The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

by Laura Furman

  After that first walk, he often asked me to go with him, but I usually refused. It embarrassed me to be seen arm in arm with him, a man who would be older than my father or my uncle, if I had had either one. He never tried to change my mind, but when I saw him walking by himself, he looked sad and lonely, so I went with him more often than I wanted to. It was a strange and entirely new sensation for me to see another person happy in my company when I myself had no such feeling at all. He was undoubtedly happy in that pathetic little park, listening to birds and smelling flowers, walking up and down with me, a sixteen-year-old, on his arm. But when we sat on the bench by the stream and he recited Baudelaire in French, I became wistful. I realized that the situation was, or should have been, romantic—if only he had been more so instead of the way he was, with an old homburg hat and his ugly mustache.

  He began to invite me on other outings, such as his Sunday afternoon visits to galleries and museums. I went with him a few times but did not enjoy it, starting from the long tube ride where we sat side by side and I wanted people to think we were not together. Looking back now, all these years later, I see that it should have been regarded as a great privilege for me to see great paintings with an artist such as Kohl, who had once been famous (and would become so again). He kept me close beside him, standing in front of the paintings he had come to view, usually only two or three. He made no attempt to explain anything to me, only pointed at certain details that I wouldn’t have thought extraordinary—light falling on an apple, or a virgin's knee—and saying, “Ah, ah, ah,” with the same ecstasy as when he was working. Afterward he treated me to a cup of coffee. There were, at the time, only certain standard eating places in London that he could afford: dingy rooms with unfriendly elderly waitresses, especially depressing if it was raining outside, as it often was, and we had to remain uncomfortable in our wet coats and shoes. But he seemed to enjoy these occasions, even the bad coffee, and continued to sit there after the waitress had slapped down the bill in front of him. At last I had to tell him that my aunt would be worried if I came home too late. Then he regret- fully got up; and it was only at that last moment, when he was picking up the bill, that his hand brushed against mine very delicately, very shyly, and he smiled at me in the same way, delicate and shy.

  The only times I really liked to be with him were in his studio when he was drawing me. All I saw out of his window was a patch of sky with some chimneys rearing up into it. When it got dark and he turned on the light, even that view disappeared. Then there was only the room itself, which had an iron bed, often unmade, and a wooden table full of drawings, and the pictures that he painted at night, showing the backs of the canvases, piled one against another on every available space of wall. The floor was bare and had paint splashed all over it. He had a one-burner gas ring, on which I don’t think he ever cooked; all I saw him eat was a herring or a fried egg sandwich bought at a corner shop. He seemed to be always at work, deeply immersed in it and immersing me with him. This was what I responded to—it was the first time I was in the presence of an artist practicing his art, and later, when I began to be a writer, I often thought of it, and it inspired me.

  Our occupation with each other was entirely innocent, but it went on too long and perhaps too often, so that others began to take notice. My aunt, La Plume, would call up, “Don’t you have any homework?” or make excuses to send me on errands she didn’t need. When I came down, she would look at me in a shrewd way. Once she said, “You know, artists are not like the rest of us.” When I didn’t understand, or pretended not to, she said, “They don’t have the same morals.” To illustrate, she had some anecdote about herself and my mother, who had both been crazy about the opera and hung about the stage door in the hope of meeting the artists. Here she began to smile and forget about artists in general to tell me about a particular tenor. He had taken a liking to my mother, who looked more forward than she was, with her shingled hair and very short skirt showing a lot of silk stocking. He had invited the two girls to his flat. “His wife was there, and another woman we thought may have been another wife for him, you know, a mistress.” Her smile became a laugh, more pleasure than outrage, as she remembered the atmosphere, which was so different from their own home that they had an unspoken pact never to tell about their visits to the tenor's flat. In the end, they stopped going; there were too many unexplained relationships and too many quarrels, and what had seemed exciting to them at first was now unsettling. Shortly afterward both of them became engaged to their respective suitors—a bookkeeper and a teacher (my father). When she had finished this story, she said, “So you see,” but I didn’t see anything, especially not what it might have to do with me, who anyway had no suitor to fall back on.

  Marta began to come in frequently and to stay longer than she used to. She perched on a stool just behind him, so that he could not see but could certainly feel her. And hear her—she talked all the time, criticizing his drawing, the state of his cheerless room, the cold that he seemed never to notice, except that in the worst weather he wore gloves with the fingers cut off. In the end he gave up—his concentration was long gone—and he threw his pencil aside and said, “But what do you want?”

  She stretched her green eyes wide open at him: “Want? What could I possibly want from you, my poor Kohl?”

  But once she answered, “I want to invite you to my birthday party.”

  He cursed her birthday and her party and that made her open her eyes even wider, greener: “But don’t you remember? You used to love my birthday! Each year a new poem for me…. He wrote poetry,” she told me. “Real poetry, with flowers, birds, and a moon in it. And I was all three: flowers, birds, and moon. Now he pretends to have forgotten.”

  Birthdays were always made a fuss over, even for those lodgers whom no one liked much. I suppose that, in celebrating a day of birth as something special, everyone was trying to take the place of a lost family for everyone else. Usually these parties were held in our basement kitchen, which was the only room large enough—the rest of the house was cut up into individual small units for renting out. My aunt was known as a good sort and was the only one everyone could get on with; she was always willing for people to come down to her kitchen and tell her their troubles as though she had none of her own. For birthday parties she covered the grease stains and knife cuts on our big table with a cloth and made the bed she slept on look as much as possible like a sofa for guests to sit on. She arranged sausage slices on bread and baked a cake with margarine and eggs someone had got on the black market. Those who wanted liquor brought their own bottles, though she didn’t encourage too much drinking; it seemed to make people melancholy or quarrelsome and spoiled the general mood of celebration.

  Marta's party was held not in our kitchen but in her room at the top of the house. Since this was too small to accommodate many people, she had persuaded Kohl to open his studio across the landing for additional space. Although the two rooms were identical in size, their appearances were very different. While his was strictly a workplace, with nothing homelike in it, hers was all home, all coziness. There were colorful rugs, curtains, heaps of cushions, lampshades with tassels, and most of the year she kept her gas fire going day and night, careless of the shillings that it swallowed. There were no drawings or paintings—Kohl never gave her any—but a lot of photographs, mostly of herself having fun with friends, when she was much younger but also just as pretty.

  On that afternoon, her birthday, she was very excited. She rushed to meet each new arrival and, snatching her present, began at once to unwrap it, shrieking. Apart from my aunt and myself, the guests were all men. She hadn’t invited any of our female lodgers, such as Miss Wundt (who was anyway under notice to move out), and these must have been skulking down in their rooms with the party stamping on top of them. Not all the men lived in our house. Some I didn’t know, though I might have seen them on the stairs on their visits to Marta, often carrying flowers. There was one very refined person, with long hair like an art
ist's rolling over his collar. He wasn’t an artist but had been a lawyer and now worked in a solicitor's office, not having a license to practice in England. Another, introduced as a Russian nobleman, bowed from the waist in a stately way but was soon very drunk, so that his bows became as stiff as those of a mechanical figure. The reason he could become so drunk was that there was a great deal of liquor brought by the more affluent guests who were not our lodgers: for instance, there was one man who, although also a refugee, had done very well in the wholesale garment business.

  Trying to keep up with the rest of the party, I too drank more than I should have. When my aunt saw me refilling my glass, she shook her head and her finger at me. I pretended not to see this warning, but Mann drew attention to it: “Let the little one learn how the big people live!” he shouted. And to me he said, “You like it? Good, ah? Better than school! Just grow up and you’ll see how we eat and drink and do our etceteras!”

  “Tcha, keep your big mouth shut,” La Plume told him, and he bent down to hug her, which she pretended not to like. He was obviously enjoying himself, making the most of the unaccustomed supply of liquor by drinking a lot of it. But he was not in the least drunk—I suppose his big size allowed him to absorb it more easily than others. Of course he was loud as usual, with a lot of bad jokes, but that was his style. He appeared to dominate the party as though he were its host; and Marta treated him like one, sending him here and there to fill vases and open bottles. If he didn’t do it well or fast enough, she called him a donkey.

  The guests overflowed to the landing and through the open door into Kohl's studio. Some of them were looking at his paintings, making quite free with them. They even turned around those facing the wall, the big canvases he painted at night and never showed anyone. The lawyer with the long hair waved his delicate white fingers at them and interpreted their psychological significance. But where was Kohl? No one seemed to have noticed that he was missing. I became aware of his absence only when I saw the lawyer draw attention to a drawing of myself: “Here we see delight not in a particular person but in Youth with a capital Y.”

  It was Marta who shouted, “What rubbish are you spouting there?… And where's Kohl, the idiot, leaving the place open for every donkey to come and give his opinion…. Where is he? Why isn’t he at my party? Go and find him,” she ordered Mann, as though Kohl's absence were his fault.

  Mann turned to me: “Do you know where he is?”

  “How would she know?” Marta said.

  “Of course she knows. She's Youth with a capital Y. She inspires him.”

  If I had been just a little bit younger, I would have kicked his shins; anyway, I almost did. But Marta laughed: “Sneaking away from my party, isn’t that just like him. Go and find him if you know where he is,” she now ordered me. “Oh yes, and tell him where the hell is my present?”

  I was glad to leave the party. It was irritating to see people go into Kohl's studio and freely comment on his paintings. The lawyer's explanation of my drawing had been like a violation, not of myself but of Kohl's work and of my share in it, however passive. And it was not Youth, it was I—I myself!—whom no one had ever cared to observe as Kohl did…. I ran down the stairs furiously and then down the street and around the corner to the little park.

  He was sitting on the bench beside the stream. He was holding a flat packet wrapped in some paper with designs on it that he must have drawn himself: an elephant holding a sprig of lilac, a hippo in a bathtub. When I asked him if it was for Marta, he nodded gloomily. I said, “She was asking for her present.” He got angry, his face and ears swelled red, so I said quickly, “It was a joke.”

  “No. No joke. This is her character: to take and take, if she could she would suck the marrow from a man's soul. From my soul… Who's there with her? All of them? That one with the long hair and lisping like a woman? He thinks he knows about art but all he knows is how to lick her feet.”

  It was a lovely summer night, as light as if it were still dusk. How wonderful it was to have these long days after our gloomy winter: to sit outdoors, to enjoy a breeze even though it was still a little cool. It sent a slight shiver over the stream and flickered the remnant of light reflected in the water. During the day two swans glided there, placed by the municipality, but now they must have been asleep and instead there were two stars on the surface of the sky, still pale, though later they would come into their own and become shining jewels, diamonds. There was fragrance from a lilac bush. I would have liked to have a lover sitting beside me instead of Kohl, so angry from thinking of Marta.

  I said, “Is it true you used to write a poem for her on her birthday?”

  “She remembers, ha?” His anger seemed to fade, maybe he was smiling a bit under that ugly mustache brush. “Yes, I wrote poems, not one, not only on her birthday, but a flood. A flood of poems…. It's the only way, you see, to relieve the pressure. On the heart; the pressure on the heart.”

  I recognized what he said, having felt that pressure, though in an unspecified form. So far I didn’t quite know what it was about, or even whether it was painful or extremely pleasant.

  “Is he there—that Mann? What a beast. When he's on the stairs, there is a smell, like a beast in rut. Musth they call it. You don’t know what that means.” I knew very well but didn’t say so, for he was wiping his mouth, as though it had been dirtied by these words or by his having spoken them.

  “Here, you give it to her.” He thrust his packet at me. “She’ll get no more presents from me and no more poems and no more nothing. All that was for a different person… I’ll show you.”

  He snatched the packet back, his hands trembled in undoing the knot; but he handled it carefully to avoid tearing the paper, which he—and so far he alone—knew to be valuable. Then he folded it back, revealing the contents. It was a drawing of Marta. He looked from it to me, almost teasing: “You don’t even recognize her.” He held it out to me, not letting me touch it.

  The lampposts in the park were designed to resemble toadstools, and the light they shed was not strong enough to overcome what was still left of the day. So it was by a mixture of electric and early evening light that I first saw this drawing of Marta. It was dated 1931, that is, she must have been fifteen years younger when he painted it. Still, I certainly would have recognized her.

  “Look at her,” he said, though holding it up for himself rather than for me. “Look at her eyes: not the same person at all.”

  But they were the same eyes. It was a pencil drawing, but you could tell their color was green. Green, and glinting—with daring, hunger, even greed, or passion as greed. At that time I couldn’t formulate any of that, but I did recognize that green glint as typically Marta. And her small cheeky nose; and her hair—even in the drawing one could tell it was red. He had drawn a few loose strands of it flitting against her cheek, the way he always did mine. Just the edges of her small, pointed teeth were showing and a tip of tongue between them: roguish, eager, challenging, the way she still was. But her cheeks were more rounded than they were now, and also her mouth had a less knowing expression, as if at that time it hadn’t yet tasted as much as it had in the intervening years.

  He covered the drawing again, taking care of it and of its wrapping. He was sunk in thoughts that did not seem to include me; and when he had finished tying the string, he failed to give the packet back to me but kept holding it in his lap. I reminded him that we had to leave, since they would soon be locking up the park for the night.

  When we got to the gate, it had been locked. It was not difficult for me to find a foothold and to vault over, avoiding the row of spikes on top. He remained hesitating on the other side, clutching his drawing. I showed him where the foothold was and asked him to pass the drawing to me through the bars. He didn’t want to do either but had no choice. With me helping him, he managed to get over, but at the last moment the back of his pants got caught on one of the spikes. The first thing he did when we were reunited was to relieve me of the drawi
ng; the second was to stretch backward to see the rip in his pants. I lied that it was hardly visible; anyway, it was dark by now, and if we met people on the road, they would hardly bother about his torn seat. Nevertheless, he made me walk behind to shield him; every time we passed a lamppost he looked back at me anxiously: “Does it show?”

  Near our house, we could see that the party was still in progress. Lights and voices streamed out into the street, and the shadows of people were moving against the windows. But inside we found that my aunt had left the party and was banging about in the basement kitchen, grumbling to herself: “Why don’t they go home instead of turning my house into God know what.”

  It was impossible for Kohl with his torn pants to return to his studio, which was full of people he didn’t like. “Take them off,” La Plume said, “I’ll sew them for you…. Go on, you think I haven’t seen anything like what you hide in there?” But when he stepped out of them, she shook her head: “What does she do all day that she can’t wash her husband's underpants?”

  I fetched a blanket that he could wrap around his legs, which were very white, unsunned. They trembled slightly, not used to being naked, and ashamed of it. Looking back now, I’m glad I got the blanket and do not have to remember that great artist the way he was at that moment, trouser-less in our kitchen.

  When footsteps sounded on the basement stairs, he sat down quickly with his legs under the table where La Plume was sewing his pants. It was Mann who entered, to borrow more glasses for the party. “Cups will do,” he said, and began to collect the few we had from our shelves. “And I’m not even asking for saucers.”

  “Thank you very much,” La Plume said, “so in the morning we can drink our coffee from the saucer like cats and dogs.”

  “Be a sport, Mummy,” he said.

  “Who's your mummy! And where do you get that ‘sport’ business, as if you’d been to Eton and Oxford.”