The Henderson Equation

by Warren Adler

  “Not a word.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Three months now.”

  “My God.”

  The shared concern for Chums generated sadness, the living symbol of their failed marriage. They had ceased recriminations years ago, sharing blame at last, along with the newspaper business, the principal debaser of their parenthood. Margaret got up from the couch, straightening her topheavy body, once the source of his pride. Middle age, like retribution, had settled the fat in her breasts. They had been her dominant physical charm and getting his hands on them was once an obsession, he remembered.

  He had observed her peripherally at first, slim-hipped and large-breasted, as she moved in a graceful glide through the city room on the way to her desk in the feature department, a glass-walled section housing the columnists, the drama and movie critics, the society and financial editors. With skin as white as alabaster and red, upswept hair shining in the bright fluorescent lights, she was, amid the physical shabbiness of the motley band of newspaper types, a fresh rose in a sea of weeds. Having spent the last two years of the war as a copy “boy,” a direct effect of the manpower shortage, she had forgone college in an effort to break into the newspaper business. The war had caused an imbalance in the sexual mix and she had seized the opportunity to storm the male fortress. By the time the boys started homeward from Europe and the Pacific, she had served her apprenticeship on the copy bench and was already seeing her occasional by-line over reviews of the “B” pictures.

  It was not uncommon for busy eyes to rise as she passed through and soon he was joining in the staring and fantasizing in the trail of her body as she moved.

  “Now there’s a pair of headlights,” Charlie had said, whistling lightly, a sound she must have heard; later Nick learned that she had secretly enjoyed the attention. To Nick, whose knowledge of women was confined to the demeaning “bam-bam, thank you, ma’am” variety of relationship in the makeshift cathouses of war-scarred Europe, Margaret Domier represented the epitome of unattainability. And although the men watched her, the blood, like his, he thought, surging in their genitals, she maintained the kind of professional coolness that could defuse them. As for Nick, even though they had begun a casual acquaintance, he always felt himself flushing in her presence, perhaps because his fantasies had by then been prompting him to masturbation and, unique to the era, massive guilt feelings.

  He had wondered if others were sharing the recall of her covered breasts, imagining them lying warm and full, nipples pink and gorged, in the restraints of her brassiere. It was the years in which the mass media, preliminary to Playboy’s institutionalizing the phenomenon, was proclaiming the American male’s hang-up with mammaries, and he assumed his case was of the galloping kind, investing him with the burden of imagined sexual aberration.

  If it weren’t for the massive snowstorm of 1947, which dumped twenty-six inches of whiteness, the last time in memory that New York had ever appeared so clean, he might have continued his masturbatory fantasies without abatement on through middle age. As it was, they were both working late on stories, she on a movie review and he, oddly, on the weather roundup, a sidebar on transportation tie-ups that was to be replated for the two-star edition. The office was nearly deserted when he dumped his finished story in front of the night city editor and moved toward the time clock. Margaret had just punched out and he found himself walking beside her along the corridor leading to the elevators.

  “I’m supposed to catch a flick tonight, but I’d better get home,” she said. She was living with her parents in Borough Park then. “Besides, it doesn’t much matter. I could rewrite the Variety review.”

  “That’s cheating.”

  “Better than being caught in the bowels of the New York subway system freezing my ass off.” The reference embarrassed him.

  “No sweat with the subways. I just spoke to them.”

  “What about later?”

  “They swear the system won’t break down.”

  “That a guarantee?”

  “I give it my personal blessing.”

  She looked at him curiously, as if seeing him for the first time. He felt the interest, sensed the moment.

  “I’ll make a deal,” he stammered. “Take me to your movie and I’ll take you home.”

  “Isn’t it out of the way?” He was living with Charlie in a walk-up apartment on Second Avenue.

  “Not at all,” he lied. He hoped she wouldn’t ask him where he lived. It was a gift, he mused, watching her button up the top buttons of her cloth coat over those tantalizing, bulging mysteries. She was silent as they went down in the elevator and walked through the lobby, the big globe circling on its pivot, with a protective chrome safety railing to enhance its veneration. In the street the snow was falling thickly, the drifts heavy. But with the feel of the crystals on the skin, and the clear smell in the air, there came an odd refreshment. It was a night to be out in, he had thought.

  “What the hell,” she said, tucking a hand under his arm. He imagined he felt the softness of her breasts pressing against him. They walked up Forty-second Street, following a beaten trail, their booted feet crunching in the fresh snow. He felt his heart leaping with the excitement of her nearness, embellished by the pride he felt in having the guts to ask her to be with him. They walked slowly, savoring the falling crystals which dropped gently on their skin. In the lobby of the New York State on Broadway, they brushed the snow off their faces and clothes. Her cheeks were red with the glow of the cold and the delight of the sudden warmth.

  In the darkened theater he felt her closeness, his concentration difficult as he sensed her breathing in the rise and fall of her chest. She was restless, perhaps writing her review in her head as she watched the contrivances of the John Wayne horse opera, mounted in gloss, clichés abounding, the music in stirring accompaniment to the lingering long shots of the Western landscape. It was odd that he could never remember the name of the movie, only the impossible happiness he was feeling, waiting for her restlessness to brush her body against his, contemplating ways in which he could move closer, trembling with impatience for the next touch. He never found the courage to reach for her hand or slide his arm along the back of her seat. When the picture was over and they filed back toward the exit, he discovered that his shirt was soaked with perspiration. By the time they had ordered waffles at the near-empty Childs restaurant across the street, he had determined that he was in love and he could barely find the strength to lift the syrup-drenched confection to his mouth. Mostly he watched her lips move, noting the crookedness of one of her teeth, a charming flaw, as she recounted her opinion of the movie.

  “Pure escapist,” she said. “When you’ve seen one John Wayne, you’ve seen them all.”

  “Will you roast it?” he asked.

  “No,” she said after a pause. “I’ll judge it strictly in terms of our audience. The yardstick will be whether it’s a good John Wayne or a bad John Wayne.”

  “And the conclusion?”

  “It was a good John Wayne.”

  “How many stars?”

  “Three, easy.”

  “That’s pandering.”

  She looked up at him, a speared waffle segment in midair. “Don’t confuse me.”

  He felt himself trying to make an impression, assuming a flippancy that he hoped she might appreciate. Above all, he wanted to be noticed, remembered, flagged down by her consciousness. The subways were running on schedule, although the drafty stations were freezing and the wait between trains was long because of the hour. They had to change, finally arriving at her station in Brooklyn after midnight. During the long ride he had searched his repertoire for ideas that might interest her, compulsively seeking ways to keep the conversation going. He got her talking about herself. Her father was a longshoreman and she painted verbal pictures of a heavy, brutish man, sitting around the house in an undershirt, with a cowed mother who worked as a waitress, and, herself, the defiant daughter.

  �
�My father is always mad at me,” she said. “He can’t understand my interest in being a newspaper-woman, among other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m a renegade Catholic. When I stopped going to confession he let me have it. I finally told him I got tired of the fat priest asking me where I touched myself. When I was through he was sorry he had asked. He’s a good old bird, though, an overgrown kid.”

  “My father was a doctor. I hardly saw him when I was growing up. I only found out about him through his letters to me in the army. By the time I knew about him, he was already dying. He was a marvelous writer. I’ve saved all his letters.”

  He was conscious that he was saying things that could only be said to someone trusted, a gift from oneself, the private revelation reserved for special ears.

  “What was it like, living in a small town?” she asked. He was overjoyed that he had, at last, engaged her.

  Perhaps it was the special way she asked that hinted of a deeper interest on her part. He felt its beginnings. No one had quite asked that question in precisely the same way, even Charlie, who considered Warren, Ohio, a kind of purgatory.

  “Like living in the bosom of one big family.” The reference made him hesitate, smiling inwardly at himself. “You knew pretty near everybody and since I was the doctor’s son, I had a special status. My mother took this status quite seriously. She still revels in it. There was a special role, too, in having married a Jew. There’s a mystique about Jewish doctors, a kind of prejudice in reverse, as if the Jew doctor were somehow smarter, more competent.”

  “Was it true?”

  “Yes.”

  By the time the ride was over, he had reconstructed his life and she hers, hardly conscious of the screening process that might have made the related images less meaningful. On the long walk to her apartment building in the deepening snow, he sensed that they had become closer. Despite the snow and the difficulties he would have in returning to Manhattan, he wanted to prolong the closeness.

  Sitting on the hallway steps outside her apartment, shivering in the unheated hall, they continued to talk, whispering. He felt her warm breath against his cheek. Finally she stood up and leaned against the wall.

  “It was great fun, Nick.” He looked into her eyes, deep in shadows, staring silently, feeling clumsy as he pressed his body against hers, searching for her lips. He had moved cautiously, hoping for some flicker of matching effort on her part, which came, surprisingly, as she lifted her face to compensate for his height, pressing her lips against his, her mouth slightly open. His tongue tentatively reached for a caress from hers, which responded, making his heart beat wildly. He felt her contours through the thick coat. Enveloping her in his arms, he pressed his mouth harder against hers, until he could feel her beginning to gasp for air. Never before had a kiss had so much meaning. When they had disengaged, she turned away quickly and without another word put her key in the apartment lock and let herself in. He stood there for a long time before he went back into the snow. He had all he could do to prevent himself from throwing himself frontside up into a snowbank and letting the crystals fall into his opened mouth. Instead, he made snowballs and flung them against the sides of cars. It took him three hours to get back to Manhattan. The subways had been disrupted after all.

  8

  Nick had always characterized himself as analytical, probing, with a mind that perceived life with some logic and sought truths with scientific curiosity. Yet he could not put his finger on the precise motivating factor within his makeup that insisted on his being a journalist. Perhaps it was a genetic transference of his father’s pursuit of medicine, essentially a similar game of hunt and find, although newspapering made little pretense to the scientific method.

  It was only a wild guess on his part, although there were writers alleged to be in his father’s line dating back to Europe and his mother had a great-uncle who had once owned a weekly paper in a town near Toledo, Ohio. But since he could never find an answer in his ancestry that totally satisfied him, he thought instead that he had a special gift, a rare enthusiasm for the written word. Hadn’t it been discovered early in his life by a fourth grade teacher? She had said to him that he had a real flair for composition, a spark that ignited soaring expectations in his parents’ hearts and encouraged them to encourage him.

  This encouragement, which came in heavy doses, made him bookish, and by the eighth grade he was becoming insular and shy; the world of the imagination, characters in library books, seemed more exciting than people who lived in Warren. How many exploding fantasies and ambitions are spawned in the public libraries of small towns? In Nick’s case, after books, it was in the newspaper section of the library, where the papers hung neatly on wooden rods. Perhaps it was also the serenity of the reading room itself, the huge globes that hung on long heavy linked chains from the white ceilings, the polished tables and wooden chairs, the smell of books and newspapers. Each turn of the newspaper page brought portents of excitement, panoramic views of cataclysmic events, stirring passions, rages, humors to his young mind. The progression from the Columbus Dispatch to the Chicago Tribune to the New York Times began slowly, then accelerated, and soon he was comparing the way each newspaper said things and perceiving similar events in different ways. Then, suddenly, the library phase was over and the high school newspaper became the obsession. This first boldface byline, misspelled as it was, was an event greater than his first long pants, which in the early thirties was an otherwise unmatched event.

  Explanations about why he pursued the newspaper business with such passion never seemed, somehow, to hit the mark. He liked to think he had a natural talent for it, an insatiable curiosity, and a special flair for presentation, although in those days he still built stories like pyramids with the five W’s always intact in the lead. Under the by-line, though, he couldn’t resist the snappy lead and once looking over his high school clips which his mother had saved, he was quite impressed with the way he turned the phrases. You were a precocious bastard, Nick, he would tell himself, as he pored over his mother’s musty shrine. Unfortunately, the old newspaper clips, yellowed and crumbled, would hardly stand the test of time. It had taught him how transitory newspapers really were.

  A life is a series of converging vectors, Nick had decided in recalling his own. If he had not been drafted after college, he would not have met Charlie. And if Charlie had not been the peculiar blend of himself, the magnetizing force that could never be adequately explained, Nick might not have been attracted to him. In the end, the contrivance was Fate, which could have killed one or the other off in the random ways of war. There was, of course, no end to that kind of speculation, but somehow Nick could relate all this sudden interest in the why of his life to his burgeoning love for Margaret. Love was apparently the time one looked inward on oneself, searching in all the dark corners, a kind of spring dusting process, uncovering obscurities, discovering misplaced riches. Love, as Nick discovered then, was only corny if you weren’t in it.

  But now that love had come the real insecurities also began. Was it to be unrequited or returned? Was he doomed to heartache and despair or was there hope ahead, the promise of unbounded joy? On that first day after the movies and the snowstorm, and the first reaching out, he had come into the office earlier than usual. He was determined to get to his typewriter early, before prying eyes might accidentally see what he was writing. He wanted desperately to tell Margaret how much the time spent with her had meant to him. After all, the typed word was the operative mode of expression and surely Margaret was sensitive enough to understand that some things could only be said properly on pulpy copy paper.

  But midway through his outpourings, being the only reporter around, he was sent out to cover a traffic accident on the West Side Highway, and soon became too absorbed with facts to allow the intrusion of any other sentiment. Maybe this was the thing about the newspaper business, the total absorption, the need to press against time, the concentration on acquiring information
above all else. He had always seen that moment as a special intrusion, a harbinger of the destructive force of pressed time, the compelling necessity to feed the maw of the presses at fixed moments, whatever the human consequences of this timetable. Deadline, even as a word, was pregnant with depravity.

  When he eventually returned to his love letter from the bloody sights of the highway accident the sweetness seemed gone from his typewriter. The fires of love still blazed, but the muse had failed.

  There was a water fountain beyond her office from which, when you dipped your body to line your mouth with the spigot, you could see into the large glassed-in feature room where Margaret spent her time. That day, like a man with an insatiable thirst, he paraded back and forth from the water fountain waiting for a glimpse of her, which never materialized. He learned later that she had been out watching movies, but the sudden emergence in himself of the possessive state had made him seethe with anxieties, insecurities, jealousies.

  When she finally did return to the office, he was exhausted with uncertainty, fed further by her seemingly casual interest as she lifted her head from the typewriter and waved, pleasantly enough, to his mooning face staring from the other side of the glass. The very aspect of pleasantness, so kind and unassuming, so bland, could only be a heatless flicker to his inflammable inner tinder. Had he misread her the night before?

  Fearful that he would betray the vulnerable softness in himself, he was quick to assume that he was merely the newest victim of unrequited love, and he deliberately changed his tactics. His first strategy was a withdrawal. He decided to ignore her, only to discover on still another trek to the water fountain that she had left for the day.

  “What the hell’s the matter, Nick?” Charlie had asked. The loss of self-possession was obvious.

  “Bellyache.”

  “Where the hell were you last night?”

  “Around.”