Men Like Air

by Connolly, Tom

  When he woke, Dilly had gone, and taken her bag and Finn’s stuff too. There was a scribbled note on the pillow.

  Meet me at noon on the northwest corner of Canal and West Broadway and ‘try to keep an open mind’.

  This last bit alluded to a line from Badlands, which they referred to often as it was the only film their tastes had so far found in common.

  Jack appeared in a bathrobe looking rough and moved around the walls of the apartment straightening his numerous framed historical maps of New York City, even though they were not askew.

  ‘What time is it?’ Finn asked.

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Oh, man, I really slept. Why aren’t you at work?’

  ‘Not feeling too hot. Your girlfriend was up at six, making some weird shapes.’

  ‘You mean Dilly?’

  ‘Of course I mean her.’

  ‘That’s Dilly-yoga. It’s a bit weird. She’s made it up herself, I think.’

  ‘Looked artistic.’

  ‘She could make a fortune with it here, Americans love that bullshit.’

  Jack sat across from Finn, too pissed off at him to share the couch. You wanna move into a hotel, he thought, you move to a bloody hotel. ‘I had a phase reading lots of novels when I moved out here, ’cos I didn’t really know anyone and I was alone most of the time.’

  ‘What about Holly?’

  ‘Well, yeah, when she was out doing her stuff, I mean. And I liked Doris Lessing.’ Jack wanted to ask Finn if he knew who Doris Lessing was but didn’t want to sound patronising. Finn didn’t ask because he knew how his brother hated to be interrupted. ‘She wrote this book called The Grass Is Singing, and in the intro to it she’s talking about racism and apartheid and she says that racism is the atrophy of the imagination.’

  There was silence. When Finn was sure that his brother had stopped talking, he asked, ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means a failure of the imagination – that, if people could truly imagine what it is to be the other person, they wouldn’t mistreat them. Prejudice, it’s a failure of our imagination.’

  Finn nodded and sipped his tea. What with his brother’s tendency to read and Dilly’s to talk, he felt sandwiched between a lot of words.

  ‘My point is,’ Jack said, ‘shed your stereotypes at the front door to this city. Forget the “seventy per cent of Americans don’t have passports” stuff, get over the apparent meaninglessness of “have a nice day” and the obscenity of “super-size me”. This city is full of extraordinary people. It’s the most amazing place with a fantastic history.’

  Finn laughed beneath his breath, impressed by his brother’s knowledge and earnestness. If Jack was going to fuck off to America and abandon him, at least he seemed to be making the most of it. The laughter made Jack feel small. It humiliated his serious nature by a further increment, as had Dilly’s revelation to him earlier, during a modified downward dog, that Finn was insisting they check into a hotel today.

  Abruptly, Finn stood up. It was not a Finn-like movement; he was the least jagged of men. But this was not how he’d imagined it: Jack being ready for them, having a bed made up, talking at him in that knowledgeable way Finn had always felt quietly warmed by. Jack had lost the right to do that sort of thing, and Finn couldn’t hear himself think for the noise of his blood pumping.

  Jack watched the prowl in his baby brother’s movements. Christ, he had filled out! The breadth of his shoulders, the veins in his arms; this was his kid brother in a man’s body, with an animal movement about him that left Jack unsure what was happening. Then, calmly and without a word, Finn left the apartment and Jack had the most outlandish sensation that Finn had been on the brink of destroying the place.

  With Dilly’s note to guide him, Finn emerged from the subway into the blinding cold sunshine of Canal Street and, as his eyes adjusted, he heard Dilly shout ‘Yo!’ from across the street. It was not a Dilly thing to shout, and it reeked of a guilty conscience. She led him into the SoHo Grand. In the elevator, she blindfolded him with a silk scarf. ‘Trust me…’ she whispered. He could hear the moisture in her mouth and gave her the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they were about to have quickie sex, something they had had a lot of in their four months together, but not in places as pleasantly scented as this. She led him into a room, shoved him so that he fell backwards on to a bed, which he allowed himself to bounce and settle on, and his cheek came to rest on the softest sheets that had ever touched him. He felt the mattress sink a little as she knelt over him, positioning herself one small movement from how his uncle would pin Finn’s shoulders to the floor with his knees.

  Dilly removed the blindfold. He looked at her as the silk slid off his face, welcoming the suggestion of sex to the same degree that he resented the allusion to violence. His peripheral vision took in the compact extravagance of the room, in the corner of which was their luggage. This was a declaration of war against the values of their trip, where being together and being on a budget in New York City amounted to more than any young lovers could possibly want.

  He smiled at her and said, as kindly as he could, ‘We’re staying with my brother. Now that you’ve dragged me there, we’re not leaving.’

  Her mouth fell open. Lost for words, she instead pressed her bottom down against his groin, opened her thighs.

  ‘It was –’ she emitted a quick burst of dismissive laughter, as if offended by the need to explain ‘– your brother’s suggestion?’ She ended the sentence with the upturned questioning tone that implied that Finn was stupid for not knowing this, and that she had hoped not to need spell it out to him.

  Finn’s head dropped to one side again. He stared at an iPod dock on a chest of drawers. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes. I was doing my practice when he had a quiet word with me. He said that… because he’s feeling so sick, and he’s got a lot on and really needs his own space, it’d just be better if we were back in our place. I don’t blame him and I hope you don’t either. He’s not to know how bad that shithole was. Anyway, I’ve taken care of it. Leave everything to Dilly.’

  ‘How much?’ he whispered.

  ‘Less than four hundred bucks a night.’ She had decided when she checked in to be brazenly honest in reply to this dull, inevitable question.

  ‘Can you get off me please?’ He squirmed beneath her agitatedly. She considered for a moment pinning him down but could already feel the strength of will in him. He walked to the bathroom and slammed the door shut. It made her jump. A less expensive door would have splintered.

  After ten minutes of silence she spoke through the door. ‘We have to try and do things in style. I’m sorry. Not my rules, Manhattan’s rules.’ She tiptoed in and sat beside him on the tiled floor. He didn’t look at her. He stared instead at the tray of complimentary soaps and oils. Finn had grown up with very little and been content. His parents’ dalliance with a middle-class life had damaged them all irrevocably. Nothing enraged him like material wealth, especially in a hotel his own fucking brother had banished him to.

  She waited, patiently at first because she was happy, very happy, to be here and it was hard for her to look any further than that. He reached out and took a bar of soap to look at, rather than pay her any attention.

  ‘The soap smells of marzipan.’ He was disgusted. He was outraged: the money on this hotel room could keep them alive, or be a gift to Glenn, someone who would need all the help he could get. ‘Now my hands smell of fucking marzipan!’

  She laughed and her laughter grew hysterical but her eyes were as kind as he had ever seen them. ‘It’s the first thing that’s ever made you angry,’ she cried. ‘This makes you angry and not all those other things! Oh, Finn!’

  He didn’t know if he loathed or loved her, but experience told him what would disguise the pain of Jack’s not wanting him to stay. One thing was for sure, he decided, as he reached across and held her hand: he was going to stop making the mistake of wanting anything from Jack. She gripped his hand tight, causing the blo
od-rush in him, and they kissed deep through her laughing mouth, and it felt dirty to him and welcome, being laughed at by her when she wanted him to fuck her. It was the best of ways to forget. He knelt at her, with her legs spread high and his ribcage pressed against the back of her thighs, a towel under his knees to cushion them against the bathroom floor. She moved up on to her elbows to stare at him. Eye contact like this always drove him crazy to please her. At her prompting they swapped positions. She wedged the towels beneath her knees and he a robe beneath his head. As she came, her head thrashed from side to side and her eyes drank in how fucking cool this bathroom was, and she called out breathlessly:

  ‘Herr God, Herr Lucifer,

  Beware

  Beware.

  Out of the ash

  I rise with my red hair…’

  She gasped and folded in two and smothered his face with her hair. His body was locked and somewhere in her oration he had come, but had not felt it and was aware only of being spent. They talked in whispers about a shared New York City, the one they could both agree on. It was short on detail, necessarily, but it was the two of them, soft and affectionate, equally in love with everything around them. This temporary harmony was the true miracle of sex.

  ‘Your hair’s not red,’ he whispered.

  She laid her hand on his stomach and played with the line of wispy hair between his belly button and his pubic hair. ‘I don’t think hers was either.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Sylvia Plath’s.’

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘Someone inspirational to me.’

  ‘Yeah, but who?’

  She wiggled into a softer position and sighed as if to sleep. ‘She’s a French singer and poet, the little sparrow I think they called her except she’s dead now. Je ne regrette rien. I think she’s dead. Not sure. She might have killed herself or her husband killed her, he was a poet I don’t know, I’m not sure, who cares. I’m going to keep your juices inside me all day.’

  He kissed her gratefully.

  ‘Which reminds me – when we go out to my folks, don’t mention my marriage.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, blankly.

  ‘They don’t know I was married.’

  Finn was torn between asking why her parents didn’t know and why her keeping his juices inside her had reminded her of her marriage. And, then, to his surprise, he discovered that he didn’t give a fuck. And that this was probably the only way to be Dilly’s lover: to allow the madness to wash over him.

  She lifted herself off him and crawled out of the bathroom on her hands and knees. ‘Legs like jelly,’ she laughed.

  He stared at the bathroom ceiling. Sometimes, he felt like saying to her, Thank you for being my lover, for this period of time. It’s been very kind of you but you don’t have to keep doing it. You’d be much happier with one of your own kind. I’ll miss you but it’s gonna happen sooner or later and you’ve sacrificed enough time on me already. I had a great time and I learned a lot. So thank you, I am going to put you out of your misery. You must go back to your people now.

  In the bedroom, Dilly put down her Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations and tested herself on the two she was committing to heart today. Two a day, every day. In time, even if only half of them stuck, that’d be a lot of knowing. She stretched across the sheets and placed the book back in the zip-up compartment at the back of her suitcase. She watched the change of light on the ivory walls, plumped two pillows beneath her head and draped herself among the bedclothes like an artist’s model. He found her like this, gazed at her pale, lean, naked back for signs of movement, and was overwhelmed by affection for the speechless version of her. The muted rumble of SoHo seeped through the walls as if he had strayed the wrong side of a movie screen. They slept, and when they woke it was late afternoon and they were met by the consuming hunger that came after sex and before old age.

  ‘You choose where we go,’ she said in accordance with an earlier resolution not to dominate. ‘What’s on your list?’

  ‘Sleepers. I wanna go where Sleepers was set. I looked it up.’

  On the streets she was snoggy and loving and she draped herself across him. He felt like a million dollars. Eight blocks later, her dislike of walking bubbled to the surface and she hailed a cab to take them to Hell’s Kitchen where nothing of the landscape of the book or movie was to be found but where Finn seemed content simply to know it had all happened once upon a time. He picked out a diner on Ninth Avenue called the Red Flame.

  ‘You totally sure?’ she asked.

  She chose the window seat and feigned pleasure at the place but already her mind was wandering, searching for something better, becoming disappointed by the day, returning her to that corner of herself from which she found it impossible to love.

  On the next table, a couple laughed, collapsing into each other as if to share the burden of their happiness. Dilly presumed they were laughing at her but they were not, they were laughing at themselves and the way they still took a look at the menu here before ordering what they always ordered. The woman took hold of her husband’s hands across the table and joined him on the bench seat. Finn watched them with a quiet, mouth-open wonder, as the woman snuggled against the man and kissed him on the lips. ‘William…’ she purred, and then she placed her mouth against his ear and whispered in it and the man, who was short and rather formal-looking, kissed his wife on the lips and stroked the river of walnut hair that had turned a thousand heads in the neighbourhood.

  Dilly glared at Finn, blushing with embarrassment. ‘You are so staring…’ she whispered.

  Finn didn’t hear her. This couple were a miracle to him, to be so old and so in love.

  William leaned away from his wife, to admire her, as if unable, still, to believe his good fortune. She had filled out handsomely in her fifties, but had not yet aged. She had a powerful, sensuous frame to support her trademark mane, and her eyes and mouth burned with a desire to express happiness. Kathleen Turner in Prizzi’s Honor, thought Finn as he gazed at her. It was one of his favourite old movies.

  ‘Are you married to each other?’ Finn asked. He couldn’t help himself.

  Dilly muttered ‘Christ almighty…’ and hid behind her menu.

  The woman looked Finn up and down. ‘Twenty-seven years,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry about him,’ Dilly said, and tugged at Finn.

  ‘Don’t we look it?’ William said.

  ‘No, you look like you just met, like you’re having an affair.’

  ‘Twenty-seven years…’ the woman repeated, amused by Finn.

  ‘That’s good. Sorry to butt in.’

  ‘No problem,’ William said, kindly.

  A waitress brought zucchini fritters to the couple and called the woman by name; she was Joy. Around them, the Red Flame hummed with conversation and laughter and the scraping of cutlery on crockery and the calling out of orders. William and Joy talked and ate and all the while they put three hundred fliers for their church recycling scheme into three hundred recycled envelopes. Joy ate with a passion, breathing deep with appreciation and sighing her approval between mouthfuls, so that Finn, who had had sex on the brain since meeting Dilly, could have believed Joy had another lover positioned beneath the table. In truth, the only man she had ever made love to was sitting right next to her.

  ‘You’re still staring,’ Dilly hissed, and kicked Finn under the table. He turned back to her, smiled sheepishly. She grabbed his hand and kissed it, in an impersonation of the couple, who made her want to vomit, and she heard that voice that said she had no right to be with Finn and it made her feel sad in the same way that seeing ranting homeless women with knee-length socks made her fear for her future and obese people eating junk food made her want to weep. She knew that if she looked into Finn’s eyes right now she would burst into tears and by the end of the evening there would be enough truth in the room for them to have split up.

  A waiter brought a large jug of water and two tumblers which he left stacke
d one on top of the other, a touch that Dilly liked for being informal, intelligent and stylish, and which enabled her to regain her lack of composure. There were slices of cucumber in the water and Finn bobbed one with his finger. ‘Soup’s a bit thin,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t do small talk, Finn. It’s not you. Your inability to talk shit or force humour is going to get you laid all your life, so don’t mess with it, please.’

  Beside them, William tuned in to Finn and Dilly’s conversation and thought to himself how much nicer the boy would look in a collared shirt, maybe even a suit. He had the ideal build for a suit. He’d feel better about himself too, no doubt about it. William scanned the restaurant proprietorially. He loved the ebb and flow of the Red Flame. He liked the season being reflected by the coat rail, empty in summer, three deep in winter. He liked the clock set into the back of an old colander hanging on the wall above the cash register. He liked Sandra, the waitress whose wristwatch William once mended as he ate breakfast, alone, one Saturday morning when Joy was at work at the health store. He liked Sandra’s laugh, and the draw of breath within it that sounded like a plea to be rescued from having too much fun.

  Dilly had noticed the colander clock and wasn’t sure if she loved it or detested it. Anything in between was not an option. The line of bullet holes on the wall beneath the clock she presumed, wrongly, was art-directed. On the opposite side of the avenue, a boarded-up shopfront had ‘Store for Rent’ in big red letters on the chipboard. She watched a dog-walker use it as a stop-off point for his pooch to take a shit by the chained entrance doors. A man in overalls painted the words HAPPY EASTER in freehand on to the outside window of the Red Flame. He had already drawn bunnies, eggs, baskets of chocolates with ribbons and, incongruously, a pizza.