The Benefactor

by Sebastian Hampson

  ‘Where have you been?’ Maggie said, as if she’d just noticed his dirt-stained clothes.

  ‘Gardening.’

  ‘In the middle of winter?’

  ‘I had to do something, productive or not. I’m thinking I might sell this place.’

  ‘So do it. I have to go now.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Like I said, I’m not telling you.’

  ‘Hold that thought. One second.’

  She looked impatient.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘it might be worth your while.’

  Henry went through to the living room to find his phone and a scrap of paper. As he was passing the dining table, he noticed a canvas lying facedown on the black lacquer.

  ‘Don’t forget your painting,’ he called out.

  ‘That’s not mine. It’s for you.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  She followed him into the living room. ’It’s your portrait. I went and saw that Jay DeFeo painting you mentioned at the Whitney, and, well…it inspired this.’

  He was about to turn it over.

  ‘No, leave it. Until I’ve gone.’

  Henry raised his eyebrows at it, not entirely convinced. He worried that it could be a punishment, designed to upset him. A part of him wanted to insist that Maggie take it with her.

  He copied out a phone number and handed it to her.

  ‘What’s this?’ she said.

  ‘Melanie Jacobs is a friend of my sister’s. That’s her number. It’s up to you, but I’d seriously suggest giving her a call. She works with an organisation that’s sending artists to teach Syrian refugees in Lebanon. I’ve talked you up, told her you have the same spirit as Martha did when she was your age—she didn’t know Martha, but she’d heard of her.’

  Maggie was about to take the paper. Then she faltered. ‘Henry, I can’t do that.’

  ‘You can do anything, Maggie. I believe in you.’

  He hadn’t said that to many people. Perhaps never.

  She seemed to appreciate it, mumbling an embarrassed, ‘Thanks,’ as she took the paper, but for once Henry found he wasn’t anxiously awaiting a reaction. What she did now was her own business. He wouldn’t try to keep tabs on her.

  ‘You have a lot of luggage,’ he said. ‘I’ll help you get it down to the sidewalk. Cash for a cab?’

  ‘It’s okay, thanks. I don’t need your money. I’ll take the subway.’

  ‘So I’ll come with you to the station.’

  They walked together to Macdougal Street, past Minetta Lane and the sleepy frontages of Henry’s favourite restaurants and bars. He’d been up and down these streets so many times since that night in 1986 when he and his writers had gone out searching for a real, gritty experience, with no idea what they were doing. He imagined running into them, leading a young Henry Calder away by the arm, shoving him against a wall down an alleyway. What would he say? Don’t rely on other people’s strengths to hide your weaknesses? That wouldn’t have left the faintest dent.

  ‘You sure I can’t give you some cash?’ Henry said.

  ‘No, thanks. I’ll have enough to get by. This is how it starts, right? What are you going to do? Go to work again?’

  They’d approached the steps to the West 4th Street station.

  ‘Most likely not. I’ll see how long I can last without it. But I don’t think it matters what any of us end up doing. I hope you stick with the art, either way. You have talent. I guess talent doesn’t matter in this city, though.’

  ‘Money talks. And it tells you where to go.’

  ‘Not always. My wife would have gone anywhere so long as it mattered to her.’

  Maggie presented Henry with a hand—a thrusting hand, demanding of attention—which Henry gripped in the firmest shake he could manage.

  She left Henry and descended into the subway’s belly. Her resolute head tilted upwards, as if she’d found something on the ceiling. As if she were about to turn and give Henry one final, penetrating stare.

  Then she folded into the surge of fellow travellers.

  As he made his way home alone, Henry chanced upon his reflection in a shop window, and was startled to see what an unidentifiable old man he’d become in these gardening clothes. As shabby and worn-down as the buildings he passed by. He’d often envisioned a perfect Manhattan—a bulldozer taken to the clutter, the city rebuilt in a continuous style, like Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. Ready to be filled with glass and concrete and steel, from the ground up. Manhattan without the outdated infrastructure, the piles of garbage, the lack of sanitation.

  What he’d failed to take into account was that intransigence made for a livelier conversation. The forgotten contributors were immovable, their foundations solid enough for them to stick around at least a few more decades. Henry no longer hoped that his apartment would be preserved forever, like Philip Johnson’s Glass House—or a museum display of well-curated aesthetics.

  The painting lay facedown on the dining table, next to the piece of the Berlin Wall and the editorial Henry had ripped from the magazine. He picked up the canvas and turned it over.

  The composition rested on a swirl of monochrome. Velvety black lines covered the unprimed surface, bleeding into one another with watered-down textures. Expressionist patterns, non-figurative. A dense thicket of shading that revealed nothing.

  Off-centre, a hand reached out. Unmistakably his. The fuzz of silver that wound its way down his wrist. His crooked, slender fingers. The sharp cuff of a designer shirt, rolled up. There was a pale band around the wrist where his gold watch should have been. Another, smaller white band on his ring finger. And, finally, a blank spot hovered at the tip of his middle finger.

  Henry leaned in close to the canvas, focusing on this lone white space in the midst of an indistinguishable sea. Clear. A haven. Waiting to be reached and populated.

  This painting didn’t show him. It felt incomplete. It prodded him, though. This wasn’t a painting he could stash away in a box in the guestroom, or in the utility cupboard with the ice chest.

  ‘What does this mean?’ he asked Martha.

  She was in the Eames chair, reading one of her books, weak from the last round of chemotherapy, a mohair blanket draped across her lap. He went over to show her the painting, bending down to touch the cold of her hands, the ugly sapphire ring around her frail ring finger. She took one glance at it and laughed, running out of breath quickly.

  ‘Nothing.’ Her throat was so badly constricted, he hardly recognised her voice. ‘It’s naive.’

  ‘It’s not like you to be so dismissive. She said it was a portrait. Where am I, in this?’

  ‘Maybe that’s for you to decide. Maybe it’s not even about you.’

  He couldn’t be too close to her like this—not in her present state. He’d been scared to touch her at all since she started losing weight, couldn’t sleep in the same bed. He took the ottoman on the other side of the room, facing the window, so he could make out her reflection while he talked to her, but he couldn’t see the details, how she’d deteriorated. The clammy skin. The deep-set eyes. He couldn’t stand to see her like this, because, even though it didn’t make sense, he felt directly responsible for the glioblastoma pushing against her right frontal lobe—felt as though he’d put it there.

  ‘What did we do wrong?’ he asked. ‘How…how did we allow things to get so bad you had to divorce me? We were meant to be better than anyone else.’

  ‘We weren’t. This is how it always ends. But we tried our hardest.’

  ‘I won’t be able to go on without you.’

  ‘Of course you will. You just need to go, get out of here. The man I married wouldn’t hang around, waiting for somebody to tell him what to do.’

  ‘You always had that wrong about me.’

  ‘Well, I guess what’s why I kept telling you otherwise. I hoped it might sink in, eventually.’

  As Henry turned his head to look at her again, he was surprised to find she’d disappeared, silently
. The Eames chair was empty, the blanket gone, as if she’d never been there.

  Of course she hadn’t been there. And she wouldn’t be there again. Henry walked over to the window. It had started to snow, the flakes sucked in by the building’s facade. They appeared to be falling up, not down. Defying gravity.

  He saw himself, reflected in the glass. A body, tired and weakened and damaged. The people passing in and out around him were scratches in a piece of metal that had been burnished too many times.

  Christine’s salad set was on the floor beside him, still its blue- and-gold wrapping paper in the Macy’s bag. He took it out and set it on the table, alongside the canvas, which he then leaned up against it. The piece of the Berlin Wall went between them, on top of the damaged lacquer. The page torn from the magazine went on there too, its ripped edge mirroring the cracks—in the lacquer and the concrete.

  He stood back a moment, appraising his work, then fetched one of the broken champagne bottles he’d dropped out on the terrace, the rest of which would soon be buried in snow. Finally he found the photograph of a naked Martha, interrupted while reading her report.

  Henry admired this new shrine, its many heads unbalanced and jumbled. You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

  All right, Martha, he thought. You can have that one.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Benefactor is informed by the work of a number of art historical authors; I’d specifically like to acknowledge Mieke Bal, Griselda Pollock, Norman Bryson and Rachel Baum, whose ideas have contributed to the novel’s central discussion of art’s power to make the peripheral central. I’d also like to thank my thesis supervisor, Geoffrey Batchen, to whom my understanding of the many art historical issues at stake in this novel must in part be attributed.

  This project wouldn’t have been possible without the enthusiastic support and guidance I’ve been fortunate enough to receive from Michael Heyward and the team at Text Publishing. In particular, my thanks to my two editors on this novel, Rebecca Starford and Elizabeth Cowell, for their insightful input and hard work. Jane Finemore, Nadja Poljo, Anne Beilby, Khadija Caffoor, Jane Novak and Alice Cottrell have all been instrumental in getting my work out there, for which I extend my huge thanks.

  I’ve dedicated this manuscript to Michael Gifkins, who read an early version shortly before passing ahead of his time in 2014. A true, gregarious bon vivant and a livewire like nobody I’d had the pleasure of meeting before, Michael was my trusted agent for two years. I wouldn’t have this space to thank him if he hadn’t believed in my work.

  Thanks also to my friends in New York, who have all given me valuable insight into this strange, fascinating city.

  As always, my family have been my bolster. Thanks again for your limitless patience and support.

  SEBASTIAN HAMPSON has studied and written on the history of modern art and urban design. He has lived in Europe and the United States and is currently based in Auckland, New Zealand. His first novel, The Train to Paris, was also published by Text.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © Sebastian Hampson, 2017

  The moral right of Sebastian Hampson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Published in Australia and New Zealand by The Text Publishing Company, 2017

  Book design by Jessica Horrocks

  Cover images by Studio Firma/Stocksy and iStock

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Title: The benefactor/by Sebastian Hampson.

  ISBN: 9781925355109 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781922253699 (ebook)

  Subjects: Man-woman relationships—Fiction.