The Irresistible Henry House (33 page)

Victoria followed him in.

“What’s with you?” she asked him. “What’s got your knickers in such a bunch?”

“How’re you doing on your monsters?” he asked her.

“Oh. So that’s it. Lacking inspiration, are we?”

He allowed himself the luxury of telling her the truth. “I’m drawing a blank,” he said.

“What color?”

“No fooling. I can’t come up with a thing.”

“It’ll come.”

“Fish?” he asked her. “Chip?”

“No, thanks. You’re the one who skipped lunch, remember? Why don’t you show me what you’ve got?” She flashed him a flirty smile.

“Pardon me?” he asked, flirting back a little.

“Sketch pad, Harry,” she said.

He pushed the remains of his lunch back into the bag, then balled it up and tossed it into a trash can.

————

HENRY GOT THE IDEA when he showed Victoria the sketch pad. There was his drawing of the Chief Blue Meanie, and there was his drawing of the Mickey Mouse ears. Later, he would confide in Victoria that he didn’t consider it a pure idea. It was based on an accidental juxtaposition, he said, of two other people’s pure ideas. She scoffed at his admission and said he was just fishing for compliments. Putting Mouseketeer hats on the Blue Meanies was a stroke of genius, she said.

She was not alone in her assessment. The sketch of the Chief Blue Meanie, wearing mouse ears, was quickly passed down the table, like a platter of cookies, and before the afternoon was out, it had met with the art director’s enthusiastic approval.

IT AMAZED HENRY—but apparently didn’t faze either the Great Martini or Peace—that she had gotten called back for the part of Girl at the Party in
America Hurrah.
This occasioned several more mornings of “I’m dead, thank you, I said, thank you, please, I said I’m dead,” as well as several concerted if awkward efforts at staging. A week later—more amazing still—it was down to Peace and one other actress, and Peace called Henry at the studio to say that Martin had told her he’d heard the part would be hers.

Henry came home early to make her a special dinner. He turned on the radio and listened, inevitably, to the Beatles, the Stones, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix. “Well,” said the DJ, “this is the beat of the sixties, here for all you mods and rockers. It’s a Thursday night in July in the year of our Lord nineteen sixty-seven, and here’s a little something smashing for you from the Who.”

Henry sharpened his kitchen knife, as Martha had taught him to do years before, and he sliced potatoes and minced onions, chopping in time to the music. He poured himself a glass of wine. He reveled in the fact that he could feel simultaneously attached and unconfined.

The dinner was ready at seven o’clock. Henry set the table with an array of the seemingly random objects that Peace had been bringing home from flea markets and who knew where else. There were mismatched plates, utensils, and glasses that somehow, once assembled, made a perfectly stylish whole, with the unmistakable flair of the perfectly stylish girl who had found them. Henry put fresh candles in the wine bottles Peace had made into holders, their sides already mottled with drippings of different-colored wax. By 7:30, Henry had fluffed the couch pillows, swept the carpet, and put the dishes in the dish drainer away. Just before 8:00, he heard Peace’s key turn in the lock. She stepped in wearing a pink polka-dot raincoat and some kind of sailor cap.

“Hen!” she said, as if it was a surprise to find him in their flat. “Wow,” she said. “You cooked?”

He tried to read her eyes, but they were hidden by the two curtains formed by her hair.

“Well?” he finally asked her. “Am I looking at the next Girl at the Party?”

“Nope,” she said, and tossed her polka-dot coat, unsuccessfully, toward the front hall bench. She did an exaggerated stage curtsy. “Thank you,” she said, as if to a vast theater audience. “Thank you so much.”

“Oh, baby,” Henry said. “I’m so sorry, baby.”

He took her in his arms, smelling her herbal shampoo. Perhaps later they would bathe together, he thought, or shower, and he would wash her hair.

He loved so much to shampoo her, building her hair into soapy swirls, like white roses.

She broke quickly from his embrace.

“It’s no big deal,” she said.

“No big deal!”

She shrugged herself away.

“You were dying to get this part,” he said.

Still standing up, she reached for one of the roast potatoes and ate it, then licked her fingers.

“You’ve been working on this part for weeks,” Henry said.

She reached for another potato. “These are good,” she said. “Hen. There’ll be other parts.”

Her focus shifted around the table. “So you cooked,” she said again, and Henry lit the candles.

He glanced back to her, nervously.

“You may be taking this a little too hard,” she told him.

He snapped his lighter shut, unnerved by encountering an indifference even greater than his own.

“Henry,” she said. “For God’s sake. There’ll always be other parts.”

  4  
So Much Harder Than It Looks

It was not the London of
Mary Poppins.
There were parks and rain and the occasional tea, but the similarities ended there. By autumn, the weather was raw, the sun set too early, and the one time Henry tried to impress Peace by drawing a chalk pavement picture of her in the park, a bobby came by—a fat, puffing man—and said: “Don’t think you’re going to be doing that here,” as if the “that” was having public sex.

“My daughters loved
Mary Poppins,”
Victoria admitted to him one late afternoon, when the sun—so rarely out—had somehow managed to flood their work table and force them to take a break. “What parts did you draw?” she asked him.

“Mostly the penguins,” Henry said. “But I was just in-betweening then, too.”

“Just,”
Victoria repeated. “And you were, what, twelve at the time?”

Henry grinned.

“Anyway, my girls
loved
the penguins!” Victoria said. She put down her pencil and held up her Coke bottle. “Sip?” she asked him.

It was oddly intimate. He took the bottle and drank about a third of it.

“Oh, thanks a bloody bunch,” Victoria said, grabbing it back.

“Tell me something,” he said.

“Anything, pet.”

“Is there a real street called Cherry Tree Lane?” he asked her.

She laughed. “Oh, Harry, you’re hopeless,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because you’re still such a tourist.”

“No I’m not.”

“What you need,” she said, “is a proper London education.”

He guessed that she meant more than just seeing the sights.

HE CAME HOME FROM WORK that evening with a bunch of purple irises for Peace. But when he walked in, he found her standing in front of the bathroom door, her forehead pressed against the mirror as if she had just tipped over there.

“Peace?” he said. “Are you okay?”

“I’m groovy,” she said.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m groovy,” she said again.

“No,” he said. “What are you doing?”

Her forehead was still against the mirror. “Waiting for my eyes to dry,” she said.

He put the flowers in the old teapot they often used as a vase. He remembered, vividly and with dread, what it had been like to walk into Mary Jane’s room the night she first dropped acid.

“Okay,” he said. “How wasted are you?”

She giggled and turned to face him. The hair that had been behind her ears fell softly into two long Art Nouveau curves.

“No,” she said. “I’m not high.”

“But you’re waiting for your
eyes
to dry?”

She giggled again and embraced him. As usual, her outfit was a brilliant blend of unmatched, unexpected parts. She was wearing her yellow miniskirt, a belt with mirrored buttons on it, and a new pair of tall white boots.

“I put on new eyelashes,” she said, and she fluttered her lids for emphasis. She had rimmed her eyes, Egyptian-style, with dark eyeliner and had applied two pairs of false eyelashes—one on top of the other—as bushy and black as a new paintbrush.

“Can you see anything?” he asked her, laughing.

“How do they look?” she said.

“They look mod.”

“Do I look like a dollybird?”

“Absolutely,” he said.

She grinned. She lifted both her arms, not to embrace him this time but to celebrate herself.

“Guess where we’re going,” she said to Henry.

He took a step forward and kissed her. “Where’d you get the boots and the lashes?”

“Guess where we’re going,” she said again.

“Where?”

“We’re going to the Scotch.”

“The what?”

“The Scotch of St. James. The Great Martini gave me his card.”

IT WAS ONE OF THE TWO OR THREE hottest discotheques in town. Henry had heard about it endlessly at the studio, because both Paul and George often showed up there, and various ink-and-paint girls were forever trying to get in. The Scotch was near Piccadilly Circus, down a narrow side street, right next door to the gallery where John had met Yoko. Peace led the way from the bar upstairs down a circular staircase to a long room dark with drama and jammed with people. Lights flashed, miraculously, in time to the music. Women in paisley miniskirts and men in velvet pants danced dangerously on the crowded floor. In the near corner, the band was dressed in what looked like Civil War uniforms, the drummer flailing away like a demonic Disney animatron. Along the walls were banquettes and small round tables, and at one of them, Henry could see two redheaded girls making out with each other.

He had learned from his days with Mary Jane at Berkeley that LSD was usually laced into sugar cubes or soaked into blotter paper. So when Peace, just moments after they’d gone downstairs, proudly produced two blue capsules, Henry wasn’t sure what she was offering him.

“What is that?” he shouted at her, above the music.

“It’s smashing!” she said.

“No! What is it?”

“What do you think it is?” she said.

THE MUSIC THRUMMED and beat against the walls. Every few minutes, Henry became convinced that he could see the sounds—pulsating outward in concentric shapes, like the rippled bands he drew for gongs or drums in animation. On the shelves and ledges that were cut into the cavelike walls, the rings of sound hit vases of flowers, stacks of books, bottles of whiskey, busts of poets and statesmen that were decked out in mod hats and sunglasses. In Henry’s mind, the sounds splashed down and over all of these things, then pooled into puddles on the ground, where the hundreds of dancing feet splashed them and spattered them around.

So this was tripping, he thought.

He remembered the night he had followed Mary Jane around Berkeley, determined to take care of her and keep her safe. A wave of regret, like a shudder, or nausea, gripped him as he saw Peace looking back at him, beaming, tripping, not remotely Mary Jane. But then he was taken up by the music, and the two girls he’d seen kissing before were now with him on the dance floor, and it turned out that Peace knew one of them, and that led Henry to a different sense—of a vast, comforting embrace, the interconnectedness of them all, with the music and lights pulsing on and on, past the fear and regret and the nagging sense that something or someone was missing from his life.

AT TWO IN THE MORNING, Henry and Peace stood at their front door, Peace trying and failing to put her key in the lock. She would succeed in holding the doorknob, and even manage to locate the right key, but then she would collapse in a paroxysm of giggles.

“This is
so
much harder than it looks,” she said.

“Peace,” Henry said.

“No, don’t tell me. I’ll get it,” she said, as if he had asked her a riddle.

She flipped a long strand of hair away from her mouth, then bent down again, the hair falling back over her face. He waited, trying to be patient, and then when her shoulder started to shake with laughter again, he said: “Peace. Let me. I’ll do it.”

“No!” she shouted, like a baby not wanting to give up a toy. And then she added, quite seriously, as if she was talking about a pair of crutches or having her arm in a sling: “I have to learn to do these things high.”

When they stepped inside, Henry noticed that the purple irises he had brought home that night had already opened and drooped dramatically, stalks spraying out from the teapot like the lines of an explosion.

PEACE, AS IT TURNED OUT, did learn to do things high—and to a rather remarkable extent. Throughout the long, damp, but domestic fall, Henry got to the point where he thought he could tell exactly how much pot she had smoked, how recently she had been tripping.

Straight or stoned, she was without doubt the most effortlessly creative person he had ever known. She painted cabinets in different colors, cut out lips or eyes from magazines and collaged them onto doorframes, turned every surface she found in life into a plausible working canvas. She tie-dyed old sheets to make napkins, sewed a hilarious, belted miniskirt to replace the tattered, dowdy one around the kitchen sink, pasted wine labels onto the kitchen floor, and added new words to the walls around them—KITCHEN, CLOSET, SHOES, DOOR—in letters that dripped and floated and beat with psychedelic life. And with a style that Henry jealously recognized as entirely her own.

  5  
Mail Call

It was a Friday afternoon in late October, and Henry had been instructed by Jack Dixon, one of the animating supervisors, to leave the Blue Meanies and switch to the Apple Bonkers. The Apple Bonkers were tall, top-hatted gentlemen who used bright green apples to freeze the inhabitants of Pepperland. It bothered Henry that, based on the available storyboards, the apples didn’t seem to need to be picked
from
anywhere and just appeared in the Bonkers’ hands. The Disney man in Henry fought the lack of logic.

“They have to come from somewhere,” he said.

“Why?” Jack asked.

“Because they do. Because you can’t just get an apple from the air.”

“Maybe you can in Pepperland,” Jack said enigmatically, and walked off just as Victoria came back in from the front desk.

“Mail call, Disney Boy,” she said.

“Mail?” he said. “I never get mail.”

“Who’s Mary Jane Harmon?” Victoria asked.

His face must have done something twisted or telling, because it seemed to startle her.

“She’s just an old friend,” Henry said.

Victoria held the envelope up to his desk lamp, grinning. There was a touch of Ethel’s brassiness in her, Henry thought. Why did women always have to be either too hard or too soft?

“Wonder what it says,” Victoria teased.

Despite Henry’s wish to seem unmoved—despite his wish to
be
unmoved—he grabbed instinctively at the envelope.

“A stateside gal?” Victoria asked. “The gal you left behind?”

Then she saw the look on his face, and she softened immediately. “Oh. I’m sorry, Disney Boy,” she said.

“She’s just an old friend,” Henry repeated.

He looked down at the envelope. The handwriting itself made him feel strange: tugged uncomfortably too far west. He didn’t want to read the letter. He suspected that it would just make him feel low—and guilty for having left the States without having said a better goodbye. He put the envelope in his back pocket, picked up his pencil, and peered down at his drawing. He could sense Victoria looking at him, but he didn’t look back at her.

He didn’t open the envelope until nearly seven that evening, sipping a cup of cold coffee on one of the leather couches in the sitting room.

October 15,1967

Dear Henry:

Ha! I found you! It took me four months, but leave it to old Eagle Eye and the bookkeeping department at Disney.

Well, I’m finally a college graduate, which of course is more than I can say for you, you stoner. Graduation was in June (of course) and everyone at Berkeley was very “Freedom now.” I was just happy it was over.

Alexa kept asking me about you. “When’s he coming back?” “I thought he really liked me.” “Did he say anything to
you
about why he left?” So I said:

1. Beats me

2. You were wrong, and

3. Nope, nope, nope

Funny how she thought that—having been your best friend for 18
years and having flown across the country and back for your mother’s funeral—I would have some coordinates for you more specific than London, England.

It doesn’t matter. I figure you’re heavily tattooed, with hair down to your waist, and are now living comfortably in an opium den with the latest three or four smitten kittens. You left America just in time for race riots to break out all over the place. It’s so grim. I wonder if you think about it there.

For my part, I’ve settled in Greenwich Village with George (remember George? Of course you don’t) and a number of projects, one of which has just come to fruition. To find out more, you’ll have to write to me. That’s right, write to me, doofus.

Love always,
MJ

Henry looked up. Victoria was standing in the doorway of the sitting room.

“I have had a profound insight,” she said.

She walked to the other end of the sofa and straddled its arm, like a child playing horse.

“And what is that?” Henry asked her, wishing she’d go away.

“Do you realize that, other than a few screams, there are going to be absolutely no female voices in
Yellow Submarine?”

“Huh,” Henry said.

“Why do you think that is?” she asked him.

“I don’t know,” Henry said. “Maybe because there are only male characters in
Yellow Submarine?”

“Aha! And why do you think
that
is?”

She blew a line of smoke rings into the air, her mouth a tough, inviting O, contracting as it pinched out its nearly opaque white circles.

Henry put Mary Jane’s letter back into its envelope. “How do you do that?” he asked Victoria.

“Do what?” she asked, as if she hadn’t meant her smoke rings to be provocative.

“Blow smoke rings,” he said.

“Ancient secret.”

“Teach me,” Henry said.

“It’s all about the tongue,” Victoria said.

He did not want her, and it was not just because she was older and he knew her body would be less exciting than Peace’s. He didn’t want Victoria because she didn’t paste magazine pictures onto doorframes, didn’t make belts out of old neckties and purse handles out of old belts, didn’t know how to give massages that were more like conversations than talk, didn’t make him want to kiss her even after she’d asked him to. Henry did wonder—his wondering such things was after all a habit of being—if Victoria actually would cheat on her husband with him. It amazed and intrigued him that he had never yet slept with a married woman. But then he thought of Peace; she was the only one he really wanted or intended to want.

WHEN HENRY CAME HOME THAT NIGHT, Peace was wearing another new pair of boots, and she kept them—and only them—on when she led him to the bed to make love. Gymnastically, she got them close enough to his face so that he could smell their mixture of leather and marijuana—a head-shop, flea-market smell.

“Where’d you get
these
boots?” he asked her after he lit a cigarette and she lit a joint.

“Do you like them?” she said. She was lying beside him now, and she lifted her legs at a perfect ninety-degree angle, admiring the boots.

“You stole them, didn’t you?” Henry asked.

She clicked the heels against each other.

“Did you?” Henry asked her.

“I think everything should be free,” Peace said. “Don’t you think everything should be free?”

She giggled and let her legs fall heavily back onto the bed.

“Where’d you steal them from?” he asked her.

She sang: “Stone free, do what I please. Stone free, to ride the breeze.”

He knew he should scold her, but he was beguiled.

He asked her to pose for him.

“In just my boots?” she asked.

“Exactly,” he said.

“Stone free,” she sang. “I can’t stay. Got to, got to, got to get away.”

Henry sprang out of bed and found some charcoals and paper. He sat on a chair about two yards from the bed.

“Find a position you can hold,” he told her. “Other than asleep.”

She looked slightly wounded. “I
know
how to pose,” she said.

“I’m sorry, baby. It’s just, you know. It’s not as easy as you’d think.”

But she was a good model, reminding him of Annie. She was in fact excellent. She found a position, up on an elbow, and then another, curled around a pillow, and then a third, her back arched, her shoulders as perfect and polished as two stones.

“You’re amazing,” he told her, hungrily sketching.

She grinned.

“It’s like you’ve been doing this all your life,” he said.

She giggled.

“Well, not all my life,” she said, but then she told him that, between auditions, she had been modeling for Geoffrey Whitehall.

Whitehall was famous—and not just in London—for his psychedelic designs, which adorned everything from record albums to shop windows, posters, and clothing. His considerable success as a graphic designer had been converted to near icon status by the fact that he’d started a trend for painting on bodies. Women’s bodies. Nude.

“How the hell did you meet Geoffrey Whitehall?” Henry asked.

“Martini introduced us,” Peace said.

“Did you let him paint you?” Henry asked.

“I told you I posed for him.”

“No. But I mean did you let him paint
on
you?”

“Not yet,” Peace said. “But he says he wants to. Isn’t that fab? He says my body’s a perfect canvas.”

“It is,” Henry said. “But it’s my canvas.”

She looked at him. “Are you done drawing?” she asked.

He nodded, perturbed.

“Then let’s go out,” she said. “I heard that Jimi Hendrix might be at the UFO tonight.”

“Who told you that?” he asked her, with a sudden desire to know everything she did during the day.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Someone,” she said.

But he managed to talk her out of going. He gave her a massage, using the Tiger Balm she had brought home. He didn’t ask her where she’d gotten it.

After he had made love to her again, she fell asleep, and he stood up to turn off the lights. Her skirt, sweater, and belt formed a checkerboard and patent-leather puddle at the foot of the bed, and beside it her new boots stood sulkily, drooping in opposite directions, as if they had had a fight.