The Benefactor

by Sebastian Hampson

  Their new apartment was on Bleecker Street—neither a first nor a last choice for Henry or Martha, but a successful compromise, an interpretation of what he believed she wanted. He’d chosen to set up their home in the middle of the Village, in spite of the neighbourhood’s seedier qualities, at her behest. But he’d decided that if he was going to live here, he was going to do it his way.

  Downstairs, Henry poured himself another bourbon and admired his new living room, which was starting to come together. The last of the quirky furniture from the one-bedroom on Jane Street had been replaced by a charcoal sofa suite imported from Italy, Wassily chairs and an original Noguchi coffee table: cherry wood base and heavy, one-inch-thick glass. Henry spent a while clearing away Martha’s well-thumbed papers and giving the table another polish. Then he dimmed the lights and admired it all from a wide angle, looking out across the room to the view beyond. The Empire State’s lilac head stood centre-frame, gleaming through the twilight, surrounded by its many reflections in the glass.

  So much work had already gone into this room, decisions taken and retaken.

  ‘How’s this?’ he asked, turning to face Martha as she descended the staircase and took the bourbon from his hand. She drank it herself, then cast an appraising eye over his outfit.

  ‘It’s good,’ she murmured, stroking his lapels. ‘So long as you’re thinking about how Timothy Fogel will respond to it—not me.’

  She was hanging just out of his reach. But Henry couldn’t help himself—he had to lean in and try to kiss her.

  A shuddering rattle came from the clapped-out air conditioning unit by the window. Henry sighed.

  ‘We need a new AC,’ he said. ‘I can’t do another summer like this.’

  It took him a while to find a cab, his timing too tight for comfort, rushing along 6th Avenue with an outstretched arm. He couldn’t afford to be late for this dinner.

  Timothy was waiting for them upstairs at Felidia on 58th Street. Henry always preferred to avoid the uneven lighting and cramped tables of the main dining room, so he’d requested an upstairs table when he made the reservation. Timothy had suggested Harry Cipriani, which Henry dismissed as a scene and a half—a declaration his friend had found surprising. He’d begun making bold choices like this since he started at Her, even if they didn’t align with his true beliefs, Martha insisting that people in his business would respond well to the unique and considered. They weren’t impressed by the too-obvious and too-expensive, like over-designed mechanical wristwatches or Hermès ties, or stuffy, establishment restaurants. Felidia was both serious and passably authentic, favouring a refined Piedmontese menu over a bombardment of carbs—a true connoisseur’s choice.

  Henry had been hoping to reconnect with Timothy Fogel ever since he’d become an industry name in the eighties. The same excitement that had overtaken him when he’d run into his friend in Milan now returned in an uncontrollable wave as he saw Timothy sucking up what little cool there was in the room, sporting a camelhair suit jacket and a black T-shirt. Henry bounded up the stairs ahead of Martha, briefly forgetting her.

  ‘There he is,’ he said as Timothy stood to greet him, and crushed him in a hug. ‘How’re you doing, buddy? Great to see you.’

  ‘Oh, likewise, likewise.’ Timothy seemed to think about it for a moment before returning the strength of the hug. Henry ruffled his hair. ‘And who do we have here? Is this the famous Martha Beaucanon I’ve heard so much about? Have to say, I was impressed when Henry told me about your work at UNICEF. Sounds like you’re doing some good in the world.’

  Martha laughed. ‘I hope you’re prepared to be disappointed when you find out what I actually do. I’m afraid I haven’t had the chance to look your work up and return the compliment, but Henry tells me you have a real talent.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Henry said. ‘Though talent’s no good to anyone if it’s wasted.’

  He’d planned those words, but for later, once they had settled into each other’s company. Timothy smiled awkwardly while Martha ignored him completely and went to sit down.

  ‘But more on that after a drink,’ he continued, hating himself, sweating, joining them at the table and waving the waiter over. ‘For now, I think a round of dirty martinis—use Stolichnaya, will you?’ He returned his attention to Timothy, talking in rapid-fire. ‘Although I’ll drink anything so long as it’s chilled. Can’t stand the city this time of year. We were in San Juan last week, took a beautiful apartment in the old town. You ever been? Martha tried her hand at photography, I tried a few bottles of rum.’

  The waiter hadn’t left. Henry turned to him.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Still or sparkling for the table, sir?’

  ‘Sparkling, sparkling all the way. Provided we don’t have to wait for it while you’re standing around doing nothing.’

  He hoped Timothy would appreciate this. It reminded him of their college days, when they used to gang up on hapless waiters and bartenders who overcharged or forgot their order. Or, as on one particularly boozy, cocaine-fuelled occasion, tried to eject them both from the building—to which Timothy responded by throwing money in the bartender’s face.

  The waiter took the wine list, much to Henry’s annoyance—he hadn’t had a chance to plan out the progression of arneis and barolo to match each course. He was frowning, ready to say something nasty, when Martha intervened.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘but we haven’t quite finished with that. This is a special occasion, so perhaps you could recommend a special wine to go with each course once we’ve decided.’

  ‘Please, not for my sake,’ said Fogel. ‘I was going to say, you must have got some sun in Puerto Rico. You’re practically brown, both of you. Did you make it to Culebra at all? I had a house there last year with a few models and my old fraternity brothers—Henry probably remembers them, bunch of clowns. Honestly…’ He chortled, for effect. ‘What a riot, you have no idea. We had the jet ski out every day, wasted out of our minds. Eventually we crashed it into the coral reef.’

  ‘No, we didn’t make it there,’ Henry said, a little stiffly. ’But we rented a spectacular villa in Rincón, danced in the waves at sunset. You should see the photos Martha took—wish I had them here.’

  ‘Oh, of course—Rincón’s so popular these days. What sort of equipment were you using, Martha?’

  ‘Honestly, Tim, I couldn’t be more of an amateur. I just take snapshots of whatever catches my eye. Street art, children running down the beach. Silly things. It’s not as if I could go off into the La Perla slums and do documentary work.’

  If Martha hadn’t been holding Henry’s hand as she said this, he might have taken it as a criticism. As it stood, he didn’t like the implication that he’d prevented her from doing something.

  ‘Where are you living in LA?’ he asked Timothy.

  ‘Santa Monica. Hell of a spot, hardly need to take a vacation when I’ve got the beach right there. It’s still the city, though. I’ll move out to Malibu once I’ve got a new wife to share a house with.’

  ‘No luck with…ah, sorry—what was her name?’

  ‘Sara. Absolutely no luck at all. Split up last year. No kids, thank Christ.’

  ‘Trust me, my man, you’re in an enviable position right now. The models must be queuing up.’

  ‘This guy cracks me up,’ Timothy said to Martha. ‘So how did you two meet?’

  ‘Flying across the Atlantic,’ Henry said, without hesitation. ‘We were on the same flight out of London—on the Concorde. Started up a conversation, and before we’ve even landed Martha gives me the spare key to her apartment.’

  He’d borrowed this conceit from a friend. It made them sound more interesting—gave them some mystique.

  ‘It wasn’t the Concorde,’ Martha said. ‘Nice as that sounds.’

  Henry had forgotten about the last time he told that story. Martha usually played along, but when he’d repeated it in front of her new boss at UNICEF, she’d been quick to chide him.
Fundraisers weren’t supposed to be in the habit of paying ten thousand dollars for a round trip.

  ‘You’re right,’ Henry said. ‘Must’ve been thinking of some other girl.’

  ‘Sounds like my cue to change the subject,’ Timothy said, opening his gaze exaggeratedly towards Martha. ‘Henry tells me you work for the UN, jetting off around the world and handing out food to starving kids, giving Mother Teresa a run for her money. Very impressive.’

  Martha almost spluttered into her martini, Henry noticed, though she recovered well. ‘Ah…no, no. I’m a fundraiser—not a field worker. My work is mostly domestic, though I do make the occasional trip to Europe or Asia.’

  ‘I thought the UN was funded by the government. Why would they need fundraisers? I mean, it can’t be like a business, where your main pursuit is profit.’

  ‘Yes, the member states put in funding, but that can only go so far. For our work to be viable, we need a budget surplus as badly as any other organisation. Henry tells me you’re from New Jersey, so this should make sense. You know how the Turnpike ends up running through the Lincoln Tunnel? And you have to pay a four-dollar toll to sit for half an hour in this claustrophobic tube behind a pile-up of traffic before you can reach Manhattan? That’s what Wall Street is to the United Nations. Everything in New York—including all the good work we do—has to run through brokerage firms. Between us, my job is to facilitate the credit flow. And I’m good at it.’

  Henry’s excitement returned, buoyed by a sense of relief. Though he preferred the image of Martha as a younger, sexier Mother Teresa, he had to admire the way she described herself so unexpectedly. Timothy hadn’t met a woman like her before. That envy had the potential to work wonders.

  ‘Well, Martha,’ Timothy said, sucking up all his pride into his posture, ‘you certainly know what you’re doing. Let me put it this way: you’re not the kind of girl Henry was dating in college.’

  ‘Come on,’ Henry said. ‘None of us knew what we were doing in college. And we were high most of the time. Let me tell you,’ he addressed Martha, ‘this man was.’

  ‘Henry hasn’t told me the first thing about college,’ Martha said. ‘How about we torture him now?’

  ‘You should’ve seen him. He’d stand around in the corner at parties, all moody with this droopy cigarette, like he was Jack Kerouac. Girls couldn’t get enough of it. One of them—what was her name, Rebecca? She told me they went on a date and he ordered pork chops. He said to her, My mom would kill me if she knew I was eating this. Made up this whole story about coming from Tarrytown, said he was related to the Milstein family—my friends. I practically died when she mentioned that.’

  ‘Jesus, Henry.’ Martha laughed, though she betrayed a sense of how baffled she was. ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘Rebecca tells it differently,’ he said, arch. ‘Not exactly how it went.’

  ‘Don’t be like that, man.’ Timothy slapped his leg. ‘It was funny.’

  ‘How did the two of you meet?’ Martha said, hungrily leaning forward with her elbows on the tabletop, flashing her interrogator’s eyes at both Timothy and Henry.

  ‘I can hardly remember,’ Timothy said.

  ‘Oh, I can.’ Henry knew he had the advantage of a detailed memory. ‘Timothy and I were playing water polo together. My first season. I was doing lengths on my own till my buddy convinced me to join the club.’ Not his buddy—his sister. ‘This man broke my nose during a friendly match, which I suspect is why you got dropped from the team.’

  ‘I was meant to be playing lacrosse. Sprained my ligament and missed out on the season—I couldn’t do anything outside of a swimming pool.’

  ‘See, Martha, he does remember. Afterwards he introduced himself and basically insisted we go out to dinner at Marliave to make it up to me…except he didn’t end up paying.’

  ‘You wouldn’t let me. You never did.’

  ‘And I won’t tonight. I remember, we sat at the bar and you made them get us dirty martinis and oysters with shallot vinegar and lemon. I’d never seen somebody order so decisively. And you told me everything about New York.’

  He’d done more than tell. He’d run down his own express tracks while Henry simply listened to the descriptions of meals at the Four Seasons and the 21 Club—shaved truffles and fine wines and cocaine in the restroom and being introduced to various Rockefellers and Astors. It was all so alien to Henry, who’d been raised to believe that any talk about money and status was crude. The idea that someone could be this crude, this obnoxious, if they wanted, seemed somehow radical.

  Timothy had insisted that they go down to New York and stay with his uncle over the summer—who was, as Henry would later discover, a bookmaker with a business based in Costa Rica. On one occasion Henry had caught a glimpse of the (presumably) unlaundered cash hidden down the end of Timothy’s dorm room closet, suffocating behind a press of tailored jackets and shirts. That summer they’d taken over the family’s house in the Hamptons with Kurt Wilder and a few others.

  Timothy wasn’t biting at this reminiscence the way Henry might have expected. He nodded slowly, deliberately, as though he were uncomfortable about whatever more Henry was about to reveal. Embarrassed, perhaps.

  For this reason, Henry stopped himself short. Of course, later that night at Marliave, once they were drunkenly settled in one another’s company, Timothy had in a rare moment of abandon confessed to being cripplingly depressed and lonely from a recent breakup. Henry hadn’t been able to contain his sense of compassion, and he’d wrapped his arm around this new acquaintance in a way that would have seemed both forward and questionable to an outsider. And he’d said, with no shade of platitude, that everyone went through these things and that it would be all right. His nineteen-year-old self’s stab at sage advice.

  In retrospect, Henry decided he was a little embarrassed about this as well.

  ‘The rest is history,’ he said. ‘We did go to New York over that summer. Best time of my life.’

  ‘Same here, man,’ Timothy said, in a way that didn’t suggest immediate agreement.

  They continued to circle around the main issue, Henry trying to convey genuine interest in all things Timothy Fogel. He didn’t have to fake it. In this line of business, the truth and the ideal often intersected. Henry had the advantage if he could sit on that intersection, flicking his indicators in both directions.

  Using a trick Martha had taught him to make the meal last longer, Henry suggested forgoing dessert in favour of a starter, and added to this with his own innovation of telling the waiter several times that they weren’t ready to order. He took care to select the dishes that had been recommended by the New York Times. Feeling daring, he pushed the evening’s budget to its upper limits by ignoring the sommelier’s recommendations and choosing nothing but the most expensive bottles.

  Once he’d concluded that they were comfortable enough with each other (a pink-cheeked Martha was getting into uncharacteristic fits of hysterics at whatever Timothy said), Henry called for dessert and grappa, explaining that Timothy had introduced him to the stuff that same night at Marliave. Pulling out a cigarette and offering one to Timothy, Henry felt he could relax. He’d mapped out his stratagem over the last three courses, and he saw the opportunity now to compensate on this sense of familiarity, of reunion.

  ‘So, Timothy,’ Henry said. ‘How’s Hemline treating you? I mean, really treating you.’

  ‘Can’t complain. I’ve got some creative freedom.’

  Henry leaned across the table, dangling his cigarette as though whatever Fogel had to say meant everything and nothing to him. He knew what he had to say, and he knew his friend would be powerless to refuse it.

  ‘Here’s the thing—you’re red hot, and they don’t know it. You want freedom? How about control? You’d be my creative director. Overseeing every major feature. Reporting to me, nobody else. Far as I’m concerned, we speak the same language. Your work is good—great—but it has the potential to be even better. In the
right environment, with the right resources, you’ll finally be recognised as the man you want to be. Remember when you introduced me to Kurt Wilder? You said he was going to take New York by storm. Well, I’m shooting for the whole fucking world.’

  Timothy took all this in with an equilibrium Henry hadn’t anticipated. It was as if this were the third or fourth time he’d had such an offer. He nodded along as Henry spoke, waiting for a chance to interrupt.

  ‘I’m sorry, buddy. I didn’t think this was the kind of dinner we were having. Obviously I’m flattered, but honestly, I wouldn’t have come to New York unless I had a few meetings lined up. I was at Vogue yesterday.’

  ‘And what did they promise you that I can’t offer?’

  ‘That’s not it. My man, I admire what you’ve done with Her. And, truthfully, so glad you’ve recovered from that…situation with Kurt. I’d love to contribute on a commission basis.’

  ‘I don’t think you understand. There’s no need to bother with commission when you have a seriously attractive opportunity sitting here.’

  Fogel’s gaze flitted towards Martha, for a second, then returned to him.

  ‘I love you, Henry, but I need to go for firmer ground if I’m committing to a contract. And it’s not as if the Vogue team aren’t winning awards…’

  Though he’d prepared himself for rejection, Henry hadn’t expected it to come so swiftly, from a friend who was supposed to have cared about him and his interests. It suggested less of an allegiance than he’d drawn in his imagination.

  But Timothy had paused, rather than calling for the cheque, waiting for Henry to brandish something irresistible. He had nothing.

  ‘Let me guess,’ Martha said, setting her glass down hard. ‘They told you at Vogue that you’re the next Avedon or Annie Leibovitz—that your abilities are unimpeachable. I’m totally impartial here: I think you could be. Which is also what everyone else will think. Yes, Henry’s version of Her isn’t established. It’s new. That’s the whole point. They were operating at a loss for years—five crusty senior staffers have left and Henry’s already replaced them, with better people. Have you seen the care he puts into each issue? You can take the job at Vogue, be one self-proclaimed genius in a room full of them. Or you can embark on a unique journey. With us. Now put your hand over a Bible and tell me that isn’t attractive.’