Now, in the hushed atmosphere of Newark’s arrivals hall, Finn shifted uneasily at recalling that it was the threat of violence that had brought him and Dilly together. The security guard, who had never in his life picked a fight or called anyone a cunt, cast an eye over the aliens entering his homeland and beckoned Finn forward to a booth. The immigration officer took a look at Finn’s passport and visa form and immediately said, ‘The address on this document is unreadable.’
Finn stooped forward to take a look, but was parried by the officer’s open palm. ‘Return yourself to behind the white line, please.’
Looking down, Finn saw the line on the floor, a foot or so from the kiosk. He took a step backwards.
‘This is not read-worthy. What was the reason for striking out the first address?’
Finn’s mind went blank, leaving his mouth open and his face contorted in thought.
For immigration officials like Elmore Baker of Trenton, New Jersey, getting young bucks like this English guy to either hit the verbal diarrhoea button or clam up was one of the sports of his profession. ‘Who lives at the address you removed from the form?’
‘My friend.’
‘What’s the name of your friend?’
‘His name.’
This was not a question on Finn’s part, merely two expressionless words fulfilling no purpose.
Elmore exhaled a slow, deep, losing-the-will-to-live breath. ‘Yes, his name.’
‘But we’re not staying there now so it doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters to me.’
‘Glenn Walker.’
The official turned to his computer and began typing.
‘If…’ Finn started, then retreated.
The official stopped and looked at Finn. ‘If…?’
Finn pointed to the man’s computer. ‘If you’re looking him up, it might say prison, but that’s not a fair reflection.’
‘Jail…’ the official said, and returned to his computer. ‘I’m not looking him up.’
‘Oh. Sweet.’
‘I’m looking you up.’
Finn laughed nervously, just when he meant not to.
Elmore created his own silence, held it longer than was natural, then broke it. ‘You need to fill out a new form.’ He struck a thick line through Dilly’s parents’ address on the form. ‘Is the purpose of your visit business or pleasure?’
‘Pleasure,’ Finn replied, watching the thick black pen line cover up the Long Beach address. ‘American pleasure, if that helps,’ he added, opening his wallet to a picture of Dilly.
Elmore took a look at the striking young woman. ‘Why am I looking at this?’
‘Just ’cos, I dunno, she’s American,’ Finn faltered. ‘She’ll tell you, you know, to let me in. She’s got the address we’re staying at.’
‘Why don’t you know?’
‘’Cos you just put a line through it.’
‘You don’t know where you’re going?’
‘She does. She’s American.’
Elmore took another look at Dilly. The photo was a head-and-shoulders shot taken from above when Dilly was wearing a strapless dress which she claimed to have got from a Blue Cross shop for a fiver but which had in fact been gifted to her by Zara in return for a donation of seventy-five pounds. The crop of the photo was such that Elmore Baker needed to have been there to know Dilly was not butt-naked. Finn reached for his wallet and Elmore held it out of reach, and looked closer still at Dilly.
‘Nood?’ Elmore asked.
‘What?’ Finn hadn’t understood Elmore, but instead of making that clear he went with the flow, just to move things along. ‘Oh, yeah, a bit, she can be. Can I have it back?’
Only then did Finn get what the man had said: nude. Nood. And, in the silence that followed, he sensed the tumbleweed roll across Elmore’s sense of the absurd and it struck him that Dilly really did look extremely fucking naked in the photograph, that the camera angle most definitely led the eye to Dilly’s seemingly uncovered breasts, that the backdrop was clearly a bed, and that no one should be expected to work out for themselves the entirely truthful back story that he and Dilly had been sharing a tub of Ben & Jerry’s vanilla when a modest mini-food-fight had ensued, leaving ice cream smeared around Dilly’s lips at the precise moment Finn took this snap, and that none of this looked good, apart from looking absolutely tremendous.
‘Are you showing me a sample of pornographic material?’
‘What? No! Shit. Fuck off! No.’
‘Did you say fuck off to me?’
Finn shook his head. His mouth had clamped itself shut. (Stable doors, horses.) He felt sick now, a sensation stirred by the malignant anxiety which US immigration officials would expertly propagate, along with an impression that one’s experience of the United States might never get further than a terminal building.
It was the undeniably curious cocktail of innocence and strength etched and chiselled (respectively) on Finn’s face that was at that very moment persuading Elmore to let this one off the hook. That, and the proximity to the end of his shift and the start of tonight’s episode of 24, inspired him to send the infuriatingly attractive young Brit to the back of the hour-long line to fill out a fresh form.
Dilly sat on their luggage, combating the irritation of waiting for her man by deleting old text messages. Nearby, she heard French being spoken and was jabbed by the self-loathing of not being able to speak a second language. This was a seasonal self-disgust she inflicted on herself whenever she heard French, Italian or Spanish around her. The revulsion was duly followed by the time-honoured resolution to learn French and one day have an apartment in Paris. She dismissed herself as a fake, and became forlorn. She wondered about Finn again, torn between concern and annoyance, not wanting to commit to the wrong one of those two emotions and miss out on the other. She was surprised by the relief she felt when he appeared. It reminded her of the liberation to be had in forgiving. (There were two epiphanies she resolved to learn from every time she had them, only to forget about them until the next time. These were, that to forgive someone rather than convince herself she had been horribly let down always, but always felt good; and that every time she saw someone in a wheelchair she remembered how lucky she was to be fit and healthy and would never complain about anything again, ever.)
They kissed and groped until they were moved on.
‘I spoke to this woman in baggage reclaim, she was wearing an Alexander McQueen coat which I asked her about and turns out she’s a film producer and I’m really sorry to tell you this but she said the part of New York City where Royal Tenenbaums was set doesn’t exist in real life. It’s completely fictional so your pilgrimage there… well, you know, can’t be done. Are you upset?’
Finn shrugged. ‘No. If it doesn’t exist then I’m not missing anything.’
She held his face. ‘You’re great. I wish I could handle disappointment like you.’
‘Well… it’s not really very important.’
‘Everything is important,’ she said, ‘otherwise nothing might be, and I can’t face that.’
They went in search of the bus that Finn insisted they catch so as to stay on budget, the bus that came to a standstill in thick, crooked traffic on the approach to the Holland Tunnel, where the fact of queuing seemed to hit Dilly like a stray bullet, leaving her slumped and lifeless in her seat.
‘If we’d taken a taxi we’d be there by now,’ she moaned.
‘Because taxis fly?’
She stared accusingly at the insides of the tunnel, then started to giggle, aware of what she could be like. She knew that he was looking at her, waiting for her to look at him. This made her laugh some more, and squirm in her seat. She morphed her laughter into another groan, achieving a perfect mixture of both.
It struck Finn, the proximity to his brother. He was now on the same slab of the planet as Jack. Jack’s face, Jack’s body, Jack’s self-contained smile, his busy schedule and impeccable appearance, his regularly monitored body m
ass index and resting heart rate, the squash shoes to which he probably still applied whitener, the girlfriend who stole him, the money he seemed to mistake for love… it was all suddenly close by, and that felt momentous to Finn and dazed him in equal measure to the low Manhattan sun. He fell into a light sleep, rocked by the occasional forward movements of the bus, and woke when the towering buildings that had stolen into the landscape while he slept pressed their shadows against his eyes. He felt his heart rate quicken. He recited to himself the names that Jack had told him in a history lesson dressed up as an email, and which Finn had memorised with an ease he would never admit to; Mana-hatta, New Amsterdam, Gotham, the Empire City, New York City, the Big Apple, the City that Never Sleeps. He was here, on a journey that had once seemed as likely as going to Mars. He squeezed Dilly’s hand and turned to tell her that he loved her, but she was engrossed in her phone and didn’t look up.
4
In the corridor between the elevator and their apartment, Jack ran into his girlfriend, Holly. ‘Don’t kiss, I’m coming down with something,’ he said.
‘Poor you. I won’t, though, you’re right.’ She ran on the spot prior to a game of squash and doing a stack of laundry before her late flight to Atlanta to start a three-week business trip. He offered to do her laundry and they asked each other how their day had been (both had been fine) while remaining at a germ-free distance of eight feet a little too expertly for lovers so young (he twenty-five, she twenty-six). To anyone watching, they would have looked like neighbours.
She blew him a kiss across the divide. Her smile was pretty and her eyes beautiful. She was generous and kind. He watched her go and a familiar twinge of regret that they didn’t have sex more than once or twice a fortnight pinched him. He smiled neatly, to disperse the twinge, and kept the smile pinned on so that when she turned at the elevator it was waiting for her.
Their apartment was seven hundred and fifty square feet of almost sophisticated but ultimately characterless comfort. They weren’t there enough for it to matter. From the fifteenth floor their views were of the sky above Harlem. Jack decided to go across to the Kinsale Tavern, which he used as his living room, reading the papers on his laptop and his history books there. He took a seat at the bar and ordered a glass of water, a nest of nachos with melted cheese and a chicken sandwich. Feed a cold, starve a fever. You could count on the fingers of one hand the things of value his mother had taught him.
Jack had never been drunk in his life. He had wanted to be, after the second funeral, but the thought of burying an alcoholic father and turning to drink himself had been too wretched. And, anyway, it had been a time of stepping up to the plate, of being organised (not a problem for Jack), of keeping himself in check emotionally (ditto), of looking after Holly, who was new on the scene and in her first year in England, and of trying to figure out what the heck his kid brother thought of it all.
‘Pretty selfish of Dad. At least Mum just killed herself, no one else,’ was all Finn had said on the subject, then and since.
Before Jack and Finn’s father died, Holly had already been pining for New York, where she had gone in ’96 from home in Seattle to study at NYU. She had waited four months after the funeral before raising the subject (she had intended to wait a respectful six, but couldn’t go the distance) and discovered that Jack couldn’t wait to get away.
‘You look awful,’ she said to him, kindly, on her return to the apartment from the laundry room. She knew he’d be frustrated at getting ill when his brother was due.
Jack put the kettle on the gas and broke a Karvol capsule into a bowl. She told him he should take a day off. He looked at her as if she was insane. ‘I can run this cold off tomorrow morning. I see guys letting it slip all around me, hearts giving out on them, high cholesterol, all that kind of thing. I don’t wanna die in my fifties like Mum and Dad.’
Holly placed her backpack by the door and checked her tickets. She filled her water bottle from the filter jug. She stood behind Jack and placed a hand on his shoulder and flinched as the menthol steam rose to her eyes. She held her breath and kissed the back of his neck. ‘You’re a fit twenty-five-year-old, Jack. And you know what? Neither of your parents actually died.’
‘We didn’t cremate them alive.’
‘Jack, that’s an awful thing to say.’
He apologised. He had thought it was mildly amusing, his dream of how understated ripples of repartee between lovers could be.
‘My point is that they were both killed, effectively,’ she said. ‘They didn’t die naturally of heart attacks and stuff… so you shouldn’t worry about dying. I mean, worry about getting killed, sure, but not about just dying. Not yet.’
From two hundred feet above, Jack watched Holly step on to the sidewalk and flag a cab. The sky above the Upper East Side was crystal-clear, the darkest blue. Jack picked out the planes from the satellites and pictured his baby brother, out there, somewhere, choosing not to come to him.
Beneath the same cold sky, Finn craned his neck upwards and his mouth fell open. Around and above him, it seemed, stood every skyscraper he had ever glided over in the opening credits to every New York movie he had seen. He recognised it all, and was shocked to find it better in real life than in his imagination or in the cinema. Nothing had ever failed to let him down until arrival in this town.
‘London is a man, Paris is a woman, and New York a transsexual.’ Dilly stood on the sidewalk, with her arms spread out wide and a grin on her face. ‘Angela Carter.’ She looked happy. Impossibly happy.
‘Who’s Angela Carter?’
‘She is… who she is, my lover.’ She picked up her bag and walked, and Finn followed her. Although there was little that was compatible between them, they shared a dislike for the Port Authority and an instinct to get away from the crusted streets around it. For a few blocks they remained nervous and tight-lipped on the sidewalk, then relaxed and began to look around openly, and pretty soon she told him to stop gawping. ‘Looks ridiculous,’ she muttered.
‘Don’t care,’ he muttered back. ‘I’m in New York.’
‘New York City, not New York; they’re different things.’
But, miraculously, he thought to himself, you knew where I meant.
She stopped abruptly and screamed. ‘OH MY GOD!’
It hurt his ears. ‘What?’
‘LOOK! The New Yorker Hotel! I’m sure that’s famous. That’s the sort of place you check into if you decide to write a Pulitzer-winning novel.’
He ignored the question of what constituted gawping and admired the hotel’s red neon. He was always willing to admire whatever impressed her, out of politeness and a desire not to seem ignorant. He saw on her face that expression of hers which he mistook for deep-in-thought but was in fact the deep self-doubt of a familiar enemy flashing across her line of sight, an image that visited her often, of a train passing slowly in the night, its lit carriage windows the accusing eyes of millions of lines of literature and history and philosophy she had never read and would never read, but which she felt compelled to imply she knew.
She faltered. ‘Maybe I’m thinking of the New Yorker magazine… not the hotel.’ The energy drained from her and turned down the volume on her voice. ‘The hotel might not be famous at all. The New Yorker magazine – that’s what I meant. That’s very famous.’ She put down her bag and watched the faces gliding past her on Seventh Avenue. ‘Why are we walking?’ she asked, as if to wrest back control of the evening. ‘What in Christ’s name is going on?’
‘It’s only five inches on the map,’ Finn said. ‘We could walk.’
‘Walk, to the other side of Manhattan? Did you think that was going to happen?’ She hailed a cab. It took them downtown and Dilly saw the names of Lower East Side haunts she had circled in the guidebook and her excitement returned. Finn watched her as they continued on to a corner of the neighbourhood the book had not mentioned. She put two thousand pounds’ worth of Nikon back into her bag and folded her arms across it as the cab
pulled over. ‘Don’t tell me this is it… Don’t tell me this is it…’ she muttered, pleading to the same gods she turned to for turbulence-free flights and a career in fashion or the arts.
‘This is it…’ the driver said. ‘Jackson and Grand.’
Finn unfolded Glenn’s scrap of paper and double-checked the instructions. The words were in caps, SAM’S HARDWARE STORE. He looked out of the window at the grisly row of five-storey buildings among which the store was crouched on its haunches, two storeys high. The whole street was peeling paint in sodium light.
He looked at the reflection of the driver in the rear-view mirror. ‘Can we come home with you instead?’
The driver’s big face crumpled and his chest heaved a couple of times, suggesting an ability to laugh, if pushed. ‘Fourteen-fifty,’ he said, and looked straight ahead at the dust-coated neon reflections on the hood. He was the sort of solid, decent sixty-year-old man Finn could imagine wanting to hold on to.
They stood where the cab left them.
‘He lives above his shop; we have to call him,’ Finn said.
‘So, call him.’
‘Use your phone?’
‘What’s wrong with yours?’
‘I didn’t bring it.’
‘You didn’t bring it what? To America?’
‘Yeah. It’s pay-as-you-go. It doesn’t work abroad.’
‘But…’ She was incredulous. ‘How are we going to stay in contact?’
Finn looked confused. ‘By being next to each other?’
‘Really? You’ve got no phone?’ She found it freakish how little he used his phone. ‘You’re serious?’
Men Like Air Page 3