The Benefactor

by Sebastian Hampson

  He mightn’t have annoyed her so much today if he’d allowed her to see his apartment. The under-maintained bachelor pad of her imagination, as lifted from the one time she’d had the dubious privilege of seeing his dorm room in Boston. Not that Martha had ever been responsible for their apartment’s cleanliness—but it didn’t seem right, in her mind, for a man like Henry to be stuck alone in a home designed for a big family. With that in her arsenal, she might have been able to argue her case further. That he needed to sell, capitalise on the hot market, move somewhere more manageable, somewhere he’d be able to clear his head and find new employment.

  Of course, the biggest mistake he and Martha had made was not having kids. As the most curious party, Christine had brought the subject up over the years—at first without meaning to. Came up to New York for their wedding, which was predictably last-minute and rushed, an afterthought tacked onto their cohabitation, held out on their roof garden in the middle of summer. No sign of Martha’s parents. Instead, a handful of her brother’s old friends, who’d got drunk and shouted surprisingly inappropriate, fraternity-style abuse at him.

  She’d had dinner with Henry and Martha in a downtown restaurant not so different to this space. Lost in the excitement at seeing Henry married, no matter how dissatisfactory the circumstances, she’d blurted out a string of speculations. To which Henry had replied by announcing, grabbing at his wife’s hand on the tabletop and grinning like a chump while Christine faced them, that they had no immediate intention of becoming parents.

  Did they have a plan in mind? A timeframe? Christine had heard of people choosing not to have children, but wasn’t that just a frivolous phase?

  Though she’d wanted nothing more than to hear her brother try to justify himself, and he’d begun to speak, it was Martha who’d cut across him. So earnest, and in such a laboured way. Her brow furrowed, and she pushed her long, dark hair out of her face as though it were an irritating veil Christine had hung between them.

  It wasn’t her duty to raise a child, Martha had said, when people already depended on her for their survival. Adding another voice to those already clamouring for her attention, while she raised funds for the causes in their communities, would accomplish nothing. So impersonal, so pragmatic. Christine couldn’t fathom how her brother found those qualities attractive. How he could have sought them out.

  Though she felt for her brother’s present situation, Christine couldn’t help but see Martha’s absence as an opportunity. He wasn’t an old man—plenty of time remained for him to come around, to lose some of his worst habits. And delusions.

  ‘Can I get you folks anything?’ the waiter said—he must have noticed that they hadn’t exchanged a word in at least five minutes.

  ‘No food for me,’ she said. ‘I have lunch later. Hot water with lemon.’

  ‘Don’t make me eat on my own,’ Henry said.

  ‘Fine.’ She turned to the waiter. ‘Just…choose for me. Whatever costs less than fifty bucks.’

  ‘We’ll both have a mushroom omelette,’ Henry said. ‘Hold the cheese for her. Black coffee for me.’

  The waiter took their menus, snapping them shut harder than necessary. A line had formed at the door.

  ‘You sure you don’t want that sprinkled with caviar?’ Christine said, once they were alone again. ‘White truffles?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure.’ He’d become interested in his smartphone. Christine felt as though she were at lunch with one of her sons, except he was somehow even surlier. Remarkable. That must have taken some effort.

  ‘So you mentioned you have a working dinner tonight,’ she said. ‘Does this mean you’re back at the magazine in some capacity?’

  ‘No, that’s not what it means. I’m acting as a consultant for another publication.’

  She didn’t buy this for a second.

  ‘And before you ask,’ he continued, as she was about to probe into the details, ‘I’m not thinking about another career. I’d like for us not to discuss that again.’

  ‘You have to do something.’

  ‘Which is exactly what I’m doing.’

  Another silence. Christine had to marvel at how easy it was to let the talk die in an environment like this—the relentless hum of voices around them crept in and overtook the empty space. She saw her brother going out to these restaurants and bars, pretending he had somebody to meet, sitting there alone, hunched over his smartphone. Drinking. Enjoying the illusion that he was connected to these strangers, following the overheard snippets of their conversations. Waiting for a carbon copy of his wife to walk in and pick up the next round.

  He had to find somebody else. He wasn’t prepared to admit it to himself, and the process would be painful, but in the long run Christine felt the best assistance she could give her little brother was to set him up with the right person. Someone who wouldn’t drain him of all his good nature until there was none of it left.

  They abandoned their half-eaten omelettes and Henry made sure to leave a big tip. As they left the restaurant, they walked past diners who were taking photos on their phones of each other and their overflowing plates of lox and sturgeon and egg salad, bagels of every persuasion stacked in a tower. Henry wished he could take a seat at one of their tables and join in their morning.

  Christine chased a cab up West Broadway faster than he could follow her, shouting a reminder to be in touch about next week.

  Henry thought about her invitation as he walked home. Her lobbyist husband, Peter, was as watered-down as his whisky and sodas—the sort of man who would ask about the baseball. Whether Henry followed the Red Sox anymore, or if he was a full-blooded Mets man by now. (Henry didn’t give the slightest damn.) How the season was going. And his two nephews were impenetrable creatures, preoccupied with little more than their cars and their Californian weed and their no-hope rich friends. As far as he was aware, they’d never learned to cook or even iron a shirt. By which Christine didn’t seem at all troubled.

  Neither Henry nor Martha had wanted children. The subject rarely came up and, when it did, their conclusions had never changed. Their jobs were challenging, requiring their undivided attention.

  He had, of course, broached the subject with Martha. The first time they’d discussed it openly was after a dinner at Kurt’s house in Westchester, in 1988. One of Kurt’s children had refused to go to bed, interrupting their conversation, and while Kurt grew frustrated, neither he nor his disinterested wife did anything about it. Deal with it, they might as well have said, throwing it in the face of the childless and daring them to object.

  Henry complained to Martha on the way home, observing that Kurt’s ability to switch at will from depraved animal to domestic dullard wasn’t a skill he envied, and speculating about why they’d bothered, when they must have known they were going to be bad parents. While she didn’t have anything to add, her agreement was more reserved than the clarity with which she usually delivered her convictions, the affirmation coming in a murmur. Yes, but. But what?

  Henry was happy without the complication, or the obligation. Having been raised by a statue of a man, he couldn’t bring himself to inflict that ill-suited father-figure on another person.

  ‘You can’t do much right as a parent,’ he’d said to Martha, persisting with his point because she needed to understand. ‘And what you do wrong makes you accountable for however messed-up they turn out.’

  That made her laugh, at least.

  The disapproval of people like Christine had always hung around when they were at home. Henry was reminded of this as he returned to their apartment, with its excess of rooms—barely justifiable for two, ridiculous for one. Though he wanted to keep working on the 1986 chapter of his memoirs, Henry had become distracted. A purer version of them had existed, and he had the memories to prove it to himself. But that version hadn’t crystallised until they left the country.

  THE drive from Geneva to Ronchamp took three hours, winding through cool, nondescript countryside. Two-lane highway
, for the most part, with an armour-plated sky and many small, sleepy towns as the backdrop. Their car was a rented BMW with a raspy, worn-out drive belt. Not the convertible speedster of Henry’s imagination, and not the Provençal scenery of vineyards and lavender fields he’d pictured for his first European excursion.

  He left most of the driving to Martha, appreciating the smooth way she attacked corners without slowing down and her steady grip on the steering wheel. A relief after his own jerky driving, which erred on the side of caution. She must have learned to drive in Charleston, perhaps on the sleepy back streets of Mount Pleasant, or on the endless causeways she’d once described that stretched across the marsh out to Sullivan’s Island. And not with a father who lost his cool every time she missed a gear change.

  He’d decided long ago not to ask much about her childhood. Though she could make the South Carolinian landscape come alive with her vivid descriptions, she didn’t offer much about herself—who she’d been in that environment—or about her family. He didn’t push her for more, assuming that she preferred what he preferred: being themselves, in the moment, with each other.

  He tried releasing information about his own childhood, about his father, who’d always wanted Henry to stand around and help with home handiwork projects, snapping into a rage whenever his indifferent son failed to hold a plank level or knocked over a can of paint.

  Though Martha asked questions and expressed some sympathy, she would never open up about her parents in the same way. Southern reserve, Henry supposed. But he liked to think that they were with each other in small part to escape their upbringings. He’d met her parents, Cathy and Gus, only last year, for dinner at the Plaza Hotel. (They wouldn’t dream of coming downtown to see the bohemian squalor their daughter supposedly lived in.) Warm and charming people, he’d thought, operating within the confines of good manners and better taste, but with no vision, no real thoughts outside themselves.

  She had a younger brother, too, whom he’d never met. He supposed there had to be a reason for that, because she never talked about him, once mentioning in passing that he worked in the Secretary of Defense’s office at the Pentagon.

  Martha had brought Henry to Geneva on a work trip, with a weekend free on either side to allow for a couple of getaways, and had surprised him this morning with the idea of this long, impractical day trip—to see one of Le Corbusier’s most renowned works, the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut. Henry had mentioned Le Corbusier’s name in front of Martha perhaps once or twice, and had never told her how he loved his work. He sometimes felt that Martha could reach inside him—that she could separate his true passions from the fleeting ones by analysing how he spoke about them: his choice of words, his body language.

  They were engaged to be married, as of two months ago. No date set and no discussion with their families. Henry glanced at her ring, standing out from the steering wheel. A clunky sapphire surrounded by diamonds. Slightly misjudged, he thought now.

  ‘I feel bad,’ Henry said. ‘You’ve organised this so you’ll be stuck on the road all day. And from what I’ve read there’s not a lot to do in Ronchamp once we’ve seen the chapel.’

  ‘Ah.’ She had that look of irrepressible self-satisfaction, the one he loved and wished he could capture for later reference.

  ‘What is it?’

  She pulled her sunglasses down, her lips thin and strained as she tried not to crack.

  ‘If you don’t tell me I’ll tickle your ribs again and we’ll crash into that herd of cows.’

  ‘Oh really?’ She laughed. ‘Because I think I’d swerve around them and then I’d break your neck, buster. We’re going to Burgundy tonight. I booked a hotel and a restaurant in Puligny-Montrachet.’

  Henry’s first thought was that he hadn’t brought a change of clothes, and that he wasn’t dressed for whatever Michelin-starred restaurant she’d chosen. At least, he hoped that was the sort of restaurant she’d chosen.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘aren’t you slick. What did I do to deserve all this?’

  ‘I felt bad that you’d be stuck on your own this week while I’m at work.’

  Henry’s instincts told him this wasn’t the real reason. But if he’d learned anything from Martha, it was that he shouldn’t dwell on her motives. Her intentions were always pure. He’d seen her on the street from their window, coming home from work one day, with a skin-and-bones mastiff pup wrapped in her leather jacket. Neither their lack of space nor Henry’s likely objection had crossed her mind. And for that reason he hadn’t been able to get angry about it.

  Though their life together in New York was steady, and Henry couldn’t justify complaining about it, they needed a new apartment. He didn’t want to raise the point, given his lack of progress at Look Closer and Martha’s risible salary. She talked about it, though. The one-bedroom on Jane Street, with its view of a brick alley and its piles of shared books, felt wrong for a married couple.

  Every week she openly fantasised about being somewhere different, from a townhouse in some Brooklyn neighbourhood to a log cabin in the Adirondacks to a self-sufficient farm in Connecticut. Henry favoured a relatively modest apartment on Park Avenue South or Central Park West, not because he liked those areas but because the right address would inspire envy in the right people.

  He couldn’t admit that to Martha, though. Not when her choices stood higher and prouder than his own.

  ‘There,’ Henry said, pointing to a hunchbacked woman in a headscarf tending to her cattle in a field. ‘That’s you in a few years, once you’re settled on the farm. Take note—it’s a harrowing window into the future.’

  ‘You say that like I was joking. The way humanity’s going, we’re better off figuring out how to grow our own food now, before we’re forced to live off the land again. Or whatever remains of it.’

  ‘You’d be happy in a place like this? Cut off from everything? Can’t say I’m compelled by your line of argument, Ms Beaucanon. People like you need to be plugged into the system or they’d lose their minds. I’ve seen it. Same symptoms as withdrawal.’

  ‘People like us, you mean. Honestly, I’d even live here in the Jura canton if it meant I got to see how the agricultural communities of the people here organised themselves. And…all right, I’d probably drive up to Paris for the occasional weekend. There’s no point denying yourself a variety of experiences when they’re all accessible.’

  Henry slumped in his seat, the road map folded in one hand in case they needed it. He wanted to ask her if she really meant half of what she said, but that would require more energy than he had.

  A sudden jerk jolted Henry awake. The engine had stopped running and Martha was steering them onto the shoulder.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ he said.

  ‘Something made us stall. Must be the timing belt that was making all the noise.’

  They got out of the car to look at the engine, Martha more the mechanic than Henry could ever be in her puffy bomber jacket and wraparounds. She popped the hood like one, too, then stood with her hands on her hips while Henry peered over her shoulder.

  The timing belt had snapped, one frayed end visible between the camshaft and the piston. Martha reached into the exposed bowels, getting oil on her hands, and pulled the whole belt out in one easy movement. She held it at arm’s length, horrified, as though it were a piece of Henry’s nervous system she’d just surgically removed.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s limited our options.’

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Unless you have some means of stitching up rubber, we wait.’

  ‘How far are we from Ronchamp?’

  ‘Too far. I doubt we’ll make it.’

  Henry waited for a car to come by and flagged it down. He tried his limited French and a few gestures on them before Martha came over and introduced herself in flawless German, asking them to send a tow truck from the nearest town.

  When the car had driven off, they found a clear patch on the grass embankment and s
ettled down to wait. Henry lit a cigarette and offered one to Martha, which she declined.

  ‘Tell me about this chapel,’ Martha said. ‘Why is it so special?’

  Henry could’ve mapped out the entire design, had she handed him a sketchpad. He could’ve written an essay about it, could’ve quoted directly from Hans Wingler and the other Bauhaus critics. Walter Gropius. Free of untruths and ornamentation. Purity and truth. Naked forms. Yet no less imaginative, no less daring, than the most magnificent Baroque cathedral. If anything, its unpretentious, organic bluntness achieved a transcendence, a soaring spirituality, unlike any traditional house of worship, its sweeping roof rising in harmony with the slope of the Vosges in the background.

  He could try to explain to Martha what this chapel meant, why it was so important, but he couldn’t without experiencing it. Everything about great architecture was experience. He’d been dying for that. Being able to pay his respects to something as simple as that chapel, something they could both enjoy for unspoken, secular reasons that should have been contradictory but weren’t. Being struck down by the nameless power of space, into which they could project themselves, one at a time.

  ‘It’s not so special,’ he said at last, ‘not really. It’s a building. We see enough of them.’

  ‘Remember when I asked what you always wanted to be?’ she said. ‘After I’d been through your book collection. And the word architect didn’t come up once in that conversation.’

  ‘It didn’t have to. I wanted to be an architect until I realised I couldn’t be one.’

  ‘Which is a massive cop-out. I always thought you were better suited to creating than commentary. And look at you: you’ve ended up on the sidelines. That’s why you’re so miserable at the magazine. You could go back to school—I know I’m not making much money, but if we stayed at Jane Street a while longer, I could cover the rent.’

  Henry turned away from her, feeling as though she’d dug into his flesh and was picking away heedlessly at his insides. ‘Martha, I’m thirty-three. Going back to school would be the real cop-out.’