years ago now—and sitting there, playing with the matchbook, I tried to get a handle on what those ten years had amounted to. We had been single. Now we were married women with children. But, despite the italics in my head, I couldn’t seem to take it any further than that. My thoughts drifted to the apartment, trying again, I suppose, to notch the progress we had each made. If my husband and I got the place, we’d be cash-poor for a few years. With both of us working, we could bring in x amount per year, put y aside, and contribute z to our 401(k)s. But, even considering promotions and raises, there was a limit to x. X was fixed, and there was only t—time—to increase it. But time ate up your life. You could say, “In ten years,” “In twenty years.” But the problem was that then whatever it was would be in ten years, or in twenty years. A decade, two decades of your life would have gone by before you attained it. The fixity of x was the most bittersweet thing I had thought of in ages. Of course, it was comparing myself with Christie that had brought on all these thoughts. When she came out of the ladies’ room, looking as happy and drunk as I had felt a minute before, her innocence struck me like a storm. And I realized that what separated us, and perhaps had always separated us, was the understanding that I had only just reached: in life you can only get so far.

  I walked home with the good news for my husband and daughter. It seemed that Christie and I were going to be friends again, or friends after all, I should say. My husband would be dubious, to say the least. “The same Christie Thorn you told me you would never have coffee with again?” Nor would he like the idea of her getting us past the board; it would take a week to make him understand what had changed in the course of an afternoon and why it wasn’t the case that we were simply using her. Then again, I deserved a dose of his skepticism. I had carried on about her—had laughed in my best moments, but from time to time had been derisive, too, and even indignant. I asked myself, now, how I truly felt about all her pretensions. I went through them one by one—the wedding, the Christmas card, then little things, little remarks from her single days, her obsession with the “it” handbag every year, for instance. I came to the conclusion that none of it was worth getting worked up about. None of it was profound. As the shrink had evidently made clear, none of it had anything to do with Christie herself. On the contrary, I told myself, it was your problem.

  Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Refuge in London

  from Zoetrope

  ALL THE people—the lodgers—in my aunt's boardinghouse had a history I had missed out on. I had been brought to England when I was two—“our little Englander,” they called me. I knew no other place, and I felt that this made me, in comparison with them, rather blank. Of course I liked speaking English as naturally as the girls at my school, and in other ways too being much the same. But I wasn’t, ever, quite like them, having grown up in this house of European émigrés, all of them so different from the parents of my schoolfellows and carrying a past, a country or countries—a continent—distinct from the one in which they now found themselves.

  They were not always the same lodgers. There was a quick turnover, for some of them prospered and moved, others had to make different arrangements when they could no longer come up with the rent. My aunt, with whom I lived in the basement, was a kind landlady, but beyond a certain point she could not afford to be generous. Also—for my sake, she said— she had to be more strictly moral than it was maybe in her nature to be. The circumstances of émigrés are not so much bound by conventional morality as by the emotional refuge they manage to find with each other. There is always some looseness in these arrangements, odd marital and extramarital situations: for instance, Dr. Levicus, who had started off in one of the rooms with his wife to whom he had been married for thirty years, replaced her with a young lady of twenty, also a refugee but nowhere near his level of refinement. My aunt
was prepared to wink at such behavior; she knew how difficult life could be. But she did give notice to Miss Wundt, who, having taken her room as a single lady, had different men coming out of it in the mornings and could often be heard screaming insults after them as they made their shamefaced way down the stairs.

  But the Kohls were tolerated year after year, though they were not at all regular with the rent, or in their morals. They were not expected to be; they were artists. Kohl was a painter, and in pre-Hitler Germany he had been famous. His wife, Marta, said she had been an actress, also a dancer, though not famous in either capacity. They rented the two top rooms but lived in them more or less separately. One room was his, his studio; she also referred to hers as a studio, though she didn’t do anything artistic in there. She was much younger than he was and very attractive, a tiny redhead. It was unlikely that, if he had not been famous, she would ever have married someone so much older and so undistinguished in appearance. He was short and plump, also bald except for a fringe of hair at the back; he had an unattractive mustache that she called his toilet brush. He didn’t seem to care that lovers came to visit her in her room; when that happened, he shut the door of his and went on painting. He painted all the time, though I don’t think he sold anything during those years. I’m not sure what they lived on, probably on an allowance from some relief organization. For a time she had a job in the German section of the BBC, but she soon lost it. There were too many others far more competent and also more reliable than she, who found it impossible ever to be on time for anything.

  Mann was another of our lodgers. His first name was Gustav, but no one ever called him anything except Mann. I disliked him. He was loud and boastful and took up more time in the second-floor bathroom we all had to share than anyone except Marta. Another reason I disliked him was that he was one of the men who spent time with Marta in her room, making Kohl shut the door of his. I had no such negative feelings about her other male visitors, but was as indifferent to them as Kohl seemed to be. He too was not indifferent to Mann. Whenever they met on the stairs, he said something insulting to him, which Mann received with good humor. “Okay, okay, my friend, take it easy,” he said, and even soothingly tapped his shoulder. Then Kohl cried, “Don’t touch me!” and jerked away from him. Once he stumbled and rolled down several steps, and Mann laughed. Mann also used to laugh whenever he passed me. I was sixteen at the time and not attractive, and he made me feel even less so by pretending that I was. “Charming,” he said, fingering the navy school tunic I wore and hated. It was my last two years at school—I felt I was too old for it, I wanted to get out, longing for what I thought of as a real world.

  Those particular years are probably difficult for most girls, and it didn’t help that they happened to be the postwar ones in England, with drab food, drab climate, and clothes not only rationed but made of a thick standard material called “utility.” But that didn’t really matter; I wasn’t so much responsive to what was going on outside as to what was going on inside me. My surroundings were only a chrysalis for me to burst out of and become something else. Only what? I didn’t feel that I could ever be butterfly material, and whenever Mann looked at me and said his tongue-in-cheek “Charming,” it was obvious that this was also his opinion.

  It was different with Kohl. I often sat for him while he drew me. Unable to afford a model, he had already drawn most of the people in the house, including my aunt. She had looked at her portrait with round eyes and her hand before her mouth in only partly amused distress: “No— really?” she said. But it really was she, not perhaps as she was meant to be—as, in more hopeful years, she had expected to be—but how she had become, after the war, after survival, after hard domestic work she was not born to, and the habitual shortage of money that was also unexpected. It was my aunt who had brought me to England, more or less tearing me out of my mother's arms, promising her that she would soon be reunited with me. This never happened: after the age of two, I never again saw my mother, nor my father, nor any other relative. Only my aunt—her name was Elsa, but I called her La Plume (from my French lesson—“La Plume de ma Tante”). She was nearly fifty at the time; some nights I saw her asleep on her bed in a kitchen alcove—her heavy red swollen face, her graying hair bedraggled on a pillow, her mouth open and emitting the groans she must have suppressed during the day. It was this person whom she did not recognize in Kohl's drawing of her.

  I was always ready to sit for my portrait. Once I was home from school, I had nowhere else to go. I didn’t share many of the interests of my classmates, nor was I involved in their intense relationships, which were mostly with each other. When I was invited to their homes, I found them smaller than mine, more cramped in every way. They lived in semidetached or row houses, with rectangular stretches of gardens at the backs where their fathers dug and grew vegetables on their days off from their jobs as postmen or bus conductors. Only one family lived in each house, whereas ours swarmed with people, each one carrying a distinct history, usually the load of a ruined past. The unruly lives of our lodgers were reflected in the state of our back garden. It was wildly overgrown, for no one knew how to mow the grass, even if we had had anything to mow it with; buried within its rough tangle lay the pieces of a broken statue, which had been there ever since we moved in. Ours was one of the few tall old houses left that had not been pulled down in the reconstruction of the neighborhood in the thirties, or bombed during the war. Its pinnacle was Kohl's studio on the top floor, and when I sat for him, I felt myself to be detached from and floating above the tiled roofs of the little English villas among which our boardinghouse had come to anchor.

  Kohl worked through the night, painting huge canvases in oil that one saw only in glimpses, for he either covered them with cloth or turned them to face the walls. These paintings were not interesting to me—in fact, I thought they were awful: great slashing wounds of color, completely meaningless, like someone else's nightmare or the deepest depths of a subconscious mind. But when he drew me, it was always in the day. He perched close to me, knee to knee, holding a pad on his lap and drawing on it in pencil or charcoal. While he was working, Kohl was always happy, almost ecstatic. He and his hand were effortlessly united in one fluid action over the paper onto which he was transferring me. He smiled, he hummed, he whispered a little to himself, blissfully, and when his eyes darted toward me, that blissful smile remained. “Ah, sweet” he breathed, now at his drawing, now at me. I too felt blissful; no one had ever looked at me or murmured over me in such a way; and although I had of course no sentiment for him—this small, paunchy, middle-aged man—at such moments I did feel a bond with him, not so much as between two persons but as something coming alive between us. There was always movement in the house, noise: doors, voices, footsteps, so many people were living in it. But we there at the top felt entirely alone and bound to each other in his art.

  The one person who ever disturbed us was his wife, Marta—and she was not only a disturbance but a disruption into our silence, or an eruption into it. Although they were living separately in their separate rooms, she entered his as of right, its rightful mistress. Without a glance at me, she went straight to look over his shoulder at the drawing: she stood there, taking it in. I felt the instrument in his hand stumble in its effortless motion. There was a change of mood in everything except Marta, who kept standing behind him, looking, judging. She had one little hand on her hip, which was slightly thrust forward in a challenging way. Her glinting green eyes darted from the drawing to me and took me in, not as the subject of his drawing but as an object of her appraisal. After quite a long pause, she returned to the drawing and extended her finger to point out something. “Don’t touch,” he hissed, but that only made her bring her finger closer to show him what she judged to be wrong. He pushed her hand aside roughly, which made her laugh. “You never could stand criticism,” she said, and walked away from him, sauntering around the room; if she found something tasty left on a plate, she ate it. He pretended to go on working,
but I could feel his attention was more on her, and so was mine. She took her time before leaving, and even when she was half out of the door, she turned again and told me, “Don’t let him keep you sitting too long: once he starts, he doesn’t know when to stop.” It took a long time for him to get back into his concentration, and sometimes he couldn’t manage it at all and we had to stop for the day.

  Once, when this happened, he asked me to go for a walk with him. I had noticed that he always took an afternoon walk and usually to the same place. This was a little park we had in the neighborhood—a very artificial little park, with small trees and a small wooden bridge built over a small stream rippling over some white stones. The place seemed dull to me—I was reading the Romantic poets for my Higher Secondary, and my taste was for wild landscapes and numinous presences. Now I saw that this park, which I despised, represented something very delightful to him. It was a spring day that first time I accompanied him, and I had never seen anyone so relish the smell of the first violets and their touch—he bent down to feel them—and the sound of starlings that had joyfully survived the winter. He made me take his arm, a gallant gesture that embarrassed me, and we paraded up and down the winding paths and under the trees that were not big enough to hide the sky. He said he loved everything that was young and fresh—here he pressed my arm a bit, tucked under his; when a blossom floated down and landed in my hair, he picked it out and said, “Ah, sweet” the way he did when he was drawing. We sat together on a bench, romantically placed beside the rippling stream, and he recited poetry to me: far from being anything young and fresh, it was something quite decadent, about a poet's black mistress or a rotting corpse. He explained that this had been a favorite poet of his in his younger days, when he had lived in Paris and sat in the same cafés as Braque and Derain.