“Bubble,” Mike says. His tone is like a hand waving in front of Henry’s hypnotized face. “Bubble. The dot com bubble.” Mike pours the two beers into chilled glasses. “I’ll tell you what, you need an Aeron chair, I can set you up.” He raises his glass with a laugh, assuming Henry can commiserate with him on the surplus of luxury ergonomic office chairs. “I’ve got a couple hundred of them in a storage unit in Norwalk.”
But Mike’s voice sounds tinny and faraway. Henry’s peripheral vision is narrowing and suddenly the preshow on the big screen sounds too loud and jumbled up with other, more mysterious and equally annoying sounds in the way of huge chain electronic stores. Pop: it all comes together. The tastefully worn Persian rug underfoot, the architectural lighting overhead.
Mike is not unemployed. Mike is a dot-com millionaire, retired early.
The chips are poured into a bowl he is told came from Costa Rica (“they don’t cut trees down to make these things…they only use ‘fallen trees’—talk about environmentally friendly”), the salsa into a smaller glass dish that also has a story (“we had these made up for everyone when we moved into our first loft south of Mission,” he said in an aw-shucks-wasn’t-that-quaint-back-then-before-we-became-mega-successful way, (“we wanted continuity, fluidity, a common thread from desk to desk. This big open space. We lasted there about two months and then went to the Valley and hired like crazy”).
But to Henry the chips lack adequate salt and therefore have no taste. The salsa is watery and messy and not spicy enough for him. The beer, too, is a complete disappointment. There is an ample head on it but to Henry it tastes flat. He finds himself imagining his mother in an Edvard Munch scream, calling out for him and here he is watching a football game letting her down again and how can I continually be so selfish it’s like a letter to Dear Abby where the mother writes in and says her son is never there when she really really needs him signed Miffed Mother and Dear Abby replies that yes indeed he sounds like a selfish boy but then maybe it’s just a phase she has to weather.
The conversation is stilted. It goes something like this:
Mike: “I’m so sorry about your dad, Henry. I didn’t know.”
Henry: “Oh, well. No…it’s totally fine. He didn’t suffer.”
Mike: “At least he didn’t suffer. Yeah.”
Both look at the game that mocks them in its glorious boisterousness: cheerleaders and spectators so rip-roaring happy it amplifies the silence that echoes through the new home that is more a house than a home.
Mike: “So, Baxter’s, huh? How’s it going?”
Henry: “Aw, man! Did you see that? That was definitely offside. What’d you say? Oh, yeah, Baxter’s. It’s good. It’s great.”
Mike: “Offside?”
Henry knows Mike has no interest in football but they both make an effort to comment whenever they can on the action on the screen.
Henry: “I guess not. I thought it was offside.”
At half time they both pretend to be engrossed by the commentary so they aren’t forced to make conversation.
By the end of the game, Henry stands and stretches and says he had better head out, purposely not saying head home because that might invite Mike to ask where home is (he has managed to avoid this question all evening—calling attention to some action on the field whenever the question threatened to humiliate him).
They shake hands and Henry hears the door seal up behind him. The fortress has spit him out, he thinks. The Jeep is freezing inside but Henry knows not to turn on the heater until he has had the engine running at least ten minutes. Otherwise it blows cold air.
Home. The front walk. The box hedge along the picture window. The house dark. The door knocker—a lion holding a big ring in its mouth. The mail slot. All of it miserably duller after the shiny spectacle of Mike Dean’s. He opens the door and steps on the restaurant menus scattered on the floor just inside. Takeout menus are a phenomenon that baffles him in their sudden appearance. Takeout used to mean the hot dog stand or even McDonald’s in Westtown. But now, day and night, these delivery menus force their way in through the rectangle that has only a strip of brass to keep the world out, the menus contemptuous in their insinuation that Henry lives a life that would prevent him from leaving home. Sometimes he wonders if they are not malevolent but rather are calling for help, messages in bottles bobbing up to him from an isolated island he might never find.
He opens the door to his mother’s room that smells like an unopened library book and sees that she is in bed, asleep. He takes her dinner tray downstairs and washes up. Henry imagines it takes Mike Dean a long time to work his way through the house before going upstairs to bed. His house requires “closing up.” Locks on French doors checked. Multiple light switches. The odd lamp here and there. When Mike gets married—and Henry considers it only a matter of time as he has everything in place for a bride—he sees the couple tickling each other on their way up that wide staircase, one of them remembering with a groan that the ground floor is still on fire with lights. The job of reaching all the switches so arduous they have to make deals with each other to get it done. “I closed up last night. It’s your turn,” or, “Just help me and we can go up together.” Henry has always thought the turning off of lights in the evening the death of another day. And in his case it is one light, the kitchen light that needs switching off, the glow from the television gone once Power is depressed on the remote. The streetlight is close enough to illuminate the house so he can move through the musty living room and hallway to the stairs. He climbs them and closes himself up in his room.
Henry undresses himself, carefully hanging up his black-and-red checkered overshirt, sniffing at the turtleneck to see if it can stand another wear before laundering. He decides it can and folds it and neatly sets it back into his shirt drawer. Floating Henry stares down from the ceiling approvingly, proud that he is the sort of person who designates piles inside this shirt drawer. One pile is turtlenecks—the mock variety lower down underneath as he wears them with less frequency feeling foppish every time. One pile is undershirts—he had a real dilemma on his hands putting the undershirts in his regular shirt drawer and not in with his underwear as, technically, undershirts are underwear. But he threw his hands up and bucked the system and there they sit, next to turtlenecks and on the other side of regular T-shirts. In wintertime he switches out the pile and puts the long-sleeved T-shirts on top, short sleeves on bottom. Floating Henry is watching his every move and is glad for his own organizational skills.
Lying in bed earlier than usual, Henry has time to think and at first panics that he can no longer conjure up Cathy’s face. The harder he tries to the more amorphous the image. He had combed the wedding announcements following her visit to the store on behalf of her fiancé but nothing had appeared in any of the area newspapers on wood poles in the library. Turning over onto his side he decides it must simply be enough to think of her moving around in the same world. Breathing the same air. Maybe even lying in her bed at this precise moment, also trying to get to sleep. This lifts his spirits considerably and he is able to go to bed satisfied.
Chapter twenty-one
2001
“Here’s the plan,” Mr. Beardsley says, clipboard clutched against his left forearm, pen in his right hand. “I’ve put an ad in this Friday’s paper announcing the sale. On Thursday they’re coming in to look at fixtures and to get paperwork from me—records, receipts that kind of thing. On Friday I’ll be asking you, Henry, to stay a bit late—I know you have an obligation around five o’clock but if you could come back here after and give me a hand I’d appreciate it. And Ramon, on Saturday if you could plan on being here along with Henry and me after close that’d be great. The sale will last all day Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Monday night it’s lights out. They’ll take care of the inventory we can’t move out. But it’s in our best interest to sell as much as we can because whatever’s left over will have to be deducted from the final purchase price and that means paychecks
will be affected. There’s no way around that, I’m afraid.”
Henry’s eyes sweep the floor, taking it all in. It’ll have to be some sale, he thinks. The smaller items, the accessories, will be the hardest push. Nothing you haven’t tackled before, the biographer’s voice whispers in his ear. You’re Henry Powell after all. Yes yes that’s true I am a darn good salesman and this time I’ll put everything I’ve got into it. I’ve been holding back a little up until now but this time this time I’ll dazzle them all I’ll take the toughest things to sell, the others are weaker, I’m the strongest on the team it’s up to me.
“Sound all right?” Mr. Beardsley asks them both. Ramon and Henry nod silently. Henry pledging to carry the team, bring them into the end zone triumphantly.
“Did they say what they’re going to do with the building?” Ramon asks. Henry thinks: that’s in bad taste right now, Ramon. He, personally, has not asked this question, imagining it to be too painful for Mr. Beardsley to have to utter the words. It’s not like he has not wondered about it, too, but this is what separates Ramon and Henry: tact. Still…he looks at Mr. Beardsley and awaits the answer.
“Restoration Hardware,” Mr. Beardsley says. He is looking down at his clipboard when he says this, as though it is a minor detail, an afterthought that means nothing. Something else to check off on the clipboard. He clears his throat and looks back up. “So we’ve got the plan, eh?”
Nods again.
“I’ll be in the back room if anyone needs me.”
“You got it,” Henry says, and the eyes in the back of his head tell him Ramon is thinking he’s a suck-up but what the hell did Ramon ever care, anyway. To Ramon it’s always been a job, just a job, and he’s got another one lined up down at Pier One so what the hell does he care, anyway?
The rest of the morning Henry daydreams about the past three weeks.
Three weeks ago he had gone for his weekly lunch at Larry’s Diner and ordered a grilled cheese up at the counter. Shaking it up, he thought to himself, as he had always taken a booth by the window, ordering Philly cheese steak. On the stool next to him was a woman he had recognized from the cereal aisle at the supermarket a few days earlier.
“Hi,” he said to her, pulling two napkins from the dispenser bracketed by a Heinz ketchup bottle but he knew was refilled with another, cheaper brand, and yellow mustard with a dot of dried mustard at the end of the funnel top so that when it was squeezed the hardened bit mixed in with the glop, unless a diner paid close attention and squirted it first to the side of their meal. He unfolds one of the napkins and puts it lengthwise on one thigh and does the same with the other. In preparation for his grilled cheese.
“Hi,” she said, wiping her mouth but not quite. “I know you from somewhere,” she said. “Where do I know you from?”
“I think I saw you a few days ago at the A & P,” Henry said. He is gratified she has recognized him, too.
“Ooh, yeah. That’s where I saw you. You were getting Cheerios.”
Attention to details, attention to my details, this is good, he thinks.
“I’m Henry,” he holds his hand out, “Henry Powell.”
She switches her hamburger to her left hand and wipes her right before shaking his. “I’m Celeste.” Several used napkins are balled up and littering the space around her plate.
“Are you new in town?” He is aware of the cliché but cannot think of another way of phrasing this question and she very well might be new and might appreciate his effort to welcome her.
“I moved here about six months ago,” she says, nodding. “From the city. My parents are here and they’re at that stage, you know? That stage where they kind of need me around more? When I lived in the city I barely got out here and they’re still pretty new here, too, and don’t have many friends so it was move out or get the guilt trip every time I talked to them on the phone, so…” She shrugs as if the decision was a light one. Then she reaches for another napkin from the dispenser. “I figured what the hey. I was sick of the city, anyway. Burned out. Ready for a change I guess.”
Her talk was quick, the information so freely flowing Henry forgot to thank Michelle for his sandwich.
“Where do you live?” he asks her.
“I’m staying with my parents right now—I know, I know—but it’s really just until I can find a place of my own and I haven’t figured out where that is yet, you know? But I have my eye out and plus they’ve got the space and it’s a nice place so I’m not really in any kind of hurry. Casing the joint, you know? I don’t want to take the plunge and buy something and then find out it’s not convenient. I want to be able to be close to them if I need to get there quickly God forbid but far enough away so that I have a life.”
Henry is watching her mouth move and notices she has dimples even when she is not smiling. Her hair is dirty blond and very thick so that when it is pushed behind her ears they stick out but not in an unattractive way. He cannot be sure since she is on a counter stool but she appears small. Her wrists are tiny, like a child’s, he could easily form a finger bracelet around them, he thinks. Her skin is pale, the kind of skin that has been sunblock-protected for years, maybe even also guarded by a floppy summer hat that will stand her in good stead when she is older and her peers are all wrinkled from sunbathing.
She takes a bite of her hamburger, wipes her mouth, and says with her mouth so full her words are barely understood: “God, I talk too much. Sorry. What about you?”
“No, no,” he says to the talking-too-much part. “Me? Not much to tell, actually. I’m from here. In the same boat you are, kind of.”
“Yeah?”
“My mom’s not well,” he says, “so I’m taking care of her….”
“Thank God I’m not the only one,” Celeste says. She swivels her seat to face him, chewing still. “My friends all think I’m crazy but you know what? I don’t care. It’s the right thing to do. And plus you can only push your way down the crowded sidewalk for so long before you get bruised, you know? I’m tired of it. Maybe I’ll go back sometime but I’m sick of it.”
Henry imagines her to be an artist of some kind. A painter? She is wearing a flowery, bohemian hippie skirt that grazes the diner floor it is so long and a bright red T-shirt that is just a wee bit off the color of red mingled in the pattern of the skirt. But she pulls it off, he thinks, but wonders how.
“Do you want to go out sometime?” Henry hears his words and holds his breath, wishing he could vacuum them back into his mouth, suction the thought back into his brain. She’s just being nice, he thinks, making lunchtime conversation, and now I’ve gone and ruined it and she’ll turn back to her burger and there’ll be that awkward thing the next time I run into her in the market and she’ll be with a boyfriend and after I walk away she’ll whisper to him that’s that guy I told you about the one that hit on me at the diner that time, remember?
“Sure,” Celeste says without hesitation.
Henry hopes his exhalation is not as audible as it seems to his inner ears.
“That’d be nice, actually,” she continues easily, “since all I’ve been doing is hanging out with eighty-year-olds for the past six months. But, wait. I hope you aren’t asking me out because you feel sorry for me because you shouldn’t. Feel sorry for me I mean. I don’t mean you shouldn’t ask me out, I just mean you shouldn’t feel sorry for me. I’ve never had a problem meeting people before so it’s not that but to tell you the truth I haven’t been on a date since I moved here. I was in a long-term relationship that finished just before I moved. But now you’re thinking I moved out here like a rebound from that but I didn’t. I’d been thinking about it for a long time and plus I knew it wasn’t going anywhere with Lars. That’s his name. He had long hair and it always sort of bothered me. It’s a metaphor, you know? Like he didn’t ever want to grow up or something Peter Pan–ish. Oh, God, Celeste, shut up. See? I talk too much.”
“No,” Henry says. He smiles. “It’s fine. It’s good.”
“An
d look you haven’t even touched your lunch. Jeez, I’m sorry. I’ll stop now.”
“How about this weekend?” Henry asks, admiring her long graceful fingers and then her delicate nose and her wide eyes. How can this girl not have had a date in six months? he wonders.
“This weekend would be great.”
“Maybe dinner on Saturday? I could pick you up at around seven.”
“Seven sounds fine. I better get going,” she says, chewing the last bite while fishing in her bag for the money to leave on top of the ticket the waitress had left in front of her. “Oh, let me give you my phone number before I forget. Call me and we can make the plans.” She pulls a napkin out of the dispenser and scrawls her name and address on it with a sharpie marker. The napkin hits a puddle of ketchup so it looks like her address is bleeding. “See you Saturday then.” And she is gone with a wave.
On their first date Henry and Celeste went to Imogene’s and Henry admired her cheekbones, which made her eyes look catlike when she smiled but did not take up any unnecessary room on her face when it was at rest, allowing her eyes to widen back up properly. And guiltily Henry thought to himself that Cathy’s eyes were, as best he could remember, beady and small and—dare he say it—suspiciously like the rat’s eyes in the Charlotte’s Web movie. The rat voiced by Paul Lynde.
On their second date they went to Terra Firma and Henry noticed she cocked her head to the side when he spoke, turning her ear toward him so his every word was absorbed. Feeling a tad disloyal he seemed to recall Cathy appearing preoccupied when he spoke. In fact, sometimes when he and Cathy had gone out to dinner and he began to speak she picked up the menu while she listened and maybe she never listened to me now that I think about it.
For their third date Celeste prepared a picnic and Henry complimented her on her cooking (fried chicken) and really meant it. Like all picnics do, this one required a fair bit of kissing and Henry became easily aroused as Celeste was forthright with her tongue. Cathy had thin lips that had to be wrenched open by his own tongue and this had secretly bothered him all along.