The Irresistible Henry House (20 page)

IT SEEMED A LONG TIME LATER when Lila stood up and walked across the room to retrieve her panties and light a cigarette. It took a while for Henry to identify what it was that seemed strange about her. Then he realized that she had newspaper ink on her backside. It was exactly like a comic strip that you picked up with Silly Putty and stretched.

In all the time he’d been mute, Henry hadn’t once found anything so funny that he had absolutely had to laugh out loud at it. But this was his undoing. The giddiness from the whole day, the joyful relief in knowing that he’d finally gotten laid, and then the thought of reading Joe Palooka upside down and backward on Lila’s rear … Whatever the reason, Henry started laughing.

Lila wheeled around, reacting first to being laughed at, and only second to the realization that Henry was making sounds.

“What are you laughing at?” she said accusingly, then: “Oh my God, I
knew
you weren’t mute!”

“You have Joe Palooka on your ass,” Henry said hoarsely.

“I have what?”

Henry walked toward Lila on his knees, then put a hand on her backside.

“Look,” he said, and she torqued her head over her shoulder to see what she could.

“Oh, wonderful,” she said.

“It is!” he told her.

She pulled her panties up.

“I wonder how long it’ll stay there,” Henry said.

“Well, I suppose you can find out if you want,” Lila said.

“How about tomorrow?” he asked, grinning.

She smiled, too, rather softly.

“It was your first time, too, wasn’t it?” he asked.

She grimaced. “Now that I know you can talk,” she said, “that’s all you want to say?”

Henry knew it was a test of some kind, but all he could think of was
thank you.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Thank you? For what?”

“For—I don’t know.”

“For being
your
first?”

“Yes. Thank you for being my first.”

“Was it what you thought it would be?”

It had been so much worse, Henry thought.

“It was so much better,” he said.

WHATEVER MENTAL PICTURE Henry had kept of Dr. Gardner in the last few years, it certainly bore no resemblance to the man who walked into the practice house the next morning and found Henry and Lila necking at the kitchen table. Apart from the expression on the old man’s face—suitably horrified, with what looked like a touch of nausea thrown in—Henry had not remembered him being so small.

“Who are you?” Dr. Gardner asked immediately. “What’s the meaning of this?”

Lila looked at Henry, and Henry looked back at Lila.

“Well, aren’t you going to say something?” Lila asked Henry.

Henry gave her a warning glare.

“Henry?” she said. “Aren’t you going to tell Dr. Gardner who you are?”

“Henry?” Dr. Gardner said, but then Henry could see him fighting through his confusion. “Henry,” he said again, more softly this time. “I’m sorry, I—I hadn’t expected to see you so—It’s been quite a few years, hasn’t it?”

“Answer him, Henry,” Lila said.

Dr. Gardner turned icily toward Lila. “Are you a student in this house?” he asked her.

Henry could tell that she was intimidated, but that she was trying not to show it. “Yes, Dr. Gardner. I’m Lila Watkins,” she said.

“Well, to begin with, Miss Watkins, where is the baby for whom you’re supposed to be caring?”

Lila smiled like a contestant on a quiz show who knows that she knows the answer. “He’s out with Carol for a walk. It’s not my week on duty, Dr. Gardner,” she said proudly, and Henry—despite his youth, his inexperience, and above all his profound gratitude for having just lost his virginity—made a mental note that this girl Lila was something of an idiot.

“Then, Miss Watkins, unless the rules of the practice house have changed without my knowledge, you have no business being here.”

Caught, she looked down. “Yes, sir,” she said.

“Miss Watkins,” Dr. Gardner said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Is it your usual practice to seduce young boys?”

“Me? Seduce
him?”
Lila said.

“What other word would you suggest to describe this kind of activity between a college student and a mentally defective high school boy?”

“Mentally defective!” Lila said with outrage completely suitable to the recent events. But even as she spoke, she was looking around the kitchen—perhaps for her purse, certainly for an exit. Henry considered speaking up. He ruled it out almost immediately. Later he would soothe himself somewhat by recalling that he had at least had the
impulse
to defend Lila. For now, his sense of the practical easily outweighed any urge toward chivalry.

“Mrs. Gaines will hear about this from me,” Dr. Gardner told Lila. “I can assure you, Miss Watkins.”

“Dr. Gardner, I—” Lila said, then halted immediately and merely directed whatever energy she had left into a long, low, X-ray-vision stare at Henry. It was the kind of look that the Ray would have given, with a wash of powerful yellow light.

“Henry, I am not happy with you, either,” Dr. Gardner said, and Henry—silent, of course—decided not to hang his head but to look frankly at Dr. Gardner. Frankly, as if they were both men of the world, but apologetically, too, as if Dr. Gardner would understand completely, if only Henry had the voice to explain it to him.

IT WAS EXACTLY THE WAY it had been after the fire at Humphrey. There was a girl who knew the truth about something Henry had done, and whom he would have to trust to tell no one. The difference, however, between Daisy knowing that Henry had started the fire and Lila knowing that Henry could talk, was that Lila did tell. First she told Dr. Gardner. Then she told the other girls in the practice house program. They, in turn, told anyone and everyone they saw. So when Henry, seeking solace—and perhaps even more—from Mary Jane, found her outside the press building the next afternoon, her usual look of pleasure had already turned into something sour and disdainful.

“So I guess you heard,” Henry finally said, hands in his pockets.

“Yeah. I heard,” Mary Jane answered. She stared at him, seething, for a long time. Finally, she said: “So this is what your voice sounds like.”

“What were you expecting?” he asked her. “Hissing and snarling?”

She didn’t smile. “I really don’t want to look at you right now,” she said. She tossed her hair over one shoulder as she pulled her macramé bag up on the other.

“You’re mad,” he said to her.

“Shucks,” she said. “What gave me away?”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She bent to tie a shoelace, but ended up swatting away a bee instead.

“It really wasn’t that big a deal,” Henry said.

She looked startled. “What wasn’t?” she asked.

“Lila,” he said.

“Lila! You think I’m mad because you had sex with Lila?”

“I
know
you’re mad because I had sex with Lila.”

“I am not.”

“Oh, please,” Henry said. “That’s such bullshit.”

“I couldn’t care less that you had sex with Lila. Do you care that I’ve had sex with George?”

“Who’s George?” Henry asked.

It struck him again as quite impressive that, even with only one good eye, she could convey a full spectrum of disdain, frustration, and outrage.

“Okay, I know who George is,” Henry said.

“And?”

“And have you really had sex with him?”

“So you
do
care,” Mary Jane said.

At that moment, Henry realized not only that he did care but that he cared enormously. Mary Jane, who had until this moment been the object of only his casual, even lazy desire, suddenly became the focal point of an obdurate need. Walking beside her in the moist July heat, Henry almost wished he had not been with Lila the day before—and not because of the trouble it was causing him but because he wished that Mary Jane had been his first. He stopped walking at that moment, directly beside an oak tree whose two main branches were splayed like a woman’s thighs.

“I wish you had been my first,” he told her. “And that I had been yours.”

She looked at him warily. “Maybe that’s half true,” she said.

He tried to grab her shoulders, but finding them through the silk strands of her hair was oddly difficult. Mary Jane neatly shook him off, the hill rejecting the climber.

“So you’re not mad about Lila,” Henry said.

“You jerk. There’s just this little lie you’ve been telling me for the last three hundred years,” she said.

“Could you just stop walking a minute?”

Mary Jane stopped.

“Seriously, would it have made any difference if you’d known I could talk? It’s not like we’ve seen each other. I wouldn’t have written to you more often.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What’s the point, then?”

“The point is, I thought I could trust you,” she said. “I thought we could tell each other anything.”

“You
can
tell me anything,” Henry insisted.

“Oh, I see,” she said acidly. “Then it’s just that you can’t tell me.”

Her one good eye looked sad, so Henry pulled her in and kissed her, hard.

“I love you,” he said.

“No,” Mary Jane said. “You don’t.”

MARTHA WAS EVEN MORE punishing when she heard about Henry’s two deadly sins: sex and speech. Having recovered from her illness at the conference, she returned to a whirl of gossip and—somewhat mercifully—decided to dole out a silent treatment of her own. The sultry days passed little differently from the days before, except that it was now Martha who seemed unreachable.

By the middle of August, Henry had finished painting the upstairs rooms, and one evening, after he had moved everything back into place in the parlor, he walked up behind Martha in the kitchen, where she was stirring a stew. He put his arm around her shoulders, gently, the way that used to make her lean back against him and sigh.

“Come with me, Emem,” he said.

She looked up wearily, warily, and turned down the flame. Heavily, sighing at least once, she followed him up the stairs.

With a flourish, he swung open the door to reveal the finished parlor.

“Do you like it?” he asked her.

She shrugged and gave him a half smile: a hurt, slight twitch of a half smile.

“Oh, come on, Emem, I know you like it,” he said.

“It’s very nice,” she said tautly, as if she didn’t think it was.

JUST A FEW DAYS LATER, he had grown tired of trying to appease her, and he persuaded Mary Jane—despite her own continuing iciness—to talk to the head of the Wilton Press. The result was a job painting all the trim on the building: grueling work that involved not only stripping but sanding the woodwork before he could even prime it.

In the sun, Henry worked in khaki shorts and white T-shirts and sometimes in no shirt at all. His shoulders became brown as mushrooms, warm to the touch the one time Mary Jane accidentally brushed a hand across them.

Lila subsided into the traffic of the practice house. The anger Henry felt at her having given away his secret averaged out with the gratitude he felt for her having slept with him. The result was that he ended up neither favoring nor ignoring her. She became, as August passed, just another practice house mother, another soft-smelling creature who would leave and probably never look back.

Throughout August, Henry painted the Wilton Press building, lavished attention on a slowly thawing Mary Jane, and waited uneasily for the other shoe to drop: either an encounter with Dr. Gardner or a lecture, with tears, from Martha. The closest she came to that was one evening when he came in after dinner to find her sitting in the kitchen, inexplicably holding a sleeping Huck.

“So,” she said, “it was all so you could get away from me?”

Henry merely looked back at her, not trusting himself to answer without his long-ago-lit anger engulfing him.

But she was the one who shouted. “And everything was a lie!”

He stared at her for a long moment. “I learned from the best,” he said acidly.

He walked out before she could answer him. The baby started to cry.

HENRY NOW ASSUMED that she would forbid him from going back to Humphrey, and he began to imagine running away to join Betty in New York. Surreptitiously one night, he filched a stack of Martha’s Green Stamps booklets and the Ideabook catalogue with Dinah Shore on the cover. After Martha had gone to sleep, Henry browsed through the book, trying to imagine what necessities for a trip to New York City could be cobbled together from its pages. He saw place settings in silver, silver plate, and stainless steel; china, crystal, everyday glasses; living rooms with fireplaces, televisions, and radios, where Dick-and-Jane children stretched out on cozy carpets; lamps and clocks and sports equipment; one happy family after another. And other than the suitcases on pages nine and ten, there was really nothing that would help Henry get to New York—unless he could go by sailboat, wheelbarrow, or lawn mower.

It turned out, however, that he would get to go back to Humphrey after all. Three weeks into August, Martha eyed him wearily one afternoon and said more words than she had said to him in weeks. “We’d better check through your clothes, don’t you think? In case you need anything new for school?”

SHE SHOWED A SURPRISING STOICISM—or perhaps it was merely exhaustion—when it came time for the actual departure, and aside from her usual searching look—that familiar attempt to find something essential, reassuring, grateful, and loving in Henry’s eyes—she let him go without too much fuss or bother. In a stern lecture, Dr. Gardner explained that, while he realized Henry’s newly recovered voice could qualify him for a place back home, Dr. Gardner himself had no interest in watching what he called Henry’s “stabs at maturity” take place on his campus and with his students.

Henry’s interest in their reasoning was casual at best. The important thing was the liberation and, after all the weeks of worrying, the knowledge that he could be safely ensconced with Charlie and Karen for another year.

On the morning of his departure, he walked over to the Wilton Press, the early sun showing the flaws in his recent paint job and then, by contrast, the near perfection of Mary Jane’s face.