The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (14 page)

“The size of France,” Captain Halvorsen says.

Leaning over, Janet says something to Peter that Maud cannot hear, which makes him laugh. Maud watches as, still laughing, Peter puts his hand on Janet’s forearm and pats it in a gesture of easy camaraderie.

“Can you pass the wine, Philip?” Maud interrupts him.

“Eighty-five percent of the ice in the world is in Antarctica,” Captain Halvorsen says. Then, as an afterthought, he adds, “and six percent of the ice in the world is in Greenland.”

And the rest? The 9 percent? Maud wishes to ask but does not.

For years, as a child, Maud had a recurring dream. A nightmare. In her sleep, she always knew when the nightmare was beginning but she was unable to stop it or wake herself up. The other thing, too, was that Maud could never describe it. The dream had nothing to do with people or monsters or violent situations or anything she might know or recognize. The dream could not be put into words. The closest way she could come to describing it was to say that it was about numbers (even so, that was not quite right as the numbers were not the familiar ones like 8 or 17 or 224); they were something other. (When consulted about the nightmare, the family physician suggested that Maud stop taking math for a while but, at school, math was Maud’s best subject.) The numbers (if in fact they were numbers) in the dream always started out small and manageable—although, again, Maud knew that was temporary, for soon they multiplied and became so large and
unmanageable and incomprehensible that Maud was swept away into a kind of terrible abyss, a kind of black hole full of numbers.

It has been years now since Maud has thought about the dream. Antarctica, the vastness, the ice, the inhospitable landscape, is what she assumes has reminded her of it. When she tries to describe the dream to Peter and mentions the math part, Peter says he knows just what she means.

“You’re in good company, all sorts of people had it. The Greeks, Aristotle, Archimedes, Pascal.”

“The dream?”

“No, what the dream stands for.”

“Which is?” Maud is not sure whether Peter is being serious.

“The terror of the infinite.

“Interestingly, the ancient Greeks did not include zero or infinity in their mathematics,” Peter continues, displaying his fondness for the arcane. “Their word for
infinity
was also their word for
mess.
”

Captain Halvorsen is right. The next morning they see icebergs. The sea is filled with them. Icebergs of all shapes and sizes. Some are as tall as six-story buildings, others remind Maud of modern sculptures and are tinged with blue—a brilliant aquamarine blue. It is also snowing.

Despite the snow, Peter spends the morning on deck with his camera, taking pictures. When Maud joins him, he says, “Have you ever seen anything like those icebergs? Have you ever seen a blue like that?”

“Are you warm enough?” Maud asks. A part of her—a part she dislikes—resents seeing Peter so happy and excited about the icebergs, and she feels excluded. At the same time, she also envies his ability to be so genuinely absorbed and enchanted by nature—at home, Peter is always pointing out large, beautiful trees to her. His appreciation seems pure and unmotivated and Maud wishes she could share it but she is too self-conscious. Too self-referential, she
decides. She cannot look at the stars without wishing for a falling one, or gaze at the sea without thinking “drown.”

Each time the
Caledonia Star
runs into a large ice floe, there is a loud thumping noise, but since the ship’s hull is made of steel, there is no need for concern. Many of the ice floes have penguins and seals on them. When the ship goes by, the penguins, alarmed, dive off like bullets; the seals, indifferent, do not move. Often, blood, looking like paint splashed on a canvas, stains the ice around the seals—the remains of their kill. In addition to fur seals, Maud is told, there are crabeater seals, Ross seals, leopard seals, elephant seals, and the Weddell seals.

“A marine mammal exhales before he dives,” Michael is saying over the public-address speaker in Maud and Peter’s cabin, “and oxygen is stored in his blood, not in his lungs.”

This time, Maud and Peter are making love on one of the bunks.

“Shall I turn him off?” Maud starts to move away.

“No. Stay put.” Peter has an erection.

“Seals collapse their lungs when they dive. Their heart rate drops and their arteries constrict. In fact, everything is shut down—”

Maud half listens.

“Except for the brain, the adrenal, and the placenta—that is, of course, if the seal is pregnant—”

Afterward, still lying pressed together on the little bunk, Maud frees her arm, which has gone to sleep, from under Peter and, as if to make up for her movement which breaks the postcoital spell, she kisses Peter lightly. Also, in spite of herself, she asks, “So what are you going to do with all the photographs you took of icebergs?”

Peter does not answer Maud right away. He shifts his body away from her a little before he says in his British-inflected, nasal voice, “Why enlarge them, naturally.”

…

Instead of going ashore again in the Zodiac with the others, Maud decides to remain on board. Except for the woman in the wheelchair, who appears to be asleep (her eyes are closed and she breathes heavily), Maud is alone in the saloon, and from where she is sitting reading or trying to read her book, she can watch the passengers, dressed in their red parkas, disembark at Port Lockroy, the British station. She watches as they spread out and start to climb the snow-covered hill behind the station. Some of the passengers have brought along ski poles and Maud tries to pick out which red parka belongs to Peter and which belongs to Janet, but the figures are too far away. She thinks again about the woman who tried to hide and again she wonders why. Was the woman suicidal? But freezing to death, Maud also thinks, may not be such a bad way to die. How did the Emily Dickinson poem go? “As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—/ First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—.” In spite of herself, Maud shivers. Then she makes herself open her book. When next she looks up, all the figures in their red parkas have disappeared.

“You didn’t miss anything,” Peter tells Maud when he returns from the station. Nevertheless, he looks animated. “There was a museum that was kind of creepy—an old sled and some frying pans—but Janet bought some postcards.”

“Ah, lovely Janet,” Maud says.

“What do you mean by that?” Peter asks.

“What do you suppose I mean?”

“For God’s sake, Maud, why must you always be suspicious of me? Why do you always attribute some underhanded motive to everything I do?” Peter turns and limps out of the saloon, leaving Maud.

The woman in the wheelchair has woken up; she gives a little embarrassed cough.

The first time, twenty or so years ago, Maud accused Peter of
having an affair, the discussion had turned violent—Maud threw a plate of food at Peter and Peter picked up a glass full of wine and flung it across the table at Maud, shouting, “I can’t live like this!” Then he left home for three days. When finally he returned, he did not say where he had been and Maud did not ask. Nor did they ever again discuss either the fight or the affair. What Maud remembers vividly is her panic. During the time Peter was gone, she could hardly breathe, let alone eat, and she could not sleep. She was assailed by all kinds of conflicting emotions, but the dominant one was fear: the fear that she had driven Peter to some action she would regret and the fear that she would never see him again.

When the
Caledonia Star
crosses the Antarctic Circle, all the passengers crowd onto the bridge to look. The sky is a cloudless blue and the sea calm, but the horizon is a wall of icebergs. Maud recognizes the handsome French first officer up in the crow’s nest, dressed in a bright yellow slicker and waterproof pants. He is reporting back to Captain Halvorsen on the bridge by walkie-talkie. The ship’s chief officer is tracing the ship’s course on a sea chart with a compass and a protractor; on the radar screen, the larger tabular icebergs show up as small luminous points.

Below, on deck, Peter is looking through his binoculars.

“What do you see?” Maud asks, but she cannot hear his answer.

By then, Maud is able to recognize most of the passengers on board the ship, and she knows many of them by name. One flight below their cabin, she has discovered the gym and she exercises regularly on the treadmill. She has also become more tolerant—even of Barbara, the golfer—and has made a few friends. One is the woman in the wheelchair.

“She’s from Philadelphia and she’s already identified five different species of albatross,” Maud tells Peter, “the gray-headed albatross, the sooty albatross, the wandering—”

“What’s wrong with her?” Peter wants to know. “Why is she in a wheelchair?”

Maud shrugs. “I didn’t ask.”

After dinner one night, a film is shown in the saloon. The film is old and grainy and tells the true story of the perilous voyage of a ship named the
Peking
. Sailing around Cape Horn, the
Peking
encounters a terrible storm—the mast breaks, waves crash on deck—and, to make matters worse, the captain of the
Peking
has brought his dog, a vicious little terrier, on board. The terrier is seen jumping up and biting the sailors who have as yet not been swept overboard. The dog provides a kind of gruesome comic relief and makes everyone laugh, including Maud and Peter.

When the film ends, Janet tells Maud, “I once had a dog who looked just like that. His name was Pepe.”

“I love dogs,” Maud, expansive, answers her.

Peter moves to sit next to Janet and starts to describe a cruise he once took in the Mediterranean as a college student. “I was on deck one night after dinner—we were docked in Cannes—and my wallet, which was in my back pocket, must have fallen overboard—”

Maud has heard the story a thousand times and does not listen. Instead she strikes up a conversation with the woman in the wheelchair. “Have you always loved birds?” Maud asks.

“You can’t imagine! The most extraordinary piece of luck,” Peter is telling Janet as he leans in closer to her. “A fisherman caught my wallet in his net. The wallet had over a thousand dollars in cash in it—I was planning to buy a car in England, an MG—”

Looking over, Maud sees that Janet has stopped paying attention to what Peter is saying. She is looking past him toward the door of the saloon and Maud follows her gaze. She sees the handsome French first officer standing there; she sees him signal to Janet.

“Excuse me,” Janet says, getting up and leaving the saloon.

“Pinned up on the wall of the Cannes police station was every last dollar—” Peter’s voice trails off.

Maud looks away. She is fairly used to seeing Peter flirt, but she is not used to seeing him defeated.

A few minutes later, Peter says, “I’m tired, I’m going to bed.”

Maud would like to say something that might be of comfort to him but cannot think what that might be. She merely nods.

When Maud wakes up during the night to go to the bathroom (or
head
as she knows she is supposed to call it), she sees that Peter is not in his bed. The sheets and blankets are half lying on the floor as if Peter had thrown them off in a rush.

“Peter,” Maud calls out in the dark.

Turning on the light, Maud goes to the bathroom, then pulls her jeans over her nightgown, grabs her parka, a hat, and gloves.

The ship’s corridor is dimly lit and empty. As Maud half runs toward the stairs, her steps echo eerily. All the cabin doors are shut and, briefly, she imagines the occupants sleeping peacefully inside. The ship’s motor hums smoothly, there is an occasional thud of the hull hitting an ice floe. Her heart banging in her chest, Maud runs up to the saloon. The saloon, too, is dimly lit and empty. In the dining room, the chairs are stacked, the floor ready for cleaning. From there, she opens a door and goes out on deck. The cold air momentarily takes her breath away but the sky is unnaturally light. The ship’s huge searchlights move back and forth over the sea, restlessly illuminating here an ice floe, there an iceberg. Inside the bridge house, Captain Halvorsen, holding a mug of coffee, stands next to the pilot at the wheel. The handsome first officer briefly glances up from the radar screen as Maud comes in.

“My husband—” she says.

“Is he ill?” Captain Halvorsen asks, without taking his eyes from the horizon. “Has something happened?”

“I’m looking for him,” Maud answers, intimidated.

His face expressionless, the first officer continues to study the radar screen.

Every few seconds the pilot at the wheel shouts out numbers, coordinates, compass points. He, too, pays Maud no attention.

Directly in front of the ship’s bow, a tabular iceberg that is taller and longer than the
Caledonia Star
appears yellowish green in the spotlight. In the bridge house all the attention is fixed on getting safely past it and not on anything that Maud says or does. For a moment longer, Maud stands motionless, not daring to speak or breathe, and watches the boat’s slow, safe progress past the iceberg.

“Where were you?” Peter asks when Maud opens the cabin door and switches on the light. He is in bed, the sheet and blanket neatly tucked in around him.

“Where were
you
?” Despite the enormous relief she feels on seeing him, Maud is angry.

Peter tells her he went up on deck for a few minutes and they must have missed each other. At night, he says, the icebergs look even more amazing. “All that uninhabitable empty space. So pure, so absolute.” Peter sounds euphoric, then, as if suddenly remembering something important, he says, “Maud, it’s four-thirty in the morning.”

Maud does not feel tired, nor does she feel any desire to sleep. Back in bed, she has switched off the light when Peter calls over to her, in his slightly inflected British voice, “Sweet dreams, darling.”

Maud says nothing.

I
t is impossible to leave without an excuse—something must push you out, at least at first. You won’t go otherwise; you are happy, the weather is bright, and you have a car. It has a sunroof (which you call a moonroof—you’re so quirky) and a thunderous muffler. After fifteen years of trial and error, you have finally arranged your bedroom furniture in a way that you and your father can agree on. You have a locker you can reach at Miami High. With so much going right, it is only when you’re driven out like a fly waved through a window that you’ll be outside long enough to realize that, barring the occasional hurricane, you won’t die.