The Benefactor

by Sebastian Hampson

  Timothy wanted this lunch to end, and he searched around for a waiter to hassle about why the food hadn’t arrived. At the other tables, ordinary New Yorkers engaged in rapid-fire exchanges or heated arguments, nervously chugging their beers and letting forth fits of laughter at well-placed intervals. Two men in business suits clung to each other, red in the face, as they toasted some achievement or other.

  Timothy and Henry remained in silence.

  Henry had met Lizzie only a few times. Timothy had knocked Gloria up, which had led to their sudden marriage after mere months of courtship, or so the talk went. She’d never been wanted. If you were aware of that, and if you had a mother like Gloria (pleasant enough, but forever unsettled, aloof) and an absentee father, Henry supposed, you wouldn’t be inclined to take after them. Or be happy about their divorce.

  This didn’t make him think any less of Fogel. But what disturbed him about his friend’s situation with the child was the resentment, the blame.

  When he’d mentioned Maggie, Henry had felt an unexpected flash of pride. He enjoyed having something to report. He hated admitting how little he’d done with his day, trying to gloss over it with convincing exaggerations, or outright lies.

  He and Maggie had rarely crossed paths when they were both at home over the last week. Despite their efforts, though, you couldn’t hope for privacy at such close quarters. He’d heard her last night, as he was about to go to bed. Talking on the phone in her room—he wasn’t sure to whom. Her voice had cracked, briefly. Something about how she was sick of being treated like a burden. Whatever that meant. And then she’d spoken in surprisingly passionate, unstudied French that Henry couldn’t follow.

  Big plates of washugyu and sashimi were delivered. Henry picked at his beef while Fogel commented on the high grade of the marbling.

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to begin with my niece,’ Henry said to Fogel, giving up on his food after a few mouthfuls, wanting to take the conversation somewhere else but finding he couldn’t pick up on any other subject. ‘This problem might be unsolvable.’

  ‘Here’s what you do: push her out further onto the ledge. Be patient about it, set her up with no more than the basics. Then, when she has no choice but to jump, get on with your life. You’ve done the best you can.’

  ‘That’s not too cruel?’

  ‘Be merciless, Calder. It’s better for everyone.’

  ‘I don’t mind having somebody around for now. She keeps me out of trouble.’

  Henry wasn’t sure why he’d said this.

  ‘True. Meant to say the other day—I’m so sorry we couldn’t be at the funeral. Terrible timing, right after we’d set ourselves up in Milan, of course. God, I loved that woman. I would’ve eulogised the hell out of her, you know that.’

  ‘I’d rather not talk about it.’

  ‘Oh. Of course.’

  Despite the sudden bout of anger that had prompted his response, Henry had been hoping for Timothy to lavish him with sympathy. He’d never known his friend to do that, and would have taken it as a sign of something meaningful. It would have quelled a few of his other suspicions about Fogel’s motives, too.

  But fishing around for sympathy was pathetic. He should have held himself to a higher standard than that.

  ‘There are few things more pleasurable than good sashimi,’ Timothy said. ‘Have you tried the toro? Melts like butter.’

  ‘Too rich for my taste.’

  ‘Your tastes have changed, man. You introduced me and Gloria to this stuff in California. Remember? Took us to that restaurant off Rodeo Drive where they charged twenty dollars for one of these suckers. Couldn’t get you to shut up about how fresh it all was, how it was like being in Tokyo again.’

  ‘I wasn’t paying attention to the price. Quality has nothing to do with a dollar figure.’

  There was no way Fogel believed him—the last time they’d shared a meal at the Waverly Inn, Henry had practically forced the waiter to shave more white truffles over their mac and cheese. Not for the flavour they imparted, but because he’d been drunk and wanted to take the experience to its most ridiculous extreme.

  They’d both stopped eating. Henry tried to commandeer the cheque, but Timothy had already snapped his fingers and tucked his black Amex into the bill holder before the waiter could set it on the table.

  ‘Thanks,’ Henry said, avoiding eye contact. ‘Good to catch up.’

  ‘Any time,’ Timothy replied. ‘You say the word if you need to escape from the niece again. Must be stressful. Have you taken a vacation yet?’

  Henry felt a slight lift at the mention of Maggie, enjoying the thought of an alternative reality—where she was his difficult niece and he wasn’t going through such a conspicuous bad phase; where his reputation remained stable.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll get out of town for a while. Go someplace warm.’

  ‘Now you’re talking. Christ, I miss California. The Palm Springs house is all yours if you want it, you know. Couple of weeks in the sun might help you to think things through, no?’

  ‘Appreciate that.’

  They embraced each other outside the restaurant. Fogel said he was due to meet Mikey Milstein for drinks at the members-only Soho House Club Bar. His hesitation made Henry wonder if the invitation would have been extended to him a few years ago.

  Having shared more meals with Fogel than he could count, Henry was surprised at the insubstantiality of this one. He couldn’t escape the feeling that they’d been picking over the shattered remains of a fine old sculpture, sifting through the dust with their chopsticks for the larger fragments.

  And he was scrambling to reclaim this picture—the one of him and Fogel and Martha in California, basking in the desert weather with sweating bottles of Napa chardonnay. Perhaps that was enough reason to revisit Palm Springs, where they’d all spent the summer of 1994, in and out of the pool, craggy, barren rock faces rising on the horizon, painted gold.

  Maggie was on the terrace when Henry returned home, smoking, watching as the western clouds turned a deep red and the skyscrapers lit up as though they were catching fire. She waved at him but stayed out there in the cold, exposed to the breeze that cut through the grid of concrete canyons.

  With a glass of wine in his hand, Henry went through his usual routine, checking the news and the weather on his computer. A cold snap was due to hit New York next week. Henry searched for Palm Springs, which was forecast to have low seventies and clear skies. San Juan would be warmer still.

  Good old San Juan, lounging in limbo between America and a simulation of something more exotic, with its too-perfect cobblestone streets and its bubbling stew of tourists. The beaches. Him sitting out on their bungalow’s verandah in a striped summer shirt and a panama hat, cradling a glass of rum. Martha dancing in the waves, calling at him to join her.

  He got as far as searching for flights before he stopped himself. It was ludicrous to think that everything would be there waiting for him, as he’d left it; that the events of the last year might be reversed and he could return to his old self. Henry knew such a magic trick was impossible, even though Fogel had planted the idea of a retreat in his head.

  As he was closing his computer, Henry noticed that one of the magazines had been left lying on his coffee table—something he never did. The May 1994 issue. Open to the same spread he’d shown Maggie last week.

  Martha gave every appearance of restrained enjoyment, unlike Sharon Stone, whose expression was somehow both clearer and more ambiguous. In this photograph, his wife wasn’t certain of anything. He didn’t like that.

  Unless he was searching for things that weren’t there? No. He’d been at the top of his game that night, doing everything to impress his glamorous guests.

  Henry was about to replace the magazine on its shelf when he saw that Maggie had also left a sketchpad on the coffee table. Checking to make sure she was busy in her contemplation of the sunset, he picked it up.

  He saw a violent impression of
a woman’s face, cut up and rearranged like a collage, or a cubist painting. It was Martha, the sketch based on the photograph from the magazine. It wasn’t a good representation of her, the jumble of different perspectives disorienting, like a bad trip, the resemblance too wild for Henry to fully believe in it, much as it screamed her.

  Henry’s hand trembled as he held it at arm’s length. He waited on the sofa, leaving the lights off, until Maggie came inside and headed towards the guestroom. Then he threw the sketchpad onto the table, making her start. ‘What is this?’ he said, calm.

  ‘Hello to you too,’ she said. ‘It’s my sketchpad, Henry.’

  ‘And you left it out so I’d find it.’

  ‘Sure.’ She scooped it up off the table. ‘Sounds like that’s what you want to believe, so I won’t argue.’

  ‘Don’t tell me it was an accident. I’m happy for you to be here, but using details from my life in your work wasn’t part of the deal.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I would never have shown you that picture of my wife if I’d thought for a second you’d distort her image like that. What the hell’s the matter with you?’

  She turned the sketchpad on its side and then upside-down, scrutinising it, bemused.

  ‘Not sure where you got that from,’ she said. ‘If anything, it’s a self-portrait. I’m sorry if I’ve done something wrong by you…whatever it was. Honest mistake. Won’t happen again.’

  ‘It wasn’t a mistake. I can tell you’re subtler than that.’

  Maggie threw her arms up and continued to the guestroom, slamming the door.

  Henry didn’t know why the sketch had upset him so much, why it had reached inside him like that. Suddenly ashamed, he took himself out to the terrace, hoping he might be able to close everything out if he focused on the last gasping light of the sunset the way she had. She’d left her cigarette end smouldering on the ledge. He flicked it off and balanced his wine glass on the railing, aware of the danger that it might topple off but too shaken to care.

  The clouds melted into a high shade of violet as darkness began to fall. It reminded him of the sun movements he’d seen through airplane windows, off on the horizon. His favourite part of the flight. He would open his window blind while the rest of the cabin was sleeping and stare out at the sun, rising above the Atlantic Ocean, or the Utah salt flats, or the Grand Staircase, its canyons twisting like veins across a vast, glowing landscape, stained with the awakening sun’s hot blood.

  If Martha was with him, she would be there in the seat beside him, asleep. Sometimes her reflection would appear in the window, depending on the light, at one with the landscape.

  Now Henry wanted to see her superimposed on every fading and rising sun, as delicate as she was in his memory, so he could know that he hadn’t been dreaming.

  Henry pulled his blind down and turned on the overhead light to read over his speech notes. Martha slept beside him, still as a mannequin, hidden beneath an eye mask.

  The cabin began rousing while she stayed put. Henry opened the blind as they descended and took in the view of Los Angeles. The endless blocks of bungalows basked in raw, white sunshine, blurred with smog at the edges, making him blink.

  They were met at the terminal by his new personal assistant, Sandy, who passed Henry an overstuffed manila envelope. He juggled this with his cell phone and the day’s second cigarette, jamming the device between his shoulder and his ear and listening.

  Six hours on that flight and already New York was flailing without him. His assistant photo editor had been insisting that they pull Kate Moss from the next cover in favour of Elle Macpherson, for reasons Henry didn’t care to try and grasp.

  ‘The market responds to new,’ Henry said, striding impatiently along the moving walkway, past the old modernist mosaic walls, each plate shuddering beneath his heels, not caring if Sandy or Martha were keeping up with him. ‘Your thinking needs to be more Sedgwick than Bardot. I don’t give a damn if the scheduling doesn’t work. Get hold of Sarah Doukas at Storm and make it happen. Use my name. No, I don’t get the same frisson from Elle. We need to be on a new narrative—swimsuits are out, emaciation is surprising. Think Lauren Hutton in a body stocking.’

  The brusque tone covered his own hesitation. Timothy was convinced that Seattle and grunge culture would displace glamour and have the biggest impact on style over the coming years, but Henry had needed persuading.

  A shiny black town car swept them out of the airport. Henry kept talking on his cell phone as he opened the manila folder. On top was a full-page clipping from the Los Angeles Times. A man looked out at him from the photograph, leaning across his desk, his big arms filling out a red-striped shirt paired with a cherry blossom print tie.

  Force Behind the Frills was the headline. And beneath: As most magazine editors search for a secure foothold in a volatile market, Henry Calder is doing it his way—or should that be the Her way?

  ‘Let’s continue this later,’ Henry said into the phone.

  ‘They ran with it this morning,’ Sandy said. ‘Miraculously.’

  ‘Hey, Martha, check this out.’ He turned to her in the seat next to him, suddenly aware that he might easily have left her on the concourse without noticing.

  She put an arm around him and read over his shoulder. ‘Fantastic,’ she said. Her voice was flat—she must have been tired from the early start.

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Henry wanted to seek more validation, but she hadn’t left him the opportunity to say more. He read on.

  Mr Calder admits to having ended up in the fashion world by accident, having studied architecture and design. His first publishing venture, the more serious Look Closer, which he co-edited with Kurt Wilder, failed to find an audience. But that hasn’t stopped Mr Calder from trying to compromise between the commercial and the cerebral. By his own description, Her has transformed from a faded grande dame into an edgy, svelte style bible over the last two years. His aesthetic is more technical than technicolor; an anomaly in the big, bold fashion world.

  ‘Everything about the publication is flawless,’ he tells me when we meet in his corner office, surrounded by prized Herman Miller furniture and Danish ceramics, their provenance already described to me in detail. ‘My favourite designers don’t let the seams show, and nor does Her. We’re creating a Mies van der Rohe skyscraper out of the human body.’

  Fogel had warned him about saying something like this when they were having lunch together at Petrossian and Henry mentioned his anxieties about the upcoming interview. Too much intellectual language wouldn’t sit well with the advertisers, according to Fogel. Inconsistent with the demographic. Henry had given this advice due consideration, but when placed on the spot, with a tape recorder whirring on his desk, had decided not to follow it.

  A sneering note ran right through what should have been a righteous puff piece. One section, in particular, annoyed Henry:

  Mr Calder’s other half, Martha Beaucanon, is the newly appointed director of private fundraising and partnerships at UNICEF. When I ask him about her, he refuses to indulge me.

  ‘I keep those two sides of my life separate,’ he says, as if I’ve demanded to see the skeletons in his closet.

  Henry quickly turned the page, hoping Martha hadn’t made it to that part. The more he read through the second half of the article, which focused on tonight’s party, the more his optimism waned.

  The question all across Hollywood today is whose after-party will take the mantle from Swifty Lazar? Mr Calder believes he has an answer, though he faces stiff competition from a host of higher-profile publications and media titans.

  ‘We’re the scrappy outsiders—think the ’51 Mets. People are going to respond to that because we have a guest list and a venue nobody can compete with.’

  I ask him if he can tease us with any tidbits from this guest list.

  ‘Of course not. But it’s going to be the most exclusive group in t
own. Everyone who’s been invited is a close friend of mine.’

  And how many friends can a scrappy outsider have at this point?

  ‘Let me put it this way—we’re hosting it at the Stahl House, the best piece of architecture on the West Coast, and it’s going to be standing-room only.’

  Had he really said that? Henry snapped the folder shut and twisted himself away from Martha to look out the window. The dead asphalt of the freeway flew past in a whirl. No crush of skyscrapers here. Nothing obstructed this desert expanse, apart from a hint of the Beverly Hills and LA’s diminutive downtown skyline, the plains in between speckled with an endless rash of palm trees.

  They couldn’t have been any further from New York, but the difference was cosmetic. Henry didn’t believe in all the contrasts drawn between these two cities. To him, Los Angeles was the same piece of machinery as New York, but in a brighter skin.

  They were staying at the Chateau Marmont, at the quiet end of the Sunset Strip, nestled in its leafy grove at the foot of the hills. Parvenus that they were, they’d chosen the most iconic of all Hollywood hotels: the site of Leibovitz photo shoots, where Led Zeppelin had ridden their motorcycles through the lobby, and Jim Morrison jumped from a third-storey window and walked away unscathed (or so the myth went). For reasons more practical than symbolic, the staff were famously sensitive to privacy here.

  Henry had spent the last two weeks working here poolside with Timothy and their Hollywood team, laying plans for tonight’s party, before returning to New York for a few meetings over the weekend. Fogel was waiting for them now on the restaurant terrace with his bejewelled fiancée, Gloria—a Brazilian model. Henry had introduced them.

  ‘There he is,’ Fogel said, waving his copy of the Times. ‘The newest star in the sky. This is great stuff, Calder. Must’ve taken some manoeuvring to get it out on Oscar day, am I right?’

  ‘Couldn’t possibly say. The official line is we got lucky. How’s the location?’