The Family Man Part 11

14. Three Humble Rooms.

THALIA MOVES INTO the maisonette with the help of two uninsured and unincorporated young men whom she found on Craigslist. From his lookout on the second floor, Henry hurries downstairs to meet the truck as its front wheels b.u.mp up onto his sidewalk. Thalia exits the truck's cab, looking a little more animated than a week of packing should induce and carrying a pint-sized Christmas cactus, which, she reports, has never bloomed.

For the next hour, Henry silently notes the transport of her sad little lot: a futon frame and its mattress, covered with a fitted sheet he recognizes as Marimekko, circa 1970. An unmoored door and the concrete blocks that hold it up; lumber and more concrete blocks that become a bookcase; a matching rattan love seat and chair with jungle-print cus.h.i.+ons; a dozen boxes of college texts and paperback novels; two plastic hourgla.s.s-shaped stools in lime green that turn out to be night tables; a computer, a printer, and a naked headless mannequin.

This charmless junk depresses him. "Did your mother and Glenn ever visit your apartment?" he asks as he watches her unwrap what she is euphemistically calling china.

"Probably. Maybe not Mott Street, but the one before that. Why?"

Instead of answering truthfully-How could they let you live an unfurnished life?-he asks what he can do to help. Does she need tea towels or sponges? His cleaning woman put the shelf paper in. Does she like it? Gracious Home had other patterns, but he thought polka dots.

"I do. I love them." She is lining up mugs, all four of them. When he compliments a pale blue cup and saucer, Thalia says, "This was from my Angel Sister my freshman year in college. Do guys have Angel Sisters? Like secret Santas? She was a senior on my floor and one of those beautiful creatures that everyone wors.h.i.+ped from afar." She holds the cup up into the light of the hundred-watt ceiling bulb. "You can almost see through it. It wasn't new when she gave it to me. It was hers, and she must've wrapped this up in a hurry for the big Angel Sister reveal. But I liked that better, that demiG.o.ddess Jodi Kleinholz would keep a teacup and saucer in her dorm room-and then it was in mine."

The way she is talking about and gazing at her cup and saucer is breaking Henry's heart-this love of beautiful things narrowed to two pieces of bone china. He squelches his impulse to say, "Please come look through my cabinets. Please take what you want."

Thalia must see Henry's pained expression because she says, "They're giving me a decent housing allowance and I'm sure it would cover ... stuff. The stylist threatened to take me shopping, but I don't want this place to look decorated. It's supposed to be the three humble rooms of a struggling actress."

"But if you like pretty things, and if you're not inviting the paparazzi inside...?"

"I'm not. But they have their telephoto lenses and probably their night vision goggles. I've been warned never to walk around naked or even in my underwear in case..." She tilts her head toward the still-quiet street outside.

Just as Thalia p.r.o.nounces underwear the movers enter the kitchen with a clipboard and a pen. "We need your signature," says the driver and apparent boss. Since they've arrived, Henry has noticed a surfeit of good manners: This boss has been instructing his sidekick to wipe his feet each time they cross the threshold and has run his palm along the walls like a man who understands wainscoting. Henry has also noticed that this team leader is quite good-looking-dark-haired, olive-skinned, hazeleyed, untattooed, Strand Books T-s.h.i.+rt, hair well cut.

"It's just to say that your possessions arrived safely and nothing broke in transit," the man explains.

"I haven't unpacked everything yet," says Thalia, not altogether inhospitably, "so I can't really say that with any authority, can I?"

"Anything particular you're worried about?"

"Dishes and stuff"," says Thalia, and gestures to the one unpacked box on the counter.

The man smiles. "How about if we unwrap the remaining valuables before I leave, and we'll see what damage we've wrought." He extends his hand-as if they haven't been in each other's company for three hours-and says, "I'm Philip."

"Then why is your friend calling you that other thing?" Thalia asks.

"Nickname," says Philip. "Dino. Left over from college."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning nothing except it's short for Dinosaur."

"And why is that?" she asks.

Philip, uninvited, is unwrapping mismatched gla.s.ses that appear to have started their lives as jelly jars. "I got a late start. Worked construction. I was a couple of years older than the morons in my house."

His buddy is standing in the doorway, looking resigned in a way that makes Henry think that Philip's conversational overtures are not atypical.

Henry says to Thalia, as lightly as he can manage, "Don't forget this young man and his partner are paid by the hour."

Philip says, "That's true. But the clock stopped ten minutes ago. That's Sid. And this gentleman?"

"Henry," Thalia provides. "Landlord and guardian."

Henry nods, then turns his attention to the doc.u.ment on the clipboard.

"He's a lawyer," Thalia warns.

"Uh-oh," says Philip. Then, "Just kidding. It's boilerplate, off the Web. All it says is, 'We didn't break anything or destroy your property.'"

Henry reads, purses his lips, nods, and pa.s.ses her the clipboard. She scrawls a signature, which Philip studies for a few seconds. "Thalia," he says. "That's an unusual name. Is it French?"

"Greek," says Thalia. "My mother's of Greek descent."

"I had one Greek grandparent," says Philip. My mother's mother. I grew up celebrating two Easters."

"Really? Me, too." They unwrap and inspect in silence, side by side at the counter, until Thalia asks, "So do most of your friends call you Philip or Dino?"

"Both. Either. Just when I think I've heard the end of it and I've been reincarnated as an adult, someone pops up from my past and I'm Dino again."

"Hey, Philip" says Sid. "We were due in Park Slope a half-hour ago."

Philip takes the clipboard, scribbles some numbers, tears off the top yellow sheet, and gives it to Thalia.

"Don't I need to write you a check?" she asks.

Henry doesn't hear the answer because vendor and customer have left the kitchen and are conferring by the front door. Sid does not follow. Henry asks him after a minute has pa.s.sed, "Is there more business to conduct?"

"Nope."

"She's kind of spoken for," Henry says. "Maybe you could tell him that."

"Maybe she's tellin' him right now."

Henry says, "I'm sure you don't have to stay in the kitchen." Sid slides his baseball cap back on his head and forward again. "Are you her father?"

"Stepfather," then thinks to add, "and I live upstairs."

"He's an okay guy. And smart. This is his day job."

"What does he do at night?"

"For work? He's a deejay."

"Oh," says Henry. "The real thing."

Henry doesn't know what defines real thing in that field. His only frame of reference is the freelancing radio disc jockeys who were hired to spin forty-fives at dances in his youth.

"He's got a following," says Sid. "Mostly East Village. But it's growin'."

"Do you do that, too?"

Sid laughs. "No. I do this. Days, and small jobs at night that I can do by myself. I've got a kid."

"You really should get insurance," says Henry. "You could charge more and do bigger jobs."

He shakes his head. "Not my call."

From the outer room comes a cheerful, "All set, dude!"

Sid tips his Mets cap and heads for the front door.

All set with what? Henry doesn't like this development at all.

"It isn't me being prudish," he explains, raising his voice to be heard above the vacuum cleaner. Thalia is cleaning up the detritus of packing materials, and Henry is trailing behind. "It's just that I know the signs-"

"Of what?"

"Of potential complications."

"If...?" she shouts.

"If? You can't mean that. Any minute now you're going to be publicly in love-nay, engaged-to Leif Dumont. You can't have a little thing on the side."

Thalia shuts off the vacuum and says, "Wow, cool," when the cord retracts with a loud swoosh.

"Maybe I'm wrong," Henry continues. "Maybe I was witness to nothing more than a gracious service person making pleasant conversation with his patron. Maybe you weren't aiding and abetting."

She points to the vacuum and asks, "Where does this go?"

"It's mine," he says. "I'll bring it back upstairs with me. You can borrow it anytime. Actually, Lidia will be giving this place the once-over Mondays and Thursdays."

"Thank you," says Thalia. "I'll reimburse you from my generous weekly housekeeping allowance."

"No, you won't."

Thalia links an arm through his and asks if his cappuccino machine is up and running.

"Absolutely! And I have paper cups and lids. I'll be right back."

"Don't be silly. I'll come with you."

On their way up the back stairway, Henry tells her that this pa.s.sageway connected the servants' quarters to the main house. Upstairs, Downstairs, Upper West Side version. He turns at the top step and says, "I can't quite believe you're here. It's just hitting me that you actually live downstairs."

"It's so great," says Thalia. "It's like Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase."

"Note the unlocked door," he says, "which will stay this way."

"I'll call first," she says.

After he's made their coffee, after he's led her to the library and he's lit the precise arrangement of logs and kindling in the fireplace, Henry says, "Again, it's not me being prudish or paternal. It's me being contractual with respect to your new friend."

"Leif?"

"Not Leif. The mover."

"Nope," she says. "Nothing to worry about."

"There wasn't an exchange of phone numbers?"

"Only because I checked the box that said he could use me as a reference."

"Is that wise?"

She sets her mug down on a Raisin in the Sun coaster after admiring it anew. "Okay. I'm not doing a good acting job here. Which might be a politer way of saying, I'm fibbing. But let me tell you why all of this is beside the point: Men don't follow up. You could tattoo your number on the palm of their hand and they still wouldn't call. They don't e-mail unless they've left a DVD at your place and want you to mail it back to Netflix. Okay, they send a text message, but it's What was the name of that bar you told me about in Williamsburg? If you run into one of them on the street he'll say, 'Oh, hi ... I was going to IM you. Maybe we can get together later this lifetime.'"

"This is very hard to believe," Henry says.

"Is it different for you? With your gang?"

Henry smiles. "We don't text message."

"Seriously, I did not mean to flirt back. But you might have noticed how attractive and charming he was for a straight guy."

"I might have," says Henry. "But here's the problem: Let's say he does call. You're not going to be able to say, 'I've signed up to be someone's girlfriend, but it's only a publicity stunt, so if you could keep that to yourself and call me in six months..."

Henry recognizes something in her face that her acting ability isn't masking-a war between her wanting to confess and wanting to protect him from the confession.

"You already told him," he guesses.

"Kind of..."

"A stranger you'd known for five minutes?"

"It looked like five minutes. But there were many hours of meaningful social intercourse at the other end. Then the ride over here took a half-hour. You learn a lot about someone from the way he reacts in heavy traffic. And would I be moving into a relative stranger's in-law apartment if I didn't have faith in my excellent judgment?"

"I'm listening," says Henry. "Nervously."

"Okay. This was very contractual: I made him swear on his mother's life that he'd never repeat what I'd told him."

"Which was what, exactly?"

"Mainly: That I had an acting gig coming up. That it involved a guy. It wasn't what it seemed. And he couldn't tell a soul."

"But you just finished telling me that men are utterly undependable-"