Men Like Air

by Connolly, Tom

  Instantly, he didn’t mind the idea, but he said, ‘There’s no way I’m leaving you.’

  ‘I don’t wanna spoil your fun, but it’s not for me.’

  ‘I’ll come back with you, no worries.’

  ‘Look, Finny-boy, I don’t wanna rain on your parade with your new best buddies,’ she said with venom. ‘And the thing is, I actually want to go back alone. Tomorrow’s another day. I’m giving you my blessing.’

  He dropped his shoulders in fake devastation while the sweet buzz of imminent emancipation rose through his glands. The cab took Dilly away and Finn looked across the water at the metropolitan meadow of lights and inside himself he felt a child’s laughter at fairy lights, and he suspected that tonight would be good, and he felt he could protect anyone who needed him, and fight anyone who deserved it, and drink without getting drunk. And he wished Jack could see him now.

  They sat on plastic deckchairs on the roof of the apartment building in the early hours. Manhattan was ablaze and silent. They got high on a gentle curve, with the fresh river breeze. Neighbours joined them and the conversation rose and there was laughter but Finn was too happy to contribute, and listening felt just fine. A man and a woman pulled up their seats and introduced themselves to Finn and told him about a book they were writing called Dusty & Co. The front cover was to be a photograph of an urn and the whole book about the personal health problems, physical flaws, frailties, addictions and the manner of death of the world’s great dictators and despots. An epilogue would describe the graves of these people. An appendix would detail the human decomposition process. ‘It will be the ultimate bringer of perspective,’ they said, and added that they were persuading a very rich old woman on the Upper East Side to fund the buying of couture for a book of photographs of designer clothes and jewellery modelled by terminally ill people. Finn started laughing, a naughty, nervous, childish giggle, fuelled by the couple’s earnestness. It made Cozy laugh too and Finn discovered the hysteria that fed on itself and could not be stopped, that spread into every corner of your body like a forest fire. He had never known it before. It made him feel sick and happy. The prospective authors of Dusty & Co. were as confused as Finn and Cozy were crippled.

  More people arrived, and all had the same watery eyes that oozed tiredness and love. Chairs and upturned crates appeared for them out of nowhere. Siouxsie danced by herself. Later she played a game, taking Polaroids of people’s naked feet and seeing who could match the feet to the person.

  ‘You two are like the Clonnie-and-Byde of making people feel good,’ Finn told Cozy.

  ‘Do you know how cool you are?’ Cozy said.

  Finn shook his head in disbelief that life could possibly feel so great. He watched Siouxsie stop her dancing and move across the roof and throw her arms around someone and as they let go of each other Finn saw that it was Amy, the waitress from the Gay Hussar, and he sat up and rubbed his face and ruffled his hair, and he looked again and she looked even smaller and prettier than before. She disappeared into the apartment and returned carrying two bottles of beer. She dragged a chair behind her across the rooftop to Finn and handed him one of the beers. ‘Cold one?’ she asked.

  He thanked her and got up from his seat as she sat in hers and it made his head spin a little and her heart skip a beat.

  It struck Finn that life was so fucking beautiful when it was beautiful and you were nineteen and high and three thousand miles from your uncle and you thought you were ready to sleep but then the hit of a cold beer on the back of your throat was like a night’s sleep and a cold shower. Amy’s arm brushed against his the first time she raised the bottle to her mouth, so delicately that he could feel the tiny hairs on her skin touch the hairs on his forearm. She allowed this to happen each time she drank, the lightest of glances against a body that had taken many blows. She pulled her tiny feet up on to her seat and hugged her knees, and they both looked out and enjoyed the view of the toy city and the enormous future.

  When Finn woke, the plastic chair had buckled slightly to cradle the shape of his coiled body. The sun was coming up. Cozy was asleep nearby and Finn had the feeling Cozy had stayed out on the roof to watch over him. He observed the minute-by-minute change in the colour of the skyline where the first cool streaks made a blue lava lamp of the highest part of the sky and the glass surfaces of midtown. The roof was warm in sunshine by the time Amy appeared and stretched and yawned, compact and neat already, and impossibly pretty. She made coffee and she and Finn sat on the edge of the roof with their legs dangling over the side, sixty feet above Kent Avenue. The soles of his feet tingled. She left for her day job and he wanted to ask for her number but felt that he should not (because there was, you know, Dilly of course) and then, before he could decide the right thing to do, she said to him, ‘You know where to find me.’

  Williamsburg slept like a village. Finn dragged his tired limbs uphill to the L Train. Outside a bar that did not seem long closed was a bench made out of a mooring post from the East River, a massive hunk of beaten wood bolted to two blocks of concrete. He sat on it and took in the view. To the west of Kent Avenue was a flattened concrete wasteland and one huge white warehouse standing surrounded by a great rubble lawn banking down to the East River. In the midst of it stood a man with a sledgehammer and a wheelbarrow, looking as if he had dismantled the waterfront single-handedly. It made Finn smile. The buildings and sidewalk either side of the Gotham Marble Works were caked in light grey dust and Finn watched as a breeze picked the dust up and sent it scuttling across the road. Cement trucks and demolition lorries lined the far side of the avenue further up, and four fat Hispanic site workers walked up 7th Street and passed two miniature Latin women entering the Built by Wendy clothes store. Laughter rang out from somewhere inside the Western Carpet & Linoleum factory and a man sat on a skateboard outside the factory listening to Spanish music in a suntrap.

  Finn wandered on. Spray-painted in red, yellow and green on to a brick wall on 4th Street were the words ‘Art + Sanity = Anarchy’. On Berry Street, two low factory buildings squatted side by side, one with its shutters open to show a display of high-priced, fine decorative glass bottles and jars. Orange glow and white light drew Finn to the threshold and among the slumping kilns he saw hip young things with sculpted stubble, blowing glass.

  On the journey back on to Manhattan, as the L Train kicked on the rails and climbed a slope up off the riverbed, he suspected that Dilly would not be there when he got back. Sure enough, the hotel room was empty, but it took Finn a few moments to recognise that not only Dilly but her belongings were gone. On a sheet of SoHo Grand headed paper, resting on the pillow, she had written: I am going home to my folks’. Come for the weekend as planned. I love you. I’ve settled the bill.

  She had written down her parents’ address in Long Beach but not their number and he knew immediately that he had no intention of going there. And then he saw, in Dilly’s deliberately tiny handwriting at the very bottom of the page, I have your book. I’ll give it back to you at Long Beach x. He slumped on to the bed and jammed the palms of his hands against his face. It was something he used to do at the detention centre: press hard until spots of colour and light appeared in his eyes, creating an impression of outer space, a limitlessness inside his head he could escape to.

  8

  Jack could barely drag his body to the phone when Holly called from Atlanta at eleven, same as she did every morning. ‘I’m glad you’re still off work. You’re being sensible about being ill, so thank you for that. Are you eating that food I left you?’

  Jack paused. He hated lying. ‘Yeah,’ he said, as he slugged back another dose of cough mixture.

  He lathered up his face but his hands were too shaky to use the razor. He washed off the foam and looked critically at his reflection. He refused to be seen like this. It drove him nuts that Finn didn’t have a cell that worked in the US. It meant another text to his girlfriend’s number, which Finn could ignore, or writing a note, and he felt ungifted when
it came to the written word.

  Finn – I am not fighting fit and cannot meet up. Sorry but that’s life. Hopefully tomorrow. Please take the enclosed in the meantime. J.

  This was the fifth, tortured draft. Despite the cartload of mucus in his head, Jack still had room for doubt as to whether his note should be addressed to Dilly as well, so that Finn didn’t feel he was snubbing her. But he was not willing to risk Finn thinking the five hundred bucks in the envelope was in any part for her when it was solely for his brother to enjoy, to live off, to make him feel loved and looked after.

  The carpeted hush of his building on a weekday mid-morning was a cosmos unknown to Jack. It blended uneasily with the flu-buzz in his head. He challenged himself to get from the apartment to the elevator without a coughing fit but failed. Life was a series of self-imposed examinations for Jack, all set at a fractionally unattainable level. The wad of notes slid back and forth in the envelope as he walked, with a dragging sound like a man in slippers behind him. A memory glanced against him, of his father wearing slippers around the house at a time of day when a boy wanted his dad to be dressed and wearing shoes.

  Jack’s least favourite doorman, Eddy, was in the lobby.

  ‘Is Connor on?’ Jack asked.

  Eddy took skilled offence at this, which Jack exacerbated by hesitating before handing over the envelope, a mistake Finn would pay for later.

  ‘Why don’t you ever call me Eddy? You never address me by name, like you do Connor and Julius.’

  Because you’re a dickhead, Jack did not say.

  ‘My brother is coming by to see me – can you give that to him, please? Make it clear, absolutely clear that I am not well enough to see him and I’ll call him tomorrow.’

  ‘You don’t wanna see him. Got it.’

  ‘I’m not well enough to see him. There’s a difference.’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  Eddy the doorman had arrived from Vermont twenty years earlier and done all the right things to become a successful comedian. There wasn’t a Chevy Chase movie he didn’t know scene by scene, a Steve Martin DVD he hadn’t studied line by line, a Bill Hicks routine he hadn’t been bewildered by and convinced himself wasn’t really comedy. Notepad after notepad of Saturday Night Live-style Vermont-centric material was filled. Not out-and-out funny, that wasn’t what he was aiming for, but observational, you know, universal… the sort of thing that made you smile rather than laugh, more intelligent material than mere laughs. He wasn’t asking to be a star – although he would have liked a little more recognition for schlepping the open mics – staff writing would have been enough. But it never happened for him and it took him too long to realise why, and when he pursued Sarah Copeland for a date (Sarah was his first unrequited crush back home and he discovered she’d moved to New York City and was working for an investment bank) and he heard her ask him, over an exquisite pork belly he paid for that night, ‘Eddy, do you ever think comedy is maybe not where your talents lie?’ he resolved to prove her wrong but also joined an employment agency and it was them who had landed him in this goddam awful doorman’s uniform which made his neck itch and – this would have taught her a lesson – he never called Sarah fucking Copeland again, the overconfident, overpaid, opinionated little whore.

  If there was one thing that Eddy the doorman hated, it was seeing the light of hope not yet extinguished in the young. Which meant that Finn was fucked the moment he walked into the building.

  ‘He’s busy. He can’t fit you in.’ Eddy handed the envelope over.

  Finn had jogged ninety blocks and felt good for it, but had anticipated taking a shower at Jack’s place. He read his brother’s note and sized up the maths involved in a pile of twenty-dollar bills as thick as this one.

  ‘Is he in?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, he’s right upstairs.’

  ‘Buzz him, will you?’ Finn said. ‘Let him know I’m here.’

  ‘He expressly asked me not to do that.’

  Finn felt like a fool and cursed himself for letting the doorman see it. He remembered those kids on the estate who showed their weakness, the ones who hesitated, those who cried. He had studied them so that he would never walk in their shoes, had locked in his mind their sad faces and their names which they had allowed to become a mockery in the short-term mythology of a sink estate. David Callahan and Kevin Plowman. He would never allow himself to be one of those guys, never show the doubt or fear, even when he found himself trapped in the worst possible narratives of the underbelly of a fucked-up seaside town in the depths of winter. And how it had paid off for Finn when it came to his uncle, who for three years had battered at the door to him and never got in. His uncle had merely spilled blood, and gone halfway insane in the process, yet himself wept so readily when Finn rained down the blows on him in one single act of revenge, one comprehensive farewell paid in secret while his girlfriend packed and their plane to New York City was prepared. Davey Cal and Kev the Plough, Finn had those boys to thank for knowing right now not to show another hint of weakness to this doorman on a morning like this when both his girlfriend, the best distraction he’d ever found, better even than the pain of training, and his unfathomable absent brother had left him alone on the streets of what he would call, in honour of his absent abbreviating lover, NYC. He was trained for this moment; he was over-trained. And, if his uncle hadn’t already bitten a large piece of it back home, unfunny-Eddy from Vermont might have been in danger right now.

  He pulled a twenty-dollar bill out from the wad, enough to see President Jackson’s quiff, and toyed briefly with the idea of keeping a few notes. But Jack would notice, and Finn did not want Jack to know that he needed the money and Finn’s next thought, that Jack might presume he’d counted the money out wrong, was laughable. Jack didn’t make mistakes like that.

  He re-sealed the envelope with the five hundred bucks inside. ‘Are there letterboxes?’

  ‘If you mean mailboxes, sure.’ Eddy said. ‘But… I can take it.’ Eddy held his hand out.

  Finn looked at Eddy. He had no idea if this man could be trusted or what the form was here. He knew only that he felt like an idiot because his own brother’s door was closed to him and this man knew it. Finn smiled at Eddy, his charming, vulnerable, beautiful, green-eyed smile, and took the envelope to the mailboxes. The blood rose in him once he was outside, the seething, pathetic, angry wave that made him want to explode into pieces. He kicked a dent in a newspaper box. A man fifteen feet away recoiled and hurried on.

  Down Third Avenue, ten blocks’ worth of traffic lights spawned a moment’s silence on the Upper East Side and deepened Finn’s sense of abandonment. He had not imagined Manhattan capable of tranquillity. He studied his Streetwise and Glenn’s note. His jeans were rolled up, the hems above his ankles. He ran again, with the map tucked into his back pocket, springing from the balls of his feet, jogging to the cross streets and striding out between the avenues, making his way diagonally across town towards Chelsea. When no one was nearby, he ducked and jabbed, and stabbed sharp breaths out of his throat. Between 22nd and 23rd Streets, the deep rust of an abandoned elevated train line disappeared behind a red-brick townhouse like a trick of the mind. It made Finn think of Belleville Rendez-Vous, his joint best film of 2005. (He categorised films by the year he saw them, not by the year they were released, a system that led to anomalies such as his top two films of 2002 being City of God and Straw Dogs.) It was one of those New York mornings when most things Finn saw reminded him of a movie. Glenn’s boss at the Chelsea Piers was Luis Guzmán out of Boogie Nights, but only facially because south of the mouth there was even more of Glenn’s boss than there was of Luis Guzmán. His body filled the doorway at the top of an external metal staircase to the Pier 59 service building. Finn divulged his name and the fact that he wasn’t from New York City (which did not seem to astonish Glenn’s boss) and explained that he was here to take Glenn’s dishwashing job while Glenn was ‘away’ and that he would need paying in cash as he was not here on a work vis
a. Also, he’d need time off to go to Long Beach to visit his girlfriend’s family.

  Fatter Guzmán stared at Finn and flared his nostrils. ‘What the hell,’ he sighed, ‘there’s no meat on the bone here,’ and walked away.

  Finn stuck around. He’d seen enough movies to know this could work out. An hour later, Guzmán nearly tripped over him on the steps. ‘Come inside,’ the big man said. He sat Finn down and poured him a coffee. ‘Drink this,’ he said, ‘then it’s adiós. I haven’t got a job for you. That situation will not be changing. And I’d be careful how many people you tell you’re looking for work without documentation, you know what I’m saying.’

  Finn retraced his steps eastwards, looking like a small-town cowboy as he gawped through the expansive windows of converted warehouse buildings, slowly realising that the insides were full of what he guessed people called art. Two water towers on a roof stood out in weatherbeaten brown against the blue sky and made him think of the feed-stores on the Sussex farms back home. In the windows of the Bovenkamp Gallery, a painting caught his eye. Entitled Route 3A and attributed to an artist called Dot Yi, the picture was of a row of open doors leading to long corridors, but painted on a relief surface at exaggerated angles so that, when Finn moved from side to side, the painting appeared to move in 3-D.

  His mouth fell open. He shut it again pretty quick, but admitted to himself that this thing wasn’t bad.

  Inside the gallery, the twenty-three-year-old woman who described herself as Richard Bovenkamp’s PA but was in fact his trainee receptionist watched Finn sway from side to side on the sidewalk to activate the illusion on the canvas, and sneered at his foolishness. As Finn noticed her, she refined the sneer into a pained smile, a smile that Finn immediately interpreted as a look of attraction. Although it was at odds with his innate modesty, the truth was that, in suddenly being inducted into the ranks of the sexually hyper-active, Finn couldn’t help thinking nowadays that many women he saw were looking at him with at least a modest dollop of sexual desire and that they knew that he was having sex on a daily basis, and not always horizontally (a detail he still found prestigious).