The Irresistible Henry House (34 page)

  6  
Not Anybody’s Baby

The Beatles walked into the Soho Square studio on a brisk November morning, and they were at once more vivid and less real than Henry could have imagined. They had, however, virtually no interest in being at the studio. They were under contract to come by twice during production, and this—six months into the project—was merely the first of their required visits. There were two still photographers and a film crew with them, following every gesture the Fab Four made as they encountered their two-dimensional cartoon selves. Predictably, they mugged with the cutouts, but to Henry they seemed to be downright bored. They were also a bit disheveled. Only Ringo’s hair looked as if it had been recently washed. Paul had a five o’clock shadow, and though George was wearing bright red pants and a red silk ascot, he looked slightly gray—either hungover or just exhausted.

“What’s it about, then?” John asked his cardboard double and flashed a peace sign to match the cutout’s own.

Not until Jack led them into the editing room—where he ran several scenes for them on the Moviola—did their outlook seem to brighten. Suddenly, Paul was asking if it was too late for them to supply their own voices. John wanted to know if the Apple Bonkers’ green apples were meant to look like the one on the Beatles’ record label. Ringo picked up one of the models of the submarine itself and began to examine it from every angle.

Most of the artists ducked back down to their drawing boards. Even Victoria seemed to be hiding behind her floppy hat. But as he had long ago with Walt, Henry remained unfazed by fame, looking first Paul, then John, right in the eye.

“Hey, mate,” John said and immediately walked up behind Henry’s shoulder to look at his drawing board. “Mind if I have a go?”

As Ringo and George departed, and Paul embarked on a side discussion of distribution rights, John Lennon sat in Henry’s chair, picked up a pencil, and began to sketch.

Lennon was wearing a black turtleneck and round wire-framed glasses, behind which Henry could see heavy-lidded eyes that seemed to mask any hint of inspiration. With Henry standing beside him, Lennon drew one simple flower, then another, then a third, the last one with a pair of petals that were flung out like ecstatic arms. The fourth flower Lennon drew had a face, and one of the petals was coquettishly hiding all but its eyes. Henry tried to appear neutral, but a small storm was starting in his heart. How was it possible for this man to come from nowhere and sit down without warning and simply create? No hesitation, no copying, no doubt, no mimicry. What John Lennon drew came from his pencil the way water might come from a faucet. There was no suggestion of any source more challenging or profound. In a way it reminded Henry of Peace: that same confidence and facility—the same instinct to fill surfaces with patterns, spaces with furniture, silences with sounds. It was the very instinct Henry lacked.

But perhaps it would be enough, he thought, to stay close to someone who did have that instinct, to have a little house somewhere: an eager, warm, brown-haired woman with a beautiful voice—and someday, perhaps, a beautiful child.

CHRISTMAS WAS ON A MONDAY and Boxing Day a Tuesday, and though Henry had had to work through the weekend, he had been given both holidays off. Defying the British custom—as well as her casual Chanukah memories—he and Peace opened their presents on Christmas Day, beneath a tree they had trimmed the night before with pipe-cleaner peace signs, curlicues of used animation cels, painted tomato paste cans, and tissue-paper flowers. Peace gave Henry clothes and, implicitly, a lesson in mod. She had long since picked out his bellbottom jeans and the wide leather belt that held them up. To his mild relief, she had not given him the pair of plaid bells she had pointed out on Carnaby Street the weekend before. Instead, she gave him a purple button-down shirt, a pair of secondhand boots, and an evil-eye bead on a black leather choker. Henry wore them all for the whole day, even though the boots were at least a size too small, and he could feel, practically before they reached the corner pub, the rawness on his heels. Peace gave him, also, the pink and orange scarf she had been knitting off and on since the day they had first arrived in London. It was easily ten feet long by now, but Peace had never gotten around to figuring out how to finish it. She had literally tied a piece of yarn through the final row, like a drawstring.

He gave her a guitar. He had bought it the week before at Macari’s on Charing Cross. Victoria had been buying a flute for her older daughter, and Henry had gone along, with Peace in mind. She had been talking all fall about how much it would help her in her auditions if she could play an instrument. Henry knew the guitar was likely to be as much a fashion accessory as a career move. But he was delighted to see her face when he gave it to her, so fantastically happy.

Someone had already taught Peace three simple chords, and she practiced them relentlessly all afternoon and evening. Henry was expecting her to try to sing something current, and it touched him ineffably that what she seemed intent on playing first was “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

At five in the afternoon on Christmas Day, Peace’s great stoned revelation was that the Alphabet Song shared the same music as “Twinkle, Twinkle.” Another hour and another joint later, Henry started singing “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” to her, and she collapsed in a heap of giggles.

“You’re kidding!” she said. “That one, too?”

They had sex even while she was still marveling at this great discovery.

BOXING DAY MORNING, Henry lay under the Indian-print covers, looking up at the ceiling, where Peace had recently affixed a dozen or more flower-shaped vinyl stickers. On the floor there were, as usual, her cast-off clothes: today a purple sweater, some velvet gloves, and a black-and-white chevron-patterned miniskirt.

She was still asleep, her dark hair crosshatching her pale face.

“Morning, baby,” he said to her.

She stretched, catlike, provocative. “Why do you always call me that?”

“Call you baby? Why? Does it bother you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because I’m not your baby. I’m not anybody’s baby.”

Henry smiled what he thought was a shared-orphan smile.

“What?” she said.

“Well, you were someone’s baby once,” he said.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said, sounding truly annoyed. “God, Henry. Not everything’s about that, you know.”

The radio was playing “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” and for a moment Henry was back at Berkeley, sitting on Mary Jane’s couch, listening to
The Beatles vs. The Four Seasons
and observing the patterns of bird droppings on her orange-tinted window.

HENRY HAD BEEN MEANING to write back to Mary Jane, but there had been something needy and vaguely punishing in the tone of her most recent letter, and the last thing Henry wanted was to feel beholden to her. In the afternoon, however, Peace decided to take a nap, so Henry finally sat down to the task.

Dear MJ:

Merry Christmas! Happy Boxing Day!

Of course I remember George. He was the guy who wrote you all that lowercase, e.e. cummings-wannabe poetry and looked like Warren Beattty except without a jaw, right?

Here Henry inserted an impressively hideous illustration.

It was good to see your handwriting, even if you were scolding me. And you’re wrong, I have not gotten tattooed. I keep wanting to tell you this—that I have finally done what you always told me to do, and that is make a choice. You’ve met her already. Peace Jacobs. Yes, the one I met at the funeral—the one who was the baby in the practice house. Honest and truly, MJ, I have not so much as kissed anyone else, and no it’s not because I’ve suddenly grown a hump. And the weird thing is it must be the real thing because it’s such a strange place and time to be picking one person. Everyone shags everyone here.
Shag,
you Yankee gal, means what you think it means.

Now, what are these projects you so calmly mention coming to fruition? Kidding aside, I hope you’ve landed the kind of newspaper job you always wanted and are raking muck all over the place. Any chance you’ll be “crossing the pond” at some point? London is totally swinging. The movie has to be done by summer, so I’ve been working fiendishly. Here is one of the fiends:

Henry supplied a drawing of the Chief Blue Meanie. He mailed the letter on his way to work.

As the winter months unfolded and the staff struggled to complete the Sea of Holes sequence, Henry rarely did anything but work late and wake early. Peace didn’t seem to mind his absence. After a winter of fruitless auditions and—as far as Henry could tell—fruitless acting classes, she had finally gotten a promising callback for the cast of the British production of
Hair.
She talked about the casting agent as if he was a mercurial deity. She called him Mr. Fate, and Henry never knew his real name. Throughout April, Peace’s practicing for the
Hair
auditions made Henry almost nostalgic for the days of “I’m dead, thank you.” Apparently there was a big opening number called “Aquarius” in which the whole cast was supposed to form a large circle and move in slow motion around some kind of altar.

For days, practicing the slow motion, Peace had not so much walked as drifted around the apartment. Every action had been excruciatingly prolonged: the peeling of a banana, the pulling back of a shower curtain, the toking on a joint.

“Why do they move like this?” Henry asked Peace.

They were walking to Geoffrey Whitehall’s studio on a Saturday morning, Henry having won the battle to chaperone.

“Mr. Fate told me it’s supposed to be like moving under water.”

“So you’re going to be dancing,” Henry said to Peace.

“It’s not exactly dancing,” Peace said, and then she shrugged, but in an exaggerated, slow-motion, underwater way.

GEOFF WHITEHALL’S STUDIO was on James Street, four blocks over from Rose. It was not so much decorated as strewn with the evidence of Whitehall’s supposed genius: posters, prints, record albums, book covers, portraits, advertisements, magazine stories, an entire cottage industry based on one artist’s ability to invent a style and stay devoted to it. Henry hated him even before Whitehall extended his slightly damp hand.

According to Whitehall’s instructions—and without the slightest hesitation—Peace lay on the floor wearing only her panties. The floor was painted with a Day-Glo rainbow and sky, and against it, her white body looked like a cloud. In one hand, Whitehall held a new sable paintbrush with a red handle and a white head. In the other he held a Cadbury’s chocolates tin that was filled with black paint.

“Are you ready, luv?” he asked her.

She nodded, contented, as if she was lying on a soft baby blanket instead of a hard, painted basement floor. Whitehall’s first move was to circle her left nipple with an inch-wide black outline.

Henry didn’t know if he was more troubled by Peace’s nude body or by Whitehall’s unabashedly nonartistic delight in it. Whatever the case, it was clear to Henry fairly quickly that neither Peace nor Whitehall had the slightest interest in his presence, and it crossed his mind at least briefly that they might be waiting for him to leave.

  7  
Under the Table at the Scotch of St. James

Henry was lying under a table at the Scotch of St. James. He had sucked on a sugar cube an hour before, and the acid had just kicked in. Beside him was Martin Doyle, the Great Martini, and beside him—also under the table—was a record producer whose name Henry couldn’t remember but whose face looked disturbingly—and, minute by minute, increasingly—like a clown’s.

“You’re Peace’s shag, right?” Martini asked him.

Henry could see the words coming out of Martini’s mouth, just as if they’d been drawn. He smiled.

“Right?” Martini repeated, and the word floated there. It was like the last scene in
Submarine,
when the words appear above John as he sings “All you need is love.” Henry wanted to tell this to Martini, but he knew it was far too complex a thought. So he simply smiled again.

“She’s a tart,” Martini said.

“Apple tart,” Henry said, not focusing.

“No, man. She’s a tart. A real tart,” Martini said, then crawled off to another table.

Henry looked up toward Peace’s legs. She was wearing a pair of fishnet stockings, and in his state, Henry thought for a moment that he saw actual fish.

IT WAS NOT A GOOD TRIP, though it was more exotic than truly disturbing; what Henry saw—even as he tried to escape the experience—was unpleasant but not unbearable. What he saw was an animalized world—actually not that different from the world he had learned to see and to draw at Disney. Martini, for example, was unmistakably a bear—somewhat along the lines of Baloo in
The Jungle Book,
but polar-bear pale. The small round tables on their center legs were storks, and the chairs were dogs and cats.

The fish in the fishnet stockings moved suddenly, slapping against each other. Henry grabbed hold of one of them, and Peace’s hand appeared on her knee, then her face beside her knee, and then she fluttered down to sit beside him under the table. Peace turned out to be a bird—a dove or pigeon—her nose beakish, her hair feathery.

“Did you sleep with him?” Henry asked Peace. Her skinny knees, above the tops of her boots, looked as if they’d been drawn by two smile lines.

“With who?”

“With Mr. Fate.”

“Of course,” she said.

“To get the part?”

“Of course,” she said. “That’s what everyone does.”

She was right, but Henry didn’t care that she was right.

He tried to locate the feeling—as weirdly unfamiliar as a sudden illness or a stranger’s rage. He knew he had felt it some time before: a blend of fear, amazement, and hollowness. But Peace’s reaction to
his
reaction was easier to recognize. He saw it in the set of her lips, in the torque of her shoulders, the almost coquettish look in her eyes that said:
What did you expect of me? Don’t tell me you couldn’t have seen this coming.
This was the look he himself had given so many times before—starting all the way back with Daisy, way back on the night of the fire at Humphrey.

“It’s the way it works,” Peace said.

“Did you sleep with Whitehall too?” Henry asked her.

“What do you want me to say?”

“These guys are just using you,” Henry said.

“And what’s wrong with that? It’s my body, you know. Nobody owns me.”

Henry tried to answer Peace for a brief, awful, familiar moment, but he couldn’t say a thing.

“YOU REALIZE, OF COURSE,” Victoria told him, “that you are attempting to zig whilst the rest of the world is zagging.”

They were sitting on one of the leather couches in the office on Monday afternoon, before a mess of lunch plates and cups that the previous diners had left behind.

“What do you mean?” Henry asked her.

“You’re attempting the vine-covered cottage bit during the only time in history when not a single soul in the entire known world is being remotely monogamous.”

Henry got to his feet and began to gather the paper plates and cups. Victoria lit a cigarette and watched him carelessly.

“Do you love her?” Victoria asked.

“Yes,” Henry said. “I do.”

“How do you know?” she asked him. He was aware that there was something more than sisterly in her inquiry, but for the moment he decided that he would ignore it and hear her advice anyway.

“I know because—I don’t know. I don’t get tired of her. I want to be with her.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Do you want to be with her now?”

Victoria asked the question as if it were clinical, not personal, but again it felt to Henry more like some form of flirtation.

“Now?” he asked. “This minute? No. This minute I want to kill her.”

Victoria crossed her legs at the ankles, leaning back into the couch. “Kill her?” she said. “Really, Harry? I didn’t think you could feel that.”

“Feel what?” Henry asked.

“Are you sure you want to kill her? Or do you just want to trade her in?”

Henry looked at Victoria. “How did you know that?”

“Harry. You’re hardly a mystery.”

“I’m not?”

It felt good to flirt back. It felt as if he had just had something returned to him that he’d been missing. After all, he was much more accustomed to this than to sincerity, jealousy, and rage.

Finally, he slid down the leather couch to sit beside her, and then he pivoted onto his right hip while she pivoted onto her left. They faced each other. She looked both wry and needy, but the wryness was more appealing to him than the neediness was unappealing. He kissed her, totally unsurprised by the enthusiasm with which she kissed him back. It was the rapid, not particularly interesting answer to a question that had been only marginally more interesting to ask.

He knew it would be their only kiss. It wasn’t because he felt guilty about Peace, or even felt indifferent to her. It was, rather, his sense of Victoria, a sense of bottomless longing that was too much like Martha’s, or maybe his own.

YELLOW SUBMARINE WAS DUE
to premiere in July. Throughout the spring and early summer, days and nights—never religiously differentiated before—blended entirely. It was not unusual for an animator to come into the studio on a Monday morning and, buoyed by successive tides of naps, snacks, and carts of bangers and mash, not leave until Wednesday or Thursday night. There were always people sleeping on the couches now, and often there were ink-and-paint girls napping in the camera room. At Disney, the ranks of animators and painters had usually dwindled as units finished their work. But here, with an intractable deadline and increasing hysteria from the distributors, more people were being added all the time. As the deadline for delivery neared, the producers sent word out to the London art schools, and now in the evenings vans and buses pulled up to the Soho studio, disgorging students who formed a delighted night shift, donning white gloves to color in the Beatles and their fantastical world.

————

PEOPLE HAD SPENT WEEKS angling for tickets, and trying to get one for Peace would have done Henry no good, even if he’d been so inclined. With the rest of the animators, he had been relegated to a balcony seat at the huge London Pavilion.

“You’ll sneak me in,” Peace said on the morning of the opening.

“Not a chance. There are assigned seats, Peace,” he said.

“Well, someone might not show,” she said.

“Why don’t you ask Mr. Fate to bring you? Or Martini? Or Whitehall?” Henry asked her bitterly.

“I did.”

Their eyes flashed and met.

“Please, Henry?” she said.

“I can’t.”

“You could if you wanted to. You’re just still mad at me.”

She was standing in front of the mirror and using a long, fine comb to tease the top of her hair higher. Then she slipped on what he thought of as her Puss-in-Boots boots, swung her patent-leather bag over her left shoulder, and walked out the door. He wanted to say he was sorry, but she’d been right: He was still mad at her.

THE STREETS WERE MOBBED for blocks and blocks with Beatles fans wearing yellow shirts, yellow pants, yellow gloves, yellow sunglasses. Around the theater, bobbies in uniforms exactly like the constables’ in
Mary Poppins
linked arms to hold back the fans, who were relentlessly singing the chorus of “Yellow Submarine” and hoping for a glimpse of the Beatles. Most of them never had a chance; the Four drove up in sequence and took turns posing with a huge Blue Meanie, as arm-waving and expressionless as any Disneyland figure.

Inside, Henry and Victoria sat in the balcony with a bunch of ink-and-paint girls. Victoria was a study in forced enthusiasm. Ever since their one kiss—with the exception of one silent, pouty follow-up day—she had been, in Henry’s view, stoically peppy, married, and mod. She pointed out, in the packed audience below them, several of the Rolling Stones, as well as Eric Clapton and Ringo. Henry spotted Twiggy as well, and felt a pang: Peace worshipped Twiggy and would have loved to see her up close. But just as Henry was recalling the morning’s conversation, he looked down from the balcony and saw Peace, with a yellow boa, flouncing down the aisle holding the arm of some man in a pink suede jacket. Something wrenched inside Henry, almost a physical tear, and he found himself changing positions in his seat, as if trying to get away from pain.

When the lights went down, for a moment before the film started, Henry could still hear the sounds of the crowd outside and imagine Peace navigating her way through it, yellow boa soaring. But then, quite unexpectedly, he was immersed in the world he had helped to make. “Once upon a time,” the narrator’s voice intoned, “or maybe twice …”

All along, they had joked that the story wouldn’t matter as long as the music was loud. In reality, though, it was neither the story nor the music that pulled Henry along, or even the jokes and surprises and the rare mixture of styles. It was, in the end, the colors: the amazingly deep, incredibly vibrant, psychedelic colors. As often as Henry had seen them in the studio, he was astonished by what they did on the screen.

Even Victoria dropped her supercasual pose just long enough to seem similarly thrilled, nudging Henry in the ribs. “Bloody hell,” she whispered when the long first scenes were over and the titles finally came up, along with the title song.

THREE MONTHS LATER, Henry sat in another opening-night audience, this time for the London premiere of
Hair.
It was all Peace had talked about when she had been home long enough and coherently enough to talk at all. The play was subtitled “The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” and Peace never referred to the cast, only to “the Tribe.” It wasn’t until Henry was watching the show that he realized that Berger and Claude and Sheila were characters, not fellow actors.

Peace looked beautiful, a sash tied Indian-style around her forehead. She danced and sang and swayed and, with the others, got briefly and unshockingly nude. Henry tried to connect her either to the woman he lived with or to the character she was playing. He could do neither. But despite everything—despite even his simmering anger at what he now knew were her constant infidelities—he was moved to another burst of hope by the words of one exuberant song:

And peace will guide the planets.
And love will steer the stars.