Dilly pulled a face at the food when it arrived and was visited by the familiar, shudder-inducing fear that she was missing out on a better party just around the corner.
‘I wanna see places…’ she muttered.
‘What do you want to see?’ Finn asked. ‘We can do whatever you like.’
‘Something like that bar called 182 or 872 or whatever. That bar where the doors to the restroom cubicles are made of see-through glass and everyone in the bar can see you going in but when you lock the door from the inside the glass frosts up. I showed it to you in the magazine. I was so happy. I want to be in places like that and watch people and kiss you in front of those sorts of people. You would look amazing in places like that. We would.’
‘We’ll go. Now. No problem. Let’s go.’
‘No…’ she whined. ‘It was in Tokyo. I sometimes feel you’re deliberately missing the point. Places like that!’ She sighed. ‘What do I have to do to be understood?’
Finn looked at his hands, glanced at the next table. William smiled back at him. Finn didn’t know what the hell Dilly was talking about and the smiling man seemed to understand that. Both men turned, instinctively, towards the sunlight and watched the owner of the Red Flame step out on to the sidewalk and hand the window-painter a cup of coffee and stand back to look at the display. He jammed his hands on to his hips and a big, jowly smile spread across his face.
Finn and Dilly ate quietly. She sometimes resented Finn’s enormous capacity for long silences, as it diluted the impact of her own deliberate, point-making ones. As they left the café, Finn stopped and admired the windowpainter’s work.
‘You’re really good,’ he said.
‘Thanks.’
Dilly rolled her eyes at the painted pizza and walked away.
‘You should paint professionally,’ Finn said, ‘I mean, real actual paintings, for people to buy.’
‘I do paint real actual paintings for people to buy.’
‘Why are you doing this, then?’
‘Because people don’t really, actually buy them.’
‘Idiots.’
‘Thanks. Where you from?’
‘England.’
‘Pretty cool.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You paint?’
‘No. I’m a gardener, sort of.’
‘That’s very cool.’
‘Not really.’
Dilly was a block ahead of Finn, watching him say goodbye to the nobody painting the café window. She turned and walked on. Finn saw her, knew he’d need to jog to catch her up and for the first time he couldn’t be bothered. He recalled the sensation of getting home from school to an empty house, of heading straight out again to walk in increasingly wide orbits of the neighbourhood in the hope of seeing his brother around the next corner, and praying that, if it were his mum he met, she would not shake, or behave as if she was out of focus.
He allowed Dilly to disappear out of sight. Feeling lonely on the streets of Manhattan felt better than all the other places he’d ever felt lonely – exotic in its way – and he received another sympathetic smile from the man called William as he and his beautiful wife left the café.
While Finn meandered south, William took Joy’s hand and walked home with her through that area they refused to call Clinton. They could have lived someplace nicer than the stretch of West 36th Street dissected by the Lincoln Tunnel approach, but they liked the nest they had made there and they liked the view and not having debts and the pact they had made to get out of bed each morning glad to be alive, to prefer laughter to sadness, to take pleasure in the detail of their day-to-day existence in Hell’s Kitchen and not to look beyond it.
‘We don’t want eyes too big for our bellies,’ William had said, a quarter of a century ago, summoning the presence of his maternal grandmother.
‘Let’s not push our luck…’ he had heard Joy say whenever they had contemplated change, and on that tearful day when they gave up on having a child.
William opened the door to this life they had mastered and watched Joy go straight to the bedroom, where she switched on a lamp and turned back the sheet. Their bedroom was small, only marginally bigger than the bed, but had a dressing room the size of a wardrobe off it. It was separated from the lounge by a bead curtain. The lounge doglegged into a kitchenette and a glazed door led straight from the kitchenette to the bathroom, which was small and filled by a huge tub that had been here in 1981 when they moved in. The apartment was bright, with large windows held together inside by thick layers of gloss paint which William and Joy liked to apply every other spring without any preparation and wearing smocks like children in an art class. The shelves were filled with CDs and cassettes stacked in messy rows. There were a few books lost amongst the music, none of them fiction.
William took the mail to a small desk tucked into the corner of the living room, dropping it on to a pile of paperwork beside the outmoded PC that dominated the desk. Mail depressed him, reminded him of a world knocking relentlessly on the door of their life, trying to get in. He sat back and looked at the shelves above him, one filled with back copies of the Chelsea Clinton News and Municipal Arts Society magazines. Post-it notes stuck out from these journals like archaeological signposts in the bedding planes of a marriage driven by good causes. Another shelf had box files of church paperwork and another was crammed with correspondence and articles relating to organised opposition to the West Side redevelopment. Three identical and never-perused copies of The Earth from the Air (Christmas presents every one of them) served as book-ends, a brass Buddha (William had just liked the look of it) serving as a fourth. The shelves bowed beneath the weight of it all and William contemplated a clearout.
He took a light beer from the fridge and shared it with Joy. The bottle floated back and forth across the apartment, a baton passed between them as they walked and talked and tied up the trash and opened the post and shared it and shredded it and looked for the TV remote. They undressed, he wrapping a towel around his waist, she putting on her robe. They drifted happily on autopilot, swigging the beer, sharing a belly laugh here and there and talking about chores they needed to do as members of the Stewardship of God’s Creation Recycling Scheme, which William still prayed would be renamed simply the Recycling Scheme. He and Joy referred to their church as ‘the Club’ because ‘the Church of the Disciples of Christ’ was a mouthful, even for people of faith.
William ran a bath and sat on the laundry box watching it fill. She hovered at the door, asked him to scratch an itch in the small of her back; when he had done so, he watched her leave the bathrobe where it had slipped to the floor and wander naked into the lounge. He heard her mute the TV and put on a Lead Belly tape. He leaned over the bath and threw water on his face, felt her rest a hand on his back as he patted his face dry. He kissed each of her breasts on his way to sitting down again. She tested the water and inhaled the scent of the bath foam. She said, ‘Mmm… nice…’ and Lead Belly sang, ‘My girl, my girl, where will you go? I’m going where the cold wind blows.’ He put his arms around her waist and rested his head against her tummy. He felt her run the fingers of her left hand through his hair. She held a sheet of paper in the other.
‘You’ll like this,’ she said.
‘Tell me…’ he replied, climbing into the bath and letting out a long sigh as he submerged himself in hot water.
She sat on the side of the tub and read from a flier. ‘This Saturday is the Hanging of the Greens. Join us as we decorate our sanctuary in the creative company of friends. Don’t forget to bring the kids. The fun starts at 1pm after coffee ’n’ cookie hour.’
‘How many people do that?’ William said, lowering his mouth into the water and blowing bubbles. ‘Forget to bring their kids?’
She giggled, and it told him that they would have sex later.
‘Shredder,’ he said.
She put the papers aside and climbed into the bath, groaned with contentment. The steam rose from the water. Every few minut
es, she lifted herself up an inch and allowed the hot water to course between their bodies and prevent their skin from sticking. His hands rested on her belly, hers on his knees. They went to bed and made love and afterwards she reached for the remote control on the bedside table and played the CD where she had queued it up to her favourite post-lovemaking song, ‘Kisses Sweeter than Wine’ by the Weavers. He lay on top of her and offered gentle kisses to her shoulders and breasts because she loved them so much and because they drowned out the words of the song he disliked, and he felt himself diminish inside her.
7
‘Are you going to celebrate?’
The final conversation Jack had with the probate lawyer in London left him wondering if they had become friends. It also left him lying in bed with a fan of loose papers on his lap and the phone in his wavering hand as he tried to imagine who he would have celebrated this with, had he felt well enough.
He pulled away the covers and sent tumbling the papers that he no longer needed to keep in order. He was not the sort of person to burn them as a gesture, but he could at last put them away and close the box (after getting them back into order). In a kitchen cupboard was a shapeless collection of alcoholic options for the non-existent guest: a few beers, an unopened bottle of gin, Holly’s slimline tonic, and a bottle of corner-store cava. He put the cava in the fridge and this act of preparation for a hypothetical gathering succeeded in marking the moment without threatening him with the actual act of celebration. Michael Hollins, Jack’s monotone, chosen-at-random-and-at-distance lawyer, was right.
‘You should mark this moment, Jack. It’s been a long old haul and it’s taken a bit out of you. Although we’ve never met, I get the impression you’ve had a few sleepless nights. It’s done. Celebrate.’
Jack did not in fact allow such things to keep him awake at night. The result of exhausting oneself with exercise was good sleep. There was also, he believed, something about living close to the East River air. He went often to the waterside and stood pressed against the railing, watching the traffic roll over the Triborough Bridge, or the cranes building Long Island City, and felt the river’s ether preparing him for sleep. A stillness pervaded even when there was noise. Today, he would have liked to go to the river wrapped in his duvet and throw the papers into the water. They would tell a tale to the rod-and-liners downstream. They would wash up at Stuyvesant Cove in any old order and tell a disjointed story from this era where a husband and wife could set sail in a paper boat with their sons on board, be lent every line of credit going, enough to stop working then immediately forget how to, then forget how to live, and die with a parting gift to their first-born son of a sinking, mouldy financial chaos that required plastic gloves and a peg on the nose.
Who to celebrate with, hypothetically? Holly was absent, naturally. Finn was in the dark, thanks to Jack’s masterful withholding from him of all knowledge of the crap their parents had left behind. He was already down to people he preferred less than solitude.
He feared that life was living him rather than him living it. People endured moment after moment after moment. They survived and survived again (until, of course, finally, they did not) but, on a day when the familiar voice of stranger and friend Michael Hollins LLB had given him permission to celebrate, mere endurance seemed meagre. What he could do with was some sound advice. He could do with someone appearing at his bedroom door, tucking him in, plumping the pillow, telling him it was all going to be alright, and, trickiest of all, him believing them. Someone to sob against and complain to about the hours and hours of his life taken up in mopping up the mess, with the help of Michael Hollins at three hundred pounds an hour. It was perverse, he knew, that if his mother were alive she’d be the one to soothe him, oblivious to the scorched earth of her ways. It would be she of all people who would offer a philosophical view. His dad was all about silence but his mother had had a taste for deep thinking when drunk. Jack wondered if one day he would be offered free, sober advice, or had he missed out on that now? By your mid-twenties were you expected to get on with it, with no further nuggets of wisdom, and to somehow live off the ones that reeked of gin? He wondered if some men received guidance from their wives. He liked the idea of it, it aroused a certain aching in him, but somehow the prospect of laying himself bare to the woman he made love to seemed an impossible one.
The shadows of early spring were cast long, throwing a tree, still bare-limbed, on to the grey-slabbed side of the buildings opposite the apartment and the elongated shapes of pedestrians marching after themselves with outsized limbs. Jack watched from the corner window of his bedroom, wrapped in his dressing gown. Late afternoon and not dressed – unheard of. A man in a trilby and a raincoat, collar up on his neck, crossed the avenue, his sideburns and muscularity old-fashioned. For a split second it could have been the seventies or eighties. So many angles in this town allowed for time-travel, placing Jack inside the TV version of New York City seen in the corner of the living room in the 1980s, watching a long-since-dead middle-aged man go about his unreconstructed business, possibly enjoying his heyday. And, inevitably, Jack wondered if his own dad ever had a prime, and he knew enough about his parents to be sure that before Finn was born they had enjoyed a certain exuberance and happiness and expectation, without ever harbouring ambition or the vein of curiosity. And perhaps way before that his dad enjoyed a golden age, of earning a first wage, of women and the idea that anything was possible.
A man of Jack’s age stood against the smoked windows of the Kinsale Tavern. The windows muted the reflections of the traffic on Third Avenue and a slow-moving line of ghostly yellow cabs passed through the standing man’s body without him flinching. From his elevated position, how could Jack be sure that the man existed at all, with the traffic driving through him and no way of calling out to him? The inverse thought also offered itself up, that the man was down there on the street but that Jack, high up at his bedroom window examining a detached world, existed to no one but himself. This was why he disliked being off work: the space for thought it created, and the feeling of invisibility. Staying busy took care of most things.
The elevator security guy at his office had asked Jack, ‘What’s your Harlem Beach?’
Jack hadn’t known what that meant, and guessed that he was being invited to ask.
‘It means, a place you can turn your back and be at peace. I’m Louis. I’m from Maui.’
‘Hi, Louis. Jack.’
‘English?’
‘Yes.’
‘London?’
‘Yes.’ (What was he going to do, describe his home town to a guy from Maui?)
‘Welcome to New York City.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Harlem Beach is where I go to fish. Not often enough but you got to know it’s there, even if you don’t get to it as much as you’d wanna. Someplace to get away from all this crazy, beautiful stuff. Someplace to just… whatever.’
Within six months, Jack knew that his own Harlem Beach was the reading room of the public library. And among the very first things he read about in that hallowed place was Harlem Beach and the East River, because Jack would look up any subject that helped him understand another person better, Louis from Maui included. It was a shame that no one had written a book on Finn, to offer his big brother a clue. He could easily understand Louis from Maui’s pact with the river, and with many human beings Jack felt a chime that would never be expressed by him or heard by them. A silent sound was his connection to people. He thought there was something noble about good deeds that went unknown, and was not wise to the tissue damage of resentment they left on him. He liked the idea of the small actions that accounted for only a few precious hours here and there but suggested a life lived on its own terms. I fish the Hudson at Harlem Beach every Sunday morning was a preferable thing to have known about someone than I live a mere act of survival, in turmoil at the things I cannot cope with.
Jack experienced a palpable, innate excitement on entering the reading room, a t
hreat to his composure, an offering of childhood made to him a decade late. It was the place he could recall the ecstasy of learning. To study had been life in freefall pleasure for Jack. Work was satisfying, but learning was on another level, and he worried that his continuing self-education was already confined to moments stolen from adult life. Jack still clung to the memory, in Pizza Express the night before he left for New York, of overhearing Finn tell Holly that his brother should be a time-traveller, not a businessman (to Finn, like many teenagers, any man in a suit was a businessman; there were no delineations between the professions) because for his mute, impenetrable sixteen-year-old brother to understand that history was Jack’s true love was the greatest and least expected of offerings. The next day, he flew three thousand miles from it.
Jack returned to his bed, lay on his back in the tight cocoon of his duvet and sent a text to his baby brother on Dilly’s number. The laziness of the day, the lifting of the burden of probate, the solid wall of flu-fuzz behind his eyes, all loosened him up and he texted without the usual detailed analysis of how to word himself with Finn, nor the accompanying self-doubt. Finn, it’s Jack. Hope you’re having fun. Call me, was thinking about you. By Jack’s standards, this was a love letter. He was throwing himself at Finn.
Dilly didn’t pass the message on because she and Finn were naked and in a sweet moment after the excellent moment, and Finn always went quiet upon mention of his brother. She didn’t want Jack bulldozing their evening.
‘You’re so lovely,’ she said to Finn.
‘We’ve got to stop falling out,’ he replied.
She looked puzzled. ‘I don’t think we do,’ she said, softly. ‘Not really.’
He thought she was joking. He glanced down at their glistening bodies and felt pleased with himself. She was such a robust lover that in their four months together his penis had become tougher and a little desensitised, all to the benefit of his staying power. And he was learning that oral sex, the conferring of, was a miracle of largesse that garnered undue appreciation. Dilly had taught him, from the get-go, to regard sex as a continuous stream to be dipped in and out of, to think of it as a wedding banquet, to indulge, pause, then indulge again. She had also weaned him off saying ‘thank you’ after intercourse. He had taken a few weeks to get out of the habit, but it was a huge improvement for her when he did.
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