The Irresistible Henry House (17 page)

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.

Instead—and for the first of many times to come—he simply decided to erase the troublesome image from his head. In his mind, he unwrapped a fresh new gray eraser—like the one that had come in his art kit from Betty—and molded it into a ball. Then, having summoned a perfect picture of Daisy as she had looked the night of the fire, he started with the toes of her sassy saddle shoes and worked his way, rubbing furiously, up to the top of her flaming red hair. Several times, in his mind, he paused to blow away the eraser dust and smooth the now-white portion of the page with the side of his hand.

IN THOSE WARMING SPRING NIGHTS, there was other mental art as well. Henry had swiped a copy of
Playboy
from Stu Stewart and kept it hidden in his sheets at the foot of his bed. Night after night—after the others had gone to sleep—Henry would turn the pages, learning the considerable pleasures of two-dimensional women. The language of sex seemed to echo with Shop: as a Playboy, apparently, you got hammered or plastered, then you nailed or screwed or drilled a woman who was built, or had a rack.

The issue of the magazine was more than a year old, and extremely well worn. In addition to the centerfold, with its naked Playmate’s breasts aloft, it offered five Christmas Playmates, four pages of Marilyn Monroe, and a cover of a Playmate in a red, ermine-trimmed leotard. Under his blanket, Henry held the magazine and a flashlight, memorizing each image, so that when, inevitably, he needed at least one hand free, he could put down the flashlight, put down the magazine, close his eyes, and use every power he had to draw and redraw, see and resee, the women in his mind.

STRANGELY, WHEN STU RECLAIMED his copy of the magazine and Henry tried to re-create one of the women on actual paper, he found the results uniformly awful. He remained, even after nearly two years in Charlie’s class, much better at drawing things that he could actually copy. That was the way he had first drawn the Ray, from purloined drawings of Superman and the Flash. The car in his closet had been copied from an ad, and even his self-portraits had come directly from the mirror before him. He was an extraordinary mimic when it came to art, and as he did with girls, he employed the chameleon gifts he had learned as a practice baby. When they studied Monet, he could paint like Monet. He could copy van Gogh, Picasso. When friends faltered on their daily Falk Book assignments, Henry could whip off sketches for them, reproducing their fledgling styles. It was only when Henry sought a style of his own—or tried to imagine, rather than recall or re-create—that he would start to falter.

PARTIALLY BECAUSE OF his newfound success with girls, however, spring felt open, free, and unburdened. Summer, inevitably, loomed. While Henry had stayed the extra three months at Humphrey the summer before, and though the school often advised that students who stayed through vacations would fare better, Martha had insisted that Henry come home this June. He felt vaguely intrigued by the prospect of encountering Mary Jane, but a reunion with Martha seemed more consequential.

“Take me with you instead,” he said to Karen one afternoon in the Falks’ kitchen.

“Take you with us? Where?”

“To Spain,” he said. “This summer.”

She laughed, but then instantly realized that Henry was serious.

“Oh, Hen,” she said. “I wish we could.”

“Why can’t you, then?”

“You’ve got to go home to your mother.”

“You mean Martha.”

“I know. Right. To Martha, then.”

“You know what that means.”

Karen winced visibly, but mainly as a sign that she sympathized. She had once told Henry, however, that she wasn’t sure she did understand what had been so bad about having all that love.

“I wish I could meet her,” Karen said. “Why don’t you let her come visit sometime?”

“Never,” Henry said, with surprising force.

“Never what?” Charlie said as he walked through the door. He threw his jacket on the kitchen counter, nearly knocking over Karen’s wineglass. Noisily, he pulled out a chair, sat down, and took his pipe from his pocket. He was wearing a green felt hunting hat, on which he had affixed a number of colorful tin bird pins. Every semester, it seemed, he added something to his repertoire to annoy the Humphrey administration. The paint-spattered blue jeans had come the year before.

“Never let Martha visit,” Henry said.

“Didn’t Karen tell you? She’s coming next week,” Charlie said, tamping the tobacco into his pipe.

“Very funny,” Henry said, but he was not happy to realize that what to him would have been an unprecedented calamity could provoke amusement in Charlie and Karen.

“PLEASE TELL ME YOU’LL BE HOME for the summer,” Henry wrote to Mary Jane that night. “I just don’t think I could handle being at Wilton without having you around.”

“I have a boyfriend,” she wrote back. “So I don’t know how much time I’ll get to spend with you, but I’ll be home.”

“I don’t care about your boyfriend,” Henry wrote back. “I just don’t want to have to be home every single minute of every single day.”

“I’ll be working at the Press,” Mary Jane wrote back. “It might not be so bad to see your face.”

The night Henry received this letter, he drew the first of what would be thirty postcard-size self-portraits—all identical, except for the lines around his mouth and eyes, which changed just perceptibly from day to day, ever so gradually tweaking up the corners of his smile, creasing the corners of his eyes until, when the pages were riffled, it was clear that Henry was smiling, then, inverted over the next many days, frowning again.

He sent the entire set to Mary Jane. “Here’s my face,” he wrote her. “Where’s yours?”