The Benefactor

by Sebastian Hampson

  Maggie had left the house late in the morning, trudging from the guestroom to the front door without a word. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to disturb him. Henry wanted to ask what she was doing on her day off. Where she was going, whom she was meeting. More curiously, he wanted to abandon his memoirs, get up and follow her.

  A few rambling footsteps took him up LaGuardia Place, past NYU. Henry stopped outside the Bobst Library, designed by Philip Johnson and Richard Foster, and described by Paul Goldberger as one of New York’s most spectacular architectural experiences. A brutalist salmon-pink masonry facade concealed its marble-floored atrium and a golden latticework of geometric screens running up the walls—recently installed to prevent suicides. The atrium’s emptiness asserted its architects’ belief that neither wealth nor beauty deserved to be overstated, that restraint was power.

  Until recently, Henry hadn’t thought about how much was unavailable to him as an older man. With no student ID, he had no way of getting inside to marvel at these spectacular new suicide screens, which he’d only seen in photographs. He couldn’t be a student again, couldn’t spend his breaks in Washington Square Park in the early spring, tossing a frisbee or playing hacky sack the way they did. Nor could he run off and meet Fogel uptown for dinner with his outrageous uncle, the one who’d slipped little plastic packages to his nephew under the table and died in a Costa Rican jail many years ago.

  Three o’clock on a Monday. Indecently early for a glass of wine. But when Henry sat down on a bench in Washington Square to check his phone, he didn’t see anybody’s name flashing up on the display. No upcoming calendar events, no reservations. Nothing but a stack of junk emails and a personalised message from Bergdorf with the subject line Henry, it’s been a while since we saw you.

  He didn’t realise, until he’d been sitting on this bench for a while, that it was the exact same one on which he’d proposed to Martha in 1989. It had been one in the morning after a frazzling day at work during which he was almost fired by a coked-up Kurt. Needing something—anything—to change, he’d bought an ugly sapphire ring on impulse on his way home. Dinner with Martha had failed to cheer him up, but later, fuelled by a mix of nerves and adrenaline and champagne, he’d found his true Martha. And he couldn’t even remember how she’d reacted when he gave her that ring.

  With nowhere else to go, he headed to the bar, and was embarrassed to find it quieter than usual. Beth had replaced the usual jazz with something jagged and modern and (presumably) recorded by struggling friends of hers in Brooklyn. To his relief, she turned it off as soon as she’d brought him his wine—a glass of a different cabernet he didn’t enjoy as much as last week’s. He tried following the swing and the sway of the jazz, once it had returned, by tapping along with his foot. Not by accident, but deliberately. Straining to keep its tempo.

  Next to him, among the handful of fellow drinkers, a woman in a pantsuit clutched her Chanel handbag as if worried it was about to be swiped. She could have been the plaintiff in a suit against some shady Park Avenue surgeon. She was waiting for someone, who turned out to be her daughter—he hoped. The younger woman’s hands were busy with three Miu Miu shopping bags. ‘What did you buy?’ her mother said, accusatorially. No greeting. They went to a table with their champagne cocktails, both glowering.

  He hadn’t expected anything as benign as shopping to cause such animosity between two people who were supposed to show nothing but love for each other. Henry wondered if either of them read Her. If the daughter had chosen to blow her pay cheque at Miu Miu after seeing the magazine’s double- or triple-page advertisements—as much gratuitous nudity as they could get away with, plus a big, fat logo.

  Martha sat down next to him, taking the pantsuited woman’s spot. Henry had to blink. She was wearing those ridiculous seventies sunglasses and a fedora, her lips painted purple. The tight leather jacket straddled a pair of riding trousers and boots. For an instant, Henry was there in the jazz club on Christopher Street, drawn away from his colleagues, into her sphere.

  Then he noticed the chains on the jacket, the stud in her nose. It wasn’t Martha. But he’d recognised her.

  ‘What’s up?’ Maggie said, dipping the glasses. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘I…I didn’t think it was you. Never seen you dressed like that.’ She was wearing mascara, too. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Dropped in on my exhibition.’

  ‘Aha. How’s it going?’

  Maggie ignored the question and instead waved at Beth, leaving Henry to face his confusion. He’d been so delighted to see Martha, so surprised, and yet it had felt so natural, so expected. As if he’d been coming down to this bar for the last year knowing that at some point she’d show up and they’d be able to talk, talk in a way they never had, about the unsaid things that had been festering inside him.

  ‘How did it go?’ Beth said, pouring first herself and then Maggie a shot of tequila—Henry noticed that the owner wasn’t around. ‘Any action?’

  ‘Not enough. I picked up a few more brochures to hand out.’

  She dropped a stack of them on the bar. Il est naturelle. A washed-out photograph of a delirious drag queen. Henry wasn’t familiar with the name of the gallery, but it was on 23rd Street—nothing subpar about that.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Beth said. ‘I’m sorry, honey. Either we’re celebrating or commiserating, but it’s grounds for another shot.’ Which she poured, readily. ‘Did they say anything?’

  ‘They’re not going to waste their breath—they took a failed wager on an amateur and they know it.’

  Beth raised her eyebrows and downed the second shot.

  ‘Main thing is you’ve already had your own show, right? And you’ll get more. Hey, perhaps you should check it out.’ She placed one of the brochures in front of Henry. ‘I bet you have a good eye. That photo is the centrepiece.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s his style,’ Maggie said.

  Henry examined the drag queen in the photograph. Despite its dynamism, the subject’s glittery expression captured in the middle of some euphoric reaction, the image didn’t stir anything in him. Not the way a clean, enigmatic Hopper landscape or one of Ezra Stoller’s architectural studies did. He decided he must have become more boring than he’d realised.

  Except there wasn’t anything boring about stately architecture. He thought of Ronchamp again, of how little such powerful, dignified design might stir in these young people, when their preference was clearly for the overstated. He wished he could have made it to the chapel with Martha, rather than waiting around in a bus depot in Basel, so he’d have known if it inspired the same reaction in her. He didn’t like to think he was alone in that.

  There had been more to that trip. Martha had booked a flight to Germany the next weekend, after finishing up her meetings in Geneva. News had come through that they were tearing down the Berlin Wall. He couldn’t remember why he hadn’t joined her—perhaps he’d needed to return to New York early for work.

  Considering the brochure while swirling a big gulp of wine around his mouth, Henry prepared to say what he would have said a few years ago, when confronted with this sort of accusation by a subordinate: No, it’s not my style. This is my style, these are the reasons it’s superior, and you’d better learn to love it or you’ll be searching for a new job. But he was too intrigued by this image Maggie had created to dismiss it out of hand.

  Nor did he have anything to say about it. The face revealed nothing, nothing he could relate to on a personal level.

  Beth was already asking about Maggie’s plans for that evening, telling her about some rooftop party on the Lower East Side.

  ‘I’m so down,’ Maggie said. ‘Who’s going to be there?’

  ‘Bunch of crazies. I went to school with one of the guys, Jason. He was in Nazareth this last year, ended up on a kibbutz, shaved his head and picked pomegranates. He says it was some spiritual journey or whatever. Now he’s opening this vegan Israeli place in Bushwick. You’ll
love him.’

  Beth wasn’t really asking Maggie to join her, Henry observed—simply assuming she would. It was presented as more threat than invitation: come with me or go home and be lonely. It reminded Henry of when he’d first met Fogel and Kurt Wilder in college, when Timothy made all the plans and assumed his friend would be both impressed by his choices and grateful to tag along. And Henry had always been self-conscious about that gratitude, even though he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it.

  The day’s failures had affected Maggie’s feelings towards her fellow human beings, so while the idea of a party still appealed, she had to bite back a few nasty presumptions about this Jason character. She saw him already: a skinny chill dude with dead eyes who wore his new-age sensitivity on his stripy, loose-fitting sleeve; chest hair spilling from his V-necked shirt, entwined with some kind of necklace he’d appropriated after a vacation to Thailand or Vietnam. Considering himself worldlier than her, he wouldn’t have hesitated to remind everyone in the room that his experiences of the world were the most authentic.

  She allowed herself to think bitterly about this archetypal man, for a moment, because she’d met him before. And she’d had sex with him, from which she’d been able to discover just how illusory that sensitive image was.

  Maggie didn’t own a passport, had never been on a flight lasting more than a couple of hours. She didn’t believe travel automatically made you worldlier or more sophisticated. And she didn’t see the point of going to a war zone only to gather material for the stoned conversations you would have at rooftop parties when you got home. Ridiculous to spend a summer in another country, another culture, and to return pretending to be some kind of expert in it.

  Despite her doubts, Maggie knew she had to go along with Beth and work hard to impress Jason and the rest of them. Nobody could navigate the maze of New York solo, and she needed a friend. Perhaps she would go to this party tonight and let herself be championed, treated as a serious threat to the competition. For now, her show was enough currency. Beth liked to brag about Maggie’s success, thinking it made her own projects more exciting, her ambitions more credible. As long as Beth recognised the advantage in claiming a relationship with her, Maggie had reason for hope.

  ‘He sounds interesting,’ Maggie said. Then, finding she had nothing to add, ‘So…would you ever want to go to the Middle East yourself?’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ Beth didn’t sound committed. ‘Beirut, Damascus. That’s where you go if you want to be a real artist, I’ve heard. Like…I don’t know, Paris in the twenties.’

  Henry spluttered into his glass of wine. The two women stared at him.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘You think conflict zones are cornucopias of culture? Let me tell you, war-ravaged countries are where you go to see humanity at its most corrupt and desperate, not its most creative.’

  ‘You’re basing that on firsthand experience?’ Maggie said.

  ‘Not exactly. I don’t have to—my wife went to Afghanistan a few times after they made her deputy director of UNICEF, and she told me all about the destruction. Kids forced to live on the street because they’d had their houses razed.’

  ‘I doubt Martha saw half of what was going on.’

  Maggie noticed as she said this that Beth was looking at her strangely. She didn’t care. Calder didn’t have the authority to speak about this supposedly darker side of humanity when it was his wife who’d encountered it. He didn’t want the slightest glimpse of the darker side, yet he wanted to talk about it as though he’d been the one there, identifying with the other victims of war, seeing the horrors through their eyes.

  Beth seemed as though she was about to say something. Then the lady in the pantsuit waved over at her, tapping her champagne flute. Beth appeared to hesitate before leaving Maggie and Henry alone.

  Prepared for Henry to let forth a few more strident words, Maggie was surprised when he simply laid some cash down on the bar and left. She didn’t understand why he’d given up—it was as though a much larger thought had occurred to him, and he had to go off and pursue it.

  Helmut Newton. Mario Testino. Steven Meisel. Henry flicked through pages of their photographs, cut from the digests Sandy used to prepare for him, trying to figure out where he and Timothy Fogel had stood in relation to the others. The lines had once been so clear: Her had gone for the classic, the understated, not the loud declaratives of postmodernity. He could no longer make such an obvious distinction. The evidence before him was hardly straightforward, the craft and the elegance of his competitors no less pronounced than his own. Kylie Bax exposing one breast at a restaurant table, shot by Newton, was as provocative, as powerful, as anything he’d ever commissioned.

  He’d found these digests shoved into one particular shoebox, after returning home from the bar with an urgent need to work on the memoirs. His attempt to tell the story of the mid-nineties as the resounding victory of Henry Calder over the rest of the world remained unfinished on the computer, waiting with limitless patience for him to make his mind up again.

  He hadn’t meant to bring up Martha and her work. Maggie’s reaction had reminded him of why he tried not to think about it, why he’d never had cause to understand what his wife did for a living, what significance it could have had beyond the obvious. Hard enough, he thought, to grope around for the meatier chunks of significance in his own career.

  Soon Henry found he’d been staring at the same page of Sandy’s digest for longer than he could keep track of, slumped in his chair, a tumbler of Stagg slowly disappearing next to him. He wondered if Martha had been fearful for her own safety when she went to Afghanistan. That was the first thing he’d asked her, when she decided to make the trip, and she’d told him it didn’t matter how she felt. She was going either way. He’d left it there, but he’d also become silently obsessed with the subject, gripped by paranoia when he hadn’t received a reassuring phone call from her for more than a day, checking the news every night to make sure a Taliban attack hadn’t hit the orphanages and schools she was visiting in Maidan Shar.

  He’d assumed that Martha was seeing the full picture, that these firsthand experiences had made her a more rounded human being. Which was why Maggie’s comment now buzzed faintly around the room, refusing to let him be. They’d never talked much about what she’d been through on these trips—which, he supposed, hadn’t lasted long enough for her to form deep connections with the children or their war-torn communities; they hadn’t been more than public relations exercises—but he’d felt strongly that she’d somehow shared that experience with him, without saying anything. He’d been so involved in worrying about his wife and her safety that, in his imagination, he could have been there with her.

  When Maggie came in an hour later, she ignored Henry and headed straight for the kitchen. Henry followed her and watched from the shadowy corner behind the staircase, between the hanging cabinets, as she prepared herself a bowl of cereal. He tried to see Martha doing the same thing, but he couldn’t make their images align again, the way they had in the bar.

  ‘So you’re going to this party, then?’ Henry said, withdrawing from the corner and making her drop the spoon with a clatter.

  ‘Jesus. You scared me.’ She picked it up off the floor, ignoring the drips of milk now on the tiles. ‘Why wouldn’t I be going? I’m meeting Beth after she’s finished work.’

  ‘Does she know you’re living here?’

  ‘No. And I don’t want her to.’

  ‘I won’t say anything. I mean, I haven’t, and I won’t.’ He was about to wipe the drips off the floor, and he took a rag from the sink and rinsed it and squeezed it hard between his hands, trying to get every drop of water out. He took in a few breaths, narrowed his vision to the floor. ‘Listen—I’m…I’m sorry for snapping at you the other day, about that sketch. It wasn’t warranted.’

  ‘I didn’t even think about it.’

  She stood at the counter to eat, leaning over the day’s newspaper as she wiped a drop of milk off her chin
. She trailed her spoon listlessly around the bowl, as if tracing its perimeter.

  ‘Have you started working on anything new?’ Henry said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I know how hard it is to try to surpass a thing that worked, but I guess nobody’s really told you what a crazy achievement it is to have your own exhibition at this age.’

  ‘They tell me all the time.’

  ‘So how come you’re so blasé about it?’

  As she searched his face, no doubt trying to guess his thoughts, she inadvertently laid bare her own. Judging by intuition, Henry believed with absolute certainty that something was motivating her, something beyond the social prestige and validation that came with success.

  ‘You didn’t have this burning desire to be a magazine editor,’ she said. ‘You wanted to be an architect. Am I wrong? I’ve seen your book collection.’

  Almost word for word what Martha had said to him when their car broke down in the Jura hills. He couldn’t believe it.

  She was waiting, unsatisfied, the cereal forgotten, but he couldn’t find the right words, had no advice to offer her.

  ‘There are a lot of practical reasons I didn’t try to become an architect,’ he said, struggling to stay authoritative, illustrating this intention with a series of forceful hand gestures. ‘Number one being I was no good at math. Or drawing. What you need to understand is I’ve never had a big dream—not like you. I was too rational to get caught up in that headspace. But I met the right people, they showed me a few opportunities, and I found a way to go after those opportunities.’

  ‘The art isn’t my big dream. It’s just a thing I’m doing, and I’m not even sure why.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, tolerant but impatient—he hated to hear people concede defeat when he was challenging them to do the opposite. ‘I’ll admit I used to feel like that too, when I first moved to New York, before I had a plan. You have to remember it’s temporary. There’s this place I’d go whenever I needed a reminder of what one disciplined mind can accomplish. How about you come with me?’