The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  “Can we stop here?” she said. They’d arrived at the lingerie store where, every year, before Christmas—usually at the last minute on Christmas Eve, at the end of one of his eleventh-hour gift-gathering runs—he came to buy her tap pants or a camisole, just as he’d done for his former wife on Christmases in years past. Marina, how was she? Was she still with Jeff?

  “Let’s go in and get you a pair of fishnets,” he said, and they went in—the store was narrow—in single file. Two salesgirls were there to help them. One walked around the counter, toward Stephen, who raised his hands in the air, as if to prevent her from coming too close. Alice could easily be made upset if she thought she saw intimacy springing up between Stephen and another woman, even an attentive shopgirl or waitress, and he had learned to play down these innocent encounters. He announced to the women that he was shopping for his wife, and then put his arm around Alice and pulled her up beside him. “We’ll need a tall size,” he said.

  He charged a pair of black woollen fishnets and two pairs of regular black stockings, and then they crossed the street and detoured off the avenue to look at a window display of men’s suits. He had no need of one, and in fact hadn’t bought one in quite some time, not since the world economy had taken its downturn.

  “Let’s keep moving,” he said. A beautiful jacket in blue worsted wool was making him feel sad over—what? His reduced opportunities in life, probably. “How’re you doing?” he asked Alice. “Are you holding up?” She was leaning against him. Here and there around them, babies, pushed in strollers, came and went.

  “I’m holding up,” she said.

  The problem—the problem—was that he was no longer getting cast in the comic roles that had become, over years of acting in plays and, for a brief spell, on television, his strong suit. Or, no, maybe that wasn’t the root problem. In a way, though, it was, in part because the dropoff in work and income had increased his normal daily load of terror, but also because his heartbreaking difficulties onstage had amplified his sense of himself, of his Self, he should say, as somehow consisting in, or activated by—what was a fitting way to put this?—the willing community made by the laughter of audiences.

  “Will you please let me hold those for you?” he asked, and reached for Alice’s shopping bags, the things he’d bought for her. She backed away from him quickly—had he startled her?—and said, “You’re too slow, man!”

  “You’re right about that,” he said.

  “Come on! You’re not even going to try?”

  “Oh, God. You want me to fight you for the bags?”

  “Yeah. Fight me.”

  “Are you fucking with me right now?” he said, in the snarl of a stock comic-melodrama villain. But this didn’t come out funny—it was far too unhinged-sounding, in tone and in volume—and her smile dropped, and she exclaimed, “Jesus, you don’t need to freak out!”

  She handed over the two purple bags and the one little black one, and they continued up Madison. They stopped for a light, and he asked her, “Are we skipping Barneys?” The entrance to the women’s side of the department store was close by. Around the corner, over near Lexington Avenue, was the apartment of a hooker he’d visited in the nineties. Victoria.

  What he hated about nice clothes was both wanting and not wanting to wear them. He disliked his own conspicuousness to himself, whenever he was out in the world expensively costumed. It was only the pleasure he felt in his tactile awareness of sewing and fabric, of the hands of the maker in the garment, that led him, again and again, to risk the danger of seeing himself—literally; reflected in the mirror of a bar, perhaps—as somehow faintly ridiculous.

  It was an American problem, something that he felt only in America. He should have moved across the ocean when he had the chance, after his divorce from Marina. Though he’d never really had the chance. Where would he have gone? Rome? Berlin? London? How would he have worked? His old Neighborhood Playhouse friend Ned had decamped to the Netherlands some years back—when people still called it Holland—in order, Ned had told Stephen, to follow through on an artistic commitment to experimental performance, of which there always seemed to be so much in northern Europe; but then Stephen had heard through mutual acquaintances that Ned had married a Dutch woman, who’d helped him qualify for some form or other of enlightened state arts support, and that the two of them had taken to spending their days and nights smoking pot with expatriates in Amsterdam coffee shops, which sounded, to Stephen, both awful and wonderful.

  “There’s nothing at Barneys this season. Everything’s got an Empire waist,” Alice was telling him. She said, “That cut makes me feel like a little girl in an Easter dress. A giant little girl.”

  “It’s not my favorite look,” he agreed.

  “It’s all right on some people,” she said, and he finished her thought for her, saying, “But not on you.”

  “Is it my tits? Are my tits too small? Is that the problem?”

  “Take it easy. It’s not your tits. Your tits are great,” he said, and went on, “Those dresses are weird sometimes. You know what I mean? You’re maybe a little too tall for an Empire waist, unless, I guess”—he made shapes with his hands in the air—“unless the skirt is very long.”

  It was how they’d met and fallen in love five years before—her absurd height. Alice and Stephen had been invited to the same dinner party, for which they’d arrived at the same time. They got into the elevator together, and he pressed the button for their friends’ floor, and she said, “That’s me, too, thanks,” and after that the doors closed and they avoided making eye contact, but on the way up they slipped and saw each other in the same instant, and, in the shock of meeting her eyes, he exclaimed, in a whisper, “You’re so tall!” and she blushed, and his face got red, too. Later that night, after they’d both drunk a lot of wine, while their hosts were clearing up, she confessed to him that, in the elevator, he’d uttered aloud her first, fleeting thought whenever she met anyone, which was that she was tall—her noticing of herself being seen, being taken in, was part of her appealing self-consciousness: it was her come-on, and it was working on him—and she’d added that (though Stephen had hardly been the first man to lead with a comment on her height) no one had ever read her mind in quite the way he seemed to have done.

  That Halloween afternoon on Madison Avenue, she sounded mildly manic. “You’re right! You’re right, as always. It’s not a big deal. I’m too tall for an Empire waist. It’s as simple as that! I try it and it doesn’t work, and I try it and it doesn’t work, and I should know better by now, because it’s obvious!”

  They were holding hands again. But he had a strong feeling that she was beginning to sink, that she was anxiously coming to feel and believe that she would somehow never be right. “Let’s get you something to eat,” he said, and she sighed and said, “Yeah, I’m starting to spin.”

  “I can hear it,” he told her.

  “You can?”

  “Your Southern accent is coming out.”

  “I don’t want to be too tall for you,” she cried.

  “You’re not.”

  “I’m a wee bit dizzy.”

  “I’ll hold you,” he said.

  A baby carriage was bearing down on them. He gripped her coat sleeve. On the next block, on the other side of Madison, was a coffee shop. He would have preferred a bar, but the one that he and Alice liked lay many blocks ahead. It wasn’t yet time for drinking, anyway. He guided her off the curb, between two closely parked cars, and directly out into the open avenue—there was a moment, he figured, before the light changed and traffic surged forward—where he maneuvered her diagonally across against the wind that funneled down between the buildings. “We’re almost there, come on,” he called. He heard cars rushing up behind them, and a horn from one blew loudly as he sped her across the final lane, onto the sidewalk, and then ten feet more, to the door of the restaurant.

  He held the door. “In you go,” he said.

  At the booth, he counted out
pills, his anti-depressants and her anti-anxieties—he carried and dispensed for her more often than not, ever since her suicide attempt—and he asked her, “How many do you think will do the trick? One? Two? Do you need two? Honey, can you talk?”

  “Are those ten-milligram?”

  “They are.”

  “Give me two. For now.”

  “Hang on.”

  “You’re scattering them across the table!”

  “Sorry. Sorry.”

  It was true, he’d dumped out a few too many pills, and some had rolled off toward the condiments, the ketchup and the sugar and the salt and pepper shakers and so forth, and he was missing—what was he missing? He had Alice’s portion under control. And there were his pink-and-yellow anti-psychotics. Where had his beta-blockers gone?

  He peered up and saw that Alice’s hair was a mess from the wind. He could see the tension in her face—it always came on so swiftly and visibly. It was her terror of going back into the hospital. Her jaw had clenched; she was grinding her teeth, and the muscles in her neck were taut. “You’re twisted up,” he said, and reached across the table to help her adjust her clothes. Her cotton blouse had been pulled back over one shoulder when she’d taken off her coat, causing the shirt’s brilliant mother-of-pearl buttons to look as if they were about to pop off at the collar.

  He pushed two Valium tablets her way. Then he noticed Dr. Tillman, sitting alone at the counter, at the back of the restaurant.

  The waitress arrived, and Alice said, “I’d like a Coca-Cola and a big piece of chocolate cake, but not the kind with raspberry filling.”

  Stephen said to Alice, “I think I see my former doctor over there,” and Alice asked him rather too loudly if he was ready to order.

  She told him, “You should eat something. If you don’t, you’re going to have a crash, and you’re going to get all angry, and I don’t want to be screamed at by you later on the street.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He rolled his eyes at the waitress and blurted, “Ha, I don’t know what to say to that!” But he felt embarrassed, and conceded to her, to the waitress, that he’d probably better have a muffin.

  “Pumpkin, please,” he added, and abruptly got up and pushed past her and escaped to the rear of the diner, calling, “Dr. Tillman? Dr. Tillman?” But the man didn’t seem to hear him. Stephen came closer and got a better look at his old analyst, hunched over a plate of pancakes. Why was Dr. Tillman alone? Had his wife, whom Stephen had never met or even glimpsed, passed away? Dr. Tillman had to be in his eighties by now; he’d shrunk, of course, and his hair had finally gone fully white. And then Stephen remembered, shockingly, that Dr. Tillman had died six or seven or maybe eight years before. The man in the diner could never have been Dr. Tillman. Stephen marched off to the men’s room, where he sat in a stall and checked his cell phone for text messages from his old friend Claire. Where was she? Had she gone to the country with Peter? He needed to talk to her—he needed her to calm him down—if only for a moment. It was a risky thing to do, with Alice so close by. Alice accepted as fact her suspicion that he and Claire had had an affair, several years back, during the months when Alice was hospitalized. They hadn’t had an affair, actually, though for a while Claire had been important to him as a confidante. He’d fallen in love with her, a little, for her kindness, and, he told himself now, for her soft, deep voice, which always seemed to reassure him. He flushed, buckled, went back to the booth, and, thinking of Dr. Tillman, told Alice that he felt as if he’d seen a genuine ghost, and that he couldn’t imagine how he’d forgotten the death of his psychiatrist of almost fifteen years, and that, although he understood that that time in his life, the time of his analysis with Dr. Tillman, was far in the past—or maybe because of this fact—he felt disoriented, weird.

  “Welcome to the club,” Alice replied. The Valium was doing its work. She already sounded slurry.

  He said, “How’s your chocolate cake?”

  “Better than your muffin.”

  “You ate my muffin?”

  “I didn’t eat your muffin. It’s sitting in front of you on your placemat.”

  “Right you are, there it is,” he admitted.

  He heard the sounds of a football game. Was there a television in the restaurant? It was the weekend of the Nebraska-Colorado game. Was it? Or, no, that game came closer to Thanksgiving.

  “Are you all right?” she asked him.

  He watched her eat. She’d scooped out all the cake and left a shell of frosting on her plate, which she’d saved for last. He watched her lick the icing off the tines of her fork. “Are you?” he asked her.

  “I asked you first.”

  “I’m all right,” he told her.

  “Should I believe you?”

  He picked up her medicine bottle, shook it gently, and dropped it into his sport coat’s inside breast pocket.

  “Are you all right?” he asked once more.

  “I’m fine. I’m eating my lunch.”

  Later, back on the street, they made their way at a kind of wobbling pace uptown, toward the Whitney Museum. The sun was getting low in the sky. He said to her, “Alice, how many did you take?”

  She was leaning hard on his shoulder, like a drunk date. They slowed to gaze at autumn scenery in the shop windows along the way. The first children wearing Halloween costumes had begun to appear on the avenue. Stephen saw a dragon, a skeleton, and several little princesses. He again asked Alice how many pills she’d sneaked while he was in the men’s room.

  “Five?” Her voice sounded like a young girl’s.

  “Five in all? Or five plus the two I gave you?”

  “Five in all. Three more.”

  He shifted her shopping bags from his left hand to his right, and offered her his other shoulder. Supporting her weight, block after block, wasn’t easy, and at Seventy-third Street he insisted that they get in a cab, go straight home, and tuck her into bed for the rest of the day.

  But she simply apologized for letting her anxiety get the better of her. She said that she was also sorry for provoking him, in the restaurant, with her fear that he might yell at her if he didn’t eat properly. She hadn’t meant to shame him. She loved him. She wanted them to have a fantastic time out in the world. That was all that mattered.

  More children, herded by parents and nannies, ran past them, trick-or-treating, hitting the boutiques. The costumes were good. A few—in particular, a spectacular lion suit on a four- or five-year-old boy—looked to have been sewn with care, showing a level of detailing appropriate to durable stage costumes, the sort meant for nightly scrutiny under theatre lights.

  When Stephen was younger, when he was a young actor, working in his costume for the first time—putting it on before the call for the first dress rehearsal—had always been a revelation. This was the case for many actors, certainly. Wearing the garment was an acquisition of—why not say it?—humanity. A Victorian frock coat or a pair of Windsor-style stovepipe trousers or even Depression-era dungarees, worn as a character, could in turn produce character. When Stephen put on a costume, he could feel his whole nervous system, his muscles, and his bones, rearranging themselves to form his character’s body and posture. For instance, the heavy woolen overcoat worn by a foolish servant caused a slump in the shoulders and an itchy stiffness in the neck that might seem to an audience to be the symptoms of a master’s beatings. The drama became palpable through tailoring. Maybe it followed that Stephen’s life seemed to gain grace and substance when he walked at an even pace on a nice street in well-cut pants.

  She wasn’t letting him do this. Both of her arms were wrapped around him. Alice was hugging him tightly from the side, and they’d become like two people in a three-legged race at some county fair or family reunion. Neither of them had much in the way of family. She’d come to the city from North Carolina, as had he. They’d grown up in neighboring valleys in the Smoky Mountains, though he’d left home—he was gone before his eighteenth birthday—before she was even bo
rn. Their somewhat shared origins had, of course, been a crucial factor in their romance. (It wasn’t her body alone that had attracted him, that night at the dinner party; nor had she truly believed, when he spoke to her in the elevator, that he was an actual mind reader.) For the first year or two of their relationship, they’d discussed plans to rent a convertible and drive south together through New Jersey and Delaware and Maryland, continuing around Washington and on through the Shenandoah Valley, in Virginia—there was a nineteenth-century inn near Staunton that he’d read about in a food magazine and wanted to spend a night or two at—and then from there into the southerly regions of the Blue Ridge, where, taking their time, they’d leave the interstate and get on the old two-lane, hairpin-turn state and county roads that would take them up and across the mountains, to home. But they hadn’t done it.

  They hadn’t done it because there was no one there for them. His parents were dead, and he had no aunts or uncles left, either. He had only a sister, who lived in Minnesota. Stephen and his sister had less and less to do with each other these days; and it had been at least a couple of decades since he had heard from, or thought to be in touch with, any of their remaining kin, the more or less distant cousins, who (some of them, at least) were surely still scattered about the countryside around Asheville. Alice’s situation wasn’t much happier. Her father, an alcoholic, had left her mother when Alice was four, and the man whom Alice had grown up calling father had been killed in an automobile accident when she was sixteen. Her mother, in later years, had become one of those people who try new places again and again, endlessly relocating. Currently, she was parked outside Fort Worth. Alice had an unmarried, born-again brother who repaired computers in Sacramento.

  Stephen turned to face her. Adjusting himself wasn’t easy to do; they were pressed together, and his arms were pinned at his sides by her close embrace. Her clothes remained as they’d been in the restaurant, tugged slightly askew, and strands of her hair, caught between their bodies, were pulled when he moved. “Ouch!” she said.