Men Like Air

by Connolly, Tom

  Finn shrugged. ‘Can we just call this guy?’

  They called and the lights came on inside the hardware store. An elderly man wearing expressionless grey skin opened the door to them and said nothing as they followed him in and he disappeared into a store room out back. Dilly looked outwards, for a hint of her dreams beyond this crease in the city.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘it will all look different in the daylight. Tomorrow is another day.’

  That was what Finn’s father would say, each night as he climbed the stairs. It was a ritual Finn would listen to from his bed. ‘Goodnight, sleep tight, tomorrow’s another day…’ and from downstairs Finn would hear his mother call, ‘Yet another fucking day.’

  The storekeeper returned, holding a small brown pay-packet envelope with Glenn’s name on it. Back out on the street corner, Finn took Glenn’s key from the envelope, checked the instructions and studied the map.

  ‘Less than an inch from here.’ He tried to sound bright.

  ‘And that’s a good thing?’ she replied.

  Between the high-rise blocks of the Housing Corp, Finn glimpsed the shimmer of the East River and felt the cool breeze of the draughts beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. He hadn’t envisaged these housing estates, big, ugly sprawls like the one he was born into, except brown here instead of pale grey. And it somehow felt better to him, to be beginning on the margins of his image of New York City rather than at its centre, to have inadvertently landed in the underbelly. (This idea, like so many, he did not share with Dilly.)

  Where 10th Street met Avenue D they found the Gully, as Glenn called it in his instructions. It was a stubby, dead-end street of a dozen buildings on each side, at the end of which a high brick wall separated the street from the Housing Corp. Industrial chimneys somewhere out on Queens perched in miniature on top of the barrier wall, belching ivory-coloured smoke into the night.

  The street was a miscarriage, a row of old townhouses out on a limb, carved up into apartments and industrial units, and left to fend for itself in the shadows of a vast haunted self-storage facility and the Con Ed plant. Halfway along the Gully was a mechanic’s shop that Glenn had offered up as a landmark. It had died some time ago and was now decomposing. A security shutter was pulled unevenly down across the shop front and the bottom corner of it had been crowbarred open like a torn envelope. Next to it, at the top of six steps, was a reinforced metal door. The ground-floor windows had been painted with tar, directly on to the glass. On the sidewalk was a pile of rubbish that had been there long enough to have weathered and attained personality.

  ‘Yeah… he said it sort of doesn’t have a number,’ Finn said.

  ‘This isn’t happening,’ Dilly muttered. ‘We’re going to your brother’s.’

  He ignored her, climbed the steps and unlocked the two security locks, then opened the numberless door with the Yale. He looked back at her. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said.

  ‘It won’t, and anyway, I don’t want fine.’

  He led her up a lightless stairwell which reeked of engine oil. Inside the apartment, Dilly could not speak. It was less messy than she had feared, but it was cold and dark and bare and the despondency of it jabbed her in the stomach. Finn dropped his bag and went to the large cast-iron radiator and turned the knob. She resented the trace of enthusiasm in his movement as he explored the apartment (and it was a studio, not a fucking apartment) and turned on another radiator that hissed and spluttered into life, and the way he seemed to think it was a bonus that the light switch worked.

  From the only window, she looked down at the aluminium roofs of a row of workshops. She shuddered at what looked like a dead snake but might have been an inner-tube.

  ‘It’s a shithole, but it’s not a whores-and-heroin shithole,’ Finn said.

  Dilly drew a short half-breath and soured her lips, causing Finn, uncharacteristically, to chatter nervously.

  ‘It’s a Shane Meadows location but not, you know, City of God.’

  ‘This is not the dream,’ she said, icily.

  ‘I thought the dream was us being together in New York City.’ They swapped positions, circling each other, and he looked out across the backyards to the East River. Behind his back, she flung herself on to the bed and lay on her stomach with her face buried in her arms. ‘No one’s gonna hurt us,’ he whispered, ‘it’s just a place.’

  She leapt up off the bed, clutching a pillow to her stomach. ‘I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF ANYONE HURTING ME, YOU LITTLE PRICK!’ And then she screamed from the middle of the room, until spit was clinging to the roof of her mouth and she was bent double, her legs bowing under the weight of her rage. Screamed as if she were giving birth to the building, as if possessed. Screamed the way an infant would scream. Finn watched, frozen to the spot. His head rang: Jesus fucking Christ! Look at her! Jesus fucking Christ!

  She stared accusingly at him and spoke, the words deformed by her mouth dredging for oxygen. ‘You must have known what this place was gonna be like – he must have described it to you.’

  ‘It’s a free apartment from a twenty-one-year-old guy in jail for the second time already. What were you expecting? And anyway, blokes don’t describe apartments to each other.’

  ‘Yes, and it’s women who pay the price for that, throughout their lives.’

  As usual, he had no idea what she meant, and no intention of asking.

  Softly, he continued, while trying to acclimatise to the insanity of her outburst and to somehow play it down. ‘I hardly know Glenn. I met him last summer, you know that. We hung out for a bit, he kept saying I should come out here, then he emailed and said the apartment was ours while he was inside if we wanted it… that’s it… that’s all I know.’

  ‘I forbid you to call this an apartment. It’s a hovel.’

  It was only now that Finn noticed a scrunched-up envelope in Dilly’s fist.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  ‘Note for you.’

  ‘Where was it?’

  ‘Please acknowledge that this is not an apartment. Tell me it’s a hovel.’

  ‘Can I have that note, please?’

  ‘Say it out loud, that you understand this place is a hovel. Because if you think this is an apartment you and I are on different planets.’

  He stared at her, mouth open, shrugged, shook his head. ‘It’s… a hovel.’

  She handed him the note and he took it to the window.

  Monotone, through her hands, she said. ‘Does the note say, This is a practical joke, you guys, this isn’t really where I live, I live on Mercer Street above a designer shoe shop, the Manhattan equivalent of Emma Hope, here are the keys. Ha ha. Does it say that?’

  ‘Who’s Emma Hope?’

  ‘Christ.’ She sighed and let her shoulders sag. ‘I’m allowing into my body the penis of a man who hasn’t heard of Emma Hope shoes.’

  ‘Glenn has a part-time job loading dishes at Chelsea Piers… says I can go and see if they’ll give me his job until he gets back. Sweet.’ He looked at her brightly. ‘We’re on our way.’

  She undid the top two buttons of her dress. ‘Work… boring.’ She removed her underwear from beneath her dress and sat on the bed. ‘Didn’t your parents leave you money?’

  He turned his back and looked out at the view. Two yards away, a semi-naked man sifted through a pile of scrap metal by a work-light. He had a white Nano strapped to his greasy upper arm, and earplugs in his ears. ‘I have to earn money. You said you were the same.’

  ‘I say a lot of things.’ She laughed at herself. ‘That’s such a line, but it actually applies to me: I do say a lot of things. What about your brother? He must be loaded.’

  ‘We’re not having that conversation again. Thanks to me we’ve got a place in Manhattan.’

  ‘Yes, our place in Manhattan… here we are…’ She sat up and hugged herself, rocked a little back and forth and stared at the floor. ‘I’m an asshole. What did I expect? This is me we’re talking about… the freak idiot… why do
I raise my hopes? I’m such a loser.’

  Finn kept reading. ‘He’s given us his parents’ number in New Jersey… says they’d love to have us to stay. He’s put in brackets, I wouldn’t bother. My folks are pretty depressing and it’s not that nice a place.’

  Dilly stared at him, mean and sexy. ‘The guy who lives here describes somewhere else as not that nice?’

  She finished undressing and slipped beneath the bedclothes. He joined her. They hugged, pressing their naked bodies together for warmth, entangling their legs.

  ‘Don’t be mad at me, just listen,’ she whispered. ‘Please don’t let’s stay here. I hate it.’

  ‘We can’t afford hotels and we’re not having the conversation about my brother again.’

  She snuggled up to him. ‘I understand…’ she said.

  For a few moments after his eyes had closed Finn listened to the hum of the city and the muffled rattle of the Williamsburg Bridge, and, although he was imagining it, the chug of boats on the river. He felt a veil of tiredness cover him and, with pleasure, he stepped off the ledge into sleep. She parted her legs a little and allowed his hand to settle between her thighs, where he liked it to rest. He woke after forty-five minutes, and was all slow motion, anchorless with slumber. He detected the subtle cinnamon aroma of Dilly’s massage oil. He opened his eyes and saw the bottle nearby him on a bedside table made of wicker. A trickle of oil slid down the side of the bottle and Finn was aware that his penis was hard and beautifully sensitive. He placed one hand beneath his head and smiled at her. She was kneeling between his legs, massaging his oily erection. She was wearing his best shirt, the only one with a collar, the one he intended to wear when they went out to Long Beach to meet Dilly’s parents. It was white and plain, and unbuttoned. She wore it as she rode him expertly and afterwards she lay star-shaped across his body, both of them a sheen of oil and sweat.

  She took his right hand and placed it back between her thighs and whispered to him, ‘Please don’t make us go straight to my parents. That will play right into their hands.’

  ‘Don’t worry…’ he whispered.

  ‘There’s a world of difference between asking your brother for money and using his spare room. Please take care of me.’

  ‘Okay, baby…’ he muttered, and fell asleep again.

  5

  This place was not what Finn considered a café. The presence of chorizo in the scrambled eggs made it a restaurant.

  Dilly watched him load his fork, watched him chew exuberantly, felt the vibration of his tapping feet, watched his eyes suck in the kinetic energy on the streets outside. He looked so pure and pretty and fuckable to her. She loved what he amounted to, and loathed the inevitability that she would spoil, in some small way, how he saw the world, without meaning to at all.

  She washed the eggs down with black coffee and felt the caffeine flirt with the nervous energy that underpinned her every waking hour, like inseparable friends who were no good for each other. She took the camera from her bag and aimed, as if attempting to take something captive. She wasn’t certain what it was, but she’d know it when she saw it. She twisted in her seat, looking for images out of the windows, and her heart quickened at the thought of a career as a photographer of interiors for Wallpaper* magazine.

  ‘Has another Beatle died?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is the third Beatles song they’ve played in half an hour. Which one would you think?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Which one would you think would die next?’

  ‘How would I know which Beatle will die next? Neither of them, hopefully.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were such a fan.’

  ‘I’m in that space between being a fan and wanting them dead.’

  She waved for more coffee.

  ‘But,’ he added, ‘everyone would keep Ringo and let Paul go, given the choice.’

  She smiled at his nonsense. It was a new thing to her. In her not inconsiderable experience, relationships were for serious stuff, and intense stuff, for fights and sex, whereas nonsense was for between girlfriends, and she was in another one of those phases of her life when she didn’t really have any girlfriends.

  She put the camera back in her bag with a roughness that made Finn uneasy, and yanked out two street maps, spilling a beaten-up old paperback of Hemingway short stories on to the floor. Seeing the book, Finn felt faint, and momentarily deaf, as if he’d hit the surface of water at speed. He was barely able to speak.

  ‘Why… have you got that?’

  She gathered the book up and held it at arm’s length, looking at it dispassionately. ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want you to have that.’

  ‘You don’t want me to read Ernest Hemingway?’

  ‘Can I have it back, please?’

  ‘Don’t be weird. I haven’t read it.’

  ‘I’m not being weird.’

  ‘Looking like death because I have borrowed a book from you is weird.’

  She was right in theory, but in practice this particular book was not one he kept out on the shelf. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Can’t remember.’

  ‘I keep that in a drawer.’

  ‘I haven’t even opened it. What’s the big deal?’ She handed it to him, leaning back in her chair so that he had to strain forward to reach it. ‘Seriously, what’s the biggie?’

  He decided that her asking probably meant she hadn’t read it, but still he felt sick at the sight of the book here in New York City.

  ‘Okayyyy…’ she said, sitting upright and clapping her hands together. ‘One map for you…’ she handed him one of the two identical Streetwise maps of Manhattan ‘… and one for me. Don’t unfold them in public. It’s tacky.’

  ‘Why would one couple want two identical maps?’ Finn asked.

  ‘I thought, if we split and then met up this evening… It’s fun to explore alone and then compare notes.’

  He smiled the false smile, and wanted to swallow but knew that swallowing would appear weak. ‘Whole point of having a girlfriend is doing stuff together.’

  ‘Sure, I’m agreeing, but we don’t want to be together twenty-four hours a day.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit early to have a break from each other? It’s day one.’

  ‘So I’ve wasted my money on two maps?’

  She was content to ride out the silence that followed and the many other moments identical to it, when a boyfriend took offence at something she’d done or said. He looked away. The Lower East Side remained exotic to him, and he urged himself not to lose faith in the great adventure, nor to be demoralised by the suspicion that he spent his life being let down by those closest to him.

  He stared at the Hemingway book. It chilled him that it had spent time in her possession. It was hard to believe she hadn’t looked inside, difficult to imagine she hadn’t been working her way through the lines and lines of his own scribbled notes in the margins, but he managed to believe it because he wanted to.

  She was done with this particular silence. ‘This is what I am going to do today. It’s up to you if you come with me or do your own thing. Unlike you, I won’t take offence. After visiting Ground Zero – which I know you refuse to do, we’ve had that convo, yadda yadda – I am going to go to the Bloomingdale’s on Broadway and treat myself. I like the idea of the juxtaposition of the two elements in one day. Tragic and celebratory. Spiritual and material. Also, it’s what this city needs: for us to shop and act normal.’

  So, act normal, he didn’t say.

  ‘I just need today to be fascinating on many levels.’

  Finn dwelt on the implication that, for Dilly’s day to be fascinating on many levels, she needed to spend it without him. It took his mind off the Hemingway.

  ‘But,’ she went on, ‘I guess I could move day two to day one and vice versa.’

  ‘What’s day two?’

  ‘The Park and the Dakota. Or, P and P, I’m calling it.’

 
‘P and P? Or, P and D?’

  ‘P and P. Park and Pilgrimage.’

  He didn’t ask.

  Day two became day one so that they could be together, and began at the MoMA design store, where she bought a set of glass tea-light holders and pinched the bridge of her nose at the onset of a possible migraine when Finn asked if she wanted to go inside MoMA itself. ‘No, thank you, my gorgeous man. Just the shop. I’m twenty-four and already feel like I’ve been through every art gallery in the world, twice over.’

  On arrival outside the Dakota, she went down to her knees, positioning the glass tea-light holders on the sidewalk in the shape of a heart.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She held one of them up. ‘They’re made by a Norwegian designer called Lotti. She’s totally amazing, and incredibly young, the cunt.’

  She took a book of matches from her pocket and cupped her hands around the candles as she lit them. Finn took a look at the box. Lotti’s ten tea-light holders had cost one hundred and eighty-nine dollars, a month’s food in Finn’s money.

  ‘Crap!’ Dilly hissed, as the breeze extinguished the pathetic flames. She raised her head a little and waited, as if reading the proximity of the next lull. Finn watched her. The breeze dropped and Dilly nodded to herself, as if she’d played some part in it, and had all the candles alight to greet the security guard, who said, ‘You can’t have those there.’

  Dilly ignored him and set about re-lighting the candles as they sputtered out again.

  ‘Lady? You cannot have those here.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Finn said, with a voice that barely reached her.

  She looked up at the guard. Her eyes burned pretty and fierce, and she used the quiet, calm voice that unnerved lovers and family members alike. ‘Do you understand the meaning of vigil?’ She turned her back before he could reply.

  Finn bent down to gather up the candles. She pointed at them without looking at him. ‘Don’t touch them, lover.’ Turning to the guard, she said, ‘I feel sorry for you, I really do.’

  He could live with that. He said to Finn, ‘Take your candles to the park, like everyone else.’