The Benefactor

by Sebastian Hampson

  Henry continued to pace the room, unable to look directly at her, while she cradled her glass of bourbon and trailed a finger around its rim. Strange how she’d brought out this response in him. He could have easily denied her entry, but a large part of him wanted to go out of his way to be this disapproving, as if on a dare. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had this kind of contact with a world so littered with problems, the solutions to which seemed, in his mind, devastatingly simple.

  Maggie couldn’t make sense of this guy standing over her, blocking the path to the door. He wouldn’t have opened that door in the first place if he had no intention of letting her stay, yet his welcome—the overfilled glass of bourbon, the bizarre crooked smile—seemed counteracted by this desire to pull her in for the sort of criticism she wouldn’t have accepted from her closest friend, let alone a relative stranger. Living alone must have eroded his sense of propriety, so that anybody turning up on his doorstep (stranger or not) was treated like a wayward family member who’d run off with a whole lot of his money before returning sheepishly to ask for more.

  She’d tried texting Beth after her roommates kicked her out, saying that she wanted a break from her own place, and would it be all right if she stayed the night? Beth replied that now wasn’t a good time, before hastily changing the subject and asking her for advice about which MFA she should try to get into. Maggie had no other option then, except for Henry. The handful of other contacts she’d made in New York were people she barely knew, people she couldn’t prevail upon—especially not at the risk of social embarrassment.

  She should have tried harder with Beth—who wouldn’t have asked her so many questions, wouldn’t have tried to wrestle her into a position of shame. She wasn’t that interested.

  Determining that she had nothing to be ashamed of, no matter what this man thought, Maggie decided it would be more a concession of defeat to leave this place now that she’d arrived. The thought of getting on a bus home to suburban Greenwich and her parents—their modest weatherboard house and the people-mover parked halfway up the driveway beneath a Stars and Stripes, the fallen leaves raked off the lawn and stuffed into bins lined up precisely on the sidewalk, waiting for collection—didn’t inspire anything in her. She’d already lost her mind once in that environment.

  Though she had plenty of sympathy for Henry’s situation, Maggie had to wonder what it had been like for the wife who’d shared this space with him for so many years. If she’d kept the apartment as tidy as he did, if they’d spent their Sundays polishing every surface together. If she’d ever been faced with the same ultimatum: get out of here or sit still and drink this bourbon while I tell you how and why you’re not measuring up to my standards.

  At the same time, she didn’t see how completely close-minded people could inhabit this place. There were too many small details that didn’t make sense when considered as part of the whole picture.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, after much hesitation, ‘I’m not going home. You wouldn’t have wanted to do that when you were my age, and I’m sure you got on fine with your parents.’

  ‘That’s why I worked to avoid it. If you want to stay here, my advice is to take a breather from the art and get yourself organised, be realistic. Get better at your job—or find a new one. You can’t rely on your success as an artist to stay afloat.’

  ‘You’re judging me ahead of my work.’

  ‘You’ll find most New Yorkers do that. I’m not a charity, so I can’t help you square any debts…that’s your own mess. But I guess you can have a bed for a short while.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘No. It’s the best I’ve got for you, though.’ He appeared to think about this, then added: ‘Judging when best to leave is an important skill. Now isn’t the time. And, by the way, keep your feet off the furniture.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Maggie dropped her sneakers to the floor. Her attention slid around the room, as it often did when she had nothing practical to focus on, searching for some distraction that didn’t make sense. So many clearly untouched books on the shelves. She scanned every row, marvelling at how their spines had been aligned, all flush.

  One shelf hadn’t received the same attention. Maggie got up to examine it while Henry was pouring himself another bourbon.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said, upon noticing that every spine on this shelf belonged to the same title. ‘Why do you own so many copies of Her? Did your wife have the longest subscription ever?’

  ‘I was editor. In-chief. For twenty-one years.’

  ‘Oh yeah? What happened—did they get sick of a man dictating how women should look?’

  ‘Believe me, it wasn’t dictatorial. I had a market to please. And it was more complex…the job wasn’t working for me anymore, so I pulled out.’

  ‘That sounds pretty simple.’

  She pulled out a copy from the very end of the shelf, dated March of that year, claiming to be a bumper Hollywood issue. The cover was a generic shot of five Oscar-nominated actresses in ball gowns that might as well have been appropriated from a fifties costume drama.

  ‘That one’s not the best,’ Henry said. ‘Here. Try this.’

  He opened up a well-thumbed issue from 1994, flicking past the feature article on Meg Ryan and the endless perfume advertisements to the coverage of what Maggie took to be an Oscars after-party. And there was Henry, grinning like a handsome fool, encased in black and white glossy print. One woman on each arm.

  ‘I can’t believe this stopped working for you,’ Maggie said, keeping the irony unmodulated.

  ‘Yeah, well…it’s me with my wife, Martha.’

  ‘Which one’s Martha?’

  ‘The one who’s not Sharon Stone.’ This didn’t help. ‘On the right.’

  Maggie tried to read something from this woman. Her expression gave nothing away. Not immediately. Her mouth wasn’t open in the usual way—not in a harsh display of peroxided teeth to catch the photographer’s flash. Instead her lower lip drooped, as if it had been left unattended when she composed herself. Every muscle in her face was trying to do the right thing, yet somehow the whole hadn’t come together like a movie star’s. Unconsciously or not, she hadn’t committed.

  Henry shook his glass so the ice cubes would melt a little faster. The city drifted in and out of view over Maggie’s shoulder, beyond the foggy glass of the windowpanes. It was an ink wash blur with blots where the skyscrapers should have been. Like an abstract water-colour. No easy way to read it.

  ‘Go set yourself up in the guestroom,’ he said. ‘And take a shower. If you need anything, I’ll be out here.’

  Henry picked up his book and tried to read again. But he couldn’t concentrate. A certain smell had stuck with him, coming from the rucksack and the canvases by the door. It transported him back to his teenage bedroom in Waltham—the piles of dirty laundry, the mud-stained cleats. Nothing else could have prompted such a strong memory.

  Henry became immersed in the wet windows and forgot the book. The sounds around him persisted—distant car horns, the whirring of his hard drive, his untouched memoirs—but they blended now with the patter of raindrops, and the hiss of the running shower in the next room.

  HENRY felt his pocket vibrating. Two missed calls, and a text from Timothy Fogel; he hadn’t heard from him since sending that message a week ago.

  Calder. Late lunch at EN? Two-thirty sharp. Won’t brook any dissent this time.

  The calls were from Christine. A voicemail explained that she would be in New York for meetings right before Christmas. Clipped, businesslike. A hanging implication that she wanted to stay with him, see how he was living. Maggie would have to be gone by then—if Henry decided he wanted to see his sister again so soon.

  No mention, however stiff, of how nice it had been to spend Thanksgiving together.

  He was at the neighbourhood mainstay butcher on Bleecker and 7th, fresh from another swim, searching for something to cook. The compulsion had hit him out of nowhere; he hadn’t made a prop
er meal in months.

  This butcher, along with the Japanese place on Great Jones Street and its wincingly expensive wagyu, had been the source of many lavish meals, thrust upon Martha with great ceremony when she returned from an overseas trip, always served on the Bernardaud. Now the best cuts of lamb and well-marbled, dry-aged beef would languish in the freezer, untouched, if he bought any.

  He’d always preferred to buy his meat from that Japanese place. It was so clean—sterile, even. More a futuristic operating theatre than a killing floor. The place on Bleecker didn’t try to present itself as anything more than a rough-and-ready depository for animal flesh, unchanged for over a century.

  Today, Henry couldn’t stomach the smell. After the man behind the counter in the blood-spattered apron had demanded what he wanted, he abandoned the idea and walked out.

  This end of the Bleecker, past the intersection with 6th Avenue, was packed tight with memories. The Blind Tiger Ale House, with its no-nonsense wood panelling and open hearth, had beckoned him and Martha in during a snowstorm soon after it opened in 1995. They’d shared a big bottle of Cantillon sour and a plate of hot wings. Henry couldn’t picture himself going there without her. Or finding a way to enjoy it. He thought he saw her then, seated at one of the high tables by the window, in her pork-pie hat. Waiting patiently for him to come and join her.

  Her old building on Jane Street wasn’t so far from here. Henry had been past it once or twice in the last year, and been struck by its unfamiliarity; it had stirred in him a vague, half-hearted sort of melancholy. That tiny one-bedroom squeezed in above the former site of Manhattan’s first ever cooperative art gallery—it must have been home to some New Jersey investment banker’s underemployed, drug-addled kid by now.

  They’d been so cramped and frustrated there. Hadn’t they? So why did he yearn for that time now? For the peculiar neighbours she would invite around on weekends and the late-night weed and the tricky give-and-take of limited space: the clothes rack she’d found on the street and brought home to use as a closet, the too-small mattress they’d shared. Stuffed with more quirk than you could digest in one go, objects of curiosity in every corner: freeze-dried Gazania leaves wrapped in seaweed from Zimbabwe, a vintage poster for Black Orpheus, Haitian Vodou flags. Her dog—the stray mastiff she’d found chained up and starving on the Hudson piers and christened Sweetpea. The one he could never control when he used to take it for walks around the neighbourhood, dragging Henry along, straining on its choke chain.

  These fragments occupied a strange, dusty place in his mind, rarely visited. He’d rather think of them together in their home on Bleecker Street, which they’d chosen and decorated together. It had always comfortably accommodated them both—unlike Jane Street, with its awkward corners and the precarious fire escape they’d perched on to smoke.

  But he found himself seeking it, consciously or not, as he walked on into the West Village. Unable to help himself, Henry took a detour across Sheridan Square and searched for the jazz club on Christopher Street. In all these years he hadn’t returned once.

  It was there, as it had been, though the sign over the door was gone. A thick layer of posters, the residue left over from many years ago, clung to the brickwork. Henry squinted to read through them. Chico Hamilton must have been buried somewhere in there, part of the palimpsest. But he didn’t recognise any of the torn-up names.

  Untouched and unloved. Left in suspended animation for twenty-five years, or however long it was. Stuck between a bank and a Dunkin’ Donuts.

  Henry kicked a chunk of concrete into the doorway and walked on.

  Timothy was waiting at EN’s central bar, surrounded by black granite and ikebana arrangements. Already drinking sake from an earthenware flask and a lacquerware masu. The shiny lacquer went with the granite and his blazer, which was trimmed in a yellow that also matched the blond wood of the chairs. He hoped a casual observer would notice, and perhaps wonder if he’d chosen his outfit based on where he was going for lunch.

  Henry never ran this late, and certainly not without texting to make excuses. Usually it was the other way around, though, with a panicky text or phone call coming through if Timothy made Henry wait for five, ten minutes. Timothy had always sought to reassure his friend that a period of absence didn’t mean anything. Funny, then, that a reversal such as this made Timothy the anxious one.

  The empty seat and the empty table both bothered him. Without thinking about it, Timothy ordered a few of the most expensive items on the menu and furiously downed the sake so that he could ask for a fresh flask.

  When Henry finally appeared, he crossed the room with the carriage of somebody twenty years older. He brought no glow with him, no indication that this lunch was anything more than a chore through which to wince and suffer.

  ‘They can’t be working you hard enough,’ Henry said, ‘if you’re free for late lunch on a Monday.’

  ‘Slipped out of my last meeting. Haven’t stopped celebrating. Here, join me in a sake.’

  He refilled his own masu before pouring one for Henry, against the Japanese custom. After all these years of sharing expensive Japanese meals together, from New York to Los Angeles to London, Timothy remembered what Henry would always tell him: topping up your own drink was bad form. But he wasn’t going to let Henry’s obsessions dictate his behaviour.

  ‘Congratulations again,’ Henry said, even though he hadn’t yet congratulated Timothy on his win.

  ‘Thanks, buddy. Means a lot when Henry Calder recognises your achievements. You’re having the dry-aged washugyu—best cut of Angus I’ve ever come across. Already ordered it. A boat’s worth of sashimi, bit of uni nigiri, bit of toro. You’re a man in need of a good meal, I can tell.’

  Henry’s expression changed in an instant, from serene neutrality to the grimace Timothy had only seen once or twice before—the warning shot that heralded vindictive and extreme punishment for its recipient.

  ‘You’ve come a long way,’ Henry said, shrinking away from Timothy and speaking into his lap, the words coming out as a sneer. ‘Winning awards under your own name. Enjoy it while you can. The diminishing returns aren’t far off.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re right about that.’

  Timothy had been hoping to excite whatever spirit lingered within Henry. A sad thing to see one of his best buddies so bloodless, seized up like an overcooked steak. This man wouldn’t have turned down an invitation ten years ago. Nor would he have responded so tersely. Sorry Fogel, busy tonight. Regards, H.

  There weren’t many people Timothy would have made the effort for. Henry and Martha (especially Martha) had always given a true, lasting impression of gregariousness—a rare trait in this business. Now Henry seemed determined to have a bad time, so wrapped up in his own problems that seeing this restaurant as a site of playful competition no longer seemed possible. It reminded Timothy of the last few times they’d hung out in New York after graduation in the seventies, before he moved to Los Angeles and Henry returned to Boston. How despairing Henry had become, how they’d had dinner on a restaurant terrace, stoned out of their minds, and a sullen, downcast Henry had murmured something about how he didn’t know what he was going to do with himself after this summer. Timothy hadn’t encountered that self-pitying side of Henry ever since; he’d been so relieved to see that marrying Martha seemed to have stamped it out for good.

  Which was why Timothy had loved seeing him in later years, whenever they were both down for an uncomplicated good time. When Henry had brought espresso in from their favourite Italian bar on 6th Avenue because neither of them could stand the insipid brew the office’s machine produced. When they’d played hooky, taking extended lunch breaks, wolfing down fusilli with octopus and bone marrow at Marea or caviar at Petrossian, then going through all the Charvet ties and Dries Van Noten shirts in Barneys and Bergdorf with a connoisseur’s competitive speed. When they left early and sneaked around the corner to the Davidoff cigar store, smoking together in the lounge’s leather
club chairs, enjoying the view of the 5th Avenue traffic and the comforting silence of each other’s company. Timothy occasionally dropping off and spilling ash on his trousers.

  Of everyone he knew, Timothy wouldn’t have expected Henry to take the loss of someone he loved so selfishly. It was easy enough to pity him, and Timothy did, but if Henry couldn’t accept the simplest gesture of support, he was better off left alone. That wasn’t going to stop Timothy from giving his friend one last chance to buck up—he supposed he could afford to offer that much, if nothing else.

  ‘All right,’ Timothy continued, ‘what are you doing later? To tell you the truth,’ he bent in across the table and flashed his eyebrows, ‘I got my hands on the most remarkable pot you’ve ever tried. Californian grower, sells most of it to musicians. Girl Scout Cookies is what they call this strain. Cost me a fortune. Think of it as the equivalent of a grand cru burgundy to some swill from the Pays d’Oc. We should light up on your terrace like we used to, hammer some of those old Pink Floyd records, piss off the neighbours.’

  ‘Would if I could. Right now I have a house guest. My…my niece.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ He’d thought Christine had two boys. ‘You should’ve brought her along. She probably smokes more of the stuff than we ever did.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, she’s a mess. Thinks she’s an artist.’

  ‘Yeah. Kids are a lottery. Be glad you never had any.’

  ‘How’s Lizzie doing?’

  ‘Great. Far as I’m aware. Haven’t heard anything for a while. I’m not letting it get to me. If she doesn’t understand how fortunate she is, I can’t keep reminding her.’

  Timothy hoped he hadn’t betrayed how worried he was for Lizzie, how he hadn’t heard from her for weeks, how a stack of his unanswered texts occupied the bottom of their conversation thread. Calder couldn’t be allowed the faintest hint that he’d failed as a parent.