The Irresistible Henry House

by Lisa Grunwald

  The more senior the animator, the closer he sat to a north-facing window and thus to the best available light. The room to which Henry was assigned was a large bullpen and had virtually no natural light at all. But every man had his own desk, complete with a strong lamp, a large wooden drawing board, and a mirror in which to pose the expressions that he was trying to capture. It was not unusual to walk into the room and encounter a row of mirrored faces trying out sadness, levity, shock, awe, confusion, rage: as distinctive and outlandish as a row of Snow White’s dwarfs.

  There were nine other men with Henry in this bullpen, and when they were not feigning cartoon emotions, they were trying to conceal their real ones. Some of them had professional experience; others had degrees from three-dimensional art schools; all of them wanted the job, and though they’d been told that in theory all of them might be hired, they understood how unlikely that was. They tried, despite this, to project a sense of calm. Much had been made to them, even on the first day, about the studio’s spirit of collaboration, about how the Old Man couldn’t stand petty politics and had always insisted the artists learn from one another. Henry figured there would be time for happy collaboration later. For now, even if quietly, he sought every advantage.

  On his third evening of the tryout, for example, Henry decided to attend the weekly drawing class taught by a Disney veteran named Mark Harburg. The classes were three hours long and were open to all current animators and would-be in-betweeners. They were held in a vast, barnlike room, where easels, huge rolls of paper, and several alarming human skeletons stood in shadow around the periphery, and a model—waiting for the class to begin—stood on a raised, well-lighted platform in the middle, wearing nothing but a man’s cardigan. Artists’ benches, each made of smooth wood, formed a large square around her. Henry scanned the room and tried not to stare at the model for fear of seeming unprofessional. None of the other would-be in-betweeners had come. But he noticed a sort of swagger as the other men took their places; they came into the studio joking loudly, and they swung their legs over the benches, mounting them as if they were steeds.

  “Five-minute poses,” Harburg said. “This is Annie. Pencil or charcoal. Go.”

  Annie took the cardigan off and tossed it to Harburg. She had a pale, thin, but muscular body whose only apparent imperfection was a disparity in the size of her breasts. She was young, with short, fine auburn hair; blank, gray eyes; and an eerie, Sphinx-like face. Neither shy nor proud, she struck her first pose, putting her left hand on her left shoulder and her right hand on her right hip. Henry spent the first thirty seconds of the pose just trying to fight the enthusiastic chaos of longing that she had provoked in him. He tried to concentrate on her eyes for a moment, and then was flustered to realize that the artists on either side of him were drawing quick sketches of her body, ignoring her face completely.

  Harburg, meanwhile, walked slowly around the benches, leaning in over one man’s shoulder to point out something on his pad. His threatened approach only made Henry more nervous. But then Harburg looked at his watch.

  “Next pose,” he said, and Henry was relieved to turn to a fresh page.

  Annie twisted her torso this time, as if she had just been startled by something behind her. Henry sketched. Four lines. Five. The arc of her back. Henry knew he could draw—as long as someone told him what to draw—and here was the assignment: Draw this woman; make her real. She bent her right knee. There was a dimple on her backside, where the buttock met the thigh. Henry sketched, and the familiar habit took over: the habit of putting one line after another, adding a shadow, shaping a curve, bringing this thing into being; there was the compulsion, once it was started, to finish—and this kept him from feeling intimidated by the other artists. He sketched. She bent over. He sketched. She reached up. It was apparent from this pose that she had a scar just under her left breast; it was a dime-size indentation that even at this distance seemed to radiate pain.

  “Hey, Annie,” one of the guys said. “Is that new?”

  “No,” she said, not changing her expression.

  “How’d you get it?”

  “Next pose,” Harburg said.

  Henry thought she would conceal the scar with her next pose, but she merely reached to her other side.

  “Annie?”

  “None of your business,” she said, but sounded more playful than angry when she said it.

  “I’ve got a scar like that,” another man said. “I got it when I fell off Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “I’ve got stitches on my arm,” another man said.

  “From what?”

  “Broke it when I was a kid.”

  They went around the room, talking about their scars and imperfections, and all the while they looked up at Annie, then down at their drawings; up at Annie, then back down, as if they were following a vertical game of tennis.

  By the time Harburg came around again, Henry had conquered his nervousness and desire, and he was solely bent on getting the lines right.

  Harburg stood behind Henry’s bench for a moment and watched him sketch.

  “Too accurate,” he finally said.

  “What?”

  “You’re being too literal,” Harburg said. “That looks exactly like her.”

  “I thought that was the point.”

  “I don’t want you to copy her. I want you to extract the point of her. Come away with something you could give to Goofy. Or Donald. Do you see what I mean?”

  Henry nodded.

  “You have no idea what I mean,” Harburg said.

  “You want a caricature,” Henry said.

  “I want an essence,” Harburg said. “What you’re trying to draw here is the world going by.”

  “Going by,” Henry repeated.

  “Annie,” Harburg said, without looking at her.

  “Yes?”

  “One-minute poses.”

  “One minute!” Henry said.

  Her movements became almost fluid now, as she changed from pose to pose.

  A dark, assertive charcoal in his hand, Harburg reached over Henry’s shoulder and drew what he had in mind: bold, quick strokes that suggested a motion but not really a person. A lunge, a reach, a retreat, a mood. Her gender became irrelevant; her age, her hair, her eyes. She became a body in motion, nothing more. As the pages and poses flew by, Henry drew with increasing speed and freedom. By the middle of the second hour, he had at least three sketches that, partly because of the speed with which he had drawn them, conveyed a sense of motion that nothing he’d ever drawn had conveyed.

  “That’s more like it,” Harburg said. He called for a break, draping his cardigan over Annie’s shoulders again, patting her shoulders paternally.

  The men lit new cigarettes, stood up to stretch, sharpened their pencils with pocketknives.

  Annie slowly walked around the drawing benches, seeing whatever images of her last pose were still uncovered. Her face remained impassive, almost shy. When she came to Henry’s bench, he instinctively reached to flip to a fresh page and cover up his most recent drawing. She eyed him and smiled kindly.

  “It’s your first time here, isn’t it,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re doing the tryout?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Annie.”

  “I know. I’m Henry.”

  “Have you got any scars?” she asked.

  He laughed. “They’re all internal,” he said.

  Her eyes softened further. “Really? Your heart’s already been broken?”

  He thought of the look on Mary Jane’s face when she told him no. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she had said. Henry looked at Annie, inviting her to find out more.

  She touched his elbow. Just a tiny touch. A little gesture, far too quick to capture, not even the length of a one-second pose, but Henry felt sure that, later that night, he would have no trouble drawing it from memory.

  IT WAS A WORLD OF ME
N, a world of fathers, cousins, and brothers, as clearly male and paternal as the practice house had been its opposite. Though there were certainly women at the studio—secretaries, assistants, inkers, and painters—they were virtually banned from the Animation Building and thus irrelevant to the real work.

  Henry saved thinking about the women for the nights. He had two of them already in his mind: Cindy, with her amazing balloon-shaped breasts and matching carnival spirit; and Annie, who seemed so much more fragile, and thus provoked in him an eager, protective urge.

  At night, Henry watched Jack Benny or The Fugitive or The Twilight Zone on TV. He tried to imagine which of the two women would be better to invite over first. On the surface, Cindy seemed a surer bet. No work to get her at all, and probably not much more to keep her. But something about Annie held promise for him, too: he pictured her gripping him tightly, and the need he imagined in her was somehow more compelling than the need he felt in himself. He didn’t know why he wanted it, but he let himself imagine that, for the first time, it might be nice to have a girlfriend whom he allowed to need him.

  THE ONLY WOMAN HENRY THOUGHT ABOUT during the workday was Mary Poppins. Emem had read the book to Henry when he was six or seven. It was a strange book, Henry had thought even then. In it, four British children—Jane and Michael and a pair of twins—were tended to by a nanny who was blown onto their doorstep, took them on all sorts of magical adventures, and then—in chapter after chapter, with what Henry had sensed as increasing cruelty—simply pretended that nothing magical had happened after all.

  Martha had kept the book among Henry’s favorites, but she was the one who had liked it. The fact that the main character was a better mother to the children than their real mother was not something Henry would notice until later, and then he would find other similarities between Mary Poppins and Martha. Both of them were stern and precise, both of them were convinced they were right, and both of them were dishonest.

  None of that mattered now. Henry would not have cared if the main character of this film was a phone book. But he gathered quickly that Disney’s Mary Poppins was a different story entirely. In the movie, Mary Poppins was more predictable in her goal: She came to fix a family, and she left when the family was fixed. There was also a certain cuteness to things. For one thing, the waiter who in the book had tended to Mary and Bert had been replaced by a team of four cartoon penguins.

  Among those overseeing the required animations were two of the legendary studio veterans whom Walt had dubbed “the nine old men” long before they were old. Henry was asked to report to Ollie Johnston, whom he found at a wooden drawing board in a private office.

  “Penguins or horses?” Johnston asked, as if he were offering weapons in a duel.

  “Whatever you need,” Henry answered, as if he was sure he could do anything.

  “Let’s see your penguin,” Ollie Johnston said.

  Henry reached into his back pocket for his sketch pad and whipped the pencil from its spiral binding. Within seconds, he had drawn the beginnings of a cheerful penguin.

  “No, no, not that way,” Johnston said.

  Mortified, Henry looked back at his drawing, trying to find the error.

  “No. I mean your penguin,” Johnston said and, cocking his hands at right angles to his sides, demonstrated for Henry the most ridiculous, the most graceful, the most convincing penguin dance it was possible to imagine.

  Henry laughed. “Oh,” he said. “My penguin.”

  “It’s even better when Frank and I do it together,” Johnston said.

  He made one last little shuffle and glide, then sat back in his chair.

  “Good luck, kid,” he said. “See you around, maybe.”

  HENRY LOVED THE WARM, TROPICAL MAGIC of California: the strange, contradictory foliage, the odd quiet, the sameness of the sky. He loved the white, green, and rust of the landscape, the pink and beige houses, the surprise of the hills. Above all, he loved the distance he had come from every place he had ever lived and, with only one exception, every person he’d ever known.

  He felt almost too free to be angry anymore. When he thought about Betty and Martha, it was mostly with grim satisfaction that he was no longer dependent on either of them. And when, exactly four weeks after Henry started his tryout, Morrow told him that he would be hired as a full-time Disney employee, it was the first time since his arrival that he had felt the impulse to share his news with someone from his former life. He was tempted by neither Martha nor Betty, and he was still too wounded by Mary Jane. But as he bicycled home from the studio late in the evening, he realized that he wanted Charlie and Karen to know.

  There was a faint tone of retaliation in the letter he wrote that evening, a none-too-subtle suggestion that he didn’t need them after all. He wrote the letter on Disney Studio stationery and punctuated it with details of the animation world and samples of drawings and many mentions of the “nine old men” and how some of them would be working on Mary Poppins and teaching him what they knew. Teaching was obviously a word that Henry chose with much precision and little subtlety.

  He enclosed an old paper face mask of Donald Duck that he’d found in his bottom desk drawer, a souvenir of whatever in-betweener had had the desk before him.

  “I know Mabel is still probably a little young for this,” Henry wrote. “But maybe she will enjoy it when she gets a little older.”

  He closed by drawing a sketch of a plump diapered baby wearing the Donald Duck mask, with her arms outstretched in glee.

  HE WANTED TO CELEBRATE getting the job, and he decided that he wanted the celebration to be with Annie. In the break during the next drawing class, while she circled the wooden benches, Henry quickly altered his drawing so that when she came over to look, she found a picture of herself, fully clothed, with a flower in one hand and a scrap of paper in the other. On the paper was Henry’s phone number.

  She laughed when she saw it.

  “Really?” she said.

  “Come out with me tonight,” he said. He grinned. He gave her his best eyes: green and golden, sweetness and mischief, a promise of fun and attention.

  The class ended at nine, and by nine-thirty they were riding their bikes, side by side, through the warm night, toward the Tuxedo.

  “This is where you live?” she asked him as they pulled up. The oval swimming pool glowed green in the night, gaudy as a gem.

  “It’s called the Tuxedo,” he said.

  “I thought we were going to get something to eat.” She was still straddling her bicycle.

  “We’re going to,” he said.

  She looked almost sorry for him. “You want to try to cook?” she said gently.

  He grinned.

  Upstairs, he gave her a glass of white wine, and while she sat sipping it at the small table, he made her a grilled cheese sandwich on perfectly toasted oatmeal bread, with thinly sliced tomatoes and, on the side, a salad with his best vinaigrette.

  “Where did you learn to do this?” she asked him.

  “Do what?” he asked her.

  “Most men don’t know how to do this.”

  He was so grateful not to have been called a boy. He was so grateful to be looking not across a room at her but across a table. He was so grateful to have been hired. To have escaped.

  “This is absolutely delicious,” Annie said. She was so sweet. He didn’t make a move to touch her. He asked her about her past, how long she had worked at Disney, when she had started modeling, and what other kinds of modeling she had done. He asked her if she liked the class.

  “Sometimes it’s weird,” she said. “You know, having all my clothes off and having these men staring at every corner of me.”

  “You know if we’re doing it right, you kind of disappear,” Henry said.

  “I what?”

  “You disappear. We’re supposed to draw you in a way so that you don’t have to be human. So you can be an animal.”

  “An animal?”

  “You’ve heard him.
Like Mickey Mouse. Or Donald Duck,” Henry said.

  “You could just draw animals,” she said.

  “I’m guessing it’s harder to get them to pose.”

  She laughed. She told Henry about her cat. “His name is Greyhound,” she said. “Maybe you’ll meet him sometime. I found him in the bus station on the day I left Cedar Rapids, and I just decided to take him with me.”

  “They let you take him on the bus?”

  “I put him in my hatbox, and I smushed a hole in it with my high heel. The whole way here, I could stroke him with one finger, and once he poked his little pink nose up through the hole.”

  Henry couldn’t tell what he liked more: the fact that she’d had a hatbox or the fact that she’d ruined it for a cat.

  ————

  SHE WAS LIVING ABOUT twenty minutes away—another twenty minutes south of the studio, almost as far as the Ventura Freeway—and the hills were fairly steep. Henry and Annie pedaled side by side but didn’t talk. There were almost no cars on the road. The houses were quiet. The sky was clear. Henry could smell the prickly scent of the junipers, and his own sweat. He felt entirely liberated. The palm trees lined the road up ahead like kindly elders, bowing only slightly in their exotic coolness. They didn’t intertwine and splay their branches out needily like the trees back east. They stood, single and strong.

  At Annie’s door, she looked up at him. “Do you want to come in and meet Greyhound?” she asked.

  “Next week,” he said, and he kissed her. “Is it a date?”

  She looked into his eyes. “I think you’re the only guy I’ve ever modeled for who hasn’t assumed I’d go to bed with him.”

  He kissed her again, more deeply this time, and hopped back on his bike. “See you,” he said, feeling gallant, and he pedaled away, into the comfortable solitude of his trip back home.

  WHEN MARTHA CALLED HIM at the office the following week, it actually took him a few minutes before he could identify the exact nature of the unpleasantness he felt. He had been expecting a call from Phil Morrow, and for a moment, hearing Martha’s voice, Henry didn’t place her, only the feeling she engendered, like the rediscovery of a disagreeable taste, or a particular kind of weather.