The Heart of Henry Quantum (2 page)

In a moment, the light turned green again, the Honda lurched forward and so did Henry, now determined to stop daydreaming while driving. When you think about it, he said to himself, people really don't pay all that much attention when they're driving. For instance when you want to change lanes, you are looking in the rearview mirror and still moving forward without looking ahead, and yet somehow you judge your distance correctly 99.99 percent of the time. And what about when you're on the iPhone or texting? He admitted he called when driving, but no texting, at least not that. The truth is, he never quite got that two-thumbs thing down—and as for tweeting, he just didn't do it. Though it was hard to be in advertising and not tweet, because tweeting was maybe the most important medium for targets under thirty.

Shit, he said to himself. Now I have to fucking tweet!

His first tweet would be:
I am on my way to buy perfume for Margaret. Can't decide which store.
Second tweet:
What's the point of Christmas, anyway? Anyone know?
Third tweet:
Just almost hit hot girl on bike. Hate those fucking bike lanes.
He tweeted all this mentally because he was not ready to tweet physically.

He was actually enjoying all this tweeting, until he realized that he'd passed Fifth Street, where Nordstrom was, and hadn't turned. In fact, he was already at the Ferry Building. But he was determined not to get upset, because he was a practitioner of Samatha meditation and also of Taoism, or at least he wanted to be, and since the path of life was pointing him away from Nordstrom, he decided to trust that this was the right way to go even though it was a big inconvenience. Thus he turned left on Drumm past the Bay Club and left again on Jackson—in other words, he went straight to the office. He could get the perfume later. Hoof it over to Union Square during lunch, why not? It would do him good. That's the Tao for you!

He pulled into the garage, cried “
¡Hola!
” to Roberto the attendant, and walked the three blocks to his office on Pacific. It was just up the block from the famous Thomas E. Cara espresso machine store, and also across from where American Zoetrope used to be when Francis Ford Coppola worked there. Every time Henry Quantum walked these three blocks, strolling past the magnificent antiques shops or cutting up the alley past BIX (best martinis in town) or checking out the scene at Roka Bar or the chicks coming out of the law offices or detouring past that crazy combination men's shop/bar/golf simulator/wine cave on the corner of Montgomery and Clay, he was filled with love—love for this little corner of the universe and for the people who lived and worked in it. On this particular morning, just one day before Christmas Eve, the winter light was working its magic—golden yet somehow also porcelain, white and clarifying yet thick with mystery—imbuing the old brick buildings with shimmering vitality and the pedestrians with a healthy glow quite unlike the pallor they wore in those gloomy, foggy summers that felt so gray and damp. Half the people who passed him were bundled in winter coats, the other half in shorts and T-shirts. So San Francisco! Most of the country was freezing, big snowstorms in the Midwest and all, but here the young women, though they sported elegant boots, wore their skirts to the tops of their thighs and let their legs go bare; the young men were all squeezed into hypertight pants and tailored sports coats cut to look two sizes too small; some wore skinny black ties with open collars, some wore sweaters, some wore polos, and some were just in jeans and sneakers. All this gave Henry an oceanic lift, the tide of which swept him along until he reached number 46, yanked open the art deco door with its etched-glass insert, and bounded up the staircase that had been refitted with teakwood and aluminum to resemble nothing so much as the grand lobby of a Disney cruise ship.

Like all the buildings on this quaint block, his was a relic of the old Barbary Coast, a narrowish, three-story brick Italianate that once housed a saloon or a brothel or perhaps a brewery or a dance hall, though now it was painted chalk white and had shutters the color of wild iris. The sign that hung above its door was not
HIPPODROME
or
KELLY'S
as in the old days, but
BIGALOW, GREEN, ANDERSON AND SILVERMAN
, and each time he passed under this sign and said good-bye to the wonderful flow of humanity that swelled his heart, he found himself coughing violently, as if the air inside was carcinogenic, which, in fact, he often thought it was.

“But I'm fine with it,” he told himself each morning.

The hour was now nine thirty. Naturally none of the creative department had yet arrived (everyone in account services had been there since seven), and this was perfect because Henry saw himself as inhabiting a privileged station midway between business and creative—he was neither right brain nor left brain—he was all brain, a man for all seasons, a pigeon not to be holed, as he put it at cocktail parties right before whomever he was speaking to found a way to escape. Yes, okay, he had once wanted to be a copywriter—that was ages ago, before he decided he had no talent for the witty line or the powerful metaphor; but he understood creative people—he did—and so he believed his mission was to champion their work to the idiots who paid the bills. That, in fact, is what he had in mind for the Protox presentation—support his creatives even if he hated their work, which in this case he did. This had to do with his samurai ethos.

He set his briefcase on his desk as carefully as if it were a finely honed katana from the hand of Hattori Hanzo, the greatest sword maker of all time, at least in
Kill Bill Volume 1
, and rounding his desk, slowly lowered himself into his Aeron chair, a chair fit for a warrior. For the zillionth time he perused his workspace, which he again found lackluster in spite of the Grateful Dead posters and quotations from Nietzsche and the Dalai Lama hanging on the wall. It was an outer office, yes, and he was proud of that, but it was only eight by ten and it was fronted by a glass wall that afforded him no privacy at all. When he tried to draw the blinds they refused to work, or if they did, people would tap on the window as if it were illegal to have a minute to himself. But honestly, who would want to be closed in this office anyway? The carpet was stained, the desk was mostly composite, and the only natural light came from a small, soot-encrusted window that looked out across a trash-strewn alley to the crumbling rear of a speakeasy on Broadway. He had found himself looking out that window often, and for years tried to spy into the windows opposite his own. Who lives above a strip joint? he wondered. Ratty curtains blocked the view, and some of the windows were papered over with yellowed newspaper. Probably Vietnamese immigrants. Or maybe the bouncer who stands in front of the entrance lives there. Not the worst job in the world. He gets to kibitz with the girls at least.

Henry had gone into one of those strip joints once. It was the cleavage on the young woman who accosted him as he was walking to North Beach for some pasta that had beckoned him in. And yet she spoke to him so gently. “You seem like a nice person,” she said. “You do, too,” he replied, feeling incredibly stupid the minute the words came out of his mouth. But she smiled and said, “Aren't you sweet!” and parted the curtains and led him inside. It wasn't until he was at a table that they told him the girls wouldn't sit with him unless he ordered a bottle of champagne. But he didn't want them to sit with him. In fact, he wanted to get out, but the girl, still holding his hand, said, “Don't worry. I'll sit with you, no champagne,” so he sat. There was another girl onstage dancing lethargically in complete nakedness except for high heels. The one holding his hand spoke with a slight southern accent.

“Used to be, back in the day, like in the seventies or something, we could be nude the whole time. Way before me. Now we have to wear at least lingerie when we sit with the guys.”

“Really?” he said.

“Um,” she replied.

She couldn't have been more than eighteen. It was all the paint on her face that had fooled him. Christ, he thought to himself, what am I doing? He was suddenly struck by how her makeup stopped so abruptly under her chin. How pale her neck was. And under the pancake, pimples. And then he had a flash of inspiration: he would get her out of there! Out of this terrible life. How? He would marry her! Yes!

Except he was already married.

“Buy me a white wine?” she said.

“Okay,” he said.

He ordered her one, but the waitress brought her two. And also two for him.

“Two-drink minimum” the waitress muttered. “Per person.”

“I love white wine,” the girl said. “Don't you? You know, I can dance for you if you like. A private dance, you know? In the back there are rooms.”

“Sorry?”

“Just you and me. Say a hundred bucks.”

“Oh!” he said.

“It'll be fun.”

“I know this sounds crazy,” he blurted, “but I want to get you out of here.”

“That's what I'm saying. Private room. Lap dance, strip, it'll be really fun.”

“No, that's not what I mean.”

“Well, okay, sure, whatever you need. Why not? Only a hundred. A lot of places it's a lot more, believe me. But I like you. In fact, I'll do it for eighty because I really like you. You seem like such a nice guy.”

She placed her hand on his leg, ran it up toward his groin.

And before he realized it, he'd bolted from his seat, run out of the darkened club, and found himself standing in the white glare of the street.

Except the bouncer ran after him and grabbed him by the collar. “Hey, man, the bill. You probably want to pay that.”

“Oh,” said Henry. “Sorry, sorry. I forgot.”

“Right.”

“No, really, I just forgot.”

“It's one-twenty.”

“One-twenty?”

“Hundred and twenty.”

“For a couple of glasses of wine?”

“That's what it costs. Read the menu.”

“They didn't show me a menu.”

“One-twenty,” the guy said.

“Do you take American Express?” Henry asked.

But the beery scent of that room and the sweat he felt coming off the girl stayed with him for a long time. Even now, as he stood there looking across the yard, he brought to mind that place on her neck where the line of makeup gave way to the real girl—and sometimes he wished he hadn't run away and hadn't already been married, because the two of them—he and the girl—could have started over: a house in the country, a passel of kids, an all-electric vehicle. He placed the palm of his hand upon his grimy little window and tried again to see past the curtains on the upper floor of the strip joint. Poor kid!

But then he heard the door to his office open and he turned to see Denise, the tattooed art director, leaning against the doorframe with an armful of layouts.

“Hey,” she said. “You ready?”

“You're here already?”

“Why wouldn't I be?” she replied. “It's almost ten. They'll be here in half an hour. I'm going to go set up.”

“Right,” he said.

“You okay?”

“Why does everyone always ask me that?”

She went off in the direction of the small conference room, but his eyes did not move from the spot she had vacated. He wondered if people leave a trace of themselves when they rest somewhere—not in the way of perfume or body odor, but in the way of essence, of soul. What if we leave little vestiges of our souls wherever we go? And is the totality of the soul diminished or is it somehow enlarged? This brought to mind a little carved soapstone someone had once given him—his old professor of anthropology at Chicago—from India, though he couldn't recall which dynasty—a tiny little frog crudely carved—from the Maratha period, yes—from northern India, some village, he never knew which, and really he had no idea how old it was, maybe from the seventeenth century, maybe from the eighteenth—and this frog was only as big as the tip of his pinky, and the white of the sandstone had turned muddy and dark where it had been rubbed over and over, especially on the ridge of the frog's back where it glistened with oil from a thousand hands—and when Henry held it in his own hands, when he touched it to his cheek, when he put it to his lips, he got the uncanny sensation he was touching not the frog but all the people who had ever rubbed it for good luck, even down to the fellow who first carved it, and that they had all left traces of themselves just as he was leaving something of himself. What an exquisite feeling that was! To be attached to all those lost lives, those obscure creatures without which this little frog would have no patina. They had lived their lives just as he was living his, the only difference being that he knew his own name and he didn't know theirs. And also they were Indian and he wasn't. Although some of them could have been British.

And then he couldn't remember why he was staring at the doorpost, so he pulled out his laptop, powered it up, waited till the screen opened, clicked on the Protox files, reviewed his notes, closed the lid, and carted his computer with him into the conference room.

10:15–11:45 a.m.

On the way to the conference room he stopped to look in at the IT guy, Larry McPeek, who was busy writing code or maybe just shopping on Amazon, and they said hello to each other and said “Merry Christmas,” which everyone had been saying to one another for days now, and so Henry continued down the hall wishing everyone a merry Christmas in a very cheerful voice, but actually he was thinking about Denise, the art director. She wasn't exactly hot, because she had a horsey kind of face, but with the tattoos and the hair extensions and the skin-tight jeans with the bright orange cuffs, she was definitely sexy, a model's body as they liked to say when you had no boobs and were tall and slender with a nice little backside; but it was her hands that got to Henry—the fingers like eels, long and elastic, as if they had no bones and which she held aloft and widespread when she was trying to make a point, or otherwise squeezed upon her waist at either side when she was standing in the hall. Sometimes she used them as a pillow for her chin when she was listening to music or contemplating the placement of a photograph. No matter what they were doing, these fingers were astoundingly erotic—what would they feel like? he wondered. He knew women hated when men objectified them this way. And he hated that he objectified them. But, jeez, he was a guy. And it was hard, really hard, to change fifty thousand years of objectifying women.
You
try it! he silently cried out to Gloria Steinem, the only feminist he could remember the name of at the moment. Yeah, you try it! And by the way, he pointed out to Ms. Steinem, I am completely aware that Denise has a brain. She's kind of egghead-y actually. So please.