The Happiest People in the World (13 page)

PART FIVE

O
ne o'clock, the first Wednesday in October. Henry's office. Kurt, sixteen years old, fresh from driver's ed, confiding in his guidance counselor, who in three days was also going to be his stepfather.

“Dad seems lonely,” Kurt was saying, and Mr. L. crossed his arms, frowned. Kurt tried again. “Dad
is
lonely,” he said, and Mr. L. stopped frowning, as though to say, That's more like it.

“And that makes you feel . . .”

“Like shit,” Kurt said, and then he waited to be reprimanded for his language. His mother and his father would have done exactly that. But Henry just looked at him, quizzically, the way he sometimes still did when confronted with the American vernacular.

“And then I come here and talk to you and feel better,” Kurt said. He felt about Henry the traditional way you feel about your mother's boyfriend, and also your guidance counselor: you didn't want to trust him but ended up doing so anyway, although always with an eye toward returning to your original feelings. But the more time went by, the more distant those original feelings seemed, the more Kurt genuinely liked and trusted his almost stepfather, and the more he liked and trusted Henry, the more guilty he felt about his father being so lonely. “And that makes me feel worse than shit,” Kurt said.

Henry frowned. “Worse than shit?” he asked. “Can one have that feeling?”

Kurt shrugged. “One can. I can. My dad can.” Then he stared baldly at Henry. Sometimes he did this when the subject of his parents came up. Kurt did not really believe Henry was the cause of his parents' breakup. Kurt knew, mostly because they'd tried so desperately to hide it from him, that his parents had been in the process of breaking up ever since he was old enough to pay attention. Still, sometimes he liked to stare accusingly at Henry to see whether he could make Henry act guilty. He never did. Kurt stopped staring. “I feel sad for him,” Kurt said.

“He has you,” Henry said.

“Ugh,” Kurt said.

“He has his brother,” Henry said, and Kurt said, “Ugh,” again, and this time Henry seemed to almost laugh. His uncle Lawrence was of course a well-known freak, but Henry's almost laughing made Kurt turn perverse and want to defend his uncle.

“Uncle Lawrence isn't so bad,” Kurt said. He remembered a conversation his parents had had once, back when they were still married. Kurt's mother had been getting on his father's case for the way he treated his brother during one of their regular Sunday cocktail hour arguments. “You act like you don't even love him,” she'd said. “Oh, I love him,“ his dad had said. “I don't think that I trust him, but I do love him.” “Although I don't think that I trust him,” Kurt said now to Henry. And then he stared baldly again at Henry, just for kicks. But Henry shocked him this time by answering his stare, out loud.

“You can trust me, Kurt,” Henry said. And wow, Kurt wanted to hug him right then. Instead he said, “Ugh,” one more time and then got up to leave the office. But before he reached the doorway, Kurt turned and looked back at Henry.

“That was a good talk,” he said, and Henry nodded gravely, as if he somehow knew it was the last good talk they would ever have.

J
ust before three o'clock, Henry looked up and saw a stout, dark-bearded, sleepy-eyed man standing in the doorway. On the door, which was open, was a sign that read
MR. LARSEN, GUIDANCE COUNSELOR
. On the other side of the cramped room was a metal desk, and on the other side of
that
was Henry himself. The stranger looked at the sign on the door and smirked. Then, still smirking, he looked at Henry's face, and most carefully, too, like he was committing it to memory, like a traveler might read an itinerary, which, of course, in Henry's case would have said Skagen, then Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Saint Petersburg, Paris, London, and so on and so on until finally here, in his office at the Broomeville Junior-Senior High School in Broomeville, New York.

“Larsen,” the man finally said. “That's a Danish name.”

In response, Henry did what by now came naturally: he frowned. Because this was what you did as his patient, or student, or whatever you called the person who came to see the guidance counselor: you uttered a declarative sentence. And this is what he did as your guidance counselor: he frowned to let you know he disapproved of the inaccuracy of your declaration. Whereupon you tried again. This was Henry's method, for which he was famous throughout the school, and into the town of Broomeville, too, a declarative sentence that, had he heard it, would not have caused him to frown. In fact, just before the stranger appeared, Henry had sat down with Pete Schuyler, a crooked-toothed tenth grader who'd gotten into a fistfight after the football game against Lowville the Friday before. It was Monday, and the cut below Pete's left eye was still raw, still glistening with ooze. The fight had been with a senior at Lowville High, and when Henry asked Pete about the reason for the fight, Pete said, “Because he was a retard farmer.”

Henry just frowned in response, as Pete must have known he would, as most anyone in Broomeville would have known he would. “If you're from Lowville, then you're automatically a retard farmer,” Pete protested. “Everyone knows this. It's just common knowledge.”

Henry frowned at that, too. He knew he was locally famous for his frown, for his method, and didn't mind, because after all, he had been internationally famous for something else, and that, he had minded. That, he still minded. Now, Henry was forced to think of the other people who might mind learning about his international fame—oh God: Ellen, Kurt, not to mention the stranger, who might do more than just “mind.”

“Larsen, that's a Danish name,” the stranger had said a few seconds earlier. The stranger then repeated the statement. But before Henry could respond again with his famous frown, someone said, “Mr. L.?” A second later, Jenny Tallent stepped into the office. As usual, everything about Jenny seemed to be wrong on purpose. Her hair was cut lopsidedly and dyed a color somewhere between red wine and mud. Her pants were black and baggy, and off one of the belt loops hung a chain that wasn't attached to anything. She was wearing a heavy, oversize black hooded jacket even though it was an unusually warm October afternoon; there were two strings hanging from the jacket on either side of her neck, and one of them was considerably longer than the other and looked wet. Henry guessed Jenny had been sucking on it, again. Her ears weren't pierced, nor was her nose or either of her eyebrows or her lips, but there was a metal rivet lodged in the left side of her neck, at the center of a tattooed bull's-eye. The bull's-eye and the rivet seemed to do something to the stranger. He got up and, without saying any last thing to Henry or any first thing to the girl, walked briskly out of the office.

“Who was
that
guy?” Jenny asked. Normally, her bull's-eye and rivet spooked him, too. But just now, he didn't think he'd ever been so relieved to see anyone in his life.

Help me! Henry said to Jenny in his mind. Shut up! he said to himself in the same place. He'd been telling himself to shut up for two years, since he first moved to Broomeville. That he'd managed to do so was a major part of his happiness, not to mention his method.

“I don't know,” Henry told Jenny. Before she could ask him any more questions, he said, “What going on, Jenny?”

“Principal Klock sent me to tell you:
baseball
.” She said “baseball” the way the stranger had said “Danish”: “Larsen, that's a
Danish
name.” The stranger had said it twice: the first time he'd spoken in Danish, and the second in English, even though Henry had understood the Danish perfectly well.

Wednesday, October 6, 2011, 11:32 p.m.

From: undisclosed sender

To: undisclosed recipient

Subject: Broomeville

My first encounter with ”Mr. Larsen” in his office was interrupted by one of his female students. Nothing to worry about. I will visit Larsen again tomorrow and begin the next stage of our plan.

B
aseball
meant it was time again for the annual student-faculty baseball game. Henry had never completely understood why this game took place during football season, nor why it was called a student-faculty baseball game when the only students who played in the game were already on the baseball and softball teams, and the only faculty who played were the faculty who coached baseball or softball. The only thing that made sense about the game was that everyone—students, faculty, staff—was required to go to it: in the case of an out-of-season, inaptly named student-faculty baseball game, you had to require attendance if you wanted people to attend.

The game had already started by the time Henry and Jenny arrived. Jenny went to lean against the fence with the other kids who dressed like something was wrong with them. Henry went to sit by
Dr.
Vernon, who was sitting by himself halfway up the bleachers. He was wearing a blue-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt with parrots perched on either end of a branch. The branch was supposed to span the shirt wearer's pectorals, but
Dr.
Vernon was hunched over in such a way that it looked as though the parrots were feasting on his nipples.

“Hello, Henry.”

“
Dr.
Vernon.”

Dr.
Vernon (his first name was Barry, but no one at the school ever called him anything but
Dr.
Vernon, with the italics) was the school's long-term sub. If you went to Broomeville Junior-Senior High School, then sooner or later
Dr.
Vernon would be your long-term sub, but he would never be your regular teacher because even though he (supposedly) had his doctorate in something or other, he couldn't be bothered to get his teacher's certificate. He was that kind of guy. He was also the kind of guy who always wore loud Hawaiian shirts, including to the student-faculty baseball games, where he would announce loud, possibly comic, play-by-play calls of the game to the crowd. For instance, just as Henry sat down next to him,
Dr.
Vernon had yelled out, “Jared Johnson hits a scorcher to short,” when in fact Jared had hit a dribbler that had barely made it to the pitcher's mound. It was unclear to Henry whether
Dr.
Vernon's commentary was meant to be optimistic or sarcastic, but in any case it was found by almost everyone within earshot to be incredibly annoying. “Why don't you deck him?” Grace Vernon shouted to Henry. Grace was sitting several rows behind them. She was a home ec teacher at the school, and like so many who've had that calling, she seemed as though she'd blown in from some prairie in her long-sleeved sundresses and heavy braids and her crafty ways of making a little go a long way. She was also
Dr.
Vernon's wife. “Why don't you deck him already?” she asked Henry.

“Why don't you?”

“He
likes
it when I deck him,” Grace announced. “It only encourages him.”

Dr.
Vernon turned in her direction. “That's true, sweetie,” he said, beaming. Then he turned back to the field and said, in response to a lazy pop fly to the first baseman, “A Ruthian blast to right field. Going, going, going . . .”

That was it: Grace charged down the stairs, the metal bleachers bonging and vibrating in her wake, punched her husband hard in the upper arm, and then ran back to her seat, where she was greeted with cheers. Meanwhile,
Dr.
Vernon rubbed his arm, still beaming, encouraged.

“See?” Grace said to everyone. Then to Henry she said, “How you can
stand
to sit next to that fool anyway?”

Stand to sit? Henry thought but did not say. Instead he waited a few seconds, then leaned closer to
Dr.
Vernon. The urge is great among those in hiding to casually test other people's knowledge of the events that necessitated their going underground in the first place. Henry had resisted the urge for so long. For the past two years he'd resisted it so expertly that he didn't really feel the urge anymore. But now that the stranger had shown up, Henry felt it again, more strongly than ever.

“Do you remember a few years ago,” Henry said, whispered actually, “the controversy about the Danish cartoonist Jens Baedrup?”

“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”
Dr.
Vernon shouted—not at Henry but at the umpire. This was another thing he did at these baseball games: he insulted the umpire—Matty—by way of quotes from Monty Python movies. Matty took off his mask and looked in the direction of the insult. He smiled at
Dr.
Vernon, then stopped smiling and gave Henry a more complicated look, a look meant to communicate, among other things: I'm watching you, buddy, don't forget that, and don't forget that I know your secrets, or at least I know some of your secrets, or at least I know what someone else has told me about some of your secrets, or at least I know you have secrets, otherwise you wouldn't be here, not that you're the only one around here with secrets, God knows, and maybe one day you and I will drink some beers and talk about them, and Jesus, that would feel
good,
wouldn't it, wouldn't it feel fucking
great
to finally stop lying, to tell the truth, not to everyone, just to one person, just to have one person you can sit down next to at the bar and rip open your chest and reveal your terrible secret heart to and have that person sitting next to you at the bar not judge you or hate you for what's in that heart, for what you've done, a buddy, a true friend who will say, after you've shown him your heart, I'm so glad you just did that, I understand, we all have our secrets, this is what makes us human, this is what makes
me
human, now it's my turn, now I'm going to rip open my chest, etc., and so hey, let's get those beers someday soon, although speaking of beers, I know that in three days you're going to be marrying Ellen down at the bar, and I'm glad, or at least I'm going to act like I'm glad, because I know you make her happy, and also because the other day she told me, when I said, casually, like your marrying her didn't bother me, because it doesn't, I said, Hey, don't you think you're making a terrible mistake marrying this joker, and when I said that, she told me not to be a jealous dick, that I, of all people, have no right to be a jealous dick, and so here I am, not being a jealous dick, no, this is me being glad you're going to marry my ex-wife, but make no mistake, every time I think about you touching Ellen, even accidentally, I want to murder you, but hey, I hope you're enjoying the baseball game. Then Matty put his mask back on and squatted back down behind the catcher.

After that, neither
Dr.
Vernon nor Henry spoke for such a long time that Henry started to forget that he'd ever asked
Dr.
Vernon the question about the Danish cartoonist, the way, before the stranger had shown up, he'd almost managed to forget that he'd ever been anything but a public-school guidance counselor in upstate New York.

“Danish cartoonist, huh?”
Dr.
Vernon finally said. “That
might
ring a bell. Remind me.”

But Henry did not end up reminding
Dr.
Vernon. Instead he started looking at the students sitting down near the fence. Specifically he was looking at Jenny, who seemed to be telling a crowd of students—including Kurt and his two cronies—a story. Henry assumed, and was afraid, that it was a good story, because for once, people actually seemed to be listening to her.