Men Like Air

by Connolly, Tom

  A photograph appeared in his mind’s eye, in the style of Eve Arnold’s Chinese reportage, which he admired. The photograph was of his apartment, and it was lit by the same soft dusk through which he cycled now. He could see every room from every angle all at once. There was stillness throughout and it had settled so deep that the silence was irreversible. It was a study of what awaited him, an image of the pang of loneliness that would open the door to him this evening as he reached for the handle. Solitude was stripping the structures of his life of peace, and the air that drew tears of moisture from his eyes was the first cool, dry air of the year, liberated at last from the icy grip of the long winter and not yet strangled by the humidity of summer. The glow of the sky was rich in oxygen and Leo felt that, even now, the yearning inside him did not preclude hope.

  The cherry blossom on 28th Street formed a guard of honour for an appreciative face. Leo had once read that a disease spreading through a forest would gradually meet a growing resistance to its canker, that the further into the forest the sickness spread, the greater the trees’ immunity would become, as if the trees passed word one to the next of the encroaching threat, and cured themselves in an act of instant evolution and fellowship.

  He decided not to go straight home, and made a call to his brother-in-law. ‘I will be in Home Furnishings in half an hour,’ he announced in a G.K. Chesterton tone.

  ‘Marvellous,’ William replied, an American who sounded more English than Leo.

  Both men hung up, William’s face now adorned with a grin at the prospect of seeing his greatest friend. He remained sitting with his stockinged feet upon his desk, heels touching and feet splayed. The slim pea coat suit he wore was redolent of a bygone time. Nobody had asked him to, but he felt that his workplace required an attire that genuflected in the direction of its postwar heyday. He contemplated the last of his four daily cigarettes. The anticipation of rolling a cigarette was more magical to William than the smoke itself. Expectation was a source of sublime pleasure, but had to be married to the certainty of its fulfilment. Doubt was not welcome. He was a religious man not given to soul-searching.

  Vaughan Williams’ Lark Ascending drew to a close, taking an imperceptible step into silence. The apparent perfection of its final moments drew a modest rapture through William’s afternoon. He switched off the CD player, as nothing could immediately follow it. He looked again at the photograph that had arrived that morning in the post, a faded grey image of a flood of people at the main entrance to the department store in which he worked. The photograph was undated but William’s growing familiarity with such images enabled him to place it in the 1930s. The vast majority of the crowd were women and among them a young girl had turned and seen the camera, and was looking now at William across a distance of seventy years. He switched on the kettle and looked up through a window set high in the room. A plane sliced the blue sky and it came easily to a man like William to picture the eternal Manhattan through the cut.

  His office was a garret, tucked into the roof of one of New York’s oldest stores. The exterior of Italian-style Tuckahoe marble and its Art Deco additions had once matched for flamboyance any of its rivals in commerce on the Ladies’ Mile. Now, it was a sole survivor on Sixth Avenue, Macy’s aside. The original painted sign remained on a west-facing brick and terracotta façade of the building,

  A.T. FOUNTAIN’S DEPARTMENTAL EMPORIUM EST. 1902

  and to the very particular type of New Yorker who still patronised the place, it was simply ‘Fountains’. Those people were few in number, ageing, wealthy and opposed to change.

  William was archivist to the Fountains Emporium, a job negotiated for him by Leo, once Leo had convinced Fountains that their archive was worth attention. Joy claimed that her husband had the best job in the world and for any shy, risk-averse, old-fashioned Anglophile, content in his own company and free of ambition, the case could be argued. William surprised himself, having never taken an interest in photography or history before, with his enthusiasm to set about the decades’ worth of disordered photographs, prints, and papers stuffed into boxes and shelves in the store’s attic and which chronicled Fountains’ life so far. He did so with the zeal of an apprentice, and sometimes with wonder, and ten years into the job he still felt a burning gratitude towards the man who was, at this moment, crossing town to join him.

  The kettle boiled and William spooned into a teapot the loose-leaf tea from Postcards of Mayfair that Fountains imported. He put on a new CD. There was always music in the attic. He listened to Chopin, Ravel, Mozart, Vaughan Williams and Delius. Bruckner, when he was feeling brave. Maybe a little Elgar, though he quickly tired of it until the next time, and never Bernstein. He could not abide Bernstein. He left the tea to brew and climbed a stepladder to the deep-set sill of an ornate arched window, at which he sat on a tapestry cushion (Soft Furnishings, fifth floor) two hundred feet above 17th Street, eye to eye with the leaded rooftops of the Kingston Academy where the gargoyles and the gulls lived among the slate and leaded canopy and the hushed sound of the streets below. He opened the single hinged pane in the window and smoked his cigarette. He looked at the girl in the photograph and she looked back at him. She had arrived in response to William’s efforts to unearth historical photographs of the store and accounts of life in it, some for the store’s cumbersome website, but most contributing towards the opening of a permanent archive. He trawled online picture libraries, contacted historical societies and colleges, and wrote to customers whose families had patronised Fountains for many years. The material arrived sporadically, offering William a welcome break from cataloguing the long-abandoned archives around him.

  Many of the old photographs and newspaper cuttings he received in the post were unsurprising; the crowds on the sidewalks outside Fountains, the Ladies’ Mile in its glory days, the horse-drawn carriages, early motor cars on Broadway, a glimpse of the elevated lines. What he found more compelling were photographs taken inside the store, faces consumed by the novelty of the camera, store assistants standing in line holding linens or items of homeware at an angle for the lens, others standing proudly beside exotic decorative furnishings. These faces existed in a faraway kingdom of magnesium light, and those looking William in the eye seemed to be trying to warn him of something.

  He had experienced a recurring dream since becoming an archivist in which he found himself smoking a cigarette on his window ledge, high enough (because it was a dream) to see the five boroughs. Scattered across them were expansive sloping patches of earth. These sepia spaces were the graveyards of New York, the resting places of all those faces in the photographs he received each day and of no one else. Every dead New Yorker that had ever lived had shopped at Fountains. They had the city surrounded.

  He slotted the photograph of the girl into the edge of the window pane, from where she could look down on the city that had been her realm when she walked the earth. Something in how the girl looked at him reminded William of Susan French, of the uncertainty in her eyes. He drew on his cigarette and looked across the room to the mattress on the floor in the corner, on which Susan lay asleep, enjoying a moment of respite during her fraught human tenure.

  William searched for absolutes from life, and the peace he gave to this girl (she was a woman but too frail to earn the word) in small, gratefully accepted pieces seemed to be one of them: a good thing, surely a good thing. The sight of her gladdened him and scared him in equal measure; it always had done, since he first took her in. He wrote a note and placed it on the floor beside her bed, telling her not to worry, that he would be back soon.

  9

  The couch Leo had seated himself on was on a small raised platform dead centre of the Fountains Emporium Home Furnishings department. He slouched and made a good fist of appearing as brazen as a man so bereft of direction could. He wondered if the boy would turn up for work at the gallery tomorrow, and noted on the wood-panelled stairwell a series of Japanese water prints he had acquired for the store in 1997. Leo acted as fine a
rt consultant to the Fountains’ board of directors. For two decades he had valued the store’s private collection on their behalf, advised them as a buyer of art, antique furniture and decorative objects, and consulted for members of the board on a private basis, hanging on the walls of their uptown apartments and country houses works by the likes of Kandinsky, Arthur Boyd, Maureen Gallace, Rothko, Nash, Lowry, Piper, Wyeth N.C., Wyeth A., Wyeth J., and Patrick Hughes.

  Currently, Leo was negotiating a commission from Fountains for one of his artists, Tilhoff, whose realist interiors were brilliant, and as angry as realist interiors could expect to be. The Tilhoff commission was less the will of Fountains president Sidney White and more that of his grandson, George, a recent and unlikely addition to the Fountains senior management who was yet to inform his grandfather, or any other member of his family, that on a recent trip to Istanbul he had met and married a Syrian student eleven years his junior whose name George himself was still mispronouncing. Leo could imagine neither George White nor Tilhoff’s interiors working in this place.

  William joined him on the couch. In no hurry to say anything, they settled like two pieces of a greater whole, docking into place. They had liked each other from the start, when Joy brought William to meet her brother at One Lex – had found themselves to be perfectly in tune. ‘I’m the gooseberry when it’s the three of us,’ Joy had said on many occasions since.

  Leo rarely brought girlfriends to join them as it diluted his time with his William. They spoke every day, they put thoughts and newspaper cuttings aside for each other, laughed at things they were doing that the other would hate (art and religion yielded plentifully in this regard).

  Sofia Passarella (Human Resources) watched them bask in each other’s company as they surveyed the store’s village life. To Sofia, who was making her way back to her office clutching a Fountains pillow to her breast, William and Leo were mischievous boys and handsome older men all rolled into one lovely smoke.

  ‘Hello, you two,’ she said.

  ‘How are you, Sofia?’ William replied.

  ‘I’m good. What are you guys plotting?’

  ‘A riot in Men’s Undergarments,’ Leo said.

  ‘Good luck with that.’

  ‘You want me to have him removed?’ William said.

  ‘Would you?’ Sofia replied, and smiled as she went back to work. Her crush on Leo, 1999–2002, had long since been confined to the vaults, but there would always be a softness in her regard for him that could sometimes feel like bruising. It had taken an extraordinary measure of courage on her behalf to tell Leo Emerson that she believed she had fallen in love with him (from a distance and in the course of three brief encounters in the store) and it had only increased her feelings for him, the pained, tender way in which he had told her that he did not share the attraction. Even now, Leo always looked for the lightest of comments when they met, just to distance them both from anything that could be honest and therefore in any way uneasy for her. He knew that this might be enormously patronising of him, suggesting she had not got over him, but it seemed polite. What a minefield it all was to him, how easy he had once found it, and how erroneous his path in withdrawing from all such encounters these past years for fear of making the wrong decision, for fear of adding to the body count of lovers from whom he had failed to understand what he wanted.

  Leo sighed. William looked at him, his eyes asking him if he was alright without creating a ripple on the surface of things unsaid.

  ‘We look like two old poofs,’ Leo said.

  ‘You picked the tartan sofa,’ William replied.

  ‘Two old poofs planning to re-feather their nest.’

  ‘Found a new assistant yet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Joy has a theory about it.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ Leo said, ‘I like my sister’s theories.’

  ‘It’s not profound. You don’t pick a new trainee because you want to pack it all in.’

  ‘Not profound…’ Leo agreed.

  William smiled. They both put an arm along the back of the sofa, arms that crossed without touching, cradling the space behind each other.

  ‘Did you say you have found someone?’

  ‘Sure did.’

  ‘Can’t wait to tell her she’s wrong.’

  ‘You won’t, though.’

  ‘True.’

  Leo had once dreamt that he and William became stuck inside a Beckett drama on one of these sofas. The dream had possessed the cloying airless quality of a mild nightmare but when Leo woke he missed it and tried to descend back into it. This dream had been the offshoot, he had reasonably presumed, of Angela Simpson’s attempt to take him to Boston to see a production of Beckett’s Happy Days in 1997. That casual (and rather lovely) invitation had become mired in complication, as her suggestion that they see the Beckett on the Friday night and then take a drive through some early fall colour over the weekend became choked and strangled by Leo’s attempt to shoehorn the experience into twenty-four hours so as to make it back to Manhattan for dinner with William and Joy on the Saturday (without giving Angela any reason to feel invited to join them).

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ Angela had said. ‘I’m inviting you for a weekend and you’re saying yes to half a weekend?’

  Leo’s answer, in the affirmative, spoken through a voice filtered by self-doubt as he wondered why he was prioritising a run-of-the-mill bite to eat in Joy and William’s oh so average local diner over Angela’s Boston hay-making weekend (they were crazy good together and would barely see a single turning leaf beyond the hotel window, and he knew it), was met by an altogether more informed and knowing decision on her part, to end their time together (eight months, which was bang on Leo’s average bat for the 1990s).

  Although Leo had resolved in some uncommitted (naturally) manner to respond to his Beckettian mistake by remaining single for a period and getting a grip, he had not intended that period to last nine years, and had never contemplated the possibility of Angela being his last lover of the millennium, nor of getting six years and four months into the new one without another. It bothered him these days that he had been unable back then to break an informal and habitual dinner date with his sister and brother-in-law. (Angela was by no means the first to play second fiddle.) He was open to change, but not right now. He had presumed back then that, unlike every other man, he was from a mould where age would have no effect on him, and his choices would never narrow. Anything he had chosen not to do, he could always revisit at a later date. There was always tomorrow. But the tomorrows had become days like today, when he arrived at a point like this one, watching some or other Sofia Passarella who could have been his destiny and borne his child.

  The difference these days was that it was too late. Truly, actually, utterly, finally too late. One could do many things in life, but one could not do everything, and Leo would never do that. And his need to weep about it, to openly mourn the death of the life he had sleepwalked around, the guttural desire to talk about it to William, the rock of his adult life, was one of those many items on the list he saved for another day.

  He fantasised about taking Joy and William on holiday, a Pullman train to New Orleans, or a road trip in a hired Chevy Bel Air east to west (Leo had driven across the States with lovers three times in the eighties and would love to show William and Joy the open road). Or, if he could ply the two of them with enough Ambien, a flight back to the UK and on to Europe. Florence, Naples, Athens. Everywhere. Christ, anywhere! Leo had visited an artist in Oregon once and wanted William to see that place, and South America, the great cities of Rio or Buenos Aires that he loved so much, or Montevideo, which he had not yet seen. He imagined flying William and Joy first class and unlocking the wanderlust in them. Imagining it had become an activity in itself, in the absence of their showing any interest in going anywhere or any appetite to be airborne. His fantasies had detail, like that for his sixtieth birthday in five years’ time, when he would take the two of them around the world
in first class. Against the backdrop of extraordinary cities and mindblowing landscapes, he would map out for his sister and brother-in-law their retirement (which he had well in hand financially, no fantasy) and at the heart of this retirement the daily breakfasts he and William had once enjoyed would be reinstated.

  Oh, what a wonderful time Leo was destined to have, around the next corner. He would take William with him on his annual trip to London, a trip he himself had failed to make these past three years. He loved London, and had adored returning to East Anglia, but these days the connections had worn thin. And something about leaving New York City made him unsure nowadays. The longer you lived here, the more improbable the rest of the world became, and the more unnecessary.

  He found William watching him and wondered if he knew exactly what he was thinking. It was possible, and he liked the idea.

  ‘Buy you dinner?’ Leo said.

  ‘It’s vigil night,’ William said. ‘I wish we could.’

  ‘You can. Give it a miss.’

  ‘Join us and rid the world of evil.’

  ‘I haven’t got my Batman suit with me.’

  ‘We’ll bib you. What’s your new employee like?’

  ‘He’s something of an unknown quantity. Which I like. There’s not enough unknown quantities.’

  ‘One is one too many,’ William said. ‘I’m sorry to say it, but I gotta go.’

  Leo squeezed William’s shoulder. ‘I’m going to stay a while,’ he said. ‘I’m comfortable.’ He did not want to go home. William knew this, and rested his hand on Leo’s back for the faintest of precious moments before returning to his room in the roof and shutting the door quietly behind him as Susan French turned in her sleep. Beneath the sheets, her legs were tucked tight to her body. Her arms were thin and pale but her face was no longer hollow these days. She looked free of worry and that pleased William greatly. He watched her fingertips draw shapes on her cheek as she dreamed.