The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2019 (retail) (epub)

  Julia alone, whose soft knock on the door used to make us so happy, now fills us with a feeling similar to—we hate to say it—dread. Sometimes when she calls, we do not have the wherewithal to answer. We’re afraid that the conversation will go too long, or that she’ll bring up Robert again and want to be affirmed. Sometimes we let her phone calls go straight to voicemail, and then allow a few days to pass before we even listen to the message.

  “Aren’t you going to call her back?”

  “I think it’s your turn. I’m pretty sure I did it last time.”

  “Are you keeping score?”

  “Keeping track is not the same as keeping score.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I just don’t want this to become exclusively my job. Like what happened with the pool.”

  We can’t help wishing that maybe one of these days Sunny would give us a call. Before we even really knew him we liked him, from afar we liked him, and sitting next to him in class we were charmed by his sudden way of smiling and his jaunty haircuts, which he received weekly from his octogenarian landlord, who in a former life had been not only a barber but a classical music deejay. This was the sort of information he’d occasionally divulge, each casually offered aside accreting into an ever more subtle, complex, and absorbing picture. He enjoyed reading fiction, especially Nordic detective novels. He’d once played lacrosse at a very high level, and done massive amounts of hallucinogens. He’d gone to a good boarding school but a mediocre small college, spent much of his twenties trying to save his family’s electronics business, and now here he was, making his comeback in medical school, where by all accounts but his own he was doing very well, with seemingly little effort.

  We liked him, too, for not continuing to kiss Julia at parties. We appreciated the clarity of his intentions, and the way in which it flatteringly reflected our own: because what sane person wants to keep messing around at this age? That was what the undergraduate experience had been for, those four short and sweaty years. Now it was time to relax into something real. “He asked me on a date,” Julia said in wonder. “That’s actually the term he used.” We suggested she wear her hair down.

  She had brought over some different outfits to model for us. It was like watching a parade of past Julias: a kittenish little number she’d worn during her year singing a cappella; a pleated skirt and sweater set that had been her daily uniform as a temp. She retreated modestly into our bathroom between each costume change. “None of this is working, is it,” she called from behind the door. We had a glass of wine waiting for her when she emerged again, plucking at the neckline of something cheap and brightly patterned, the kind of pretty dress found for half price on a sidewalk rack. She looked with longing at the wine but didn’t take it.

  “Will you drink it for me?” she asked. “I’m already nervous that I’m going to have too much at dinner. And wine turns my teeth purple, so I’ve decided that I’m just going to stick with gin and tonics for the night. The lime always brings me to my senses.” She hiked up the skirt of her dress and climbed unceremoniously into the club chair. “Oh no. Do you think this place is going to have a full bar, or just beer and wine?”

  As we searched the bookshelf for our restaurant guide, Julia recounted tales of other boyfriends she had had. She didn’t want to make any of the same mistakes again. One ex had followed her down to Ecuador during her semester abroad and camped out for two weeks at a nearby youth hostel, watching her morosely from an Internet café as she walked in the mornings to the local clinic. And then, the year after graduation, she had become embroiled with a Ph.D. student who was supposed to be supervising her at the lab where they worked, doing gene sequencing in a mild stupor. He was already engaged to someone else, which had made things extra heated and complicated between the two of them. She’d trained for her first marathon with him, and it was really more the running than the lab that had gotten them into trouble, and even though the relationship had ended in disaster and she was relieved, glad, that it was all over and done with, sometimes even now she found herself crying a little as she ran.

  At least there was a full bar, according to our guide. “The crispy cod cakes come recommended. Also the short-rib ravioli.”

  “I’m not saying that going out to dinner automatically makes him my boyfriend. I’m getting ahead of myself. Way ahead of myself, as I have the tendency to do.”

  “Did the fiancée ever find out?”

  “Oh, sure. It was kind of inevitable. I think he was just looking for a way to avoid getting married and there I was. Literally sitting right next to him, day after day. I had the whole convenience factor going for me, which can be a powerful source of attraction,” she said plainly. Sitting cross-legged in the chair, she planted her elbow on her knee, and then her chin on her palm. She gazed out the window at our air shaft, where the daylight was already starting to disappear. “Do you realize that Sunny is the first guy I’ve liked before he liked me?”

  We stopped listening for a moment to wonder which of us had liked the other first, and how, when things happened so naturally and fast, was it possible to tell?

  “Which seems significant somehow,” she was saying. “Even if nothing comes of tonight, even if he never asks me on a date ever again. I’ll still feel hopeful. In a general sense. About me and love.” She inhaled. “Please forget I said that word.” And then, recalling her audience, she smiled at us trustingly. “But you probably use it all the time.”

  We did, of course, and contrary to what we thought, it didn’t necessarily make us authorities. We believed strongly and without any particular evidence that Sunny had liked her all along, even back in the days of Sheri and the garbage bags, and we told her so. From where our confidence came we couldn’t have exactly said, but it struck us as indisputable, the rightness of Julia and Sunny, and on this feeling alone we were willing to stake our new friendship with her, and to not say a word when she leapt out of the chair and put on her coat while still wearing the cheap dress, which wasn’t nearly nice enough for the restaurant where he was taking her. We experienced not the slightest protective urge as we sent her out the door.

  In fact, the wrongness of the dress only served to further endear her to him, as did, we were to learn soon enough, her half-drunk insistence upon paying her share of the bill and her less drunk attempt at getting him to sleep over. Julia had predicted correctly that he would never ask her on a date again. It seems miraculous to us now, the quantity of mistakes we made, mistakes that should have sunk our romances straight off from the start: the hasty tumbling into bed, the disproportionate demands, the declaration of feelings. How did we manage to stay together despite all of those offenses? Today young people are so cagey. Always keeping their options open, hedging their bets. Sure they have a lot of sex with near strangers, but that’s not the same as being heedless in love. Not like us! Before we knew it, Sunny was making dinner for Julia most nights and cleaning up afterward. He was, he is, a terrific cook: cassoulets, curries, the most remarkably ungreasy fried chicken. We had never liked lentils before trying his. The card table set for four, the yellowish glow from Julia’s thrift store lamp, our textbooks, open to the same page, spread like stepping stones across the floor, the steam rising from whatever rich, soupy thing Sunny had just placed in front of us…It was a very sweet time.

  Incredibly, he liked us back. That was the great, unhoped-for gift of it all, that Sunny—whom we had admired from both near and far, from our plastic seats in the lecture hall and over bagels at our apartment, who had so enchanted us with his distracting good looks and breezy style and eccentric remarks—appeared to find pleasure in not only her company but ours. It now seems negligible, his being six years older, but then the difference in age felt meaningful to us, as if we were being paid a serious compliment. Often, he would send us into spasms of private delight by doing that thing that comedians do, a callback, he was so good at doing that, pluc
king out of thin air some throwaway line we’d mentioned days earlier and then making it sound hilarious and intimate by referring to it again. He was listening, he was remembering! Even his impatience made us happy. Once, we were driving home from a camping trip in the mountains, and after sliding up and down the radio dial a few times, he finally landed on something he liked, turned up the volume, and then swiveled around to grin at us from the passenger seat. It was a song we hadn’t heard before. Neither had Julia, clearly. She was driving with her eyes fastened on the road and a small, polite smile on her face. “Guys. Really?” Sunny looked at us in despair. “It’s their best record. With the kudzu on the cover?” He let out a low groan. “You probably weren’t eating solid foods yet.”

  * * *

  —

  So much of that is irretrievable now. The papers haven’t been signed and filed yet, but Julia and Sunny, as a couple, are over. We’ve needed to keep reminding ourselves of this fact, only because it is so easy to slip into the habit of hoping otherwise. Our hope has remained quite stubborn for the most part.

  “I met him at that physician wellness conference,” Julia told us, and started to cry. This announcement occurred in Utah, about six months after our last time at the lake house. We were chopping things atop the kitchen’s glittery granite counters while the children, stripped down to their long johns, watched television upstairs, and Sunny drove back to the grocery store because he was making turkey chili and the rental didn’t have any cumin. His name was Robert, and he was in radiology. He lived in San Diego. His first email had just been friendly, Julia said. A regular old great meeting you hope our paths cross again kind of email. No more than two sentences, and a signature featuring a long list of his various titles and affiliations. They had exchanged business cards after eating a complimentary buffet breakfast together at the hotel, at one of those big, round banquet tables where solitary conference-goers are herded into each other’s company. She had had a yogurt and watched him polish off a plate of warmed-over scrambled eggs. After the perfunctory exchange of cards, and after being slightly sickened by the spongy look of the eggs, she was then surprised to experience a little surge of erotic feeling when he stood from the table and she registered how tall he was. Not just tall, but big. Visibly strong through the chest and shoulders, and with thighs that looked like they could belong to an Olympic speed skater. Briefly he had loomed over her.

  He was not her type at all, not by any stretch of the imagination—and yet she had been moved to reply. “Take care” was what he’d written in closing, and though every rational part of her knew that this farewell was, if not electronically generated, then at least his go-to phrase when signing off in casual correspondence, Julia couldn’t help but feel that there was a hidden message for her in the words he had chosen, as if he had perceived, and was tactfully acknowledging, that she might be in need of some care. So it seemed reasonable to answer, “Thank you for your kind message,” and somehow just the typing of that one word, kind, released the series of sentences that followed, which began lightly enough, with a humorous account of the delays she had faced when flying home from the conference, but then made a sort of unexpected but lyrical turn toward the prospect of another long winter, the ineffectiveness of Lexapro, and the pain of watching one’s only child struggle socially at school. Off it went, off into the ether, and a several-day silence had followed, long enough that she thought for certain she would never hear from him again, an idea that didn’t really bother her once she realized that simply the act of writing those sentences down had helped her, and that maybe she should just start keeping a journal like everybody suggests, or at least consider combining some talk therapy with the medication, when bam! There in her in-box one overcast morning: the most wonderful, wonderful reply.

  The sound of the garage door churning open caused us to drop our knives and circle helplessly around the kitchen, but Julia, pausing, promised us that Sunny already knew about the radiologist. “I’m committed to being transparent,” she said. “And nothing has actually happened. I haven’t even seen him since the conference, which is strange to realize. But I feel like something might happen. Soonish.” She said it ominously, and all of a sudden looked as if she might cry again. “I just wanted to keep you updated. The thought of telling you guys was almost worse than telling Sunny.” She tore a paper towel from the roll and swabbed her eyes while we tried to keep our faces still. We wished that the children would appear, demanding snacks and a different show. What were we to do with this information, except pretend that we hadn’t received it? Sunny, smiling, came inside with the cumin, cheerfully unaware that we’d had this talk, and what a relief it was when Henry pulled his groin on the slopes the next day and we had to head home early.

  Back in South Pasadena, under the safety of our own duvet, the conversation turned inevitably to Julia and Sunny. And now this new person, this Robert. A radiologist, of all things. It was impossible to conceive of the attraction, despite his size and his flair with email. The simple fact was that no one could compare to Sunny, who was sensitive without being spineless, capable but not controlling, funny, affectionate, generous, a highly respected doctor, a hands-on parent, and still so staggeringly handsome. He was aging better than the rest of us. True, they had landed in a city that was a bit off the beaten path, it was hard to get direct flights, the school options weren’t terrific, he had persuaded her, for Coco’s sake, to adopt a small hypoallergenic dog that she hadn’t wanted, her father was showing signs of dementia—but still, on balance, in fact by all imaginable measures, her life was good. Wasn’t it? We sank into bemused silence for a moment, and then got sidetracked by a disagreement over who had made the greater professional sacrifices for the other, Sunny or Julia, and in a fit of sulkiness stopped talking, only to wake up in the middle of the night to have intense, heartbroken sex that resulted in our sleeping through the alarm the next morning and Henry’s being late to Chinese school.

  A phone call from Julia soon followed. “My mom wants Coco to stay with her over the summer. And though my initial response was to say no, now I’m thinking it could be good for both of them.” She was calling from the car, on her way home from the hospital. “Coco can be an uplifting presence when she wants to be. Even if she’s not, just her being there will keep Mom from dwelling and, you know, fixating. She was always a worrier but it’s gotten so much worse with my dad.” The ticking of a turn signal punctuated the roar in the background. “The great thing is it’ll be a chance for Coco to train with my old swim coach. And she’s never ready to come home when we visit. She always wants to stay longer. I think she’s kind of starved for an environment that isn’t dominated by freeways and Chipotles. A place where you can walk to the corner drugstore.” Julia’s parents live for most of the year in Rhode Island, in one of those flat-faced colonial houses that stand a little too close to the road. “Does it sound like I’m rationalizing? I’m really not. I really think this will be beneficial for everyone. It’s an adventure for Coco, and it gives us a little space. A little room to breathe. Do you realize that Sunny and I have not taken a single vacation without her since the day she was born? I know—you’re the same as us. I don’t need to tell you. And I know it seems easier with just the one to bring them everywhere, especially when they’re this age and they’re good travelers, but it’s actually not easier in the end, it takes its toll, and we have to remember how important it is, to have time alone as adults—” A getaway! Just the two of them and their swimsuits. It was exactly what they needed. The Azores, or Cambodia…“Well, what I meant was time alone alone, not together alone,” she said gently. “Sunny has signed up for a cruise, believe it or not, because he’s short on his CME credits. Then he’ll stay on in Alaska for a few weeks to see the fjords and do some camping. You know how he gets about Grizzly Man. It’s still his favorite.” And what would she do? All by herself? With that long, luxurious stretch of unencumbered time? It felt dangerous to ask. “O
h, I’m staying put. Cranking up the air as high as I want and working some extra weekends. Someone has to be here with Peaches.”

  There was no mention of Robert. And no mention, conspicuously, of the lake house. Months later, in a semiapologetic text, it was confirmed that we wouldn’t be gathering there in July. But we have managed to get together with Julia twice this year: first at a Houston’s off the 405 in Irvine, roughly equidistant between San Diego and our house, and the second time, also in Orange County oddly enough, for a long, hot, glazed-over day at Disneyland with the kids.

  We should acknowledge that Robert ended up not being as bad as we were prepared to think he would be. The meeting up at Houston’s had been his idea, according to Julia, and as we drove south we couldn’t decide whether this choice was considerate on his part, our drive being ten minutes shorter than theirs, or whether it implied a sort of finicky exactness, an insistence on making everything “fair” instead of just sucking it up and driving to South Pasadena as Julia had most likely wanted. Then again, maybe Robert’s plan suggested depths of sensitivity that we hadn’t expected, allowing him to intuit that we weren’t yet ready to have him hanging out at our house, his very presence polluting the home in which Sunny had cooked countless pots of dal and relinquished so many hands of Hearts. And the fact is, we were not ready, not at all. Which was nice of Robert to anticipate.