Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

I’m going to give you power, she said. I’m going to make you able to feel what the cards are, without looking at them. You’re going to sort them into red and black. It's not even something I can do myself. Look.

She pretended to guess, frowning and hesitating, dealing the top few cards facedown into two piles. I don’t know. Black, red; black, black, black; red, red. Something like that. Only I don’t have this magic. I’ll turn them over. See? All wrong. But you’re going to have this power. I’m going to give it to you. Give me your hands.

He put his two long brown hands palm down on the table. She covered them with her own and closed her eyes, squeezing slightly against his bony knuckles, feeling under the ball of her thumb a hangnail loose against the cuticle of his. Really, something seemed to transfer between them.

There, she said briskly, Now you’ve got the power. Now you’re going to sort these cards into black and red, facedown, without looking. Black in this pile, red in this. Take your time. Try to truly feel it. Concentrate.

Obediently, he began to deal the cards into two piles, doing it with hesitating, wincing puzzlement, like someone led blindfolded and expecting obstacles, laughing doubtingly and checking with her.

I have no idea what I’m doing here.

No, you have. You really have. Trust it.

He gained confidence, shrugged, went faster: black, red, black, black, red, black, red, red, red… Halfway through, she asked him to change it around: red cards on the right pile now, and black cards on the left. Readjust. Don’t lose it. It's really just to keep you concentrating.

Then, when he’d put down his last card and looked at her expectantly, she swept up the two piles and turned one over in front of his eyes. So you see, if it's worked, this one should run from red to black… Look, there you are!

She spread the second pile, reversing it so that it seemed to run the other way. And, this one here, from black to red…

Oh, no. No! That's just too weird. That's really weird, man. How did you do that? Jesus! He laughed in delighted bafflement, looking from the cards up to her face and back again.

She was laughing, too, hugging her secret. Do you want me to do it again, see if you can guess? Only, hang on a sec, I need the loo.

He didn’t notice that she took the second pack of cards with her to the bathroom to prepare them. (“Shall we use these newer ones, see if it works with them?”) Gina couldn’t quite believe that he didn’t see what she was doing. She had worked it out for herself the first time the trick was done on her.

It's just spooky, he said in awe, shaking his head. It doesn’t make sense. There's just no way I could be getting these right. You must be making me deal them right, somehow.

No, it's you, it's you, she insisted. I can’t do it. It's only you.

He wouldn’t let her tell him how it was done, although she was longing to explain. He was right: it was better to hold off the climactic revelation with its aftermath of gray; the power of the mystery he couldn’t break was a warm pleasure, satisfying and sensual between them. They ran their eyes over each others face in intimate connection, smiling. He brimmed with puzzlement, and she was replete with knowledge.

As they leaned toward each other across the table, she could smell his sweat and the nut-oil odor of his skin, which had been soaking up the sun all summer. She could suddenly imagine with vivid realism, as she hadn’t been able to do in all her daydreams, what it would be like to be pressed up against him, existing in the orbit of that hot decent embrace. She could imagine how the male taste and smell of him could become known to her and comfortable, as familiar as her own. In fact, leapfrogging audaciously over all the things that hadn’t happened between her and Josh, she found she was actually even imagining herself bored and constrained in his arms, hunting around for something more, pushing away from him. She was shocked at this intimation that the impossible dream of bliss might conceivably turn out, in some later phase of existence, not to be enough for her.

The moment slipped away. After the third time, they gave up the trick and played Mastermind and battleships, exchanging talk in low, lax, friendly voices. The others returned, crashing through the garden, tipsily exalted, looking around at their home, surprised that it seemed not to have changed in their absence. When Gina climbed between the sheets in her pajamas, she found the pleasure of the evening persisting, a soft surprising parcel under her lungs. She examined it, and thought that it was probably happiness, a small preparatory portion of the great ecstasies she supposed life must have in store for her.

It was twenty-five years before she visited Wing Lodge again.

This time she was alone. She remembered that she had been there before, with Mamie, although she couldn’t quite imagine why she had been staying with her; there had never been any real intimacy between their families. Dickie and Mamie had divorced not long afterward, and Mamie had died recently. One of the boys had drowned, years ago-she couldn’t remember which. The visit now was uncharacteristic of Gina. She never went to stately homes or birthplaces; in fact, she gave ironic lectures at her university on the enthusiasm of the masses for traipsing humbly and dotingly around the houses where they would most likely-as recently as sixty years ago-have been exploited as estate hands or scullery maids. But then this was an unsettled time in her life, and she was doing uncharacteristic things. She had been divorced for five years, and now her new lover wanted to move in with her. On impulse, leaving her son with friends for the weekend, she had booked herself into a hotel and come down to this little town to be alone, to think.

She hadn’t imagined that she would actually go inside Wing Lodge, although she had been aware, of course, that the town she had chosen to think in was the one where John Morrison, who remained her passion, had spent his last years. She had had a quixotic idea, perhaps, that by moving around in the streets he must have moved around in she might attain something of his clarity; needless to say, the streets remained just streets, full of cars and tourists, and, for someone used to London, there were disconcertingly few of them to explore. She had, with determined austerity, not brought any books away with her, imagining that not being able to read would concentrate her mind. But the habit of years was too strong to break overnight, and so, over drawn-out coffees in the wood-paneled tearoom, where the waitresses still wore white frilled aprons, she found herself reading the menu over and over, and then the ancient injunction against asking for credit in red calligraphy above the till, and then the discarded sports pages of a newspaper, rather than dwelling at last and with a new penetration on the purpose and shape of her life.

So it was in flight from herself, almost, and also because there simply wasn’t that much else to do, that she eventually joined the little party of visitors being taken around Wing Lodge. She was a middle-aged woman now, tall and statuesque in a tan linen skirt and jacket, with a mass of thick dark curls in which new gray hairs were sprouting with a coarse energy that made her suspect that age was going to impose itself differently than she had envisioned: less entropy, more vigorous takeover. There were copies of her book about Morrison's novels in the little bookshop upstairs, but she wasn’t going to own up to that; she followed the guide obediently about and listened with amusement to the way the wonderful works abounding in disruptive energy became, in the retelling, so much sad sawdust, so much argument, as Pound put it, for old lavender.