He saw it simply as a skill he did not possess, to remain central to people who cared for his company. Tonight his loneliness felt shameful, magnified by the boy’s crashing out of his life. Solitude was a self-fulfilling prophecy, a crude oil that had gotten into the blade and phalanx of his wings. Bored by people, he yearned for them. He felt that he could sometimes hear the fibres of senility twisting in his head.
His experience of Manhattan had become one of absence. In the eighties, a girlfriend took him to decrepit warehouse buildings and he swept up the best young artists there. Years later, he met her at Keith Haring’s funeral and they resolved to remain friends forever and forgot what they had seen in the idea the instant it was diluted by the beginning of a new day. He had fallen out with no one and kept in touch with the same number. The neighbourhoods and artists he had loved in the early years here had transformed into something polished and no longer served to accommodate his seclusion and glorify it for him. He had always been alone in some unacknowledged way, he realised, but in the eighties and nineties Manhattan was his mirror image, full of bright circuses bearing the illusion of love and kinship. The cleaning-up of the city had left him unmasked.
Lately he had found that if he was interrupted when talking he wanted to weep, and could not find the will to resume speaking. When he did have conversations, they filled him with regret, with the feeling that he had done too much talking, even though he had not. Women who showed interest disappointed him as he felt they could do better. When he tried to talk to her about it, Joy mimed a cigar and Groucho Marx eyebrows and accused him of not wanting to belong to any club that would have him as a member.
The previous Christmas, in the bitter end days of 2005, he had visited Maison Claudine for tea and found himself on the brink of another collapse and it was on this edge that he had seen Willow. He had watched how her face stayed constant but never blank as she listened to other customers, the kindness of her expression, the swaying of her hips when she moved between the tables. The longer he watched her, the better he felt. When she brought him his tea, he looked at her skin, the minuscule dark hairs on her arms, at the strength of her shoulders, the dry skin around her hairline. Fleetingly he saw her big brown eyes, and, as she walked away, he looked in wonder at the way she pressed her hands to her ribs. In the bars and coffee shops of New York City, such moments of indefinable grace anchored the lonely to the hope that they might be better off in love, and filled the air with the sweet, mind-altering drug of possibility. He had imagined that she was still by his side and that she went down on her haunches and asked him if everything was alright, laying her hand very lightly on his leg. In her other hand she held a small, delicate bone china plate with a tarte au citron on it and Leo could smell the zest and it seemed to come from her skin. ‘You seem lonely,’ he had imagined her saying to him as she placed the plate down and leaned forward and took him in her arms. She was large and beautiful and she wrapped him up. They both laughed. His laughter came from deep in his heart where every picture of his parents sat and every memory of their kindness. Willow held him tight and he held her, it seemed for hours. The city fell dark. He cupped his hands around her face and thanked her for not letting go too soon. None of this was strange. She said she had enjoyed it and that he should take care. And, like every other thing Leo imagined happening to him to make him feel whole again, it had happened effortlessly, fearlessly and without risk of rejection.
After dreaming all this, he had stared at his hands until his tea went cold and the café emptied and Madame Claudine sat on a high stool working through her receipts until whatever time the English gentleman wished to leave. The Christmas lights in the windows blinked at Ninth Avenue and Leo had remained in his chair, oblivious, imagining a world in which all this could possibly have happened, a world in which such gestures were commonplace, where people saw in others the need for love and gave it, instinctively, without question, regardless of appearance. They held them, they stroked their arm, they kissed their cheek, they made them smile, they walked on. People stopped on the sidewalk to embrace strangers. No one escaped unloved.
What had passed between Leo and Willow last Christmas was an invention of his imagination but it had sustained him somehow in this long, waning winter. He stood at his apartment window and faced the night, saw in the seams of the dark sky a changing season.
Somewhere, his early life had separated from the one he was living now, so cleanly that his former years seemed to belong to a different man. In meeting Finn he had been offered the chance to reunite with that man, the one who had ideas and galvanised people, affected them, opened doors for them. And now he had thrown the boy out for bringing a mere ripple of disorder into his life and he loathed himself for it.
It was seven in the morning and he was sleepless. He stepped back into the shoes beneath his bed and walked through the drizzle on Irving Place in the clothes he had lain in, combing his hair in the reflection of an antique shop window.
‘Morning, Mr Emerson.’
The greeting came from a man wiping down the outside tables of a café. To be familiar here, to be known by name, considered a neighbour, had been an aspiration once.
Inside the café, he saw lying in wait the recollection of a distant Hallowe’en and although he warned himself not to indulge in any more recollections of lost love he could not help himself and fixed his sights on the memory of a woman in a cherry tartan wool coat, her brown hair tinged with bronze and in a fringe, her skin tanned a warm shade of cobnut, Aladdin shoes with laces crisscrossed around her ankles. She was the same age as Leo, which was a former age. Her face was painted, for eighteen Hallowe’ens ago, and the memory of it finally threatened to break Leo’s heart today. It had been four in the afternoon and the light was beginning to fade on red and golden leaves on the sidewalk. The café had been full of people. Leo had watched the woman from his table inside as she waited for her order. Others ordered after her and left before her. She waited without seeming to grow impatient. Her feet tapped the floor, pivoting on her heels. She used both hands to neaten her fringe. She turned to look out of the autumn window, noticed many things but did not see Leo. He watched her, wondered why she was waiting so long, wondered who she was and whether he had ever seen someone so pretty. He saw no ring on her wedding finger. She changed the weight on her feet. In a lull in the café, she was the only person left waiting at the counter.
‘Did you order something incredibly complicated?’ Leo said. And she laughed. He saw the smile break across her face first, saw his words enter her head, saw her like them, saw it all a moment before it was happening.
‘I know!’ she said, smiling at him.
Life was like that then. He saw it all in advance, saw the waves parting for him more often than not, and he didn’t stop to think.
‘I’ve seen babies born and raised since you ordered.’
She laughed again, more fully this time, with her mouth wide open and her teeth bared. She laughed from her belly. They made love at five in the afternoon and she went to her party late, leaving make-up on his face, a trace of cat’s whiskers. She asked him to feed her before she left. She walked around his apartment with his shirt on. It swamped her body and consumed his heart. He cooked her angel hair pasta while she showered and he felt exultant at how life could be, at how well an afternoon on Planet Earth could treat him. He indulged in replaying in his mind the smile that appeared on her face as she stepped into his apartment and whispered Oh, my Lord… and the way she had turned to look at him with those eyes that wondered who he was and what he did. They sat opposite each other and she ate ravenously and he imagined marrying her. He pictured waking up to her every day of his life.
‘Life’s so funny,’ she said, and put her tartan coat back on while still chewing the last mouthful of food. At the door she said to him, ‘So, I’m guessing let’s not do the numbers thing… let’s just have this gorgeous few hours on the last day of summertime?’ She waited a moment, then kissed him. ‘You
were lovely,’ she whispered, and left.
He had once had the capacity to strike up conversation. It had been effortless to make someone laugh. He had once been a human being acting on instinct, giving and taking in the same breath, not stopping to think. Overthinking was the death of you and was all he did these days. He wanted to hold a funeral for the old version of himself, to hear a eulogy or two, see her again in her tartan coat, somewhere among the mourners in whatever row of seats towards the back that she felt was appropriate. Today, in the spray-like rain on Irving Place, for the very first time, he asked himself why he had not stopped her, why he had not said, No. Let’s. It might have won her heart. She might have wanted to hear that. Today, eighteen years too late, he finally noticed the moment she had hesitated before leaving.
‘No,’ he said to the man cleaning the tables, who was asking him if he was alright and did he want to come in out of the rain. ‘No,’ Leo said, ‘let us do the numbers thing. Let us meet again and not allow this to slip out of reach.’ And, perhaps, he told himself, it was that moment at the threshold to his apartment, when he did not say to the lover with cat’s whiskers, ‘Please take me with you,’ that was the end of the first life.
The morning was grey and musky, with blocks of humidity trapped in the cross streets, and the tepid drizzle unable to take hold of the day. Umbrellas were up. A young boy caught rainwater in his mouth as it ran off a canopy. His mother yanked him away, but was not harsh with him. Irving Place had a knowingness about it this morning, the bedraggled air of revelries ended and lessons learned. Though barely more than a mist on Leo’s face, the rain had fallen all night and created rivulets on the sidewalk. His hair became soaked as he crossed town, and he enjoyed running his fingers through it, the same way his sister liked to walk barefoot through Leo’s apartment and on to his balcony. He was outside the pâtisserie before it opened. Claudine Ardant let him in and he sat alone, wondering if he might look less old, more handsome to Willow, with his wet hair swept back. He knew he was looking for the wrong cures in the wrong places.
He enjoyed the silence of the café before opening, and appreciated the place for what it was: his.
Having a secret was good for an ageing man, Leo felt, a resting place for flirtation. Claudine Ardant did not know that the Englishman she had brought in from the rain this morning, called an ambulance for two years ago, and many times observed looking lost and handsome in her café, was her landlord. Leo had bought the building with the opening salvo of the first fortune he’d made on this island, miscalculating by a few streets the Chelsea art boom but nevertheless destined in the long term to make a mint on it. He bought it for his children, for Joy’s children, not knowing then that he would come to have more than he could have imagined to leave behind and no one to leave it to.
238a Ninth Avenue was all his, a tall, thin, elegant building constructed in 1899 by the Corlessi Brothers, both of them romantic brutes with a signature fascia of looping interlinked carved figures that few New Yorkers had taken the trouble to look at in the last century but which Leo noticed high above a realtor’s board in 1993, on the day that his mother died. (Leo spent big on the occasion of each of his parents’ deaths, and on that of the woman he was engaged to in England and whose fatal heart attack at the age of thirty had precipitated his emigration.) The building came with incumbent tenants, Gluckman Trading, an import-export business that inhabited a mundane plateau of modest success, apparently unaffected for better or worse by the peaks and troughs of economics. They inhabited the top four floors of the building and, on witnessing the vast discipline and microscopic imagination of his tenants, Leo had decided that the vacant ground floor would provide a contrast and that he would charge a minimum rent to attract a worthy or creative occupant. He paid Dazelgio & Son five hundred dollars to empty two decades’ worth of junk, paperwork, damaged furniture and obsolete word processors until the ground floor of 238a was the empty shell of one light-starved room and a ropey-looking kitchen at the back.
Leo imagined a variety of pleasing scenarios: a second-hand record store or bookshop, a tailor, a vintner’s agent, a bootmaker, a small charity. He pictured many different tenants for that nebulous space beneath Gluckman Trading but he could never have imagined Claudine Ardant, who arrived with the snow and offered Leo’s agent half the knockdown price, who herself painted every inch of the ground floor matt black, hung lace curtains on the Ninth Avenue windows, charmed the city inspectors and opened ‘Maison Claudine’, a French pâtisserie where it was always dusk, and where pale orange light escaped the tissue-thin lampshades, and in which were served loose-leaf teas and fine fresh-ground coffee and pastries and cakes (oh, the pastries and cakes!) and in which Leo Emerson rediscovered the sweet tooth of his childhood.
Long before this quiet, damp morning, where the city’s reticence made a church of the streets, Leo had realised it was too late to introduce himself to Madame Claudine as her landlord, that it would only seem strange not to have done so sooner. Instead, he enjoyed the secret and had instructed the agent to assure her that she faced no rent increase for as long as she chose to remain.
His sleepless night drew level with him and in his crumpled suit he went to the restroom and threw cold water on his face. When he returned, he saw Willow tying the apron ribbon around her waist as she started her shift and he hurried out of the café without ordering.
The sun had burned its way through the mist on to Ninth Avenue and Leo lamented the passing of that season which permitted him to disappear inside his winter coat and dig his hands in deep. He sent Astrid a text: Is he there?
She replied. Who?
Finn!
Oh, him.
Is he there?
No.
Call him please.
Leo quickened his stride but didn’t seem to walk any faster. He had a physique that was not built to rush. Astrid called him. ‘He doesn’t have a cell. We don’t have an address or anything for him. You kinda took him in without asking any questions, remember?’
‘This is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘We have to know where he is. Why on earth didn’t we give him a phone that works over here? He’s an employee.’
‘Leo, it’s 2006 and I only got you to carry a cell with you last year; now you want every petty criminal you take in to be given one?’
Leo ignored this. ‘He said his place was down in the East Village, didn’t he, or was it the Lower East Side?’
‘I honestly don’t know, I wasn’t taking too much notice. Do we care? I’m not saying we don’t, I’m just asking, do we? I’m not even asking why we do – just tell me if we do and I’ll set to it. I don’t personally care; people come and go.’
‘We do care.’
‘Then fine, I’ll try and find him. Don’t hassle me about it, though, I’m selling paintings.’
Within sight of the gallery, Leo turned away, flagged a cab and headed back in the direction he’d come from. He asked for Tompkins Square Park and when they got there he told the driver to work his way up and down the streets.
‘I’m looking for someone,’ he said, and didn’t care how it might sound.
They drove back and forth, east to west, then west to east, first the East Village, then the Lower East Side. Leo gazed at the sidewalks and at the greasy swirls and fingerprints of the taxi window. The meter ran and the sun rose into a fresh sheet of clouds and the light evened itself out across Leo’s world and the driver buried a faint shake of the head as they repeated their route, south to north. Leo fell asleep and the driver pulled up and drank coffee from a flask and watched the women on Avenue B. When Leo woke, he told the driver to continue and later when the driver burst into laughter it shook Leo and brought him back into the present, where he could see and hear no obvious cause for the driver’s mirth. Maybe something he had seen outside, maybe a thought that crossed his mind or a voice in his ear. Either way, Leo realised he had not been looking for a long time. Finn could be anywhere; he could have just walked past.
&nbs
p; ‘Take me home,’ Leo sighed.
‘Give me a clue,’ the driver said.
From the balcony of his penthouse apartment at One Lex, Leo looked down on to Gramercy Park with the same pleasure that the key-holders of the rectangular garden looked at those not permitted to step inside it. A squirrel stop-started its way across 21st Street. A Tibetan terrier barked at a song sparrow, which took refuge on Edwin Booth’s head. Leo watched from his vantage point among the mock orange, jasmine and mandevilla which Joy had planted out on his balcony over the years. He sucked in the view of the new Schrager hotel and apartments going up opposite and the ripples in the canvas banner making water of the words Showstopping Luxury Residences. He liked the construction phase, when a building had its belly hanging out, and he regretted that all too soon the site would be reduced to the mere finished article. He switched off his cell, unplugged the phone, put on a winter coat and spent the afternoon on the balcony, drifting in and out of sleep. When he woke, the lights of the Chrysler Building were twinkling in the dusk. On the day he had secured this view as his own, the thirty-five-year-old with a mean gift for discovering canvas genius had said out loud, on this exact spot, to an audience of just himself, For such a view was I born. He had seduced twenty women on this balcony with the assistance of that view but could no longer reconcile the swagger of that younger man with himself. He disliked that man and considered him the thief of his present-day happiness. He recalled, too, the offer he had made to provide Joy and William with a bigger home, nearby. They had flinched at his generosity, not knowing how to convince him, on the crest of his wave, that there was nothing they could want less than to live in Gramercy Park.
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