Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

He recognized that people thought him an oddball at best. His friends warned him that, at worst, he would dry up, he was so wanting in emotion. But he considered most of them to be sentimentalists, worshiping sensations that they called feelings.

“You have a transient sensation. At once you convert it into a conviction,” he said to a woman sitting beside him at a dinner party. The hostess heard him, sprang to her feet, grabbed the salad bowl, with its remaining contents, and emptied it onto his head. He was dismayed, but he managed to laugh along with the other guests, who helped to pick leaves of lettuce and strips of carrot and radish from his collar and neck.

For the rest of the evening, desolation wrapped itself around him like a mantle. Everyone, including himself, was wrong. Somehow he knew he was alive. Life was an impenetrable mystery cloaked in babble. He couldn’t get the olive-oil stains out of his shirt and had to throw it out.

In the vet's waiting room, Grace sat close to John's feet, her ears rising and falling at the cries of a cat in a carrier. The cat's owner tapped the carrier with an index finger and smiled at John. “Sorry about the noise,” she said. “We all get scared in the doctor's office.”

She may have been right, but he shied away from her all-encompassing “we.” He smiled minimally and picked up a copy of Time magazine from a table.

When the receptionist told him to go to Room One, Grace balked. He picked her up and carried her, turning away from the cat owner's sympathetic gaze. He placed Grace on a metal examination table in the middle of a bare cubicle. A cat howled in another room.

As the doctor entered, his lab coat emanating the grim, arid smell of disinfectant, he nodded to John and looked at Grace. She had flattened herself against the table; her head was between her paws. The doctors pink hands moved Grace's envelope of fur and skin back and forth over her bones as he murmured, “Good girl, good dog.”

He took her temperature, examined her teeth, and poked at her belly. With each procedure, Grace grew more inert. “Distemper shots?” the doctor asked. John shook his head mutely. The doctor asked him more questions, but John couldn’t answer most of them. Finally John explained that he’d found her in an animal shelter. The doctor frowned. “Those places weren’t great even before the city cut funding for them,” he said. John nodded as though in agreement, but it was all news to him. What he’d known about dogs was that they could get rabies and had to be walked at least twice a day.

The doctor said that Grace had a bit of fever. It would be best to leave her overnight for observation. John could pick her up in the morning on Saturday.

John went to his office. People remarked on his paleness and asked him what the doctor had said. “I had a fever yesterday. Probably a touch of flu,” he replied. After his words they kept their distance. A secretary placed a bottle of vitamin C tablets on his desk, averting her face as she told him they were ammunition in the war against colds.

“I have leprosy,” John said.

She giggled and backed away from his desk. She doesn’t know what leprosy is, he guessed, or senses that it's vaguely un-American.

He kept to his section of the office the rest of the day. He was gratified that his colleagues had him pegged as a bit crazy. He had no desire to dislodge the peg. It made it easier. Thinking about that now, as he drank his third carton of tea, he didn’t know what the it was that was made easier.

After work, with no special reason to go home, he stopped at a bar on Columbus Avenue. He ordered a double whiskey. As he drank it, his brain seemed to rise in his skull, leaving a space that filled up with serene empti- ness. He ordered a repeat, wanting to sustain the feeling, which recalled to him the moments that followed lovemaking, almost a pause of being. But as he lifted his glass, he became cautious at the thought of four whiskeys on an empty stomach, and asked a passing waiter for a steak, medium. He took his drink to a booth.

The steak, when it came, was leathery, and it reminded him of the gloves he wore when he played with Grace. At this very moment she was in a cage in the dark, bewildered but stoical. Long-suffering was more like it, poor thing, carried along on the current of existence. No wonder she suddenly got up and went to another room to lie down. It wasn’t thought that roused her, only a need for a small movement of freedom inside of fate. Why, after all, had he stopped in this awful, shadowy bar?

He had a few friends, most of them cocooned in partial domesticity, living with someone or seeing someone steadily. His oldest friend was married, the father of a child. Occasionally someone would introduce him to a woman in an attempt at matchmaking, feebly disguised as a dinner party.

One showed no interest in him, but another had taken him aside and asked him why he had lent himself to what was, basically, a slave auction. His impulse was to remark that no one had bid for her. Instead he asked why she had agreed to meet him. She replied that she had a sociological interest in the lifestyles of male loners in New York. He observed that life, like death, was not a style. She called him a dinosaur.

The only woman over the years for whom he had felt even a shred of interest was the mother of his friend's child. When he recognized the interest, stirred once more to life after he stopped seeing the kitty-cat girl, a sequence of scenes ran through his mind like a movie: betrayal, discovery, family disruption, himself a stepfather, late child-support checks. She was steadfast and not especially drawn to him.

There had been a time when he took the kitty-cat girl out for social evenings with his friends. Their enthusiasm for her was tinged by hysteria, he noted, as though he’d been transformed from a lone wolf to a compliant sheep. Walking away from a friend's apartment where they had spent an evening, he felt like a figure in a heroic illustration: a woman-saved prodigal son.

Now he was down to a sick dog. An apartment filled with unattractive furniture awaited him. But Grace would not be there.

He was dizzy after downing such a quantity of whiskey. His fork slid from his hand to fall beneath the table. He didn’t bother to search for it but continued to sit motionless in the booth, most of the steak uneaten on the plate.

It might be only the strange weakness that had come over him like a swoon, but he imagined he could feel his bodily canals drying up, his eyes dimming, the roots of his hair drying with tiny explosions like milkweed pods pressed between two fingers.

His resounding No to the kitty-cat girl, from months ago, echoed in his ears. What had prevented him from saying yes? She might have laughed and embraced him. By that magic of affection that can convert embarrassment into merriment, they might have averted all that followed. Instead she had turned away and, he thought, gone to sleep, leaving him in an agitated wakefulness in which his resentment at her fatuity kept at bay, he knew now, a harsh judgment on his own nature.

She was, after all, a very nice woman: kind, generous, full hearted. What did it matter that in bending to someone's pet or a friend's small child she assumed a high, squeaky voice, that she held her hand over her heart when she was moved, that she struck actressy poses when she showed him a new outfit or hairstyle? What had it mattered? Body to body-what did it all really matter?

He sighed and bent to retrieve the fork. In the darkness beneath the table he found a whole cigarette lying among the damp pickle ends and crumpled napkins. Smoke it , he told himself as he felt the strength returning to his arms and hands. Smoking was the one thing that aroused the kitty-cat girl to anger. He’d been startled by it, so much so that he’d given up the pleasure of an infrequent cigarette after dinner in the evening. “Don’t make it a religion,” he’d chided her. “It's only one of a thousand things that kill people.”