The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (27 page)

Later, back at the compound, before they parted ways, the roommate said, “Do you really care for him?” Her voice was hard, but her face wasn’t, and it occurred to Bernadette now, as she sat
down in the sand next to Rado, that the roommate might not have been fishing at all but instead giving a warning.

If Bernadette hadn’t held herself apart, hadn’t taken on airs, the women might have felt sorry for her. Rado, in the end, would move on. He was interested only in Bernadette’s connection to the university system, though he was mistaken, since she was, after all, a
vacataire
, not a real professor. He would have been better off with the one who came from Marseilles and ran a feminist press and had friends in the right places. Or with the prettiest one, whose skin and figure they all envied. If Bernadette and Rado ended up together, since these things sometimes happened (there was talk of the friend of a friend who after a stint with a medical nonprofit married a man from the Congo), Rado would expect Bernadette to wait on him like a slave. Seen in this light, they were victimizing each other.

“Show me where you live,” Rado said as they shared a cigarette.

She drew a map of France in the air with her finger and pointed to the center. “It’s not much of a town, more like a village.”

“I thought you taught in the city.”

She wondered if he knew what it was like for black men in the small villages. “Yes,” she said. “It is only a short ride by train.”

“I’ve always wanted to see it. The grave of Baudelaire.”

Was that the beginning? The opening? Would he bring up not having enough for a ticket? Could she lend him the money? Was that how this kind of thing went? In the hospital she had interrupted her husband’s deathbed confession and said, “You’re cruel.” He thought she meant the affair he was revealing, but she meant his telling her so many years later. If she had known at the time, when she was a young woman, perhaps she would have stayed with him. Perhaps she would have had her own affair. She did not know. But he had robbed her of the choice.

Rado looked up at the coconut tree over their heads. “Do you want one?”

She nodded. And then he was gone. Feet flat on the trunk, he climbed toward the fronds. His pink heels looked tender against the leathered trunk, and she felt a twinge of pity. Here, or in France, he would rise to become head of a school district. He would wear bow ties. A coconut thumped down beside her. “Too close?” he yelled.

She picked up the coconut and handed it to him when, breathing heavily, he returned to the ground. “You looked smaller from up there,” he said. He husked the coconut, then slammed the point of a pocket knife into its eyes. He pressed the coconut to Bernadette’s mouth, and the water spilled over her chin. She pushed the coconut away. He kissed her neck.

“Don’t,” she said.

He put the coconut to his own mouth and drank.

“I’m sorry,” he said when he was done. “It’s too soon for you. My father has been gone ten years, but my mother still can’t look at his picture without weeping.”

Bernadette was surprised by how his words stung. “It’s not that,” she said. “I’m not thirsty.”

“So let’s not drink.” He threw the coconut down the beach and leaned into her again. She imagined how he would write about this moment: the crashing waves, the fluttering palms. But her heart was thumping. She unbuttoned her shirt.

Bernadette and Rado were seen walking back from the beach, without bags or towels, her hair down, her hand in his. That evening, at dinner, the women couldn’t look down the table without imagining that elegant mouth on Bernadette’s. Rado, too big for his chair, seemed to them dangerous and fragile. In Bernadette, as she passed the bowl of salad and salted her fish, the women watched for some sign of regret, but she was straight
shouldered and quiet, her hair back in its chignon. Each of the women, for her own reasons, was resolute. They went to bed having decided what they must do.

The next morning as Bernadette left class, the Director called her into his office. When he was done talking, Bernadette said, “You patronize him. Is it his youth or his color?”

“It is the abuse of power,” the Director said. “You are his instructor.”

“We did nothing wrong,” she said. That was all she would give him. She had decided so at dinner the previous night as she and Rado were bathed in sidelong stares. Or perhaps the preparation started earlier, when she walked away from her roommate without answering the woman’s question. “I’ll go,” she said. “Leave him be.”

Outside, she passed students reading under a baobab tree, playing a game of checkers on the grass. She thought of the papers being stacked, the blackboards being wiped, behind the cloudy classroom windows. What would they talk about now? She sat in her room, bags by the door, and read for a while, then looked out the window to watch the sky drift down into the trees. She recalled the softness of Rado’s hand as they walked back from the beach. He started to let go as the trees thinned for the buildings, but she held on tighter. For the first time since his death, she felt tenderness toward her husband. He thought he was seeking her forgiveness, but he also wanted her rage.

“You shouldn’t have come,” she said after opening the door for Rado.

“They’re too busy toasting their victory to notice.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “I know you took the blame. Your roommate told me.”

“She saw it coming,” Bernadette said.

“What will happen to you?”

“Nothing of consequence.”

“You threw yourself on the sword,” he said. “Why?”

It was the first time he’d asked a real question, and for a moment she believed that they were what he seemed to think they were: tragic lovers. But then he smiled, and she wasn’t sure what he thought. “I leave that to you,” she said.

Some of the women sought the book. Others stumbled on it. He looked mostly the same despite the time that had passed, but there was less fierceness in his jaw. He was the first man from the island to win such a prestigious award. They flipped through the pages in bookstores, in bed, on the couch, looking for something they recognized. They didn’t know where truth ended and poetry began. They didn’t know if he climbed a tree to pick a coconut or if she punctured the eyes with her thumbs. Did she undress him like a mother? Did a thicket of palm fronds grow over the sky? They didn’t know if the ocean claimed the empty shell, which floated around the Horn of Africa and past the icebergs of the north. They didn’t know if the coconut still traveled, studded with barnacles and bleached by salt. There was so much they didn’t know.

H
e would have to begin any minute now; everyone else was there: the half-dozen dads on each sideline, the boys shoaling up and down the pitch with a couple of practice balls. They were getting boisterous. He stood up tall and scanned beyond the field of play to the edges of the park. To his left, the low autumn sun shone heavily into his eyes. Elsewhere it made the colors rich, pulled long shadows from the trees. Nothing. Walkers with dogs. Mothers with pushchairs. A cyclist zoomed silently along a path, spokes glittering, and disappeared for an instant behind the back of one of the fathers, who held a baby astride his right hip. Maybe eighteen months old. It narrowed its eyes in the breeze, soft hair lifted from its forehead. It held one arm up and tried to grasp with its curling fingers the moving air.

“Rev, are we gonna start?”

“Yes, we are. I was just waiting for Jack. Let’s get those balls off the pitch.”

When Reverend Peter blew his whistle he saw a few shoulders in Jack’s team drop with disappointment. The boys moved slowly into position. Peter carried the match ball to the spot on his fingertips
and just as he placed it, rolling it precisely with his boot, he heard a shout. It was Jack running toward them. He had sprinted ahead of his father, whose tiny, bag-carrying form rose and fell far away, laboriously shrugging off the distance.

Peter didn’t particularly like Jack. The boy had one of those innocent, insolent faces with an upturned nose and styled brown hair. He was ten and he had a hairstyle. He looked too much like the cinema’s idea of a boy, too much like everybody’s idea of a boy, and this made him vain. He was vain of his footballing skills in particular. Moreover, he had a professional’s tendency to foul, to fake, and to celebrate his goals with excessive displays, running with his arms outstretched, his shirt pulled up over his head to reveal his white, muscled body, his blind mauve nipples. He was strong and pretty and cruel, at least in his careless mastery. Peter’s sympathy was elsewhere. It was his natural Christianity perhaps; he felt himself with the boys who weren’t as fit or as sure of themselves, the frightened ones. Those boys, however, lit up when Jack joined them.

“You’re late.”

“It was traffic. My dad …”

“People are getting annoyed. Just get into position. Right.” He pulled a fifty-pence piece from his pocket and pointed at the opposing captain. “You.”

“Heads.”

He flipped it up in a spin, swatted it down onto the back of his hand. “Heads it is.” He raised his arm, blew his whistle, and the game began.

The low sun was awkward, flashing uncomfortably whenever the game turned in its direction and heating one side of him. His neck sweated as he ran between the shouting fathers. With sharp blasts of his whistle he cut the game into sections until there was a long period of fluid play when it found its rhythm, the boys in midfield bustling back and forth quietly, the defense lines pulled forward, pushed back. After minutes of this the boys tired and the
game degraded into a series of pointless long kicks, the ball lofted practically from goal mouth to goal mouth. At the end of one run up the pitch, at the end of the tether of his breath, Peter slowed to a standstill. He turned when he heard a baby crying. He saw the child rearing up on its father’s hip, its face red and mouth wide. Clear globes of tears stood on its cheeks. Its small fists trembled. The man was doing a poor job of comforting the child. Surely if he spoke soothingly to it and stroked that soft hair it would quieten. Frustrated at his powerlessness to intervene and take the child, he heard another yelp on the pitch, turned again, and saw the game halted, a knot of arguing boys around one boy lying flat on his back, rocking from side to side, his forearm over his eyes. Peter blew again and ran over. Blood: a long streak of it down one boy’s shin. It poured from a flap of startled white skin just below the knee. Jack was protesting. Of course he was. He reached for his cards. “Right, you, off.” The boys swarmed around him when he pulled out the red card, tossing their heads and flinging their arms down in despair. Jack shouted at him, “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!” Peter bent down and asked the injured boy, grave-faced and silent amid the uproar. “Was it him?” The boy said nothing, nodded. “Thought so.” He stood up again and felt a brief, cold dizziness of blood draining from his head. He saw Jack’s father running on.

“He didn’t do it.”

“Off the field.”

“But he didn’t.” Jack’s father’s ears were small, pink, and tightly curled.

Peter avoided his eyes. “He didn’t.”

“He did do it. The rules are the rules. He’s off.”

“You didn’t even see it. You were looking at Mike’s Janey. I saw you.”

“You and your son, off now.”

“But …”

“Off. Now!”

He raised the red card for everyone to see and blew as loudly as he could.

The bathroom was warm and heavy from Steve’s use, the air scented with shower cream and deodorant and aftershave. Peter arrived trembling from the exercise, his mind marked with the argument. The shower cubicle was warmer and heavier still. A remnant of foam still stood over the plughole, whispering away to nothing. Steve wasn’t always very tidy when he was excited to be going out on sermon night. After Peter had showered, watching the soil spiral away, he stood wrapped in a towel, pink and soft, and saw the gunpowder of Steve’s beard still in the sink. The lid of his hair gel was off, its contents lashed up into a crest by his delving fingers. Peter dried himself, added his own blasts of deodorant to the funk, then dressed, stabbed the plastic of a ready meal, and put it in the microwave.

He ate in front of the television. He told himself it was to find a neat quirk of topicality to add to his sermon, something to remind the congregation that he lived in their world, but he watched quite mindlessly the celebrity dancers in their camp little outfits, taking their turns then awaiting judgment, chests throbbing, smiling crazily, sweating through their makeup. He thought of Steve, perfumed and pristine, sitting on the Tube or already at a bar chatting to someone. Steve, who had arrived like the spring, painfully, changing everything with his provoking warmth, his beauty, who stepped in and out of Peter’s cage like it didn’t exist, who argued that it didn’t exist:
Half the bloody church, Peter
. All that. Steve who was getting bored, who was elsewhere.

Peter felt his rice and meat settling, looked down at his belly. He’d put on black jeans and a black top. Even when he wasn’t working, that’s what he would put on. He noticed that these two blacks didn’t match. The jeans were older than the top; their dye had grayed in the wash. It made him think something, about dailiness, about time spent. The sadness of laundry. Clothes laboring
through the wash week after week.
The sadness of laundry! Listen to yourself. Just write your sermon, pray, and go to bed
.

The phone rang, stalling him in his seat. He let it bleat and bleat until the answerphone came on. After his own voice apologizing for his absence: “Hello, this is Steve …” No, it wasn’t. It was the wrong Steve, a non-Steve. “I’m Jack’s father, from football. I thought I’d ring you because I’m not happy, really, with the way things went this afternoon. What you did wasn’t … it just wasn’t the right call. Jack wasn’t guilty and I think you know that, more than you could let on at the time anyway. I sort of wanted to clear the air and just get things straight with you. I’ve got a very upset lad here and it’d be nice to tell him it’ll be all right next time. Maybe you can call—” the machine cut him off with a long beep. In the silence afterward Peter said out loud, “Now go away.”