Henry felt he’d made his point successfully, so he left it there and returned to his computer. She was welcome to help herself to the single-origin coffee, smoother and stronger than anything she’d had before, and then be on her way—perhaps with a newfound appreciation for what she could have, if she reversed her attitude.
Maggie didn’t listen, still rattled, not trusting him. There was something so repellent about old men’s desires to play out their hero fantasies. And this wasn’t the first time she’d experienced it.
Though he’d obviously come to a different conclusion already, Maggie wasn’t a Midwestern transplant. She’d grown up in suburban Connecticut, traded her broken childhood home for a string of temporary jobs through the Midwest, and recently returned after ten years away to find New York a changed city. Especially with no resources and no real friends to her name. The ones from her hometown hadn’t gone anywhere, as far as she was aware, and she’d found the others attractive for their fickleness.
She’d seen this sort of apartment before, but in most of those other places the sense that anything terrible could have happened was buried beneath thick layers of shag pile carpet and Banksy paintings and flower arrangements from Renny & Reed and yapping miniature shih tzus. Henry’s taste was more austere, almost impersonal, but the same austerity left him with nowhere to hide.
That hadn’t stopped him from trying. He’d put himself together as though he were about to host a power lunch around the corner at Cipriani Downtown, his suit all nineties Wall Street, minus a tie and with his blue trousers rolled up to show off his loafers and the absence of socks.
The initial shock of waking up in an unfamiliar place having worn off, Maggie took stock of the situation. Her head was pounding, but she remembered enough of the previous night to realise that she’d been falling-down drunk well before Henry showed up. And, as more fragments began developing out of the murk, she remembered demanding to have that shower. And she remembered throwing up in the bathroom. She wondered if Henry knew about that, if it had been cleaned up already.
‘You’ve got a nice place,’ she said, not caring if he was trying to work on something, taking a few still-shaky steps to examine the framed photographs on the wall—hoping for family snapshots and finding moody modernist architecture instead.
‘That’s an Ezra Stoller original,’ Henry said. ‘Personally developed by the artist in his darkroom in 1952. Extremely rare piece. Found it at Yossi Milo.’
She moved to the shelves of small glass sculptures that reflected the light movements as ragged clouds blew across the sun.
‘My Orrefors collection. Ingeborg Lundin and Sven Palmqvist, primarily.’
She wanted to ask what these objects meant to him, beyond the fact that they were tasteful and rare.
‘You might like to check out the wine collection—you’ll find the entire nine-vintage line-up of Henri Giraud in there.’ Another name that stirred nothing in her. ‘Limited production grand cru champagne, impossible to find. Truly exquisite wine.’
The bottles were lying on their sides in a custom-built wine fridge embedded into the liquor cabinet, unadorned except for some gold lettering etched directly onto the glass. No foil, no paper labels. Each of their naked corks was fastened in place with a band so shiny it could have been solid gold.
‘Can’t say I’ve heard of it,’ she said. ‘Are you ever going to open them?’
Henry stared at her blankly.
‘You’ve spent a lot of money on this apartment.’
‘I’m careful about how I hedge my investments. The things I buy appreciate in value. And this is my only property.’
‘I see. And these investments are…split?’
Henry didn’t say anything.
‘Plenty of room for one person. There’s a pile of women’s clothes in that room. And this bathrobe smells like perfume. I assumed you had a wife.’
‘I do. She’s not here at the moment.’
‘Oh. She’s at work? Travelling?’
‘No.’
‘Divorced?’
Henry’s smile was aggressive. He hadn’t got up from his desk and had dug his fingers into the arms of his chair, his nails leaving an impression in the leather. ‘Why are you asking these questions?’
‘Not sure, sorry. I can’t help myself.’ Maggie was sweating, and she felt the tears of alcohol weeping out into the bathrobe. Such an intimate piece of somebody’s wardrobe to give away. She wondered why a man who guarded his possessions so closely would have done that. Perhaps he was already regretting the decision.
For the sake of experiment, she picked up one of his sculptures and turned it over in her hands. He watched from the other side of the room, but didn’t say anything. After toying with it for longer than any owner would have wanted, she deliberately put it down in the wrong place. Still nothing. But now he was on the edge of his seat, opening and closing his mouth a few times.
‘So tell me,’ he said, the cool tone more laboured than it had been before. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Nowhere in particular. My name’s Maggie, by the way.’
‘Aha. And where did you go to school, Maggie? NYU—Tisch? You got a creative arts degree, and now you expect a job and money to fall out of the sky?’
‘I don’t expect anything. And I didn’t go to college.’
‘Get out. How the hell did you swing a gallery show if you never went to art school?’
‘Not everyone thinks as narrowly as you. I developed a following with some…provocative performance pieces in Chicago. I think the saying goes that I was discovered. YouTube videos. This dealer liked my installation work better, so she gave me a commission and brought me to New York. The income’s not enough to live on, though.’
‘No kidding. I mean, I had to do it tough before I first made it big. But that was the eighties. Simpler times, lower rents. This city’s become quite dispassionate about you and your money since then. It’ll take as much as it needs—everything you’ve got and then some.’
‘Where else would I go? New York is the art world. I have to build a reputation somewhere.’
‘If that’s what you think you were doing last night, then I hope your parents are prepared to lose their life savings. I’m being straight with you here, because I suspect nobody else has been and your dealer’s lured you here with false promises: New York isn’t what it used to be. There’s no room left for penniless creatives.’
Maggie sensed a need, beneath the condescension, for Henry to cover his own tracks. Her presence must have frightened him. Much as she wanted to provoke him further, she also saw this as a hopeless pursuit, one that could always be countered with a pivot and a strident explanation. She hated to imagine what he must have been like as a boss. Or, for that matter, as a husband.
‘I shouldn’t have imposed on you,’ she said, the last of her sincerity evaporating. ‘Thanks for the hospitality—I’ll get going.’
She began walking out of the living room.
‘Stay.’
That word must have leaped out, against his will, because he’d blushed spectacularly. She paused.
‘For a start,’ he continued, ‘I should give you money for a cab. I’m guessing you’re in the outer boroughs somewhere.’ He got up and came over to her, picking out two twenties from his billfold. Then he picked out two more. She hesitated before taking them. ‘Second, you have to eat. Bagels are in the kitchen. And I put out aspirin.’
Pulling the cash between her fingers as though it were a contract he’d forced her to sign, she nonetheless went to the kitchen as he’d suggested.
The change in focus allowed Henry to return to his desk. The trouble with having a view was that his attention slid so easily from the incessantly blinking cursor to the receding expanse of the Flatiron District and Gramercy Park—the gold cupolas popping against the water towers and the clambering rooftops. Smoke and steam rising. All bathed in spills of sunlight, oily shadows.
The view was incomplete. He’d
once had a direct sightline to the Met Life clock tower, which had been blocked out by a sleek new monolith knocked up two or three years ago. Condos, one of which Gisele Bündchen had recently bought for several million. Or so Page Six said.
Henry tried moving his chair to the left, and then the right. The old clock tower wasn’t visible from any angle.
Another paragraph, which he spent a while reformatting before restarting on it: 1992, that hectic year—his first at Her, when he came in and showed no clemency, or guilt, as he silenced the dissenters and showed them the door.
That wasn’t exactly how it had happened. A chill came over Henry as he recalled writing his first editorial, sitting at his desk after midnight, hopelessly alone, too destroyed to enjoy the view from his office, or to pour himself a drink. He’d spent the day sandbagging against the waves of gossip lapping at his door: that he wasn’t up to the job, that the board of directors had made a terrible mistake. He’d gone over his editorial in silence, again and again. Frustrated. Crying. Pathetic.
No way could he write about that.
Minimising the document, he got up and rearranged the items on his desk, lining his fountain pen up beside the original stainless-steel Jacob Jensen telephone. He picked up a pile of books and returned them to their alphabetical places on the shelves. Breathed the perfume on his collar—the James Heeley Martha had given him for his birthday, their last one together. His fragrance for years, since they’d first picked it out together at Les Senteurs in London. The bottle was already running low.
Maggie was going through his kitchen, opening each drawer, a plain, untoasted bagel between her teeth. Not searching for anything, just exploring.
That was something Martha did. The first time she’d come around to Henry’s apartment in Murray Hill, she made her way through every detail, right down to the books on his shelf. She’d found his treasured eleventh-grade copy of The Great Gatsby and read out the idiotic notes he’d scrawled in the margins, while he tried to take it back. He explained with pride that it was one of the classes which hadn’t concluded with a could have done better in the teacher’s report.
He remembered now how she’d quoted him one of her favourite lines from her own high school English class. Whitman. You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self. Henry told her he’d never cared for poetry. Too abstract.
The fruit in his basket had been sitting there for weeks. He watched as Maggie went to feel its flesh. She would find that it had shrunk underneath, the skin coming loose.
He left her to it.
‘We don’t need to speak about this,’ Henry said, when she came through from the bathroom later on, her leather jacket hanging limp off slumped shoulders. ‘Rest up, hydrate. And when I come to the bar next, nothing’s changed. Good?’
‘Yeah, good.’
‘Who were you out with last night?’ he said, unable to help himself, trying to make it seem as though the thought had come to him then.
‘I started out with Beth and her friends.’
‘And then?’
She didn’t answer. Henry felt she was keeping something from him. He shouldn’t have wanted to know. No, it was none of his business.
‘You’re lucky if nobody else saw you in that state,’ he said. ‘Dignity is a tool.’
He returned to his computer and started to play the album Chico Hamilton did with Little Feat, turning the volume up, letting it transport him to the jazz club on Christopher Street.
‘You can show yourself out.’
She hung around for a moment, bristling perhaps. He didn’t care. He’d had enough.
As he heard the front door click, Henry should have felt relief. Instead he found himself wishing he hadn’t done any of this. The bathrobe he’d given her from Martha’s otherwise-untouched closet, now polluted. He winced at this thought.
Out the window, the city continued to go through its day. The cabs scurried down 5th Avenue from Midtown, a plague of hungry yellow rats. He tracked the East River Ferry, which slid out from behind a building and disappeared again. The clock on his desktop ticked past one. He followed the second hand with his eyes for almost a minute.
When he looked away, he noticed the nude photograph of Martha sticking out from between two sheets of paper. He’d forgotten to return it to the shoebox. She was giving him that dirty, unguarded grimace again. Asking him what was going on.
He tried to imagine what his wife would have done if they’d been together last night, on their way home from dinner. Martha would have done something sensible, like giving her money and bundling her into a cab. Henry wasn’t sure why he hadn’t thought of that.
‘There’s no harm in doing well,’ he heard her say from his living room in Murray Hill in 1986, replacing The Great Gatsby on the shelf next to his books on Frank Lloyd Wright and Japanese aesthetics, coming in close to him, tracing the circumference of his trouser belt with one hand and loosening his tie with the other. ‘So long as you know your talents and what you can contribute with them. Come on. Show me some more hubris.’
‘REMIND me, who is this guy?’
‘Timothy Fogel. Trust me, you’ll like him.’
They were at their sinks in the ensuite, Martha applying eyeliner in the mirror while Henry searched through his cabinet for the right aftershave. His hand trembled as he knocked the bottles out of their alignment.
‘That’s not what I was asking,’ Martha said. ‘You were a little sparing with the details.’
‘He’s a photographer. I’ve known him since college, but we haven’t talked in years. Old New Jersey boy, from Livingston—Livingstein, he always used to call it. Ran into him at the Versace after-party in Milan—he had Claudia Schiffer hanging off one arm and Tyra off the other. And it was funny: neither of us could say why we’d fallen out of touch. I got the impression he’s not satisfied with his gig in Los Angeles. So we’re framing this as a catch-up. Nothing formal. The object is to get him loosened up. And, you know…you have a talent for that.’
Henry reached over and ran a hand down the low-cut back of her cocktail dress, which he’d brought home as a souvenir from Milan Fashion Week. Not the sort of dress she would have chosen for herself, yet it clung to her frame, accentuated her curves.
The success of Her wouldn’t have depended so heavily on this dinner if Henry hadn’t made it so in his imagination. He needed a real friend in a court of advisers he didn’t feel he could trust—and Timothy Fogel was a flashy commodity. Trying to appear as a bigger deal than it was, Her was hosting its inaugural Oscar after-party next year, seeking to fill the gap left by Irving ‘Swifty’ Lazar, the legendary agent and producer, who had fallen terminally ill a few months ago. The project occupied Henry’s whole attention, mostly due to the terror it inspired in him. Swifty’s parties were regarded as statements: enforced sit-down dinners at Spago, built over the years into a media circus. Table-hopping was reserved for the man himself and nobody else, and older guests would ask for permission to go to the bathroom. The pressure was on for Henry to make his own statement, to get the right voices saying the right things.
Having a renowned photographer at the head of his creative team would shift the conversations in his favour. Fogel’s contacts were those same voices. He’d photographed half of Hollywood. The talk was that he and Christy Turlington were engaged to be married. Henry didn’t believe it, knowing his friend better, though he did understand the weight those rumours carried.
Martha indulged his hand briefly, then shrugged it off.
‘Which shirt should I go with?’ Henry said.
‘That’s up to you.’
‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t value your opinion.’
‘Henry.’ She turned to stare at him, her sharp, bemused expression accentuated as she pulled her hair into a topknot. ‘My God, I’ve never seen you like this. Why are you so nervous?’
‘I haven’t seen this guy in a long time. It’s…’ He sighed. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘No
, go on. Were the two of you close in college?’
‘Oh yeah—we ended up in the same fraternity at Boston University. Alpha Epsilon Pi.’
‘Isn’t that the Jewish one?’
‘He pulled some strings. Great guy. One of the few people I felt I could be myself around.’
‘So why did you fall out of touch?’
Henry wished he had a straightforward answer. Timothy had been living in Los Angeles rather than New York since the early eighties, but it went further than that, required more context than he was willing to give her—and had more to do with Timothy’s relationship with Kurt Wilder than anything else. And that wasn’t something he wanted to dwell on. He’d moved on.
‘I don’t know,’ Henry said. ‘Grew apart, I guess.’
He returned to their bedroom and stood before the open closet. He’d only just showered but was already damp with sweat. In New York, even the most desirable of old buildings didn’t come with centralised units, so the draught came from nothing but a single AC on each floor. He couldn’t think straight in this humidity. He had a bourbon over ice waiting on the side table, which he downed in two gulps before Martha finished in the bathroom.
His eventual choice sported a peacock feather print, similar to the one Jens-Peter Johnston had modelled for Armani last year. It had come from La Rue des Rêves on Spring Street, a vintage boutique Martha had introduced him to on one of their first wanders around the neighbourhood together. A dark, cluttered place with tame monkeys and tropical birds roaming free among the rhinestone-studded dresses and bronze-painted mannequins. They knew Martha by name there. Called her Mattie.
Henry paired the shirt with a loose-fitting linen blazer, which he’d started wearing into the office at Martha’s urging. No tie. That signalled you wanted money. He needed to show what he had, not what he wanted.
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