The stairs deposited him on to 18th Street. He cast a disdainful look at the cabs and hated the thought of taking one to work. He rode them like a dog, with the window down. How idiotic this all was, and yet William could see that George White, for all his ignorance, was right on the money in understanding that firing the little man served a big purpose. William was the beacon shining tonight in the life of the Boltons. The fake flames that had engulfed his tidy little form this afternoon blazed the message that their standards, their times, their games, their pursuits, had meaning still. Their epoch was not at a close, they were not dead and buried, and would yet sustain against the barbarian invasions. This faceless, forgettable man, fired for not being up to their own laudably high standards, was the person who saved the Boltons from oblivion. Their dying breed could not be lost to Fountains, for they, and the few Russians and Arabs drawn to the store’s timeless tastes, were the modern-day equivalent of the crowds piling through the doors on the Ladies’ Mile, and if they were lost then all was lost because the crowds were, most certainly, gone forever. When the girl in the photograph walked through the doors of Fountains a few years before the Second World War began, she entered a store of limitless riches, extravagant window displays, gratis lectures on current trends in fashion, complimentary tea and cigarettes, no-obligation interior design visits to upstate homes. Nowadays, the store offered to their valued customers the sacrificial lamb that manifested itself in this particular instance as William. It was enough to make a humble man proud of his place in the grand scheme, and proud William would have been if he weren’t so unnerved by having to pretend he didn’t exist, an idea that felt a little too close to the bone for comfort.
In an act of monumental defiance by his standards, he ignored the plentiful cabs and walked home. He called Leo and asked him what he thought of the whole thing.
Odd, was what Leo thought. ‘That’s an odd thing to do, pretend to fire someone. And not necessarily that easy to pull off. You want me to talk to George this evening?’
‘No. Thanks. No. I just need to get home.’
‘You okay?’
‘Yeah. How’s the show looking?’
‘I’ve no idea any more,’ Leo said, and laughed. ‘But Astrid seems confident. You know, she really doesn’t need me here, I can come and meet you.’
‘She needs you, sure she needs you.’ William said. We all need you, he thought.
‘Sure you’re alright?’
‘Yeah. Just want to get home.’
Leo stood with the phone to his ear for a few moments after the call, as if checking William was headed safely in the right direction. The April show was billed as Tilhoff Realist Interiors and, when Leo had visited Tilhoff in his studio two months earlier, giant oil on gesso interiors executed (Leo’s choice of word) in photographic detail was what he had seen. But, two days before this evening’s private view, Astrid’s Tuesday morning had been capsized by the arrival of a pallet-load of portraits from the mononymous artist. By Tuesday lunchtime, she had been more frustrated by Leo’s indifference to the five thousand dollars wasted on the brochure than by the artist’s intransigence.
Thereafter, the build-up had gone well. Four of the nine large canvases and one of the four small ones had sold to collectors since the show was hung on Wednesday and Astrid was buzzing. Even Finn, though unsure about the outsize limbs (deliberate), bug eyes (deliberate) and three-nostrilled noses (Tilhoff’s signature detail), had gushed that Tilhoff’s portraits were ‘not that bad’.
In the gallery, there was a moment of calm. Astrid had disappeared. Finn was making a cup of his unconventionally strong, sweet tea. It was the way he understood tea to be, the way the guys at work back home liked their tea (he tended to be the one making it for them), but to Astrid and Leo the brew was an abomination, although Leo occasionally accepted a cup and took a sip, fancying that it reacquainted him with memories of a working-class England that he was forgetting he had never experienced in the first place.
Astrid returned with a shirt from Seize sur Vingt for Finn. It was the sort of thing he wouldn’t wear for money but consented to for Leo, who, she implied, wanted to smarten him up. Nothing of the sort had crossed Leo’s mind, but Astrid was operating on a particular unstoppable inner turbo of hers which kicked in for private views every fourth Thursday. The Astrid-turbo was breathless, excited, passionate and borderline frenzied. At six o’clock, Finn would discover, she changed clothes and changed down a gear and became calm, confident, charming and knowledgeable, and she queened it over the evening, cradling a glass of champagne from which she never sipped (waiting instead for the privacy, later, of her own apartment, where she could down a bottle of pinot inside two hours).
She persuaded Finn to do up the top button of the shirt, which was slim-cut and mauve with subtle yellow stitching and faint pale blue lines. Doing up the top button was, she explained, the style. Finn disliked it, but she insisted it looked great on him and even winked at him. (The wink was caused by a turbo malfunction, itself caused by glimpsing Finn’s quite extraordinarily beautiful, smooth, lean, muscular torso as he buttoned up.)
The torso had no chores left to do, no more errands to run. Finn’s list of tasks for the afternoon was replete with ticks. Astrid ran a tight ship and always had the gallery ready for a private view two hours before the doors opened. Despite this, she watched disapprovingly as Finn took his mug of tea and sat on the steps to the sidewalk, creasing the $175 shirt as he bathed in the lowering April sun and pulled at his collar. He smiled a little at God knew what and emitted a short punchy sigh of metropolitan pleasure. He dared not jinx it by admitting it, but West 26th Street had the potential to feel safe. He drank his tea and strolled lazily, confidently, muscularly across the street to the Bovenkamp Gallery. Dot Yi’s painting looked even better with a brew. He moved diagonally, pivoting through his ankles, and at the same time up and down on his haunches, taking perspective to its human limits and getting the most awesome of 3-D shifts from the painting.
Beryl Streep watched Finn with her customary blend of amusement and scorn (ten per cent/ninety per cent), an expression that, once again, she transformed into an alluring smile when Finn glanced at her. He decided the moment had come to step inside now that he understood art and was, according to Astrid, wearing the sort of shirt you wore to a gallery. Inside were seven more of Dot Yi’s 3-D paintings, each of them four times bigger than the one in the window. This was 3-D paradise. A Yiorgy.
Finn turned to Beryl. ‘I like these paintings.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘The whole street knows.’
The only other punter, George White, shared a knowing smile with Beryl. ‘Aren’t they exquisite…’ George agreed, wearing his fine art face, the one that resembled the constant detection of a bad smell, even when smiling. On private view nights, George was groomed with such diligence and expense as to appear handsome at a glance, and he accentuated a trace of Ivy League in his vowels, for Beryl’s ears. There was no Ivy League on his resumé, but the voice sat well with his position at Fountains and with his ambitions for the evening because tonight George was out to buy art, although the Dot Yi’s were not on his list. He admired them, but he didn’t want them on the walls of his Meatpacking District loft conversion. The only thing he coveted here was Beryl, which was possibly why he had not brought his Syrian bride along with him.
Finn asked for a price list and a catalogue. Beryl’s left hand flinched in the direction of the shelf hidden beneath the counter, but she stopped herself. She was not going to waste a glossy full-page catalogue on this punk.
‘All the pieces are thirty thousand dollars,’ she said, employing speech as a cold slap across the face.
Finn stood firm, determined not to look shocked by the numbers, but he suspected he was blushing. George strolled over, the sharp tap of his brogues echoing the room. He had donned a William Fioravanti suit for the evening, with his top two shirt buttons undone. He was slight and in lesser cloth would have looked scraw
ny, but instead he looked rich and fine.
‘What’s your angle?’ George said, affably.
Unlike many, when Finn didn’t understand a question he remained silent, until the moment passed or the questioner made themselves clear.
‘Yeah…’ George White smiled inanely at the mute boy. ‘Is it the movement, the comment, its contextual element, or are you looking at it decoratively – which I don’t disapprove of, by the way?’ This toying with the cowboy was his shot at flirting with Beryl.
Finn shrugged. George returned to the canvases, peering close, looking for clues as to what the hell he should be doing with his trust fund. Beryl watched him and wondered if she could overcome George’s lack of sexual appeal to enjoy that which was quantifiably attractive about him.
Finn took a sip of his tea and froze, not wanting to swallow for fear of the crude sound it would make in the uptight silence, and not knowing in what order he was supposed to view the paintings. He used the sound of the man’s footsteps between paintings as cover to swallow and crossed to the painting nearest the entrance. Bigger, more intricate, more colourful and, a modest sashay from side to side confirmed, even more mindblowingly three-dimensional than the painting in the window, it was indescribably cool.
‘You want to buy one?’ Beryl asked.
‘No,’ Finn said. ‘But she’s a pretty good painter.’
George White’s face lit up and he sniggered. ‘He…’
Beryl smiled and nodded to back George up. Finn felt sweaty and his spine tingled.
‘The artist is a he, not a she.’ George made clear.
‘A man called Dot…?’ Finn asked, dubiously.
‘That’s a nice new shirt,’ Beryl said, deadpan.
‘Thank you…’ Finn said, uncertainly.
‘I always like that straight-from-the-packet look,’ George added, riffing with Beryl, ramping up the foreplay.
‘It’s a good colour on you…’ Beryl added, removing her knickers for George and staring defiantly at Finn, daring him to react.
Finn felt the familiar old nausea of the encroaching bully. ‘It’s from Sezzy Van,’ he ventured.
‘Sezzy Van…?’ she asked, confused.
‘Yeah.’ Finn shuffled his feet.
Another silence ensued. Finn wanted to turn back to the paintings but it seemed too huge a movement.
‘Do you mean the shirtmaker Seize sur Vingt on Elizabeth Street?’ George White asked.
Finn swallowed, crushed by the muteness that traditionally served him well. He heard a sound which reminded him of the hiss of steam from the radiators in the hovel. It was Beryl, crying with laughter, trying to stifle it, really trying damned hard. A whine was escaping between the fingers of the hand she had clamped over her mouth. She shrieked as she doubled up, and assumed the exact bent-over shape that Finn’s mother used when vomiting in the garden before breakfast.
George White strode behind Finn’s back with a flourish and pulled at his collar. ‘Let’s just check that it’s not a – what did you call it? – Sezzy Van shirt!’
Finn snapped his arm backwards and cracked his elbow into George White’s face. In the same fractional moment, he turned and gripped George’s throat, kicked the man’s legs from under him and nailed him to the floor with the downward pressure of one rigid, outstretched arm. Suddenly, a paper-thin moment from normality, there were spots of George’s blood on the floorboards and the two men found themselves eyeball to eyeball. George White’s face turned purple. Beryl remained frozen. (She was in fact marvelling at the way Finn had kept hold of his mug of tea and not spilled a drop throughout this whiplash-quick manoeuvre.) Belatedly she grabbed at the desk phone, knocking it to the floor.
‘I’m okay,’ George said to her, scraping the words out of the narrow opening in his throat, through which he then called Finn an ‘animal’.
‘I’m calling the fucking police,’ Beryl stuttered, handling the f-word with the conviction of a non-smoker lighting a cigarette. She dropped her cellphone too.
‘No,’ George White croaked, as he studied Finn and pondered a couple of business ventures he did not want the police to become aware of. ‘A mistake… wasn’t it, my friend?’
Finn stared lifelessly at George before releasing his neck. He stood over him, his frame pumped up and powerful, watching the dream ebb away. He had been here before, in this exact moment, watching his freedom slip through his fingers. But then, there had been nothing to lose. Now, he found himself thinking of Amy, tiny, amazing, beautiful Amy, and he wanted to undo the day. It could not be right that pricks like this man beneath him got to offer him forgiveness, got to choose whether or not he walked free. Even the thought of being torn away from Jack angered him and he realised that he could never, would never, hit his brother. And although he was determined to hate Jack for deserting him, he felt the emancipation in letting go of the wish to hurt him.
He poured his tea calmly over George White’s tailored crotch and walked away.
‘Ungrateful bastard,’ George White complained, and already both he and Beryl couldn’t wait to tell friends their pimped-up version of the incident.
Finn returned to work and kept his head down and tried to fend off the blackness circling his mind. He hid in Leo’s office, out of sight of the growing crowd. Leo ushered him into the throng, gently, protectively, and Finn fought to stop himself flinching. The people sounded like birds in a cage to him, shiny, dark-feathered birds pecking at the innards of their own evening and watching him side-eyed. The darkness grew in his head and the light touch of Leo’s hand on his shoulder reminded him of his uncle’s when he would lead him out of his room and he would see that his aunt was out of the house and that his uncle had him to himself. Finn knew that Leo did not deserve to be associated with this, that he was worthy of Finn’s best behaviour, Finn’s true self, but he was angry and the scent of the bully was caught in his nose and not to brush Leo away was a mighty task.
As the gallery filled, Astrid buzzed and Leo grew increasingly uneasy watching Finn, and beckoned him to join him and Tilhoff and Tilhoff’s elderly uncle, who had taught his nephew to paint during summer vacations on Nantucket, a detail Tilhoff chose to omit from his self-penned impoverished angry young man biog.
‘And what do you think of the work you’ve helped exhibit tonight?’ the uncle asked, with the remnant kindness of a man who had nurtured pupils all his life.
Tilhoff placed his hand on Finn’s shoulder and said, ‘You don’t have to answer that.’
Finn shrugged him off, unimpressed by the artist’s warmth towards him, given how charmless he had been whenever he spoke to Leo. With a sway of his body and a smile held hostage by tension, Leo invited Finn to leave them. Finn fixed his stare on the uncle.
‘It doesn’t matter if someone like me likes them, we all know that.’
‘Bravo…’ Uncle Tilhoff said dreamily, blind to the danger. ‘Does an emerald become worse if it isn’t praised? – so enquired Aurelius. I’ll think of you as my little British Marcus Aurelius from now on.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t think of me at all,’ Finn said.
‘Finn…’ Leo said his name, and hoped that the boy recognised the plea in it.
‘Sorry…’ Finn whispered, through the barbed wire in his throat, as he heard laughter and looked up to see George White strolling in with a Band-Aid across the bridge of his nose, wearing a new suit purchased five minutes earlier in Comme des Garçons on 22nd Street and lifting a glass of champagne from the table.
Finn made a gun of his hand and extended his arm to aim it at George White.
‘What are you doing?’ Leo whispered.
‘New suit?’ Finn called out, loud enough to silence the room.
George saw him and smiled cockily. ‘Yes. I won’t charge you. I don’t imagine you could cover it.’
Astrid stepped forward. ‘What’s going on?’ Leo pulled her back, as if the gun were real.
‘You’ve wasted your money,’ Finn said. ‘You c
ould have walked in here naked, everyone would have told you how good you looked. You wanker.’ And he pulled the trigger.
‘Get out,’ Leo whispered, though he intended to shout.
Astrid stepped forward and hammered her fist against Finn’s chest. ‘Get out!’ she shouted. ‘You’re fired, you’re so fired.’ She shoved him and he allowed the momentum of her attack to march him out on to the sidewalk. Leo disappeared into his office. Astrid dusted herself down and stepped back inside. George White finished his drink. Beryl peered through the glass from the opposite side of the street and someone said, ‘Is this performance art?’
Beneath the Hermès billboard on 18th Street, where he first allowed himself to stop walking, Finn’s mind hurtled towards the image that was permanently wedged into that faultline to which anger invariably lured him: the image of Jack catching his father when he fell. For a few hours the thought of it would eat away at Finn. He had lost sight of which of them he resented, Jack for being there to hold his dad, or his dad for being held. It was simpler, nowadays, to resent them both and allow them to distract him from thoughts of how badly he had let Leo down.
Leo’s absence fell over the corners of the private view like a dull aura of malfunction and Astrid summoned him from the corner of his office. But, even as Leo was apologising to Tilhoff and working the room, he was already looking over his shoulder to the window in the hope of a prodigal son.
13
Leo could not sleep. When he felt like this, embarrassed by the need for William and Joy’s company, he raked through his address book, the names he had bought art for, spent evenings in the city with, weekends in their upstate houses, men he had found much in common with, women he had slept with, lived with. Finding not one he felt able to call, his mind strayed towards insatiable thirsts, like that for Willow, a craving that laboured under the illusion that the last twenty years had not yet occurred.
Men Like Air Page 17