The Heart of Henry Quantum (18 page)

She now was within sight of the Village shopping center, which was packed with shoppers and ablaze with Christmas lights even though the sun was still out. She turned right onto Paradise Drive, which wound along the lip of the cove like a hawk circling a field, but it was a route that always gave her a sense of peace, perhaps because she knew her daughter was waiting at the end of it. But today she let her foot off the gas because she was in no hurry to get there, they'd make her wait in line at the roundabout anyway, but also she wanted to be alone with her thoughts, to have a little more time to think them, because she hadn't come to the heart of it yet, to the part in which she could see her way through all the tumult of feelings to whatever lay within.

And so she pulled over to the side of the road just a few yards up from the police station. She knew other parents would pass her, perhaps even recognize her, but she didn't care. She simply wasn't ready for the onslaught of Tasha and all her demands and complaints and the begging not to go to ballet. It was the last day of school before Christmas holiday and that would add to the craziness, with all the kids bringing home their art portfolios and science projects and all the other things they were done with now that the semester was over. Everyone was still going on about the winter concert and the fifth-grade show and how hard their exams were, and the energy would be frenetic, and Daisy needed a bit of quiet. She turned off the engine and released her grip on the steering wheel. She removed her phone from her purse and placed it on her lap.

She looked at that phone for a very long time.

Don't make a fool of yourself, she said silently.

Not everyone appreciated Henry, she knew that. On paper Edward was far his superior: Aside from the fact that Edward came from money and was uniquely able to make more and more money as if there was nothing to it, Edward was, well, he was beautiful, by which she meant he was much more than handsome—he was gorgeous, electrifying, like a movie star—and women were drawn to him in droves. She knew he slept with a lot of them, too, and for the longest time she accepted this as the price of being married to such a man: the price for in-laws with a house in Napa and another in the Hamptons, a main residence in Ross and a pied-à-terre on Russian Hill; the price for the extravagant and interesting parties with the Gettys and the Betzes and the Hellmans; for the eighteen-foot Christmas trees and the buffet breakfasts served by staff; for the family cruises and the family horses and the family “getaways” on Kauai and in Aix and Fiesole and on the private island off Bali; for the opening-night box at the opera and the easy reservations at French Laundry; for the satisfaction of donating large sums and seeing your largess do good in the world; for the privilege of hanging on his arm in public and becoming more desirable because of it. The price for all this, unfortunately, was Edward. His unthinking infidelities. His unfailing denseness. His unholy sense of ownership.

She was only twenty-one when he'd scooped her up and married her, only twenty-four when she'd had Denny. Too young, she told herself. Much, much too young.

And then one day it all changed.

“Are you crazy?” he said to her.

He told her he didn't care about her affair with that ad guy, he'd get over it. It wasn't that big a deal.

“It should be a big deal!” she said to him.

“But it's not. Things happen.”

“I'm moving out,” she screamed. “I'm going back to school. I want to be a scientist. A biologist.”

“But why?” he said.

“Because I've always wanted to.”

“You always wanted to leave me?”

“I always wanted to be a scientist.”

“Daisy, I hate to tell you, you're thirty-four years old. You have two children. They happen to need you; maybe you've forgotten that. And the household and all your volunteer work. And me. I need you. Not that you care about me.”

“You'll be fine,” she said.

“Daisy, do you have any idea how hard it is in graduate school? You think you can manage that? Be realistic. You don't have a scientific brain, Daisy. You're all over the map. You're terrible at math. What kind of scientist would you be? You'll end up a lab technician. Get a grip. You're having a midlife crisis, that's all.” And then to make her feel better he added, “Listen, I've had affairs, too.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

Until that moment perhaps she had doubted her resolve, but now there was no turning back. She found a little house much farther out in Marin, in Fairfax, in the flats, not much more than a bungalow with a little yard, three small bedrooms, a tiny eat-in kitchen, and a miniscule living room. It was far, far away from the house in Belvedere and felt like a place where you could start over. Fairfax, with its head shops and unrepentant hippies in tie-dyed T-shirts and long floral dresses, was something out of the sixties. Everyone seemed to drive a beat-up Datsun and there was a postbox-size ice-cream shop on Main Street and a real five-and-dime. Daisy felt strangely at home in this retrograde universe and sensed she was returning to something she had long forgotten, though she was much too young to remember the sixties and in reality she was simply a divorced woman with two kids and this is what she could afford. But she enrolled in community college, beefed up her math, took her GRE, and ended up at San Francisco State with an internship at the Hamer Eye Research Institute. She worked part-time in the bookstore in Fairfax until she got a teaching assistantship, and took money from Edward only for the kids' school and their share of the rent, and for nothing else.

When her friends came to visit, they all said to her, “You're crazy.”

Daisy sat in her car on the shoulder of Paradise Drive thinking about all this and hoping somehow to get to the heart of it, but somehow she wasn't. She decided it was time to concentrate.

How had she met this Henry Quantum? At a meeting of the PR committee of BrainPower for Kids. Someone on the board knew someone at some ad agency who agreed to take them on pro bono. Everyone had been quite excited about it, so they all got there early, which almost never happened, but the agency people arrived late anyway. In came a young woman of indeterminate age and sexual orientation and a lanky guy in his midthirties who seemed to trip over his own feet, which at the time were encased in red high-top sneakers—a strange contrast to the rather conservative suit and club tie he was also wearing. Everyone assumed that he was the art director because of the sneakers and the fact that he kind of looked like some movie or rock star they couldn't place—Justin Bieber? (Only pastier, if that was possible.) Daisy rather thought he looked more like a goofy Ben Affleck. In any event, the guy turned out to be the account manager, so everyone expected him to say slick, annoying account executive things. Except everything he said made sense. He explained things simply, from beginning to end, without making you feel stupid. By the end of the meeting everyone trusted him and unanimously decided to go with whatever the agency said. “Great!” the account guy said, and suggested it would be most efficient if they appointed just one person from the committee to work closely with the agency. Daisy raised her hand and said, “I'll be the liaison on this.”

Which surprised everyone because Daisy never volunteered for extra duty.

She remembered specifically how her hand felt raised above her head, her fingers spread wide and wagging about like little puppy-dog tails. She also remembered how quickly she put her hand down because she was worried there might be sweat under her arm.

This, she now knew, is how the universe conspires for love.

It conspires to teach you something. Only you have to be willing to learn. It conspires to take you to undiscovered countries. Only you have to stay the course.

Over coffee at Peet's and over lunch at the Depot and on the phone at all hours and at his office in the mornings and at her house on gray afternoons they conspired. They told themselves their objective was a public persona for BrainPower, a way to raise awareness and money, but their course of action was a conversation that ranged from childhood reminiscence to political meandering to complaints about spouses to revealing secret writings kept in drawers to “tell me what you think this dream means” and “you crack me up you're so funny” and “I wish I'd met you years ago.” They had more and more of these meetings as the weeks went by, and less and less progress on the ad campaign. Then one day Henry traveled to Chicago to shoot a commercial for one of his clients, and that afternoon he called her from O'Hare and said to her:

“Hi, Daisy, I'm just calling to say hello.”

“Hello, you,” she said.

He took a breath and said, “I know it's crazy, but I miss you.”

It seemed forever before she said, “I miss you, too.”

“So you know?”

She said, “Yes, I know. I feel the same.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I do.”

Her heart was pounding, really pounding, and the phone in her hand seemed to shake of its own accord.

He said, “I've never—”

“Me neither,” she said.

“It's overwhelming.”

“I know.”

“But, Daisy—”

“You don't have to say it.”

“I do. I have to. We can't let this go anywhere. You know that.”

“I do know that.”

“It has to stop here. Just with our knowing.”

“I know that, Henry.”

“We can't let it go any further.”

“I agree.”

“So this is hello and good-bye.”

“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “I think so.”

There was another pause, this one filled in equal measure with rapture and wretchedness. And when the silence simply became too much, he said, “Hello, Daisy.”

She answered, “Hello, Henry.”

And then he said, “Good-bye, Daisy.”

And she answered, “Good-bye, Henry.”

“I'm glad,” he said.

“I'm glad, too,” she answered.

And honestly they did try not to take it any further. When Henry got back he didn't call her. He went straight home to his wife and told her he had been exhausted from the trip—the 6:00 a.m. production calls, not wrapping till eight, the crew dinners and the barhopping with clients, all the various headaches of trying to please everyone and at the same time keeping a handle on things back at the office, and then the long, horrible flight—the weather was awful! But the truth was the only thing on his mind was Daisy, day and night. It was exhausting! And when he got home all he wanted to do was sleep.

But Margaret needed him to run errands for her and she screamed at him, “Why don't you ever take care of me? Why do you even bother coming home if you're not going to pay attention to me?” He told her he hadn't slept in two days, but she kept waking him up, saying, “I need you to do this for me
now
,” and “Why can't I ever count on you?” until finally he just locked himself in the bathroom and went to sleep in the tub, even with her banging on the door, that's how tired he was. It was only then, he'd told Daisy later, that he realized that Margaret didn't actually love him. She merely needed him like you need a handyman or a psychiatrist; when she didn't need him for something, she didn't seem to even notice him. My God, he said to himself lying in the tub,
she's not a wife, she's a client
! It was something any of his friends could have told him years before, but that's Henry.

Two days later he called Daisy and asked her to meet him in the parking lot along the water's edge at Marina Green. When he saw her drive up, he motioned to her and she got into his car and before she could say a word he had enveloped her with kisses; and she kissed him back, felt her entire self kiss him, as if a vise around her heart had suddenly given way, and from her mouth molten kisses erupted from an unexpected fire at her core.

He reached beneath her sweater and touched her nipple. She swooned and it amazed her because she never thought her nipples were sensitive—but they were, they were! There were people about, families strolling up the path along the shoreline or playing on the green behind them. Anyone could see them through the windshield. She didn't care. She wanted to tear off her sweater then and there, but he stopped her by placing two fingers upon her lips and saying, “Shhhh, shhhh. We have all the time in the world.”

And at first it seemed they did. Each time they slept together she marked it in her calendar with a smiley face, although she soon changed that to the letter “H” for happiness, because a smiley face could raise suspicions if someone got hold of her phone or looked on her computer. She laughed remembering how she had warned him that first time that she didn't always have orgasms and never, ever, had a multiple one, and then went on to have four that afternoon, four in a single instance, and then more later. It was stunning, and even more so when Henry said, “I didn't do that; you did.” But it was only later that she came to know that it was true: it was she herself, in her radical openness, in her openness to him. And now, sitting in the car by the side of the road two days before Christmas, she finally understood she had loved him not for what he did for her but for what he allowed her to do for herself; and that was the core of it, that's what that fire was, that is what she wanted back, and that is what she had lost forever.

Alone in her car by the side of the road, Daisy buried her head between her hands and began to cry.

3:26–4:30 p.m.

Suddenly there was loud knock on the driver's side window and Daisy jumped so hard the seat belt locked and crushed her shoulder. It was a cop.

She cursed herself and rolled down the window.

He leaned in and said, “Everything all right?”

“Oh! Yes, yes.”

As she was saying this, her cell phone starting ringing. She wanted to answer it, knew she better not. Knew she had to keep her eyes fixed on the policeman. It was driving her crazy that she couldn't look at the phone to see who was calling.