The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

by Laura Furman

  He had pictures of himself at that beach on his phone, taken by his father during Henry’s very well-documented childhood. He was his father’s last child, and the only one from his second marriage. His brothers were all much older than him, born when their father had been relatively poor, when he still made his living, despite his Haverford education and his well-received first book, playing piano in bars. Henry came in well after that, when there was money for cameras and camcorders and time, attention, and interest to take a picture of the baby every day. He had thumbed through them in bed the night before, showing them to Hobart, who somehow got conditioned to yawn every time he saw a picture of Henry at the beach with a bucket and a shovel. It was a less melancholy pastime, and less pathetic, to look at old pictures of himself, instead of pictures of himself and Bobby, though he did that, too, late into the night, with Hobart’s sleeping head on his chest.

  They spent the morning making their way slowly down the beach by throws of a rubber football the size of a child’s fist. Henry had a reasonably good arm: once or twice he threw the ball far enough that Hobart disappeared around a dune to go in search of it. He daydreamed considerably as they went, and thought indulgently of Bobby as Hobart leaped and galumphed and face-planted into the sand. He had to be persuaded every time to give up the ball, running back as if to drop it at Henry’s feet, then veering away and playing a prancing, high-stepping keep-away until Henry caught him around the neck and pulled open his jaws. It made him a defective sort of retriever, and it doubled the work of play with him, but Henry didn’t mind it.

  He laughed at the dog, and thought of his father laughing behind the camera at him, and thought of something Bobby had said to him more than once. He’d accused Henry of being unable to delight in him, and had said that this was part of the reason that Henry had never been properly able to love him, or anybody, really. Bobby had said deflating things like that all the time—he’d kept an arsenal of them always at hand and ready to spoil any occasion—and the Bobby in Henry’s head still kept up a running commentary years after they broke up. But it had been fair, for Bobby to say he was delightless, a million years before, when Henry had been an entirely different person, selfish and self-loathing and more in love with his own misery than with the man who wanted to marry him.

  All that had changed. It was far too late to make any difference with Bobby, but now he was the sort of person who couldn’t help but take pleasure in the foolish exuberance of a clumsy black Lab. “Look, Bobby,” he said quietly as Hobart raced after the football. “Look at him go.” He shook his head at himself, and sat down, then lay down on his back with his knees bent and his arms thrown out at his sides, staring up at the sky for a while before he closed his eyes. “I’m tired, Hobart,” he said, when the dog came back and started to lick his face. “Sit down and relax for a minute.” But the cold nose kept pressing on his eyelids, and the rough tongue kept dragging across his cheek and nose and lips. He swatted at the dog’s head, and grabbed his collar, and reached with his other hand to scratch the Lab’s neck.

  In another moment his face was being licked from the other side. When Henry opened his eyes he discovered that this was Hobart. The dog he had been petting was someone else entirely, another black Lab, but with a face that was much pointier (and frankly less handsome) than Hobart’s. The owner came trotting up behind him. He was standing in front of the sun. Henry only registered his hairy chest and baseball cap before the man asked him, “Why are you making out with my dog?”

  One heard various stories about Lenny. He was alternately from San Francisco, or Houston, or Pittsburgh, or Nantucket, or someplace no one had ever heard of. He was a teenager, or an old man, or in his middle age. He was perfectly healthy, or terminally ill. He was happily married, or heartbroken and bereft. He was a six-foot-eight black man or he was a diminutive honky. He might not even have been the first one to go through. It was only certain that he’d been the first to announce that he was going, and the founding poster on what became the Black Square Message Board. As the first official Black Square (the anonymous individuals who might have passed in before him, as well as the twelve German shepherds, together held that title unofficially) he had become something of a patron saint for everyone who proposed to go after him. Lenny knows was a fairly common way to preface a platitude on the board, and his post, this is not a suicide, had become a motto of sorts for the whole group. The post had a ceci n’est pas une pipe quality about it, but it was consistent with what became the general attitude on the board, that the square offered an opportunity to check into another universe as well as the opportunity to check out of this one. He should have said, This is not MERELY a suicide, Martha wrote. Not everything she wrote was stupid, and Henry was inclined to agree with her on this count. There was an element of protest to Lenny’s leap into the square: it was a fuck-you to the ordinary universe the likes of which it had not previously been possible to utter. By entering into the square you could express your disdain for the declined world, so far fallen, to some people’s minds, from its potential for justice and beauty, as effectively as you could by blowing your head off, but instead of just dying, you might end up someplace else, someplace different—indeed, someplace full of people just like you, people who had leaped away from their own declined, disappointing lives.

  The pointy-nosed Lab’s name was Dan; his master’s name was Luke. Henry ought not to have talked to him beyond saying “Sorry!” Meeting yet another handsome, witty, accomplished fellow who was utterly uninteresting on account of his failure to be Bobby was not part of the plan for his last days on the near side of the square. Henry tried to walk away, but the dogs were already fast friends, and Hobart wouldn’t come. The man was smiling and looking at Henry in a particular way as Henry tugged on Hobart’s collar. He was short and muscled up and furry, and had a pleasant, open face. Henry was trying to think of something inappropriate to say, but nothing was coming to mind. The man stuck out his hand and introduced himself. Henry, his left hand still on Hobart’s collar, stuck out his own, shifting his balance as he did, so when Hobart lunged at his new friend he pulled Henry over. Henry ought to have let go of the stranger’s small, rough, appealing palm—he thought as he squeezed it harder that it felt like a blacksmith’s palm, and that it went along nicely with the man’s blacksmith build—but he gripped it harder as he fell, and pulled the other man over on top of him. They were momentarily a pile of bodies, human and canine, Luke on Henry on Hobart, with Dan on top of all of them. Henry got a paw in his face, and a dog nail scratched his cheek, and his face was pressed hard into Luke’s chest. Luke smelled like coffee and salt, and tasted salty too, when Henry thought he had accidentally tasted the sweat on the man’s hairy chest, but it turned out that it was his own blood on his lip, trickling from the scratch.

  The injury, though it wasn’t totally clear which dog had inflicted it, prompted profuse apologies and an invitation to dinner. Henry felt sure he should have declined. All his plans aside, he knew that he wasn’t going to be interested in this man as certainly as he knew that the sun got a little colder every day, or that eventually the whole island would be incorporated as surely as Hilton Head or Manhattan, and that the rich folk would have to ferry in their household help from Martha’s Vineyard. It was inevitable. But he considered, as he wiped the blood off his face and listened to Luke apologize, that he might be overlooking another gift of the square, and that it didn’t matter that loving Bobby had ruined him, and smothered in the cradle any possible relationship with any other man. He had no future with anyone, but he had no future at all. That took the pressure off dinner. And it was something else to say good-bye to, after all: dinner with a handsome man.

  “Sometimes I kind of like being the only homo in a ten-mile radius,” Luke said while they were eating. “Or almost the only one.” Henry had asked what had possessed him to come to Nantucket for a vacation. When Henry cocked his head at that, Luke asked him the same question.

  “Something simil
ar,” Henry said, reaching down to pet Hobart’s head, a gesture that was becoming his new nervous tic. They were sitting outside at a restaurant in ’Sconset, both dogs at their feet and a bowl of clams between them. Dan was just as well-behaved as Hobart was. They both sat staring up at the sky or at another table, or staring intently into each other’s eyes, leaning forward occasionally to sniff closer and closer, touching noses and then touching tongues before going back to looking distracted and disinterested until they started it all over again with a sudden glance. Henry and Luke took turns saying, “I think they like each other.”

  “I was born here,” Henry added. Luke was smiling at him—he seemed to be one of those continuous smilers, the sort of people that Henry generally disliked (Bobby, until he had left, had always appeared perpetually troubled), but there was something sad, or at least resigned, in Luke’s smile that Henry found appealing.

  “I didn’t think anybody was born on Nantucket,” Luke said. “I thought people just magically appeared here once they made enough money.”

  “They do,” Henry said. “Sort of. There’s a ceremony. You claw your way naked through a pool of coins and they drape you in a white robe and everyone chants, ‘One of us! One of us!’ But if you’re poor you just get squeezed out of a vagina and they put your name on a plaque in the hospital.”

  “You have a plaque?”

  “Sure. Henry David Conroy. May 22, 1986.”

  “I figured you were special,” Luke said, managing to smile differently, more warmly and more engagingly and more attractively. Henry looked away. It was part of his problem that flattering attention from handsome men only made him more sad, and made him feel Bobby’s rejection more achingly and acutely. The handsomer the man, and the more flattering the attention, the greater his sadness. To date, anybody else had only discovered in miserable degrees how thoroughly and hopelessly they were not Bobby. But there was always that homunculus in Henry, weakly resistant to the sadness, that protested in a meek little voice whenever he said good-bye early, or declined an invitation up to someone’s apartment. Proximity to the square made it a little bolder, and Henry thought he could hear it shouting something about saying good-bye to sucking on a nice cock.

  Henry took a clam and looked at the dogs. They were looking away from each other now, but he said it anyway. “Look at that. They really like each other, don’t they?”

  “They sure do,” Luke said.

  Because of my mother, somebody wrote. Half the messages on the farewell board were unsigned. You were only supposed to post your final notes there, but this was a rule that was impossible to enforce, since anybody could retire one ID and come back with a new one. And you were supposed to limit yourself to just one reason, either by prioritizing, or, more elegantly, by articulating a reason that contained all other possible reasons. While Because of my mother could be unpacked at length, there was something crude, or at least unsophisticated, about it. Because of incorporation was its political equivalent: it contained a multitude of reasons, all the accumulated disappointments of the past decade for the people who cared to mourn the dashed hopes of the early part of the century. But it was less subtle and less mysterious than Because I believe, into which one could read a richer sort of disappointment, one that was tempered with hope that something besides oblivion lay on the other side of the square. This sort of post could be crude as well: Because I want to see Asian was its own common type. Still, there was something pleasing about these notes that looked forward through the square and saw something or someone waiting there, Aslan in Narnia, Dejah Thoris on Barsoom, or more private kings in more particular kingdoms. Because I have suffered enough was less appealing than Because I wish to suffer differently.

  Most mysterious and most mundane of all were the last posts of the lovelorn. They were neither necessarily hopeful nor despairing. Because of Alice could mean anything in a way that Because of my mother generally could not—Alice might be hero or villain, after all, but all mothers were villains on the board. Because of Louise, Because of Juliet, Because of John, Because of Alan and Wanda and Bubbles—that one seemed like cheating to Henry, though he liked it for the possibility that Bubbles might be a chimpanzee, and for the likelihood that the circumstances driving the poster through the square must be uniquely weird and horrible. Because of George, Because of Althea, Because of you. Because I broke his heart, Because she broke my heart. Because of Bobby.

  Henry took Luke and the dogs out to the old barn. There were pictures of that, too, taken back when it had been Henry’s home. Henry had called them up on the ceiling and they had all looked at them, even the dogs. It was hardly a first-date activity, to share your distant past this way, though he’d done it with Bobby, the two of them sitting in an overpriced café in Cambridge with their phones on the table, excitedly trading pictures of their dead brothers and fathers. That had felt like showing each other their scars, part of the process of recognition by which they came independently to understand that, while it was probably too early to say they were meant for each other, they were at least very lucky to have collided. It was a less intimate revelation to show pictures of himself at five years old, naked except for a little cowboy hat and boots, to a man he had fucked three times in the twelve hours he had known him, but it was still a startling bit of progress. He hadn’t been interested in that sort of thing—the moving on that his friends and shrinks and Bobby himself had encouraged him to do—largely because it seemed both impossible and unnecessary. Trying to not be in love with Bobby was like trying to not be gay anymore, or like annulling the law of gravity by personal decree. It was ridiculous to try, and anyway gayness and gravity, for whatever sadness or limitation they might generate, felt right. Henry still wasn’t interested in moving on, but there was something about his pending encounter with the square that made it feel like this was something else, similar in form but not in substance to getting over it at last, since he was about to make a permanent attestation to his devotion to Bobby, and to his objection to the end of their relationship.

  “This is okay,” he said to Hobart, the only other one of the four still awake after the slide show. Luke and his dog had fallen asleep before it finished, and now the man’s head was on Henry’s chest. “This is okay,” Henry said again, staring down his nose at Luke’s face. He was doing a whistling sort of snore, in through the nose, out through the mouth. “I’m not making out with your dog,” Henry said quietly. “He’s throwing up into my mouth.” He wondered why he couldn’t have thought to say that two days before. Hobart crawled up the bed and added his head to the empty side of Henry’s chest. It was a little hard to breathe, but he still fell asleep that way.

  The barn was in as much of a state of ruin as the law would allow. No one had lived there for five years, and no one sanely inclined to keep it up had lived there for fifteen. A friend of his father’s, a crazy cat lady who kept birds instead of cats, had moved in after his father had died, and after she died Henry had left it empty, never visiting and only paying now and then to have it painted when the nearest neighbor complained that it was starting to look shabby in a way that was no longer picturesque. All the nearest neighbors were eventually eaten up by incorporation, and there were mansions all around now in the near distance, but Henry had never sold the place in spite of offers that grew both more generous and more threatening. He’d left it to Bobby with instructions never to sell, which he probably wouldn’t—Bobby was not exactly a friend of incorporation—but who knew. Maybe he and the Brazilian would want to make another baby together, and Bobby’s grandma had only been good for one.

  …

  “You used to live here?” Luke asked in the morning. “All the time?”

  “All the time,” Henry said. “It’s why my manners are so atrocious.” They were standing in what remained of the living room. A pair of squirrels were staring at them from a rafter above. The dogs were staring back. “It was fine,” Henry said. “It was great, actually. As much as I remember. It doesn’t h
ave anything to do with … it.”

  “Yeah. Mine neither,” Luke said. They had started talking about the square during breakfast. Henry wasn’t the one to bring it up. Out of nowhere and all of a sudden Luke had asked him what he was going to wear when he went through. “Shorts,” Henry had said, not thinking to deny it, or even ask how Luke knew he was a Square.

  “I brought a parka,” Luke said.

  “Because you think it will be cold?” Henry asked.

  “Because I like the parka,” Luke said. “It’s my favorite piece of clothing. It’s puffy but not too puffy.” A silence followed, not entirely awkward. They were eating in the room, on the bed, and had just moved the plates to the floor for the dogs to finish up. Henry was still trying to decide what to say next when Luke reached over for his cock, and what followed felt like a sort of conversation. Henry had always thought that having someone’s cock in your mouth ought to provide you with some kind of insight on them, though this hadn’t ever been the case. Staring into someone’s eyes while he pounded on their ass made him feel infinitely remote from them, except of course for Bobby, and maybe it was the extraordinary intimacy he had achieved doing such things with Bobby that spoiled it with everyone else. But there was something revealing in the exchange between him and Luke. Luke was holding on to him too tightly, and he was holding on too tightly to Luke, and Henry thought he heard notes of agonized sadness in both their voices when they cried out at each other as they came. By the end of it Henry felt as if they had communicated any number of wordless secrets, and that he had a deep, dumb understanding of why Luke was going through the square, and felt sure that Luke felt the same way, and it seemed all of a piece with the whole process that it would fuck things up by asking if this was true.