“Huh. ‘Mom,’” she repeated, as if it was funny, and she took another sip of wine.
Henry lost, for a moment, any desire to forgive her; clearly she had forgiven herself, or at least forgotten how to blame herself.
“Mom,” he said, as reprisal. “I’ve been living in London for almost two years.”
He could as easily have told her that he’d been living in India, or Athens.
“That’s great!” she said, clearly not comprehending that the point was how close he had been to her, how punishingly close he had been without her having known.
The waitress came by and asked something in French.
“Oui,” Betty said, a bit flustered.
“What was that?” Henry asked.
“She wanted to know if my sandwich was okay.”
Henry looked at Betty’s sandwich. She hadn’t had a bite. “Why don’t you have some?” he asked her.
“I will,” she said, and took another sip of her wine. “How’s yours?”
“Delicious,” Henry said. “Do you come here a lot?” he asked her.
“A lot of lunches,” Betty said.
“Do you like Paris?” he asked her.
“I love Paris.”
“Where do you live?”
“In the Third,” she said. “But you don’t know Paris.”
“No,” Henry said. “I don’t know Paris.”
“That’s okay,” Betty said, perhaps a bit giddily. “I don’t know London.”
“I’m not going to be living in London anymore,” Henry said. But she didn’t ask him why not. She didn’t ask him where he was going to live, or how, or with whom.
————
IT WAS, INCONGRUOUSLY, spring in Paris, a pale silver and green flowering. Back out on the street, Henry could feel the sun on the top of his head.
“Where do I get a taxi from here?” he asked.
“I’ll take you to the stand,” she said. “It’s just a few blocks.”
They walked toward the Arc de Triomphe, massive and unreal in the sun.
Betty checked her watch. “There’s a lot of talk about de Gaulle stepping down,” she told him.
“And you’re doing a story?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
The taxis were lined up, rounded and gleaming, like large boulders in the sun.
“Mom,” Henry said. “I want you to know I wish you the best.”
“Oh, I don’t need that,” she said, as if he’d offered her a handkerchief.
“I want you to know it,” he said.
“Let’s face it, Henry,” she said. “I ditched you.”
“Yeah, but you also kept me.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the first place,” he said.
“You need a cab,” she told him.
She hugged him now, this time tightly, forcing herself to settle for a moment into the structure of his arms. He could feel her exhaustion, her tipsiness, her tininess. He could feel her shame, and her need to flee. He looked back once from the taxi, just in time to see her brush her hair from her forehead and tug on her ear.
11
Draw!
On the flight to New York, Henry sat beside a thirtyish Frenchwoman who was wearing orange silk pants, a peace-sign necklace, and a surprisingly demure expression. He had her hooked by the time the pilot announced the altitude and the speed. Had her hooked despite the fact that she barely spoke English and his one reliable French word was merci. He used it strategically.
They clinked glasses over the horrible meal and laughed at their identical reactions to what passed for a chocolate parfait. Henry admired the way she tucked her feet almost shyly to one side. He liked the angles of her cheekbones, and the way she powdered her face as if she was wiping something away from its surface, not adding something to it. Henry let her ankle lean against his, and let her arm share the armrest. She smiled at him, and then fell asleep.
He felt like an athlete playing his last game as a professional, one who has made the choice, a bit nobly, to quit at the top of his game.
IT WAS RAINING IN THE AFTERNOON when Henry’s plane touched down at Kennedy Airport. A gray sky framed gray buildings and sepia fields, black tarmac and dingy white airport trucks. Henry found his bags and stood in line waiting for a taxi, and though by now the rain had started to let up, he could feel the dampness in and around him, as if it was being painted on.
He had, of course, seen pictures of the World’s Fair, the gleaming beginnings of Walt’s greatest dreams, but Henry had several times declined the invitation that the studio offered employees. Now he asked his driver to slow down as the taxi passed the already lonely site. The tall towers loomed with their strange disk-shaped rooms, and the silver globe looked smaller and duller than Henry had hoped it would.
IT WAS FIVE O’CLOCK BY THE TIME he found a taxi, and just past six when he was handed the key to a small single room at the Roosevelt Hotel. Icy February air seemed to linger around him all night long. He woke every few hours, cold, confused, and jet-lagged, mentally juggling what he hoped for and what he regretted.
At six in the morning, he gave up on sleep. He showered, luxuriating in the force of the American plumbing and the fact that there seemed to be no end to the hot water supply.
Outside, on the frigid street, he walked for several blocks toward Times Square and found an open coffee shop. He sat at the counter on a green fake-leather stool, warming his hands on his coffee mug and trying not to stare at an old man two seats down who was eating soup and steak despite the early hour. Henry looked instead at the ambitious fortress someone had built of small cereal boxes, the kind that could be opened with a surgical cut.
A waitress stepped up to take Henry’s order, tapping her pencil against her pad just the way Cindy used to do. The waitress had hair like Karen’s, skin like Annie’s, a voice like Betty’s. She had nothing of Mary Jane’s, though, and that was, Henry thought, exactly the way it was supposed to be.
SINCE SOPHOMORE YEAR AT HUMPHREY, with the unveiling of Stu Stewart’s Playboy-inspired little black book, Henry had carried around a small address book of his own. By now, seven years and three locations later, most of the phone numbers were either defunct or irrelevant. There were, however, three people with New York numbers: a former student from Haaren, a fellow in-betweener from Disney, and a woman who had worked briefly on Submarine.
Henry tried the three numbers in alphabetical order. No one answered. He wasn’t particularly surprised or disappointed. This was, after all, a Tuesday morning in a normal workweek, and there was no reason to think that anyone would be home.
He sat sleepily on a faded chintz chair next to the telephone. He turned on the TV. A soap opera. A game show. Another soap opera. He turned off the TV.
There was a fourth New York number, but it belonged to Mary Jane, and Henry knew he wasn’t ready to dial it yet.
He sat, listening to the kiss, or hiss, of the bathroom’s dripping faucet.
On the glass-covered desk was a stack of well-thumbed magazines: Time, Life, The Saturday Evening Post. On the cover of Life, a photograph of the moon seemed to float under the words “The Incredible Year.” Henry flipped through the pages and found the table of contents. There were five chapters: Discovery, Shock, Dissent, War, and Comeback.
He felt he had been through all of them.
Then he turned another page, this time to the Life masthead, and saw Ethel Neuholzer’s name.
HE CALLED HER AT THE MAGAZINE. She was still living in the old apartment and asked him to come by on Saturday.
“Kid!” she shouted expansively when she opened the door for him. She hugged him hard, a lengthy embrace that seemed unexpectedly meant for her as well as for him. “Come on in,” she said.
She had redecorated the place, sixties style. The low couch had been re-covered in bright royal blue, with overstuffed striped and polka-dot pillows. The wooden coffee table had been replaced by a round glass one that was planted heavi
ly in a round white fur rug. Even the orange chairs at the dining table were high-backed and futuristic. But the apartment’s shabby moldings, painted-over phone wires, and worn parquet floors were unconcealed by the general makeover.
Ethel was heavier than when Henry had seen her last, and her skin drooped a bit. Like the apartment, she was decked out in mod, and, like the apartment, she didn’t wear it all that convincingly.
“So you’re a big guy now,” she said to him.
“And you’re a big shot,” Henry said. “I saw it in the magazine.”
Ethel laughed. “Yeah. They made me an editor. Imagine that. A woman editor.”
“So what do you do?”
“It’s really what I don’t do. I don’t get to use a fucking camera anymore.”
Henry hesitated, then asked the next question looking down. “Are you still with—who was that guy you were with?”
“Who, Tripp?”
“Tripp, right. Are you still together?”
Ethel snorted. “Were we ever together?” She lit a cigarette and exhaled emphatically. “He left his wife,” she said. “But then he left me.”
“Sorry.”
“What the hell,” she said, adjusting a bra strap. “He was a shit.”
SHE DIDN’T ASK HIM ABOUT BETTY, whose bedroom she had converted into an office. But Henry asked Ethel if she had heard about Martha.
“Yeah, kid,” she said. “Good old Nurse Peabody wrote me about it. She told me Betty didn’t come to the funeral.”
“That’s right.”
“That must have been rough.”
Henry thought back to the funeral, a moment he guiltily remembered for the pleasure of finding Peace rather than the pain of losing Martha.
He was silent.
“Let’s get out of here,” Ethel said. “Come on. I’ll buy you lunch.”
SHE TOOK HIM TO A RESTAURANT he’d only heard and read about: the “21” Club, just a few blocks from the apartment, on West Fifty-second Street. It was quiet at lunchtime, and they were shown to a small table where Henry was surprised, and a little uncomfortable, to be seated on a banquette next to, not across from, Ethel.
“How are we supposed to talk to each other this way?” Henry asked.
Ethel shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just how it’s done.”
Henry was conscious immediately of his casual clothes—the beige corduroy bell-bottoms and well-worn black turtleneck. It was an unaccustomed and unwelcome awareness of his own lack of means.
“They’re going to kick me out of here, aren’t they?” he asked Ethel, masking his discomfort with an attempt at nonchalance.
“Yes, Henry,” she said. “That’s why I brought you here.”
A waiter came to take their order. Ethel ordered them two beers. Henry looked up at the ceiling, where hundreds of toys and signs and knickknacks were hung, like a three-dimensional collage. He saw an Esso oil sign. A teddy bear. A fire truck.
Ethel talked about the magazine, the growing worry that still photographs were being eclipsed by TV.
He ate a burger and French fries, reveling in their American flavor the same way he had his hotel shower. He told her about London, the Beatles, and Peace.
“Were you in love with her?” Ethel asked him.
“Absolutely,” Henry said.
“And are you still?” she asked him.
He pictured Peace lying naked on the floor of Geoff Whitehall’s studio.
“No,” he said.
“Peace,” Ethel said.
“Yes.”
“That was really her name?”
“Yes.”
“Serves you right. You should never date anyone whose name is a noun.”
Henry laughed, wondering if the rule applied to Mary Jane.
Ethel offered to help him save money by moving back in with her. He was only briefly tempted. He did, however, accept her help with finding a job. She scoffed at his suggestion that he might teach drawing somewhere while pursuing his art career.
“And live on what?” she asked him. “This is New York, for God’s sake.”
SHE KNEW A LOT OF PEOPLE in the publishing world, and that—even more than her friendly, almost big-sisterly attitude—would be her real help to Henry.
“I got you an interview in the art department at Simon and Schuster,” she barked at him one morning. “Go buy yourself a decent pair of pants and a decent jacket.”
“Define decent,” he said.
“Decent, as in I’ll lend you the money if you need me to, but get them, for Christ’s sake.”
In the next few weeks, Henry would wake in the morning, shower and shave, pick up a New York Times at the corner, and read it while eating breakfast at the coffee shop he had gone to on his first morning back in New York. He would sit at the counter, looking through the classified ads and trying to find a job that a background in animation and art could let him try for plausibly. In the afternoons, he would walk the streets of New York, which warmed slightly as February thawed. He went to museums, parks, movies. And every blond woman he saw made him think about Mary Jane.
Finally, in March, he was hired at Farrar, Straus by the woman who oversaw the book jackets.
For the next three months, Henry worked from nine-thirty every morning until seven or eight each night. His hope was that he would be able to design or illustrate some of the book jackets himself. For now, however, he was merely assigned to help out with the pasteup and to color-check the proofs.
In a life that was remarkably like the one Betty had told him she’d lived during her early days at the Barbizon, Henry came back each night to a dark, empty hotel room, only to sleep and to think about the reunion he wanted. For the first time, he understood what it had been like for her to live one life with the main hope of achieving a different one. He was absolutely determined that, unlike Betty, he would succeed.
IT WAS ON A SATURDAY IN EARLY MAY—and for no particular reason except that he couldn’t wait any longer—that he decided it was time.
He reached Mary Jane at home. She yelped and told him to come straight over, and, riding the subway downtown, he closed his eyes and braced himself for the meeting they would have. He had assumed, from the tone of Mary Jane’s voice, that George, or at least some boyfriend or other, was going to be present as well. She hadn’t sounded like a woman who was waiting to be saved from a lonely life. It even crossed his mind, if briefly, that she might have gotten married.
He would take that on if he needed to. He would do whatever penance it took. Whatever punishment came his way would be fitting for all the choices he’d made: choosing Peace over Mary Jane, and Alexa over Mary Jane, and Lila over Mary Jane, and even, way back in their nursery school days, choosing not to make a choice.
He wanted to make a choice now. The rest—how they lived or where he worked or maybe even what he did—wouldn’t matter, he thought. Mary Jane was what mattered, he thought: the most authentic part of his life.
She met him at her front door with a long, warm, unromantic embrace. He looked at her left ring finger and was relieved to find it unadorned.
She was living in a narrow carriage house in the heart of Greenwich Village, just a few blocks from Washington Square Park. Vivid green ivy slipped hopefully around her front door, which was painted bright yellow.
“Are you going to let me in?” he asked her. “Or don’t you want me to meet him?”
“Him?” Mary Jane asked.
“Him,” Henry said. “Is it George? Or is there someone new?”
They stood in the front hallway. The bright front door had led Henry to expect that there would be color inside her house, a Charlie-and-Karen paint box, perhaps. But the walls turned out to be tenement white, the furniture used and drab.
“There is someone new,” Mary Jane said.
Henry nodded, neutral, trying to suppress the jealousy he knew he had no right to feel.
“But it’s not a he,” she added, and just at the moment of his greatest conf
usion—nothing being called to his mind in images, thoughts, or precedent—a little girl with white-yellow hair came running into the hallway and reached her arms up toward Mary Jane, who seemed to bend down, lift her up, and hug her all in one motion.
THE FLOWERS WERE PINK AND WHITE on the trees in Washington Square Park. Every petal looked like a dab of paint. Henry felt as if he and Mary Jane were walking through an animation cel from Mary Poppins. He knew their starting position: hands in their pockets, elbows occasionally brushing, eyes on the path they were walking. He knew what he wanted their end position to be: kissing under a shower of petals, promising everything. He would have loved to have an in-betweener move them through the intervening scenes.
They walked under the Washington arch, and Henry tried to ignore the memory of the arch in Paris, with Betty standing under its shadow, tipsy and ashamed.
“How old is she?” he asked Mary Jane.
“Nineteen months.”
“So she was born—”
“In October.”
“I was still working on Submarine.”
“I know.”
“You could have told me about her,” he said.
“You disappeared, remember? And anyway. I wrote you that I had a project, didn’t I?”
A bus drove by. A dog pulled on its leash. A teenage couple perched on the back of a bench laughed and shared a small brass pipe.
“Whose is she?” he asked Mary Jane.
“She’s mine, doofus.”
“You know what I mean. Who’s her father?”
Mary Jane looked surprised. “It’s George, of course. Who do you think?”
“And he flew the coop. Useless creep.”
“He didn’t fly the coop, Henry.”
He grabbed Mary Jane’s left hand and held it up, her pale, unadorned fingers fanned out against the background of the flowering branches.
“Where’s the wedding ring?” Henry asked.
She laughed. “You’re so conventional, Henry.”
“Please.”
“Did it ever occur to you that I didn’t want to marry him? Maybe I like him just coming and going.”
The Irresistible Henry House Page 37
