The Benefactor

by Sebastian Hampson

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘I’ll show you. Might not be helpful, but it’s worth a shot.’

  ‘Sure. Just remember I have to go to this party later.’

  They headed for the door. It would be cold outside. Reaching deep inside the hallway closet, Henry’s hand fell upon the wrong overcoat. One he didn’t recognise immediately. He had to feel the angular hemlines and the zips arranged at random down each breast before he picked it—the one Martha had bought for him from La Rue des Rêves, years ago. The one he’d never liked. Which was strange, because usually he shared Martha’s tastes.

  He thought about loaning the coat to Maggie, whose own clothes were so insubstantial for a New York winter. He held it briefly under the light, the metal of the zips glinting, menacing, like the teeth of a dark ghost. The immaculate cashmere still carried the musty remnants of his cologne from the last time he wore it, maybe twenty years ago.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Maggie said.

  Henry scrunched up the ghost’s smirk and shoved it into the furthermost corner of the closet.

  ‘I need to clean some of this junk out.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Maggie said as they were leaving, stepping past the pile of untouched mail in the entryway. ‘This package came for you yesterday. Got it from your super.’

  Henry wasn’t expecting a package. He closed the door on it.

  ‘WHAT do you think?’

  They stood across 5th Avenue from the Guggenheim Museum. A twilight shroud hung over the trees of Central Park, the rings of the building’s spiral rotunda illuminated in changing colours, rising above the stream of rush-hour traffic.

  ‘I’ve seen the Guggenheim before, Henry.’

  ‘Bet you haven’t spent this much time with it. You’ve walked past it, probably. I couldn’t get enough of this building when I first saw it. The design was so…radical. In its simplicity. A temple of the spirit. Evokes the nautilus shell. When architecture’s that close to nature it becomes a continuous piece within its environment. Wright called it a symphony. That’s the word. And you know what? He died six months before it opened. He put everything into this space and he never saw the public interacting with it.’

  ‘So when you saw it the first time, were those pretzel carts out the front?’

  Henry hadn’t noticed the pretzel carts before. Nor had he noticed the advertisements for five-dollar pashminas, or the barricade of postcards and fridge magnets and caricatures blocking the flow between the museum, the park and the sidewalk. ‘Forget those,’ he said. ‘They aren’t important.’

  ‘Why not? There’s nothing more going on with that building. It just sits there.’

  How could an artist not appreciate the uncomplicated elegance of this design? Ezra Stoller had treated the Guggenheim as a precious object, his camera pitched at a low, wide angle, in rightful awe of it. Without the clutter of unnecessary details, the building in the photographs was more prominent than its real-life counterpart could ever be. Henry hadn’t noticed before that the buildings around it were twice as tall. An uninformed passer-by could have missed this masterpiece completely.

  His thoughts drifted back to the sketch he’d found on his coffee table—the one that had refused to leave him alone, tugging at a loose end whenever his mind turned to Martha. The figure in the middle of the composition was his wife. Maggie had channelled her somehow—not the Martha Henry normally preferred to remember, but the one who didn’t fit in, who stuck out at odd angles and took up more than her half of the bed when they were sharing it, sleeplessly, on hot nights. The Martha who arrived home after a trip abroad and filled her quota of pleasure in dinner together and sophisticated conversation, but then retreated to the chair by the windows, eyes scanning for something, something he couldn’t see, over the rooftops and the pink summer fog. Impossible to reconcile that detached Martha with the one who loaned herself to other people so effortlessly.

  Except he knew that detachment, recognised it in himself. In the painful discussions that gradually fell away over years of silence and denial. Henry’s experience of this building was just as beautiful, and just as fractional.

  Inside, the museum’s atrium had given itself over to one of those all-encompassing installations, Wright’s skylights hidden behind concentric neon circles. The surrounding galleries displayed rectangular light boxes, like luminescent Frank Stellas, beacons for a crowd of moths. The longer Henry spent beneath their glow, with the other insects, the less this sad, unmoving parade meant to him.

  He could imagine coming to the opening night of this exhibition with Timothy Fogel, both of them working the room, Henry commenting on the formalist success of this artist’s work, the graceful reductivism and reinterpretation of space, not really meaning it but at least thinking he understood. Fogel wouldn’t have been able to shut up, namedropping relentlessly, the two of them practically elbowing each other in the ribs to get to the show’s sponsors.

  But the familiarity of this imagined scene seemed counteracted by how far out of reach it was now. Despite its incomparably small scale, Henry decided on balance that the image of the drag queen on Maggie’s brochure had spoken to him more powerfully than anything in here. He wanted to take one of these people aside and grill them about why they’d chosen to come here, what it was about this minimalist spectacle that resonated with them. Why it deserved their attention.

  Maggie didn’t show any signs of being impressed, standing around with her hands in her leather jacket pockets—another thing Martha always used to do, though Maggie appeared to be playing up her boredom more than his wife ever had. Henry wasn’t sure why, but this made him feel as though he’d done something wrong by bringing her here. They didn’t stay long.

  Out on the street, Maggie breathed against her hands while Henry tried vainly to hail a cab. Her face had gone pink in the chill, the wind slicing straight through that leather jacket.

  ‘You’re cold,’ Henry said, giving up on the cab. ‘Let’s grab a bite.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Sure you are.’

  They ended up at a sleepy Japanese place on Madison, shoved in between a New American brasserie and a bridal wear store. Unless it was a yakuza front, Henry couldn’t imagine how they afforded the rent.

  As they settled in, Henry became uncomfortably aware that he’d been to this restaurant before. The rickety paper blinds. The steel fan with its cord hanging loose. The instructions in big, red text on how to help a choking diner, ominously displayed next to the sushi bar.

  A day in 1986. Right before he’d met Martha. His first Saturday afternoon living in New York, his first chance to be alone and savour the city. He’d wandered over here after visiting the Guggenheim, searching for something filling that wouldn’t cost too much. Being new in town, there was no fear of running into acquaintances, no need to impress anyone with his knowledge of the trendiest restaurants, clubs, smoking lounges.

  Maggie ordered chirashi for both of them before Henry could decide what they were having. Then they sat for a while, Henry’s desire to break the silence somehow compounding it instead.

  ‘What did they tell you today?’ he said. ‘At the gallery.’

  ‘Not much. They acted starstruck, took me out to lunch like it was a big deal.’

  This wasn’t how it had sounded when she’d told Beth. Henry wondered why Maggie would have downplayed this meeting when she could have spun it into something that cast her in a much better light. Then he realised she’d already revealed more to him than to her object of attraction. He told himself to shut up and allow her to go ahead.

  ‘Basically they asked if I had anything else lined up, which I believe means they’re not making a profit off this show. Otherwise they would’ve told me the sales figures.’

  ‘I didn’t think the money mattered that much to you,’ Henry said, leaning forward propping one hand beneath his chin as he concentrated on her, not judging but cu
rious.

  ‘Not to me, but I need to have an audience for my work. It wouldn’t mean anything if it didn’t belong to other people.’

  ‘And the money and the audience are co-dependent. Like that show at the Guggenheim.’

  ‘Exactly. Nobody would think that museum was a great piece of architecture if Frank Lloyd Wright and the Guggenheim family weren’t these famous, established names. It wouldn’t have been built in the first place. And nobody would have visited that exhibition.’

  She had a point. Henry wouldn’t have allowed himself to pass judgement, whether affirming or negating, on Maggie’s work—not unless somebody told him to. He didn’t have enough of a stake in it. He supposed that any sense of quality had to be an illusion, in the economy of aesthetics. Timothy Fogel’s photographs had quality because they were the subject of conversation among the right commentators, not because of some formal characteristics. Removed from that context, his images were interchangeable with the Helmut Newton and Mario Testino and Steven Meisel shots in Henry’s old digests.

  He couldn’t recall a time he’d thought so cynically about Fogel or their work together. Writing about it in his memoirs had felt like an exercise in self-persuasion, but it had also felt so vital.

  The bowls of chirashi attracted Henry’s attention as they were delivered. In all his years of eating at Japanese restaurants, he hadn’t tried this dish before—had seen it on menus but never felt convinced enough to stray from his standard dry-aged wagyu and bluefin tuna tataki.

  ‘I’m curious,’ he said. ‘Did you know what that was before you ordered it?’

  ‘No. The name just sounded interesting.’

  ‘It means scattered.’

  Maggie picked at it, not sure where to start, holding her chopsticks the wrong way but persisting, not really caring if she lost her grip on the slippery pieces of fish.

  ‘It’s funny,’ Henry said. ‘I’ve been trying to write a memoir.’

  ‘Yeah, I noticed.’

  ‘It’s a work in progress. I don’t have a whole lot to say about when I was your age. But when I was going over those early chapters, well…I met this guy, when I was at college. Slight chance you’ve heard of him. Timothy Fogel. And I started wondering how things would’ve been if I hadn’t become friends with him. Which, I’ll admit, is a pointless way to think. I’m not sure how much of what we do is our own fault…as opposed to someone else’s. But… you really like Beth, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s fairly chill, what we have going on.’

  Something about this didn’t gel with what Henry had seen earlier in the day. Maggie had been hanging off Beth’s every word, as though afraid the end of their conversation might signal another kind of ending, that she might be cut off and left alone again.

  ‘Here’s what I think,’ Henry said. ‘Either you came to New York to be with someone, and it didn’t work out, or you came here to get away from them.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I heard you talking the other night. Bad break-up…nothing indecipherable about that language. Whichever it was doesn’t matter—I don’t need to hear the details.’

  ‘And you won’t. Why were you listening in on my private conversation?’

  He noticed Maggie had gone rigid, stopped eating. Though it was shameful, and that was how she wanted him to feel, Henry somehow thought it deserved to be his business. Her mistake to have that conversation under his roof.

  ‘You need to keep a clear head about who you are in these situations,’ he said, unwilling to offer an explanation, the need to offer advice now prodding him more urgently. He remembered how empty he’d felt, being alone in New York without Timothy in 1986, when he had to confront the city he’d only ever experienced together with his friend, unable to attend the same clubs and parties without invitations. ‘If I’m ever worried about who I am, I go stand in front of that building for a while.’

  He couldn’t elaborate, couldn’t share anything so intimate, and he worried that she would ask him why that helped. He’d visited that building as a bachelor, as if it were a true temple of the spirit, and himself a lonely pilgrim, in communion with a space that opened up to him, that spoke of limitless possibilities. But he hadn’t made that pilgrimage in years, and now he wasn’t sure if it could still affect him as it once had.

  ‘I really don’t need you to tell me how to deal with men,’ Maggie said, so unexpectedly stern that Henry felt he’d been given a smack around the jowls. ‘I’m not some fucking…hysterical teenager. There’s a reason it ended, and there’s a reason I don’t want to get over him immediately. And, while we’re on that subject, I know you didn’t quit your job.’

  ‘All right. They kicked me out, three months ago. It doesn’t have to be the end, though. Fogel thinks he’s got something for me at Vogue. Not sure I want it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Too much changed.’

  ‘You mean your wife died.’

  Henry hadn’t seen any connection between the loss of his wife and the loss of his job, the old, soot-stained firewall that had always stood between his marriage and his work intact and unbreached. In his mind, this ending was a punishment of which he was the victim. His employers had seen him off with no more apology or goodbye than a shrug and a clap on the shoulder. Better luck next time, son. But perhaps Martha’s absence had made it easier to accept that clap.

  ‘What would she tell you to do, if she were here?’ Maggie continued. ‘Presuming you talked about that kind of thing.’

  ‘She wouldn’t tell me to do anything. She was happy with whatever I did. Supportive.’

  ‘Right. What did she do?’

  ‘She hung around at UNICEF, until eventually she became deputy executive director there. She started out in fundraising, sticking her hands in as many pockets around town as she could find. She was good at it—she should’ve kept doing that. It all changed when she began visiting the places where the money went.’

  ‘How did it change?’

  Henry chewed on a rubbery piece of sashimi. ‘I don’t know. I guess it wasn’t a game to her anymore. It seemed more important when she was visiting the clinics in Zimbabwe and shaking hands with lepers and whatnot. I was proud of her. She didn’t have to go and do all that, but she wanted to.’

  Maggie got the impression that the pride depended on another feeling to sustain itself, which he wasn’t going to reveal. Perhaps he’d been jealous of the attention Martha had given her work, rather than him. Perhaps it had shown up, however intermittently, the worthlessness of his own contributions to the world around him—leaving him alone in New York with his material goods, which he appreciated for their murmuring reassurances of status and power.

  She couldn’t imagine the man who clung so tightly to his modernist photographs and champagne collection holding the same convictions as his wife. There was nothing altruistic about him. Though he’d taken her in when she was desperate, it wasn’t compassion that had driven him but something more complex, something she couldn’t quite identify. She imagined him with his old friend, the famous photographer, ganging up on the models at their photo shoots, flashing their expensive wristwatches, seeing who could get the girl to come out for a drink, who could make her the most uncomfortable while staying just within the bounds of professional conduct.

  She also wondered why his wife had hung around at the same organisation for the whole time they were married. Perhaps she’d decided to settle down, to lower her own stakes, after marrying—but the thought of anyone settling in for twenty-whatever years of low-stakes living with the man in front of her seemed unlikely.

  Deflecting the attention from her own relationships seemed to have worked—after all, what man wouldn’t prefer to talk about his own suffering? She didn’t understand why somebody who claimed to have no interest in her life—who dismissed it out of hand from his casual, moralising boomer perspective—would pry into her conversations from behind closed doors. The boy (she didn’t like to think
of him as a man, even though he was older than her) wasn’t the reason she’d come to New York, and he wasn’t the reason her life was in tatters. Henry had obviously drawn from his own experience.

  ‘And what about your pride in your own work?’ she said. ‘It must have meant a lot to you, editing a magazine.’

  ‘Of course it did.’

  She made a point of showing that this was insufficient, raising her eyebrows, leaning her chair back and crossing one big-booted leg over the other.

  He squirmed. ‘I was…I was dealing with incredible talent. Best way to make it in this city is to spend a few years learning your way around the network of talent. Then you mess with it, make new connections. It was like having a backstage pass to everything. I made entire careers for designers by introducing them to the right people, over the right sort of lunch. There’s an art to hooking people up. And you should’ve seen our offices. I always said the operation has to look like a bigger deal than it really is. You came in for a meeting, you entered a Roman palace. My first assignment for a new writer was to go down to Bergdorf’s and buy themselves a Charvet shirt.’

  A few safe old lines, Maggie presumed. He could have recited those to a journalist, or dedicated a page to them in his memoirs. Clearly he didn’t realise how sick, how wrong, those words sounded when they didn’t have any convincing framework to rest on. She tried to think which Roman emperor he best resembled, reaching into the depths of high school history class. Trajan, generously. Maybe more of a Tiberius.

  Tired of having her own life dissected on somebody else’s terms, Maggie decided she had to give Henry the same treatment.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘So how about you show them to me?’

  ‘My offices?’ He was trying to wither her, curled sideways in his chair, the chopsticks in his hand tapping nervously together as he stared her down. ‘Why?’

  ‘I think you need to put your own theory to the test. I won’t be convinced till I’ve seen the palace for myself. Come on.’