The Benefactor

by Sebastian Hampson

  A man whose importance could never be shaken. She didn’t understand why somebody as enlightened as Beth was indulging him.

  With no passion driving the decision, Maggie wouldn’t have taken this job unless Beth had coaxed her into it. If nothing else, she enjoyed working with a friend, somebody who could highlight the absurdity of what they were doing and band together in united disdain for both management and clientele, rigid power structures that they were.

  ‘Who is that guy?’ she said, when Beth had a moment and they were idling together. ‘Obviously thinks he’s someone if he can brush off strangers that rudely.’

  ‘Mr Calder. I hope you realise he’s just about our best customer right now. Has to be treated with respect.’

  ‘That’s a joke, right? I’m pretty sure the last person he respected was about twice as influential and half as desperate.’

  Beth busied herself in a tray of glassware, distracted, pained. ’I’m serious. Keep it together.’

  ‘Wow, okay.’ Maggie tried to get into her field of vision again. ‘Whose side are you on here?’

  ‘Yours, obviously. I want you to do well. Doesn’t pay to make enemies on your first night.’

  ‘All right, noted. What are you doing later? We should steal a bottle and go somewhere beautiful.’

  She felt around for Beth’s hand, squeezing it. The gesture was returned, after a moment’s contemplation.

  Settling in for his second glass of the malbec, Henry watched the two young women as they talked in hushed voices at the other end of the bar. He couldn’t tell whether they were fighting or flirting. At one point they both glanced up and caught him staring at them. Beth turned away immediately, but Maggie scowled and held his gaze.

  Uncomfortable, he settled his bill.

  With no reason to hang around and nowhere else to go, he soon returned to his top-floor apartment on Bleecker, between Thompson and Sullivan, to find the afternoon’s inactivity evidenced by an empty whisky glass and a half-finished bagel. He had to eat better—and sleep better.

  But the prospect of sleep didn’t appeal now: too abrupt an ending to a day that must have contained more than it seemed to. He’d spent hours going through old issues of Her and Look Closer, all of them returned to the neat shelves of his numerical archive. It made him wonder why he, like so many people, had to surround himself with so much stuff. Was it to counter his own insubstantiality?

  Henry settled in the Eames recliner by the windows and fell into a fitful half-sleep, waking occasionally to the view of the skyscrapers encased in their glass frame, the centrepiece of his private gallery. The lights of the Bank of America Tower shifted through the spectrum while everything else remained constant: red, blue, green, yellow.

  They glinted, spectral, against Henry’s window. Then they faded into dawn.

  EVERY day began with black coffee, followed by work. Not that Henry was really working, but it was an old habit he hadn’t kicked yet. The caffeine jolted him into action, which once he would have seized and built into a productive day. Meetings, emails, conference calls to London, more calls to the West Coast, meetings, lunches, drinks, dinner. A few more drinks. Now he channelled the energy he’d once put into that seventy- or eighty-hour work week into a single project, on which progress remained painfully slow.

  Henry had never been convinced by words. He was a man more attuned to the punchy headline and the snappy caption than to anything especially cerebral. It was images his market wanted—every focus group and survey said so—and he’d cast himself as the alchemist who could divine new trends before anyone else saw them coming, distilling their essence from the ether and capturing them on film.

  The pinnacle of his accomplishments in that field occupied a particular place on his desk: a framed blow-up from the original negative. The iconic high-white shot of Iman posing with a mastiff in nothing but a pair of Versace boots—the photograph that effectively paid for his second floor. Yes, that was a culturally significant image, for which he deserved credit as the mastermind. Unless these provocative nudes were now associated with nobody’s name but the model and the photographer, his old friend Timothy Fogel.

  No matter what the rest of the world thought, his eye had been second to none, his reputation as an art director formidable. His achievements at the magazine were perhaps easier to appreciate now they were effectively sealed off in a gallery display. But he had stories to tell.

  Some of them were better than others. Some of them involved betrayal, cruelty. Resignations that came out of nowhere, via email.

  ‘You have to give yourself more space,’ he heard Martha say.

  He’d received one such unpleasant email on his smartphone in the middle of a pleasant dinner at Mas, distracting him as they set down the main course. Sautéed lamb’s brain with sorrel mayonnaise for him, eel brandade for her.

  ‘Turn your phone off, Henry,’ she’d said. ‘Stop being so generous with your attention.’

  ‘You think that’s easy?’

  ‘No, I don’t. But I’m trying, for a minute, to appreciate that I’m in an interesting restaurant and about to enjoy a compelling meal with someone I love. Look around you.’

  Henry didn’t understand what she wanted him to see. He turned the phone facedown and tried to take in their surroundings: the plush chairs, the polished timber tabletops and schist details on the walls; the wine cellar encased in glass in the centre of the dining room, every familiar label on display. He saw the offal on his plate. A tender part of the anatomy that, he decided now it was in front of him, not confined to the crisp typeface of the menu, shouldn’t really be eaten. And he saw a room full of diners, most of whom were also attacking their phones.

  Usually Martha made him feel special, even exceptional—as if they were tuned in to a signal nobody else had picked up.

  ‘Am I missing something?’ he said.

  ‘No. But I’m sitting next to someone different now.’

  Funny how that conversation had stayed with him. He couldn’t remember what else they’d talked about, though, or how he’d responded.

  But none of this belonged in the memoirs. Too personal. It was difficult, when he sat down to write about his work, to stop his mind wandering off towards other memories. Childhood. His mother. She was out there, in a Massachusetts nursing home barely a mile away from where he’d grown up in Waltham, an empty shell after suffering a stroke five years earlier, swiftly followed by dementia.

  He used to enjoy hanging around her, when he was very young. Watching as she made preserves and followed Julia Child on the television, or as she rearranged the rooms, lost in thought while she decided how many inches this chintzy end table should be moved in that direction. He’d always wanted to understand where that deep contemplation of such trivial things could have come from.

  But something happened when he grew older. Any desire to understand was compressed, tamped down—her life now seeming conventional and unfulfilled when compared with what the outside world had to offer.

  Suddenly aware that he’d finished his coffee without typing a single word, Henry forced himself to refocus, returning to his desk and clapping his hands. He liked this desk—a pane of frosted glass, commissioned from a Japanese designer, which he kept completely clean to avoid distraction. He’d read enough about minimalist aesthetics—Bauhaus and wabi-sabi and the like—to know how everything should be harmonised.

  He checked this thought. No, not wabi-sabi. He was thinking of iki—a completely different principle.

  The precise lines of mid-century modernist philosophy defined the rest of his apartment, his haven. A former pre-war walk-up converted into a piece of the world’s most expensive real estate, complete with retrofitted elevator, his penthouse space on the eighth floor was a seamless combination of old loft and new additions. The sort of home you often saw in New York Times features. Unique, sought-after, with the added benefit of its ties to a more authentic time in the city’s history.

  His floor stuck out s
lightly above the townhouses on either side—a peak in Manhattan’s mid-rise valley. Panes of glass framed an unobstructed view up to the Empire State and down to the new Freedom Tower. A strange mirror of its Art Deco forefather. Close to a hundred years between them and the new tower didn’t stand much taller.

  Falling somewhere between these stylistic ends of the skyline, Henry had fashioned this apartment after his favourite architectural masterpieces. The Stahl House in Hollywood. Richard Neutra’s pavilions. A clean glass cube that floated high above the crisscross of streets and squares below, secluded and airy. A slice of California in the cramped gloom of Manhattan.

  The final result after many years of planning, every detail mattered, each designer object catalogued in Henry’s mental inventory. But the big, surprising features were the most effective. A downstairs terrace and an upstairs roof garden, planted out with many shrubs and trees, capitalised on the views, though they didn’t warrant a spread in the Times in their present condition: fallen into a state of neglect, overgrown with weeds. Henry had never been much of a gardener.

  Though he couldn’t deny his fortune, Henry questioned it. He clung to this apartment, all the while wondering if he deserved it now—if it shouldn’t belong to someone else. Someone who would enjoy these views, rather than resenting them as reminders of how he used to spend his weekend mornings.

  He and Martha always got up early to carve out a few hours of peace, before the flood of shopping lists and phone calls and board papers could catch up. They had their coffee and bagels on the good china, the Bernardaud breakfast set trimmed with silver. Out on the roof, watching the city come alive beneath them. The sunrise burning the skyscrapers orange before fading to grey. Martha’s hair drying in the fresh air. Her cracked lips catching on the rim of her cup, slipping. Leaving no smudges.

  His mind was wandering again. Henry snapped himself to attention and tried to focus on the empty screen before him. This proved futile. He’d expected the words to fall out of him, naturally, as though they’d been backlogged for years and simply needed the gate to be lifted. So far, it had been a struggle. Perhaps he needed to cajole the memories out. So instead of writing this morning, he decided, he would trawl through the shoeboxes beneath his desk, full of press clippings and photographs from formal dinners and awards ceremonies (the Met Gala, Fashion Week), hoping they might jog his memory.

  Flicking through them, Henry was struck by how little these mementos stirred him. As he extracted a puff piece cut from the Los Angeles Times about Her’s 1994 Oscar after-party, an old snapshot of Martha fell from between the pages. He was surprised—Henry hadn’t kept many pictures of her, and even fewer of himself. He held it up to the light. Martha was beautiful, but not what one would describe as photogenic. She rarely stopped moving and never posed, becoming a different, and not always so attractive, person in every frame. A colleague of hers had once claimed Martha’s expressive face was a problem in boardroom discussions. Henry could see why. She wore a distinct grimace when she knew herself to be right but the rest of the world disagreed.

  Now, with the shot of Iman still winking at him from the background, he confronted that same grimace. Martha was in bed, naked, propped up against the pillows, her glasses on, reading a report on child labour in Pakistan. This must have been when she was interviewing for the executive board at UNICEF, around 2006 or 2007. Her breasts hung out accidentally, the result more unfortunate than erotic.

  The phone rang. Christine. After debating whether or not to pick up, Henry acceded to the interruption. Though he didn’t admit it, he wanted to hear a familiar voice.

  ‘Hey, Chris,’ he said. ‘They let you off for good behaviour yet? The holidays were coming up soon, weren’t they?’

  ‘Hmm? Thanksgiving’s not till next week, kid.’ His sister laughed, nervously, as though his slight miscalculation of days and weeks was a matter worthy of concern. ‘Can’t come soon enough. I’m inundated. So over it.’

  ‘Aha. Is that why you called?’

  ‘I’m in town for a deposition. Last-minute day trip, ugh. Thought we should grab dinner—home-cooked, perhaps. It must be your turn.’ Henry sighed. ‘What’s up? You have plans?’

  ‘That’s no notice, Chris. I have a working dinner.’

  ‘Really? That’s great to hear. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a coffee. I’m between meetings, and I’m in the neighbourhood. You’re at home right now?’

  ‘I…yes.’

  ‘I’ll swing by in twenty minutes.’

  ‘That’s not going to work.’ He thought about the whisky and wine glasses lined up by the sink. The empty refrigerator. ‘I told you I’m busy.’

  ‘That’s no excuse. We haven’t seen each other in so long. You can’t spare half an hour to talk? That’s all I have.’

  ‘Meet me at Cipriani on West Broadway,’ he said automatically, as though he were inviting a client to lunch. ‘Wait, no. Sadelle’s.’

  ‘Fine. Did you get my card, by the way?’

  Henry stood up and walked with the phone over to the pile of mail on the sideboard. He sorted through various bills, some of them addressed to Martha, until he found an unopened envelope. One of those handcrafted ten-dollar deals, sealed with the Papyrus logo embossed in fake wax, presumably to compensate for the lack of a gift.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, as he read it: she was sorry not to be there, stuck as she was in the middle of a Supreme Court case, defending a coal company against wrongful death charges, something about carcinogens discharged into a river—she didn’t want to bore him with the details. She knew he would be celebrating in style with his friends.

  He hadn’t. He’d treated it as he treated every other day.

  ‘Nice sentiment, thanks.’

  ‘Did you spend the day with anyone special?’

  ‘What, like Timothy? He’s in Italy.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean like Timothy. I mean someone special.’

  Henry prepared to respond, stopping and starting a few times. Then he threw the card into his desk drawer and closed it.

  ‘I’ll see you in twenty minutes,’ he said.

  ‘Fifteen.’

  Henry had been to Sadelle’s before, for one of his last ever brunch meetings, and it occurred to him as he walked down LaGuardia Place, past a string of bakeries and coffee shops appealing to the NYU crowd, that he didn’t have the first idea where to get a simple cup of coffee around here. Nothing about Sadelle’s was simple. The space was cavernous industrial chic and exposed brick, the paint on the metal chairs intentionally peeling. Candelabras lined up above the banquettes. And the food. Humble Jewish deli fare flung into the SoHo stratosphere.

  He knew Christine wouldn’t find it impressive. But that wasn’t the point. He hoped, as he’d always hoped since she first started visiting him in New York, that the places they went would correct the misapprehensions about him she’d carried since childhood.

  Yet few knew him better, deep down. Nobody else tended to call these days, and sometimes, after she hung up, Henry felt adrift. Not in a wide, open sea, but confined to a bay, a secluded slice of the coastline where he could float, undisturbed. Numb.

  As Henry had expected, she arrived ten minutes late, appearing to have raided Hillary Clinton’s wardrobe, with the addition of what Henry recognised as a Lacroix scarf draped like a shawl over her shoulders—a crucifix on her necklace peeking from beneath it. She embraced Henry as though he were a brace she’d fallen into, transferring all her stiffness to him. A slipped disc meant she wasn’t sleeping, and it showed. Her eyes wouldn’t stop moving, sliding around in drooping lids as they tried to examine him. She had a matron’s face, hidden beneath layers of the same expensive make-up that used to get full-page spreads in Her, worn by celebrities before it trickled down to the consumer.

  ‘Well,’ she said, clutching her purse in her lap, leaning forward in the cracked leather banquette in a way that made Henry feel her discomfort threefold. ‘This is certainly trendy. There wasn’t
anywhere quieter?’

  ‘Not really. It’s New York. When I’m in DC, you get to choose where we go for coffee.’

  ‘I’m hoping that’ll be soon. You’re overdue for a visit.’

  ‘I was there for Christmas and your birthday party.’

  ‘Yeah, so you haven’t seen the twins in almost a year. They’ll be around next week—dying to see their uncle.’

  ‘Who, the kids?’ He snorted. ‘Wow. Can’t say I share your optimism. How’re they doing?’

  The tired crease of a smile made its first appearance. ‘So great. Harvard accepted Jake’s capstone for review, and they’re all over the athletics awards. You know…the usual. Almost reminds me of when you were in college. Almost.’

  ‘Thanks a lot. I don’t have to tell you you’re sounding more and more like Mom every time I see you.’

  ‘So long as I’m not looking more and more like her.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  Christine inclined her head and busied herself with the menu.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I was kidding.’

  ‘I know you were.’

  The way she said it didn’t exactly imply understanding. Henry couldn’t recall the last time they’d been able to talk free of insinuations—if there had been one. The strangest thing about this dynamic was Henry had felt, on rare occasions, flashes of understanding from his sister. Not since they were much younger. But he couldn’t trust his own judgement there when she’d changed so drastically.

  Satisfied with the silence her response had produced, Christine glanced down the menu, which had no marked prices and a conspicuous credit cards only printed on each page. Baeri caviar offered as a garnish for every dish. A friend must have recommended this place to her brother, and she had a strong idea of who that could have been.