“The Barbizon,” Betty said. “Why?”
“The Barbizon?” Ethel said. “Might as well be the morgue.”
“It’s not that bad,” Betty said.
“It’s not? I heard that men can’t take the elevators.”
Betty nodded. “They can’t,” she said.
“We’ve got to get you out of there. Look. I’m semi-serious about this. Move in with me.”
Betty laughed. “What?” she said.
“I’m living on Forty-eighth Street, and I can’t afford the rent, and I’m never there anyway.”
She said all this while walking away, toward her assistant, so it was nearly impossible for Betty to judge if there was any meaning behind her words. “Wait,” Ethel added. “I have something for you.”
She dashed over to her bag, reached in, and pulled out a pair of blue sparkle sunglasses.
“Someone gave me these. They look terrible on me. But they’ll look great on you,” she said.
With terrific deftness, she placed the glasses over Betty’s startled eyes and waltzed around one more time, waving a hand behind her back.
Out on the street, in one of the huge plate-glass windows of the new building, Betty caught her reflection with the sunglasses on. Almost glamorous, she thought.
BETTY MOVED IN WITH ETHEL a few weeks later, exulting in the promise of freedom from the Barbizon women, of proximity to Ethel’s exuberance, and, finally, of a place where a teenage boy would be, if not easily accommodated, at least not forbidden to enter. But in the meantime, the focus under Ethel’s tutelage was strictly confined to fully grown men: to Greg Peterson, in Betty’s case, and to a Life sales manager named Tripp Whitehouse in Ethel’s. Ethel had been sleeping with Tripp Whitehouse for three years now. In private, she referred to him as “my lover,” which almost made Betty long for the Barbizon. Tripp was, inch for inch, one of the least impressive men Betty had ever met. Red-nosed, prematurely balding, slow in both motion and apparent comprehension, Tripp was nonetheless to Ethel the epitome of glamour and, like Greg for Betty, the main player in the ongoing narrative of her life. Ethel spent a good deal of her time with him in one of the hotel suites that Time-Life kept for visiting staff and guests. Betty was never sure how they arranged that, but two or three nights out of every seven, Ethel did not come home.
There was so much about Ethel that seemed to promise glamour. Ethel owned her own china set. She had a pink Lady Sunbeam that dried her hair in a vinyl cap. The furniture in her apartment was all low and lean and modern, made of walnut with canvas webbing, as if at any moment someone might have to lie down, or neck. True, she had never married, and she was childless and living alone at the end of a decade during which most people in their twenties had paired up as if they were Ark-bound. True, Ethel was, like Betty, working absurdly long hours and earning absurdly little pay. But she made these things seem like choices: the preferences of a career woman hitting her stride in mid-century.
It would take Betty months—months of actually living with Ethel and watching her journalistically—before she realized just how much of her time Ethel spent yearning to be someone else. This was the reason for the leopard-skin coat and the sparkle sunglasses and the stack of magazines constantly rising on and beside her night table: House & Garden, Architectural Digest, Esquire, Vogue, Bazaar. It was not until later that Betty realized that Ethel actually used Lustre-Creme shampoo because Elizabeth Taylor advertised it, and Lux soap because Kim Novak did. But Ethel’s relative naiveté in such matters underscored her optimism, and Betty found herself hoping that some of that would rub off on her.
THERE WERE DAYS at the office when Greg left long before Betty did, and it would strike her—in the vacuum created by his absence—that work meant virtually nothing to her without him to see her do it. She was fighting off just this lost sense on an early December evening when most of the offices were already empty and dark. The bullpen, where Betty worked, had taken on a sort of fragmented appearance, with selected desks lit up like panels of a dark comic strip. Betty was working on a story about a voice instructor who believed he had discovered a way to teach people to sing in all ranges. Apart from checking the usual spellings and dates, she was supposed to find out the notes of Maria Callas’s singing range, the year in which the practice of castrating tenors had been ruled illegal, the names of Mozart’s sisters-in-law, and the name of Giuseppe Colla’s fiancee. And since Betty had begun the day not having heard any of the names in the story except Mozart’s, it had definitely been an uphill slog.
She heard Greg’s voice before she saw him. She was used to listening for that voice, and then, in the sixty to ninety seconds it took for him to get from the hallway to the bullpen, she would always wet her lips, smooth her hair, and pinch her cheeks. Tonight she was so tired that she thought for a moment she’d imagined his presence, and before she realized that she wasn’t imagining him, it was too late, and he was standing in front of her desk. He was drunk. The hum of the cleaning woman’s vacuum came nearer and nearer as she made her way up the hall. Greg insisted Betty leave the story, and he took her downstairs to La Fonda del Sol, the restaurant on the main floor of the Time-Life Building. It had been designed by someone famous—not just the room but the plates and napkins, the menus, match-books, and cigarette holders. Whenever Betty went there, she felt the tingly sensation that she was immersed in a metropolitan life that almost anyone would have envied. The ice in the glasses was rounded and clear, the conversation was newsy, and everything felt sophisticated, classy, and urbane.
For months, the papers had been filled with reports on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and although Betty still had at best only a vague understanding of the legal intricacies and issues involved, she had learned in her years at Time how to nod intelligently and listen intently, and she had learned how to ask questions that seemed to demand intelligent answers. Tonight, as she heard Greg go on about the likelihood of a verdict this week, she tightened her lips into a concerned pout. In truth, she could not have felt less about the prospect of a verdict this week. But she was enjoying the idea of being someone who could lean forward into the light of a candle and look as if she cared.
“Will it come to that?” she asked Greg. She opened her eyes wide, knowing her eyes could pull him in. She took a sip of her white wine. Just her first glass of the evening. Just a glass of white wine. Elegant and ladylike and smooth. She played with a book of matches that had the cheerful face of the sun on it, giving her a benediction. She already knew she would put this matchbook next to the one on her dresser.
“WILL IT COME TO THAT?” Betty asked Greg again an hour later. They were on their desserts, and it was Betty’s fourth glass of wine. She had forgotten that this was the question she’d asked him about Eichmann. Now she was asking it about the cover story, which Greg was saying probably wouldn’t be finished until Thursday or Friday, and he might have to edit it, and Betty might have to help check it, depending on the schedule of the medical editor and his team.
“Will it come to that?”
“You’re repeating yourself, honey,” Greg said.
“What’d I say?”
“You said, ‘Will it come to that?’” Greg said.
“I did?”
“Several times,” Greg said. “But that’s all right.” He patted her hand with his own. “I have a question for you, too.”
“What is that?”
He leaned in close, so close that she could see the yellow stains on the edges of his canine teeth. “Tell me,” he whispered with unmistakable innuendo. “What would you like it to come to?”
THEIR FIRST KISS was in the elevator—silver and cold—on the way back up to the magazine. Their second was half an hour later, after Greg had taken her to the Waldorf, which was twelve short blocks and a large decision away from her apartment.
Not counting her years at the Barbizon, the only other time that Betty had been in a hotel room had been on her way home from Australia. Then she had been on a mission
to reclaim her son. Now she had no mission, or in any case chose to pretend she had none. She pretended instead to be Greg’s mission, because that was the best way to arrange things in her mind.
Up until the kisses, he had been a man with a certain kind of power, and after the kisses, he was a man with a different kind of power, but now she had power as well.
There was a marble fireplace with overflowing planters of ivy, and there was a vase of lonely roses on a side table. Beside that were two striped, silk-covered chairs, and across from them an ebony cabinet holding a fancy hi-fi. The ceilings were high and the drapes heavy. Greg’s breath smelled of gin and his neck of cologne. He had a cotton handkerchief in his breast pocket, and an elegant pair of shoes that hit the thick carpet silently as he pulled off first one and then the other.
Betty stood by the window, wondering if sex would finally move her—as it hadn’t, in truth, with Fred and as it hadn’t, in truth, with Henry’s father. She could not remember his face now, only the movie they’d seen together that night in Pittsburgh so long ago now: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. In those days, she had wanted to be more like the hardworking, future-planning mother in that film than the drink-loving, flighty father. Now she wasn’t sure. He did have a lot of fun, that father.
Greg was rough with her—from his cheek, which was stubbly with midnight, to his hands, which grasped her wrists and lifted them over her head, to the rest of him pushing in and against her. She tried to feel something good, to be swept up the way she had read that women could be. Only at the last moment, as he shouted and then sighed, did she feel some sort of pull, a shudder, something that wanted or needed more.
5
Henry and the Falks
Back in her spot over the mantel, the Mary in the rescued Matisse seemed to offer a peaceful benediction, perhaps a thanks for her safe return. Henry looked up at her, waiting for some freshman girls to leave before he joined the Falks in their kitchen and said out loud the sentence he’d been rehearsing since the fire, three days before.
Finally, the door closed and Henry sat down at the kitchen table.
“I can talk,” he said.
The Falks looked at each other before they looked at him.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “We kind of figured that out when we heard you yell ‘Fire.’”
“Did anyone else hear me?” Henry asked. He looked down at the table and drew patterns from the water rings. He was doing his best to seem casual, though the sound of his own voice was nearly as foreign to him as it was to the Falks.
“Apparently not,” Charlie said.
“We don’t know yet,” Karen said at the same moment.
Henry glanced up, scanning each of their faces, trying to parse the difference between their responses.
Charlie puffed on his pipe unsuccessfully, then pulled an ashtray across the kitchen counter and tapped the pipe’s bowl, hard, against the palm of his hand. While he did so, he shook his head.
“Karen?” Henry said. It was the first time he had ever said her name.
She was wearing a peasant blouse, white with red stitching, and she pushed the sleeves up to her elbows, then plunged her hands into the salad bowl and started to toss the leaves and tomatoes.
“Are you mad at me?” Henry asked.
“Mad?” she said.
“Not so much mad,” Charlie said. “More like—”
“Like what?”
“Tell him, Charlie.”
“Confused, I guess,” Charlie said. From his back pocket he produced a packet of pipe cleaners. Henry watched as Charlie withdrew one stalk and placed it inside the stem of his pipe.
“I used to think those were just made for arts and crafts,” Henry said.
Despite himself, Charlie looked at him and laughed. “Then why did you think they were called pipe cleaners?” he asked.
Henry shrugged and smiled, and Karen laughed out loud, and then all three of them laughed, another first.
Karen put the salad bowl on the kitchen table, then picked up Charlie’s used pipe cleaner and tossed it into the trash.
“What are you confused about?” Henry asked Charlie.
“Did you just get your voice back the night of the fire?”
“Or have you been faking all along?” Karen added.
“And would you tell us if you were?” Charlie asked. “Do you know that you can trust us?”
So he told them. He looked at Karen—picking a heel of a cucumber from the salad to pop into Charlie’s mouth; and he looked at Charlie—tamping the new tobacco into his pipe, his pant legs splotched with paint—and he told them the truth. He told them how his silence had started in anger, then changed to escape, and then, terrifyingly, become real. Fire, he explained to them, had been the only word he’d been able to speak for months, even to himself. He begged them not to tell anyone. Tacitly, they agreed. He had told them just enough to make his being sent home seem too punishing an option.
————
APART FROM THE FREEDOM he now enjoyed with the Falks, Henry found other benefits to spending so much time in and around a girls’ dorm. On his way to the Falks’ apartment one spring afternoon for example, Henry looked diagonally through the two corner windows of the downstairs living room and saw that Sheila Martinson was waiting around the corner. She was standing under a shower of apple blossom petals, holding her books, and when she walked by—pretending that she was just coming back from the dining room—Henry knew that she had been waiting for him.
He knew this in the same way he had known that Daisy wanted him to kiss her, and that she still wanted him to kiss her, even though he had been avoiding her ever since the night of the fire. If he had stopped to ask himself why he had such faith in his attractiveness, he might have traced it back to his days in the practice house; to his primal skill in discerning women’s longings and fitting himself, puzzle-piece-like, into the rounded clutch of those needs. But he hadn’t yet stopped to examine it. He merely enjoyed his power.
“Hi, Henry,” Sheila said, with her best attempt at casualness. Sheila was known to be what at Humphrey and other places was simply called slow.
Henry gave her one of his best, most inviting smiles.
“Have you done your chemistry yet?” she asked him. She said chemistry as if she was proud that she knew the word.
He shook his head no.
“Do you want to do it together?”
He knelt down unexpectedly and brushed a petal from her brown-and-white saddle shoe. Then he glanced up and behind her, in the direction of the apple trees where she had been waiting for him. He grinned knowingly—almost cruelly—but rather than being embarrassed or defensive, Sheila grinned, too, as if relieved to have been discovered in the perfectly understandable act of wanting to be with him.
He took her hand, grabbed her books, led her around the corner of the house and back under the apple tree. He kissed her, tasting the minty gum that she had no doubt just discarded; chewing it was probably the most serious crime she had yet committed. He was confident there would be others. He felt sure, just as he had with Daisy, that nothing could stop Sheila from loving him, just as nothing could make him love her.
Through the spring, he ate dinner many nights with Karen and Charlie, and not only Sheila but lots of the other girls stopped by frequently, looking for homework help, dimes for the laundry, schedules—and, he thought, for him. He continued to avoid Daisy. He flirted with two juniors at the beginning of April, and a few weeks later he drew a portrait of a senior named Beth while she posed in a cone of sunlight. Every time that spring that Sheila asked him if he still wanted her to be his girlfriend, he would take her to the apple trees and kiss her again. Once he just gave her a drawing of an apple with a smiling face, and it seemed, quite clearly, to please her.
ON A MONDAY AFTERNOON IN MAY, Henry sat doing his homework at the Falks’ kitchen table, trying to figure the square footage in the part of a field that a cow could circumscribe if it was tied to a post. In front of him�
�directly in front of him—Karen was chopping vegetables, her hips swaying just slightly as she sang along with Barry Mann:
Who put the bomp
In the bomp bah bomp bah bomp?
She was wearing a pair of tight slacks with a kind of Indian paisley fabric, all dark blues and reds. She was wearing a dark blue V-necked sweater that was just tight enough to show the straps of her brassiere.
Who put the dip
In the dip da dip da dip?
Sometimes, these days, when Sheila and Henry made out in the laundry room in the Reynolds West basement, he would imagine that it was Karen he was kissing. Less frequent—but just as powerful—were the moments like this, when being alone with Karen made him think of things that he wanted to do with Sheila. He had reached the point where he was starting to think that kissing and stroking might not be enough.
Back in the boys’ dorm, Stu Stewart, originally so silent and skinny, had matured into the sophomore class’s aspiring Hugh Hefner. As Hugh was reported to, Stu kept a little black book with him at all times, though in Stu’s case, the book had a cardboard cover and no phone numbers next to the names of the girls, because they all lived in the freshman or sophomore dorms. Still, Stu claimed to have had his conquests, including, he said, a blow job in the empty chem lab.
“Who was it?” Epifano asked one night.
“Yeah, who?” Enquist echoed.
“A gentleman wouldn’t tell,” Stu replied.
“Yeah, he’s bullshitting,” Epifano said.
“This from the king of bullshit?” Stu said.
“So who was she?” Enquist asked.
There was a pause, then a whispered answer. “Daisy Fallows,” Stu Stewart said.
“You mean Daisy Swallows,” Epifano said.
In the darkness, Henry heard, and pictured:
Daisy Fallows, red hair flying, tilting her freckled nose upward and literally burning down a barn.
Henry knew that the thought of Stu Stewart putting his naked self anywhere near that perfect face should have made him ache with pain and jealousy, even question whether he should have kept her, or whether he should get her back.
The Irresistible Henry House Page 17
