The Irresistible Henry House Part 33

"Keep them, doofus," she said. "You might have a daughter someday, you know."

They were words that conjured no image but were unaccountably soothing.

PEACE CAME AT AROUND EIGHT O'CLOCK, and despite the chaos of the room and the singular strangeness of the day, Henry found himself quietly delighted that he had been right to sense something in her eyes.

"Mary Jane Harmon," he said. "This is Peace Jacobs."

"Peace? Jacobs?" Mary Jane repeated. Her look was quizzical, pressing, possessive, defiant: Henry could have drawn it from memory.

"Henry and I met at the funeral," Peace said, looking around and clearly trying to make sense of the room.

"You met at the funeral," funeral," Mary Jane repeated. Mary Jane repeated.

Peace shrugged.

"Peace was a practice baby," Henry explained.

"You're kidding," Mary Jane said.

"Her name was Hazel," Henry said.

"Hazel. You're not the one he saved, saved, are you?" Mary Jane asked. are you?" Mary Jane asked.

"Saved? What do you mean, saved?" Peace asked.

"Oh, I didn't actually save you," Henry said. "We were just locked in here together one time."

"Really? Just the two of us?"

"That's the story I always heard," Mary Jane said. "And heard. And heard."

"So what did he save me from?"

"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. 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 has.h.i.+sh.

"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 embarra.s.sed 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 s.e.xual 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.

"b.u.mmer. Couldn't they fix it?"

"They tried, but it turned out they'd waited too long."

"b.u.mmer."

"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 s.e.x; 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 Ca.s.s, 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 ma.s.saged 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 s.e.xual 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. 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 s.h.i.+rts 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 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. 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 c.o.c.kney-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."

"Bulls.h.i.+t," 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.