The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

Claudia rolled her eyes and took a sip of her espresso; she looked out the window into the little back garden. “It's so peaceful here,” she said, proving something Julia already suspected: that her sister had no idea what was going on in their house.

It started when her father's best friend, Bernie, left Paris to take a job with a French wireless company in Bombay. He’d wanted Julia's father to leave with him, but even though her father complained all the time about the oil business, he wouldn’t go. Julia heard him telling her mother that he was in the middle of an important deal.

“This is the biggest thing we’ve done. I love Bernie-but he's afraid of being successful. He's afraid of a couple of fat Russians.”

Somehow Bernie had managed to convince her mother that Bombay was a good idea. She would read the share price of the wireless company out loud from the newspaper in the mornings, while her father was mak- ing eggs. It was a strange reversal; in the past, all her mother had wanted was for her father to stay at home. The places he traveled had been a family joke, as if he were trying to outdo himself with the strangeness of the cities- Istanbul and Muscat eventually became Tbilisi, Ashkhabad, Tashkent. Now, when Julia had heard the strained way that her mother talked about Bernie and wireless communication, she had known she was hearing part of a larger argument-known enough to determine its size, if not its subject. It was like watching the exposed bit of a dangerous piece of driftwood, floating just above the surface of a river.

Soon after Claudia's visit, in the spring of Julias freshman year, her parents gave her a choice. Her mother took her to Galeries Lafayette, and then to lunch at her favorite creperie on the Ile Saint-Louis, where, in between galettes tomate-fromage and crepe pomme-chantilly, she told Julia about the divorce. She said she had found a two-bedroom apartment in the West Village: a “feat,” she called it.

“New York will be a fresh start-psychologically,” her mother said. “There's a bedroom that's just yours, and we’ll be a five-minute train ride from Claudie. There are wonderful girls’ schools- I know you were really happy at Hockaday-”

“No I wasn’t.”

“Or we can look at some coed schools. And I’m finally going to get to go back for my master’s-” She leaned forward confidentially. “We could both be graduating at the same time.”

“I want to go back to San Francisco.”

“We haven’t lived in San Francisco since you were three.”

“So?”

The sympathetic look her mother gave her made Julia want to yank the tablecloth out from underneath their dishes, just to hear the glass breaking on the rustic stone floor.

“For right now that isn’t possible,” her mother said. “But there's no reason we can’t talk again in a year.”

Julia had stopped being hungry, but she finished her mother's crepe anyway. Recently her mother had stopped eating anything sweet; she said it “irritated her stomach” but Julia knew the real reason was Dr. Fabrol, who had an office on the Ile Saint-Louis very near the creperie. Julia had been seeing Dr. Fabrol once a week during the two years they’d been in

Paris; his office was dark and tiny, with a rough brown rug and tropical plants which he misted from his chair with a plastic spritzer while Julia was talking. When he got excited he swallowed, making a clicking sound in the back of his throat.

In front of his desk Dr. Fabrol kept a sandbox full of little plastic figures: trolls with brightly colored hair, toy soldiers, and dollhouse people dressed in American clothes from the Fifties. He said that adults could learn a lot about themselves by playing “les jeux des enfants.” In one session, when Julia couldn’t think of anything to say, she’d made a ring of soldiers in the sand, and then without looking at him, put the mother doll in the center. She thought this might be over the top even for Dr. Fabrol, but he started arranging things on his desk, pretending he was less interested than he was so that she would continue. She could hear him clicking.

The mother doll had yellow floss hair and a full figure and a red-and-white polka-dotted dress with a belt, like something Lucille Ball would wear. She looked nothing like Julia's mother-a fact that Dr. Fabrol obviously knew, since Julia's mother came so often to pick her up. Sometimes she would be carrying bags from the nearby shops; once she told them she’d just come from an exhibit at the new Islamic cultural center. She brought Dr. Fabrol a postcard of a Phoenician sarcophagus.

“I think this was the piece you mentioned?” Her mother's voice was louder than necessary. “I think you must have told me about it-the last time I was here to pick Julia up?”

“Could be, could be,” Dr. Fabrol said, in his stupid accent. They both watched Julia as if she were a TV and they were waiting to find out about the weather. She couldn’t believe how dumb they must have thought she was.

Her father asked her if she wanted to go for an early morning walk with their black labrador, Baxter, in the Tuileries. She would’ve said no-she wasn’t a morning person-if she hadn’t known what was going on from the lunch with her mother. They put their coats on in the dark hall with Baxter running around their legs, but by the time they left the apartment, the sun was coming up. The river threw off bright sparks. They crossed the bridge, and went through the archway into the courtyard of the Louvre. There were no tourists that early but a lot of people were walking or jogging on the paths above the fountain.

“Look at all these people,” her father said. “A few years ago, they wouldn’t have been awake. If they were awake they would’ve been having coffee and a cigarette. Which reminds me.”

Julia held the leash while her father took out his cigarettes. He wasn’t fat but he was tall and pleasantly big. His eyes squeezed shut when he smiled, and he had a beard, mostly grey now, which he trimmed every evening before dinner with special scissors. When she was younger, she had looked at other fathers and felt sorry for their children; no one else's father looked like a father to her.

In the shade by the stone wall of the Tuileries, with his back to the flashing fountain, her father tapped the pack, lifted it to his mouth and pulled a cigarette out between his lips. He rummaged in the pocket of his brown corduroys for a box of the tiny wax matches he always brought back from India, a white swan on a red box. He cupped his hand, lit the cigarette and exhaled away from Julia. Then he took back Baxter's leash and said: “Why San Francisco?”

She wasn’t prepared. “I don’t know.” She could picture the broad stillness of the bay, like being inside a postcard. Was she remembering a postcard?

“It's quiet,” she said.

“I didn’t know quiet was high on your list.”

She tried to think of something else.

“You know what I’d like?” her father asked suddenly. “I’d like to watch the sunrise from the Golden Gate-do you remember doing that?”

“Yes,” Julia lied.

“I think you were in your stroller.” Her father grinned. “That was when you were an early riser.”

“I could set my alarm.”

“You could set it,” her father teased her.

“I’m awake now,” she said.

Her father stopped to let Baxter nose around underneath one of the grey stone planters. He looked at the cigarette in his hand as if he didn’t know what to do with it, dropped and stamped it out, half-smoked.

“Can I have one?”

“Over my dead body.”

“I’m not sure I want to go to New York.”

“You want to stay here?” He said it lightly, as if it were a possibility.

“I want to go with you,” she said. As she said it, she knew how much she wanted it.

She could see him trying to say no. Their shadows were very sharp on the clean paving stones; above the bridge, the gold Mercury was almost too bright to look at.

“Just for the year and a half.”

“Bombay” her father said.

“I liked India last time.”