“The Pouilly-Fumé,” he finally told the waiter.
“And pommes frites!” she cried.
“Oui, madam.”
“To nibble on while we decide.”
Because that is also what they always did.
The waiter disappeared, and Daisy folded her hands in front of her. She looked at Henry as if she were contemplating a great work of art.
“Okay, Daisy,” he said, giving up. “What’s going on?”
“Why should anything be going on?”
“Please.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied. “It’s just that when I saw you, I couldn’t stop myself.”
“Stop yourself from what?”
She lowered her eyes. He wondered why women do that—lower their eyes. He knew there were these universal facial expressions—for instance, when you meet someone with whom you are acquainted, your eyebrows go up—it’s a way of saying you intend no violence—every single person in the world does it, regardless of culture—but what about lowering your eyes? Do guys lower their eyes? Does he? People in China don’t smile for no reason like we do. We’re always smiling. It certainly doesn’t mean we’re happy. It just means we’re morons. Emotion is so hard to pin down! He wondered what emotion his own face was conveying and what Daisy was intuiting from the curve of his mouth or the arch of his eyebrow, but he knew that even if he had had a mirror, he himself would not have been able to discern what his feelings were. He never looked natural in a mirror. It was like in quantum physics: observing the object alters it. So you can never see yourself as you are. Actually, when he looked in the mirror, the impression of his own unreality made him kind of nauseous.
Unless he was combing his hair. Because your hair is somehow apart from you, an accoutrement, an add-on, like a lampshade.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“You,” he said.
“What about me?”
“Everything,” he said.
The waiter came with the french fries and also set the wineglasses down before them. They ordered their lunches, and when the waiter left, they lifted their glasses, hers sparkling pink, his pale straw—
“To our time together,” she said, clinking his glass.
He took a sip of wine and nibbled on a couple of potatoes.
“So, your divorce is final now?” he asked.
“Oh my God, yes, for a long time.”
“How long?”
“Two years.”
“That’s not all that long, Daisy. How did the kids take it?”
“They’re fine. Well, Denny was very angry for a while, but Tasha was too young to fully understand. She just accepted. Then Denny did, too. I mean they hardly saw their father when we were married, so it wasn’t that big of a change for them. Honestly, he sees the kids more now than before. He’s on a mission to prove he’s the world’s best dad. You never had any kids?”
“No, as I said—”
“It’s a shame. You really would be the world’s best dad.”
“I doubt that.”
“I don’t.”
Again they fell into silence.
“I don’t know why I broke up with you,” she said.
“I do.”
“Then tell me.”
“Because we were married to other people, and it was wrong, and I was a jerk,” he explained.
“You weren’t a jerk.”
“I was. I didn’t care about who we hurt. Your kids, our spouses. I was a selfish jerk.”
“I don’t think that’s why I broke it off.”
“Yeah, it was.”
“No. I think it was because I was afraid.”
“That’s what I’m saying. You were afraid of hurting your family.”
“No. I was afraid of what you required of me. You wanted me to give myself to you. To actually be there. To fight things through with you. You were a very demanding lover. I mean that in a good way.”
“I was a jerk,” he repeated. “I’m a smotherer. Though not with Margaret, as it turns out. I don’t demand anything of her.”
“That’s because you don’t love her.”
He was relieved when the food arrived and he could comment on his fish and ask her about her pasta. But what she had just said—that he didn’t love Margaret. Of course he loved her. Why would he have stuck it out if he didn’t love her? Maybe it wasn’t the same as what he’d felt for Daisy, but was that love? Wasn’t that just the excitement of an affair? The forbidden fruit? I mean, look at her. So fucking sexy. With those red curls and freckles and—
“So your pasta is good?” he said.
“You already asked me that.”
He stared down at his trout. Much better: it wasn’t the least bit sexy. It was fish.
In fact, at this moment he loved his trout. When he looked at the trout his groin did not tingle. When he looked at the trout he did not doubt himself or question his past or imagine some alternate future. Though he did wonder about what happened to the trout before it reached this plate. Part of him hoped it had traveled far and wide through foamy white-water streams, but he knew it most likely had had a bitter life in an overcrowded fish farm. And now it sat there on a white plate on a white tablecloth in a white sauce ready to be eaten by a white man. Actually the white cloth was covered with a sheet of white paper, so it really wasn’t a white-tablecloth restaurant. It was just a white-paper restaurant. White is also the color of death, he remembered. Poor fish! Although he had to admit it looked delicious. There were bits of wild mushrooms floating about, too, and that gave the whole thing an inviting frisson of danger, because mushrooms—wild mushrooms—all those people mistaking death cap for caesarea. Italians mostly. That’s why he always stuck with boletus and chanterelle. Can’t mistake those. They were everywhere just now, including in his trout, though chanterelles mostly come up in January and February, at least out at Lake Lagunitas where he liked to hunt for them, but these days you could find the most exotic things in the grocery store, mostly from Oregon, because, well we have no goddamned rain in California, and so he thought about the drought once again, and the people eating outside and . . . Mind! he screamed (internally, not out loud, thank God), Mind! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Because for once he wanted to concentrate on the here and now. Yes. He admitted it: he wanted to concentrate on Daisy—yes, Daisy—yes, be here with Daisy—yes, find out what the hell they were doing together—yes, he wanted to—he wanted—he didn’t know what! And in that moment he realized that he hadn’t always been this way—that his mind hadn’t always wandered quite so much—not that he hadn’t always loved to cogitate on the things he saw during the day or on ideas that had come to him by chance or that his inner voice hadn’t always been loquacious, to say the least, but this constant monologue, this incessant vocalizing of every moronic scintilla of thought, this had grown into a kind of compulsion in the last two or three years. And with a terrible start he realized: only since Daisy. It started when he lost Daisy and went back to Margaret. What could that mean?
He raised his eyes from the whiteness of the tablecloth and the fish and the sauce, and he said to Daisy, “Why did you divorce Edward?”
She laughed. “You are an idiot. Because of you.”
“Because of me? Why?”
“Because I saw what a relationship was supposed to be. I understood what it felt to actually love someone and to be loved by someone. I couldn’t settle anymore.”
“But, Daisy, it was so short. We slept together what? Once? Twice? We knew it was wrong.”
“What difference does it make how many times? Eighteen, actually.”
“But was it ever a real relationship?”
“You tell me.”
He truly did not know the answer to this question, so he said, “And that was that with Edward?”
“That was that.”
“That’s crazy,” he said. “First you break it off with me, and then you get divorced because of me? And then you take up with some g
uy you say was horrible?”
“Why did you stay with Margaret?” she shot back.
“Because I’m married to her. Marriage is supposed to mean something.”
“But you don’t love her.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that,” she insisted.
“Why do you think I don’t love her?” he asked.
“And you think she loves you?”
“Yes. Of course.”
She set down her fork and grasped the edge of the table. “Look me in the eye, Henry, and tell me: Do you love Margaret?”
“Yes,” he declared. “I love her.”
“Then I guess we don’t have anything more to talk about.”
“Why not?”
She pushed her chair from the table, scrambled into her coat, her fur hat, her gloves.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said.
“I don’t understand you . . .”
“Bones, I apologize. I shouldn’t have done this. All I know is, I haven’t stopped thinking about you a single day in the last four years. I fucking dream about you. It’s stupid and it’s crazy and I’m sorry.”
And with that, she fled Café Claude.
* * *
A few of the diners looked up, the waiter hung near the bar trying to gauge whether to bring the check, and then all went back to normal. But Henry Quantum was still shivering in the frigid wind of her departure. He took several deep breaths to calm himself, as he had learned in his one session at the Green Gulch Zen Center and then at the retreat he had attended at Spirit Rock, and shut his eyes so he could realign his chakras but mostly so he wouldn’t have to look at the seat she had just vacated. What just happened? he asked himself. What had she said? What had he said? Only half opening his eyes, he motioned to the waiter, asked him to remove her plate of pasta.
“Is the light bothering you?” the waiter asked.
“Something’s in my eye,” he said.
He decided to finish his fish. The fish that had taken that long journey from the fish farm to this plate. He would not waste its life. As his has been wasted. Have I really wasted my life? he wondered. I’m forty. Past fucking forty by three fucking months.
He took another bite. It tasted like dust. Not really. It tasted like fish. But he heard his inner voice say it tasted like dust. Jesus! Why be so dramatic? You had an affair. You blew it. Just eat your fish.
You’re married, for Christ’s sake.
And this reminded him about the perfume.
He asked for the check, left an overgenerous tip, and stepped out onto Claude Lane.
“Perfume!” he declared to no one in particular. “Perfume!”
And so he resumed his route toward Macy’s, but in spite of his new resolve, found himself walking at a snail’s pace, his arms folded in thought.
CHAPTER 5
* * *
2:24–4:16 p.m.
Of all the people to run into on this very day—in the midst of his critical mission to buy perfume for his Margaret—why on earth did it have to be Daisy? Why couldn’t it be—he couldn’t think of anyone except for Donald Trump for some reason. But even Donald Trump would have been better than Daisy.
And why vision science? That’s what she said she was studying, right? How we see. How can you see how we see? Just because you determine some neuron shoots off at a certain wavelength, what does that tell you about seeing? Still, it was great she was in school. She’d actually end up with the PhD he’d never gotten. But what did she mean, she never stopped dreaming about him? She’d been living with some other guy: the one he once got a glimpse of in the white suit and the Panama hat at that fundraiser they both happened to attend a year or so after they’d stopped seeing each other. Seeing each other. Did they in fact see each other? Yes, perhaps they had. Perhaps that’s what she meant. She had been seen. That’s what scared her and that’s what she wanted back. But you can’t have things back. It’s like going on the same vacation twice. It’s never the same.
He meandered back to where he had first run into Daisy, in front of SlinkyBlink, and here at last he stopped and took a breath. In the window were shredded jeans and rhinestone-studded T-shirts, flouncy skirts, platform shoes, bright-colored handbags with huge buckles—things he could barely imagine anyone wearing, except maybe Denise, the art director, and Gladys, the receptionist, but not really—Gladys was ultraconservative in her dress because she wanted to be taken seriously and become a copywriter. And he was pretty sure Denise was more Goth than SlinkyBlink, if people were still called Goth, which Henry seriously doubted. This all got back to the question of seeing. Fashion looked great one year and stupid the next. But the clothes—they stayed just the same. How is it they no longer looked the same? How is it the woman you loved last year is no longer the woman you love this year? And to whom was he referring? Daisy or Margaret?
But Daisy said she dreamed about him every day.
When he thought about it, it was all crazy. Before the divorce, Daisy had it all. The mansion in Ross, the rich and beautiful husband, the two brilliant kids, the garden parties, the Tesla runabout, the Land Rover, the Lynch-Bages as the house wine ($200 a pop!), and the Dom Pérignon in the fridge. Why did she throw that all away?
She’d asked him, “Did you ever write that novel?” He had forgotten that he even wanted to write a book, that he’d actually taken notes, sketched out a few scenes, did a little research. Where was all that stuff? He knew very well where it was. In the earthen storeroom in the back of the garage, in a box, with the mildew and the smell of mouse turds and mushrooms. Maybe he should take it out and try again. But no. That would be Daisy entering his life again, too. That’s what she did to him. False hope, he called it. He had zero talent and he knew it.
True, he had written little stories and poems for her. “I love your writing!” she’d say, her face flushed, tears forming in her eyes. He didn’t believe her, but he swelled with pride anyway. Even now he could feel her enthusiasm course through him. She would be spread out on the couch with his typed sheets piled next to her and would throw open her arms as if he had just written Moby Dick or Love Story or something, and would swallow him up. He figured it was just the pleasure she felt for having been the object of all this writing. She would shower him with kisses, wrap her legs around him, and seem to melt beneath him. But perhaps he had not really understood these moments. Perhaps her passion was much deeper than that. Maybe it wasn’t just flattery when she gushed that no one had ever written her poetry before, not to mention the little love stories. Maybe it was more. Maybe he was a good writer, after all.
This whole business of writing was now in his mind, and his struggle with it. In graduate school he found he could compose a decent paper, but Daisy had liberated something else in him. For her, he conjured medieval lovers, stolen hours, secret trysts, island hideaways, and erotic messages conveyed by carrier pigeon. Ordinary joes and janes were transformed by ecstasy or condemned to fathomless depths of despair. The sex in these tales was never explicit, mainly because it embarrassed him to write about it, but it didn’t seem to matter. Daisy wrote those parts in her own imagination, and the real-life lovemaking was immediate and overwhelming and, he had to admit, wilder than anything he could have captured on paper.
Why had he insisted he loved Margaret?
But he knew he must not call Daisy, must not start all that again. It was so much easier, so much cleaner is how he put it to himself, to live a life without secrets. Secrets cause pain, and the avoidance of pain was his current preoccupation. So he moved away from the display window at SlinkyBlink—these places come and go so fast, he told himself—like everything else, like everything else—and continued on his way to Macy’s, although this time he did decide to go by way of Sutter and not Geary, because he didn’t want to pass the saxophonist again. Or—he stopped himself just as his foot touched the sidewalk on the other side of the street—maybe it really was because he was hoping to run into Dais
y again, knowing she parked at the Sutter-Stockton garage and this was the direction she would have to take to get there, and perhaps she was dawdling, maybe even waiting for him beside the flower shop near the garage entrance. The flower shop run by the beautiful East European blonde—Henry guessed she was Serbian by the crisp line of her chin and the way she had of dispensing with anyone who gave her a hard time—but she certainly was a great beauty, and he wondered why such a beauty would work in a flower shop— well, probably because she owned it, she and that husband of hers, who was quite a bit older and had the head of a buffalo—couldn’t she have done better? Couldn’t she have married a rich man or been a fashion model or something? He admired her, actually. For not trying to get by on her looks. Because, let’s face it, if you’re extremely good-looking, you get much further. There was a Darwinian force at work there. Surely there were studies on this. He would look into it when he got back to the office.
Henry trudged up the Sutter Street hill, and when he reached the entrance to the garage, he did look in, and the beautiful Serbian woman was indeed sitting on her stool in the flower shop, clipping roses, but Daisy was nowhere to be seen. How do you know you’re in Serbia? he quipped to himself. When you can choose between several war criminals in the presidential election. He read that online and for some reason it stuck with him. And here she was cutting flowers, one of the most beautiful women in San Francisco. And what about the Jews and Palestinians? And Islamic State and Al Qaeda and that horrible business in Paris with the newspaper and then the theater, and those morons in Somalia or Nigeria or wherever that Boko-whatever was. And then Russia going into Ukraine and China in Tibet and North Korea with that new guy, and then Iran and—it could be World War III at any second. We don’t think about it. We go on as if everything is fine. But a bomb, a nuclear one, why not? Everyone in the world is afraid of something. The Serbs are afraid of the Muslims because they’re afraid all Muslims want to go back to the Dark Ages and if you don’t believe what they believe, then they want to kill you. Actually, he was afraid of the Muslims, too, he was sorry to admit. Like on the plane. You try to be cool about it, but let’s face it. Then again, when you think about it, guess what? They’re afraid, too. Afraid of their children becoming polluted by the rest of us. Afraid of being taken over because they were already taken over. Afraid of being profiled and abused by . . . people like me!
The Heart of Henry Quantum Page 5
