The Irresistible Henry House (29 page)

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Talk About Disneyland!

The New York World’s Fair ran from April to October in 1964 and again in 1965. During those twelve months, four enormous Disney exhibits had drawn nearly 50 million visitors—as well as Walt’s exuberant attention. Meanwhile, despite the huge success of
Mary Poppins,
there had been a constant and deepening depression at the studio, where the pared-down ranks of animators worked desultorily on various shorts for television’s
Wonderful World of Color,
made up storyboards for possible new features, and bemoaned their dwindling budgets and status. There had been some hope that when the fair ended, Walt’s focus would return to the studio. But now, as the fair came to an end, and Disney looked for ways to relocate hundreds of small moving dolls and large moving cavemen, it was obvious that he was much more interested in his three-dimensional than his two-dimensional worlds. There were even rumors of something most people were calling “the Florida Project.”

Martha phoned Henry in early November.

“I read that Mr. Disney is starting an East Coast operation,” she said.

“I’ve heard that too,” Henry said.

“Well, how far east? Could you work for that and then come back and be with me for a while?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Henry said. “It’s in Florida, which is almost as far from you as L.A.”

“I’d think you’d want to see me while you still can,” Martha said.

“SHE’S NEVER GOING TO LET ME GO,” Henry told Annie. It was Christmas Eve, and for Annie’s sake, he had gone to her church on Hollywood Way to hear her sing. Now they were walking back to her place. The air was warm and heavy. Annie didn’t say anything.

“Annie?” Henry said. “You know?”

He could hear both sets of their footsteps.

“I know,” she said, somewhat carelessly.

“And nothing I ever do for her is going to be enough,” Henry said.

Again, there was silence.

“Annie?” he said.

“Okay, look,” she said. “I just don’t get it.”

“What don’t you get?”

“Hey, I know she lied to you when you were growing up. But now it’s just that—all she wants is for you to be her son. Why is that so terrible?”

“She doesn’t just want me to be her son,” Henry said. “She wants me to live with her, and need her, and love her. Love her more than I love anyone else.”

“She cares about you,” Annie said. “Does that have to be a bad thing?”

Henry asked: “Would you want me to love her more than I love you?”

“Well,” Annie answered, in barely a whisper. “That wouldn’t be saying much, would it?”

They had reached the steps of her house. Someone had draped a W-shaped garland of Christmas lights on the doorframe, incongruous as the December warmth.

Henry tucked a strand of Annie’s hair behind her ear.

“Aren’t you going to ask me up?” he said.

“No. Not tonight.”

She might suddenly have been speaking a foreign language.

“What?” Henry asked.

“Not tonight,” Annie said.

“YOU SHOULD LET HER GO,” Mary Jane counseled in the first week of the new year, after Henry had told her about Christmas Eve. With her ever-growing political fervor, she had spent her winter vacation organizing for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Now Henry was sitting beside her at a table in the Union, watching her fold flyers.

“What do you mean, let her go?” Henry asked.

“Annie. You should let her go. What’s she ever done to you? Why keep her on the hook?”

“What makes you think she doesn’t like the arrangement?” Henry asked.

“Come on, doofus. Who would like the arrangement?”

“What if I love her?”

“Bullshit, Henry.”

“What do you mean, bullshit?”

“I mean bullshit. You don’t love her.”

“How do you know?”

“You love
you.
And barely,” she said.

IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN Mary Jane scolding him, or maybe just Henry’s own yearning. Whatever the reason, he left his desk on the evening after he returned from Berkeley and went eagerly to the art studio. His goal was to stop by and ask Annie to come over after the class, but once he was there, he found he wanted to stay. It delighted him how completely he now took for granted his place in a room that had once been so intimidating.

Annie was up on the platform, mid-pose—by the look of it a long one. Her right hand was on her left shoulder, and her face was turned in to her right one, like a bird seeking shelter under its own wing. Yet her body language suggested not fear or sorrow but coyness. As Henry straddled one of the smooth wooden benches and nodded hello to the other artists, he marveled at Annie’s skill and also at her concentration, because she had to have heard the door open, had to have felt the outside air against her naked skin, maybe even wanted to turn her head to see who had just come in. It was not until Mark Harburg said “Next pose” that she looked up and met Henry’s eyes. He gave her his best, most meaningful, most sincere smile. And it
was
sincere. He wanted, at that moment, to be the wing above her.

After an hour or so, Harburg called for a break. Annie, as usual, pulled on a sweater and made the rounds of the artists’ benches, looking at their work. When she reached Henry’s spot, she found that he had dressed her in her current sweater, put a rose in her hand, and drawn his own dining table before her.

She smiled when she saw the drawing, but in a pale sort of way.

“How about I cook for us tonight?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Candles. Lava lamps. Wine. Sherry.”

“Henry,” she said. “I’m getting married.”

THE GUY’S NAME WAS JIMMY OAKES. Annie had met him at an interview for a modeling job that she didn’t get. He was a photographer’s assistant, and he’d been up on a ladder, clamping a backdrop to a metal frame, when she walked into the studio. The ad was for a shampoo, and though the photographer found her face utterly enchanting, he thought her hair was too flat.

Jimmy Oakes, Henry thought, must have seen in Annie’s eyes the same mixture of sweetness and sadness that he had always seen; must have seen in her beauty the same promise of hope and inspiration; must have wanted, too, to be the wing protecting her.

Or maybe he’d just liked her in bed.

THE WEDDING TOOK PLACE in the Lutheran church where Henry had heard Annie sing just a month before. Her mother, who looked not much older than Annie, sat nervously in the front row. Beside her, Annie’s sister awkwardly twisted a strand of her long hair around a long pale finger.

The music was the traditional wedding march. Annie entered beside her father. She wore a garland of tiny roses and a necklace of baby pearls. Her dress was short-sleeved and calf-length, the color of a blush, not quite white, not quite a wedding gown. She wore makeup, and her hair was in a hatlike pouf; she looked almost unlike herself, clearly the product of too much advice.

Henry stared at her, transfixed. She was, of all the women he’d wanted and dated since coming to California, the only one who’d ever rejected him.

He had never wanted anyone more.

“I’M SO GLAD YOU CAME,” Annie said at the reception when it was Henry’s turn to embrace her.

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” he said.

She looked around for the groom. “I want you to meet Jimmy,” she said.

“I will.”

“You’d like him, Henry.”

“No,” Henry said. “I wouldn’t.”

He realized immediately how wrong it had sounded, though he had meant it as a compliment.

Annie fidgeted with her new wedding ring. “You mean we’re not going to stay friends?” she asked.

“No,” Henry said. “I don’t think we could stay friends.”

He said it because, despite the ring on her finger and the exuberant first dance with her groom, Henry believed that Annie could still be his, and it wouldn’t be fair to want her.

HENRY FOUND MARK HARBURG leaning against a wall, a gin and tonic in his hand.

“Gaines!” he cried with liquid conviviality.

Henry walked over to join him.

“Think of it,” he said. “Our little Annie. Married off.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bet you didn’t think this day would come.”

“Well,” Henry said.

“Bet you thought you’d be the one,” Harburg said.

“No, sir,” he said with complete honesty. “I never did.”

AT ANNIE’S WEDDING, Harburg, in his slightly oiled state, had told Henry that the studio was going to go ahead with making
The Jungle Book
as an animated feature. Henry immediately knew that it was what he wanted to do.

On the surface,
The Jungle Book
was a classic children’s film, filled with light and lovable characters and songs. To Henry, however, it was—darkly and unavoidably—a story of betrayal and, inevitably, of loss. First the boy, Mowgli, is orphaned, then handed off from panther to wolves, from wolves to panther, from panther to bear, and, finally and most painfully, from bear to humans. All of the characters care for him. But everyone he trusts is replaced.

“Trust in me,” the python sings to the boy.

“I don’t trust anyone anymore,” the boy says.

Henry asked Phil Morrow to assign him to the film.

“I’ve got you on
The Borrowers
instead,” Morrow told him.

“I’ve worked here three years,” Henry said. “Isn’t it time I have a say in what I work on?”

“I’ll think about it,” Morrow said.

Now, as if he were wooing a girl, Henry started doing daily drawings and leaving them on Morrow’s desk. He drew himself as Mowgli beseeching Morrow as Baloo the bear. He penned a plea on a ribbon and wrapped it around Morrow’s pink rubber ball. He slipped toy snakes into jacket pockets, and finally one day snuck into Morrow’s office and left a life-size drawing of Mowgli on the back of his door.

At last, in March, Morrow told him he had the assignment.

Throughout the spring he worked on
The Jungle Book,
making colorful cartoons out of hope, lies, trust, and sorrow. He met a woman named Maggie at the supermarket one afternoon, emptied her grocery cart into his own, brought her home, cooked her dinner, and went to bed with her. Another time, he asked a salesgirl at Woolworth’s if she was ambidextrous, and somehow that led to a conversation about her father, and somehow that led to bed as well.

In June he was given an actual raise, and he moved into a slightly larger, slightly higher apartment in the Tuxedo. Someone in the building had persuaded management to clean the pool, and as the California summer unfolded in cartoon-background perfection, Henry took to spending weekends doing laps and reading or sunbathing. Two new tenants—sisters—had moved in, and Henry enjoyed their parade of poolside fashions: the large white-framed sunglasses, the little kerchiefs in their hair, the two-piece bathing suits that were more provocative than the sight of their fully nude bodies would have been. Sometimes he invited Cindy for a Sunday swim, enjoying her company almost as much as the consternation her presence inevitably provoked from the sisters.

By September, Mary Jane was back at Berkeley for her junior year, and Henry began once again to spend every few weekends with her. He liked the freedom the visits gave him to be a less conventional version of himself, but he also liked the freedom from all the women he knew, all their expectations and hurt feelings, even all their gifts.

One late October Friday, he arrived at Berkeley to find Mary Jane’s room dark, her record player silent, and Mary Jane herself curled up on the sofa, an unfamiliar look on her face.

“What’s happening?” she said, without getting up. Her voice, usually unremarkable to him, seemed softer and lighter, as if she was having trouble finding the breath or the energy to speak.

“Hey,” Henry said. He kissed her cheek, inhaling the complementary smells of marijuana and herbal shampoo.

“Did you drive, drive, drive?” she asked him.

“What?”

“Did you drive?”

“Why didn’t you wait for me?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“You’re already stoned. Why didn’t you wait for me?” She smirked, a secret crimping her lips, then hidden by a toss of her hair.

Henry put down his overnight bag just as Alexa emerged from her bedroom, uncharacteristically free from her Samsonite case. “Hey, Alexa,” Henry said.

“Hey,” she said, the openness of her Southern twang completely belied by her sour expression.

“Got a date?” he asked her.

She glared at him through her cat-eye glasses.

“What?” he asked her.

“Ask your friend,” Alexa said, and slammed out the door.

Henry took off his jacket and hung it on one of the hooks he had put up some weeks before.

“What was that about?” he asked Mary Jane.

She shrugged.

“You’re being weird,” he said.

“You’re being weird,” she repeated.

“Let me at least catch up,” Henry said. “Where’s your stash?”

AN HOUR LATER, Mary Jane had pulled the crocheted afghan over her knees and was systematically sticking her fingers through its holes.

“Come on, let’s go eat,” Henry said.

Mary Jane ignored him.

“Mary Jane,” he said.

“Did you know that Mary Jane
means
marijuana?” she said.

“What?”

“Mary Jane. Marijuana. Marijuana,” she repeated, this time rolling her
r
and blowing out her
j,
Spanish style.

Henry just looked at her.

“You’re not hungry? Come on. Munchies,” he said.

“Not hungry.”

“What’s going on?”

She crossed her arms on top of her head, a model in a bathing suit pose.

“I dropped acid,” she said.

“Where?”

“What?”

“What did you do?”

“I dropped acid,” she said.

THERE WAS ACTION ALL OVER the campus that night: some kind of party at the Union, tryouts for the debate team and the university chorus, the usual fraternity and sorority things.

Mary Jane loped along beside Henry, the good-natured grin on her face occasionally giving way to openmouthed, full-out wonder.