Irving Wallace - The Prize

Tying his shoes, he watched Lilly arrange her clothes on the bench and automatically begin to dress. It fascinated him. It was like a filmed striptease run backwards. She held her brief nylon panties before her, and stepped into one leg opening and then the other, and pulled them up tightly so that the elastic band came to her navel. Then she sat on the bench, rolled her sheer nylons, inserting one foot, then the other, and unwinding the nylons up her slender calves and up her thighs, and fastening the stockings at her thighs with garter bands.

Now, when she stood, her nudity partially clothed, her bare breasts seemed to expand and grow. A trick of the imagination, Craig knew, because the panties and stockings had focused attention on what was still revealed. She slipped into a white cotton blouse, and began to button it, and Craig remembered that she had disdain for brassières. The indigo jersey skirt was on, a single tug of her hands circled it into place, and she was pulling the zipper. Her sandals were on her feet, and her thick woollen sweater was over her arm.

Craig was ready, and he met her between the benches, and they went into the corridor. Briefly, they were alone. She halted to put on her sweater. She poked one arm into the sweater, and tossed her golden ponytail, as he assisted her with the other arm. Coming around her, face to face once more, he could see that the upper button of her blouse was open, and he could see the cleavage between the breasts.

He tried to picture the breasts and nipples now pressed behind the blouse, and he tried to picture the thighs beneath the skirt, and at once, all at once, in that instant, he was moved by a consuming passion for what could not be seen, and by a hungry desire to see it and possess it. For the first time since entering the gymnasium, he was physically aroused.

It amused him, and he smiled.

She saw his face, and took his hand. ‘What is it, Mr. Craig?’

‘Just a private thought,’ he said. ‘I was thinking of the most incredible thing on earth.’

‘What?’

‘Man,’ he said.

And then he squeezed her hand, and started with her down the corridor, wondering how long it would take her to undress.

WHAT awakened Andrew Craig was the sound of voices from another room.

When he opened his eyes, he instantly realized that he was lying on the folding bed of Lilly Hedqvist’s living-room. Hazily, the events of the night before were recalled-Gottling, in the Wärdshus, drunkenly revealing how the Nobel Prize in literature had been inspired by politics, not art; the nudists in the gymnasium, unclad and bizarre, listening to a speech by their director; Lilly and himself, on this bed, performing their protracted lovemaking.

Only the last memory made sense, and Craig tried to revive the details of it, but at last he gave up. He had been more inebriated than he believed. A few fuzzy amatory pictures remained. The rest was a void. The surviving evidence of pleasure, aside from the rumpled bed, was his languid body frame. His mind contained neither hangover nor remorse; his limbs were loose.

He would have chosen to remain in bed all morning, but then he remembered the voices that had roused him. Undoubtedly, one voice was Lilly’s. He glanced at the clock. It was already after nine o’clock. Why was Lilly here? Why wasn’t she at work? And the other voice. Who had come into the apartment-friend? enemy?-and seen him this way, and was now in the kitchenette?

The voices, indistinct, resumed their give-and-take, and Craig realized that one of the voices was male. Alarmed, Craig immediately sat up, and then lifted himself off the bed, gathered up his clothes and shoes, and hurried into the bathroom.

The shower and drying, the dressing and grooming, took him twenty minutes. When he emerged, somewhat combative over the compromising position Lilly had put him in (alleviated quickly by the realization of the compromising position he had put her in, and by the further realization that she had no idea at all, or at least had not expressed an idea, of his importance and news value), he noted that the pull-down bed had apparently been made and raised back into the wall, and that the living-room was all neatness and chastity again.

He went into the kitchenette, prepared for anything.

At first he thought that Lilly, at the stove in the foreground, was now alone. The morning was dark, and there was but a single window and a weak lone electric bulb overhead. She was a delight to the eye, as usual, golden hair combed free and long, throat exposed and young, wearing a crisp cocoa dacron blouse and dark tan swing skirt. She had just finished pouring coffee, as he entered, and her spontaneous friendly smile showed him even white teeth and no regrets.

‘Good morning, Mr. Craig. Did you rest?’

‘I’m wonderful, Lilly. I thought I heard-’

He stopped short, in mid-sentence. His gaze had gone past Lilly, to the shadowed end of the kitchenette, where, leaning casually against the service porch door, holding a saucer in one pudgy hand and a steaming cup in the other, stood a man.

‘I want you to meet my best and oldest friend in Stockholm, Mr. Craig,’ said Lilly. ‘This is Nicholas Daranyi. He does not like to be reminded of the Nicholas. Everyone must call him Daranyi.’

‘Like Garbo or Duse,’ said Daranyi. ‘Or, for that matter, Kitchener. It would be less to call him Horatio Kitchener. Immodest of me, perhaps. But we all have our little vanities.’ He had set down the cup and saucer, and now he came forward to accept Craig’s hand. ‘I am pleased to know you, Mr. Craig.’

Under the electric bulb, Craig was able to appraise the intruder. Daranyi was in his fifties and below middle height. His head was large and fleshy, and was sparsely covered with hair that had been oiled, then parted well to one side and combed to cover a balding spot. His face was sleek, too closely shaved, and the jovial cheek fat made the eyes into slits. But the eyes were merry, and the long nose and mouth amused, and you thought of yuletide and were sure he wore a costume to surprise all children at Christmas. Preceding him was a considerable potbelly, and you wondered how the legs, so thin, held him upright. His grey suit, faintly checkered, was short at the sleeves and short at the trouser cuffs, but pressed and clean and fastidious, with signs of rubbed usage. His total appearance was unmistakably Middle European, and even in this foreign place, he looked foreign. He smelled of exotic soap and strong cologne.

‘I confess a certain embarrassment,’ said Craig frankly.

‘But why?’ asked Daranyi ingenuously. ‘Because you overslept?’

Lilly turned from the tray she was preparing and clapped her hands with delight. ‘Oh, Daranyi, do you not understand? Mr. Craig is a nice American with Pilgrim morals. He is ashamed to be found in the bed of an unmarried woman.’

‘Yes, I see,’ said Daranyi gravely. ‘But, Mr. Craig, you are in Sweden, not in your native Minnesota-’

‘Wisconsin,’ interjected Lilly.

‘-native Wisconsin. Moreover, I am like a father to Lilly.’ Then, he added quickly, slit eyes bright, ‘A tolerant and sophisticated father, that is.’

‘I don’t know how I would have lived without Daranyi,’ said Lilly, finishing the tray. ‘When I left Lund four years ago, I knew no one here except for three letters of introduction. One was from an aunt to Daranyi. He found me the job with Nordiska Kompaniet. He helped find me this apartment. He bought me my television. And on my two mornings off, and on Sundays, he drives me wherever I must go. Without him, I would be lost.’

‘Pay no attention to Lilly, Mr. Craig,’ said Daranyi. ‘She over-values me constantly, to my secret delight.’