The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

  Madeleine is my next-door neighbor and best friend. She and I have never even kissed boys: we have no actual sexual experience except a few things we’ve done with each other, experimentally, and out of desperation. (Not shamefaced afterward—flaunting and wicked; it is the 1970s, after all. But it’s boys we want.) At an all-girls school, we don’t get many chances to meet boys, although there are usually some on the bus, on their way to the Grammar School. This is part of our excitement, at quarter past eight. There are certain boys we are expecting to see, and we may even pluck up the crazy courage to speak to them, a word or two; any exchange will be dissected afterward in an analysis more nuanced and determined than any we ever give to poems in English lessons. (“What do you think he really meant when he said that his friend said yesterday that you weren’t bad?”)

  Anything could happen on the bus in the next half hour, even something with the power to obliterate and reduce to dust the double math, Scripture, double Latin, and (worst) PE that lie in wait at the end of the journey—a doom of tedium, infinitely long. And, after PE, the nasty underground shower room with its concentrated citrus-rot stink of female sweat, its fleshly angsts, its tin-pot team spirit, the gloom of girls passed over, the PE teachers ogling, the trodden soaking towels.

  Something has to happen.

  Into our heat that morning comes Valentine.

  He walked down to join us at the bus stop. We’d never seen him before: into the suburban torpor his footsteps broke like a signal for adventure on a jaunty trumpet. I loved his swaggering walk immediately, without reserve. His eagerly amused glances around him—drinking everything in, shaking the long hair back from his face—were like a symbol for morning itself. (His energy was no doubt partly a result of the Do-Dos—caffeine pills—he’d have swallowed in the bathroom as soon as his mother got him out of bed. Soon we were all taking them.) A Grammar School blazer, hooked by its loop around one nicotine-stained finger, was slung over his shoulder; his cigarette was cocked up cheekily between lips curved as improbably, generously wide as a faun’s. The pointed chin was like a faun’s, too, and the flaunting Caravaggio cheekbones, pushing up the thick flesh under his eyes, making them slanted and mischievous. He was tall, but not too tall. His school trousers slid down his impossibly narrow waist and hips; he tucked his shirt half in, with a careless hand. The school tie that others wore resentfully as a strangled knot became under his touch somehow cravat-like, flowing. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone. He was sixteen.

  He grinned at Madeleine and me.

  At me first, then at Madeleine—although Madeleine was willowy and languorous, with long curls and a kitten face, pink cheeks. I was too small, too plump and shapeless, and my eyes, I knew, were blackly expressive pits in a too-white face. Madeleine, trying kindly to advise me on my sex appeal, had said that I might be “too intense”—but I didn’t know how to disguise my intensity. Valentine stopped and offered us his cigarette, me first. It was not an ordinary cigarette. (We went to school stoned for the first time, but not the last.)

  “Hello, girls,” he said, beaming. “Does this bus go into town? Do you catch it every day? That’s good. I like the look of you.”

  We met each other’s eyes and giggled, and asked him what he liked about us. Thinking about it, surveying us up and down, he said we looked skeptical.

  What did he mean, skeptical?

  Thank God we weren’t wearing our hats.

  I longed for the bus not to come. Proximity to his body—a glimpse, via his half-tucked shirt, of a hollowed, golden, masculine stomach, its line of dark hairs draining down from the belly button—licked at me like a flame as we waited. His family, he explained, had just moved to one of the posher streets behind Beech Grove. When the bus did come, he sat on the backseat and took Beckett out of his rucksack: Endgame. The very title, even the look of the title—its stark, indiscreet white capitals on a jazzy orange cover—was a door swinging suddenly open into a new world. I’d never heard of Beckett; I think I was plowing through The Forsyte Saga then. None of the other boys on the bus read books. Val smiled at us encouragingly, extravagantly, over the top of his.

  “He was gorgeous. I liked him,” Madeleine conceded as we trudged in a tide of other green-gowned inmates up the purgatorial hill from the bus stop to where school loomed, the old house frowning like a prison in the sunlight. “But I couldn’t actually fancy him, could you? There was something weird.”

  I was disappointed in her; I was already wondering if I’d find Beckett in the local library. (The librarian, warmly supportive of my forays into Edwardian belles lettres, would startle and flinch at my betrayal.) Madeleine didn’t insist on her doubt—she never insisted—and I closed the door on that early intimation of danger. I wanted Val because he was different—as I was different. What I’d felt at my first sight of him that summer morning was more than ordinary love: something like recognition. When I read later in Plato about whole souls divided at birth into two halves, which move around in the world ever afterward mourning each other and longing for their lost completeness, I thought I was reading about myself and Valentine.

  And it was the same for Val; I do believe that it was. He recognized me, too.

  “What a scarecrow,” my stepfather, Gerry, said, after Val came to my house for the first time. “I can’t believe the Grammar School lets him get away with that hair.”

  “He looks like a girl,” my mother said. “I’m not that keen, Stella.”

  Following up the stairs behind Val, I had been faint from the movement of his slim haunches in his tight white jeans. How could she think that he looked like a girl? Yet all we did in my bedroom was cozy up knee to knee, cross-legged on the bed, to talk. We swapped our childhood stories. He was born in Malaya; he’d had an ayah.

  “What was your family doing in Malaya?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “I want to know everything.”

  “My father worked for the government; he was an awful tax expert. Now that he’s retired, he’s just awful and old. What does yours do?”

  “Gerry’s not my real dad. My real dad’s dead.”

  Mum brought in a pile of ironed clothes to put away in my chest of drawers. Then she called up to ask if we wanted coffee. Philip came knocking at the door, asking us to play with him. Afterward, Mum spoke to me awkwardly, about self-respect. The familiar solidity of the house and its furniture melted away around Val; after he’d left, I couldn’t believe I really lived there. I couldn’t hold my two worlds in the same focus. I wanted Val to be brilliant for my parents, and he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. He never made any concessions to them. If they asked him questions, he sometimes didn’t even seem to hear them; his eyes were blank. It was as if he simply paused the flow of his life, in the presence of anyone unsympathetic.

  Yet among our friends he was magnetic, commanding, funny. He was a clever mimic. We started getting together at Madeleine’s in the evenings—a gang of six or seven of us from the streets round about. Madeleine’s father was often away; her mother, Pam, was bored and liked flirting with teenagers. She brought homemade brownies and cheese straws and jugs of weak sangria to Madeleine’s room, and we cadged her cigarettes. Madeleine fancied a boy who played the guitar and wrote his own songs; we tried to talk a shy blond girl out of her faith. Madeleine bought a red bulb to put in one of the lamps; we draped the others with colored scarves. When Gerry was sent over to fetch me home, he never stepped across the low fence between our front gardens but went punctiliously via both front paths and gates. He said that if Pam wanted teenagers carrying on under her own roof it was her business.

  “What’s this?” he joked, when I brought Beckett back from the library.

  “He’s a play writer. Haven’t you heard of him?”

  “Playwright.” (Gerry did crosswords—he had a good vocabulary.) “Aren’t they all waiting for some chap who never turns up?”

  Gerry had been so keen for me to go to the High School, yet he was hostile
to the power my education brought me. He thought I was putting on airs—and I expect I was. I was probably pretty insufferable, with my quotations from Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, my good French accent. (I corrected his: “Ça ne fait rien,” not “San fairy ann.”) He could still usually trip me up, though, in geography or history—my sense of how things fit together was treacherously vague. Gerry knew an awful lot; he was always reading. He subscribed to a long series of magazines about the Second World War, which he kept in plastic folders on a shelf. Already, invidiously, however, I had an inkling that the books he read were somehow not the real books.

  He was amused and patient, correcting my mistakes. He did it to my mother, too: as long as he had the upper hand, he was kind. If I had given in gracefully to that shape of relations between us—his lecturing me and my submitting to it—we might have been able to live happily together. My mother didn’t care about his corrections; she just laughed at him. (“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Gerry—as if it mattered!”) But I couldn’t give in. I wanted everything I learned to be an opening into the unknown, whereas Gerry’s knowledge added up to a closed circle, bringing him safely back to where he began, confirming him.

  I took Beckett up to my room.

  It wasn’t the kind of writing I was used to. I’d taught myself to stir in response to the captured textures of passing moments—the subtle essence of unspoken exchange, the sensation of air against the skin. Now I learned to read Beckett (and then, under Val’s influence, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti) like a convert embracing revolutionary discipline, cutting all links with my bourgeois-realist past.

  “Is he your boyfriend, then?” Madeleine wanted clarification.

  I was disdainful. “We don’t care about those kinds of labels.”

  “But is he?”

  “What does it look like?”

  Val and I were inseparable. We saw each other almost every day—not only on the bus going to school and coming back but in the evenings, as often as my parents allowed me to go out or said he could come round. They claimed they were worried about my schoolwork, but I didn’t believe them. I saw my mother recoil from what she dreaded—the dirty flare of sex and exposure; my making a fool of myself. (They were so innocent, I don’t think they guessed about the drugs until much later.) Sometimes I went out even when they’d forbidden me to, and then there was trouble. When I got home, Gerry took me into the lounge for one of his lectures, screwing up his forehead, leaning toward me, pretending to dole out impartial justice. From my dizzy vantage point (high as a kite), I believed I could see right through him to his vindictiveness, his desire to shoot me down when I was flying. “They hate me,” I said to Val. “Under his pretense of being concerned for my future, he really hates me. And she doesn’t care.” “Don’t mind them,” Val said, his eyes smiling. He blew out smoke. He was serene, bare feet tucked up on his knees in lotus position. “They’re just frightened. They’re sweet, really, your parents.”

  We were talking in his bedroom: a drafty attic where his books and clothes lay around in chaos on a Turkish carpet gray with cigarette ash, so unlike my little pink cell. Val’s attitude toward his own parents was coolly disengaged. I was afraid of them—I tried to avoid meeting them on my passages through the rambling house (built when Stoke Bishop was still the countryside). They were both tall and big-boned. His father was stooped, with brown-blotched skin, long earlobes, and thinning white hair. His mother had a ruined face and huge, watery eyes; she wore pearls and Chinese jade earrings at the dining table in the evenings. (Unlike us, Val’s family actually ate in their dining room.) They were polite with me, and their conversation was as dully transactional as any in my house, yet in their clipped, swallowed voices they seemed to talk in code above my head.

  They never came up to his attic room. Sometimes his mother shouted up the stairs, if a meal was ready or Val was wanted on the telephone. We were private up there. I loved the evening shadows in the complex angles of the sloping ceiling. In summer, the heat under the roof was dense; in winter, we cuddled up for warmth under the blankets on his bed. Our bodies fit perfectly together—my knees pressed into the backs of his, my breath in the nape of his neck, his fingers knotted into mine against his chest; we lay talking, or listening to the Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Dylan. The shape of the long, empty room seemed the shape of our shared imagination, spacious and open. I couldn’t believe the long strides he made in his mind, all by himself. Sometimes, depending on what pills he’d taken, he would talk and talk without stopping. “How do you know that I really exist, outside you?” he asked me urgently. “I might be a figment of your imagination.”

  Our heads were side by side then on his pillow. How lucky I was to lie like that, so intimate with his lovely looks that I couldn’t see them whole: teasing green eyes, down on his upper lip, curving high hollows in his cheeks. I longed for him to begin kissing me, as he sometimes did, but I had learned that I must not try to initiate this—he didn’t like being hurried into it. “I just know!” I insisted, stroking his face as if the feeling in my fingers were proof. “And I’m not a figment of yours, either. I’m really here, I promise.”

  “I believe in you. I’m not so sure about me. You’re solid. You’re fierce.”

  I wasn’t as solid as I had been. Since meeting Val, I’d stopped bothering to eat. I couldn’t bear my mother’s gluey gravy any longer; I drank black (instant) coffee and gave up sugar. The weight had flown off me. Although I was small and Val was taller, we came to look like a matching pair: skinny and striking. By this time, we were on the fringes of a set who gathered at weekends in a sleazy bar behind a cinema in town. Val had a good instinct for the people worth getting to know: a man with freckled hands and a mane of red hair who sold him speed and other things; a clever art student, half Greek, who played in a band (they sounded like art-punk before punk had really happened). These men were older and more powerful, and a lot of people were eager to be their friends, but Val was able to impress them with his quick wit and cultural know-how.

  I knew it mattered to Val that I look right. I wore his shirts and his sleeveless vests and his Indian silk scarves, over the tight jeans that he helped me buy. I put kohl around my eyes, and so did he sometimes. We both dyed our hair the same dark licorice color. (My mother was aghast, another scene—“Whatever are they going to say at school?”) I paraded up and down the attic in different outfits for his approval, getting the effect just right, and yet when we went out we looked as if we didn’t care what anyone thought. Val’s idea of me was that I was single-minded, fiery, uncomplicated, without middle-class falsity. (“But aren’t I middle-class?” I asked, surprised.) And I performed as his idea, became something like it.

  We made plans to live abroad together—in Paris or New York. He’d been to both these places; I hadn’t been anywhere except Torquay and Salcombe. He talked about how we’d earn money and rent an apartment, and I believed that he really could make these things happen. There was a rare blend in him of earnestness and recklessness. And he seemed to know instinctively what to read, where to go, what music to listen to. He was easily bored, and indifferent to anything he didn’t like. Psychological novels were dreary, he said. The Beatles were consumer culture. I didn’t talk to him about the old-fashioned books I’d loved before I met him.

  “In New York, I’ll work as a waitress,” I said. “And you can write.”

  “Sometimes I think I could do something with my life,” he said. “But then, in the middle of the night, something awful happens.”

  “What kind of awful?”

  “I feel as if I’d already done it, this important thing—writing a book, or whatever it is. I feel as if it were a mountain to climb, and I’d toiled up the mountain and achieved the thing and I’m coming down the other side and it’s behind me, and it’s nothing. It doesn’t alter anything in this world by one feather’s weight. And then when I wake up I panic that, because I’ve already dreamed the end of the work, I’ll never be able to
begin.”

  But, more often, Val’s mood was buoyant and exhilarated—he was impatient to get started. Everyone assumed he would take the Oxbridge entrance exam, go to university. For the moment, he went along with the idea. “My English teacher at school,” he said, “he’s invested a lot of hopes in me. He’s giving me special tuition. I don’t know how to tell him I’m leaving, not yet. Soon I will.”

  “Wherever you go,” I said, “I’ll follow you.”

  • • •

  We ran into him once—the English teacher, Mr. Harper. Val and I were arm in arm, walking down Park Street on a Saturday in the crowds of people milling about and looking in the shops—jeans boutiques, bookshops, places selling Indian and Chinese knickknacks and silver jewelry. A stubby middle-aged man was staring in a shop window; he veered away from it as we passed, almost walking right into us and then recognizing Val, putting on a show of surprise that seemed contrived, as if he’d actually seen us coming from miles off and prepared for this scene. I thought at the time that he was socially inept because he was such an intellectual. I knew that Val respected him, and that it was he who’d put Val onto Pound and Beckett and Burroughs. But I could see that Val wished we hadn’t met him—he seemed shocked by this collision of the worlds of school and home.

  “Hello, Valentine,” Mr. Harper said. He was staring leeringly at me. “What a good way to spend your Saturdays. Aren’t you supposed to be revising?”

  “We’re on our way to the reference library,” Val said sulkily, blushing.