excerpts

[ziegfeld]

lair of dreams

“‘Pos-i-tute-ly isn’t a word,’ she said.
‘Why, it pos-i-tute-ly is! It’s in the dictionary, just before prob-a-lute-ly.’
‘You’re doing that simply to annoy me.’
‘Abso-tive-ly-not.’ Henry’s smile was pure innocence.”

"How do you do? I'm Henry Bartholomew Dubois IV," Henry had said in a slow taffy pull of syllables, extending a hand. He had the longest, most elegant fingers Theta had ever seen. The soft brows and heavy fringe of pale lashes that made the heavy-lidded gaze of his narrow hazel eyes seem permanently sleepy. Faint constellations of freckles on his arms, cheeks and nose, which only showed themselves in the sunlight. Even his mouth, set in a perpetual smirk of amusement, was only a shade darker than his skin. You might look past him completely, except for his eccentric style of dress: a pair of tweed trousers held up by suspenders splayed across a stiff white tuxedo shirt worn under an open vest, and a jaunty straw boater hat with a red-and-blue striped ribbon around it perched on his head at an angle that hinted at mischief - or at least impertinence.

"Betty," she'd managed to say, giving his fingers a quick shake.
Henry tilted his chin and looked down at her, appraising. "That's an awfully dull name for such an interesting girl."
She struggled to keep her eyes open.
"Do you need a place to stay?" Henry had asked quietly.

Theta's eyes snapped open. She palmed the knife. "Try anything funny, fella, and you'll be sorry."
"Well, after everything, I would hate to meet my end with a simple butter knife," Henry said as if he might be saying hello. "I can assure you, Betty, I'm a gentleman, and a man of my word."

Theta was so tired. It was as if the hunger had been the plug holding back her emotions. Now it had been removed, and she sat weeping softly in her seat. "It's copacetic, darlin'. Come on." Henry told her later he'd never seen anyone so beautiful cry so ugly.

Theta followed Henry home to his one-room apartment with the leaky roof on St. Marks Place, where he offered her a pillow and a blanket. While she cradled them both to her middle, still distrustful, he dragged an old cane chair to a battered piano beside an airshaft window. He hummed softly and made notes on those same sheets of paper filled with scratchings and blots of ink. "You're welcome to stay," he said without looking up. "There's no cleaning lady. The pipes leak. The bathroom down the hall is shared with ten very eccentric neighbors. It's cold in the winter and hot as the devil in summer. All in all, it's not much better than the street. But you're welcome all the same."

“Don’t you get it? I don’t fit. The songs I want to write aren’t the songs they want to hear. All this time, I’ve been trying to figure out what they want and give it to them. I don’t want to do that anymore, Theta. I want to figure out what I want and write those songs. Songs I care about. And if I’m the only one singing ‘em, so be it.”

before the devil breaks you

Henry sat at the piano, plinking out a tune on the tinny keys. "There's things in the night, out of infernal dreaming," he sang. "Can you hear it now- my infernal screaming?"
Isaiah made a face. "What song is that?"
Henry kept his fingers tripping along the keys. "It's from a new show I'm working on, called I've Been Eaten By Ghosts with big Teeth and I'm Very Upset About It."

"I happen to think the people in here are very brave," Henry said, full of fire. "Imagine living each day and not being able to trust your own mind. Imagine having it lie to you, trick you, tell you you're worthless or that the world would be better off without you in it. It would be like...like always hearing an awful radio playing inside your head, one that you can't seem to turn off." He glared at Sam. "Or maybe I'm just 'crazy' for feeling sympathy for them."

"Gee, Hen, I'm sorry--"
But something had come loose inside Henry. He backed away from the others, hands up. "I need to calm down. Going for a walk."

tw: suicide
The day her mind broke, his mother had taken one of those shining knives and crawled into the bath. She'd meant to silence the howling dogs for good. Henry had found her, pale and bleeding. The doctor had come to dress her wounds. Henry's father refused to admit his mother to a sanitarium for fear of gossip. "She needs rest." The doctor agreed, a bond sealed between men. They gave her opium. They looked away. And Henry's mother became the unofficial ghost of their ancestral mansion, floating through the elegant rooms where, if you looked too closely you say the tears and worn spots in the papered walls, the soot on the velvet drapes, the fraying along the seams of the antique dining chairs.

This was what Henry ran from. This was what the jokes masked. It wasn't callousness. It was pain and loss so great he could only let it in a little at a time, filtered through the safety of melody and rhythm. It was the way he survived. And to hell with his friends if they didn't understand that.