Henry Strauss heads back into the shop.
Bea’s taken up residence again in the battered leather chair, the glossy art book open in her lap. “Where did you go?”
He looks back through the open door and frowns. “Nowhere.”
She shrugs, turning through the pages, a guide to neoclassical art that she has no intention of buying.
Not a library. Henry sighs, returning to the till.
“Sorry,” he says to the girl by the counter. “Where were we?”
She bites her lip. Her name is Emily, he thinks. “I was about to ask if you wanted to grab a drink.”
He laughs, a little nervously—a habit he’s beginning to think he’ll never shake. She’s pretty, she really is, but there’s the troublesome shine in her eyes, a familiar milky light, and he’s relieved he doesn’t have to lie about having plans tonight.
“Another time,” she says with a smile.
“Another time,” he echoes as the girl takes her book and goes. The door has barely closed when Bea clears her throat.
“What?” he asks without turning. “You could have gotten her number.”
“We have plans,” he says, tapping the tickets on the counter.
He hears the soft stretch of leather as she rises from the chair. “You know,” she says, swinging an arm around his shoulder, “the great thing about plans is that you can make them for other days, too.”
He turns, hands rising to her waist, and now they’re locked like kids in the throes of a school dance, limbs making wide circles like nets, or chains.
“Beatrice Helen,” he scolds. “Henry Samuel.”
They stand there, in the middle of the store, two twenty-somethings in a preteen embrace. And maybe once upon a time Bea would have leaned a little harder, made some speech about finding someone (new), about deserving to be happy (again). But they have a deal: she doesn’t mention Tabitha, and Henry doesn’t mention the Professor. Everyone has their fallen foes, their battle scars.
“Excuse me,” says an older man, sounding genuinely sorry to interrupt. He holds up a book, and Henry smiles and breaks the chain, ducking back behind the counter to ring him up. Bea swipes her ticket from the table and says she’ll meet him at the show, and Henry nods her off and the old man goes on his way, and the rest of the afternoon is a quiet blur of pleasant strangers.
He turns the sign over at five to six, and goes through the motions of closing up the shop. The Last Word isn’t his, but it might as well be. It’s been weeks since he saw the actual owner, Meredith, who’s spending her golden years traveling the world on her late husband’s life insurance. A fall woman indulging in a second spring.
Henry scoops a handful of kibble into the small red dish behind the counter for Book, the shop’s ancient cat, and a moment later, a ratty orange head pokes up over the chapbooks in POETRY. The cat likes to climb behind a stack and sleep for days, his presence marked only by the emptying dish and the occasional gasp of a customer when they come across a pair of unblinking yellow eyes at the back of the shelves.
Book is the only one who’s been at the bookstore longer than Henry.
He’s worked there for the last five years, having started back when he was still a grad student in theology. At first it was just a part-time gig, a way to supplement the university stipend, but then school went away, and the store stayed. Henry knows he should probably get another job, because the pay is shit and he has twenty-one years of expensive formal education, and then of course there’s his brother David’s voice, which sounds exactly like their father’s voice, calmly asking where this job leads, if this is really how he plans to spend his life. But Henry doesn’t know what else to do, and he can’t bring himself to leave; it’s the only thing he hasn’t failed out of yet.
And the truth is, Henry loves the store. Loves the smell of books, and the steady weight of them on shelves, the presence of old titles and the arrival of new ones and the fact that in a city like New York, there will always be readers.
Bea insists that everyone who works in a bookstore wants to be a writer, but Henry’s never fancied himself a novelist. Sure, he’s tried putting pen to paper, but it never really works. He can’t find the words, the story, the voice. Can’t figure out what he could possibly add to so many shelves.
Henry would rather be a storykeeper than a storyteller.
He turns off the lights and grabs the ticket and his coat, and heads over to Robbie’s show.
 |
Henry didn’t have time to change.
The show starts at seven, and The Last Word closed at six, and anyways he isn’t sure what the dress code is for an off-off-Broadway show about faeries in the Bowery, so he’s still in dark jeans and a tattered sweater. It’s what Bea likes to call Librarian Chic, even though he doesn’t work in a library, a fact she cannot seem to grasp. Bea, on the other hand, looks painfully fashionable, as she always does, with a white blazer rolled up to her elbows, thin silver bands wrapped around her fingers and shining in her ears, thick dreads coiled in a crown atop her head. Henry wonders, as they wait in the queue, if some people have natural style, or if they simply have the discipline to curate themselves every day.
They shuffle forward, presenting their tickets at the door.
The play is one of those strange medleys of theater and modern dance that only exist in a place like New York. According to Robbie, it’s loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, if someone had filed Shakespeare’s cadence smooth, and cranked up the saturation.
Bea knocks him in the ribs.
“Did you see the way she looked at you?” He blinks. “What? Who?”
Bea rolls her eyes. “You are entirely hopeless.”
The lobby bustles around them, and they’re wading through the crowd when another person catches Henry’s arm. A girl, wrapped in a tattered
bohemian dress, green paint flourishes like abstract vines on her temples and cheeks, marking her as one of the actors of the show. He’s seen the remnants on Robbie’s skin a dozen times in the last few weeks.
She holds up a paintbrush and a bowl of gold. “You’re not adorned,” she says with sober sincerity, and before he can think to stop her, she paints gold dust on his cheeks, the brush’s touch feather-light. This close, he can see that faint shimmer in the girl’s eyes.
Henry tips his chin.
“How do I look?” he asks, affecting a model’s pout, and even though he’s joking, the girl flashes him an earnest smile and says, “Perfect.”
A shiver rolls through him at the word, and he is somewhere else, a hand holding his in the dark, a thumb brushing his cheek. But he shakes it off.
Bea lets the girl paint a shining stripe down her nose, a dot of gold on her chin, manages to get in a solid thirty seconds of flirting before bells chime through the lobby, and the artistic sprite vanishes back into the crowd as they continue toward the theater doors.
Henry threads his arm through Bea’s. “You don’t think I’m perfect, do you?”
She snorts. “God, no.”
And he smiles, despite himself, as another actor, a dark-skinned man with rose-gold on his cheeks, hands them each a branch, the leaves too green to be real. His gaze lingers on Henry, kind, and sad, and shining.
They show their tickets to an usher—an old woman, white-haired and barely five feet tall—and she holds on to Henry’s arm for balance as she shows them to their row, pats his elbow when she leaves them, murmuring, “Such a good boy” as she toddles up the aisle.
Henry looks at the number on his ticket, and they sidestep over to their seats, a group of three near the middle of the row. Henry sits, Bea on one side, the empty seat on the other. The seat reserved for Tabitha, because of course they’d bought their tickets months ago, when they were still together, when everything was a plural instead of a singular.
A dull ache fills Henry’s chest, and he wishes he’d paid the ten dollars for a drink.
The lights go down, and the curtain goes up on a kingdom of neon and spray-painted steel, and there is Robbie in the middle of it all, lounging on a throne in a pose that is pure goblin king.
His hair curls up in a high wave, streaks of purple and gold carving the lines of his face into something stunning and strange. And when he smiles, it is easy to remember how Henry fell in love, back when they were nineteen, a tangle of lust, and loneliness, and far-off dreams. And when Robbie speaks, his voice is crystal, reflecting across the theater.
“This,” he says, “is a story of gods.”
The stage fills with players, the music begins, and for a while, it is easy. For a while, the world falls away, and everything quiets around them,
and Henry disappears.
|
Toward the end of the play there is a scene that will press itself into the dark of Henry’s mind, exposed like light on film.
Robbie, the Bowery king, rises from his throne as rain falls in a single sheet across the stage, and even though, moments earlier, it was crowded with people, now, somehow, there is only Robbie. He reaches out, hand skimming the curtain of rain, and it parts around his fingers, his wrist, his arm as he moves forward inch by inch until his whole body is beneath the wave.
He tips his head back, the rain rinsing gold and glitter from his skin, flattening the perfect wave of curls against his skull, erasing all traces of magic, turning him from a languid, arrogant prince into a boy; mortal, vulnerable, alone.
The lights go out, and for a long moment, the only sound in the theater is the rain, fading from a solid wall to the steady rhythm of a downpour, and after, to the soft patter of drops on the stage.
And then, at last, nothing.
The lights come up, and the cast takes the stage, and everyone applauds.
Bea cheers, and looks at Henry, the joy bleeding from her face. “What’s wrong?” she asks. “You look like you’re about to faint.” He swallows, shakes his head.
His hand is throbbing, and when he looks down, he’s dug his nails into the scar along his palm, drawing a fresh line of blood.
“Henry?”
“I’m fine,” he says, wiping his hand on the velvet seat. “It was just. It was good.”
He stands, and follows Bea out.
The crowd thins until it’s mostly friends and family waiting for the actors to reappear. But Henry feels the eyes, attention drifting like a current. Everywhere he looks, he finds a friendly face, a warm smile, and sometimes, more.
Finally Robbie comes bounding into the lobby, and throws his arms around both of them.
“My adoring fans!” he says, in a thespian’s ringing alto.
Henry snorts, and Bea holds out a chocolate rose, a long inside joke since Robbie once bemoaned that you had to choose between chocolates and flowers, and Bea pointed out that that was Valentine’s Day, and that for performances, flowers were typical, and Robbie said he wasn’t typical, and besides, what if he was hungry?
“You were great,” says Henry, and it’s true. Robbie is great—he’s always been great. That trifecta of dance, music, and theater required to get work in New York. He’s still a few streets off Broadway, but Henry has no doubt he’ll get there.
He runs his hand through Robbie’s hair.
Dry, it is the color of burnt sugar, a tawny shade somewhere between brown and red, depending on the light. But right now it’s still wet from the final scene, and for a second, Robbie leans into the touch, resting the weight of his head in Henry’s hand. His chest tightens, and he has to remind his heart it is not real, not anymore.
Henry pats his friend’s back, and Robbie straightens, as if revived, renewed. He holds his rose aloft like a baton and announces, “To the party!”
|
Henry used to think that after-parties were only for last shows, a way for the cast to say good-bye, but he’s since learned that, for theater kids, every performance is an excuse to celebrate. To come down from the high, or in the case of Robbie’s crowd, to keep it going.
It’s almost midnight, and they’re packed into a third-floor walk-up in SoHo, the lights low and someone’s playlist pumping through a pair of
wireless speakers. The cast moves through the center like a vein, their faces still painted but their costumes shed, caught between their onstage characters and their offstage selves.
Henry drinks a lukewarm beer and rubs his thumb along the scar on his palm, in what’s quickly becoming a habit.
For a while, he had Bea to keep him company.
Bea, who much prefers dinner parties to theater ones, place settings and dialogues to plastic cups and lines shouted over stereos. A groaning compatriot, huddled with Henry in the corner, studying the tapestry of actors as if they were in one of her art history books. But then another Bowery sprite whisked her away, and Henry shouted traitor in their wake, even though he was glad to see Bea happy again.
Meanwhile, Robbie is dancing in the middle of the room, always the center of the party.
He gestures for Henry to join him, but Henry shakes his head, ignoring the pull, the easy draw of gravity, the open arms waiting at the end of the fall. At his worst, they were a perfect match, the differences between them purely gravitational. Robbie, who always managed to stay alight, while Henry came crashing down.
“Hey, handsome.”
Henry turns, looking up from his beer, and sees one of the leads from the show, a stunning girl with rust-red lips and a white lily crown, the gold glitter on her cheeks stenciled to look like graffiti. She is looking at him with such open want he should feel wanted, should feel something besides sad, lonely, lost.
“Drink with me.”
Her blue eyes shine as she holds out a little tray, a pair of shots with something small and white dissolving on the bottom. Henry thinks of all the stories about accepting food and drink from the fae, even as he reaches for the glass. He drinks, and at first all he tastes is sweetness, the faint burn of tequila, but then the world begins to fuzz a little at the edges.
He wants to feel lighter, to feel brighter, but the room darkens, and he can feel a storm creeping in.
He was twelve when the first one rolled through. He didn’t see it coming. One day the skies were blue and the next the clouds were low and dense, and the next, the wind was up and it was pouring rain.
It would be years before Henry learned to think of those dark times as storms, to believe that they would pass, if he could simply hold on long enough.
His parents meant well, of course, but they always told him things like Cheer up, or It will get better, or worse, It’s not that bad, which is easy to say when you’ve never had a day of rain. Henry’s oldest brother, David, is a doctor, but he still doesn’t understand. His sister, Muriel, says she does, that all artists suffer through their storms, before offering him a pill from the mint container she keeps in her purse. Her little pink umbrellas, she calls them, playing on his metaphor; as if it’s just a clever turn of phrase and not the only way Henry can try to make them understand what it’s like inside his head.
It is just a storm, he thinks again, even as he pulls away from the scene, makes some excuse about going to find air. The party is too warm, and he wants to be outside, wants to go onto the roof and look up and see there is no bad weather, only stars, but of course, there are no stars, not in SoHo.
He makes it halfway down the hall before he stops, remembering the show, the sight of Robbie in the rain, and shivers, deciding to go down instead of up, deciding to go home.
And he’s almost to the door when she catches his hand. The girl with ivy curling over her skin. The one who painted him gold.
“It’s you,” she says. “It’s you,” he says.
She reaches out and wipes a fleck of gold from Henry’s cheek, and the contact is like static shock, a spark of energy where skin meets skin.
“Don’t go,” she says, and he’s still trying to think of what to say next when she pulls him close, and he kisses her, quick, searching, breaks off when he hears her gasp.
“Sorry,” he says, the word automatic, like please, like thank you, like I’m fine.
But she reaches up and grabs a handful of his curls. “What for?” she asks, drawing his mouth back to hers.
“Are you sure?” he murmurs, even though he knows what she will say, because he’s already seen the light in her eyes, the pale clouds sweeping through her vision. “Is this what you want?”
He wants the truth—but there is no truth for him, not anymore, and the girl just smiles, and draws him back against the nearest door.
“This,” she says, “is exactly what I want.”
And then they are in one of the bedrooms, the door clicking shut and blotting out the noises of the party beyond the wall, and her mouth is on his, and he cannot see her eyes now in the dark, so it’s easy to believe that this is real.
And for a while, Henry disappears.
