The Irresistible Henry House (35 page)

  8  
Lost Something, Sweetie?

It was their second autumn in London. Henry hoped that would make a difference. First times were for travelers and tourists, he thought. Second times were for people who had made a place home.

It was a chilly season, and rain, as it had the first year, came swift and gray, leaching the colors out of the city. Henry worked in color all day long. With the movie over, and no immediate substitute in sight, he had reluctantly landed a job through Geoff Whitehall, painting murals for a new discotheque called the Logical Alternative. The murals were entirely Whitehall’s designs—already classic combinations of flowers, rainbows, stars, and mythic creatures. But the job was perfect for Henry, demanding patience, precision, and virtually no invention. He was one of a team of only three artists, and they worked in separate areas of the disco, close enough for the occasional tiff about the choice of radio station but far enough apart so that their brushes never met.

It was for Henry a particular joy not to have to job out the colors to the usual set of ink-and-paint girls. Not since the summer at Wilton, when he had painted first the practice house and then the building where Mary Jane worked, had Henry’s hands, shoes, and hair been so often spattered with paint. Even now, even on a too-early October morning, with the empty club, the bad coffee, and the nagging sense that things with Peace were still not what he wanted them to be—even now Henry could remember the way the peach juice had trickled down his arm over the tangerine paint on the day he had first had sex.

November came, and as the brick walls of the club deepened with color, lunch was served up daily by whatever chef the owner was trying out. One of the artists flirted with Henry. So did one of the waitress trainees, and several of the auditioning dancers. Victoria called a few times, her pretexts growing more forced and her airiness less convincing. Henry perceived every one of these women as a viable option, and thus as at least a minor sacrifice. But he still wanted Peace.

Predictably, and perhaps alluringly, he saw less and less of her now. She was always asleep when he got up and left for work in the morning. Her show, it was true, didn’t end until ten-thirty, and then there was the inevitable comedown—unachievable, apparently, without some sort of drug or drink. Most of Peace’s contributions to the flat—even the ones that had involved theft more than industry—had halted now. Sometimes in the evenings, Henry would lie back on his side of the bed and try to plan what he would paint on these walls. The empty landscape stretched before him. It was still the inviting two-tone backdrop of green and blue it had been when they’d first moved in. It could have been Pennsylvania, or the woods behind Humphrey. It could have been California, or the British countryside.

Henry tried to decide what to put on the wall. There was pale blue sky and there was deep green grass. For a moment, he allowed himself to go back to Wilton, back to the closet where he had painted the field, the Ray, the car, and had first discovered the vibrant freedom of an existence without Martha. Nostalgia struck him, but without any precision.

Sometimes, even down their little side street, a car would pass, its lights would throw a shadow onto the wall, and Henry would try in vain to catch those shadows and find meaning in them.

NOVEMBER WAS FRIGID, and Peace took to pulling the covers away from Henry at night. Usually, she slept in total, almost scary stillness. Henry had watched her many times. He knew sometimes it was only drugs or drinking that made her sleep so deeply. But even when she napped or when she had had a night that was sober and straight, she was normally immobile in her sleep. These days, it seemed, it was more common for her to turn and startle.

He wondered if she was ill. He imagined nursing her. He would bring her soup on a tray, the way that Martha had brought it to him. As always, he was surprised when he had any memory of Martha, let alone a good one. But he could taste the chicken soup, feel the cold shiver of the darkness behind the window in the practice house.

Peace opened her mouth in her sleep and licked her lips, which looked dry. She scrunched herself into a tight ball. Henry put his arms around her and fell asleep, trying to keep her warm.

HE WOKE TO THE SOUND OF HER RETCHING, a forlorn and foreign sound that he mistook at first for a street noise. When he had located the sound, he sprang out of bed, as if there was something he was supposed to do. The bathroom door was closed, the collage on the doorframe looking puckered in the daylight, a two-dimensional time capsule of some things that Peace had liked.

He put on the kettle and took the tea down from the shelf. By the time Peace opened the bathroom door, he had remade the bed, fixed her the tea, and placed the cup on the stack of old magazines that served as her makeshift night table.

“Why aren’t you dressed?” she asked him. “Shouldn’t you be on your way to work?”

He said, “Are you okay?”

“I got sick,” she said. She sounded and looked about five years old.

“I know, baby,” he said, and for once she didn’t object to the nickname.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking embarrassed.

“Come and get into bed,” Henry told her.

She was wearing nothing but her panties and a sleeveless baby-doll nightgown.

“Come on, let me get you warm,” he said.

“I’m fine,” she said.

Her skin was the color of sourdough bread.

“Get into bed,” he told her again.

She took a few uncertain steps toward it, and then she got in.

“Have some tea,” he said. “It’ll settle your stomach.”

“I’m okay, Henry,” she said.

She reached for the teacup, her fingers embracing it from the bottom, like the green base of a flower.

She slept. At ten o’clock, he called the disco and told them he wouldn’t be coming in. Then he felt her forehead and left to find her some chicken soup.

SHE WASN’T IN BED WHEN HE RETURNED, and his first thought was that she was sick again. He waited for her, putting the soup on the stove and turning on the radio, so that the music could fill the silence. After five or ten minutes, though, he began to worry about her and walked up to the still-closed bathroom door.

“Peace?” he said.

There was silence.

“Peace?”

Silence again.

He knocked, waited, asked, called, pounded, and finally opened. The bathroom was empty, and the only sign of Peace was the toothbrush she’d left on the side of the sink, along with an empty box of false eyelashes and a dark mascara brush.

Henry worried, sensing she’d gone somewhere in an untamed state, unthinking and in pain. He put his coat on, wrapped the scarf she had made him twice around his neck, and went back outside.

She had not been to the drugstore two blocks down, nor to the market a block beyond that. Neither shopkeeper had seen her.

For an hour or so, Henry made his way through the neighborhood, passing the dry cleaners, the pubs, the head shop, the used-book store. At a side entrance of the small church six blocks away, he finally saw a familiar short red coat and white boots, breath clouds wisping out from the arched doorway into the gray-white day.

Henry’s step quickened. Only at the last moment did he see the broom at the woman’s feet, the broom handle in her gloved hands, the scraggly red hair, and the middle-aged face.

“Lost something, sweetie?” she asked him.

Henry, speechless, shook his head no.

Someone, he thought as he walked away.

HE WENT BACK HOME with one last hope that he would find Peace there. His worry grew into annoyance, then anger. When it was too big a feeling to confine to the apartment, he took it back outside. It would be rage by the time he reached the theater.

Snow was coming down, and Henry walked through the streets toward Piccadilly, remembering the tracks he had made in the snow the day he left Humphrey and ran away to find Betty. Betty, who had never even written to him after Martha’s death and who, as far he knew, was still working for
Time
in Paris, just the English Channel and a lifetime away. He thought about what it had been like to have Betty as an unknown, a promise in his future. His future now seemed to lack so specific a hope.

The Shaftesbury was an old theater, with a castlelike turret on top. In the snow, it could have been a Disney backdrop except for the huge banner hanging across its famous corner entrance: HAIR: THE AMERICAN TRIBAL LOVE-ROCK MUSICAL. Henry had come to hate the poster and everything it stood for. What it stood for, to him, was Peace’s absence.

Henry knocked at the stage door, and after a few minutes it was opened by a guy he recognized as one of the Tribe.

“I’m looking for Peace,” Henry said.

“Who isn’t?” the guy said.

“Jacobs,” Henry added.

“Who isn’t?” the guy said, smiling.

“Well, okay, is she here?” Henry asked.

“Try the rehearsal rooms. Look around. Hey, have you got any food? I’ve got to get something to eat,” he said.

The ancient wooden walls of the backstage corridor were covered almost entirely with framed photographs and vintage posters. But the current actors—it was hard to know whether they were in costume or their regular clothes—left little doubt about the decade. Henry walked down the corridor smelling marijuana, coffee, stale flowers, perfume, and sweat. He could hear laughter, music, arguments, curses. He felt like a stick of wood being borne along a river.

Peace was sitting on the floor of a rehearsal room cross-legged, wearing an old leather aviator helmet. A guy was lying beside her with his head in her lap, and she was stroking his face intently, with both hands, as if she was curing him. She was saying something to him, or singing, and every few minutes she bent down at an impossible angle, gently kissing him. Only when an actress came over and swiped the hat from her head did Peace look up. Then she saw Henry.

Later, he would play and replay the moment and realize that her face had been remarkable not for the expression it held when she saw him but rather for what it lacked. There was no shock, no guilt, no regret, no anger. The look on Peace’s face was perfectly open, perfectly welcoming. Henry might have been anyone. He might have come in to deliver food, or mop the floor, or anything.

“I want that back!” Peace shouted playfully to the girl who had taken the helmet.

“We’ll see!” the girl called over her shoulder.

The guy on Peace’s lap reached back up for her.

“Hi,” she said to Henry.

“Hi.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“What are
you
doing here?”

She blinked. She shook her hair out and smoothed it down.

He realized in that moment that he was staring into a mirror. He had been blind to it—as incapable of sight as he had once been incapable of speech. Henry was looking at Peace and finally seeing the unaffected indifference, the strident autonomy, the inability to trust in one person; seeing, unavoidably, the absolute worst in himself.

THERE WAS A CLOAKROOM OFF THE CORRIDOR, and after a few minutes, Henry managed to steer Peace into it. In her bell-bottom jeans and flea-market cardigan, she looked like the schoolgirl she should still have been.

“What is it?” she said to Henry.

“Why aren’t you home?” he asked her.

“Why would I be home?” she asked. “And why aren’t you working?”

“For the same reason you should be home,” he said. “Because I thought you were sick.”

She crossed her arms in front of her chest. It was a petulant, protective gesture.

“Pregnant,” she said.

It was oddly not shocking. Nevertheless, he repeated the word.

“Pregnant,” he said.

“Yup.”

She looked back over her shoulder in a way that made him completely certain he’d had nothing to do with the pregnancy and wanted nothing to do with it.

She took a step back, toward the coats that were hanging, arms intertwined.

He couldn’t help seeing himself again, this time more than ten years before, on the day Betty had come to school, and Mary Jane had pulled him into the coatroom and he’d told her about Martha. He wondered, if he had told her his other big secrets, whether she would still love him the way she had loved him then.

That day, he had been the one stuffing his hands into his pockets, lessening the chance of physical contact. Now it was Peace, folding her arms, looking desperately down and away. Even as Henry’s mind sped along to try to make sense of the new information, he understood for the first time how Mary Jane must have felt when he backed away from her that day. How that must have felt, he thought, as he took a step closer and saw Peace recoil.

“Do you—can we—” he began.

She shook her head emphatically.

“I got the name of a clinic from Cathy,” she said. “It’s legal here, you know.”

“Don’t you want to talk about it?”

She shrugged. “It was just a mistake,” she said.

Someone came by to find her. “Half hour,” he said.

“I’ve got to get into costume,” Peace told him.

He nodded, staring at her. It was impossible to imagine that her schoolgirl self could be pregnant. Of course it had been, as she said, a mistake.

It was not until he was halfway home, trudging back through the canvas-white snow, that Henry thought about Betty and realized that she had been even younger than Peace was now when she’d chosen to let him be born.

  9  
The Most Moving Story Ever Told

There were two facing rows of blue bucket seats in the waiting room of the clinic, and a half dozen young women sat there—two with their mothers, four on their own. All of them seemed to be smoking, and all of them stared at Henry when he walked in with Peace. He was the only man.

A chubby receptionist with an unfortunate Twiggy haircut took Peace’s name and told her to have a seat. Henry hung up their coats, and then he sat down beside Peace, the newest members of a wretched, transitory club.

On the table beside Henry there were worn copies of
Queen
and
Rave, Tatler
and
Woman, Time
and
Life.

“Want to read something?” Henry asked Peace.

She shook her head. She was trying to look casual, but Henry could tell she was scared.

He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away, just forcefully enough to inspire both the mothers to look at Henry accusingly.

But he didn’t feel guilty. If anything, he felt noble for having come with Peace and quite certain that from the start he had cared too much, not too little, about her.

She fiddled with the strap on her bag. He studied the floor—a threadbare carpet—and studied the heels of Peace’s pink shoes. Who wore pink shoes to an abortion? A girl who wasn’t old enough for anything real, he thought.

Half an hour passed. A nurse appeared in the doorway with a clipboard in her hands.

“Laura?” she asked of the room in general.

Laura put down her copy of
Woman,
stood up, offered a universal shrug, and followed the nurse out.

The group that remained readjusted. One of the mothers picked up the copy of
Woman
that Laura had dropped. On the cover was a smiling blond model, one story called “Looking Ahead to Christmas” and another called “My Babies” that was subtitled “The Most Moving Story Ever Told.” For weeks people had been talking about Sheila Thorns, a Birmingham woman who had given birth to sextuplets.

“Six at once,” the woman now reading the magazine said to no one in particular. “Can you imagine?”

“Six at once,” her daughter repeated. “That would be so groovy.”

No one pointed out how odd it was that the girl who thought six was groovy was clearly not as inspired by the prospect of one.

The mother kept up a stream of reactions. “Think of that,” she said. “Poor sod.” “I’d rather walk on coals.”

Henry looked over to see whether Peace was interested, but clearly the sextuplet story had passed her by. She gave him one of her fake, forced grins: the invitation he suddenly found so false and so appalling. For more than a year now, he had watched her slide that inviting expression under the fences surrounding so many people she’d met. She’d done it with the groupies by the theater. The Great Martini. The cast of
Hair.
Even now, in the waiting room of a woman’s clinic, he could see the invitation in her eyes, the promise of an intimacy she could feign with her body but clearly never feel with her heart.

By the time the nurse came for the next patient (“Suzanne?”), Henry hated Peace the way one can only hate a part of oneself. And by the time it was finally her turn—halfway into the bleak, lifeless afternoon—he was not all that unhappy when the nurse said he couldn’t come in with her.