The Prize

Unable to find what she wanted at the Brandenberg Book Nook, Alexis drifted to the front of the store. “Edith Wharton...” Alexis shifted her gaze to the far side of the store, where she had been sifting through the offerings. “I just checked the stacks but couldn’t find a thing by the author.”

“That’s genre fiction. Ms Wharton's situated in literary classics.” The clerk, who looked to be in his late twenties, stepped out from behind the counter. A mop of dirty brown hair and wispy, anemic beard did nothing to dispel Alexis’ initial impression of a bleary-eyed adolescent trapped in a man’s body. Or maybe it was simply his relaxed, pokey manner as he led the way to a collection of free-standing displays.

“The House of Mirth was one of the author's earliest works.” He deftly pulled two paperbacks off the shelf, handing them to her. “Ms Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, but I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know.” He offered up this last bit of incidental trivia while staring absently at a dust bunny the size of a silver, half dollar drifting aimlessly about the baseboard trim before meandering quietly away.

Ten minutes later Alexis wandered back to the front of the store where a middle-aged woman with a dowager’s hump and bifocals was counting out change. “I spoke with a young bearded fellow earlier.”

The woman gestured diagonally across the room. “That would be Tom. You’ll find him stocking shelves in young-adult fiction.”

Alexis located the clerk hunched over a cardboard box of shiny paperbacks. “Which did you choose?”

“Age of Innocence. I’ll read it first and work backwards.” Alexis took a step closer and lowered her voice. “Are you seeing anyone?”

Only now did the clerk straighten up. “I'm not dating at the moment.”

“Would you like to go out?”

He glanced at her but only briefly allowing his eyes to droop until they finally settled on the bright neon cover of the book he was holding. “You don’t seem the type who would be sitting at home twiddling her thumbs on a Friday night.”

“No, that’s true.”

“A date,... that would be nice.” His right hand came up as though he meant to shake her hand but thought better of it. “I’m Tom.”

“Alexis. Alexis Hamilton.” She retreated several steps and began talking once again in normal, conversational tones. “Here, let me give you my cell number.” She jotted the digits on a scrap of paper and handed it to him. “Since I put you on the spot, choose whatever you like.”

He stuffed the slip in his shirt pocket. “Dramatic irony.”

“Excuse me?”

“Ms Wharton... she was most famous for her humor and dramatic irony when describing the New York upper class.” He reached for the pricing gun. “Keeping up with the Jones - are you familiar with the expression?”

“Yes, sort of.” The bookstore clerk had a queer penchant for drifting off topic.

“The Jones were Ms. Wharton’s wealthy father’s family.”

“You’re joking?”

Easing a pile of books onto a shelf, Tom smiled affably. “I’ll call closer to the weekend.”

You don’t seem the type who would be sitting home twiddling her thumbs on a Friday night. Alexis entered the Book Nook with no ulterior motive, no hidden agenda other than to find an Edith Wharton novel. The dark-haired girl with the willowy figure wasn't horny; she wasn't lonely. She wasn't feeling particularly desperate, depraved, emotionally labile, or psychologically unhinged. And at twenty-five, her biological clock certainly hadn't run down. Still, something went awry when, with no great sense of urgency, Tom lead her on a rather circuitous route away from mainstream fiction – detective novels, Harlequin romances, steamy erotica and chick lit - back to the classics. Or was it a metaphor, like the Frost poem reminiscing about diverging paths? You come to satisfy one unmet need but forfeit that in lieu of something more exigent.

******

Thursday evening the phone rang. “Any thoughts about succotash?” Tom was on the other end of the line.

Succotash – wasn’t that lima or shell beans cooked together with corn in a sweet broth? “I’m rather neutral on the subject.”

“The Seakonke-Wampanoag Tribe is holding its annual Powwow in Rehoboth this weekend. Indians from all over New England will be converging - ”

“What time,” she cut him short, “will you be picking me up?”

“Saturday, around noon. We can eat there.” Not a man of many words, he hung up the phone. Alexis drifted into the bedroom. On the comforter, a black strapless bustier outfit with metallic beading at the waist lay next to an Andrew Marc drape chemise with cap sleeves, an asymmetrical neckline and ruching at both the sides and shoulders. Chuckling under her breath, she hung both dresses back in the closet and reached for her jeans plus a plaid denim shirt.

******

Alexis’ previous blind date, which occurred six months earlier, soured her on men.. A Harvard economics major, the swarthy fellow brought her to the Newbury Steakhouse off Massachusetts Ave in downtown Boston. Jason Tarkington - that was the graduate student's name. His father was an investment banker with a brokerage firm on State Street, three blocks down from historic Faneuil Hall Market Marketplace. Gaunt with an avalanche of black hair that buried his ears, he was actually quite handsome despite a stubbly, five o'clock shadow that materialized most days shortly before noon.

Jason Tarkington was infatuated - not with his svelte date, who he had only just met for the first time a half hour earlier, but with someone infinitely more intriguing. "I truly believe Greenspan got it all wrong with his … From my point of view, and I can only speak for myself when it comes to Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations… I can’t agree with any of the Keynesian crowd who claim that trickledown economics…" During the ride north on Route 3 into Boston, he carved the air with absurd gestures and screwed his face up in the most ridiculous expressions. Whether discussing microeconomics, laissez-faire capitalism, commodities markets or the Red Sox's chances for winning the World Series, he never let up on the histrionics.

Following the meal, he tried to grope her in the parking lot of the restaurant, but Alexis had seen it coming and was neither caught off guard nor the least bit flustered. She slapped his face - just once, but so brutally hard it left a permanent red welt that was still evident as they pulled up in front of her apartment complex. “I don’t know what came over me... I'm not really the sort of guy who... I swear to God, Alexis, I seldom if ever…"

******

Saturday, Tom arrived a little after noon. They drove through Brandenberg center, passing out of the city into a rural stretch of New England country. Out the passenger side window, a blur of oaks and maples descended to a wide lake stocked with largemouth bass, sweet perch, pickerel and catfish. “Where'd you go to school?” he asked.

“Wellesley College.”

He flipped the directional and took a sharp left onto Arcade Avenue heading towards Seekonk. “Didn’t Hillary Rodham Clinton attend Wellesley?”

“Yes, the president’s wife, along with Diane Sawyer, Secretary of State, Madeline Albright,... Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.”

Tom pursed his lips and a fleeting smile drifted across his lips. “Anyone among those illustrious alumnae you care to emulate?”

They passed the Grist Mill Restaurant with its huge turn-of-the century paddle wheel originally powered by a relentless deluge of water cascading over a granite dam. In recent times, the immobile wheel was more decorative than functional. “No, thank God!”

Up ahead and to the right stretched a huge open field. They could already hear the pulsating rhythms of a huge tribal drum being struck by multiple sticks. Tom pulled into the grassy parking area at the front of the field alongside a stand of birch trees. A profusion of tents and EZ-Up canopies ringed a hundred-foot enclosure where both men and woman in Indian garb were furiously dancing. Two sets of drummers and singers were alternately accompanying the dancers as they twirled, trotted, skipped, shuffled and hopped about the perimeter of the circle. Dead center, a hardwood fire, which had burnt down to coals, sent up a plume of aromatic smoke. “What I do at the bookstore," Tom noted soberly, "pays the bills but it’s basically a dead-end job.”

Alexis sensed that the man wasn’t apologizing so much as simply setting the record straight. An elderly Indian wearing a loincloth and buckskin britches hobbled by with the aid of a much younger man and an aluminum walker. The couple entered the circle and joined the dancers. “Why are you telling me this?”

“It’s been suggested that I suffer from a Peter Pan complex,” he noted tongue in cheek. “As a Wellesley girl, who may on occasion rub shoulders with America’s elite, I thought you ought to know.”

They meandered halfway around the perimeter of the circle and pulled up in front of the music' tent, where a dozen men were pounding away on a communal drum. Behind them, the woman, decked out in feathers and native costume, were singing wordless accompaniment, a rambunctious call and response. More people were arriving every minute with giddy tribal members rushing off to greet long lost friends and relatives. “Considering some of the men I've dated,” she muttered with a self-deprecating half-smile, “Peter Pan might represent a refreshing change.”

Alexis found a pair of turquoise earrings and a matching bracelet at one stalls, while Tom bought a flute fashioned from fire-killed, old-growth cedar. The wood was not grown locally but originally harvested in British Columbia. Alexis was three tents down looking at a collection of handmade moccasins while Tom spoke with the Mashpee Indian who hand-carved the wind instruments. The artisan had driven up in a camper from the tribal reservation on Cape Cod. “Can you find the seam?” Tom handed her the amber colored flute he just purchased.

Alexis flipped the flute over in her hand. The satiny smooth wood shimmered in the early afternoon light. “There’s no break in the grain. It looks all of one piece.”

“The wood is split down the middle, then each half carefully hollowed out and planed smooth before being glued back together.” “That Indian,” he pointed to the craggy-faced elder with a single eagle feather wedged in his gray ponytail, “claims the assembly is so exact that most people can’t find the join line even if he shows them where it's located.” Tom’s enthusiasm over the ingenious workmanship was infectious, and Alexis grinned foolishly even though she wasn’t quite sure why the method was such a big deal. A young toddler dressed in moccasins and beaded leather shirt wandered by nibbling on an ear of corn. Near a display of handmade Indian artifacts, a huge pile of unshucked corn was roasting on a blackened grill. “Hungry?” Tom queried.

They ignored the hot dogs and hamburgers in favor of a watery succotash, which was actually quite good, and traditional corn tortillas with vegetables, a roasted meat of unknown origin, generous dollop of sour cream and pungent, herbal sauce.

A new group of drummers and singers replaced the original musicians as a stream of children and teenagers, some brandishing war clubs and elaborate, handmade jewelry, entered the dance circle. Out of breath, the elderly man with the breechcloth and geriatric walker shuffled unsteadily off to the side and collapsed onto a folding chair. His companion ran off momentarily and returned with a large bowl of succotash. Many of the participants didn’t especially look like Indians. A tall black man with dreadlocks and a broad, fleshy nose was talking to a blond woman with pigtails. Both wore feathers and traditional Indian regalia. With an impromptu change of clothing, the WASP’y blonde could have passed for a cheerleader or collegiate homecoming queen.

Alexis was feeling slightly woozy from the food and excitement. Somewhere between the changing of the guard with the drummers and the young people joining the older dancers, Tom had slipped an arm around her waist. He felt her hips lean up against him. “So, what are you doing next weekend?”

The following Saturday night, Tom took her to an older, Russian foreign film, Dersu Usala. Directed by Akira Kurosawa, the joint-venture movie had won the Grand Prix at the Moscow Film Festival in 1975 and was loosely based on the memoirs of a Russian explorer, Vladimir Arsenyey, describing his exploration of the Sikhote-Alin region of Siberia in the early twentieth century. By the end of the film, when the aged hunter was losing both his eyesight and ancestral ways, Alexis found herself dabbing away the tears. "I'm not usually like this," she sputtered averting her soggy eyes.

The third date, they went out to eat at a Korean restaurant where the diners heaped meats and vegetables in metal bowls and watched as the chef cooked and seasoned the meals on a communal grille. Later they went to hear a jazz quintet at a lounge in downtown Providence. Tom said that the tenor saxophonist reminded him of Dexter Gordon with his wide vibrato and angular, melodic improvisation. Afterwards, they went back to Alexis' apartment and, rather quietly and without fanfare, made love.

"At some point, you ought to meet my parents?" It was two in the morning. They were snuggling together naked.

"People with the financial resources to send their daughter to Wellesley College generally aren’t terribly fond of near-do-wells."

"Tolerant or accepting of near-do-wells," Alexis appended his previous remark. "And, yes, in all likelihood, they’ll be extremely critical, but if we are going to continue seeing each other…" She left the remark dangling.

A month later, dressed in slacks and a neatly-ironed flannel shirt, Tom visited the Hamiltons for dinner. Things went reasonably well. Alexis’ mother flitted about the kitchen overseeing the meal – a spicy pot-roast with candied carrots, potatoes au gratin and asparagus in a lemony butter sauce. She basted the pot roast in a Kikkoman teriyaki marinade before slow-cooking the meat in its own juices with garlic and black pepper. For dessert, she picked up a selection of creamy pastries from Konditor Meister. Alexis didn't see her mother until the middle of the following week. "Where did you meet that silly boy?" The tone was blithely dismissive.

"At a book store."

Mrs. Hamilton was a tall, fair-skinned blonde with broad shoulders and a stony expression. "He seems rather limited."

Alexis, who hadn't expected either of her parents to like Tom, would have been shock to learn otherwise. "That's the appeal. He is rather limited but in all the right ways."

"Your father was even more disappointed."

"Your collective disgust has been duly noted, and I won't bring him home ever again." Mrs. Hamilton opened her mouth to deliver a rebuttal but reconsidered. "I'm the prize," Alexis said intuiting her mother's unspoken thoughts, "the perfect daughter-in-law... the future mother of some Boston Brahmin's precocious grandchildren." There was no reply, just a sullen frigidity the temperature of dry ice.

Later, as Alexis was slipping on a North Face jacket and getting ready to leave, her mother petulantly asked, "Whatever happened to that lovely economics major Aunt Edna introduced you to?"

Alexis felt something snapped in her brain, a subtle misfiring of neurons somewhere in the frontal lobe. "He stuck his hand up my crotch in the parking lot of the Newbury Steakhouse."

"Oh, dear!" A fluttery palm drifted to her mother's wrinkled throat. "And he seemed so refined and self-assured."

Alexis laughed sarcastically. "Those are the ones you have to watch out for." Alexis went home and poured herself a Heineken. Three beers later when she was reasonably drunk, she reached for the phone. "What're you doing?"

"Nothing, why?"

"Come over and make sure to bring a toothbrush plus a change of underwear."

******

“Is there a literary precedent for what we’re doing?” Alexis asked. Lying in bed, Tom was kissing the satiny skin between her shoulder blades.

A minute passed before he spoke. “E.M. Forster... A Room with a View?"

"I read the book in high school but can't remember a thing."

Tom flipped over and lay supine, fingers laced behind his neck. “The novel ends in Florence, where George and Lucy have eloped without her mother’s consent.”

“Star-crossed lovers.”

“No, not at all,” he objected. “Although Lucy alienates all their friends and relatives, the story ends with the promise of lifelong happiness.”

"Funny… you chose a term like happiness, not love."

"Countess Olenska in the Wharton novel you purchased was madly in love, but, from the outset, her passion offered no hope whatsoever of future happiness."

Alexis flipped over on her stomach, rising up on her elbows. “A Room with a View,... the plot is coming back to me in bits and pieces.” She draped a leg over his thigh. “There was George’s father, a very doting, warm-hearted fellow and an overbearing older cousin chaperone, who accompanies Lucy on her ill-fated Italian trip.”

“That would be Charlotte,” Tom offered.

A Room with a View -- rediscovering the plot was like fitting the frayed pieces of a favorite puzzle together. Every time she located a matching piece, another possibility suggested itself. “Back home in England, Lucy agrees to marry some pretentious boy she really doesn’t love.” Alexis' voice cracked, the words catching in her throat. “How utterly hideous!”

“What’s wrong?”

“There was this boorish ass I went out with briefly last year who reminds me of the fictional character.” Alexis proceeded to tell Tom about Jason Tarkington.

"On any given day of the week," Tom observed drolly, "several dozen dolts like that Harvard graduate student wander through the Book Nook." He jabbed a forefinger playfully into her side. "Just as many fusty females, too."

Alexis smiled sheepishly. "The boy who surfaces at the end of the Forster novel and almost spoils everything reminded me of the egomaniac."

"It’s just a book and and you're over identifying."

What Tom had just said was true but, everything struck too close to home. Like the stodgy, brittle-minded adults in the Forster novel, Alexis’ mother had a perverse sense of propriety, bordering on the fanatical. Politeness, decorum, respectability, correctness, aptness – whatever the term Mrs. Hamilton chose, people were compelled to be proper and respectable. By sheer force of will – water dripping through endless millenniums on bare granite – Alexis' mother would ultimately wear her down. Alexis would come away from each family visit with a gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach, and then a migraine and then diarrhea followed by ulcerative colitis, a hemiplegic stroke and myocardial infarction death resulting - all because Tom, the kind-hearted bookworm, didn’t measure up.

"Well," she pouted, leaning her head on his arm, "I'm still upset."

"If it's any consolation," Tom added, "in the final chapter of the Forster novel, the love birds eloped to Italy,… impetuously rushed off in the middle of the night and married without telling the parents."

"Where do we stand in comparison to George and Lucy?"

"Actually, we're light years ahead of them."

"That makes no sense,” she protested. “The couple was already married and away on their honeymoon."

"Yes, but because the older cousin, Charlotte and intriguing relatives conspired to keep the lovebirds apart, they never dated or had a chance to get to know each other."

Alexis considered what Tom told her. "Then I don't see why we couldn't be every bit as happy."

"More so!"

Around five o’clock in the morning, Tom slid off his side of the bed, and a moment later she heard pee splattering against the toilet bowl. “My mother’s a blockhead,” Alexis observed as Tom slipped back under the covers. “She’s got the preternatural instincts of a feral animal to sense that I’m falling hard for you and will do everything in her power to destroy our happiness.”

“Could we backtrack to the ‘falling hard for you’ part?”

“It’s been a month and we get along reasonably well, wouldn’t you agree?”

“That’s fairly obvious.”

“And it doesn’t really feel like we’re dating anymore.”

“No,” the breezy humor fell away, replaced by a sober resoluteness. “The relationship’s grown too comfortable,... cozy.”

Alexis nudged him with an elbow. “I thought a latter-day Peter Pan would never fall into that trap.”

“You didn’t hear me right the first time.” Tom’s voice was shot through with an undercurrent of genuine irritation. “What I implied at the Powwow was that other people mistakenly viewed me as a Peter Pan-type, perennial adolescent. I’ve never personally felt that way." He leaned closer and kissed her on the throat. "And just for the record, by the final scene in Dersu Uzala, I was already fantasizing about the two of us growing old together.”

A car door slammed. An engine fired up and the vehicle crawled out of the parking lot in the direction of the highway. When it was gone, the bedroom was engulfed in soothing silence. Alexis rolled over and straddled him. Resting lightly on his stomach, the girl sat up straight, draping her forearms provocatively over her head. He was staring intently through the chalky, early morning light at her naked torso with an expression of abject reverence. "Like what you see?"

Lips parted, he lay transfixed, breathing through his mouth in shallow puffs of air. An unintelligible, guttural sound welled up in his throat. Alexis inched back down on top of Tom and placed her lips up against his ear. "Consider yourself a risk taker?"

For the most part, no," he spoke haltingly, "but on rare occasion, I'll go for broke."

"Listen closely." Alexis let out a deep sigh, almost like a moan and whispered, "Conventional wisdom be damned, this is what I think we ought to do…"