The Prize (9 page)

He looked into her eyes and nodded his head and smiled. “I never told Holly about Tess. I don't know why.”

“You really do need to see a shrink,” she said.

A man in a business suit approached the woman with the thin eyebrows at her table. He sat down, ordered a cocktail and another for her, and after their drink they both rose and climbed the winding, golden brocade staircase to the upper lobby of the hotel. Edward's eyes met Julia's. He paid the bill and they left.

The cool air summoned both of them out of their interiors, and as they walked, their bodies occasionally brushing against each other, he felt remarkably unburdened. They strolled slowly, staring up at the buildings, stopping at a fountain, looking into shop windows, as if to prolong the evening.

At the hotel desk they procured their individual keys and rode the elevator without speaking. Edward walked Julia to her room and they lingered in the dim doorway a minute and discussed the coming morning, the airport, returning home. He wasn't quite ready to leave. He placed his hand against the doorframe next to her. He moved close and then stopped and looked into her eyes deeply and she returned the look. “I guess it's time,” Julia said, to fill the awkwardness. She reached up and kissed him on the cheek. He felt for her hand and took it in his and he was glad she didn't mind that he held it. “Well, I guess it's time,” she said again. She slipped the key in the lock, turned to say good night, and before she went into her room, she stopped and turned back. “I like what
you said about friendship. You know, C.S. Lewis. About it adding value to survival.”

“Does that mean I'll see you in New York?” Edward asked.

She nodded.

“Safe flight,” he said, before she closed the door.

H
E TURNED ON
the light in his hotel room, walked past the mirror on the wall toward the bathroom, and stopped. He saw his own image and smiled at himself, first with pleasure, but then unease filled him and heat traveled up his neck. In all the years he'd been with Holly he'd never felt drawn to another woman. He kept thinking of Julia's vulnerable eyes behind her glasses, and the way she scrunched up her eyebrows when something troubled her, her soft lips. He listened to the fan churning the air above him and the squeak of the metal frame of the bed when he turned on the mattress. He tried to put Julia out of his mind but bits and pieces of their conversation came to him. Even when he tried not to think of her, her scent and sound were with him. He awoke once in the middle of the night, unsure where he was, and panic filled him until he remembered.

7 NEW YORK

H
IS FATHER HAD
arranged an interview with a trustee of Amherst, an old friend from graduate school, to whom, because he hadn't done well on the SATs, Edward attributed his college acceptance and the lingering sense that he was a fraud and with it the feeling that forever followed him—that he wasn't deserving and intellectually equal to his peers. All summer before his freshman year, his father in and out of hospitals, he didn't think he'd talked to anyone other than his parents. The last few days in August, his mother packed up his trunk and duffel while he sat on the bed in denial that he was leaving. He told her he'd defer for a year and help take care of his father, but she insisted he go. On the Greyhound bus, nauseated from the smell of gasoline fumes, he pressed his face against the window and watched New Haven fade into the distance. A gray bird soared skyward and a weight lifted off his chest, and for a few moments he experienced a flicker of happiness until guilt took hold.

His first few weeks at Amherst, he couldn't remember how to make conversation. His roommate, a stubby kicker from Minnesota, was either at practice or at the frat. They had nothing in common. When his roommate was out, Edward spent painful hours propped against the cement wall on his narrow bed feeling unsure of himself, afraid to come out of the dorm room for fear of bumping into another
student and having nothing to say. To calm himself, he sometimes thought of his sexy English professor and jerked off. Alone in his room, an image came to him of his father lying lifeless on his bed miles away in New Haven, the glare from the light turning him into his pillow. The man who quoted lines from Keats and Wordsworth, threw a football with him in the backyard, read his English papers zealously correcting his grammar, had all but vanished. Edward went to the gym and kicked soccer balls against the wall.

He met Tess in his art history class the second semester of his junior year. Occasionally he turned to look at her seated at the end of the row, wearing a snug Amherst T-shirt over her small chest, her hair in a high ponytail, and she returned his stare. He was impressed by how poised she looked in the lecture hall, while many of the other students were slumped in their seats, falling asleep. Sometimes he saw her in the library in one of the carrels by the window. Once she caught his eye, looked up, and smiled. Nothing was ever said between them, but he found himself remembering her when he was walking home from the library at night or after soccer practice or right before he fell asleep. In his memory he could make out the darkness of her brown eyes and her very white skin, and the way she moved her head up and down taking notes, and knew that she was extraordinary. But more profound was her voice, warm and alive and stirring with emotion when she raised her hand in class and spoke about the hues in Vermeer's work or Rembrandt's empathy. He mentioned her name to his buddy Chris Blake, trying to find out something about her. He'd heard that Chris and Tess had gone to the same high school in Michigan. “Her mom died from breast cancer when she was a kid. You didn't know?” Edward didn't, and knowing it moved him. He tried to find her in the library
during study hall the next day, but once he saw her in the wooden carrel, underlining passages in a book, stroking her finger back and forth across her lips in concentration, he walked away. He spent his days going from class to the cafeteria to soccer practice, and his evenings shut in his dorm room getting stoned, listening to music, locked in a deeper interior fog of her. And then one day, when they were looking at slides in the auditorium, Tess leaned over in the darkness and asked his name. After class he walked her back to the house she shared with four roommates, and on Saturdays they met in the library to study and that became their routine. Afraid to make a move out of fear of being rebuffed, he resigned himself to their becoming close friends.

Shortly after he received the phone call from his mother about his father's death, dividing his life into before and after—she told him the details softly . . .
when I came down in the morning the pill-box for the week was empty
—he went to find Tess and she hugged him and said she'd drive him to New Haven for the funeral. In the front seat with his fists clenched, he stared out the windshield smudged with bird droppings watching cars race past, aware his future had remarkably changed.
His father gone? His mother a widow?
Anxious thoughts paralyzed him. Tess popped in a cassette; she'd been listening to
War and Peace
for her lit class. “Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy.” Anthony Hopkins narrating Tolstoy resounded from the speaker of her Honda Civic as they traveled the highway.

Once home, he went to his parents' bedroom. On the nightstand beside his father's side of the bed sat a half-empty glass of
water and his father's reading glasses. His father had always put a glass of water beside his bed before he went to sleep. The sight of it made him break down.

At the funeral service, the dean of his father's department gave a eulogy praising Harold Darby's dedication, precision, and intellect, quoting from his books and reviews. One of his students, a heroin addict in recovery, approached the podium and talked about how Professor Darby had saved his life by turning him on to literature and offering him a window into the dark and contradictory nature of the soul. John Kincaid, his father's closest colleague, took the podium and read from his father's book on Keats and immortality. His parents were close with the Kincaids. Their daughter, Violet, with a wild head of frizzy hair she tried unsuccessfully to tame into a braid down her back, was a year younger than Edward and growing up the families had shared dinners and vacations together. Kincaid spoke about how all of Harold's work was an attempt to understand existence and how he believed that art was the threshold of truth, offering the possibility of transcendence.

“He could not accept that the most trivial, transient of infatuations and associations lack any real cause. Through veils and layers he tried to document every thought, every action as if we human beings understand what we do and every action has a cause, and that the same is true of feelings that go deeper. Through literature and poetry he attempted to understand the contradictory nature of the human soul. He believed there had to be an underlying cause or reason for two people to be drawn together and that this union offered the possibility for self-knowledge, even transcendence.
Writing at once tortured and compelled him—he could not live with uncertainty and embrace the mysteries he couldn't fully grasp.”

Kincaid choked up and then continued. “Harold couldn't live in the same world as the rest of us, because he could not succumb to the beliefs to which the rest of us conform. In that sense Harold Darby was an aesthete of the highest order.” He concluded by quoting lines from Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” saying that Harry had lived by these words, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” choking up again before taking his seat.

Another colleague, Margery Greer, spoke about how Harold believed, like Keats, that the only way to attain immortality, to lead a life that held meaning, was to create something lasting, and that indeed Darby's work would last. She closed by saying that it was unfortunate that he had gotten ill before being able to finish his current project, that she'd read drafts of it and believed it to be his most brilliant and compelling.

Edward sat stiffly in the church pew, a crick in his neck, rubbing his stinging eyes with his sleeve, Tess on one side of him stroking his arm, his mother on the other, regretting as he listened to his father being eulogized that he had not fully acknowledged the great man's accomplishments. Why hadn't he taken the time to read his father's books? To talk more about his ideas when they took walks together? His father's early death signaled to him that he, too, must find meaning in his life and seek divine truth outside the here and now.

On the ride back to Amherst Tess said, “I'm here for you,” and took his hand.

“I don't know how I'm supposed to feel,” he shared.

“Why would you,” Tess said, and he felt his throat close up. His mother put the house on the market and moved to New Horizons, a retirement community where Bev, her old friend from college, lived. She boxed up his father's study, including his books and papers, and they resided in a storage bin in a remote area of New Haven until, years later, Edward obtained them.

Edward felt like one of the alabaster statues of
The Mourners
, as if he were wrapped in one of their dark hoods. Rembrandt's
Sheet of Studies with a Woman Lying Ill in Bed
, Munch's
Death in the Sickroom
, Picasso's
The Weeping Woman
, paintings he had studied in art history, he saw with a new and personal meaning. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Edward said to himself, unable to quite penetrate the phrase's meaning but repeating it anyway.

He spent his waking hours outside class in the art studio, where he attempted to make dark and mercurial (and not completely successful) paintings to express his sadness, and strange collages made out of found objects, and afterward he'd find Tess at the library. He pulled a chair next to her, bleary-eyed from the studio, until she finished, not wanting to return to the house without her. Tess rented foreign films for them to watch at night, and together they witnessed complex and historic moments played out in small domestic scenes and made popcorn in the microwave, listening to the pop, pop, pop of the kernels until it was done. Her presence calmed him. One night they got stoned together, fell into a tranquil, narcotic-laden sleep in her bed, and, as if bringing to life unconscious wishes, upon awakening they moved toward each other, and Edward reached over and kissed her, and then slowly moved on top of her, relieved she did not push him away. They made love two or three times that morning and throughout the day, only getting
out of bed to get a glass of water, and later he went in the kitchen and made them orange juice from a frozen container. From that day forward they never slept apart. All of a sudden it hit him, how much he was in love with her.

He grew to depend on the smell of her hair and the outline of her cheek resting against his nose when he awoke in the morning. He was suddenly drawn to her, wanting her constantly. She was all he could think about. After class they met in dark, unused lecture halls to study and wound up having sex behind the podium or met at the football stadium where they planned to eat a picnic lunch and had sex behind the bleachers. Why? When they could go back to her room at her house, or to his dorm room that looked like a prison cell? Because somehow the urge overtook them the minute they met. Maybe Kincaid was right: there was no apparent cause for one's attraction or feelings for another person, no knowing when they might be unleashed. When the housemates were gone, Tess rhapsodically traipsed through the living room wearing T-shirts and bikini underwear that revealed curls of her pubic hair, humming to Phoebe Snow on the stereo. Sometimes he grabbed her thigh when she walked by and she came over and sat on his lap. He liked the sounds she made when he made her come, and the way she stroked her fingers underneath the hairline on his neck when she held him. He liked how sure she was of herself. How damn sure.