Leo felt safest here, suspended in mid-air among his plants with a two-thousand-square-foot capsule of beautiful objects behind him. When the chill defeated him, he returned inside and took his local paper into the living room and on his Queen Anne wingback armchair he read about Lucca Passaro, whose apartment in Long Island City had been destroyed by fire the previous day and who had said to a journalist that he felt unburdened by losing everything – his lifelong music collection and all his family photographs and his high-school reports and essays and every object he had accumulated in forty-one years of being alive. Losing them all had given him a sense of freedom, he said, and he felt light and unhindered, and he could see, for the first time in three years, a clear way of getting over his divorce.
The apartment wrapped its dark arms around Leo as he stared at the wall, thinking of Lucca Passaro. Distracted, eventually, by the gloom, he leaned forward and untied his laces, slipped off his shoes and slid them beneath the chair. He reached out and switched on his Art Nouveau bridge-arm floor-lamp with burlap shade, which gave a mushroom of warm light to the room and erased the city from the windows. He rose to his feet and walked softly through the apartment, turning on the nineteenth-century marble and ormolu table lamp in the lobby, Chinese celadon table lamp in the study and Regency bronze table lamp in the drawing room. He drew the curtains and returned to the wingback where he sat in silence again, motionless but for the movement of his head as he scanned everything in front of him, every object he owned, every piece of antique furniture, the spine of every book, every work of art hanging from or propped against his walls.
By two o’clock in the morning, he had emptied the shelves and the walls were bare. Thirty piles of books stood tall in the room, some for the auction house (he would donate the proceeds), one for a friend, some for the charity shops, many for the library off Union Square, a smaller pile that he thought Madame Claudine might like for the walls of the pâtisserie. The paintings were stacked against each other along the walls. He knew the man who would auction them all for him and not cheat him of a dollar. The piles stood like Easter Island figures trespassing on the gloom of a large, lonely Manhattan apartment. He weaved his way through them to a bottle of Lagavulin and lay on the bed in his suit, his head unaccustomed to the clammy exhaustion of fearing for another’s wellbeing. Tomorrow would be emptier without Finn. He had enjoyed seeing the world through the boy’s eyes, and the stirrings of renewal at having someone other than himself to worry about.
14
Outside the Gay Hussar restaurant, the owner sat on a bench, gazing at a deserted Ludlow Street but seeing nothing of it. Cigarette in one hand, black coffee in the other, she was tired and quiet, with song lyrics writing themselves into her head. She smelled of wine.
The way she studied Finn as he came to an uncertain halt in front of her bore traces of the affection she kept mostly hidden beneath the burden of translating this in-vogue hangout into some sort of a living, into a life good enough to make a song and dance in her heart that might drown out the ticking time-bomb of a rent increase that would surely blow her out of the water one day, same way she was ushered in over the drowning body of the previous, even less profitable tenant. Her soundest business move might have been to place a bet that the spot she was sitting on would become a glass condo within ten years.
‘You’re kinda early in the day, cowboy,’ she said, with screwed-up eyes.
‘You too,’ Finn said, looking inside for any sign of Amy.
‘I wish this was early. This is late. This is what’s left of the night before. This might be more than coffee can help me with.’
She reminded Finn of the land girls in the old wartime posters on Jack’s bedroom wall, back when they were brothers.
‘You know Amy, the waitress who works here?’
The woman laughed to herself and sat upright and drew on her cigarette. ‘Yes, I know Amy, the waitress who works here.’
‘She due in any time soon?’
‘’Bout eight hours.’
Finn pulled a face and looked across the street to where Dilly had bummed her cigarette. Every new morning in New York City made ghosts of the nights before. He wondered if the ghost was doing okay, imagined her posting the Hemingway book to him and telling him she was happy and didn’t want to meet up. He let out a breath, fearful that he was being unkind. What an uneasy revelation it was for him, to discover he could want so little from an ex-lover and want it now.
‘You can leave your cell number.’
‘I don’t have one.’
She squinted up at him and produced another smile for her own consumption. ‘Cute…’
‘Would you tell her I came to see her?’
‘At eight o’clock in the morning. I will.’
‘I was passing.’
‘Well, passing stranger, I’ll tell her.’ She got up and stretched and muttered the words, ‘Oh, fuck,’ and wandered inside.
Finn took her place on the bench, glanced inside the restaurant at the table he and Dilly had sat at, and took out his map in exactly the manner that would have annoyed the hell out of her. He hesitated, constricted by an uneasy feeling about himself. He presumed it was a misgiving that he had been ungracious to Dilly, but realised it was Leo he was worried about. He rested the map in his lap and thought about it. Dilly was her very own home-made explosive, and she had deserted him. He was not the captain of that ship. But Leo he had let down, which was why he had tried not to think about him this morning. Leo might not turn out to be any better than the rest, but there again he might; the law of averages suggested someone had to, one of these days. The older man had deserved better than the version of Finn that Finn had served up. His heart sank. The seeds of the apology he owed planted themselves. He opened his map, double-checked the route, and allowed himself a few more moments of sunshine on the bench before heading uptown.
Arriving in the ticket hall at Grand Central Station half an hour later was the latest extension to his hard-earned and carefully guarded quixotic other life, the one he had never let his peers see, in which he watched The Last Picture Show in a small cinema on All Saints Street in the quaint part of town that his neighbours on the estate called the Gay Quarter and would have taunted him for visiting; the life in which he read The Catcher in the Rye by torchlight in the attic of his uncle’s house where he could not be reached, thanks to a pull-up ladder; the life in which he lay in bed with Dilly imagining a city so vast and cosmopolitan and modern that none of the cast of his first life could possibly find their way there, except for Jack.
In the netherworld of Grand Central’s concessions Finn bought a map of Queens. He rode the elevated 7 beneath Manhattan, out into the daylight and fifty feet above the Borough. At a corner restaurant called Kay’s Place he queued to buy water beside sticky-looking tables with bottles of ketchup and Tabasco sauce. A woman in her seventies sat with a blonde, corkscrew-haired boy of eight or nine. The two of them shared a bowl of fries. She allowed herself one to every fistful he took. On a saucer between them, a dollop of ketchup had become an artist’s smear. Salt grains were scattered across the table-top. Finn watched the boy and the woman a moment longer than he might have done. If you yearned for something badly enough, everything seemed to pertain to it.
There was an old jukebox in one corner and next to it a bald man with an Elliott Smith RIP T-shirt was installing an ATM machine. His buttocks were squished against a window festooned with posters demanding that St Teresa’s church be saved. Bicycles leaned against the other side of the glass, on the sidewalk along Queens Boulevard. The saddles looked ready to melt in the sun. A fading banner read YES WE HAVE $2 PABST BLUE RIBBON.
The walk to the New Calvary Cemetery was lead-lined with backyards of junk and the debris of people who did things for themselves, adapted things, fixed things, made things last. Barriers of buckled corrugated iron separated them from the grinding Expressway and it all felt homely to Finn. He watched his trainers hit the sidewalk and could have been a
nywhere and he forgot about everything beyond his own footsteps until the slope to Greenpoint Avenue offered up to him the mountain range of brick and steel peaks called Manhattan. The sight of it took his breath away and then gave it right back, and his chest filled with the simple wish for a modest quantity of hope in his life, an amount that would go unnoticed and so be granted him without enraging the gods.
He stopped at every intersection to stare at the city in Cinemascope, and entered the gates of the cemetery with a rare and undefined sense of purpose. The slopes beckoned him to progressively better views. The glaring sun above Queens and black storm clouds over Manhattan conspired to paint the city silver. On the pale grey tombstones the sun was blinding and Finn squinted to read the inscriptions. Basilio, Pavone, Cantasano, Guariglia, Stasa, Lucilento, De Salvio, O’Sullivan, Duggan, O’Neal, Callan, Gaffney, O’Donohue, O’Rourke, Kiernan.
He had never been inside a graveyard before, and for a boy of nineteen with four dead grandparents and two dead parents that was some feat. Maybe he should have done, because from the cemetery the city began to make sense to him, and people too. He felt a little more sympathy for them, and a little less betrayed. It wasn’t just him; it didn’t seem to have quite worked out for anyone.
If this is the deal, he thought, then little wonder no one knows how to handle it all.
Laid out at his feet were the bodies of those who once upon a time were New York City. And above them lay the city they built, which was the city that spawned them. Each presided over the other, the living over the dead, the buried over the standing. Neither could claim victory. He stood in awe of the view. This was church. This was veneration. This was remarkable.
But it was not the view. It was not the photograph.
This view skimmed over the graves to the tips of the famous skyline, hinting at death and hinting at life, but not offering a clear picture. This was a thin view beneath a huge sky. The photograph had been taken from somewhere else, where the cemetery was the dipping, swelling, colossal sea of stones, and Manhattan a lofty altar in full view. Why this mattered to him, whether it mattered, he still had no idea.
He was hot and lay on the grass. He looked at the sky and felt the tombs encroaching on the corners of his view. Given the inevitability of a mighty big full stop one day, he felt a snarling disdain for the living dead back home, those who had the opportunity to live but didn’t take it; those like his aunt, bystander to a boy’s suffering. He resented her more than he hated the bully she had chosen to spend her life indulging. He despised the memory of her daytime-TV voice: ‘Of course, Finn here has suffered loss, but it’s nothing compared to what his big brother went through. The…’
She would search for the word here, every single time, always the same way, as if it were the first occasion she’d ever thought to use it.
‘… trauma…’
Sometimes Finn would mouth the word as she said it.
‘… trauma is the only word I can think of to describe it. The trauma of actually being there as his father died, plus the loss, is what poor Jack has to live with.’
Finn heard this story whenever his aunt had a visitor. Always identical, the words and the intonation, the pauses and expressions, a repeated, precision performance. Every one of her friends and neighbours who came by to meet the orphan Finn heard the story of Jack’s harrowing loss. Finn was not mentioned; he was merely in the room, and he came to recognise that these visitors anticipated a coffee morning with Oliver Twist, and did not expect to be staring into the chest of a six-foot-two teenage athlete, whose muteness both appealed to them and appalled them.
‘This young man’s brother literally caught their father in his arms as he died.’
And if Finn tried to leave the room his aunt would bar him with an outstretched arm. ‘Don’t go, Finn, Mrs Prentice has come here especially to meet you. Be polite. The least you can do.’
There was one lady whose face Finn could picture, still. She was the one who said that perhaps Finn didn’t want to talk about it, that she didn’t need the detail, that she was just very pleased to meet him, and they should talk about something else. She was the one who had noticed Finn mouth the word ‘trauma’ just before his aunt said it. She was not invited again. She had thin lips and a strong face and her hair was long and already greying, and she was tall and upright and her eyes were kind and Finn couldn’t imagine why or how she knew his aunt and uncle, because she seemed intelligent and subtle. She had a diamond ring and an eternity ring on her wedding finger. Her eyes were blue and her skin was pale and she had honey-coloured freckles on the bridge of her nose, which was a little angular. And his heart felt close to bursting out of his chest with the desire to be taken in by her.
But, with Mrs Prentice, and Mrs Hughes from next door, and Mrs Sherman from the Rotary and Cheryl Davison the deacon, and a dozen others, Finn had no choice but to listen to the story of his father’s death, as told by his aunt: of how his father drove drunk through a give-way at the crossroads at Castleton’s Oak and wiped out a sixteen-year-old boy in the passenger seat of the car he hit. Of how his father left, ignoring the dead boy and the unconscious driver. How he stole himself away from where the glow of the pub lights fell on to the wreckage as people came out on to the lane, their curiosity nudged by the sound they had heard and stalling then in the silence of momentary visual miscomprehension. How ‘the father’ (she never called him ‘my brother’) stumbled into the darkness beneath the swaying canopies of the oak trees on the glebe, reeling, emptying of blood, half of it left on the roadside. How he called his eldest son and how the smile that overwhelmed him when he saw his son coming to him seemed to capsize him and he fell and died in Jack’s arms.
And it wasn’t that Finn’s aunt was saying anything untrue. There was no need to embellish: the story had everything. A mother’s depression after giving birth to Finn (spoken about openly in this house in front of Finn, used by the uncle against him), her alcoholism, a father who did not drink as he tried to hold the family together, who devoted himself to Jack’s education as Jack showed promise and Finn hid his, a drunk mother and desperately lonely father who saw in their elder son’s education the possibility of rescue from themselves, and a deft, seamless, extraordinary and nonsensical handing over of the alcoholic baton by the mother to the father in the last year of her life, a baton he took on with some fervour and devotion after his childhood sweetheart took her gin-raddled body out on to the reservoir and then to the bottom of it. Finn’s aunt had every right to tell such a story when she had none of her own, but it was just that, whenever Finn heard the legend repeated on these stifling coffee mornings, he appeared to be living with his aunt and uncle now because Jack’s parents had died, not his own. Finn sometimes had to remind himself that they were his parents too, even though the die was cast before he could walk or talk, had been cast in the act of his being born, in his being a life too many for his mother to bear. He had to remind himself too that there had been shards of affection towards him, little flickers of maternal warmth among the wreckage of his twelve years with his mother. They tended to come in the twenty minutes’ grace when she had had one drink but not two, when she could be funny and outspoken and it remained safe.
‘We only had a second child ’cos we were running out of things to do together and we couldn’t afford a camper van. Thought a baby could kick-start us,’ she said, near to the end of her life, when she seemed to be improving, coming out of a slump.
‘How’d that go, Mum?’
‘Well, not successful. But we got you, Finny.’
It was the most affectionate thing she had ever said to him and, as if to make up lost ground, she’d followed it with two weeks of cursing him and throwing anything she could reach from her bed at him before doing him a favour and dying in the far reaches of the valley they had flooded the year she was born.
‘Do us all a favour, Mum…’ They were the last words Finn ever said to her.
He stripped to his waist as a ripost
e to the sweat running from his armpits and marauded across New Calvary Cemetery, which ran into the Mount Zion Cemetery, searching for the photograph and pursued by a rainstorm sweeping across the New Jersey Marshes and South Manhattan. It scraped low across Queens and caught up with Finn as he wrestled his shirt back on and took shelter beneath the Expressway. The traffic above him whined and droned and, when the centre of the storm hit, pockets of wind trapped beneath the Expressway howled around him, seeking an escape. When the rain abated to a mere downpour, Finn ran from the underpass, leaving behind those souls trapped beneath it, those who were excluded from the graveyards for reasons he did not care to know about. He ran on the balls of his feet to raise himself above the flash flooding on Greenpoint Avenue, a small act of defiance against the elements that was instinctive but of no practical effect. From the jolting carriages of the elevated 7 he saw the entire silver city disappear behind a veil of rain.
Back in the hovel, Finn draped his wet clothes across the cold radiators and the sight of it was homely despite the chill in the room and the damp in his bones. With the bedsheets wrapped around him he studied his map and it made no sense to him that he had not found the photograph. He toyed with the thought of calling Jack. Jack would like his interest in the photograph. It was a bit like taking an interest in history. But if he were to tell Jack he’d got fired it would sound as though he was asking for help, and if he were to shiver with cold it would sound as though he was asking to move in. Instead, he showered under a dribble of cold water. Later, he felt horny and tried to dispel the memory of Dilly’s thighs parting for him. From above him, he heard quivers of laughter and the low rumble of conversation, carried to him by a chance permutation of pipework, vents and ducts in the carved-up, fucked-up building.
In the flickering, sticky aisles of Elsa’s Food Market, he found that for $2.99 he could buy a chicken, vegetable and melted cheese pie big enough for four people. With 0.4 per cent broccoli content, 0.8 per cent carrots and an unspecified percentage of sweetcorn, there was clearly no need to waste his cash on further side vegetables. The oven warmed the hovel tenuously. He raided the top of the cupboard into which Glenn had rammed his possessions and duly found a modest but significant bundle of adult films. He settled down to porn and pie.
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