Read Online The Heart of Henry Quantum by Pepper Harding - Free Book Online Page A

her face flushed, tears forming in her eyes. He didn’t believe her, but he swelled with pride anyway. Even now he could feel her enthusiasm course through him. She would be spread out on the couch with his typed sheets piled next to her and would throw open her arms as if he had just written Moby Dick or Love Story or something, and would swallow him up. He figured it was just the pleasure she felt for having been the object of all this writing. She would shower him with kisses, wrap her legs around him, and seem to melt beneath him. But perhaps he had not really understood these moments. Perhaps her passion was much deeper than that. Maybe it wasn’t just flattery when she gushed that no one had ever written her poetry before, not to mention the little love stories. Maybe it was more. Maybe he was a good writer, after all.
    This whole business of writing was now in his mind, and his struggle with it. In graduate school he found he could compose a decent paper, but Daisy had liberated something else in him. For her, he conjured medieval lovers, stolen hours, secret trysts, island hideaways, and erotic messages conveyed by carrier pigeon. Ordinary joes and janes were transformed by ecstasy or condemned to fathomless depths of despair. The sex in these tales was never explicit, mainly because it embarrassed him to write about it, but it didn’t seem to matter. Daisy wrote those parts in her own imagination, and the real-life lovemaking was immediate and overwhelming and, he had to admit, wilder than anything he could have captured on paper.
    Why had he insisted he loved Margaret?
    But he knew he must not call Daisy, must not start all that again. It was so much easier, so much cleaner is how he put it to himself, to live a life without secrets. Secrets cause pain, and the avoidance of pain was his current preoccupation. So he moved away from the display window at SlinkyBlink—these places come and go so fast, he told himself—like everything else, like everything else—and continued on his way to Macy’s, although this time he did decide to go by way of Sutter and not Geary, because he didn’t want to pass the saxophonist again. Or—he stopped himself just as his foot touched the sidewalk on the other side of the street—maybe it really was because he was hoping to run into Daisy again, knowing she parked at the Sutter-Stockton garage and this was the direction she would have to take to get there, and perhaps she was dawdling, maybe even waiting for him beside the flower shop near the garage entrance. The flower shop run by the beautiful East European blonde—Henry guessed she was Serbian by the crisp line of her chin and the way she had of dispensing with anyone who gave her a hard time—but she certainly was a great beauty, and he wondered why such a beauty would work in a flower shop— well, probably because she owned it, she and that husband of hers, who was quite a bit older and had the head of a buffalo—couldn’t she have done better? Couldn’t she have married a rich man or been a fashion model or something? He admired her, actually. For not trying to get by on her looks. Because, let’s face it, if you’re extremely good-looking, you get much further. There was a Darwinian force at work there. Surely there were studies on this. He would look into it when he got back to the office.
    Henry trudged up the Sutter Street hill, and when he reached the entrance to the garage, he did look in, and the beautiful Serbian woman was indeed sitting on her stool in the flower shop, clipping roses, but Daisy was nowhere to be seen. How do you know you’re in Serbia? he quipped to himself. When you can choose between several war criminals in the presidential election. He read that online and for some reason it stuck with him. And here she was cutting flowers, one of the most beautiful women in San Francisco. And what about the Jews and Palestinians? And Islamic