The Prize (28 page)

Uncomfortable, he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, listening to the rain tap on the roof. Had Annabel intuited something different about him? Did Holly know? He thought about his own parents and their troubled marriage, and how he had often felt that his role was to make them happy to compensate. The thought made him want to protect his daughter. He'd been absorbed in the gallery, in Agnes, and Julia. His dishonor was spilling into all of them.
He looked at the clock again. Three in the morning. After an hour or two he crawled out of bed and tiptoed upstairs to his study. As he fell asleep the sun was rising.

Annabel came downstairs close to noon, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing a long nightshirt. She looked pale. Holly and Edward were reading the paper and drinking coffee in the kitchen, waiting for her to get up before starting their ritual of Sunday brunch.

“Can I get you a margarita?” Edward said.

“Thanks, Dad.” Annabel rolled her eyes and then slumped down in a chair.

He rose to make them eggs. He turned on the grill and put in a slab of butter and the skillet sizzled and then he cracked open the eggs and watched them spread into the pan. He turned his head around to look at his wife and daughter.

A
FTER BRUNCH HE
went upstairs to shower and change. One of his artists, Jake Carter, was in town. He dreaded setting foot in the gallery now that Agnes had left him and Savan had stepped in. He'd have to keep his head down, grin and bear it, and avoid Savan at all costs. After his shower, he dressed and grabbed his briefcase and reluctantly proceeded outside to his car. Holly was in the garden with a large shovel in her hand. She'd hacked down the half-eaten dried-out pine trees; they were stacked in a pile like a heap of dead bodies. She wore a blue bandanna tied around her head, gardening gloves, and jeans, her cheeks and the tip of her nose red from the cold.

“Jesus, Holly. What are you doing?”

“I couldn't bear seeing them anymore. We didn't take care of them. We should have . . .” Her face looked tense.

“Holly, it's the deer.” The early afternoon sun flooded the frozen lawn and then a cloud passed over the sun and the garden darkened. “I'll see you tonight. I'm late for the train.” He kissed her on the cheek. “Annabel's fine. Everything will be,” he said, his betrayal lurking like an outsider at the edge of the lawn. The pebbles from the driveway shifted underneath his feet as he walked to his car.

“Edward,” Holly called out.

He peered back.

“I don't want you sleeping in your study anymore. We have to be different.” She gazed toward the empty spokes of the hydrangeas in the garden, bare and exposed, and then back at him with a look that made his heart catch.

3 NEW YORK

H
E SAT UNCOMFORTABLY
in the leather chair across from Clara, unable to meet her eyes. Three weeks had passed since London. He hadn't spoken to Julia since the airport, after he landed in New York. He didn't know what he wanted or didn't want to happen between them and was relieved that Julia was in Vienna working on a commission. His mind darted like a skee ball from Julia, to Agnes, and then to his wife and daughter.

“What is it?” Clara said. “Where are you?”

He looked into Clara's clear eyes behind wire rims and told her about Tess.

He felt as if he couldn't breathe and loosened his collar and broke down. He wasn't a man who cried often.

“Do you think your wife would love you any less if you told her what you've suffered?”

“I'm not sure. We were young. Tess and me.”

“Of course you were,” Clara said.

He broke again. Clara leaned in closer. He looked down at the kilim rug.

“You're not responsible for Tess's death,” she said, her glasses slipping to the end of her nose. “You don't have that power. No one does. If anyone is at fault it was the driver.”

“You say that. And of course it's the rational thing to say. But if things had been different between us she wouldn't have gone home to Michigan.”

“So you can control how you're supposed to feel toward someone? Not possible. Let me ask you.” She stared at him without shifting her eyes. “Are you doing something now that you don't want Holly to know about?”

He wanted to tell her about Julia. He thought about it for a few moments, but he didn't know what to say or how to put it into words. He'd already said too much. He scanned the faded spines of books by philosophers and psychoanalysts on the bookshelf and wondered what they thought about patients who hid from even their therapists. He was a coward. Maybe all men at the heart were cowards.

He observed other couples they knew in the neighborhood and wondered how much they shared with each other. He preferred keeping certain things about himself private. He couldn't tell Holly everything about himself. He had to keep his equilibrium, to not appear weak in her eyes.

“My parents kept things from each other,” he said, looking at the hanging spider plant on her window, its long, spearlike leaves dangling over the pot.

“Tell me about it,” Clara offered.

“It's not something I can put words to.”

“Do you know you're angry? I'm telling you this because I think it might help you. Not to scare you. To recognize that your suffering is real.”

“Did you think I didn't know it was real?” He tempered an urge to get up from his chair and pull the dead tendrils from the spider plant's head of sprawling hair.

“Let's think about that for our next session,” Clara said, looking at the clock placed strategically on a shelf above his head.

H
E WALKED FROM
Clara's office back to the gallery and told himself to end things with Julia. His family was too precious to risk. Remarkably, when he opened the door to the gallery she was there, sitting in the reception area waiting for him.

“I hope this is okay,” she said, rising, when he greeted her. “I was in the neighborhood. I just got back.”

“It's fine,” he said and led her into his office and closed the door and then turned the blinds. They stood close, looking for a moment long and deep. Julia moved toward him.

“Your tie's crooked,” she said, and adjusted it for him. Tears were in her eyes.

“What's wrong? What's happened?”

She looked shaken and began to talk, something about needing to see him to see whether what actually happened, happened, and whether she had imagined the feeling because she wanted to feel that way again, to feel, and yes, in seeing him she knew it had happened and she apologized for coming without calling because if she called she wondered if she would come at all.

He gazed at her and she leaned forward and suddenly they were kissing. He could not trust his emotions from one moment to the next. It scared him to lose sight of himself. They remained close, their breaths mingled, hardly any room between their bodies.

“Since London I can't stop thinking about you. I know it's wrong, but I thought if we saw each other maybe it would stop. Maybe I wouldn't feel it so intensely.”

He kissed her again, pressing her against the door of his office, wanting her to feel his excitement. The tension of the weeks since he'd been back seemed to fall off of him. They clung to each other and kissed again, his hand on the bare skin between her skirt and blouse, her hands reaching to touch his back and buttocks, her body pressing against him.

His intercom buzzed and, out of breath, they came apart. Georgia said his four o'clock was here. He gazed at Julia, her face flushed, hair out of place, and clothes ruffled and a little undone.
It's all almost like the first time, the very first time, and I'm a man in my forties.
He watched her pulling her blouse down where it had crept up, exposing the full shape of her breasts, and walked toward her again and put his face in her neck.

“I shouldn't have come?” Julia said, in a question. “Is that what you're thinking?”

“No, I'm glad you did.”

“I came to say we shouldn't see each other. That was in my head.”

“We'll figure it out,” he said, because he couldn't lose her.

“I should go now. I need to get back to the studio.”

“We'll talk when our heads are clear,” he said and then took a drink of water from the glass on his desk. He offered the glass to her and she drank a long sip and he watched the way the water drops remained on her lips. She moved toward him and straightened his tie again and before he took her to the reception area, he kissed the drops from her mouth.

4 CONNECTICUT

S
LOWLY SHE CAME
into focus. In the dream he sank into deep pleasure as if it were a warm pool. It had been twenty years since he'd come home to Tess sitting at the breakfast table with her tort law book and notes spread out on the table. She looked bright and beautiful with that glint of irony in her eye and a ponytail on top of her head, wearing her short nylon running shorts and Amherst T-shirt. Just as he relaxed into the pleasure and anticipation of seeing her—it occurred in slow motion, the two of them locking eyes and being slowly drawn together—she faded into the distance.

A shiver went through him. His body was weighted to the bed. He didn't want to get up because if he got up he would lose the chance of finding her. His head was heavy, and his body twisted in a strange paralysis. He tried to lift his head from the pillow, then, slowly, his arms and his legs.

When he awoke again he heard the sound of wheels spinning in the gravel of the driveway. He looked at the clock on his night table. It was ten twenty, Saturday. All quiet. Holly must have let him sleep in and was with Annabel at the barn for her lesson. Once again he tried to raise his head, but it was like lead. Throughout the hours of the morning it was as if he were living inside his deepest and most fearful thoughts, filled with dread and guilt, afraid Holly would find out his secrets. He wondered whether in waking life he
was responsible for his dreams. For months after Tess died he'd reenacted in his mind the weeks before she'd left him, stopping at the point at which she'd gotten angry, holding out some strange hope that he could reverse what had happened and be released from his torment. On the subway he stared incredulously at other commuters who were laughing, or smiling into their newspapers and books. At work he watched his colleagues engaged, Savan making deal after deal, resentful that they could go about their day effortlessly while his life had ended. His world had reordered into a shape and structure that was completely foreign.

At noon, exhausted by his thoughts and memories, he forced himself to get up. He felt sluggish and disoriented. He lifted his upper body and sat up. He brushed the sleep from his eyes and dragged himself to the bathroom. He splashed water on his face and trudged downstairs for coffee. Drinking it, he forgot about his toast, blackened in the toaster. He threw it into the garbage bin and walked slowly through the rooms of his house. He absorbed the auras of Holly and Annabel and the feeling of the three of them together, the way in which when he was a boy he had absorbed the atmosphere of his own family. The house was unbearably quiet.

He climbed upstairs to his study to work, but before he got settled he heard Holly's car come up the driveway, the storm door slam shut, and the sound of her footsteps climbing the stairs. By the time she reached the third floor she was out of breath. The frosty air of winter rose from her down jacket when she entered. He looked at her chapped hands without gloves holding her keys and her hair tucked into her winter hat. There was something
about seeing her that way that made him feel he could confide in her and finally free himself of his terror.
Let yourself be known
, he heard Clara say.

But Holly looked ashen.

“What's wrong?” Edward asked.

“It's Daddy. They've put him back in intensive care. I'm going in to see them.”

“Let me get dressed. I'll come with you.”

“It's better if you stay with Annabel. Marly's dropping her off at four. I'll call from the hospital.”

He couldn't stop himself. He felt he could tell her, that he needed to tell her, that now was the moment. It was as if he thought he was doing her a favor by suddenly coming clean.

“Before you go. Will you sit down for a minute?”

“I don't need to sit. Tell me.”

“I should have told you a long time ago.”

“What is it? You're scaring me.” She leaned against the book-case with the car keys in her hands.

“Remember my college girlfriend. Tess, from Michigan.”

“Yeah.”

“She and I were married.”

“Married?” She shook her head, confused. “This is some kind of joke, right?”

He bowed his head and then looked up. “It's not. I wish it were.”

“What happened?”

“She got sideswiped by a truck when she was jogging. She was killed. We were twenty-two.”

“I don't understand.”

“We were living in New York. We weren't getting along and she packed up her stuff and went back home to Michigan. The accident happened three days later.”