The Heart of Henry Quantum

by Pepper Harding

  By the time he had finished thinking this, he was already on King Street, having circled the Embarcadero, and was about to go up the ramp to the freeway toward the airport. In spite of the weather, traffic was moving quickly. He supposed people had finally had time to get used to the rain, or maybe it was just that nobody but idiots like him went to work so near to Christmas. Anyway, Henry decided to relax and enjoy the scent of his leather seats and the fresh zest of ozone coming through his slightly open window.

  Maybe he should call Margaret, he thought. But when she was meeting with a client she never picked up. She was always yelling at him about not answering his phone, but she was just as bad. Although it seemed to him she always managed to answer everyone else’s calls.

  He so wanted to understand what was going on between himself and Margaret.

  He recalled the first apartment they’d shared in North Beach—it was huge by their standards then—and the rent was four hundred a month, a fortune! The ceilings had been sprayed with sparkling foam—he laughed now recalling how they used to lie in bed looking at that ceiling, gathering clusters of sparkles into constellations that they named according to their mood: the constellation Sexpot, the constellation Pasta, and one of their favorites, the constellation Shakespeare, which meant it was time to read aloud from the sonnets. Did they actually do that? Or did he just imagine it? Or maybe it happened only once and he transformed it into something more. He had no way of knowing: only that thinking these things, remembering these things, created a painful longing in him. And yet he knew it was not for Margaret he longed—not even the Margaret of those days, if she ever existed. Perhaps he used to wish for those days to return, but not anymore.

  Even so, he hadn’t wanted an affair. For years he’d been living in the shadow of Margaret’s indifference, waiting for the light to return, which sometimes it did in little flashes that might illuminate a walk or an evening at home. But the main light never did return, and when Daisy appeared, how could he avoid naming that darkness and running toward the flame Daisy held out to him?

  He swung onto the feeder road to the airport, followed the directions to short-term parking, and found a space near the green signs for United. It was amazing Margaret had gotten Arthur on a flight so quickly. It was two days before Christmas—who gets a last-minute flight right before Christmas? She probably had to put him in first class, full fare. Yes, Margaret seemed to own the world, while he, Henry, simply observed. What, he wondered, had he done to make her hate him so? He walked from the garage to the terminal and ended up at the foot of the escalator in baggage claim where you were allowed to meet disembarking passengers.

  Arthur’s flight was scheduled to arrive at 7:12. It was now 6:30, but weather had caused a delay and his flight wasn’t due until 7:50. Almost an hour and half. Henry could hear his feet squeaking in his wet shoes. He ran his fingers though his hair—flat as a pancake and still a little damp. He tucked in his shirt, looked down at the mud on his cuffs, and thought: I must look like a lunatic. No wonder people are keeping clear of me. Maybe I should buy some clothes. He looked around. There was a Starbucks kiosk just past the carousels. No help there. Perhaps he could just look nonchalant. One hand in his pocket. Casual stance. Ralph Lauren.

  Or maybe it would be better if he took a walk.

  He made his way up to the departure section, which, unlike arrivals, was a bit more open to the public. There were a couple of shops before you got to security, but they were for candy and the like. He thought he might just saunter for a while. That’s it, saunter. What a nice word. Saunter. Thoreau liked that word. What had he said? To appear to be going on pilgrimage but never quite getting there. That was Thoreau. That was sauntering. In fact, Henry had memorized a great deal of Thoreau in his youth, along with Keats and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. He knew parts of the Iliad by heart, too, and Eliot, and quite a few Basho haiku, and could even quote from Marx once upon a time, so he was pleased that he could now recall, at least vaguely, what Thoreau had to say about sauntering. It came from the Middle Ages, in the time of the Crusades, when vagabonds used to roam the countryside begging for money to help them on their journey to la sainte terr—yes, that was it! Henry gleefully patted himself on the back. But everyone knew they weren’t really going to the Holy Land, just to the nearest tavern, so the children used to chide them, calling out, “There goes a sainte terrer!” That’s right: a saunterer! A Holy Lander! But the truth is, nobody knows how to walk, really walk. You have to have a genius for it: and that’s called sauntering. The point is to just walk, walk in a way whose end is the walk itself, and your intention is nothing but to be on that walk and to experience everything you can on that walk in the moment in which it occurs—then you really are going to the Holy Land, because you bring that Holy Land right along with you.

  And that, Henry declared to himself, is more or less what I’ve been doing all day. And indeed, now when he examined his clothes, he thought: Thoreau would approve! I may look like a bum but I’m not a bum. I’m a saunterer.

  Poor Margaret! When was the last time she took a real walk?

  And that is why once again the idea came into his mind: perfume!

  Why don’t I just get that fucking perfume here and save another trip downtown? Surely there were places in the airport where you could buy a lady an ounce of perfume.

  Unfortunately, a quick perusal of the departure area proved that all the good stuff was beyond the security station sequestered behind rows of X-ray machines and phalanxes of security guards. He supposed he could buy himself a ticket to somewhere cheap, say to Burbank, go through security, buy the perfume, and hightail it back out. All he needed was a refundable ticket. On the other hand, if he was given a boarding pass in order to pass through security, would they still give him his money back? And if he didn’t get on the plane, wouldn’t they assume he was a terrorist? Come to his house in the middle of the night and make him disappear? And even if none of that happened, wouldn’t he be holding up the flight until they were sure he hadn’t put any luggage on it? He wouldn’t like it if someone had done that to him. Especially on Christmas. Not to mention that by the time he bought a ticket and gone back and forth and all that, Arthur’s flight would have arrived, he’d be waiting in a state of confusion and panic, and then there’d be hell to pay from Margaret. When he thought of Margaret’s anger, he decided he better check the arrivals monitor again, just in case.

  Arthur’s plane had been delayed another half hour.

  * * *

  He began his saunter again, determined to notice even more detail than before: the design of the carpet, which was ghastly; the way the arrival and departure monitors were hung, which was inconvenient; the placement of the little waiting areas, which were too small and too near the doors. I am really sauntering this time, he delighted in telling himself. It occurred to him that perhaps he had concluded too quickly that there were no stores this side of security, so he continued along, only now with a renewed objective, which interfered with the purity of his sauntering, but just like in meditation, you go in and out, in and out. He decided it was okay to saunter with an objective—Chanel No. 5—because he’d had the same objective that morning and look where it took him.

  He soon found himself entering a rather long passageway, which he followed even though there were very few people in it, and when he came to the end he was surprised to find he had emerged in the international terminal. Here everything was very modern and streamlined and much less crowded, and also the restaurants were available to anyone, not just the ticketed passengers, and, though he didn’t see any, Henry assumed there were shops aplenty, and surely one that carried Chanel No. 5. It was a vast space with soaring ceilings and marble floors, and around him he heard many languages, not just Spanish or Chinese. It suddenly occurred to him how marvelous a thing language is. After all, who first pointed to a chicken and said “chicken”? And who was the other guy who said, “Yeah, that’s a chicken all right.” Or did they first come
up with the word “bird”? Did the organizing concept of birdhood come before or after chickens? In fact, how is it that one thing stands for another—that a word can substitute for a thing or that at some point the word becomes the thing, even surpasses the thing—like “love.” The word “love” is so much more solid, more tangible, more comprehensible than the actual experience of love. In reality, love is nothing but confusion and despair with a little ecstasy thrown in. But say the word “love” and immediately you think of Romeo and Juliet or Doctor Zhivago or Brokeback Mountain—and everyone seems to know what you are talking about, and yet to live through love is to know nothing at all.

  Oh, the human heart, he wailed, the greatest mystery of all! Of course it’s the brain really, not the heart. The trillions of synapses and infinite lines of possibility. Isn’t that what Daisy was studying? How a photon of light becomes a picture in your brain. How we take this crazy world inside us and make it understandable?

  But he didn’t want to think about Daisy.

  Although it was Daisy he was thinking about when he said no to Denise. Actually he’d said, “I’m married, I can’t,” but it wasn’t Margaret who’d come into his mind. It was Daisy with her flurry of red hair and her sparkling gold-green eyes and the freckles on her delicate, energetic hands.

  “Oh, come on,” Denise had said.

  “I can’t,” he insisted.

  “No one will know.”

  “I’ll know.”

  She pressed herself up against him and whispered, “Yes, you will.”

  Maybe because they were in the bathroom, maybe because it was the office, maybe because it was Christmas—but mostly because of those few moments he had spent with Daisy at lunch—he said, “Gotta go!”

  And he grabbed his sopping clothes, ran naked into his office, dressed with the speed of Superman in a phone booth, and ran out to the street and all the way to the garage before he realized he’d left his sports coat in the bathroom.

  Now, however, he reminded himself: perfume. So he recommenced his search of the international terminal in earnest. There was a very elegant food court, with two sushi bars and a really nice steak house and yet another Emporio Rulli café as well as the usual newsstands and bookshops; he even found a place where he could take a shower—they sold toiletries, but no Chanel No. 5—and there was a Brookstone where he couldn’t resist the massage chair and thought about buying one (for Margaret of course) even though it was three thousand dollars, but the guy said it was too late to get it delivered by Christmas, so he nixed that idea, and later he walked by one of those places where you could rent a DVD player, not that anyone did anymore, and thought about how he and Margaret used to watch Netflix movies together, but now they just downloaded onto their own devices and sat separated by headphones and personal taste. Finally there was a museum shop, but it was closed, and even though he spent quite awhile with his nose pressed against their window, he knew that even if it had been open, there would have been no perfume.

  He sighed. He tried not to, but he couldn’t help it, because he saw in his mind’s eye Margaret dabbing Chanel No. 5 on her clavicle, and this grieved him. Maybe that’s why he thought of perfume in the first place. Because when he thought about perfume, he always thought about Margaret and about her dabbing it on her clavicle and also behind her ears and upon her wrists—and how he delighted in coming up behind her, placing his hands upon her shoulders and leaning in so as to catch the sweet wild scent of flowers rising from her body—it was one of the few intimacies they still shared. Yes, that’s why he was so damned set on getting the perfume. That brief interlude of tenderness, with his hands upon her shoulders. The beauty of her neck as it curved toward her chin, and how he could sometimes see down the back of her dress the swerve of her spine and the amber skin of her shoulder blades and for that sliver of a moment she was once again unaware of her beauty and of her power over him, and in that moment he was once again, at least a little, madly in love with her.

  He had told himself he hadn’t a clue why things had changed, but that wasn’t true. He did know, and he finally allowed himself to call it to mind, because of the perfume, and because he had been thinking of perfume when he told Daisy that he still loved Margaret—he’d been thinking of those rare and perfect moments when he would come up behind her and hold her shoulders and, mostly, when he felt them relax under his grasp as she opened her neck to welcome him.

  Of course the change in Margaret took a long time to unfold. But it had become obvious even as early as the fourth or fifth year of their marriage. She was disappointed in him. There, he said it. It happened one day when he saw the doubt creep in her eyes: What was he doing with his life? What did he intend for the two of them? Finally she had to express it: “You’re always going on and on and on, but nothing ever comes of it.” To prove her wrong he got into advertising, if for no other reason than to show her he could make money. He had wanted to be a writer, but they placed him in account management, and he surprised himself by doing quite well; in fact, he rose quickly—account executive, account supervisor, account director. But then he faltered, ran aground. He did make decent money, yes; but something had gone out of him. He could easily have become a management supervisor and soon after that the director of management. But he’d gone as far as he wanted to go. He couldn’t quite say why. Only that he was standing in some sort of doorway that led nowhere. Or maybe it was quicksand. Or maybe—well, who knows? A couple of creative guys did once approach him to start their own shop, but he hemmed and hawed until they gave up on him. And instantly his caché faded. Most everyone began treating him with a measure of contempt not unlike Margaret’s. It was barely perceptible, but undeniable. And this, somehow, filtered into his home, exacerbating his problems with his wife.

  But it needn’t have.

  Margaret could not have cared less about management supervisors or new agencies. She despised the idea of advertising from the outset. She wanted more from him, something she called “great things,” even if she herself could not articulate what they were. It certainly wasn’t money, at least in the beginning. It was something far more difficult. Margaret had wanted a conqueror, a slayer of dragons, a man of the world. What she got was Henry Quantum. And this left her with but one choice. To either live in shame or to transform herself into that man of the world, that slayer of dragons; and so, over time, that is what she did. And the more dragons she laid to rest, the more she came to despise her husband for his weakness. Henry recognized this and could not in his heart disagree. And not just for his weakness. For his fecklessness, his credulity, his indecision, his puzzlement, his absentmindedness, and for all the musings and daydreams and reveries of mind that resulted in his aimless philosophizing. She was right to hate him.

  And yet, she did not leave him. This, to Henry, was the greatest mystery of all.

  He had told a lot of this to Daisy when they were together. She blinked her eyes many times and finally said, “Henry, you’re crazy. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. That person you’re describing? Guess what? It’s not you. It’s someone she made up.”

  “Maybe you don’t know me very well,” he had said.

  “Maybe you don’t know you very well,” she replied.

  And the thing was, they were both right. He’d become that miserable weakling with Margaret, but with Daisy he was someone else, someone newer and fresher and more powerful, because, frankly, that’s exactly the way he felt around her. That’s why he’d said to her that terrible night, “No, I don’t feel guilty, not one little bit.” Then she dumped him.

  * * *

  He wasn’t having any luck with the perfume. He looked at his watch again. He’d already killed almost two hours and now he’d have to get back to baggage claim to meet up with Arthur. The thought of Arthur always depressed him. It was weird. Arthur was ten times the fuckup he was. But Margaret loved him. Really loved him.

  So it wasn’t that Margaret couldn’t love. It’s just that she didn’t love
him.

  “Merry fucking Christmas,” he said to himself.

  By this time he had done a full circle of the main hall of the international terminal; he had listened to dozens of unknown languages and heard the loudspeaker announce flights to dozens of exotic places; he’d poked his nose in all the shops, checked out all the restaurants, and now he tried to find his way back to the tunnel that led to the United terminal. It was then, out of the corner of his eye, that he spotted, tucked away behind some glass partitions and a series of advertising banners, a little store called, simply, THINGS. Well, he thought, I can be a few seconds late for fucking Arthur, so he traversed the hall and arrived at the store just as the young Filipino woman began closing the security gate over the entrance.

  “Wait!” cried Henry.

  “Sorry, sir, we’re closing.”

  “I see, I see, but I just have one question. Do you carry Chanel Number Five?”

  “The perfume?”

  “Yes, Chanel Number Five.”

  “Yes, sir, we do, but we’re closing.”

  “You do?”

  “But we’re closing.”

  “Please, please, can I come in? It won’t take but a minute, I promise.”

  The woman pointed to her watch. “We’re closing.”

  “Oh, please, please! It’s Christmas!” He saw her finger a little gold cross dangling from her neck. “Christmas?” he said again. She rolled her eyes and, still clutching the cross, reluctantly waved him in. And, oh, it was a lovely store! A lovely store with lovely things on lovely shelves. The nice Christian saleslady went directly to the perfume section, pulled open a drawer, and came back to the register with a beautiful bottle of Chanel No. 5.