The Henry Calder who’d been described in these memoirs so far wouldn’t have followed any trend. Perhaps if he’d listened to Martha when she suggested Brooklyn in 1989 he would be able to make that claim about himself more convincingly. At the very least more truthfully. Could he make up a complete alternate history for himself? Would that defeat the purpose?
As his thoughts returned to the fundraiser with Tina Brown, Henry tried to remember what else had happened that night. Martha must have noticed how little he was getting out of that British expatriate media crowd, because she’d suggested, gently, that they leave before the speeches started. And she’d taken him to a diner on some nondescript block in Midtown, where they’d sat at the bar like the couple in Nighthawks, and they’d had matzo ball soup and sodas. It was one of the least insightful, most carefree nights he could recall in her company. They’d talked about so many dull things—films, music, where to go for that year’s vacation, before she went to Geneva in November. Her thoughts on the community gardens set up on the Lower East Side by the Green Guerrillas, and whether they should join that movement.
Henry hadn’t heard of the Green Guerrillas or the gardens, which Martha said had taken over abandoned lots in the last decade. Without either of them making a decision, and despite their awareness of the dangers involved, they’d ended up walking all the way down Park Avenue in the dark. He’d never gone so far by foot before, and though his feet ached from the stiff dress shoes he’d chosen to wear, he didn’t think to try to hail a cab. Martha had a joint in her handbag, and they smoked it together while they walked, and they kept talking, talking about nothing much, hypnotised by each other.
Midtown turned into Gramercy, and on to Astor Place, where they stopped by Tony Rosenthal’s forbidding cube sculpture. They spent a while pushing it around on its hidden central pole—something they’d seen other people doing. The sculpture was so heavy that one person couldn’t make it budge on their own.
Thunder rolled in the distance. He’d forgotten a storm was on the forecast.
‘We should go home,’ he said as they stood together on the corner of St Mark’s Place and Lafayette Street, watching the cabs cut across each other and the students smoking dope on the hoods of Cadillacs and kicking soccer balls by the subway kiosk.
‘Come with me. I want to show you one of those gardens.’
He couldn’t argue with her. She took his hand and led him down St Mark’s Place, across a succession of shadier and shadier streets until they got to a patch of green shoved between a dense stack of tenements. Locked away behind a gate.
‘The guerrillas threw seed bombs at this abandoned lot,’ Martha said, her make-up running a little in the summer heat. ‘Over the fence because they couldn’t get into it. Fertilised the whole space. The city only gave it up to the community a few years ago. Probably because nobody wants to develop this far east.’
‘And you want to trek all the way over here, every week, to tend a tiny slice of land?’
‘I thought we could live around here. It’s going places.’
‘You want to squat with the crack addicts? I’m getting nervous just standing here.’
She gripped his hand tighter. ‘It’s not that dangerous. I’ve got the pooch. And I’ve got you.’
‘I hate to think which of us is more intimidating.’
He pressed himself up to her leather jacket—so wrong for the event they’d just been to, but so right for now. Her dangerous breasts, the ones he liked to explore with the tip of his nose and his wet, drooping upper lip, as though he was surveying for a map of their surface. He could have illustrated them in a perfect schematic, if he’d been a better draughtsman.
‘Dare you to jump the fence,’ she said.
The night’s disappointments had made him powerless to any suggestion. He did her one better by taking the fence in a running jump, clambering over the bars with a primal wildness, and trampling somebody’s potato plant. She followed him calmly, declining his hand when he offered it to her, landing weightlessly.
And then the clouds opened. Henry was drunk and high enough that the rain felt like rubber pellets on his sensitive skin. Without thinking about it, he removed his jacket and shirt and began wrestling Martha into a vegetable patch, which was overgrown with weeds. The mulch beneath them smelled revolting, and as the rain came down harder it turned soft, dirtying their skin and their clothes. They pushed each other around in it, until Henry couldn’t distinguish between the taste, the smell, the feeling of Martha’s body and that of undergrowth and compost.
‘God,’ he breathed, reaching into her jeans and stretching the zipper until he had space to work with. ‘God, I love you.’
He hadn’t written a word. He’d been staring out the window at the city below him, letting it play out in his memory. In all these years, Henry hadn’t returned to that community garden. It might be gone by now. He needed to go and find it, to remind himself that it really had happened.
Closing his computer, Henry wrapped himself in an unassuming overcoat and left the apartment, and the smothering feeling of dissatisfaction he got there.
Though the streets of the Village also reminded him of Martha, they hadn’t stopped changing. A cluster of architectural styles rubbed shoulders over a few short blocks. Greek revival here, fifties modernism there, the Italianate turrets of NYU and the Deco giant One Fifth Avenue presiding over them. Each one contributing its piece to the neighbourhood’s muddled history, characters at a boozy funeral trading memories of their late friend, good Old New York, that debauched fellow whose partying days had finally caught up with him.
Henry headed east, away from his usual haunts, towards Alphabet City. He still thought of that area as too edgy, though it was now as safe (and expensive) as any other part of Manhattan. Disgusting and depressing when he and Martha had wandered these streets, there had been nothing to herald its coming transformation. He remembered trying to use an ATM on St Mark’s Place in the middle of winter in 1991, and finding he couldn’t open the door because a crack addict’s corpse was propped up against it.
Though it had changed plenty, he enjoyed the thrill, the stale hint of danger that he got walking up 2nd Avenue, towards where he thought the garden was. Vomit in doorways, garbage bins overflowing. Two frat brothers with popped collars took up the sidewalk in front of him, leaning off each other. He sidestepped them and walked ahead, fast.
‘Nice Commons, old man,’ one of them shouted, referring to the ridiculously expensive sneakers Henry suddenly wished he’d neither bought nor worn.
6th Street. That was it. Two blocks down from St Mark’s Place. Though no recognisable shop or restaurant fronts remained, he could feel his way through the general geography.
His stride slowed halfway down 6th Street. A small crowd had gathered outside a bar as two cops restrained a young woman dressed in a baggy man’s leather jacket over hot pants, despite the cold weather. As Henry approached, he recognised the woman. It was Beth’s new friend, from the wine bar, struggling against the cops, a trash bag in her hands beneath her sharp, crimson nails. The crowd was impassive, almost bored, a few of them recording the incident on their smartphones.
‘Let me go,’ she shouted. ‘You patriarchal pricks want a scene? I’ll give you a fucking scene.’
She threw the trash bag onto the hood of the nearest car, the contents exploding and seeping across the windshield.
‘Yeah, keep recording.’ She addressed the crowd. ‘This is the face of militant capitalism. They want to silence our voices.’
The cops got her up against the car and took out a set of handcuffs.
Henry was more amused than he thought he should have been. He felt an urge to do something, even though he barely knew her and had no more reason to help her than anyone else.
But he couldn’t stop himself.
‘Pardon me, officers,’ Henry said. ‘I know this woman. What’s going on?’
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, recognising him. ‘Get
out of here. You’re as bad as the rest of them.’
‘Sure don’t envy you, buddy,’ one of the officers said while his colleague continued to pin her down. ‘She was jumping on the roof of that car. We’re throwing her in the drunk tank.’
‘No, you’re not,’ she said, still struggling, doing nothing to discredit their charge of intoxication. ‘I’m telling you people the truth and you can’t handle it.’
‘I’ll take her home,’ Henry said, surprised at the genuine concern he heard in his voice. ‘Less work for you,’ he added, ‘am I right? If she keeps struggling, the whole thing’s going to end up online, and you don’t want that.’
The officer weighed this up and then turned his attention to the crowd. ‘Show’s over, folks,’ he said. ‘Move on—nothing more to see here.’ Once they’d dispersed, he approached the woman. ‘Ma’am,’ he said. ‘You know this gentleman?’
She stared at Henry, her head pressed against the roof of the car, next to the dent her heels had left in it, her eyes slipping around in their sockets. She must have come to terms, in that moment, with the reality of the situation. Henry supposed the choice was between one patriarchal prick and another.
‘Yeah, I know him. I’ll go with him.’
Before they could change their minds, Henry took out his billfold and silently slipped a few notes into each officer’s hand.
THE story seemed to write itself. Young artist, no resources to speak of, finds employment at a mid-tier Manhattan wine bar. Lives far out on the wrong side of Utica Avenue because her dollar stretches no closer. Ends up in a situation beyond her control, takes whatever amphetamine happens to be in fashion and makes a spectacle of herself.
Henry came to these conclusions easily. He’d lived in this city long enough to know how it treated people, how they slotted together. No matter how hard they tried to be different, the story was always the same. He could have probed into the lives of his entry-level workers at Her, if he’d chosen, but he never made time for it. That was the most essential New York truth: not that nobody cared, but that nobody had the time to care.
It went beyond that, though. Henry had the time, now. And although this young woman was tidied away, sleeping it off in the guestroom, he wanted her gone.
Generosity often gave the wrong impression, kindness mistaken for weakness. Which was why he shouldn’t have involved himself in the first place, why he shouldn’t have helped her along 6th Street, tried to draw words out of her. What had she taken, did she need to go to the hospital, did she have insurance, and so on. When this garnered no more response than laboured breathing and a ‘Leave me alone, asshole,’ Henry decided that the most efficient way of dealing with this problem was to get it under his own roof.
That was how he evaluated the situation. As Henry waited for the girl to get up, he began to wonder how it would appear to an outsider—and before his eyes the indignant faces of a grand jury materialised out of nowhere, listening as she told them of the seedy old man who’d picked her up off the street and led her into his sinister pleasure pad. Him in an orange jumpsuit, his attempts to explain silenced in a hail of condemnation.
If not to a full jury, the question was whether he could explain it to himself. And this question spurred on a panicky moment, forcing him to pace around the living room several times, combing through his justifications. He didn’t find her attractive. Number one. Number two…his intentions weren’t suspect. Not really. Although that depended on the objective definition of suspect. He’d intervened positively, saved her from herself—nothing sexual in that motivation. If anything he did to a young woman could be considered completely free of sexual motivation, on a subconscious level…again, mileage varied.
Number three. He simply hadn’t done anything. I swear, your honour, he almost muttered to himself, listening out for sounds of movement in the guestroom. He’d had plenty of opportunities, over the years, to take advantage of models at photo shoots, of cocktail waitresses and air hostesses. And he hadn’t gone there. Not in any serious, damaging way.
The girl emerged from the guestroom at midday, wearing Martha’s old bathrobe. She spent a while going around the living room, swaying as she poked her nose up against his collection of artworks and books and records. It all must have gone over her head. Nobody who lived so recklessly could have understood the significance of his apartment and his possessions, though he imagined, as an aspirational artist with a show in Chelsea, that she was impressed.
Henry had taken refuge at his desk, pretending to type at his manuscript when in fact he’d lost himself in an endless game of solitaire. It gave him an excuse to ignore the figure now standing awkwardly behind him, reflected in the big Henning Koppel vase on his desk. Distorted by the bulge in the silver surface, the results of a night out were exaggerated to grotesque effect. The swollen lips, the bloodshot eyes. The creases from Henry’s good linen all down her cheeks.
She wasn’t saying anything, which surprised him—instead hanging around, waiting for him to explain himself.
‘You’re up,’ he said at last, turning to face her. ‘Good. You slept a long time.’
‘What the hell am I doing here?’
‘You don’t remember? No, I guess you wouldn’t.’
‘It’s Henry, right?’
‘Yes. Henry Calder. Not that we were ever introduced.’
‘Beth told me your name. And she told me to watch out for you. I didn’t think this was what she meant.’
‘You’d be waking up in the drunk tank right now if I hadn’t stepped in. Seriously—jumping on a car roof? What were you thinking?’
‘It seemed like the best way of expressing how I feel about those people who were watching. That area used to have its tongue in its cheek, back when my aunt ran a consignment store there. Now it’s full of the stars of Rich Kids of Beverly Hills and their Snap Pack acolytes, and serious…’ she searched for words, ‘…deep-thinking graphic designers with fucking…vintage Mercedes, parked over two spaces. They can’t handle their trash anymore, so I…threw it at them.’
She was clearly struggling with basic functions—the impassioned words slid out in a slurred lump that he had to spend a while interpreting. Henry wanted to give her credit for that passion, though he didn’t understand the world she described on any level. Whatever it was—whoever the ‘Snap Pack’ were—missing any reference annoyed him as a man who’d made it his business (his entire livelihood) to be in touch with these trends.
He assumed, on that basis, that she couldn’t have really known what she was talking about.
‘From what I could gather,’ he said, ‘you’d lost your wallet and couldn’t get home. You weren’t in any fit state to be left alone, so I brought you here.’
She narrowed her eyes at him, though they were so glazed-over the effect wasn’t quite successful. ‘That’s…strange. And unnecessary.’
‘You’d rather be in a filthy cell surrounded by strangers? I did you a big favour. Help yourself to coffee, you’ll find it on the table—there by the Tizio lamp.’
‘Where’s my stuff?’
Henry shrugged. ‘You’ll most likely find it in the bathroom. You insisted on having a shower, even though you could hardly stand up. You said you hadn’t had one for days.’
‘This is messed-up…what else have you been doing? Watching me while I showered?’
‘Hey—I saw you were in trouble and helped you out the best I could. I even checked on you through the night to make sure you hadn’t choked.’
‘Wow.’ She laughed, though she still looked sceptical. ‘I got messed up.’
‘What did you take?’
‘Molly and a pint of tequila.’
Henry was about to ask who Molly was, until he remembered an article he’d read in the New York Times earlier that year.
‘Christ, you’re an amateur,’ he snorted. ‘Drinking and then bad ecstasy?’
‘You say that like you’re an expert.’
Though his career’s heyday ha
d been the nineties, Henry had never really partied. Drinking with strangers, getting high with them—it all bored him. A waste of energy better spent on other pursuits, the benefits revealing themselves as he became more important and, as a result, more sought-after at industry parties. Keeping a distance made them hungrier.
Henry studied the girl, who tried to steady herself against the rigid back of his Barcelona sofa. New York was hard. He appreciated that. To survive it, you had to play by the rules, respect the complexities of the system. Otherwise you’d never find a way to enjoy what little you eventually managed to achieve. Henry wished he could make the girl understand that. He wondered who she’d been out with, what had happened to make her snap, beyond the obvious drug intake. But he couldn’t ask a question like that without lowering himself to her level.
‘You’d got yourself an audience,’ he told her. ‘Which is actually quite an achievement in this town. I don’t think that was your intention, though—and it’s not the kind of notoriety you want. If you’re planning to make a habit of these performances, I’d recommend being smarter about it.’
‘I didn’t plan it,’ the girl said. ‘Things just got out of control.’
‘All right, let me rephrase that: don’t let things get out of your control. Not if you want to get anywhere in this world.’
‘Why do you assume I’m this naif from out of town?’
‘It’s a statistical probability. Plus you’re behaving like one.’
‘And what does that say about you…taking a stranger into your house, when you know we have nothing in common? It’s seriously kooky. At best.’
‘I understand you lost your wallet,’ Henry said, remaining calm, ‘so I’ll give you cash for a cab home. And you’re welcome to breakfast. Despite what you seem to think, I expect nothing in return. I know what it’s like to be a nobody starting out in this place. Somebody’s showing your work in Chelsea, right? So don’t waste it. You get maybe one chance like that, in a lifetime.’
The Benefactor Page 7