Men Like Air

by Connolly, Tom

  Finn let himself into 443 West 36th Street and climbed the stairs with Leo’s weekly gift. He placed the bag on the doormat and, as he stepped back to double-check he had the right door number, he had the sensation of a man planting a bomb.

  On the other side of the door, William lay awake, listening to the rustling at the front door and the sound of fast-moving feet down the stairs, too fast to be Leo’s.

  ‘The new assistant,’ he whispered. ‘The unknown quantity.’

  Joy stirred. William turned on to his side and looked at her. It was an age thing, he knew it was an age thing, the transformation in one’s appearance when asleep, the fact that his wife had looked like Sleeping Beauty once upon a time and now, on mornings like these when he woke before her, he glimpsed her death mask. Mouth open, jaw slack, a breathing losing interest in itself. An age thing. His age, all in the eyes of a beholder more preoccupied by growing old than ever before. And he didn’t kid himself he was any different, always knew upon waking when he too had corpsed the night away.

  He took his first deep, conscious breath of the day, squeezed his eyes open and shut. He rebooted his system with a positive thought, that to grow old without a fear of death was a gift he could thank his faith for. He smiled anew at the sight of his wife, the woman of his dreams.

  Today was their late start. They both had one a week and, whatever day Joy’s rota gave her, William took the same morning off. Once upon a time he would inform his employers but, truly, it did not matter to the Fountains Emporium what time William Fairman pitched up for work.

  The beginning of a new day on this fine earth was a thing beloved by William. Serenaded by NewsTalk 77 on the kitchen windowsill and the rising smell of coffee, the view across the four- and five-highs was cherished by him, held tight to his chest as one of the few things he would not want to live without. On a flat roof behind 35th Street a wiry-looking old dog straightened its front legs and stretched and yawned and, although he couldn’t, William fancied that he could hear the languid whimper from its mouth. A bullet-shaped scratch in the sky, reflecting the sun, rose from JFK through the scrawls of other take-offs. The voice on the windowsill told William that service on the elevated 7 was restored following an overnight fire, and that a new website could tell him when the place he lived had suffered an earthquake of any size or description, and that included New York. There were thousands of earthquakes occurring every day beneath our feet without us knowing it or thinking it was anything more than the rumble of traffic. He opened the box of pastries that he had brought in from the doorstep and smiled at the sight of them, placed them beside the wine rack that took up too much space on the worktop. Wedged between the rack and the wall were a bundle of brochures for vacation tours of the Napa Valley and Sonoma region, trips William preferred to read about than to take. Sometimes, in conversation, he and Joy had to remind themselves they hadn’t actually been to these places. They talked a good holiday and never left Manhattan.

  The marvel of their kitchen was the way the sunrise blinded the window. William loved to start his every day on earth here. He and Joy had made love on the worktop many times. Once, as they did so, he’d looked out across the rooftops and wondered if he was the most highly sexed Christian in the Club.

  He poured her coffee and took it to the bedroom. She was sitting up in bed, speed-dialling, barely conscious. He set the mug down on her bedside table.

  ‘You’re perfect,’ she muttered.

  He pointed at himself and made a question mark of his expression.

  ‘Yes, you.’ But she looked serious, about the call she was making. He listened in from the living room.

  ‘Di, it’s me, I know you’re always up at this hour… we’ll spread the maps out and have a good look at your trip… use William and me as a contact when you sub-let… please forgive my crabbiness last night, it was awful…’

  William drank his coffee at the kitchen window with a smile on his face and the sun flaring the gaps in the west side, gaps that William did not want filled by chrome and glass. He felt proud of Joy for waking with an urgent need to put right the previous evening. She joined him at the window and hugged him. She was responsive now that she had rebalanced a world listing from her lack of generosity (notwithstanding how unappealing in every way the McGuires’ travel plans still sounded). She felt tiny to William this morning, in his arms. Sometimes she seemed bigger than him; other times he enveloped her when he held her. He liked both versions. They both liked both. The variation seemed to share itself equally and according to their needs.

  She sat quietly in the living room. He watched her from the window, understood her silence. She was still bugged by a lingering self-reproof about her behaviour the previous evening, and he knew that she would not talk about it any further, for, despite her strength of character, and the way she caught the eye, she was shy and didn’t want to be deciphered. He had looked on as, purposely or not, she had hit the perfect note across the years in seeming to give everything of herself to all people while revealing nothing. William’s understanding of this was more than the backbone to their romance – it was the reason for it. It was, for Joy, love itself.

  They walked together to the health food store Joy worked in, Complementary, and parted with a kiss, and William felt his soul gladden at the prospect of the walk to Fountains which he loved so much. His morning walk was the ball of energy in the eastern sky made flesh on the sidewalks of the neighbourhood he adored. People drinking coffee in a window on the avenue, the bins spilling over with trash, a gridlock of umbrellas, the uncertain expression of a tourist strayed too far off-Broadway, it was all God’s work to William, wonderful in its steadfast familiarity and for escorting him to the routine of his beautifully solitary job.

  He loved to walk. It had begun, probably, on his first Christmas Day in the city, which he’d spent alone, living a newly arrived bachelor life in a rented room in Bloomingdale, having met neither Joy nor Jesus. He had walked the stretch of Fifth Avenue from Washington Square to the Park that Christmas Day, to lend structure to it, and been delighted by snowfall across the late morning, and by shop-window-gazing and greeting strangers on the sidewalk. He gave to the homeless and gazed out with a calm, dewy-eyed thrill from the windows of the coffee shops he stopped in, reminding himself, proudly, that he was a long way from Illinois. He arrived at the Park as evening fell and the street-lights lit a new-dusting blizzard, creating a moment in time exquisite enough to bind him for life to this town. By the time he found one corner of a table to share in a packed Barney Greengrass, he felt hewn from New York granite. The sight of his own parents strolling Fifth Avenue with him and Joy a year later was something that to this day, this glorious spring day, William was able to shut his eyes and relive on demand, and feel ecstatic about. His idea of a heaven was being returned to them. The way he imagined death was a simple, painless turn of the head to find his parents returned to Amsterdam Avenue, taking their suitcases out of a taxi and looking up with incredulous happiness at the sight of their son with his arm around the beautiful Joy Emerson.

  William installed himself in his office in the upper vaults of the store and got down to work with two further walks to look forward to. The first was a late-morning stroll on one of the shop floors (he let his mood lead him, but it tended to be Maps & Antiquities) and the second a lunchtime walk of a dozen blocks to Calvani’s on 21st Street, where he stood at the bar to sip a double espresso and where the cut of his suit and the mildness of his manner lent him the appearance of a dormouse of a man, either a bachelor, or a man wedded to a tyrant of a wife with an opera singer’s bosom.

  Today, he returned from Calvani’s with a sandwich, which he ate while he worked. Susan French texted at two-thirty and by three o’clock she was coiled tight beneath the bedsheets in the corner of the office. She turned faintly in her cracked, porcelain sleep then did not stir again, not even when the ‘Adagio Assai’ of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G was interrupted by a call from the ground floor.
/>   William squinted at the phone, as if asking it if it meant to ring. It was a rare occurrence.

  At the sink in the corner, he slooshed with mouthwash and combed his hair. He took the stairs to the tenth floor and crossed the broad parquet aisles laid with Oriental rugs, passing the vast Whitaker chandeliers and the oldest operational wooden escalator in Manhattan, the worn beauty of which he marvelled at still. In William, familiarity bred not contempt but deeper love, at home and at work, and, with the confidence of a man who felt loved in return by the stately, fading institution that employed him, he took the elevator to the ground floor and in his modest, unhurried style ambled into the offices where a solid, disgruntled man in his sixties stood next to Fountains’ new young general manager, George White.

  The sullen man greeted William’s arrival by folding his arms across his chest. He had a brick imprint of a forehead, tight-knit red hair, and a freckled face pulled taut by overexposure to the sun during a lifetime’s sailing off Westhampton. Moisturiser had never been an option. Only then did William notice an elderly woman seated in the corner. She looked ferocious, familiar with wealth and getting her own way. She had watery eyes and a drinker’s nose and a tight perm from the realm of the genderless, and beneath these features, or perhaps because of them, William could see that she was the man’s mother. Their name was Bolton and, although there was not much about Fountains that George White truly understood, he was only too aware of the fact that the Boltons were of eye-watering value to the store.

  Bolton. The name wormed its way through William’s brain until it made a connection. A year back, Mrs Bolton had sent William an envelope of photos of her Martha’s Vineyard summer house. These photographs dated from the fifties all the way through to the fledgling years of the twenty-first century. The house had been interior-designed and stocked by Fountains after the war, and many interesting items of practical and decorative furniture had been added from the store over the years. He remembered her letter, stately but illuminating. Her husband had died recently and she was sifting through hundreds of loose photographs stashed away in cardboard boxes and had remembered William Fairman’s letter requesting archival material relevant to the store.

  The snaps old man Bolton had taken all his life had unwittingly created a twentieth-century portrait, decades’ worth of Fountains employees delivering to the Martha’s Vineyard home. One of the photos had been on the Fountains Emporium website for over a year, and that was the reason for Hunter Bolton III’s visit with Mummy. That photograph, dated 1999 on the website, as per the date written on the back by the late Hunter Bolton II, portrayed a George III giltwood side table in the centre of the garden room and the two Fountains employees who had delivered it. The men stood happily, looking relaxed as they posed for the old man, having done so plenty of times over the years, and pleased, always, to make the trip up to Massachusetts to this beautiful pile where time stood still except when it came to the old man’s tipping, which was way ahead of inflation and came gift-wrapped in the same enthusiasm that had helped Hunter II take over Hunter I’s shipping firm, turn it into a construction business and add six zeros to its value.

  ‘We’ve made a mistake, William, an innocent one,’ George White said.

  William smiled politely in turn at everyone in front of him. He waited to be introduced but instead George beckoned him to a computer screen and pointed at the photograph of the Boltons’ garden room on the website.

  ‘That should not be on public display,’ Hunter Bolton III said.

  ‘We’ll take it off,’ George said. He had already stated this a number of times prior to Mr Bolton’s insisting that the man responsible for this situation be wheeled out.

  William straightened up and produced the curious smile of a man wondering what the problem was. In Mr Bolton he saw a handsome man with an ugly heart who had come here to have the last word, but he castigated himself for being judgemental.

  ‘My mother’s sending you these photographs was not an invitation to publish them on your website. It certainly was never that.’

  It had been exactly that. Mrs Bolton had been nothing but enthusiastic in her letter. William knew it, and so presumably did the old girl, whom William spared the indignity of a glance.

  Very few people visited Fountains’ creaky and slowly developing website, but Murphy’s law insisted that one who had was the ex-wife of Hunter Bolton III, and she had been particularly interested in the 1999 photograph, featuring as it did, in one corner, the Claude-Joseph Vernet which Hunter had given her as a fiftieth birthday present in the hope of saving their marriage. The painting had disappeared from their Manhattan apartment when she retained the place after their divorce in ’97, and Hunter Bolton III had insisted he didn’t have it and had not held back when chastising her for allowing such a treasure to go missing.

  The old lady broke her silence, with a voicebox that nowadays sounded shrill when attempting to sound dominant. ‘That painting is worth two million dollars and my son should never have given it to his wife in the first place.’

  Mr Bolton tensed up and immediately transferred to William his anger at being reprimanded publicly by Mother. ‘You need to correct your mistake,’ he said, addressing the horizon over William’s shoulder.

  ‘My mistake?’ William asked.

  ‘It’s easily done,’ George White said, brightly. ‘Easily fixed.’

  ‘You got the date wrong,’ Bolton said. ‘You can be clear about that. ’96 not ’99. The photo was taken in ’96.’

  William could picture the old man’s handwriting on the back of the photo. He could have the photo in the room for them in under ten minutes, but knew that was the last thing that was wanted.

  ‘We can indeed,’ George said. ‘Not your fault, William, but we need to rectify this with a letter and make clear the correct date of the photo. And change the website.’

  ‘1996 and no later,’ Bolton said, then indulged in a spot of repetition. ‘My mother’s sending you some of Dad’s photos is not an invitation to spray them all over the atmosphere.’

  George White nodded eagerly at William. William looked at the wall beyond George for fear of showing his disdain. Hunter Bolton III stopped grinding his teeth and his jaw muscles settled back down to sleep after a decent workout. He had been far from convinced when his mother had persuaded him to take their complaint to the store in person (Hunter Bolton III went to very few places in person), but now he was pleased that he had. It was good to have a presence, and, since his wife had remarried so happily and so modestly and so very, very quickly after he left her, Hunter had felt a little lonely in the world. It was good to get out and have contact with people like this. He felt satisfied, in as much as he felt anything.

  William returned to his office in the heavens, discarded his tie and put into a drawer the note from George White in which was set out the exact wording of the letter he was to write, confirming his mistake in dating the photograph.

  He rolled a cigarette and took it to the window. The air that crept in through the small open pane of glass was warm. He was convinced that spring had taken hold and the doom-merchants were mistaken in believing there’d be another cold snap. He looked down on a miniature 17th Street. On days as beautiful as this, he felt he could lay his hands upon the people below and make them as content as he. He could heal these people. He could heal Mr Bolton and his mother who, it occurred to him, could be the girl from the photograph tucked into the window beside him. A girl of, say, twelve years old in, say, 1935, would now be an eighty-three-year-old woman. The thought spooked him and enchanted him too, and he instantly felt a strong belief that it was her, or that, even if it wasn’t, the fact that it could be meant something. He admired the old bird for her longevity. What an amazing, wonderful world, he told himself. Too good to spoil with a lie: he would not write the letter, or alter the website.

  Susan joined William at the window, moving more quietly than the air. She took the cigarette from William and drew on it. She climbe
d the stepladder and sat on the deep sill. Her feet were bare. William climbed up too and they shared his cigarette and his cloud. Two hundred feet of steel, brick and human flesh beneath them, Mrs Bolton asked her son to stop a moment while she caught her breath. She had felt a little dizzy when she got up from her seat to leave, born from a quiver of repulsion at her son’s tendency towards brutishness in public. Her husband had been such a kind man, despite his success. She missed him terribly. She composed herself and then marched ahead of her son, because she knew how it annoyed him, and pushed through the doors of the main entrance on to Sixth Avenue. She hailed a cab, before her son could, and it took them uptown, to their residence overlooking the Park.

  11

  Leo gave Finn a hundred dollars. ‘Take this for now. At some point I need to sort out what I pay you.’

  ‘And what I’m doing,’ Finn said. ‘You haven’t given me anything to do.’

  He set out in search of ways to delay his return to the hovel. He shadow-boxed on a ball court at dusk, in a dark corner of the Piers, out of reach of the overhead lights and a few yards away from Glenn’s dishwashing job. Tied to a mesh fence was a poster of a cartoon George Bush, eyeballs popping out of his head, sucking Condoleezza Rice’s penis. The breeze moved them back and forth.