The Prize Read online

  Days later, recognizing the Michigan area code on the caller ID at the gallery, he answered the phone in a quick rush of excitement and relief. It was her father. Tess had been out jogging and got sideswiped by a truck and was instantly killed. After he got off the phone he stood up and then sat back down. He was trembling. For minutes his mind spun. He left the gallery and went back to their apartment with the strange expectation that she’d be there waiting for him, and upon seeing in the kitchen the two empty café chairs they’d bought at an antique fair, he vomited in the sink. He found a clump of her long hair still in the shower drain. He planned to go to her funeral, but at the airport he couldn’t bring himself to get on the flight. He called Mr. Thompson and told him that he’d come out and spend a few days with him once he got his feet back on the ground but he couldn’t face the funeral. He took long subway rides to parts of the city he’d never been to before. There was something about the motion and anonymity of the train that seemed to settle him, or allow his thoughts to wander. He ended up in Queens or somewhere in the Bronx and then got back on a train and went home. He found their wedding license in the utensil drawer in an envelope and stared at it. At twenty-three he was technically a widower. He put the ring in its neat velvet box alongside it in the drawer. He kept making plane reservations for a trip to Michigan to see Mr. Thompson and then at the last minute canceled them. He began work on an intricate collage from bits and pieces of Tess’s possessions—letters and little notes she’d written to him, photos of the two of them, materials like buttons and trim from some of her clothes. He made one collage after the other, the smell of the shellac made him a little high and while he worked it was as if Tess was with him. He sent one of the collages to Mr. Thompson as a gift along with the boxes he had packed of Tess’s things.

  Weekends alone on the couch in front of the TV for hours, he popped sleeves of Fig Newtons. Monday mornings he found it challenging to get out of bed. Once he called in sick for a week. What difference did it make? He lay in bed and conjured her, not wanting to get up, or let her go. He thought about days they spent together, and if he closed his eyes and shut the blinds it was as if she were still in bed next to him. Days passed, weeks during which he seemed to be sleepwalking. Everything in life seemed random and without meaning. His life had been reordered in a way he didn’t understand. Outside it was so hot he could barely breathe. August in New York. Everything was suffocating. Things she’d said—he didn’t make her feel special—haunted him. He replayed their last few arguments wishing he could change the outcome. On the street he thought he saw her from a distance, the way we do when someone is on our minds, her ponytail bouncing when she walked, and his heart quickened before he realized it wasn’t her. In a lull at work he thought of calling her, forgetting. Memories of her twisted inside him like a strange root, sprouting their own inexorable branches and fibers. He missed her so much his lungs hurt. Her memory, along with the force of his longing, became a dark icy lake in his consciousness where he submerged his emotions, frozen and safe.

  8 CONNECTICUT

  ON THE PLANE Berlin was fading behind him, but still he carried the wide, beautiful streets and buildings, the walk by the river in Hamburg, the opulent hotels. He thought of the fragrance that came off Julia’s clothes, her heavily lashed blue eyes, and the way she took off her glasses once they sat down for drinks, as if she needed him to see her more closely.

  After landing, clearing immigration, and collecting his luggage, he found himself in the backseat of a town car with yet another stranger, this one a very friendly and elegant man wearing a business suit. His anxieties rushed him. He thought about Holly and Annabel at home.

  It was after five by then, dark when the driver pulled up his driveway. The sun had tucked itself away so that all he could make out was wet piles of leaves and the skeletal shape of branches in the headlights. It was still cool, not quite cold, and, though it wasn’t winter yet, the autumn left him with a sensation of sadness and regret. There were no lights on in the house. Why? He was sure he’d told Holly what time he was getting in. He signed the voucher and waited for the driver to deposit his roll-on luggage on the wet drive.

  “I’ll take it from here,” Edward said to the driver. Twenty years of taking the train back and forth from Manhattan to Westport, so he could own the white farmhouse for which he still paid monthly mortgage payments, meaning that in reality the house was only partially his. The house and a few thousand dollars in the stock market, and the shares he owned in the gallery, and whatever was in his 401(k)—this was what the last twenty years had amounted to?

  As he inserted his key, still groggy from the flight, everything felt strangely foreign. He had loved coming home to Annabel in her playpen when she was little, lying on her back, her feet in the air, enchanted by her toes, and Holly in another room talking on the phone to one of the volunteers at the refuge or out in the garden returning to him with dirt underneath her fingernails and smudged on her face. He liked coming home to the smell of baked chicken or a hearty sauce cooking, and the anticipation of making a fire in the living room, where he and Holly ended the evening with another glass of wine. He liked to check in on Annabel in her room with the pink-and-white polka dot wallpaper that Holly had carefully picked out once she discovered she was having a girl, to make sure she was asleep on her back, because they’d heard that you should never let a baby sleep on her stomach. Annabel’s childhood could be mapped out and charted in every room in the house. The rug they’d bought for the living room when she was just an infant, learning to crawl, because Edward was worried she’d topple over and hit her head on the wood floor. Or the coffee table, purchased for its height, so that their daughter could learn to pull herself up by it. Or that little china figurine, a ballet dancer, on the bookshelf in the den, which they’d given to her for her fourth birthday, when she’d just started taking ballet.

  In those early years when Edward opened the door after a long day in the city he thought only of making love to his wife, this person who seemed so sure of herself, who had been born into privilege and felt guilty for it, who possessed a love and gentleness and sixth sense for creatures great and small, marveling that this woman, who loved taking a long walk with the dogs at her heels and found sustenance in the shades of color in a sky, had chosen him.

  Getting remarried had thrust him back into life. They’d been happy in those early years. He liked how she pressed against him when they stood together at cocktail parties, or the way she slipped her hand into his arm, or the look of her as she entered a room. Or the way she had of describing the tenderness of a sheepdog she’d rescued off the road. He liked the wildness in her eyes.

  When Annabel was born his devotion to Holly deepened. He could never get over how she had carried his child inside her, and given birth to someone for whom he felt the deepest love. It seemed to him that he had little to do with her accomplishment and he felt profoundly obligated to her for giving him a prize he didn’t feel he deserved.

  He liked taking long walks with her and the dogs and Annabel in her stroller on a Sunday, and then later in the afternoon making love on their bed with the cool breeze coming through the window. He wanted Holly to know how she grounded him and gave him a reason for living, but he never knew how to tell her. The years passed and he grew to accept that she wasn’t going to leave or tire of him. She wasn’t the kind of woman who needed him to articulate in words what she meant to him, she did not expect him to be a poet; it would undermine what they had. But in the last few years something had shifted. After dinner Holly withdrew to the den to read one of her obscure magazines or journals—the latest was called Horse Husbandry—and he wandered upstairs to work. They moved around the house as if on their own private vessels.

  On the evening he returned home from Berlin, things felt different. The key no longer turned with ease, he had to jiggle it, just a little, and then turn it again before the door swung open, and this time there was no smell of a home-cooked meal to overpower
him. It was completely dark inside and the only beings that greeted him were Simon and Trudy, their dogs.

  He climbed the stairs with his suitcase, the creak on the wooden steps breaking the quiet, dumped his dirty clothes from his suitcase into the hamper, let out of the luggage bag the suit he’d worn his last night in Berlin—he smelled the lingering scent of Julia’s perfume in the fabric and for a moment thought of her. There was something about her; he couldn’t quite name it, exactly. He stamped the suit into the bottom of the dry cleaner bag along with his shirts and pulled the drawstring. He’d drop it off on his way to work in the morning. He showered, changed into a pair of weekend khakis and a sweatshirt, and went downstairs, slowly readjusting to the nuances of being home. Everything around him looked a little dull and colorless without Holly and Annabel.

  He’d gotten in late on Saturday afternoon. Holly had left him a note pinned to the refrigerator saying they’d gone to the coffee shop for dinner and then to the barn to see the new pony that had been born a few days ago.

  “YOU’RE HOME,” HOLLY said when she opened the door a few hours later and entered the kitchen with Annabel.

  “Hi, Daddy.” Annabel stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. “How was Berlin? You were in Berlin, right?”

  “Yes, Bell. Berlin.”

  “Did you get dinner?” Holly said, kissing him quickly on the lips. He smelled the pungent and familiar odor of horsehair.

  A tightness passed across his face. Now that they’d returned, he found it difficult to get past the fact that they had not been at home waiting for him.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I thought we’d have dinner together. I was looking forward to it.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what time your flight got in. I’ve been preoccupied with Daddy. And Annabel wanted to see the new pony.” Immediately he was sorry. He had forgotten about Holly’s father.

  “How’s your father?” Edward asked.

  “The same,” Holly said.

  “Why don’t we go into the city tomorrow and see them,” Edward said.

  “We’ll see. Bell and I went in to see them yesterday.” It hadn’t occurred to him until they walked through the door that Holly and Annabel might prefer his absence. They had their own routine. When they weren’t at the barn, they liked splurging on manicures or going for tea at one of the fancy Manhattan hotels. He remembered how the air in his house would clear when his mother left for her bridge group. He and his father watched a James Bond film together—his father had a passion for what he called Bond’s “magisterial elegance”—or they’d toss a football in the backyard. Sometimes he wondered what he and Annabel would have to talk about a year or two from now. Annabel liked getting dessert at the cafeteria after a tour around a well-chosen gallery, so he could still persuade her to join him. Every now and then he had wished they’d tried harder to have another child.

  “It’s fine about dinner. I made a sandwich.”

  After Annabel hung up her coat she had gone racing upstairs to her room.

  “I can barely keep my eyes open,” Holly said, and started for the staircase. “Are you coming to bed?”

  “I’ll be up soon. You holding up okay, Hol? You look tired.”

  “I have to be.” Holly yawned. His eyes moved to the tender skin above her throat. He reached toward her but she continued climbing the stairs. “We’ll catch up tomorrow,” she said, covering another yawn with her hand. “I’m glad you’re home.”

  He lolled into the kitchen, poured himself a glass of scotch, and climbed the stairs to his third-floor study. They had procured an antique walnut desk and a Victorian velvet couch at an estate sale to furnish it after they bought the house. Edward took his father’s library out of storage, alphabetized his books, and shelved them in the study. He hung his father’s paintings on the wall. The attic room with its low ceiling and wood-paneled walls reminded him that his father was metaphysically present. He’d been working on an essay for a catalogue raisonné for one of the gallery’s artists and he thought he’d try to polish it, but couldn’t concentrate. He looked for the copy of Keats’s poetry his father had given him, remembering Julia’s wish to read the odes. He thought about what John Kincaid had said at his father’s funeral: his father believed that in union with a kindred spirit one might find the divine. Keats wrote the odes in a sort of winter of eternal youth (he died at age twenty-five). He opened the dusty pages that smelled like mothballs and dust, and, enveloped in unexpected sorrow, put the book down.

  He uncapped a bottle of scotch from his desk drawer and poured another inch into his glass. He liked how his body relaxed and his mind drifted when he drank it.

  He settled into his chair and turned on the desk lamp. Next to the desk, on the sill, two or three dead flies were curled in the corner, and another, nearly half-dead, buzzed limply against the glass. It raged and then quieted and then resumed buzzing and flinging itself against the window. A strange feeling of deadness engulfed him. He swatted the fly with his hand and it fell to the sill with the others. He swirled the dark liquid in his glass, took a sip, and winced from the whiskey’s hot burn in his throat. He turned on his computer and logged into his e-mail account. There were ninety-two unread messages awaiting him. He took from his wallet the stack of business cards he’d accumulated in Germany and went through them. On one he’d scribbled Julia’s e-mail address. He held the card in his hand. The air in the warm room felt confining. He cracked open the window, letting in the cold, damp air. His mind drifted to her lovely smile and warm eyes.

  How are you? How was your flight? He hit the Send button without recognizing that in writing to her he was taking a step back from his life as he knew it and into the unknown future, for one cannot embark upon the new without giving up something in return.

  9 NEW YORK

  NEARLY TWO DECADES earlier, when he’d first started out, Edward ordered a cocktail from a young artist slumming as a bartender. Having heard he was an up-and-coming gallerist at Gertrude Silverman, the bartender asked if Edward would visit his studio. Edward liked the guy, Josh Swartzman, shaggy hair and muscular arms underneath a black tee, from a Jewish background in Queens, son of a worker at a failing button factory. Though Edward rarely made commitments on a first viewing, he was knocked out. Bold and expressive, the work revolutionized a technique in which Swartzman used different-sized buttons from his dad’s factory and applied them in patterns to form an image, the way Seurat’s work was made from dots. It celebrated the integrity of the working class and confirmed Edward’s conviction that it was possible to turn materials into something as transparent as life itself. In the faces of the workers he saw there was illumination behind death, that memory could be objectified. Edward snapped him up immediately. It was his first major find.

  Swartzman’s unusual working-class background got him a big feature in the Times and the work flew off the walls. If a painting sold, or he scored an institutional sale, he felt weirdly as if he were still doing it for Tess. He had dreams where she was sitting at their kitchen table waiting for him. In the dream her cheeks were rosy and wisps of hair came loose from her ponytail, the way she looked after she came back from a run around the reservoir. There were strange moments in the dream when he was trying to enter the room to see her, but somehow couldn’t move closer, like he was out at sea and the waves kept pushing him back. When he awoke it was as if she was there beside him.

  After she died he walked through his days as if living behind a veil, and then, unable to stand himself, he threw himself into his work. It was the only time he felt free of his sadness. He told himself that Tess would want him to make something of himself—she was always in his thoughts, a second consciousness. He conversed, mused, read, wrote, thought, obsessed, and fantasized about art—breakfast, lunch, dinner with collectors, artists, gallerists—evenings pounding back shots at their favorite corner bar on Cornelia Street with pals from the gallery, so that he felt like his life was one long
arduous effort to prove there was a reason to go on living. After Tess died he was attracted to work that spoke to the fragility of the human condition and grew obsessed with the randomness of existence. He began to get a reputation at the gallery for being way too serious.

  EACH MORNING HOLLY Moore, the gallery’s full-time receptionist, greeted him with a wide and buoyant smile and cheery welcome. It annoyed him to see happiness incarnate at nine thirty every morning. Pretty and always dressed in a crisp white blouse and slim black skirt or pants, hers was the perfect face for the gallery. Once walking in after a somber weekend, he heard her laughing on the phone—a clear, effervescent laugh unencumbered, almost like a trill. He felt a sudden pang. Why is she so happy? Walking home, he noticed that little grass blades had come up in the park, and stubborn shoots of daffodils sprang forth as if thrusting themselves up from the darkness of the earth. He thought about her laugh. Another time when he walked into the gallery, thinking about an unpleasant conversation he’d had with a collector, she traced her lips with her index fingers in the shape of a smile. “Life can’t be that bad,” she said. “Is your girlfriend giving you trouble?”