Wolf at the table, p.27
Wolf at the Table, page 27
“I would say five-eight.”
“Not bad. Five-seven-and-a-half.”
“Your posture is sort of elite,” he says. “That gives you the extra half inch.”
“And my weight?”
“One-twelve, one-thirteen?”
“One sixteen,” she says, shifting a bit in his chair, “but that’s at the end of the day, before I go to bed. And I think my scale is a few pounds heavy.”
“So then I’m right,” he says.
“And my shoe size?”
“Eight in women’s.”
“Oooh,” she says, “you’re legit.”
“I could have a booth at the carnival.”
“What else would you put on the back of my baseball card?”
He asks her middle name.
“Elizabeth,” she says.
“Henrietta Elizabeth Woods hails from northwest Connecticut—”
“Cornwall,” she says.
“Cornwall, Connecticut,” he says. “She is left-handed. High school?”
“Groton. A prep school in Massachusetts.”
“For high school she attended Groton Academy—”
“It’s Groton School.”
“For grades nine through twelve she attended the Groton School and then Yale University for like nineteen years after that, where she graduated with honors.”
“No ‘the.’ Just Groton School. And grades eight through twelve. And it’s was graduated.”
“Was graduated with honors,” he parrots.
“And I was at Yale for undergrad and grad,” she says, “which was six years, not nineteen. More please.”
“When the striking Ivy Leaguer watches a play she leans forward with her chin cradled in her hands and her elbows driven into the tops of her thighs like she’s taking in a slow, distant car crash.”
“I like that,” she says, smiling, tugging a little at the sweatshirt still wrapped around his waist. “What else?”
“She prefers wearing men’s shirts that are too large. So she can hide her beautiful body in them.”
“Keep going.”
“She has a constellation of moles spanning the small of her back that looks almost artistically arranged. Her eyes change color depending on what she wears. If she wears a blue shirt they look gray. If she wears a green shirt they take on a yellow, almost wolfish quality. At the writers’ group that she attends on a weekly basis she sort of clucks when she doesn’t like someone else’s work. It’s like a hollow wooden sound. Like maybe a child’s toy falling off the countertop. She also makes this clucking noise when she’s embarrassed.”
“I’d like corroborated testimony of this clucking.”
“One of her teeth on the top left row is slightly discolored but you can only see it when she uncorks a big smile, which is rare. The veins in the tops of her hands make the onlooker think that she studied piano as a child.”
“It was the clarinet. But my veiny hands are probably from mixing my dad’s paints. He’s a painter.”
“I’m well aware,” Ronan says. “Thanks to Alexis.”
“I mixed enough damn paint to last a lifetime. And I danced, by the way. My mom was with the Paul Taylor Company for almost twenty years.”
“My detective-work had already uncovered that fact as well.”
“I’m just telling you, I danced. Running fast is in your blood, dance is in mine. I did ballet from age three to fourteen.” She flexes her left foot, showing off a pronounced arch.
Ronan kneels before her and takes her foot in his hands. It’s strong, coiled, heavier than it looks. “Were you good?”
“To prima Swan Lake you have to be able to do sixty fouettés on each leg, and by the time I was twelve I could do thirty-two. So I was definitely on my way to playing Odette. But they don’t let you dance six hours a day at Groton.”
“Do you miss it?”
“The ritual but not the pain. Until a few years ago I had troll feet. Calluses, missing toenails—and the ones that managed to stay on looked like rotting oyster shells. My blisters had blisters.” She wiggles her toes and flexes her feet a few more times.
“They look pretty good now,” Ronan says.
She gets out of the chair and steps toward the futon, where she turns to him. She leans back against the corner, holding the pillow to her breasts now. “So your mother the nurse,” she says.
Ronan sits in the chair, adjusts the sweatshirt around his waist, retying the arms, and tells her how she moved steadily up the Pediatrics ladder at St. Joseph Hospital in Joliet, Illinois, until she was offered a job at the local juvenile prison. “Last month she was promoted to Stateville,” he says. “The big-boy house. So now she’s handing out meds to adult rapists and killers.”
“Do you worry about her?”
“There’s always a guard present, but she’s only five-four and like a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet. So yeah, I worry.”
“Is that what you would write on the back of her baseball card?”
“I would write, ‘Myra Lee Larkin Happ. Date of birth: June fifteenth, 1938. Hometown: Elmira, New York. Height: five feet four. Weight: a hundred and ten pounds—’”
“Soaking wet.”
“‘Soaking wet’ is such a cliché,” Ronan teases.
“A hundred and ten pounds walking out of a swamp,” she offers as an alternative. “Who’d you get your height from?” Henny asks.
“My grandma Ava is six-three.”
“Jesus. And Myra Lee Larkin’s foot?”
“Size seven.”
“Eyes?”
“Hazel verging on gray.”
“What else?”
“An alum of the University of Chicago’s prestigious nursing program, Myra Lee Larkin is a shy beauty with dark brown hair who’s never really known how pretty she is. The oldest of six children—”
“One of whom I met tonight.”
“Yes, one of whom Henrietta Elizabeth Woods from Cornwall, Connecticut, met tonight.”
“Aunt Fiona.”
“Fiona Larkin, the freewheeling second-oldest Larkin sister who purportedly joined a lesbian fertility cult in Massachusetts sometime in her twenties.”
“No shit?”
“I’m not clear on the details but that’s the family folklore, I shit you not. I think she’s always been pretty troubled. It seems like she still is.”
“Because she’s an out-of-work actress?”
“Because she shamelessly borrowed ten bucks from me after I told her I worked a poverty-level job in book publishing.”
“I’m not sure that’s adequate evidence. But back to your mother’s baseball card.”
“Myra Lee’s youngest brother, Archie, died of rheumatic fever when he was an infant. Alec, the third-oldest, disappeared sometime in the mid-sixties and was never seen again. In addition to Fiona, she has two other sisters: Joan, who is mentally handicapped and still lives with my very tall grandmother, and Lexy, who went to Vassar, married the head of a successful hedge fund, has twin daughters, and lives in Rowayton, Connecticut, in what one might describe as a sprawling estate mansion. Myra Lee’s husband, Denny Happ, left her and her young son, Ronan, on the day of an unlikely blizzard on April second, 1975. She has few friends and relishes her solitude. At fifty-three she has less than ten gray hairs and swears that she’s never dyed it and never will. And she makes an excellent meat loaf, which is a slight variation of her mother’s legendary recipe.”
“That’s a helluva baseball card.”
“The print would have to be really small.”
Henny grabs the forty, which they’ve all but ignored, drinks, grimaces because of its obvious warmth, swallows, and asks his middle name.
“Archibald,” he says.
“So Mom named you after her dead baby brother.”
“Should I be worried about rheumatic fever?”
“Ronan Archibald Happ,” she says.
He loves the way she says his name, how it makes her smile in a sly, secretive way, as if she’s written it on a piece of paper and slipped it into a beloved book.
She takes another sip from the forty, passes it back. “What about Denny?” she asks.
Something goes loose in his chest.
“Oof,” she says. “That bad, huh?”
“What?”
“Your face just did something.”
“He’s sort of a mystery,” Ronan says.
“Is he still alive?”
“Apparently, yes,” he says. “I don’t think my mom’s ever gotten over him.”
“She never remarried?”
“She’s barely dated anyone else.”
The fan oscillates a few times, blows the warm air around.
“And what about you?” Henny asks.
“I date,” he says. “No one at the moment, but I’m almost positive that there’s some keen interest from a slightly older woman in my playwriting group.”
“I was asking about your father,” she says. “Have you gotten over him?”
“There’s really nothing to get over,” he hears himself say.
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t even remember him.”
“Nothing at all?” she says.
“There are fragments. Like he wore this hat in the winter, one of those Irish tweed bucket hats, something Michael Caine would wear in a seventies film. It was forest green with little bits of red and gray.”
He drinks from the warm forty, passes it to her. She drinks and passes it back.
“All I know about him besides his high school track glory is that he went to West Point for a little over a year and was discharged for being deemed mentally unfit for duty.” He drinks from the forty again, swallows, and sets it on the floor. “He’s schizophrenic,” he adds, and as he says it, he realizes it’s the first time he’s told anyone this about his father. It feels as if he’s cleared a bunch of debris out of a coat pocket. “Like the kind of schizophrenic who has serious breaks with reality,” he continues. “I think he might have been hospitalized for a time. But that’s all I know.”
“What does your mom say?”
“She never talks about him. I assume it’s just too painful for her. Like I said, I don’t think she’s ever gotten over the guy.”
“For some reason I thought you grew up in this big Midwestern Catholic family,” Henny says. “In a house with an endless staircase. Old upright piano in the living room. Family photos all over the walls. Station wagon. The front yard overrun with leaves in the fall. A fort in the woods behind the house.”
“That was my mom’s family,” he says. “Except in upstate New York. I grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in a sketchy part of Joliet, Illinois.”
“‘Sketchy’ meaning…?”
“Gangs. Drugs. Lots of single moms on welfare. Eight-year-olds smoking menthol cigarettes. The shells of pillaged cars half sunk in the man-made pond.”
“I guess we all make assumptions,” she says.
She tells him about Cornwall, Connecticut: its vast rolling hills, the dairy farms, the endless fields of wildflowers, its famous covered bridge. As a child she’d danced the Maypole at the spring festival. “It was basically like growing up in a Norman Rockwell painting,” she says.
“Thank God you’re freakishly talented, or I’d hate your guts.”
“Fucking classist,” she says, then lets the pillow fall, crawls over to him in the chair, and kisses him again. Her mouth is warm and full, sweet from the malt liquor. “That thing’s louder than a speedboat,” she says, pointing to the fan.
“I don’t picture many speedboats up in northwest Connecticut.”
“Oh, yeah?” she says playfully. “What do you see there?”
“A smattering of roadside vegetable stands. Teenagers walking into beautifully lit woods, smoking the joints that they found in their parents’ twelve-thousand-dollar mohair ponchos that they will take with them to Amherst or Williams or Wesleyan—”
“Or Yale,” she says.
“Or Yale,” he says.
“So what happens to all those ponchos?”
“They get left at various dive bars in all the economically depressed college towns scattered along the Northeast Seaboard, to be discovered and taken home by the lucky townies who happened to be throwing darts until last call that night.”
“Not bad,” she says with a laugh. “You probably won’t be surprised that my parents have a place on Cape Cod. One of our neighbors, the Leddingtons, own a bowrider. It’s white with a red racing stripe. They call it Cookie. They actually painted that on the hull.”
Ronan imagines Henny sunning herself on the beach on Cape Cod. He is beside her, pale as a sail. “Cookie the speedboat,” he says. “Sounds like a children’s book.”
He lowers himself off his wobbly street chair, kneels, and embraces her. He can’t help himself. Entwined, they move back to the futon, scooting on their knees.
After they land on the mattress he mentions that Alexis also told him about her amazing apartment, how she lives off the interest of her father’s trust.
“Are you paying her a fucking retainer fee?” Henny says.
“I could see you two were friends. I just wanted to know more about you.”
“Alexis makes it sound like my life is a series of annoying tableaux: Henrietta Woods, in her Chanel bathrobe, lounges on her immaculate Victorian furniture; Henrietta Woods insouciantly flips through one of her many high-end coffee-table books; Henrietta Woods takes her morning tea at her Bill Willis occasional table.”
“Or on her rear terrace overlooking a lush neighborhood garden.”
“What the fucking fuck, Alexis?”
“Your place sounds really cool,” he says. “You should invite me over.”
“That’s a big step for me,” she says.
“You feel weird about your wealth.”
“Playwrights are supposed to be broke, right?”
They are sitting shoulder to shoulder on the futon now, with their backs against the wall.
“I work, too, you know,” Henny says. “I sit for an art school. A few times a week.”
“You pose?”
“It’s called sitting,” she says. “I’m not doing Playboy pictorials.”
“Are you naked?”
“For the most part, yes,” she says. “Sometimes there’s a scarf or a piece of muslin to break things up. But it’s the human figure they’re studying.”
“Life drawing,” he says.
“I’m good at it because of my dance background. I can hold positions for a long time.”
“Does it pay well?”
“No,” she says, “but I don’t do it for the money. I like the feeling of becoming someone else.”
“Like another character?”
“Yes,” she says. “Under that level of scrutiny, that intensity, I get to transform. Change my spots. I like the control of that.”
Somehow this hidden life of hers spooks him. This person who shape-shifts under the gaze of others. Is she an exhibitionist?
Henny takes the forty from the floor, moves back to the futon, and drinks, then holds the bottle between her arches, her feet curling around it like hands. After a silence she says, “What about you? What secret are you prepared to share, Ronan Archibald Happ?”
Still wrapped in his sweatshirt, he rises from the futon and moves to his closet. From the small overhead shelf he removes a bundle swaddled in one of his three towels and unwraps it, then turns back and hands her the book.
She looks at the spine, opens it slowly, and pages through the front matter. “This is a fucking first edition,” she says, tracing the text on the copyright page with her fingers. “Where’d you get it?”
He tells her the story—how his boss had him over to his brownstone for dinner on Saturday; how his wife collects first editions; how following the meal he excused himself to the bathroom and went up to their second-floor library and removed the book from its shelf and spent the rest of the evening with it wedged in the small of his back.
“Are you borrowing it?” she asks.
“I think I’m a thief, Henny.”
“Holden Caulfield would be proud,” she says, returning the book to him.
“Holden Caulfield wasn’t a thief,” he says. “He was just really confused.”
“But didn’t he steal that record he gives to his sister? The one that breaks into pieces?”
“He buys the ‘Little Shirley Beans’ forty-five from a record store on Broadway,” he says. “It’s one of the only record stores that’s open on Sundays. He says he spends about five bucks but he’s probably exaggerating.”
“You really know your Catcher in the Rye,” she says.
“The Catcher in the Rye,” he says.
Henny is still holding the bottle with her feet, and Ronan is still facing his closet, his back to her.
“So what do you think of my secret?” he says.
He half expects her to get dressed, grab her bag, and leave. Instead, she tells him that it turns her on a little.
“So you’re not about to leave?” he asks.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she says.
As he clutches the book with both hands, a rush of warmth surges through him, and he feels another swelling in his groin.
“I want to sit for you,” she says.
“I’m not artistic in that way,” he says, re-swaddling the book. “I wouldn’t do you justice.”
“Then you could just watch me,” she says.
“And you would just sit there?”
“Like I am now,” she says.
But he can’t see her because he’s still facing the closet.
“I won’t even look at you,” she says. “You can ask me to hold any position. Your wildest dream…”
He places the book back on the closet shelf and finally turns to her.
“I want to feel your gaze on me,” she adds.
“And who would you become?” he asks, fully erect.
“I don’t know yet.”
He steps toward her on the futon, where she takes the length of him in her hand and pulls him closer. This time they assume a classic missionary position, Henny’s miraculous head of hair settling into the corner of the room. They are just below the lone, inoperable window, streetlights weakly silvering its smudged glass. With her left hand Henny clutches the narrow sill. Ronan gives most of his weight to his elbows and eases into her. This time it’s tender, careful, as if they’re both recovering from injury.
