The Irresistible Henry House (32 page)

“I didn’t save you,” Henry said with a short but well-aimed glare at Mary Jane. “I just didn’t do anything bad to you.”

“Well, I’d take that deal most days,” Peace said. She smiled directly at Henry, as if Mary Jane was not in the room.

Henry smiled back in much the same way.

Mary Jane looked at both of them. “Fine,” she said, as if Henry had actually asked her to agree to something. In fact, the request had been entirely implicit:
Leave, so that I can forget everything by charming this total stranger.

“Will you be here tomorrow?” Mary Jane asked, a question that had its own tacit meaning: a warning to Peace about the man she was eyeing with such unconcealed eagerness.

Annoyed, Henry gestured to the room at large.

“You think I have elves coming?” he asked her.

“I never know who you have coming,” Mary Jane replied, and even through his annoyance, Henry had to admire her wit.

It was ten o’clock when Mary Jane left, and ten-thirty when Henry kissed Peace for the first time.

She tasted of the brownies she’d brought and proffered and—once Henry had eaten one—proudly explained that she’d laced with hashish.

“I baked them this afternoon,” she said. “My mom was right there in the kitchen when I put the stuff in the batter, and she didn’t have a clue.”

Henry started to mind, and then he didn’t, because Peace added, with unexpected and captivating pride: “And I baked them from scratch. I didn’t even use a mix!”

————

PEACE JACOBS’S REAL NAME WAS SARAH, but she had changed it even before she’d decided that she wanted to be an actress. “Peace” went with the whole hippie aspect of her. She was just seventeen, and her appearance by her parents’ side at Martha Gaines’s funeral had been entirely anomalous. She had not been in touch with either of them for months beforehand, having dropped out of high school in search of herself. A trip home for funds had prompted a truce, and Martha’s funeral had occasioned a show of good-girlism that no one with any insight could have taken seriously.

“I don’t know why,” she said to Henry, leaning back on Martha’s pillows and lifting her arms up over her head. “But it feels like I don’t like to stay in one spot very long.”

Henry felt the giddy fog of the hash brownies overtaking him. He watched his hands move as he spoke, and found them newly fascinating.

“Me neither,” he said.

“My parents say I’m crazy,” Peace said. “Really, they always have. They say I should learn how to stay in one place. But what’s the point of staying in one place? You can’t learn anything. You can’t meet anyone. You can’t go anywhere.”

Henry smiled, then started laughing.

“What?” Peace said.

He laughed harder, a being-high laugh.

“What?”

“That last one,” he managed to say, “is pretty much the definition of it, don’t you think?”

“Huh?”

“‘If you stay in one place, you can’t go anywhere’?”

She was embarrassed for a split second, and then she started laughing, too. He liked that about her.

“Well, I love things that are new,” she said, finally, when they had caught their breath.

“And people who are new,” he said, and kissed her again.

————

HE STAYED SIX DAYS AT THE PRACTICE HOUSE, ostensibly to tidy up Martha’s things, but really to explore Peace’s considerable sexual talents and her unexpected mystery. Mary Jane, having sized up the situation perfectly, gave Henry a withering look and a halfhearted hug and left just two days after she had come.

“Why’s she wearing that eye patch?” Peace asked after Mary Jane had left.

Henry hesitated. “She lost an eye when she was little,” he said.

“Bummer. Couldn’t they fix it?”

“They tried, but it turned out they’d waited too long.”

“Bummer.”

“Yah.”

“How?”

“What?”

“How’d she lose her eye?”

“A long time ago,” he said vaguely.

Talk at first seemed silly, and certainly superfluous. Peace had an acrobatic talent for sex; she could practically fold her body in half, while her face stayed fixed in profile, like a portrait on a coin. And she had other talents as well. She had an extraordinarily beautiful voice, part Mama Cass, part Patsy Cline. Singing illuminated her face, as did listening to music and even, apparently, to Henry.

One afternoon, when they were both so tired that they could not have packed another box, she told him to lie on his stomach, and, wearing only her panties and a hand-me-down vest, she straddled his backside and bent over him, the fringe of her long brown hair feathering his shoulder blades. She massaged him, starting with his head, working down through his neck, his muscular shoulders, his sides, the small of his lonely back. Her hands were incomprehensibly strong: kneading, holding, circling, fanning out and then twisting in, until there seemed no way to tell the difference between what he needed and what she knew. At every position, at every part of his body, her hands were answering the questions his body asked. How could she know this language? Where had she learned this exquisite art?

She stayed with him as the room around them grew emptier and colder, and whatever traces of Martha remained were the ones that had shaped them as infants.

HE COULD NOT REMEMBER having felt this kind of hunger. Within minutes of making love to Peace, he would want her again. Perpetually, he had the feeling he’d usually experienced only on the brink of a first kiss: the ravaging pang and rigid ache. With Peace, he was never entirely calmed if their bodies were not together. All thoughts of other women—the thoughts that had often propelled or sustained a sexual moment, or sweetened an afterglow—had exited his mental repertoire. He yearned to tell someone that he was in love. He had no one to tell. He told Peace.

“Really?” she said, as if she’d just been picked for a volleyball team. She smiled. The strap of her granny dress fell off her shoulder, over an irresistible shrug.

She wanted to come back to L.A. with him, she said.

“What would you do there?” he asked her.

“Live.”

“And what would your parents say?” he asked.

“Maybe I wouldn’t ask my parents,” she said.

“You’d just run off?”

“You
did,” she said.

He didn’t take her with him, but he was careful to take her address, her phone number, and the phone number of her best friend—just in case she ran away again. For once, he was not planning his own escape. He wanted to have Peace with him. Some instinct, however, told him that he would risk the thing’s perfection if he attempted to have it too quickly.

He expected her to be angry, or at least to be visibly hurt. Rather, she lifted her chin an inch.

“That’s cool,” she said. “I’m cool with that.”

————

HIS PLANE LANDED IN L.A. AT 6:00 P.M., and it was 8:00 by the time he opened the door of his apartment. The plant Cindy had given him months before was finally dead, its green leaves dusty and gray. Henry turned on the TV, then turned it off again. He unpacked his bag, all his clothes neatly folded from the laundry he’d done at the practice house. He put the shirts and shorts away, put his extra shoes on the closet floor. Then he spread out the things he had kept from Martha: a scarf, the necklace, the earrings, a box of his childhood drawings and schoolwork. He thought about Peace and imagined giving Martha’s necklace or earrings to her. Then he placed Martha’s scarf in the back of his sock drawer, put her gold pin on his key chain, put his drawings on his closet shelf. This was, for him, the real burial. He fell asleep and dreamed that he was standing at her graveside, but in the dream the day was gray and snowy, not the unmarred blue it had been. He woke to an unusual chill. He knew it wasn’t Martha he was missing, nor any particular person or place. He just felt, as he had when Walt died, the weight of the list of what he had lost. And though he was only twenty, he felt certain that what he had lost would always remain more powerful to him than anything he could gain.

THE STUDIO SEEMED EVEN EMPTIER than it had right after Walt’s death. In spirit if not in fact, D-Wing felt like Martha’s bedroom at the practice house: a place defined uniquely by a vanished inhabitant. The crucial difference at Disney was the goal of preservation. The director of
The Jungle Book
talked explicitly about survival and, along with the top animators, seemed to see the film as a test case for the continued existence of Disney animation, even of Disney himself. The quest—it was nearly religious—was to do what Walt would have done.

Debating the nuances of Walt’s wishes was hardly a new pastime. But now, with no chance of an actual verdict, the arguments were more fraught. Days dragged. Henry made the vultures flap. He made them jump. Shed feathers. Shrug. He made them yawn and speak and open their eyes in disbelief or excitement—all except for the eyes of the cockney-voiced vulture named Flaps, which were hidden by mop-top hair.

“I heard Walt wanted to get the real Beatles,” Chris told Henry.

“For the vultures?” Henry asked lazily.

“Yeah.”

They were stretched out at lunchtime on the lawn, knowing they should be back at their boards but equally unwilling to move.

“No way,” Henry said.

“That’s what I heard.”

“Bullshit,” Henry said—although he would later find it was true.

“But wouldn’t that have been cool?” Chris asked.

Henry looked up at the sky. It was gray, unpleasantly so, and there was moisture in the air. He thought about Peace. He felt a stinging desire to see her. He wished now he had brought her back. He wondered what she was doing. He looked at his watch, as if that would tell him.

“Totally cool,” Henry said.

“We should get back to work,” Chris said.

“Yeah.”

Each of them lit a cigarette.

“Imagine in-betweening the Beatles,” Henry said.

“Ringo’s nose would be exactly like the vultures’ beaks,” Chris said.

Henry laughed.

“Well, I’ve heard they need people,” Chris said.

“What?”

“In London.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Where have you been?” Chris said, and then he told Henry about a Beatles film that was being produced in London. An animated film, he said, that had to be finished in one year.

“Do they sing in it?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“What’s it about?” Henry asked.

“I don’t know,” Chris said. “Something about a submarine.”

  3  
All You Need Is Love

Henry got the job by mail and by necessity: It turned out that
Yellow Submarine
had to be completed in only ten months’ time, and animators were being hauled in from all over Europe as well as from the States. The key requirements seemed to be a willingness to work hard and a willingness to accept chaos. Even Joe Hinton, the hiring producer, made it clear to Henry from the start that no one in London had the vaguest idea what was going on.

Henry had money saved and was perfectly prepared to pay Peace’s way, but her parents had apparently liked his clean-cut, fine-young-man look and had been moved by his words at the funeral. In any case, they decided that Peace going with Henry was preferable to Peace disappearing again. They paid for her ticket and sent her with cash.

“They called you that nice son of that nice woman,” Peace told him when she returned his phone call in June to say that she could come.

She expressed no fear, no apprehension. The only doubt she acknowledged was about how long she would want to stay.

“I like to move around a lot,” she told Henry.

“You said that before. You said it that first night in the practice house.”

“So?”

“So it’s fine,” Henry said. “I move around too. Maybe we’ll move around together.”

He knew she was talking about a habit that was more than geographical. He was too. But he wanted, with absolute urgency, to be anchored, or at least tethered, and there was something in Peace—perhaps the surprise of their shared past, or how he imagined it might connect them—that gave him reason to think she was the one to whom he should be tied.

“Dear Miss Fancy,” he wrote to Mary Jane on a homemade postcard with an outlaw drawing of Mickey Mouse wearing paisley shorts instead of the usual red ones.

Well, chick, I’m leaving. These boots, as the song says, are made for walking.

I got a job in London, and it’s too good to pass up. I’m sorry I won’t be around to see your graduation, but I figure there’s an equal chance you’ll burn the place down before then anyway.

I’ll let you know when I know where we’ll be living.

Meanwhile, raise your hand if you’re happy for me.

And he drew a tiny picture of himself with a hand in the air. His only reference to Peace was the pronoun
we.

Henry sublet his Tuxedo apartment to Chris in exchange for the promise that Chris would send some boxes to London once Henry had gotten settled. Two days later, he met Peace at Grand Central. She was carrying three suitcases and wearing a flowered hat, bright pink lipstick, and red velvet pants. She kissed and hugged him exuberantly. All the way to the airport, he found himself eagerly trying on the same pronoun he had used in his postcard to Mary Jane, the pronoun that this journey abroad would include:
We’ll live; we’ll find; we’ll work; we’ll spend; we’ll go.

THE STUDIO WAS IN SOHO SQUARE, where buildings were painted with huge Day-Glo flowers and shop doors were curtained by strings of beads. Several hundred people shared an enormous suite of mismatched rooms, with the usual clutter of storyboards, character sketches, color palettes, and clay models. But, at least on the day Henry arrived, there was nothing approaching a working script. All anyone seemed to know was that the story would somehow evolve from the Beatles’ songs and that the Beatles themselves would have virtually nothing to do with the film.
Yellow Submarine
had not been their idea. They had been signed to a three-movie deal years before, and now, in the mania of their
Sgt. Pepper
popularity, animation seemed the only way to make a movie with them in it. Even their voices would not be their own but would be supplied by actors. On the mild June day when Henry arrived at the Soho studio, the closest things to actual Beatles were four life-size cutouts of their animated characters.

Joe Hinton showed Henry to an empty spot at one of three long tables that could accommodate ten or twelve artists each. With the tables and the low ceiling, the place felt a little bit like a lunchroom; the sensation was reinforced by the Ringo and John cutouts, poised like waiters behind the artists’ chairs.

Henry gathered pens and pencils from a communal supply cart. He turned on his desk lamp. He brushed old eraser dust from the corners of his drawing board. All the while he kept glancing at, then away from, then back to, the cutout Beatles.

“Odd, isn’t it?” the woman across from him said.

“Excuse me?”

“Odd, to have them here. Without the usual mob scene, I mean.”

Henry laughed. “I’m Henry,” he said.

Her name was Victoria Green. She was British, married, thirty-five, and had two children, she said.

She asked his age and where he was from. There was something frank and open about her.

“So you’re the Disney boy,” she said. “Got tired of Mickey Mousing around?”

Joe Hinton came back with a character sheet.

“I guess I should get to work,” Henry said. He sat on the rolling chair and tucked his feet onto the tops of the wheels. He looked back up at Ringo and John.

Victoria exhaled her cigarette smoke, then waved it away with a wedding-ringed hand. She glanced over her shoulder and smirked. She said: “One piece of advice. Watch out for John. He’ll talk your ear off.”

HENRY HAD LEFT PEACE that morning with a map and a newspaper, and they had agreed to meet at six at the Piccadilly station. She was grinning when he emerged from the dark, deep tunnel into the bright summer evening. He had not intended her to make a decision without him, but her enthusiasm was captivating, and the flat she had chosen for them was, like her, both cheerful and surprisingly practical.

The flat was in Rose Street, a tiny lane closer to the theater district than to Soho Square, but just a block from the Tube, or a fifteen-minute walk to the studio. In the basement of an old row house, the place was funky in a way that Henry liked immediately. The walls were painted dark green on the bottom and light blue on top, the rudimentary backdrop of a landscape without foliage. It reminded Henry of his practice house closet walls, and he knew that he would paint it someday, but he had no idea with what.

The previous tenants had taken it upon themselves to label the main objects in the place, so that the words SHOWER and SINK had been painted onto the bathroom walls, and, in the main room, the words BED, DESK, and DRESSER floated helpfully under the ceiling. There was a tiny stove, no larger than the ones Henry had had at the Tuxedo, and a sink with a tattered skirt covering its legs. He felt he was finally home.

Then they started to unpack, and soon Peace took out her knitting—explosive pink and orange yarns in long, thick rows; she was using enormous knitting needles as thick as turkey basters.

“Where’d you learn to knit?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said.

It was one of a dozen things she did unusually well, with surprising confidence, although it would not take Henry long to realize that her talent for picking things up was not matched by an equal talent for finishing them.

“Aren’t you going to unpack the rest?” he asked her.

“Eventually.”

“Eventually when?”

“Come here, Hen,” she said. “Let’s test the bed.”

FOR ALL HIS PRECOCIOUS EXPERIENCE, Henry had never lived with a girlfriend before. Every aspect of it was exotic, from selecting a single toothpaste brand to negotiating the height of the shower curtain rod. On their first weekend in London, Henry and Peace went to King’s Road and bought an Indian-print bedspread, sheets, towels, pillows, paper lanterns, a secondhand radio, and a secondhand color TV. They came home with their purchases and had sex before they’d unpacked them.

They had sex nearly every night. The undisputed soundtrack of their lives was John Lennon singing “All You Need Is Love.” When it wasn’t being replayed relentlessly on the radio, Peace was singing it in the shower or in the bedroom or on the street. Her voice was so sweet and strong, and sometimes, when she wanted to make love to Henry, she would simply sing “It’s easy” in a pretty good Liverpool lilt.

Meanwhile, there were fifty or sixty shows being performed in the London theaters, and within days, Peace had staked out a spot at the stage door of the Victoria Palace and made half a dozen friends among the other hippies and hangers-on. By the second week, she had managed to talk one of those friends into introducing her to an agent named Martin Doyle. By the third week, Martin had become “the Great Martini,” and had lined up a series of auditions for her.

In the mornings, after they had eaten breakfast, Henry would leave Peace sitting in the huge white wicker peacock chair that she had hauled home from a flea shop. She would invariably have a script in her hands and a blanched, open look in her eyes as she sat down, with utter earnestness, to try to memorize her lines.

The big prize of the season would be a part in
America Hurrah,
a huge hit in the States that was destined, everyone said, to make an even larger explosion in London. The play was a biting, avant-garde, daring indictment of modern society, and Henry was convinced that Peace didn’t understand a word of it. He wasn’t sure he did. But he would leave her in the morning hearing her practice lines like “I’m dead, thank you, I said, thank you, please, I said, I’m dead.”

“Good luck,” Henry told her on a Thursday morning in July, the day of the big audition and a month after they’d arrived.

“Martini says I don’t need luck. I’ve got talent,” Peace said.

Henry left the flat, stepping past the black-and-white mosaic doorstep, heading down Rose Street, loving her confidence, or at any rate the way she pretended to have it.

He passed the Lamb & Flag, the three-hundred-year-old pub where John Dryden got beaten up and Charles Dickens got drunk. He passed a cat in a doorway, and theater posters fixed to the sides of buildings like stamps. It was a warm summer, but never oppressive in the mornings or the evenings, when Henry walked to and from the Tube stop at Tottenham Court Road. He had even learned to say
Tottenham
so it had two syllables, not three.

AT THE STUDIO, Henry had been assigned to the team of animators who were drawing the Yellow Submarine amid the Sea of Monsters. Many of the monsters had already been drawn. There were the Kinky-Boot Beasts and Vacuum Monster, Snapping Turtle Turk and the fish with the human arms. But the Sea of Monsters was supposed to be a large sea, and in a non-hierarchical, non-Disney way, even some of the in-betweeners were being asked to contribute their own creations.

To the left and right of him along the long, cool table, Henry’s colleagues madly sketched their own monsters at every possible opportunity. Frank had concocted American Monster, with the head of an eagle and the body of a flag. Dick was working on Many-Breasted Beast, which he alternately referred to as Many-Beasted Breast. Victoria was trying to counter with Muscle Man Monster.

In typical fashion, it had taken Henry only about a day to master the
Submarine
style—all flat, bold colors without shade or shadow; vibrant, bold ink strokes, and coloring-book fill-ins. But he felt no closer than he ever had to choosing a style, let alone a character, all his own. Faced with a blank page, Henry searched for inspiration. All that filled his mind was drawings he’d already drawn—of other artists’ characters. “Doesn’t have a point of view,” the Beatles sang in the film about the Nowhere Man. “Knows not where he’s going to.”

One day early in July, when most of the staff headed out to the Dog and Duck for lunch, Henry stayed behind. Someone had put the standing fan on “oscillate” by mistake, and the air at regular intervals lifted the top cel on his drawing board. For a while, smoking a cigarette, Henry watched the cel rise and fall. Taking a sketch pad from the shelf behind him, he started to draw a fan monster. He made two fans for the eyes. Then he made the whole head a fan. Then he tried making the body the fan, with the blades looking large and dangerous. He imagined how Fan Monster might move: he might blow the submarine away; blow bubbles at the submarine; chop the submarine into pieces. He saw Peace’s face and her smooth brown hair as she leaned back into her peacock chair. He thought about making a peacock monster. There could be a clock monster, he thought. Its clock hands could reach out with long, sharp claws, and its numbers could be launched as grenades. Henry wasn’t sure he liked it enough to choose it above the others.

Choosing things, he knew, had been the challenge of his life. Choosing a woman, choosing a style. They weren’t really that different.

He turned a page in the sketch pad, drew simple shapes—the old trick of Charlie’s—then closed his eyes and tried to see what was in his own mind. In the darkness, he sensed light trying to get in. Insistently, the fan continued to make the room rise and fall. He imagined the street beyond the studio with all the black taxis and red buses rattling by. That didn’t seem to be useful either.

He opened his eyes, completely dispirited, and began to draw toofamiliar objects: the
Mary Poppins
penguins, the Mickey Mouse ears, the
Jungle Book
trees, the bulbous Blue Meanies.

At the sound of voices, Henry threw down his pencil.

“You’re going to love me,” Victoria told him, sweeping back into the room with Frank.

He looked up, smiling. “I already love you,” he said.

“No, really. You’re going to love me. I brought you fish and chips. I guessed you’d be starving.”

“You’re right,” Henry said. “I do love you.”

“I told you.”

She handed him a brown paper bag that was spotted with grease.

“Just don’t get oil on this table,” she warned him.

Delighted to abandon his efforts, Henry took the bag into the sitting room, where he settled into one of several cast-off leather couches that sat amid mismatched coffee tables. The fish and chips, each in a little red-and-white paper boat, were too salty, but he didn’t care.