e. Ten bucks."
"Why?"
"There's a program on tonight that I thought we should watch."
"But-" I can't imagine what show would make Henry risk time traveling.
"It's okay, I won't sit and stare at it. I want you to see this."
"Oh. What?" I'm so out of touch with what's on television.
"It's a surprise. It's on at eight."
The TV sits on the floor of the dining room while we eat dinner. Henry refuses
to answer any questions about it, and makes a point of teasing me by asking
what I would do if I had a huge studio.
"What does it matter? I have a closet. Maybe I'll take up origami."
"Come on, seriously"
"I don't know." I twirl linguine onto my fork. "I would make every maquette
one hundred times bigger. I'd draw on ten-foot-by-ten-foot pieces of cotton rag
paper. I would wear roller skates to get from one end of the studio to the other.
I'd set up huge vats, and a Japanese drying system, and a ten-pound Reina
beater...." I'm captivated by my mental image of this imaginary studio, but then I
remember my real studio, and I shrug. "Oh well. Maybe someday." We get by
okay on Henry's salary and the interest on my trust fund, but to afford a real
studio I would have to get a job, and then I wouldn't have any time to spend in
the studio. It's a Catch-22. All my artist friends are starving for money or time or
both. Charisse is designing computer software by day and making art at night.
She and Gomez are getting married next month. "What should we get the
Gomezes for a wedding present?"
"Huh? Oh, I dunno. Can't we just give them all those espresso machines we
got?"
"We traded those in for the microwave and the bread-making machine."
"Oh, yeah. Hey, it's almost eight. Grab your coffee, let's go sit in the living
room." Henry pushes back his chair and hoists the television, and I carry both
our cups of coffee into the living room. He sets the set on the coffee table and
after messing around with an extension cord and fussing with the knobs we sit on
the couch watching a waterbed commercial on Channel 9. It looks like it's
snowing in the waterbed showroom. "Damn," says Henry, peeking at the screen.
"It worked better in the Unique." The logo for the Illinois Lottery flashes on the
screen. Henry digs in his pants pocket and hands me a small white piece of
paper. "Hold this." It's a lottery ticket.
"My god. You didn't-"
"Shh. Watch." With great fanfare, the Lottery officials, serious men in suits,
announce the numbers on the randomly chosen ping pong balls that pop one by
one into position on the screen. 43,2, 26,51,10,11. Of course they match the
numbers on the ticket in my hand. The Lottery men congratulate us. We have just
won eight million dollars.
Henry clicks off the TV. He smiles. "Neat trick, huh?"
"I don't know what to say." Henry realizes that I am not jumping for joy.
"Say, 'Thank you, darling, for providing the bucks we need to buy a house.'
That would work for me."
"But-Henry-it's not real."
"Sure it is. That's a real lottery ticket. If you take it to Katz's Deli, Minnie will
give you a big hug and the State of Illinois will write you a real check."
"But you knew."
"Sure. Of course. It was just a matter of looking it up in tomorrow's Tribune."
"We can't...it's cheating."
Henry smacks himself dramatically on the forehead. "How silly of me. I
completely forgot that you're supposed to buy tickets without having the
slightest idea what the numbers will be. Well, we can fix it." He disappears down
the hall into the kitchen and returns with a box of matches. He lights a match and
holds the ticket up to it.
"No!"
Henry blows out the match. "It doesn't matter, Clare. We could win the lottery
every week for the next year if we felt like it. So if you have a problem with it, it's
no big deal." The ticket is a little singed on one corner. Henry sits next to me on
the couch. "Tell you what. Why don't you just hang on to this, and if you feel like
cashing it we will, and if you decide to give it to the first homeless person you
meet you could do that-"
"No fair."
"What's no fair?"
"You can't just leave me with this huge responsibility."
"Well, I'm perfectly happy either way. So if you think we're cheating the State
of Illinois out of the money they've scammed from hard-working suckers, then
let's just forget about it. I'm sure we can think of some other way to get you a
bigger studio."
Oh. A bigger studio. It dawns on me, stupid me, that Henry could win the
lottery anytime at all; that he has never bothered to do so because it's not normal;
that he has decided to set aside his fanatical dedication to living like a normal
person so I can have a studio big enough to roller-skate across; that I am being an
ingrate.
"Clare? Earth to Clare...."
"Thank you," I say, too abruptly.
Henry raises his eyebrows. "Does that mean we're going to cash in that
ticket?"
"I don't know. It means 'Thank you.'"
"You're welcome." There is an uncomfortable silence. "Hey, I wonder what's
on TV?"
"Snow."
Henry laughs, stands up, and pulls me off the couch. "Come on, let's go spend
our ill-gotten gains."
"Where are we going?"
"I dunno." Henry opens the hall closet, hands me my jacket. "Hey, let's buy
Gomez and Charisse a car for their wedding."
"I think they gave us wine glasses." We are galumphing down the stairs.
Outside it's a perfect spring night. We stand on the sidewalk in front of our
apartment building, and Henry takes my hand, and I look at him, and I raise our
joined hands and Henry twirls me around and soon we're dancing down Belle
Plaine Avenue, no music but the sound of cars whooshing by and our own
laughter, and the smell of cherry blossoms that fall like snow on the sidewalk as
we dance underneath the trees.
Wednesday, May 18, 1994 (Clare is 22, Henry is 30)
Clare: We are attempting to buy a house. Shopping for houses is amazing.
People who would never invite you into their homes under any other
circumstances open their doors wide, allow you to peer into their closets, pass
judgment on their wallpaper, ask pointed questions about their gutters.
Henry and I have very different ways of looking at houses. I walk through
slowly, consider the woodwork, the appliances, ask questions about the furnace,
check for water damage in the basement. Henry just walks directly to the back of
the house, peers out the back window, and shakes his head at me. Our realtor,
Carol, thinks he is a lunatic. I tell her he is a gardening fanatic. After a whole day
of this, we are driving home from Carol's office and I decide to inquire about the
method in Henry's madness.
"What the hell," I ask, politely, "are you doing?"
Henry looks sheepish. "Well, I wasn't sure if you wanted to know this, but I've
been in our home-to-be. I don't know when, but I was-will be- there on a
beautiful autumn day, late afternoon. I stood at a window at the back of the
house, next to that little marble topped table you got from your grandmother,
and looked out over the backyard into the window of a brick building which
seemed to be your studio. You were pulling sheets of paper back there. They
were blue. You wore a yellow bandanna to keep your hair back, and a green
sweater and your usual rubber apron and all that. There's a grape arbor in the
yard. I was there for about two minutes. So I'm just trying to duplicate that view,
and when I do I figure that's our house."
"Jeez. Why didn't you mention it? Now I feel silly."
"Oh, no. Don't. I just thought you would enjoy doing it the regular way. I
mean, you seemed so thorough, and you read all those books about how to do it,
and I thought you wanted to, you know, shop, and not have it be inevitable."
" Somebody has to ask about termites, and asbestos, and dry rot, and sump
pumps..."
"Exactly. So let us continue as we are, and surely we will arrive separately at
our mutual conclusion."
This does eventually happen, although there are a couple tense moments
before then. I find myself entranced with a white elephant in East Roger's Park, a
dreadful neighborhood at the northern perimeter of the city. It's a mansion, a
Victorian monster big enough for a family of twelve and their servants. I know
even before I ask that it's not our house; Henry is appalled by it even before we
get in the front door. The backyard is a parking lot for a huge drug store. The
inside has the bones of a truly beautiful house; high ceilings, fireplaces with
marble mantels, ornate woodwork- "Please," I wheedle. "It's so incredible."
"Yeah, incredible is the word. We'd be raped and pillaged once a week m this
thing. Plus it needs total rehab, wiring, plumbing, new furnace, probably a new
roof.... It's just not it." His voice is final, the voice of one who has seen the future,
and has no plans to mess with it. I sulk for a couple days after that. Henry takes
me out for sushi.
"Tchotchka. Amorta. Heart of my heart. Speak to me."
"I'm not not speaking to you."
"I know. But you're sulking. And I would rather not be sulked at, especially
for speaking common sense."
The waitress arrives, and we hurriedly consult our menus. I don't want to
bicker in Katsu, my favorite sushi restaurant, a place we eat at a lot. I reflect that
Henry is counting on this, in addition to the intrinsic happiness of sushi, to
placate me. We order goma-ae, hijiki, futomaki, kappamaki, and an impressive
array of raw things on rice rectangles. Kiko, the waitress, disappears with our
order.
"I'm not mad at you." This is only sort of true.
Henry raises one eyebrow. "Okay. Good. What's wrong, then?"
"Are you absolutely sure this place you were in is our house? What if you're
wrong and we turn down something really great just because it doesn't have the
right view of the backyard?"
"It had an awful lot of our stuff in it to be anything but our house. I grant you
that it might not be our first house-I wasn't close enough to you to see how old
you were. I thought y