Right now, however, he was having an unproductive working day, and that was tough for a man who disliked inefficiency as much as chaos. His distraction was a fear that he had flunked the most recent phone call from his little brother, the one last month when Finn had announced he was coming to New York City. Phone calls from Finn were rare, and Jack worried he’d not seemed genuine in inviting him and his girlfriend (whose name escaped him) to stay. He had made the offer genuinely, but mindful of the logistical complexities. Finn would have the sofabed, obviously, but in terms of Jack and Holly moving round the apartment and all four of them using the bathroom, well, it would mean disruption. Jack would have to do his crunches in the bedroom instead of the living room and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get his feet under the bed, as it was a divan, but obviously he’d find a way – that in itself wasn’t a deal-breaker. One thing was for sure: if Jack’s concern about the arrangement had been present in his voice then Finn would have picked up on it. Finn required little persuasion to take offence.
Jack unfolded two brown napkins on his desk and placed his dressed crab sandwich on them. The reassuring electrical burr of the office re-entered his head. He took a look around. Even the least evolved of his male colleagues seemed to have their heads down in work, a situation that was pleasing to him and had no hope of being sustained. A hard core of them were incapable of remaining at their seats for more than twenty minutes at a time. They were the ones who would approach each other’s desks with the vacant, amused, goofy expression which betrayed that they had not yet decided what nugget of humour to unleash. They would ad-lib some jewel, designed to conjure up the spirit of their frat or the locker room, or of the other night in the sports bar when they had waaaaaaay too much to drink and had an awesome time. In contrast, Jack believed in working when he was at work and in talking in the office only if he had something to say about work. He was old-fashioned, and a bit freakish, in that respect. Athletic, nice-looking, impossibly polite and with that thick shock of neatly cut jet-black hair, Jack was liked by women in the firm. His male colleagues, who did not deny his superior professionalism, had a line on him they considered hilarious: ‘We thought Jack was gay, but turns out he’s British’.
Sandwich eaten, he went to the restrooms and washed his face. His reflection bore a warning of rare ill health: a slight reddening in his eyes and at the pinch of his nose. He patted his face dry and threw the paper towel into an overspilling bin. Halfway out of the restroom, he hesitated, then doubled back and pressed the paper towels down with his foot so that they did not spill over and cause the cleaners unnecessary work.
As he straightened up, he felt dizzy and knew he had a cold coming on.
‘Damn…’ he said to his mirror self, wanting to be in perfect shape for his baby brother’s arrival, even though Finn had snubbed his offer to stay in favour of some apartment downtown.
He returned to his desk with a roll of toilet paper under his arm and found Kit waiting for him.
‘There were some great jokes flying around at Scottie’s bachelor party last night, it was a blast. You can imagine. It was a riot…’ Kit said, with an approach to anecdotal storytelling that left Jack to fill in the gaps when it came to characterisation, setting and, well, anecdote.
Jack’s inbuilt bullshit-detector told him that a sizeable minority of the guys working around him, earning six figures and chasing the Christmas bounties, lied through their teeth when talking about the quality of the parties they attended and the quantity of their sexual activity (they exaggerated upwards, to be clear) and Kit was the embodiment of the AIG buck who had more chance of conquering Everest without oxygen than playing out the sort of sexual conquests and extreme sport weekends he and his like would boast about in vague, suggestive terms. And vague was vital, unless you had an excellent head for keeping consistent your fictional detail (lies, if you will). Jack struggled to relax with these men who seemed so terrified of women, so clueless about them, that they had adopted the most bereft of vocabularies to deal with their terror.
Kit, as was his habit, picked up a couple of items on Jack’s desk and put them down moments later not quite where he’d found them. Apart from struggling to spell the word ‘derivatives’, Kit’s role in the office seemed to be to ruffle Jack’s equilibrium.
‘You don’t get many fat gay guys, do you?’ Kit ventured.
‘Go away.’
‘Or, maybe there’s millions of fat gays but it’s just too much to admit to two humiliations. They are clearly, undeniably fat, so they keep the gay thing under wraps.’
‘Because being gay is a humiliation?’
‘I think so. If we’re being honest. Deep down. Don’t you, Jack?’
‘You’re an idiot.’
‘Are you saying you’re gay, Jack?’
‘How old are you?’
‘I’ll have to take that as a yes?’
‘You’re a disgrace to your company and this city,’ Jack muttered, in a mild, uncensorious tone, designed to end conversation.
Kit laughed under his breath, but it was less a manifestation of amusement and more a sign of his curiosity over the workings of a mind like Jack’s. ‘You actually believe that it’s possible in this day and age to be a disgrace to something, don’t you, Jack?’
Yes. Jack believed that implicitly. He thought men like Kit were a letdown to the company that paid them, particularly if that company was of the stature and credibility of AIG and situated in a city as extraordinary as this. Jack felt privileged and overwhelmed (still, three years in) to call New York City his home and he expected others to feel the same. He needed a strong opinion on this because, without one, his decision to leave England when he had might appear suspect.
He blew his nose and coughed into his tissue and warned himself there was no way he could get ill with Finn due in town. He set about getting back down to work but found himself recalling the woman walking ahead of him on Third Avenue earlier that morning. She was tall and thin and leggy and wearing fine, tight jeans (Italian jeans, he presumed, for no reason). When she flicked the long dark hair off her shoulder, he glimpsed her face and saw that she was deeply tanned. He watched the movement of her buttocks, in as much as she possessed any, for two or three blocks (he wanted to think of it as her ass but felt that he couldn’t pull off a word like that even in the privacy of his own thoughts) and imagined himself and the woman together. Aware that he needed to stop staring, he diverted west on 88th Street, stopped for a moment for a slug of green tea, and spent the rest of the 80s on Lexington, reminding himself that the thoughts he had had about that woman were not right. He blamed his brother, as if Finn’s imminence was encouraging him to think about things he normally wouldn’t think about (namely, removing that woman’s knickers with his teeth) because these were the sorts of things he presumed Finn was doing regularly back in England. In Jack’s head, Finn had that way about him and Jack didn’t.
An email from Kit appeared: HEH BIG MAN! WAS JUST BLOWING A LITTLE AIR AND TAKING A QUICK BRAIN-BREAK. NO OFFENCE INTENDED JACKY-BOY. KIT.
Jack sent back immediately: NONE TAKEN. ALL GOOD. CHEERS, JACK.
He glimpsed Kit lean forward to read his screen and wave in Jack’s direction. Jack raised his hand in return, without looking up from his desk, and felt satisfied with the balance of power in the exchange. He returned to work. Today was going down the plughole. He had achieved next to nothing by his standards. (It was a day of spectacular productivity by Kit’s.)
He ran through the checklist that acted as his pacifier on the occasions he experienced this kind of self-doubt or distraction. It went something like: this city suited him perfectly; his girlfriend was great and he was lucky to have her – even though she wore an eye-mask to bed and never slept naked, not even after sex, which he hated but didn’t mention; he had money; he liked his apartment, or at least he presumed he did; his brother was safe and hadn’t blown anything up for some while. Jack was content and life was gratifyingly tidy. He decided that w
hat he needed to do was schedule his head-cold away so that one, there were no chinks in the armour when his brother showed up, and two, he could get down to some work, and three, there were absolutely, categorically no chinks in the armour.
He took a blank sheet of paper and composed a thirty-six-hour timetable. It consisted of six vitamin- and energy-rich meals, this evening’s spin class, a brisk fifty-block walk to work tomorrow morning instead of taking the subway (a walk during which he would studiously avoid gazing at women’s buttocks and remain faithful in thought as well as deed to Holly), a sauna tomorrow lunchtime at NYSC and an hour on the elliptical and treadmill tomorrow evening. Plenty of sleep, and no alcohol (he could take it or leave it; it had made an orphan of him, after all). He felt optimistic about this plan. Good. Excellent.
He wrote four work emails and saved them to his drafts folder. He would send them at three in the morning. He did this from time to time: set his alarm for the middle of the night to fire off some pre-prepared correspondence, as the image of the employee who worked into the night sat well with his bosses.
He went home and made himself honey and lemon in hot water and turned in early. He set his alarm for three and lay in bed reading the last pages of Why A Curveball Curves: The Incredible Science of Sports with a tray heaped in loose coins on his lap, which he fed one by one into the coin organiser. This was Jack’s mother-ship moment: learning from a book and tidying up his world, simultaneously. Life was sweet.
3
The walkway to the terminal was all carpet, no oxygen. Dilly bundled Finn into the first restroom on offer, locked the cubicle door and pulled at his leather belt. ‘You’re beautiful,’ she told him, going down on to her haunches and unzipping him. He watched her passport rise gradually out of the back pocket of her jeans in time with the rhythmic bobbing of her buttocks as she sucked him. He arched over her back and took hold of the passport before it landed on the pimpled floor. Despite the immediate circumstances, human nature obliged him to take a look at her passport photo. In doing so he discovered that Dilys Parker’s surname was Vela, not Parker, a development that preyed on his mind without disabling him.
When she had zipped him up, she rose to her feet and he handed her passport back. ‘Why is the name in your passport Vela, not Parker?’ he asked.
She licked her lips. ‘That was yummy. I was married. No biggie.’
He tilted his neck so that a mop of hair fell and drew a curtain over half of his face. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘Obviously. No one knows anything until they are told. By definition. I’m telling you now, so that’s no longer the case. YOU – NOW – DO – KNOW. I got married at eighteen. I’m not married any more. Well, not in practice.’
‘What happened? Why didn’t it work?’ he stuttered.
‘It did work. It just didn’t last. That’s it. No mystery. No skeletons. No sweat.’
‘Is he out there?’ He meant America.
She shrugged. ‘He’s gotta be somewhere. Europe probably.’
The notion of a physically perfect, mature (meaning anything over twenty-one), olive-skinned Mediterranean male drew up a seat in the frontal lobe of Finn’s brain, without assuming a precise physical appearance.
She whispered in his ear. ‘I can’t wait for you to fuck me in Manhattan.’
He smiled bravely. Given the events and revelation of the last few minutes, the possibility of delivering on that front seemed remote.
‘Don’t worry about the past,’ she said, taking hold of his hand as they rode the travelator. ‘You’re the present.’
On the immigration concourse, overhead signs directed them to different queues. They let go in slow motion, holding hands for as long as possible and dragging their fingertips across each other’s palms. From the back of the queue for passport control he watched her breeze through the US Nationals line, and as she descended towards the baggage carousels she did not turn to look back at him.
Finn had not shaken off his childhood habit of picking out happy families in crowds, watching them until the longing and jealousy warped his day out of shape or he was caught staring. There were plenty of them here, in the lengthy queue that snaked towards a line of mostly unstaffed passport booths. It was a bad habit, one that achieved no catharsis, one he needed to drop, but in this instance it was a more tolerable train of thought than dwelling on that prototype-in-perfection who was Dilly’s ex-husband. He nudged his backpack forward with his foot. Up ahead, he saw a red-haired security guard patrolling the headland between the front of the queue and the booths. The guard was big-armed and fire-armed, and reminded Finn of someone: he had the same hair, freckled face, pallid complexion and brick-wall physique as the man who had threatened Finn on his first date with Dilly, the man who had materialised from a crowd of drinkers in the pub and fixed Finn with lifeless eyes that brimmed with the capacity for easy violence, and said, ‘You called me a cunt.’
In the minutes prior to the man’s intervention, Dilly and Finn had sat in silence, their conversation run dry. He’d known she was not right for him – too terrifying, too old, too everything – and the fact that he fancied her had to be weighed against the fact that he fancied everyone. As for Dilly, she was bored by his lack of words, his refusal to talk about blowing up the shed, and by his failure to ‘get’ most of her cultural references. Her mind had been wandering since fifteen minutes in and she was ready to quit the evening.
‘You called me a cunt.’
Finn felt the life drain out of him. He understood the deal for young men of his physique: that for any drunk man who needed to prove himself he was worth attacking.
‘No, I didn’t,’ Finn said.
‘You called me a cunt.’
The man glared, the way large, drunk men did. He swayed a little, yet seemed impossibly strong, his feet rooted to the spot, his hands clenched. His lips were moist, his mouth lazy and sunken, weighed down by great reserves of vitriol. There were no negotiating points here. He wanted to fight. He wanted Finn to make the mistake of standing up or being cocky, providing the trip-wire for violence.
‘Please leave us alone.’ Finn’s voice was thin. He looked apologetically across to Dilly. She was shaking with fear but it was the sadness in her eyes that struck him, their betrayal that she understood that she was not in danger here, that she knew Finn was the sole focus of abuse. The glance Dilly cast him, its offering of a beautiful solidarity, instantly changed his feelings for her from lust and disinterest, to lust.
‘No one calls me a cunt.’
‘No one did.’
‘You did.’
Finn’s insides were hot but the fear had already been replaced by disappointment. He had been asked out by this dazzling older woman and he had presumed the whole world would share in his happiness – that it would wish him well in this adventure, do anything it could to help, slap him on the back as he entered the pub with her, wink knowingly and a little enviously (if he were being honest with himself`) as they left.
But, instead, yet another man of violence stood before him, demanding to be navigated. ‘Outside, now, you cunt.’ The veins and tendons in the man’s neck stood proud on his clammy skin.
Finn knew he could rip this man apart and that if he did he’d be condemned as a repeat offender. He hated the way the world seemed to work. ‘I’ll meet you outside in one minute. Let me say goodnight to my date first.’
The man thought about this, the effort of which made him list to one side. ‘You’re a fucking cunt,’ he hissed, betraying a slur. For the first time, drinkers nearby turned and looked across. Finn looked at them, making sure to catch their eye, and waited for the rescue boats to launch. But none came. They averted their eyes. They looked at their drinks, at each other, at the middle distance. They looked anywhere at all but at Finn.
The man left the pub and took up position outside. He leaned his forehead against the window and glared in at Finn. Finn put on his coat. His legs threatened to buckle at what seemed like another conspiracy
against his chances of happiness. Men walk to the electric chair with more poise, he scolded himself.
‘Stay here. Don’t come outside,’ he said, in a lifeless, commanding way that rekindled Dilly’s interest in him.
‘Where is he?’ she said.
They looked outside. The man had gone. Finn went to the door and stepped out on to the pavement. He felt the dislocation of air behind him as the door to the pub swung shut. The street was quiet. The cold air stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him. The man had not left. He was face-down on the pavement, mouth open, legs splayed, one arm flat against the tiled wall beneath the windows. To Dilly, who appeared now at Finn’s side, he looked like a melted Dali timepiece. To Finn, he looked merely drunk, and Finn had seen drunk many times. He looked over his shoulder at the men inside the pub. Gutless wankers, he wanted to say, but as usual he kept his counsel.
She took him to a bedsit above a shop and left him in a room of objects from London markets that implied a lifetime of travel. She reappeared wearing a silk scarf from Gujarat wrapped around her waist, and nothing else. She threw the cushions from the sofa and made up the sofabed with sheets stored in a chest in the corner of the room beneath copies of Aperture magazine. In the early hours of the morning she watched him sleep and whispered aloud that she would turn this boy into something better than he was now. A better lover. A more cultured man. A more stylish man. A man. She would give him all this and seek nothing in return other than his beauty and to be left alone without having to be by herself. He heard her whisper all this to herself, like an instruction from that part of her that knew best to the bit of her that never learned. None of it made sense to him, and most of what he had heard so far in his life he had tried to forget.
Men Like Air Page 2