This is a disaster of gargantuan proportions.
On the drive back to his apartment he constructs another letter. One that would include an apology to her for his repetition (in the off chance she does find and read that first letter). One that would go even further than the last. Now that he thinks about it, Henry is sure he was vague. He loves her. He loves her even more now than ever before. She is the only one for him: of this he is sure. So why hold back? he asks himself as he pulls into the parking space in front of his unit. He will not make the same mistake in this letter. He will spell it out for her. He will fight for her!
He takes the stairs two at a time and is sitting at his kitchen counter with a legal pad within minutes.
Dear Cathy,
Strike that.
My love, he writes.
Yes. That’s right. She is my love so why not say it? Life’s too short to hold back, he tells himself.
My love,
From here, though, every first sentence sounds like a song lyric. I can’t breathe without you…he is sure this is a line in a song, he just cannot remember which one. He crosses it out. I miss you like crazy. No, that’s cheesy. A line is drawn through that one, too. You are everything to me. You are my world. We belong together. He curses himself for his completely unoriginal thoughts. All have been put to music. Goddammit.
Dear Cathy,
He starts again, certain that by using her name he will stay the course. Using her name reminds him of her face…a face unlike anyone else’s. She is original. She is unlike anyone else he has ever met. That’s it! She’s unlike anyone he’s ever met! That’s how he’ll start. Perfect.
Dear Cathy,
You are not like anyone I’ve ever met.
He groans at this line but does not cross it out. He decides to keep going and—at the end—pledges to go back and change whatever sounds corny.
Dear Cathy,
You are the most fantastic person I’ve ever met.
But wait. His eleventh-grade teacher told him not to use contractions in letters. He is pretty sure of this. So…
Dear Cathy,
You are the most fantastic person I have ever met. You are incredible. It is YOU who keeps me up at night (remember how I told you I can’t sleep very well?). I know you know exactly how I feel. You and I go together. It is a fact.
Look, I know my mom talked to you that night and maybe she scared you off about me. But if you’d just let me talk to you and explain. She can make stuff sound different than it really is. Trust me. I know.
I’ll (damn! A contraction again. Oh well, he thinks. The other way sounds stupid) I’ll admit you might not need me as much but I need you. You called me the other night and I felt so tremendous! I never knew a phone call could do this to me. I just can’t believe this feeling inside me. It’s tremendous! Right before the phone rang I was thinking about you and thinking I’d love to hear your voice and sure enough you read my mind. That’s proof right there. No girl has ever made me feel like this. You’re all I think about every minute of my day. It may sound corny but don’t laugh. It’s true. I’ll do anything for you. I love you. When we look at each other I can tell you are thinking some of the same stuff.
I wish I could just tell you this in person. I wish you’d just let me talk to you. Write me back.
Love, H.
P. S. Sorry if you already got a letter from me. It wasn’t as good, anyway.
He sits back in his chair with relief. Looking it over he decides the contractions aren’t so bad. It’s a pretty damn good letter, he says out loud. Damn good. But the only envelopes he has are white so he folds the letter up and goes back down to his car to go to the only stationery store in town.
Hal’s Hallmark smells like Christmas all year round, a scented candle-chocolaty smell that Henry does not mind one bit. He smiles at the kid behind the counter and sees, in the return nod, that this boy does not like his after-school job. It does not dent Henry’s mood one bit, this thought. He happily heads to the blank stationery section. He is not discouraged to find the envelopes are only sold as a package deal with matching sheets or cards. In fact, he buys a box of yellow fold-over notes and envelopes that is the most expensive package on the shelf. The fact that he will have one fold over note leftover (without a matching envelope) does not bother him in the least.
After a predictable monosyllabic exchange with the high school kid, Henry gets back in his car and takes out an envelope, proud of his choice of color. This will stand out on the floor of her entry, he thinks. Definitely.
The light above the door to her building has not yet come on. Henry checks his watch. It usually comes on by now, he thinks. The super had better get that fixed.
He wishes Cathy hadn’t seen him parked out front the other night. This recollection threatens to ruin his mood. Still, he picks at the scab of thought.
She’d been dropped off in front of her building and, before he’d ducked, their eyes met. He cursed himself for the impulsive ducking. He knew it showed him to be “getting out of hand”—something she had accused him of the day following her meeting his mother.
“Let’s just take a break is all I’m saying,” she’d said. They were standing outside Cup-a-Joe. He’d gone in to talk to her and the minute she saw him she called to the back to ask Lois to cover for her for a minute and then she suggested they talk outside. Even though it was cold. Henry sensed it was rehearsed.
“Things were going so well,” Henry said. “Things were so great just, like, a day ago.”
“I don’t want a serious relationship, Henry,” she said. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”
At first he’d tried to be cool. But “I don’t want a serious relationship, either.” But his reply came out sounding whining and defensive. “I’m falling in love with you.” A popped blister of a statement.
“You don’t even know me,” she said. “And I really don’t know you.”
“What did she say to you?” He’d meant to touch her arm gently—a gesture intended to encourage disclosure. But he’d forgotten how tiny her bones were.
“Ow! Let go of me,” she said.
“Sorry! I just…”
“You’re getting out of hand.” She backed into the store shaking her head. Fear mixed with disgust.
The door closed behind her so she did not hear him say, “I didn’t mean to kill him.”
Miserably he stalked back to Baxter’s, kicking at a pebble, “I didn’t mean to kill him” softly murmured on the way.
For he knows this is what his mother has told her. That he is a murderer. Lately she’d begun using that word: murderer. At first it punched his rib cage. But he’d been working on tuning it out. He’d almost succeeded: the last time she slurred it at him it barely registered as he tucked her into bed at five-fifteen.
Chapter fourteen
1987
“Hold still,” Carol Douglas is rodeo-wrangling her son. One little arm is just barely stuffed back into a jacket sleeve when the other shrugs itself free and the whole process starts over right to left this time. Henry remembers someone telling him that the Golden Gate Bridge is in a constant state of repainting because it takes so long to reach the far end that by the time the painters get there the beginning is once again in need of touch-ups. “I’m so sorry about this,” Carol says in Henry’s direction. “If you don’t hold still I swear to God…”
“It’s okay,” Henry says through pins between his lips. “Almost done down here. Just…one…more turn for me and we’ll be all set with your pants then I’ll do your arms and we’re all done.”
“Bunny? Did you hear the nice man?” his mother asks, her voice childlike but so heavy with bitterness and frustration Henry looks up at her. She softens, mostly for his benefit. Her conversation patterns are staccato Tourette’s outbursts disconcerting to others but completely unnoticeable to her. “Bunnyholdstill. I swear, Henry, when did I become my mother? You know? Oh. Well. You know what I mean. Jesus. My brain is fried
. Sorry. If I’d’ve known what a pain in the a-s-s him being in this wedding was going to be I never would’ve said yes. BunnyImeanit. I thought it was a compliment. Can you believe they’re actually going through with it? She’s a fool, I’ll tell you what. Bunnyholdstill. That Neal Peterson’s always been a loser. Total loser. But she’s hung in there this long so I guess she just figures—Bunnyifyoudon’tholdstillIswear—why not get something out of it, you know?”
“Yeah,” Henry says. The child’s hand, sticky from lollipop residue, is resting on Henry’s head. Henry has unsuccessfully tried moving his head slightly back, hoping it would encourage the boy to remove his hand. He even jerked his head once as if in spasm but that backfired as the boy leaned even more weight onto the hand to prevent tipping over should Henry jerk his head again.
“I can’t believe how cute he looks,” Carol says.
Here the wavy picture lines begin. A fun-house mirror in which Carol’s face distorts this way and that until finally coming back into the focus of a lens trained on her in 1976.
“I mean, doesn’t he look so cute?” she asks Henry. “Oh, what am I asking you for. You’re a guy. What do you know?”
Last year’s yearbook is open, binding long ago broken so that its natural part is on the ninth-grade class picture. Carol is sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor, her long hair pooling on either side of the picture she is poring over. Henry leans in, too, not to get a view of Carol’s latest crush but to inhale the patchouli oil she rubs into either side of her long neck because she read that’s what Gloria Steinem wears.
“He’s a fag,” Henry says, tired of Carol’s obsessions. Gloria Steinem doesn’t have psycho crushes, he thinks.
“Hey,” he says. “Punch me as hard as you can in my stomach. Seriously. As hard as you can.” His voice reflects the fact that he’s tensing up every muscle in his midsection in anticipation of a fist.
“You’re a retard,” Carol says, flicking her hair over her shoulder. “I’m not going to punch you.”
“Just do it. As hard as you can,” he says.
“No,” she says.
“Come on.”
Whomp comes the punch and then Carol is shaking her hand.
“Yeah, uh-huh,” Henry nods at her. “Does Albert Brinkman have a stomach that hard? Huh? Huh?”
Carol rolls her eyes, closes the yearbook and slides it back into the bookshelf alongside the other yearbooks.
“I better get going,” he says.
He watches her spread her books out around her in preparation for homework.
“Are you walking me out or what?” he asks.
“Oh,” she looks up at him. “Yeah, okay.”
He had been planning on trying to kiss her but loses his nerve when she says “So long, see you tomorrow” and closes the door behind him without even waiting for his reply.
“There,” Henry says. He prepares to stand up and winces when the little boy pulls his hand off the top of Henry’s head—the gumminess of little Bunny’s hand has claimed a dozen hairs at least. Henry stands back up and stretches. “Be careful getting him out of those pants—there’s pins all over.”
“Bunny, wait—wait,” she’s saying from inside the changing room. “You’ve got to be careful, honey. Jesus. Hang on. Hang on.”
Henry can see the two sets of legs under the double doors that just cover the middle of the changing rooms. One set is struggling to extricate itself from the fabric, the other more solid set is squared off, hands working in between, feverishly untangling the octopus child.
“You need this by Friday, right?” Henry calls out to her. He’s filling out the tailor notes on the guest check.
“Is that okay? That’d be great,” she says.
“How’s Kevin doing?” Henry calls out. “That suit work out for him? The navy one?”
He has not seen Kevin since the accidental backslap-turned-shove. It is something he has felt bad about ever since and has been hoping to rectify the next time they met.
The doors push open, saloon-style, and Carol waddles through, Bunny’s tiny tuxedo pants and jacket draped over one arm, an overloaded tote bag in the crook of the other bent arm.
“I just sewed a button back on last week,” she says. “Funny you should ask.”
“If there was a button missing he should’ve brought it back,” Henry says. “We’d take care of that right away.”
“Even after three years? Wow. Now that’s service,” she says, smiling and fishing into her bottomless bag. “Time flies, huh?” she says, noting Henry’s confused look. “Kevin bought that suit three years ago. The year before Bunny was born. Jesus, those were the days.” She sighs as she hands over the tuxedo. “Thanks, Henry. How’re you doing, by the way? How’re your parents? How’s your mom doing? Bunny! Get your foot out of there. I’m so sorry, lemme just go grab him. Bunny!”
The boy, at first gleeful in his discovery of the electric shoe buffer, had in a matter of twenty seconds wedged his little foot deep into the bristles in between the red side and the black side and was howling.
“Your parents are good? BunnyIsweartoGod.” Carol talks in two different volumes, adjusted accordingly while fishing in her purse for something that has eluded her throughout their exchange. “Sorry,” she says.
Chapter fifteen
1989
It starts with the movie theater. Back to the Future is long gone and still he goes. Buying tickets for Cocoon, then Crocodile Dundee, Moonstruck, Big, Driving Miss Daisy. Slowly he walks through the years, unnoticed, to the concession stand. Same size popcorn. Same size Coke. He is only out there, getting food and drink, because he knows he has already draped his jacket across the seats. The same two seats. “Will you guys watch my coat?” he asks the couple in the seats directly behind his. “I’ll be right back.”
“No problem,” they’d said in unison.
So he stands there accepting his change back, savoring the fantasy—however fleeting—that she is in the bathroom. That he will wait there in the lobby for her and she will come out and together they will happily settle in to their chosen places in the theater. That she will take turns holding the tub of popcorn until they’ve eaten enough. That she will whisper, “Do you want any more?” and, when he shakes his head no, she’ll put the half-finished bucket on the sticky floor. That they will laugh at the same moments and look at each other in confirmation of the hilarity. That she will clutch his arm in suspense—not even realizing she’s doing it. The way driving mothers’ arms swing out when they need to stop short whether or not there is anyone in the passenger seat.
Unhurried he allows others to push past him on their way into the theater from the candy stand. He knows his jacket is there. He prolongs the lobby moments as long as possible. When he, too, enters the theater it will jar him. The reality of a coat holding two seats for one will spell it out to him.
And still he goes. Time and again. To the theater. To the same two seats.
That becomes the ritual. So does the ice cream place. And the pizza parlor.
He tries to put out of his mind that last visit to Cup-a-Joe. He had stayed away at her request but then could not resist.
“Can I help you?” the stranger asks.
“Where’s Cathy?” he says. Maybe it is her day off. Maybe she’s switched her schedule around.
“She doesn’t work here anymore.”
He looks around and is shocked to find no one else seems to notice the subtle shift in atmospheric pressure. He tries to keep his voice steady:
“Oh, yeah? Where’d she go?” Maybe up the street to the stationery store, he thinks.
“Don’t know. She left town, I think,” he says. “Anyways, what can I get you?”
Henry turns and leaves without a word.
It had been a comfort, until then, a security blanket, knowing she was still there. Even though she had made it clear she did not want to see him, it had remained a steady part of his day—this knowledge that she was moving around in the world
just a few storefronts up from his.
Back at Baxter’s he pleads a stomachache and asks to leave.
“Sure,” Mr. Beardsley says. “Feel better.”
In his car it takes a few minutes to catch his breath, which had become shallow, as if when she left she took all the oxygen with her.
He drives first to her apartment building. No wonder he hadn’t seen her coming and going from his spot down the street.
Out of his car he walks as if in a dream. Straight to the buzzers. To the spot where once “Nicholas” was affixed. That label now peeled off seems to him the cruelest cut of all. As if she’d been erased from existence.
At his apartment he reaches for the headphones.
It seemed like a good choice at the time: Michael Bolton. “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You.” Once the song starts he realizes his mistake and lifts the record from the turntable.
Instead, he slips the Richard Marx record out of its sleeve. “Right Here Waiting.”
The Henry Powell Band gears up to lay it down. They have groupies now. Girls—and a couple of die-hard guy fans just digging the music—who have gathered in the studio. But no. The studio becomes a concert stage. The groupies multiply and soon he is holding his microphone out to the crowd, for them to finish the lines they’ve memorized. Crowds love this. And so does the band. To have their words sung back to them.
Like a disc jockey he quickly switches out records and Bad English is playing the concert encore. “When I See You Smile.” The audience is singing along with it, the throngs packed into the arena. But this time he keeps the microphone to himself, sings to them entirely. Gives it his all. And their manager tells them they “killed” once they collapse backstage in the dressing room.
Glossies are signed for radio stations and contest winners and soon they load up and head out to their next gig.
Henry sings Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” a cappella on their way onto the tour bus. Someone laughs. Someone else—probably the drummer—calls out for shots of JD. Henry retreats to the tiny bedroom in the very back of the bus. Wrung out, he flops onto the custom-made mattress and tries to get a little sleep.
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