‘Ottelia, the first thing I have to get out of the way,’ Martha said, ‘is that while UNICEF would love to scratch your back in return, we don’t have a whole lot to scratch it with—apart from prestige. But that’s where Henry comes in.’
No wonder she’d agreed to this location so readily—too readily, Henry thought. This wasn’t the sort of deal you could stitch together over coffee and stale danishes in some dingy room deep in the bowels of UNICEF.
‘This is exciting,’ Ottelia said. ‘I know Martha wants me to become a UNICEF ambassador. Perhaps we could go to visit the communities in Africa together, make that the subject of the feature. What did you have in mind, Henry? How can we work together to inform your readers about these issues…’ she picked up one of the papers she and Martha had been reading earlier, ‘…the mother in Zambia who has infected her child with a virus that will kill them both? The seven-year-old girl in India who has to sew wallets to earn enough money for her dying mother’s medication?’
Henry couldn’t imagine anything worse. His readership didn’t want to see photographs of child labour, and his advertisers would run screaming.
‘I’m not sure informing is the right word,’ he said. ‘We can’t be too obvious about it, but we could certainly incorporate the…issues into editorial pieces, as long as we did it subtly, of course. Exotic locations are sexy. We can play off that.’
The women pretended not to have heard this remark, but Henry caught the slightest hint of disapproval from Martha. Gone in an instant, as always.
Martha couldn’t remember the last time her husband had behaved so rudely. They left the restaurant less than an hour later, after Henry had drunk most of two bottles of wine and eaten all the oysters. The photographers had disappeared from the sidewalk, replaced by indifferent pedestrians and street vendors no more interested in her or Henry or Ottelia than any other nobody.
Henry hailed Ottelia a cab and promised to be in touch soon, with an exaggerated, awkward kiss goodbye. Martha didn’t try any such move. She reminded Ottelia to set up another meeting to discuss becoming a UNICEF ambassador.
As the cab pulled away, they stood together on Park Avenue for a minute. Henry shook his head and spat out a couple of disbelieving sighs, wincing, waiting for her to say something. She ignored him.
‘You know, next time you try to ambush me like that,’ he said, after a few false starts, ‘I’d appreciate it if you could at the very least show a little respect.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘No, seriously, not a clue.’
‘Jesus, Martha. You’ve put me in an extremely difficult position here. I can’t run stories about AIDS and starving children. The advertisers will pull out, and I’ll be held accountable when they do.’
‘Hey—I thought we had an agreement.’
‘An unspoken one, apparently.’
Martha knew exactly what she was doing, where she was treading, but she felt her expression slipping out of her control. They hadn’t spoken much, about anything, for several years now. The few attempts to discuss Timothy—her concerns about his character—had resulted in a quick dismissal from the presiding judge, the discomfort she felt sharing his company whenever he was in town brushed aside in favour of other, more pressing matters. Henry wanted it both ways: something to hold over her, and to keep up the beneficial relationship with his old fraternity brother. The relationship that meant more to him than she ever could.
She’d also tried, on a few occasions, to make sure they were both on the same page with the magazine, where it was taking him, where he wanted to go. She’d made reservations at his favourite restaurants so they could be alone together for an hour or two, and then found, when she tried to talk seriously, that he wasn’t really there—that he was tapping his foot, searching around for someone else to talk to, for some name to walk in the door and give him an excuse to rush over and say hello. He would take a call on his cell phone without hesitation, or spend half an hour in conversation with the bartender.
After some coaxing, and a few glasses of wine, he might listen to her, might even agree with her, in principle. Yes, he would say, of course we need to be addressing child poverty, rape, starvation. Yes, the work you do is important. Yes, I want the same things you do. No, I don’t think you’re naive. Yes, I wish there was more I could do. But they always reached the same impasse, as they had the other night when they prepared for this meeting. No, he was not in a position to address those sorts of issues in the pages of Her.
Either she loved him for who he was—easy. Or she loved him for who he could have been, if he put the extra ounce of effort in. Not so easy.
‘I’d wondered if you weren’t really listening when we talked about this,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to lose your job over slipping a little politics into that magazine. And I thought that was what you wanted—to publish something real. You’ve got a platform, now use it to say something important.’
‘You don’t get it,’ he told her. ‘I can’t just do whatever the hell I want. They’re scrutinising my every move, waiting for me to slip up. It’s a game, and I have to play by as many rules as you do, even if you can’t see that.’
‘What game?’
He didn’t answer her. A call was coming through on his cell phone, which he didn’t decline immediately. She watched as his finger wavered over the answer button.
‘Fuck this,’ Martha said. ‘Go on: talk to Timothy, tell him what a bitch I am, tell him I don’t understand what you’re trying to do. I’m late for another meeting.’
She began walking down Park, sweating beneath the mid-afternoon sun. A cab almost ran her down as she was crossing 51st Street, and she pulled her middle finger at the driver.
‘Martha,’ Henry called, the sound of his heavy-heeled brogues following her down the street. He caught up to her on the other side of the intersection, tried to grab her by the wrist—she shook him off. ‘What are you doing? You’re insane.’
‘I can’t deal with you when you’re like this, Henry. Go away.’
‘Obviously you can’t deal with any of this. Hey, how’s this for a solution? Next time, I’m meeting Ottelia on my own.’
She wasn’t surprised, but she hadn’t expected anything quite so venomous. And she had nothing more to say to him. With a dismissive wave, Martha crossed the road and kept walking, feeling the heat radiate off the concrete. She turned to catch a brief glimpse of her husband, who hadn’t moved from the street corner. He’d reached for another cigarette, and he was dialling a number on his cell phone.
THE years following 1994 became murkier, harder to put into words. Unable to work them into his memoirs, Henry reflected on them in solitude as he swam lengths at Chelsea Piers. Martha never got the job in Rome. Whether she performed badly at the interview or declined the offer outright, he hadn’t asked. The subject wasn’t permitted to surface for air again. Promotions came through, though, as she chipped away at the big block of her organisation, and she began to travel, as if she had to prove her humanitarian credentials to her superiors, who favoured a more public style of compassion that verged on martyrdom. No longer enough to simply kick around New York and set up deals with investment bankers.
As for Henry, he tried to ride the wave of his own career without being dumped. The Oscars party gamble paid off, raising the magazine’s profile and making him a name in his own right. The event itself lasted two more years before it became unprofitable.
He’d gone to charity dinners with Martha; she’d come with him to the Costume Institute benefits, before they became the Met Gala, and Spring Fashion Week. Neither of them had complained—about anything. For Henry, it had felt like a natural trade-off, although never much more.
At the end of the next length, Henry dropped into a flip turn at the wall and stretched his spine too far, the ligaments creaking out of alignment, refusing to contort the way they had when he was younger. He hadn’t been discontent during t
hose years, not exactly, more resigned, and that resignation had swum beneath the surface of everything. The thrill had gone. The apartment on Bleecker Street had become a home that required maintenance rather than a blank canvas. Martha spent more of her free time in the garden, and less with him.
They’d spent plenty of time with Timothy and Gloria out in Palm Springs over the summers, though he’d made sure they alternated this with a week or two in San Juan, alone together as a couple. Henry had waited for Martha to say something about Timothy, ever since he’d seen him grope her in the Marmont Bar. But years passed, whole years, with no mention of his friend’s betrayal.
Martha was friendly towards Timothy whenever they were together—too friendly for Henry’s liking. They laughed too loud at each other’s jokes, touched each other too readily. A recurring nightmare visited Henry whenever she was away: his wife making illicit plans with Timothy, who called her at the office after a snort of cocaine and told her to change her flights, meet him for dinner in Paris or Milan on her way home from Africa. The dream didn’t resolve or clarify itself after he’d woken, drenched in sweat, instead returning to him in incomplete flashes throughout the day.
Henry felt paralysed, unable to express himself except through bouts of irrational anger. If pushed, he wouldn’t have been able to identify their source. Easier to internalise his resentment than risk the loss—of Timothy or Martha. Or both of them.
A cramp ran down Henry’s leg as he kicked too hard, setting off the gout in his knee. Gasping, he grabbed the lane divider and held his head above the water, the pain searing down his thigh. He was in the middle of the pool, far from either end. The swimmers in the other lanes flew past, sending up a wake that rippled against him as he dangled off the divider.
Henry would have usually taken a cab down to Bleecker Street after his swim, found a selection of cheeses and charcuteries at Murray’s and taken them home with a bottle of wine, but with Maggie around these habits seemed indulgent. He dropped his duffel bag at the taxi rank outside the sports centre and checked his smartphone in case anyone had invited him out for dinner, drinks, parties—not that he would have accepted. Nothing. His voicemail showed one untouched message.
He was disheartened to find, as he started listening, that it was another from Christine. Though tempted to hit the delete button before she could keep going, he persevered.
’So,’ she said into his ear, after drawing in a deep breath, ‘I’m going to assume you’ve been consciously avoiding my calls. Fine. In case you were wondering, we’re doing great here. The boys walloped Yale in the last wrestling meet. Custer’s got an eye infection…pigmentary uveitis. Might lose his sight. I guess everything else is the same as usual. And we won’t be seeing you for Christmas, so I might as well catch you up now.’ She took in another breath. Henry put a finger into his other ear, trying to hear something other than crackling, dead air, waiting for her to say something else. A little hiccup. She could have been crying. Then he heard the receiver click.
Henry had known his sister too long to take her attempts at emotional blackmail seriously. He would have been happy to ignore these sentiments. But it stuck with him as he gave up waiting for a taxi and walked out of the piers, crossed the West Side Highway and followed the rows of converted warehouses into Chelsea, dazed, not really focusing on where he was going.
He headed for 23rd Street, hoping to find Maggie’s gallery. He’d been strangely lonely without her the other night when they’d returned to the apartment and she went out to meet Beth. He’d stayed up, hoping she would have a terrible time and come home early, finally giving up after midnight and going to bed. He hadn’t seen her until the next evening, when she got in from work. It had been a relief when she finally arrived—he’d felt an urge to cook dinner, to ask her about her day. She’d ignored him, fixated on her cell phone all evening, and had eventually sidled off to the guestroom with a mumbled goodnight. Taking care not to step too heavily, Henry had gone to her door and then lurked outside, listening to her talk. She was speaking in French again, her voice occasionally rising.
Then he’d asked himself what he was doing and left her to it.
He found the gallery next door to Cheim & Read on 25th Street, near the High Line. Maggie’s exhibition announced itself with the same washed-out photograph of the drag queen he’d seen on the flyer. Sister Magdalene: Il est naturelle. It was one of the smaller galleries, one he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been searching for it.
Stepping inside, Henry found the space emptier than it should have felt, a combination of works hanging on the walls and sculptural forms in the centre of the room thrown around without much sense of order. Everything about it—the straightforward presentation of the pieces in well-lit rectangular arrangements, the vague description of the show’s themes as the artist as outsider engaging with her own history—had the air of many risks being taken on an unknown. They weren’t sure how to market it, what aspects to emphasise, what mood to settle on. Without any such scaffolding, the works inside were free to topple over. Some stood on their own merits, but they were shaky.
Consistent with what Henry had seen in other contemporary exhibitions, many of the pieces had unabashed autobiography written all over them. In the centre, an installation wall held more than a hundred blown-up snapshots taken on cell phone cameras, each one printed at the size of a letter page, some more pixelated than others, spanning years. In all of them, Maggie was with a partner whose face had been scratched out and replaced with miniaturised copy taken from newspaper articles—everything from college basketball scores to heavy metal concert reviews to a recipe for fried chicken.
Though the images intrigued him, Henry couldn’t understand what Maggie was trying to say. And he couldn’t follow the narrative, though he suspected there was one. A male doll squeezed into a feather dress occupied a prime place by the entrance, face made up with glitter, encased in perspex, wearing a crucifix around its neck. Nothing personal about that, the cartoonish splash of colour detracting from the rest of the show’s more sombre tone.
As Henry was about to give up, he noticed a subtler collection of images on the rear wall that most would have missed. Three frames, each empty except for a miniature collage at the centre, composed of news clippings from the time of the Iraq invasion and glossy print ads for women’s clothes. In both, she’d redacted chunks of the text with black bars, like an NSA document.
They disturbed Henry. He thought of Martha. How, in 2003, she’d come out swinging against the national security hysteria during a presentation to the Security Council, playing up to her more public role as UNICEF’s deputy executive director, against the advice of her board of directors. As Fogel pointed out on one drunken occasion, her position shared a lot in common with their friend Tom Ford’s comments on the same subject—the implication of which Henry had been quick to read. Simplistic as it may have been, Henry hadn’t understood why Martha had given up on her standing.
‘You’re enjoying the triptych?’
Henry was startled out of his thoughts by the gallery assistant, who must have been Maggie’s age, if not younger.
‘This could be the work of a completely different artist,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘She’s playing with the plurality of self—public and private gender roles. Would you care to take an information sheet?’
‘No, thank you. I’m good.’
Stretching his torso, Henry felt the crick in his spine. Those flip turns weren’t doing him any good. His leg continued to ache. He had to go home.
Maggie was sitting at the lacquer dining table when he came in, reading through a pile of papers. As Henry approached she looked up in alarm and scrambled to tidy them into a stack. She’d found the chapter he’d printed that morning for review. It was as though he’d come home to find Martha going through his things—invasive, true, but somehow also endearing, her curiosity so unguarded that he couldn’t pretend to be offended.
‘So,’
he said, ‘what did you think?’
‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t being nosy. Just…bored, really. And I’ll read anything when I’m bored.’
‘Gee, thanks.’
‘You want to have it published?’
Henry dumped his duffel bag on the table and unrolled his racing trunks and the silicone cap from his towel.
‘I went to see your exhibition,’ he said, by way of answer. ‘It wasn’t bad.’
‘Gee, thanks. You’re not the target audience.’
‘Why not? Somebody has to buy it. Parts of it I did enjoy. Who’s the guy in the photos?’
‘Oh.’ This caused in her a choke-up, as though somebody had turned a key in her and she’d backfired. ‘Nobody. A relic.’
‘That sounds like you’re attaching a lot of meaning to him. You certainly seemed to be enjoying each other’s company. Look,’ he put his hands up and returned his attention to folding up his swimwear, ‘it’s not my business. I have been in love, though. I know what it’s like to have one person clouding all your decisions.’
‘His name’s Geoffroy,’ she said, after a long hesitation, during which Henry watched her lick her dry lips a few times. ‘I met him in Chicago. From Quebec. He thought he was so sensitive and new-age. I used to think I had terrible taste in men, you know? But that wasn’t the problem. I couldn’t turn myself into this limp little love thing for them. Turns out even the sensitive, new-age ones don’t like that. Which is what that triptych is about, I guess.’
This confused Henry. He had to think about what she’d said for a while, trying to understand it from his own experience. He thought back to when he’d met Martha in the eighties, what he’d wanted from her.
Then he thought of something else. He thought of the expectations that had been placed on him, as a man. The unstated maxim that he had to be a cool guy, a chill dude, in the eyes of everyone. Not to let things bother him, never to take anything seriously, always to deflect womanly histrionics with a crude sense of humour, or, failing that, nothing. Finding the missing strength in lazy silence and cruelty.
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