The Heart of Henry Quantum (6 page)

“What are you doing, now?”

He was startled again because it was Daisy again.

“I thought you were going home,” he said to her.

“Nah. What are you doing?”

“Just standing here.”

“Why?”

“Nobody ever stops to watch these guys play,” he explained, “so I thought I would.”

“That's so
you
,” she said.

His heart began to pound, though he wasn't sure if it was in a good way or a bad way.

“Let's go get some coffee,” she suggested.

“I don't know—I have to go shopping.”

“There's got to be coffee around here,” she went on. “There's a Starbucks up by the Sutter-Stockton, isn't there?”

“I think so,” he said. “But I—”

“I know!” she exclaimed. “Let's go to Café Claude!”

“We can't just get coffee there,” he said. “It's lunchtime.”

“Have you had lunch?”

“No, I guess not.”

She smiled and took his hand. “Well, then, come on.”

“At least let me give this guy something,” he said, and he threw a couple of bucks in the sax case. The musician nodded without skipping a note and Daisy squeezed Henry's hand.

“I love how you do things,” she said.

It was only a little bit of a walk to Café Claude, five minutes, maybe even only three, but decidedly in the opposite direction of Macy's. They backtracked along Grant and then down Sutter to tiny Claude Lane and then down the lane all the way to the other end, at Bush Street. That little bottle of Chanel seemed to grow ever more distant.

“Let's sit inside,” she said, even though most everyone liked to sit outside under the russet-colored tent because it felt so much like Paris, only foggy. But on a day such as this, the sky cloudless and blue and the sun warming your skin so much you had to take off your jacket, everyone wanted to eat on the terrace. But Daisy knew that Henry believed these happy patrons were dining on their own graves—the cloudless blue was a sign of drought, that's all. He'd be obsessing about all the parched lawns and starving deer and stranded salmon and he wouldn't enjoy his lunch.

So she led him up the stairs to the dining room and, once inside, all the way to the back, as far away from the blue sky as possible. They settled into the last table and in this cave-like corner he finally began to relax. He even leaned toward her until the space between them was compressed into a few tentative inches. How long had it been since he'd been so close to those amazing lips, that adorable nose, those vivid, sparkling eyes? He soon retreated, though, aware that the scent of her hair and wind of her breath were like honey to him.

“You always liked this table,” she said.

It's true, he had.

He decided not to speak. He wanted her to say what it was she had come back from the garage to say.

But of course she did no such thing. Instead, she called to the waiter and ordered a glass of rosé. He knew this was his cue to order a glass of Pouilly-Fumé. She always ordered the rosé. He always ordered the Pouilly-Fumé. Surely she sensed the hesitation in him, but she just sat there smiling, her face an open book.

“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 guy 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.