The Irresistible Henry House (28 page)

————

HE HAD BEEN PRETENDING to be eighteen for more than a year, so as his actual birthday approached, Henry found he was less happy than relieved about its arrival. He did not particularly wish to celebrate, but with some bygone, formless longing, he felt the need for attention, too.

It was Fiona who took him to dinner that night. This was not because he had decided he liked her best, and he certainly didn’t love her. It was simply because she’d been the first one to ask. He might have preferred to go with Annie or Cindy. He had even thought about taking out a girl named Coco, whom he had just met at the market. Annie, perhaps, knew enough not to ask him if he wasn’t asking her. And Cindy did ask, but as soon as he said he couldn’t, she said she’d forgotten that she had other plans as well.

All three of them gave him presents, though. Fiona’s was the dinner, and a cel she had painted of her own design: a hideous abstraction that Henry knew he was supposed to find deep.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You don’t like it,” she said.

“Of course I like it,” he said. “And I like you for making it.”

From Cindy he received a trio of sleazy paperbacks called
Sex Hop, Sex Atlas,
and
Sex Pack.
It was clear that she thought her boldness would delight and inspire him.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You don’t like them,” she said.

“Of course I like them,” he said. “And I like you for getting them.”

For her part, Annie had knitted him a scarf.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You don’t like it,” she said.

“Of course I like it.”

“Then why do you look so annoyed?”

“Because you spent too much time on this,” he said.

“But Henry. I wanted to.”

“You have better things to do,” he said.

The effect on her was as immediate as if Mark Harburg had just asked her to change poses. Her eyes narrowed; her shoulders sank—so much that he felt he had to do something to open her eyes again, lift her shoulders. He stood looking down at her, and then he used the scarf to circle her neck and bring her in close, just as he’d seen some student do at Humphrey so long ago. He kissed her.

“You don’t love me, do you?” she asked him.

“I couldn’t love anyone more,” he said, which was not exactly a lie.

  4  
To Help the Medicine Go Down

By now, Henry had imagined the phone call many times, but in his imagination, it had always been Dr. Gardner calling to tell him that Martha was dead. Somehow, he had not counted on an illness, with all the attendant demands and the guilt and dread. And he had not counted on Martha herself being the one to deliver the news.

“It’s cancer,” she said to him on the phone. It was the evening of August 27, the evening of the
Mary Poppins
premiere. Her timing was perfect, he thought bitterly.

“What kind of cancer?”

“Does it matter?” Martha said.

“Yes it matters.”

“It’s everywhere, Hanky.”

She sounded almost relieved, or perhaps that was only his imagination.

“Will you come see me? I’m going to die.”

“Have you gotten a second opinion?”

“I don’t need a second opinion.”

“Have they told you how long you’ve got?”

“Not long.”

“Have they told you?”

“Henry. Don’t make this hard for me.”

————

HE HUNG UP AND WAS somewhat surprised to discover that the office was nearly empty. He had been on the phone for only ten minutes, and almost everyone was gone—either off to dress for the premiere or to go home early.

Henry walked through the bullpen, hands in his pockets as always, proudly surveying the storyboards for some of the films that were being developed. He imagined for a moment what it would feel like to be Walt tonight, what it would feel like to be Walt on any night.

With the light coming in the windows where the shutters had not been drawn, Henry walked back to his own desk and saw that someone had left a present for him, a six-inch-long box wrapped in the Mickey Mouse paper that usually adorned all studio gifts.

Inside was a silver spoon with Mary Poppins and her umbrella engraved on the handle.

“Something to help the medicine go down,” Walt had written on a slip of celluloid, above his famous signature.

For a moment—and it lasted only as long as it took Henry to walk once more around the bullpen—he inhabited a world in which his secrets, fears, and wishes were somehow magically understood. The moment ended when he passed Chris’s desk and saw an identical box on it, and then on all the others.

The spoon, obviously, had nothing to do with the specific pain that Henry or anyone else was likely to go through, now or ever. And though each note was indeed hand-lettered and signed, Henry should have been the first to recognize that in a world of animators and in-betweeners, that meant absolutely nothing, either. It was an opening-night memento, lovely and kind, but produced in bulk for everyone who had had even the slightest thing to do with the film.

For those who had had more than slight things to do, there was, instead of a commemorative spoon, a coveted ticket to the old-fashioned gala opening at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where giant Disney characters stood curbside, greeting guests in black tie and gowns. The festivities were being aired locally, so when Henry got home, he nursed a glass of wine and watched the broadcast on TV. A trainload of balloons was released into the night sky. Actors were dressed as British bobbies and English music-hall singers, and various Hollywood reporters milled about.

“They tell me this could be one of your biggest pictures, Mr. Disney,” one interviewer said.

“Well, I haven’t retired yet, you know,” Disney said. “You never know what’s coming.”

THE THING WITH WOMEN had become so easy. It took remarkably little for Henry to figure out how to get them. Part of his success, he knew, was the certainty of success itself. It never occurred to him that any of them would be ungettable. It was merely a matter of working out the steps from
apart
to
together
—just like the steps in in-betweening.

For all his facility, Henry was not exactly cynical, and his confidence was so justified that most of the time it readily passed for charisma instead of conceit.

Mary Jane was the notable exception to this pattern, and in the days following Henry’s conversation with Martha, he realized how frequently he was thinking about her. He wasn’t sure why. Perhaps they really had evened the score. Perhaps it was all their history: Other than Martha and, if you counted him, Dr. Gardner, Mary Jane had been the only person who had known him throughout his life.

As he flew east on the last day of August—this time it was Martha who had paid for his airfare—he thought about Mary Jane, seeing her in sequential, but recessive, snapshots: skinny and slim-hipped and piratelike, laughing in the car after his question about her uncrying eye; pudgy and square and brutal on the day he had asked her to marry him; sexy in the photograph she had sent him at Humphrey; earnest in their grade school coatroom, listening intently as he told her about his real mother; and then finally, unavoidably, the sight of her blindfolded and bloodied, feeling for the car door—and then giggling in her hospital bed, bound to him forever by how each had forever been harmed.

“I’M SORRY,” HE SAID TO HER, walking through the campus at Wilton the morning after he landed.

“For what?” she asked.

“For your eye,” he said.

“Oh. That. You mean the crying thing?”

“No. Not the crying thing. I mean, your eye.”

“Oh.”

“You know, I wasn’t even really throwing the block at
you.”

“Yes you were, Henry.”

“I think I was just mad.”

“You didn’t want to play castle.”

“That’s right.”

“And you didn’t want to have to choose between Annabel and me,” she said.

“And you said there couldn’t be more than one Miss Fancy,” he said.

“Do you want to choose now?” Mary Jane asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Anyone in particular?”

So he told her about his three women. About Annie’s delicacy, Cindy’s sass, and the haughtiness of Fiona’s smile. He told her about his vague, distracted guilt and his annoyance—really unchanged since nursery school—whenever one of them tried to make a greater claim on him than the others.

Imparting this kind of information was new to Henry, a discovery as concrete and startling as if someone had just revealed for him a new room in the house he had lived in for years.

MARTHA, MEANWHILE, seemed to sag more noticeably when Henry walked into any room where she was. Henry knew that she hadn’t invented her illness. Two mornings after his arrival at Wilton, he had gone with her to her doctor’s appointment and heard firsthand the litany of her symptoms, tests, results, and the doctor’s unequivocal conclusion. But the doctor had also given no hint of a time frame. In fact, he had repeated—not only for Martha’s benefit but also when she was out of the room—that some people could live for years with her type of cancer, which he called Hodgkin’s disease. He said Martha might easily have had it for years as well.

At the end of his first day home, Henry understood that Martha would die from this cancer and that, before she did, she would use it at every possible turn to keep him close to her side. The claim upon him was nearly as strong as the rage it inspired.

  5  
It’s Called a Toke

Henry first called Mary Jane at Berkeley on a Friday in October, but he had to leave her ten messages before she called him back. It was early November by then, and she was breathless with tales of the Free Speech Movement and her own raging debate about whether to join in with the protesters or simply write about them. This was a topic that kept her occupied—and, to Henry, somewhat more remote than he wanted—throughout the rollicking fall of ’64 and the winter of ’65. Mary Jane organized and petitioned and took part in the campus sit-in and didn’t actually ask Henry to visit her until the middle of March.

She was living on the northeast side of campus in a two-bedroom dorm suite, where the radiators were always on and the windows were always open. The floors were linoleum and elephant gray. Track marks, scuff marks, rust stains, and spills of all kinds and vintages had contributed to their texture, if not to their allure.

Mary Jane had a roommate named Alexa, who seemed to want to share nothing more than the living room and the bathroom—and those only reluctantly. Southern and square, she wore white blouses, slim kilts, and dark green cat-eye glasses. Her prized possession was a small, pale blue Samsonite train case, in which she kept her ample supply of makeup. When Henry first met Alexa, she was doing what she would do on nearly all their subsequent encounters: namely, sitting at the card table by a window, leaning into the slightly clouded mirror in the little suitcase, and daintily checking, patting, sponging, or outlining various parts of her face. Brush in hand and palette before her, she reminded Henry a bit of Fiona—in those rare moments when he had actually seen Fiona at her inking desk. But it was clear that Alexa wanted nothing at all to do with Henry—or with Mary Jane, for that matter.

On Henry’s second visit to Berkeley—this one in early April—Mary Jane drove Alexa from her makeup table by relentlessly playing
The Beatles vs. The Four Seasons,
and when the door finally closed, Mary Jane rolled Henry his first joint. She used the crease of the double record album as a kind of funnel, taking out seeds and impurities, creating a tiny green-brown mound of marijuana, a miniature version of the leaf piles that Henry and she had sorted as children under the ancient autumn sky. With the little pile ready, Mary Jane took out a small white booklet that had the word
Zig-Zag
and a strange Arabian-looking man on the cover. Smiling, she opened the booklet and popped one sheet out, leaving another behind it, just like Kleenex.

“Zig-Zag?” Henry asked her.

“Rolling papers,” she said.

Smiling, she placed the marijuana carefully on top of the rolling paper, twisted it into a tight stick, and licked the edge of the paper to seal it. Finally, ever so gently, she ran the whole joint lightly into and out of her mouth—a tiny, provocative gesture that Henry would always enjoy watching.

“Are you ready?” she asked him.

IT WAS AN INITIATION. They both knew it, and knew that it was a milestone in the making.

Henry inhaled, predictably coughed, and endured her equally predictable laughter.

“Try again,” she said. “Only this time, breathe in a little less and hold it in a little longer.”

He followed her instructions, allowing the woodsy, sweet-sour smoke to enter his lungs.

“You’re going to love this,” Mary Jane said, as if the few puffs she had taken had already endowed her with cosmic mind-reading abilities.

“Should I have another puff?” he asked her.

“Toke.”

“What?”

“It’s called a toke. With a cigarette you have a puff. With a joint, you have a toke.”

“Toke,” Henry repeated, sampling the word and then the joint. A bit of time and a few songs rolled past. “Toke,” he said again, and again illustrated the word. Suddenly, giddily, he found the word itself ineffably hilarious.

“Towwwwwke,” he intoned.

“Yes, Henry,” Mary Jane said, watching his progress with some satisfaction and considerable superiority.

“Towwwwwke,” he said again, laughing lightly.

Her couch was a seven-foot-long thrift-shop monstrosity, covered in a salmon-red fabric that was the color and nearly the texture of heavy-grade sandpaper. Henry lay back on it and watched the smoke marble the air.

On Mary Jane’s record player, the Beatles sang:

Do you want to know a secret?
Do you promise not to tell?

Henry sang along, “Ooo-ah-ooh.”

“Now,” Mary Jane said. “That’s more like it.”

SUNSET HAD TINTED THE WINDOWS ORANGE, but now the sun was down, the panes showed fingerprints, dirt, and a series of white splotches in which Henry struggled to find patterns or meaning.

“What are you looking at?” Mary Jane asked him.

“Bird droppings, I think.”

“Gross.”

“Actually, they’re kind of pretty.”

“Henry. We’re not
that
high.”

THROUGHOUT THE SPARKLING SPRING OF 1965, Henry spent nearly every other weekend at Berkeley with Mary Jane. Sometimes they even left her suite to wander the campus or see a movie or—especially after they’d smoked her pot—grab a bite to eat. Now clearly in her element, she had gathered a group of friends and a style of living that Henry found compelling, especially because it was so different from the still relatively buttoned-down world of Disney. Everything in Mary Jane’s Berkeley crowd was long hair, long skirts, and long, intense talks.

Henry would drive up on a Friday night and arrive at the dorm bringing wine, but not the Almadén or Lancers that the rest of the undergraduates drank. He would bring something French, with a nice-looking label, and Mary Jane would light candles, then cigarettes, then joints, and they would talk half the night. One weekend—by her design but with his help—they painted her bedroom entirely black, including the school-owned bed and dresser, even including the ceiling, which inspired her to rub his shoulders and neck, though at a speed that was almost aggressively platonic.

Usually—despite the dorm’s rules against such visitors—Henry slept on the couch, feeling a fraternal protectiveness as both Mary Jane and Alexa retired to their rooms and he was left to turn out the lights and make sure the hot plate had been switched off.

One night in early June, Mary Jane fell asleep on the far end of the couch, and when Henry woke in the morning, he saw that both her madras shirt and her eye patch had been thrown askew during the night. Her bra—white, clean, more rounded than pointed—was clearly visible. But he found himself staring instead at her face. He had always wondered what Mary Jane’s eye looked like under the patch. Over the years he had imagined all kinds of horrors—bruised flesh, missing flesh, a hole like the kind a doll’s eye would leave. Instead, her bad eye—what he could see of it, anyway—looked not that different from her good eye. Both were pale, fragile, closed in sleep. Hidden from sunlight all these years, the skin around her bad eye was fishily paler, and Henry thought the eyelashes were a little more sparse. But otherwise, there seemed no difference, and Henry found himself slightly disappointed, as if he’d finally been told a secret, only to discover that it was something he’d known all along. Nevertheless, it was an intimacy that until now he hadn’t known, and as Henry lazily watched Mary Jane sleep, he realized with satisfaction how much he knew about her. Her favorite color was still pink. She was still angry at her mother. She was still scared of heights. Nervous around babies. Dreaming of being a journalist and taking on the world.

He had never seen her naked. He had never been naked in front of her. There had been their one, long-ago-summer kiss and his even less plausible marriage proposal, and now, after the wild, precipitous terrain of adolescence, their friendship had returned to its natural path. Still, when she woke and saw him, she covered her eye before she covered her breasts.