The Prize - Barry Rachin (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) 📗

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…"


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Publication Date: 10-26-2010

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