The Heart of Henry Quantum

by Pepper Harding

  “Why do you have to save me?” she would ask.

  “But first you save me with your kiss. You see, it’s, like, equal. I can’t save you unless you save me.”

  “You don’t have to save me,” she said. “Nobody has to save me.”

  “It’s just a story. But even if it weren’t, why can’t I help you? Don’t you think love can transform a girl into a princess?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” she screamed, and fled into one of the empty bedrooms.

  “Jeez,” she heard him complain through the closed door. “What did I say?”

  * * *

  He never did get it. And when she’d brought home that ersatz Christmas tree a couple of years ago and he said, “What the hell is that?” she blurted, “Stop being such a pussy.”

  “But it’s Christmas . . .”

  She slammed the miserable little whatever-it-was-made-of bush on the table. “It’s a fucking tree. Deal with it.”

  Naturally, he went off to sulk. It took but fifteen minutes for him to emerge with that vapid smile of his and concede, “Well, actually it’s not so bad.”

  The thing is, even though she’d known when she was buying the damned thing in the five-and-dime exactly how events at home would transpire, Henry’s response turned into a revelatory moment for her. Because it was not her intention, and it was certainly not her desire, to be cruel. What she did desire, quite simply, was for Bones, her husband, the man with whom she had elected to spend her entire life, to—just once—stand his ground.

  * * *

  Henry seemed so perfect when she’d first met him. It was as if she’d wandered into a rose garden of a thousand varieties she’d never seen before and Henry was the most beautiful of them all. There was a fragrance in this garden, something ineluctable, something just beyond her field of experience but she nevertheless could feel with senses she’d never explored, as if her skin could hear, her eyes could feel, her ears could see, as if all the senses of her body were one, and the whole of her was vibrating with sensation. Whatever it was, it was overwhelming, and she was swallowed up in a happiness so unfamiliar it made her dizzy. All those petals opening before her, all those colors, all those scents inviting her to fall into his garden. The garden of Lethe, she ultimately realized, for indeed a kind of forgetfulness had come over her—she forgot her fears, her ambition, forgot the faults of her body and the very laws of reality by which she had tried to live her whole young life. In this strange state she felt she could fly, could melt, could flow outside the river of necessity. It was frightening, and yet she did not want it to stop.

  It must have been that stupid, openhearted laugh of his that got her, that wide, innocent smile that she now saw as merely insipid. How could she have fallen for that? But really, what defense did she, a mere girl, have against those soul-searching eyes? Back then, they were the eyes of Adonis, the most beautiful of the gods, and his laugh was the laugh of Dionysus, god of wine and passion, about whom she vaguely remembered reading in a class she’d once taken on mythology. If she had had the slightest of brains, she would have put the brakes on right then and there. But why berate herself now? She was just a dumb kid, a little honeybee buzzing around the nectar of love.

  And he was so tall and strange and awkward. The distressed jeans, the Doc Martens lace-up boots. He even had an AC/DC T-shirt! She couldn’t imagine Peter ever wearing anything like it, thank God. But the memory was kind of sweet, anyway.

  She never could quite shake that first conversation they had, God, so long ago. Sixteen years this past summer. It stuck to her like chewing gum on the bottom of her shoe.

  They’d gone back to that Chinese restaurant after the party because they never did have dinner. It must have been an all-night joint because it was late. In her mind’s eye, she could see him sitting across from her, his hands wrapped around one of those Chinese teacups with no handle.

  “So, Henry,” she ventured, trying as always in those days to deflect the conversation away from herself.

  “Bones,” he corrected her.

  “You majored in English lit? What good did that do you?”

  “Even worse. Creative writing.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, that’s cool,” she said. “Creative writing.”

  “Double major with philosophy. But I love to write,” he explained. “I love the way the words go down on paper. There’s something magical about it. Or musical. Or both. I don’t know. Mystical. All the ‘M’ words.” He laughed.

  “I can’t write to save my life,” she said.

  “Sure you can.”

  “No, I can’t. It’s like pulling teeth. I start with these great ideas, like, for a term paper or a journal entry or whatever, but then, like, I don’t know. Thank God I’m done with term papers.”

  “Hmm,” he mused.

  “Hmm, what?”

  “No, no, I’m not being judgmental. I just want to know more,” he said. “I’m interested.”

  “There is nothing more.”

  “Sure there is.”

  “I just said there wasn’t.”

  “I know you said that. I’m actually listening to what you’re saying. But there is more.”

  “I don’t know where you’re going with this,” she said, shrinking at the sharpness of her tone. She looked up to see what damage she’d done, but he was just sipping his tea.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question or two?” he said.

  She hesitated.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “Never mind.”

  “No, no, go ahead.”

  “So when you sit down to write, what happens?”

  “I don’t know. I just go blank.”

  “But, Margaret, that’s what you should do. In fact, that’s perfect. Blankness is the perfect state of mind.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “It is. Just don’t let it scare you.”

  “It doesn’t scare me.”

  “That’s what’s stopping you.”

  “What is?” she asked.

  “You don’t admit you’re afraid.”

  “That’s not true,” she said, averting her eyes. She could feel her stomach start to cramp. And then, weirdly, her right leg began to tremble.

  She waited for him to say something. Tell her what’s what. Fix it. But when she looked up he was still just sitting there waiting, enjoying his tea.

  She had the terrible urge to say something funny, or at least try to explain herself—but something stopped her and that something was, simply, Henry. Because he just sat there waiting. Hands on the cup of tea. Chopsticks resting on the folded napkin. Teapot white and bulbous. Water glasses beading from the ice. Little jars of soy sauce and vinegar. It was all like a Vermeer, uncannily still, shimmering with color, every detail held to the light just for her.

  “I really don’t know what I mean,” she finally said. “I don’t know what’s true and what’s not true.”

  “See, I think that’s great,” he replied, with a voice as gentle as the rain that had begun falling beyond the big plate glass windows of the restaurant. “You’ve just opened yourself up to whatever is actually happening inside you. If you took a pencil now and started to write, you’d write.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “and I’d hate it.”

  “So what? So what if you hate it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It doesn’t matter if you like it or not. It just matters that it’s coming from you, from inside you. At least that’s what matters to me.”

  And then, in spite of the fact that they had not yet ordered anything to eat, she said, “You want to get out of here?”

  * * *

  Where had this gone? Where had he gone? How could it all have changed so much? She fiddled with the radio. She used to have an old Volvo. The radio was so simple. The MINI required an advanced degree just to find a decent station. She was on Sirius and wanted to switch to AM to check the traffic but somehow ended u
p with blues. Henry could not resist the blues. Put on the blues and Henry got all African American on you, lowering his voice and everything. But actually it was Arthur who had become quite blue lately. It was long in coming. So many things hadn’t worked out for him, and how long can a person stay hopeful? She could feel his sadness—and it wasn’t about the girls he went through. It was something else, something corrosive, like he had fallen into a vat of self-doubt. He was putting himself down a lot these days. That never happened before. And on top of everything, Arthur had gotten fat. Extremely fat. Like almost three-hundred-pounds fat.

  No wonder it had become harder and harder for Arthur to feel the exuberance for which he was so admired. He admitted once that it was too hard to climb the stairs to his bedroom, so he fell asleep most nights on the recliner in the TV room.

  Henry reminded her that there were no stairs in his apartment and no TV room, either. It was a junior one-bedroom. “It’s because he drinks the better part of a bottle every night,” Henry insisted.

  “Can you blame him?” she said. “Can you blame him?”

  The trouble really started when Arthur got his hands on the inheritance. It wasn’t all that much, just a little nest egg, so paltry Mother actually apologized for it on her deathbed. “Your father didn’t leave all that much, really, in spite of what you think, and then, well, I needed it,” she wheezed.

  But small as it was, it was more than enough to get Arthur into trouble.

  Margaret had urged him to invest it.

  “I am investing,” he declared.

  She was thrilled. “So who’s going to manage it for you? Fidelity? Schwab?”

  “The best in the business!”

  For some years, Arthur, explained, he’d been enthralled by an infomercial that had been appearing on one of the shopping channels. “It’s like, foolproof. We should go in on it together.”

  “You’re kidding,” she said. “An infomercial?”

  “It’s called Investomatic! Check out their website. Investomatic! With an exclamation mark at the end.”

  She immediately brought it up on her screen and read: Created by the world’s most successful investors! Automatically trade stocks like a professional! Just five minutes of your time a day! Earn 10, 15, even 20 percent a month! Take our FREE introductory course and make your financial dreams come true—today!

  “It’s really easy,” he said. “I took the course.”

  And indeed, after taking the free introductory course, the Investomatic! system required almost nothing of him. Aside from coughing up fifteen hundred for the DVDs, booklets, online briefings, 24-7 chat line, daily “for your eyes only” e-mail tips, and the “proprietary” Investomatic! trading software, all he had to do was go to their site every morning and look at a bunch of green and red arrows. A massive amount of greens? Buy! Too many reds? Sell!

  “Arthur, that’s day-trading. It’s the worst thing you can do. Nobody makes money day-trading. You have to constantly be on top of it. You have to really know what you’re doing.”

  “No, these guys have got everything. You should see their charts! Really, really cool. The moving averages. The stochastics. The indicators. The volume.”

  “Do you even know what those things are?”

  “Of course I do. They teach you all that stuff.”

  “You really went to classes?”

  “More like a video.”

  For the next few weeks Arthur was the main topic at Henry and Margaret’s house, breakfast, dinner, and bedtime.

  Finally he said, “Margaret, just do something about it.”

  “He’s a grown man, Bones, what can I do? Anyway, I don’t know why I’m so worried. He’s so smart.”

  “I know. He’s a fucking genius.”

  “Why do you always have such a negative take on him?”

  “Me? You’re the one going on and on.”

  “It’s his inheritance. The money my father slaved for.”

  “Here we go with your father again.”

  “You just hate Arthur.”

  “Honestly, I don’t. But I do hate the drinking.”

  “He’s under pressure.”

  “He’s out of control.”

  “Well then, talk to him.”

  “Me? What could I tell him that you haven’t told him?”

  “You’re a man. He’ll listen to you.”

  “Right.”

  “He will.”

  Henry sighed. He was always sighing.

  “If he ends up coming here to live,” Margaret told him, “you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.”

  In the end, though, Margaret didn’t trust Henry to say the right thing. So once again she was forced to fix things. Thank God she still had power of attorney over the inheritance, even Arthur’s half. Mother had seen to that. When reason didn’t work with Arthur—when did it ever?—she just went ahead and stopped the bleeding. Arthur was livid, and this pained her, but she felt she was doing exactly what her father would have done, and he was rarely wrong.

  In retrospect, she saw that this was when Arthur went into his hole. She had to ask herself if she had done wrong by him. She looked at it from every angle, and in the end decided she was right to hold firm. Otherwise she would have been letting him down as Mother had.

  * * *

  Now as she was driving down 101, rounding the curve at the Rodeo Avenue exit, she wanted to know why she never got mad at Arthur, never yelled, never told him he was a fool—because that thought never crossed her mind. As the MINI descended toward Mill Valley, and the wild hills and the bay gave way to shopping centers and low-rise apartments, she asked herself, Why did she forgive him everything? And why could she not forgive Henry anything?

  Her shrink told her it most likely had to do with her father.

  “I don’t think so,” Margaret had said.

  “You don’t think your father—”

  “Haven’t we already talked about my father? It seems like we’ve talked and talked about him.”

  “Is that how it feels to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you like to talk about him now?”

  “I don’t know where to start,” she’d said.

  “How about the first thing that comes into your mind?”

  But the first thing that came into her mind was that she almost missed her exit, coming as it does so soon after you come down the hill. And why was she worrying about all this old stuff when she was on her way toward the new, the bright, and the wonderfully beautiful?

  * * *

  As she approached Tam Junction (right to Mill Valley, left to Mount Tamalpais—hurray!) the phone rang again. She knew by the ring it was the office—Matt Hoffman, the chief investment officer at Regency Development. He was also the main bean counter. What now? she thought. She’d called in sick but foolishly told them she would be working at home. You always say you’ll be working at home. Nobody believes you. But Matt was a big muckety-muck at Regency and she was just a vice president in residential development. Even as recently as two months ago she wasn’t sure it would work out. Yet here she was, a breath away from full partner. She had to laugh, remembering her first days in real estate. She was selling $500,000 homes way out in the Avenues to mostly Asians and Latinos. It didn’t take long for her to realize she could make a hell of lot more money selling houses in the Marina District to young up-and-comers or in Pacific Heights to the already well-heeled. She finagled an interview at Hill and Co., got a job, and soon was a top producer. She knew why, too. There was more to selling than being a salesman, more even than arranging the financing and navigating escrow. It was all about allaying fears; and the way to do that was to befriend your clients. To make it fun. To let them understand they weren’t in it alone. But more than that, you had to know your client—and this was her specialty. When she was working in the Marina, she understood the echo-boomer. Nowadays she’d made herself an expert on millennials. She studied them, analyzed them, hung with them, catered to
them—which is why she drove a MINI and not a Mercedes like every other fucking agent in the world.

  Her life really changed when she got the call from Charlie Oates. He was an old-timer, an independent who liked to buy and sell and occasionally do a rehab. He was deep into a loft conversion on Townsend and didn’t know how to appeal to young people. He’d heard about her, he’d said. “Yeah, well I haven’t heard of you,” she’d said. When he told her about the project she realized the whole concept was shit, and she told him so. The apartments were too big. No place for bicycles. No amenities like top-drawer kitchens. He begged her to come work for him. “Why the hell should I do that?” she said. “Because if we close this thing out, you will be very, very richly rewarded.” The promote, Charlie called it. The payoff. One year later, every unit in that building was sold and she was, indeed, considerably richer.

  And this was in 2009, the worst part of the Great Recession. Now everyone knew who Margaret Quantum was. They did an article about her in the Chronicle.

  It was after Charlie’s second conversion—an old icehouse on Delancey Street that she topped out in six weeks (six weeks! thirty-six units! 1.1 million for a lousy 700-square-foot one-bedroom)—that she got the call from Regency.

  Now she was dealing not in the millions but hundreds of millions. At Regency they created entire neighborhoods, built huge office complexes. There was a unit that dealt only with medical buildings. Another that focused on retail. She was currently in residential and mixed-use, but she made sure she was part of the Market Street renaissance that was now going on between Fifth and Ninth Streets. What with Twitter, Spotify, Yelp, and a bunch of other youth-oriented companies moving their offices there, she reasoned, those overpaid millennials would need a place to live, wouldn’t they? She had in her mind a new kind of apartment building. It would be totally wired for every possible online application, down to regulating the air-conditioning, turning on your lights, locking your door and, if possible, tucking you in at night; it would be 100 percent green, 50 percent solar, totally water-conserving, recycling eco-masterpiece. In fact, it would be built of largely recycled materials (that number eventually went down to 10 percent, but whatever); it would be super friendly, with easy sharing of whatever you wanted to share, because that’s what millennials were all about. Furnishings? Incredibly hip. Italian kitchens, Japanese soak tubs, in-apartment bike storage, undercounter wine coolers—even retro-looking appliances if you wanted. Not to mention the rooftop pool and outdoor party space with retractable roof, and, somewhere nearer the ground floor, the communal kitchen and wet bar and a couple of faux-rustic dining rooms with those long farmhouse tables for dinner parties too big for your apartment. She practically wanted to live there herself, and if she weren’t married, and maybe five years younger, she would have.