by Jane Smiley
Cassie went on: “Given Henry’s predilections and good looks and the wife’s frustrations, it took them maybe ten minutes to get to it, and pretty soon, she was mad for him, and she wanted him to come to the house every day. He also liked one of her maids, so Henry was pretty happy. This being France, it was perfectly normal for the wife to pay him for his services, and so she bought him nice clothes. The husband would come and go, but he was a surgeon, so they could always avoid him.
“One day the doctor was in the surgery preparing the anesthetic when he was called to the telephone, and he absentmindedly carried the container of anesthetic with him to the phone—laudanum or something. The phone call was about a huge traffic accident with lots of injuries. The doctor ran out and left the drug by the phone. He told his wife not to expect him for a couple of days, so she called Henry.”
Watching Stoney and Isabel slicing tomatoes and cucumbers, Max thought maybe they were flirting a bit.
“Since they had the whole night, they decided to do it in every room. After he tied her up in the bedroom, and she tied him up in the living room, she wanted to do it in the study just to get back at the husband for being so boring; so they went in there, and they were about to do it when the wife decided she needed something to enhance her experience.”
“Boots,” said Simon, laughing. “A camera!”
“Shh,” said Delphine and Elena simultaneously. Max took another sip of his wine. It was pretty clear what was coming. “While she was out, Henry saw the stuff on the desk by the phone. He opened it, took a whiff, and then tried it. He always prided himself on being a transgressor and damn the consequences, and, as he said to me, ‘Look at me now. I am unkillable. It didn’t matter what I tried. I had to try everything! I knew it even then.’ He did pass out on that occasion, though, because the drug was very strong.
“Well, the woman panicked when she came back in the room. Henry was to all appearances dead on the floor. She got the maid. They knew that there would be big trouble for everyone if Henry stayed there. Even though the wife quite liked him, she thought it would be best in the long run to get him out of the house. So the wife and the maid carried him out the back entrance, and down the alley. I guess it was raining, and the wife just couldn’t bring herself to leave him there, so they put him inside a big steamer trunk that was sitting under a portico and left the lid slightly ajar on the off chance that he wasn’t dead. Of course, he pieced all of this together later.
“Pretty soon, a couple of drunks came walking down the alley, and they saw this trunk. When they went up to it, they happened to bump it so it closed and locked. It was heavy and in this great neighborhood, so they thought it was worth stealing. They picked it up, and they did drop it once as they carried it down the alley, which was good for Henry, because it landed on a rock that broke a hole in the bottom and let in some air, or he might have smothered. He slept on.”
Max decided that Stoney and Isabel were definitely flirting. Max took a sip of his wine.
“When the drunks got home, they were tired, so they set the trunk on the back stoop and they went upstairs and passed out. After a while, Henry came to, and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out where he was or what had happened to him. He thought he might have been buried alive—it was dark and stuffy and he was very stiff. For a moment he began to panic—though, as he said to me, ‘I am not the panicking sort, Cassie. And in those days I was a cool customer—’”
“Did you ever see that famous picture of him in that fedora?” said Stoney. “He was a very cool customer.”
“But then,” continued Cassie, “he saw the tiny shaft of light coming through the hole that had been knocked in the bottom of the trunk when it was dropped, and he stopped panicking, because really, as he said to me, ‘Nothing scared me for long, Cassie, nothing at all, not even German fascism.’ He decided to try to turn over, and when he did, the trunk fell off the ledge it was on, and broke in half, and Henry got out. He was still a little groggy, so he looked around for a moment, and then staggered out into the street.”
Charlie spoke up. He said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Cassie glanced at him, made a small face, and went on. Max gazed at Isabel now, thinking at how serious she was, listening to this story, while Simon was grinning. Then the kid rubbed his hands over his bald head in glee. Max couldn’t help smiling, and he couldn’t help thinking that Isabel could use some of Simon’s lightheartedness even as Simon could use some of Isabel’s caution. While he was regarding Isabel and Stoney and Simon and only half listening to Cassie’s story, thinking of the kids, not Henry Miller, he had a vivid image of Henry Miller, bald and skull-like, not forty in a fedora but eighty, in pajamas and a robe, staggering in a half-stupor around the streets of Paris, wondering what had happened to him. He said, “Did you ever see the movie they made of Tropic of Cancer? It had Rip Torn as Henry.”
“I didn’t,” said Cassie. “But when I knew him, that was a big topic of conversation for him. How it was going to make him a legend. ‘Bogart will be nothing to me,’ he’d say. They also made Henry & June. I never saw that.”
“Aren’t they all alike?” said Zoe. She shook her head. “Dear one,” she said to Paul, who was standing behind her in some funny white pants and a T-shirt, beard, and bare feet, “you’re the only man I know who doesn’t want to be a Hollywood legend.” Paul didn’t say anything, but Max wasn’t so sure she was right.
“Anyway, here’s Henry, all disheveled and groggy, staggering around the Faubourg Saint-Germain with only one shoe on, and the gendarmes pick him up for disorderly conduct, and of course he starts arguing, which gets him in more trouble, because, although he was a very charming man in his way, he did have an authority problem. So they put him in the clink. Everyone he knew from hanging out on the Left Bank is just as happy to leave him in there. But the wife—”
“Named Marcelle, no doubt,” offered Zoe, with a glance at Paul, though as far as Max could tell, he made no response.
“—begins to worry. She sends the maid out to look around, and the maid reports that the trunk has been carried off! Now the wife and the maid both go out looking, and they find the broken trunk a few blocks away, lying in another alley, and Henry’s left a few things in the trunk—a shoe and a pack of cigarettes—so they know he’s still alive. Right about this time, the drunk guys wake up and come down from the premier étage—”
“To the rez-d’-chaussée,” said Isabel.
“—to see what’s in the trunk. The woman, who is very well dressed, accuses them of stealing her trunk, and they deny it, but they look guilty, so she knows they did it. But, still, where is Henry?
“The wife and the maid walk up and down the boulevards, and don’t see anyone, and the maid discreetly asks at a few cafés if anyone has seen anything of a man with one shoe who maybe looks a little ill.”
“Mal à la tête,” said Isabel.
“Shhh,” said Delphine.
“Finally, a waiter at one of the cafés says that the police took him off for vagrancy, and so the maid agrees to dress up nicely and go to the police station. At the police station, they aren’t saying anything, but of course this is France, so the maid goes into one of the cells with one of the guards, and the guard is good-looking and the maid is pretty, and she convinces him that Henry is her boyfriend and that it was her fault he drank the opiates, and she can’t tell the doctor, and so, in short order, they let Henry out and they give him his shoe and his cigarettes, and they take a cab to the house, and Henry can finally sleep it off in comfort. In the meantime, of course, the doctor comes home, and here is Henry in his bed, but the maid tells him the whole story—how Henry is a great American novelist who has become her lover, and on top of that has come to Paris to learn about life, and he had gotten thirsty and drunk the anesthetic by mistake, and he nearly died, and then the doctor remembers that it was he who left the drug lying about, and so he decides not to press his luck. And after that, Henry kept on with the wife for
another few months or so without the husband being any the wiser.” Cassie shrugged. “I always thought that was a good story, and I couldn’t figure out why Henry didn’t include it in one of his books, but he said there was nothing to be learned from it. It didn’t fit in with the themes of the rest of his adventures, and anyway, his books were not autobiographical in the strictest sense, but if not, what’s the point, I always thought.”
“When I was in my English class last year,” said Simon, “we acted out a scene from one of his books. My part was to come in one door of the lecture room and shout, ‘Ah ah ah!’ and then go out again. I had to do that four times.”
“What scene?” said Elena from the stove, where she was opening the oven door and bending down to look inside.
“I don’t know,” said Simon. “I wasn’t in the room long enough to make sense of it, but one girl did take her shirt off. I saw that.”
“Good heavens,” said Elena. She stood up, a fork in her hand.
“Well, she had a bra on. It was fine, Mom.”
“‘Fine.’ I hate that word.” But she smiled at Simon, then said, “Anyway, these veggies are done, Delphine.”
Max saw Isabel look over at Simon. She did not smile. Stoney was laying the slices of cucumber and tomato on the chopping board in a circle.
“The soup is ready,” said Delphine.
“What soup?” said Max.
“Artichoke bisque,” said Isabel appreciatively. “My request.”
Now the food began to be carried to the table—a big salad, the pot of pale creamy-green soup sprinkled with crispy croutons, a dish of caramelized roasted vegetables (he recognized potatoes, carrots, garlic, onions, fennel, and dark delicious-looking quartered mushrooms), a baguette of whole-wheat bread, another dish of braised asparagus sprinkled with herbs.
Charlie said, “Do you-all ever eat meat?”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Isabel.
As they were pulling out their chairs and sitting down at the table, Max was still thinking of Henry Miller. Of course, when he was with Ina, and then right after he came to California, it had been clear to everyone that you couldn’t achieve manhood without reading Tropic of Cancer and, at least, Sexus, if not the whole of The Rosy Crucifixion. If you had the time and the money, it was also desirable to go to Greece with a copy of The Colossus of Maroussi. If not that, then some time in Big Sur might work almost as well. In college, there were the boys who read Ulysses and the boys who read Tropic of Cancer, and it was clear that the Tropic of Cancer boys were more daring and had more vitality, probably bigger dicks, and a somewhat more brutal sensibility. Max had dutifully done his reading, aspired to be Miller rather than Joyce, and, truth to tell, he couldn’t remember a thing about any of the books, but he remembered that feeling he had, that excitement. This book had been banned! All through the life of his father, a person in the U.S. was not allowed to read this book! How precious the book was as a result—so precious you carried it around casually but with the cover carefully obvious, so that everyone in the world—your buddies, your teachers, the mailman, the cop on the corner, your girl—would know that you were friends with Tropic of Cancer, on intimate terms, utterly familiar, as unconsciously at ease with Tropic of Cancer as you were with your driver’s license.
And while he was posing with Tropic of Cancer, Max remembered how he would privately ponder Miller’s photo. Of course, he saw now, with a professional eye, Miller had a great face, with deep-set eyes and cheekbones and forehead that reminded you subconsciously of a skull, and therefore death, and therefore the fact that he seemed to defy death, and he also had such full, sensuous lips that even if you didn’t know the word “sensuous” you could not help responding to those lips as an anomaly for a male, threatening, promising, contradicting the boniness of the rest of the face. And it was even, symmetrical—the other thing about Miller’s face was that it was beautifully drawn and got clearer and cleaner as he got older. When you, carrying around your copy of Tropic of Cancer, looked at your dad and his friends, with their paunches and droopy jowls, what did they have in comparison with Henry Miller? In fact, they didn’t even have Henry Miller! And you did! And so, obviously, you knew something they didn’t, since, rather than going to France and engaging with Life in the 1930s, your father and uncles had gone to war, written home faithfully to your mom and your aunts, revenged themselves upon the Germans, taken part in a few celibate, wholesome, and entirely virtuous anti-Nazi adventures, and returned home, still nice American boys, to get married and produce you. Miller had gone to Paris and reveled in what he found, as you would (you thought), whereas your dad and uncles had carried Philadephia with them to Paris and surrounded themselves with it like a force field, not reveling in life but saving lives—a good thing, to be sure, but not an inspiring thing. And, also evidently, it was the only thing your dad was capable of, since now, when you were carrying Tropic of Cancer around with you, he was sitting in his La-Z-Boy with his glasses on his forehead and his shoes off, the evening paper in one hand and a beer in the other, tired from a day at his job and ready for dinner at 6 p.m. (pot roast, not boeuf bourguignon). Max smiled. And now he hadn’t thought of Henry Miller in fifteen years—who had? He said, “You’re reading Henry Miller in school, Simon?”
“We were supposed to.”
“We did, too,” said Isabel. “In my California-authors class. Let’s see, Mark Twain, Helen Hunt Jackson, Jack London, Nathanael West, John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, Wallace Stegner. It was all pretty male. I thought Miller was nicer than the others. More Buddhist. The girls in the class kind of liked him. The boys liked Jack London.”
“I heard he was gay,” said Stoney.
“Who?” said Zoe.
“Both of them,” said Stoney.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Isabel.
“Henry Miller was not gay,” said Cassie decisively, as she helped herself to the roasted vegetables.
“But there would be nothing wrong with it if he were,” said Isabel, with a stubborn note in her voice.
It was this very note of mulishness that Max suddenly found provoking. He said, “According to whom?”
Elena looked at him.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Isabel, a little startled. “According to him, maybe.”
“My guess,” said Charlie, “is that there would be a lot wrong with it according to him, if he were still alive.”
“I just meant that we shouldn’t judge him for being gay if he were gay. That’s all I meant.”
“How about for not being a vegetarian?” said Stoney. “Should we judge him for that?”
Isabel, Max saw, realized that she was being put on the spot, if only playfully. She said, rather stiffly, but aggressively nonetheless, “Meat-eating is a choice, and being gay isn’t. You can judge people for choices they make, but not for ways they are that aren’t choices.”
“Who told you that?” said Charlie.
“I think he was a vegetarian,” said Cassie. “From living in Big Sur.”
“And following Buddhist precepts,” said Paul, gravely.
“It’s funny to think of Henry Miller the sex warrior as being a gay Buddhist, don’t you think?” said Zoe mildly. “It makes me laugh.”
“He lived a long time,” said Paul. “You can espouse a lot of ideas in a long life, and most of them will be contradictory.”
“That’s what I said,” said Cassie. “He was a talker. While he was saying any given thing, he tried to sweep you away with it. This whatever it was was the greatest, best thing. Here were all the reasons to convert to whatever belief he was urging upon you. But in the end you couldn’t convert to everything he gave you reasons to convert to. Life was too short for that. However, he wasn’t gay.”
Isabel, Max saw, opened her mouth and then thought better of contributing, and began eating her soup. Simon and Stoney were both looking at her, and the sight of that gave Max a little prickle of alarm, almost a genetic prickle of alarm, a p
rickle of alarm that as a father he had to feel. After inuring himself to Leo, now he had to watch this? was what the prickle of alarm said, but, really, he had no idea what “this” was. Stoney and Simon were just looking at her, smiling—that was all. Neither of them, necessarily, had designs upon her. He looked at Zoe. Zoe, too, was glancing at Isabel, Stoney, and Simon, but she didn’t look alarmed. On the one hand, Max thought, she could be relied upon—she would know through some female sixth sense whether Isabel was in danger—but on the other hand, would she care? Zoe herself, to tell the truth, had been in plenty of danger over the years, the danger, not least, of being a black actress trying to make a career in Hollywood. Maybe her sense of danger was dulled or jaded? Or maybe she didn’t realize how her talent and beauty had propelled her through the storm, between the clashing rocks, up the waterfall, over the tops of the trees? Maybe she had inherited, or learned, Delphine’s striking way of simply not acknowledging danger of any sort, physical, emotional, social? And so maybe Zoe didn’t understand what might happen to a lesser, slightly lesser, or maybe just different, sort of girl, a girl without an evident destiny. A girl that things could happen to, whose life events could deform. Zoe had never seemed like that sort of a girl, even when he first met her singing at a party. No matter what happened to her, she seemed much more like a—what?—a location rather than a person, a phenomenon that was perennial even while things were happening to it. But as Max thought this, he realized he had no idea what he meant.
In fact, having Zoe and Paul around for the last couple of days had been weird for him. He considered his coparenting relationship with Zoe fairly exemplary, and he would not have said that they had lost touch, but there was a little bit of a shock to seeing her in the kitchen first thing in morning, and to hearing her voice waft up from the pool at night, and to seeing her going up and down the stairs as if she still owned the place. What it reminded him of was how much trouble she had been, and how much he had gotten used to not going to that much trouble for a woman. And yet, at the time, he wouldn’t have said that. In those days, he thought getting swept up and carried away about a woman was the point. If you didn’t think about her all the time, if you didn’t, God forbid, sit on the beach and cry at some disappointment or another that she handed you, then how did you know you were in love? The sight of the right woman was supposed to hit you like a blast or a flood, and his first sight of Zoe Cunningham singing, “He’s got the urge for going, so I’ll have to let him go,” and then following that up with “Every breath you take, every move you make…I’ll be watching you,” did exactly that. He had never seen anyone like her. So, of course, in the flush of his own success, he claimed her as his prize, and he was willing to admit, even at the time, that the fact that she was both breathtaking and black gave her still more of that quality of the precious and the rare. Yet, he had never quite thought of Zoe and himself as an interracial couple, because there was nothing so mundane about it as any social or political statements they might be making. She had simply rendered him breathless. He was, what, almost Stoney’s age, or thereabouts. Which thought reminded him that when he introduced Zoe to Jerry, Jerry did say, “Represent her, don’t marry her. She’s a baby.” But Max told himself that Jerry’s idea of a wife was Dorothy, and he, Max, dismissed that idea as just a version of the Ina idea, which had not worked for him. So he tried the Zoe idea, the blasting, flooding, suffocating idea. And he’d tried it with all the very best intentions, because one look at Delphine indicated that only the best intentions were permitted.
