The Heart of Henry Quantum

by Pepper Harding

  He had just arrived in front of SlinkyBlink, a new pop-up for hip women’s clothing, when someone called out his name.

  “Bones!”

  He turned around.

  “Bones, it’s you! Oh my God!”

  “Daisy,” he heard himself say.

  “Oh my God, Bones! I can’t believe it! You look great!”

  “I do?”

  “Delish! A sight for sore eyes!”

  She smiled up at him with wide, voluptuous eyes.

  “It’s nice to see you, too,” he said, wondering how long it had been. Three years? Five? Not five. Four.

  “Last-minute shopping?” she asked.

  “Yeah. For Margaret.”

  “Of course, of course,” she said.

  Now, finally, he decided to take a better look at her. Truly he had tried not to, tried not to look at her, but she was standing right in front of him and already her scent, whatever it was she used, had invaded his nostrils. So he allowed his eyes to travel up from her booted toes where he had tried to keep them focused, across her salmon-hued Jackie Kennedy coat with its oversized coral buttons and its rounded schoolgirl collar, up over her long, bare, slender neck, past the curve of her chin to the thick, moist, radiant lips, and then past her upturned nose to those wide, blinding, sea-green eyes, and finally the wild, feathery tips of her auburn hair that peeked like hungry birds from beneath her stylish fur hat. She was dressed as if it were really cold outside, but he knew it was just that she loved fashion and autumn was the most fashionable time of year—though winter had already officially begun. When we say “looked up,” really we mean “looked over,” because she was much shorter than Henry, petite, but with a fulsome-ish body—not fat, not fat at all—it’s just her breasts were a tad larger than her frame would suggest, which gave the impression of her being short-waisted—which she wasn’t.

  She was beautiful, in fact. Beautiful and adorable and full of life. And that was the problem. He didn’t want to remember how beautiful and adorable and full of life she was. He certainly didn’t want to allow any inkling of confusion to enter his body, confusion of the extramarital type, which in truth had already begun its torturous journey up his spine. He forced himself to look past her to the store window across the street.

  “Hey, kiddo, have you written that novel yet?” she was saying.

  “What? No, no, ” he chortled.

  “You will,” she replied, turning serious. But then she smiled. “I broke it off with Noah.”

  He had no idea who Noah was. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

  “Don’t be,” she said. “He turned out to be a complete asshole. All he wanted was sex and television. And wine. He fell asleep every night watching the Shopping Channel. I swear to God. But guess what? I’m getting my PhD after all. Yes, little old me! Neuroscience! Just like we talked about, remember? I’m at SF State. I’m studying the eye. You know, how light signals are perceived on the cellular level. I love it.”

  “Really?” he said.

  “It’s because of you, Bones,” she continued. “Because you encouraged me. You were the only one who believed in me.”

  “Me?”

  “Of course you.”

  “Huh!” he said.

  “So everything good with Margaret?” Daisy offered up her biggest, most intoxicating smile.

  “Great!” he replied.

  “I’m glad for you.”

  “Yeah, really. Great.”

  “No kids yet?”

  “Not yet. Ha-ha! Maybe later.”

  “Tasha’s in fifth grade. Can you believe it? And Denny is starting high school next year!”

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  They stood there in front of SlinkyBlink and looked at each other for what seemed a very long time, but it was really only two or three seconds, and then Daisy whispered, “I still collect teddy bears.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. It started with you, remember? Whenever we had a night together, you brought one.”

  “Not every time.”

  “You used to name them, remember? We had Lost-Weekend Bear. Night-at-the-Opera Bear. One-Month-Anniversary Bear. Remember?”

  “You still collect them?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows?” She glanced at her watch, “Oh, jeez,” she exclaimed. “I have to buzz.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  “It was great seeing you,” she said. “Really great.”

  “Yeah, it was,” he agreed. “Merry Christmas!”

  She started to walk away, then came back. “I’m really sorry,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “That I hurt you.”

  “Oh, come on—”

  “No, I am. I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m sorry, too.”

  “You have nothing to be sorry for,” she said. And then she lifted herself up on her toes, placed a feather-soft kiss upon his cheek, and hurried off in the direction of the Sutter-Stockton Garage.

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  12:39–2:23 p.m.

  The world suddenly became quite silent for Henry Quantum. He stood quite still and watched Daisy fade into the crowd. He thought he could just make her out as she found her way into the entrance of the garage, but really he couldn’t. Even so, he remained there watching. Was he waiting for her to change her mind and come back to him? There was certainly a time he would have hoped for that. Now it was just—what? Curiosity? Nostalgia? He couldn’t put his finger on it, only that his insides had become a bit unsettled.

  The last time he’d seen her she was also walking away from him, but that time she was racing into her house, and it was summer, and it was four years ago, and she was wearing her very short cutoffs, and all he could think of at that moment was that he would never be able to touch those fabulous legs again—but even before she entered the house Henry had thrown the BMW in reverse and tore out of her driveway. Surely that meant he didn’t really love her. Surely that is not the thing you think when you lose someone you love—I’ll miss your legs! And yet he had felt for so long that he had been madly in love with her, couldn’t live without her, met her every chance he could, anywhere he could, coffee in Sausalito, sex at the Hilton downtown, and later, when they became very bold, at her house, in her marriage bed, when her husband was off on one of his endless business trips and her children asleep down the hall. Did he feel regret for his transgressions? No, he did not. She even accused him: “Don’t you feel the slightest bit guilty?” When he told her the truth, “No, I don’t,” she shook her head sadly. But he didn’t feel guilty, because when he was with her he felt genuine for almost the first time in his life, as if a storm had broken upon him and swept him into a great sea of feeling. The same sudden rain he felt overwhelm him just now. It was like what happens when you are born again, he thought. Deluged in light. Hallelujah! But eventually Daisy’s scruples won the day and she broke it off with him, and, in all honesty, he was relieved. He went back into his marriage as if none of it had ever happened. Everything else fell back into place, too. His job. His workouts at the gym. His morning news. His evening novel. He never saw her again. Never even Googled her. Didn’t even look her up on Facebook. Margaret never knew, thank God.

  But now he wanted more than anything to understand what was happening in his marriage to Margaret. Why had he done what he had done with Daisy? It was strange, his behavior. Unsettling. Unethical. Completely out of character. Never before. Never after. He shuddered even to think of it. But Daisy— Oh, Daisy!

  He decided he ought to remember how he and Margaret had first met and how they fell in love and why they were together in the first place. He wanted to remember it exactly, the first time he’d seen Margaret. Yes. He’d spotted her from a block away—she was waiting in line at some restaurant, he couldn’t remember which, in Berkeley, probably on Shattuck. He’d only just arrived in San Fra
ncisco, having finished college a month before, had already been accepted to graduate school in Chicago, wasn’t even remotely thinking of staying in California, certainly wasn’t looking for a girlfriend. But there was something about her, must have been, because it emboldened him—maybe he was drunk or stoned, but he didn’t think so. It was her, something about her. And the force of that something allowed him to drag his friend Rudy along as he marched right up to her and commenced talking as if he did this kind of thing all the time. What exactly had he said, anyway? He had no idea. But he was in the flow, that’s for sure, and whatever it was, it worked. She was enthralled. He felt so powerful and attractive and cool. What was it about her, he wondered now—was it simply the way she stood with those rigid shoulders and slightly arched back? Or the way she was talking to her friend in little whispers as if imparting the most profound secrets, her lips quivering in her friend’s ear? Something enigmatic, that’s what it was—a straight arrow all closed in on herself with her arms folded and her chin down, but even from a distance he could feel that her eyes were wild and uncontained, two fiery daredevils constantly moving, watchful, ready. And her hair—she’d pulled it into a tight, prissy bun, but strands kept falling out all over her face, as if they too could not be tamed. For some reason he found the schoolmarm outer shell sexy, no question about it. But what he really wanted was the feral creature within. Or at least that’s what he told himself.

  She had worn glasses back then, wire rims, very intellectual, even though she wasn’t in the least, and an Indian skirt down to her ankles, and, my God, Birkenstocks! It’s not possible, he thought—had she really looked like that? My tailored Margaret with a dozen pairs of Jimmy Choos and the manicured chestnut hair cut fashionably short in an asymmetrical bob so severe it reminded him of a wedge of cheese? Once, she was rounded and soft. Now she was all angles and edges. She even seemed taller, five seven, where not all that long ago he could have sworn she was five five. Could he be remembering someone else?

  The next thing he recalled was his shock when Margaret first took off her clothes in the rather run-down room she rented as a house share. He remembered peeling paint and water-stained floors but also the scent of lavender and roses coming from dozens of sachets she had piled in a basket, and there were fluffy pillows on her bed, the bed he was lying upon when she undressed right before his eyes. And him thinking: this only happens in the movies. And his amazement that under all that crazy, flamboyant, excessive material was a truly beautiful body—slender, proportioned, the skin of an angel, breasts like Aphrodite’s on that sculpture he saw at the Met—high, round, smooth—she was perfect, really. But it was how she had stood there waiting nervously for his judgment and how he could not speak, not a word, and how she thought he was displeased—that is what caught him off guard. All he could do, so dumbfounded was he, was spread his arms as wide as he could, and when she fell into them, when he closed them around her and felt her sumptuous skin beneath his hands, he was lost.

  Even that day, that first day, she said, “I think you should clip your nails more. Toes, too. Kind of disgusting.”

  Very soon after that, she started picking out his clothes.

  And yet he remembered how dependent on him she became, how she’d clung to his elbow and to his words, too, and how uneasy that made him. He encouraged her to be more independent, to have a more realistic assessment of her abilities and charms. And then one day, she did. This was after the stint in graduate school in Chicago. They’d come back to San Francisco because it was where their best days were and they’d been looking at houses—not that they could afford yet to buy one, but they liked to go to open houses on weekends, playing the role of a successful young couple—when one day she started actually listening to what the agents were saying and how they approached potential clients and how they hooked someone in. “I can do that,” she declared as they drove back to their little apartment in their used VW. “Do what?” he asked. “Do what the real estate agent does. How much money do you think they make? I think they make a ton.” So she took a course, got an entry-level job, passed the agent’s exam, and before he knew it, she was a different person. It was as if a light had been switched on and she was ablaze. But not toward him. That was the problem. She had this toggle switch in her soul and it could only be on in one direction. He could feel her presence in that darkened state, but could never quite touch her. An infinity of space, that’s what it was. A vacuum. Yet space, he reminded himself, was never really empty—it teemed with secret energies and ineluctable particles always in motion. That must have been what he felt all those years. The radiation emanating from her disdain, the dark energy of her contempt.

  * * *

  He was suddenly very glad Daisy had walked away just now. Don’t have to deal with that, he thought. Perfume for Margaret. Perfume! So he set off again down Grant Avenue and when he reached Geary he turned west toward Union Square. But right there on the corner in front of Peter Panos, the Gentleman’s Tailor, a man was playing the saxophone. He was playing a Christmas medley over a recorded soundtrack that blared from two huge speakers festooned with red ribbon and plastic wreaths, and the man himself was wearing a bright red Santa hat, and Henry wondered what could drive a person to do this kind of thing—to play a saxophone on a street corner accompanied by a boom box, two days before Christmas. Love of music? Extreme poverty? Rampant exhibitionism? The guy was doing a jazz riff on “Silent Night,” which was, frankly, terrible, and Henry wondered if whoever wrote “Silent Night” would have been appalled, and he wondered if maybe it was Irving Berlin, because Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade,” and Sammy Cahn wrote “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”—oh wait, no, that was Mel Tormé—was he Jewish, too? It’s funny how many Jews wrote Christmas songs, but maybe he was wrong about that, because a lot of carols were traditional, coming from jolly old England. But didn’t Charles Dickens invent Christmas? That’s what he learned somewhere, probably in graduate school when they were deconstructing everything. But the Yule log, that was very old. Pagan. Actually the whole Christmas thing was kind of pagan and that’s why everyone liked it. Denise’s tattoos. Her fingers. What would it be like to be pagan? You see spirits inhabiting trees and rivers and clouds and feel the whole world is alive with meaning. Terrifying, that’s what. Ghosts and goblins! But wouldn’t it be marvelous? Marvelous in the true sense of the word—in the sense of miracle, in the sense of awe. Now the sax player moved on to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” but this time, in spite of his utter lack of talent, what came out of the horn shimmered with sweet melancholy and Henry felt tears well up his eyes, because, after all, he did love Christmas, and . . . and . . . if only he had had children, it would have been perfect—if only Margaret had wanted them . . . and fuck, Mel Tormé was Jewish. . . .

  “What are you doing, now?”

  He was startled again because it was Daisy again.

  “I thought you were going home,” he said to her.

  “Nah. What are you doing?”

  “Just standing here.”

  “Why?”

  “Nobody ever stops to watch these guys play,” he explained, “so I thought I would.”

  “That’s so you,” she said.

  His heart began to pound, though he wasn’t sure if it was in a good way or a bad way.

  “Let’s go get some coffee,” she suggested.

  “I don’t know—I have to go shopping.”

  “There’s got to be coffee around here,” she went on. “There’s a Starbucks up by the Sutter-Stockton, isn’t there?”

  “I think so,” he said. “But I—”

  “I know!” she exclaimed. “Let’s go to Café Claude!”

  “We can’t just get coffee there,” he said. “It’s lunchtime.”

  “Have you had lunch?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  She smiled and took his hand. “Well, then, come on.”

  “At least let me give this guy someth
ing,” he said, and he threw a couple of bucks in the sax case. The musician nodded without skipping a note and Daisy squeezed Henry’s hand.

  “I love how you do things,” she said.

  It was only a little bit of a walk to Café Claude, five minutes, maybe even only three, but decidedly in the opposite direction of Macy’s. They backtracked along Grant and then down Sutter to tiny Claude Lane and then down the lane all the way to the other end, at Bush Street. That little bottle of Chanel seemed to grow ever more distant.

  “Let’s sit inside,” she said, even though most everyone liked to sit outside under the russet-colored tent because it felt so much like Paris, only foggy. But on a day such as this, the sky cloudless and blue and the sun warming your skin so much you had to take off your jacket, everyone wanted to eat on the terrace. But Daisy knew that Henry believed these happy patrons were dining on their own graves—the cloudless blue was a sign of drought, that’s all. He’d be obsessing about all the parched lawns and starving deer and stranded salmon and he wouldn’t enjoy his lunch.

  So she led him up the stairs to the dining room and, once inside, all the way to the back, as far away from the blue sky as possible. They settled into the last table and in this cave-like corner he finally began to relax. He even leaned toward her until the space between them was compressed into a few tentative inches. How long had it been since he’d been so close to those amazing lips, that adorable nose, those vivid, sparkling eyes? He soon retreated, though, aware that the scent of her hair and wind of her breath were like honey to him.

  “You always liked this table,” she said.

  It’s true, he had.

  He decided not to speak. He wanted her to say what it was she had come back from the garage to say.

  But of course she did no such thing. Instead, she called to the waiter and ordered a glass of rosé. He knew this was his cue to order a glass of Pouilly-Fumé. She always ordered the rosé. He always ordered the Pouilly-Fumé. Surely she sensed the hesitation in him, but she just sat there smiling, her face an open book.