His arousal proved short-lived. As the bareness of his surroundings reminded him that the DVD was not the same as the real thing with Dilly, and that a pie that pushed the definition of the word ‘food’ was now a part of his body, his right hand stumbled upon a lump on his right testicle. A hot panic rippled through his body. He cleared away the food and switched off the porn, as if removing them would remove the lump. He sat at the small circular table into which Glenn had carved his initials on the morning of his hearing, and delved into his underwear to check and double-check that he had found what he thought he had found. He sweated, he cried, and, in order to remain faithful to the promise he had made to himself to never be let down again, he didn’t call Jack even though he wanted to.
He sat outside on the steps. The gully no longer frightened him now that his death was imminent. He entered the first phase of big calm, sure in the knowledge that if the fox man or any other fucker bothered him tonight he would take them out, without hesitation, without effort, without a sound. But there was no one. He sat there until three in the morning. When he returned inside he reached up to the kitchen cupboard door, in the beading of which he had wedged Leo’s card. He sat at the table and dialled the number at One Lex and when Leo answered, thick with sleep, Finn said, ‘I ate a pie thirty centimetres wide tonight. I should not live alone.’
Leo’s heart shivered a little with happiness. He listened to the boy’s breathing and asked him what was wrong, and Finn told him, and when he had told him he said that he was frightened and didn’t know what to do.
‘What you do,’ Leo said, ‘is stop worrying. Men get this a lot. I’ll call my doctor tomorrow and he’ll check you over.’
How good it felt to be spoken to like that. Finn savoured it for a moment.
‘Look…’ Leo sounded agitated. ‘Tomorrow I’m getting you a cellphone – a mobile – because I have to be able to contact you. I need to know you’re okay, otherwise this is all too much for me.’
15
Jack still couldn’t hold a razor steady but, if a shave was impossible, fresh air was not. Striding out a couple of blocks to re stock on cough mixture would be a good move, he decided. Come to think of it (he turned back at the elevators), he should push himself a little and turn this into a spot of exercise, give him self a jump-start. He would march a few blocks with Holly’s mini-wrist-weights on, and take things from there.
Unshaven, temporarily gaunt from not eating, fuelled by cough mixture and coffee, he shuffled out on to 94th Street performing arm raises with cerise-pink wrist weights. For a shy, easily embarrassed British man, Jack had his moments.
Women in green overalls were planting shrubs around the red oak trees on the Avenue. Behind them, 94th Street climbed the slope past Precious Nails to brownstones stacked up the hill with rowan trees and firethorn out front by the steps. The neighbourhood felt different during the working day. There were shops Jack had walked past and never noticed. Third Avenue was pale. A mist hung over the Upper East Side and its monochrome triggered Jack’s dreams of the Indian trails. Reading in depth about the Lenape Indians and the Wiechquaesgecks had established a world of primordial rains and muted colours in Jack’s imagination. He loved the avenues, each one of them a trail still.
His breathing was cleaner for being outdoors, but his body was weak and he rested inside among the echoes and shadows of the Church of Our Lady of Good Counsel, which appealed to Jack’s penchant for Manhattan’s Grand Gothic. He came here often, when the place was deserted. He knew the service times and how to frequent the place without exposure to Mass or Catholics. Religious or otherwise, Jack found people alarmingly complex, unnecessarily so. He had convinced himself that he was happier on his own, most of the time.
It had not always been so. He had been open and talkative as a child. Relatives and neighbours had commented on it: how freely and happily he talked to adults, the spontaneity with which he’d position himself beside them and talk in flowing colour about what he had just come from doing and what he was off to do next. When Jack entered the grammar school the openness left him, and, when his parents took the boys from the estate they had been raised on, they made it clear they were doing it all for Jack, and his easygoing nature deserted him. He lived then in the choked space between his parents’ pride and Finn’s bewilderment.
When they lived on the estate it all worked fine and Jack never complained about the string of buses he had to take to the grammar each day. But his parents moved them off the estate to the lesser of all the streets that spread out from the edges of the town like fissures on a drunkard’s nose. They moved in pursuit of the expansive life their elder son was bound for, with his good brain and hard work, and lived among people who had nothing to say to them and in time those people included Finn, who every day had to make in reverse the journey to his old school that his parents had considered too onerous for his big brother.
At the pinnacle of what Finn and Jack’s parents deluded themselves they could afford was that exhausted cul-de-sac on the edge of the old forest. The straggling pines and the clapboard houses that had been young when George Best was beautiful were hemmed in now by new private developments and bigger houses, by richer people and the vast screening trees they planted. The shadows of these trees had long since made a permanent winter of one half of the cul-de-sac (Jack and Finn’s half) and this gloom was the detail first commented on by the very few parents of Jack’s schoolfriends who visited, as they drove away. They would sigh with relief, mutter Never again and comment on how Jack’s mother could put away her drink. The shadow of the pines, the shadow of the drinking, it was all anyone said about them.
They lived beyond their means in no man’s land, in a house kissed by moss and the fossilised imprint of creeping ivy. They wrote cheques to purchase the life they had window-shopped in the grammar school car park, but it didn’t assemble. On a good day, they felt merely as isolated with these people as they did when they were alone. When they were caught over-reaching, possessions would be sold while Jack and Finn were out at school. Jack had resolved to always have money. It had embarrassed him as much as it confused Finn that their parents clung by their fingertips to the ability to marshal Jack’s education while falling apart in every other respect.
Finn was proud of his brother’s intelligence but, when his parents expressed their hope that he would follow his big brother to the grammar, he scuttled his own academic chances so as to deny them, took pleasure in it and in returning every day to be educated with his peers from the estate. Jack was not unhappy at school, but his little brother’s indifference towards the grammar, and the need to concentrate so bloody hard all the time, made him subdued and serious, and very, very organised. The more organised he was, the better he did, and the better he did the more his parents dished out the sort of praise their first child craved. He watched with envy the liberation Finn won for himself by eliminating any trace of potential about him. His parents’ praise became over-reaching and aimless, and lost its allure. His room became his world. It was neatness that made Jack feel good. Order. Being quietly on top of things. Having no frayed edges.
He emerged on to the sidewalk and watched the withered hands of the branches in the trees of the small park opposite wave to him in the same breeze that failed to rouse the Papal Flag or the Stars and Stripes hanging limply outside the church. He passed the fruit stalls on 86th Street and the thin townhouses and bare magnolias. He hid the wrist-weights in his fists and passed through a muted, airless East End Avenue, where the traffic was a soft swish of slow-moving tyres in the misty rain. A tide of tiny Oriental-looking kids in bright yellow raincoats spilled out of a kindergarten as a text came in from an unknown number.
Hi, handsome – looking forward to see you again. xD
He presumed it was a mistake. Suddenly, the children were under his feet and the only sound he was aware of was the creaking of the swings in Carl Schurz Park. He did not want children. Family made him nervous. He didn’t understand the dyn
amic between family members. Any decision he had made concerning his little brother he had felt unsure of. He doubted every word he had said to Finn since their parents died, and was uncertain about everything he had done. With a defeatism he would not allow in his professional life, he was resigned to the sensation that all he could do was take a stab at doing the right thing and try to appear surefooted for his brother’s good. To the same degree that Finn made him feel useless, New York City offered Jack a feeling of permanence, of being enveloped by something that made sense to him. He had read its story; he understood its birth, its actions and motivations.
Two dogs went for each other’s throats in the dog run. Jack heard them as he reached the wide, strong, steady-moving river that cradled the Upper East Side like a muscular arm. It was a favourite spot for him; it reminded him that he was on an island busting a gut to stimulate him. From the outset, he had had the sensation that there was always something extraordinary going on in Manhattan just beyond his reach, but this did not trouble him – far from it. He wasn’t looking to join the party; he was happier living in its reflected glory and maintaining a semblance of order. He could enjoy the periphery to the same degree that he couldn’t have dealt with the centre.
Across the river, a lone woman on Roosevelt Island wandered through the damp haze to the lighthouse, stirring in Jack the romantic longings his peers had no reason to suspect him of, and a desire to walk on water. His cough had worsened. A parcel of phlegm caught in the back of his mouth but his throat was sore and he did not want to swallow. He looked for somewhere to spit, considered the East River, but didn’t have whatever it took to do so in public. He swallowed instead, and the bitter taste swayed him to treat himself to a coffee and he decided that a wet shave at York’s might transform him.
He broke a rule and drank his americano in public, on the 6 Train. (Jack did not like people eating and drinking in public.) A stooped man who had once been elegant, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with him, took a slim brown paper parcel from his pocket. He slid one finger under the fold to break the tape without tearing the bag. He eased a paperback book out into the world and, carefully, so as not to dig his elbow into Jack’s side, folded the paper bag into the shape of a bookmark and placed it inside the back cover and laid the book on his knees. In the brief moment that savours an unopened book, Jack read the cover. Collected Poems. Robert Hayden. The man opened the book randomly and pressed the pages apart without hurting the spine. Jack began to read the poem on the right-hand side. Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold… The man shifted in his seat, crossed one leg over the other, and came to rest in a position that stole the poem from Jack’s view. Jack was not a consumer of poetry but he felt disappointed. He wondered if the man had shifted in his seat deliberately, then cautioned himself for thinking something so petty.
The area around Hunter College was Jack and Holly’s favourite approach to the Park in spring, beneath the blossom of 70th Street. From time to time, maybe three times a year when he’d allow himself to go unshaven through a holiday weekend, Jack liked to have a wet shave at York Barber Shop and she would go into the shoe shop and the bookstore while he was in there. The area gave Holly the sort of warm, safe, sloppy, shoppy feeling that she loved on her days off, and what Jack enjoyed was to see that pleasure in her. He acknowledged to himself that travelling thirty blocks to get the occasional wet shave at York’s was probably something of a cliché, and that being known by name in a less polished local joint would carry more credibility, but he liked the place and the signed framed photos in the window of Woody Allen and, intriguingly, Charlotte Rampling, and a bunch of other actors he didn’t recognise (and the guys in his office could go hang; he wished he had never mentioned it to them). He stood looking at the photos now as he realised that he could not join them today because it would be selfish to risk passing his cough on to one of the guys in there. Wouldn’t it? Yeah, damn, it would. The sinking feeling was one Jack knew well: it came upon him whenever he saw there was a right thing to do that was contrary to what he desired. The dragline of feeling responsible. He had been hooked up to it for as long as he could remember.
He entered the bookstore and gazed aimlessly at the shelves, simply to connect with Holly in her absence. It was an afterthought to enquire of the bookseller if they stocked a poet called Robert Hayden. He bought the book and read the poem at his seat outside the café on Lexington which Holly was fond of. As he read it, he fell so deep into it that he did not acknowledge the waitress placing the coffee and sandwich in front of him, a discourtesy he could not abide in others.
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
He read it twice more then drank the coffee and pushed the sandwich away, as if merely ordering and paying for food amounted to sustenance. He slid the book into his jacket pocket, an act so neat and pleasing that he regretted that it was impossible to do so with a history book. Until today he had found poetry flimsy. History was all backbone.
He got another text.
At Long Beach, I mean. You have to join us there. Bring your girlfriend. Dilly x
He listened in on a powerful elderly woman on the next-door table as she talked into her phone. ‘What is your name, honey?… well, that’s wonderful… Jean… that’s a wonderful name and you know what, Jean? You can do anything, you’re incredible, you can get us better seats than that, all four together, four in a line or two behind two I don’t care which, I know you can make this happen, Jean, because you are strong and you are your parents’ pride and joy, Jean… are they? Well, there’s no such thing as dead, not truly dead, Jean… and you can improve on these seats you’ve sent me, I know you can…’
Jack admired it, this New York City way of knowing what you wanted. He wanted his bed. And he wanted Holly to be in it and to hold him. But he wanted her to be naked, not always wearing one of her fuc… sodding ubiquitous nighties.
He sent Dilly a reply.
Thanks for the kind invite. Please get Finn to call me now as I’m free to talk. Jack.
He waited. The woman got herself better seats. Two birds eyed up Jack’s uneaten sandwich. He called Dilly’s number and got her answerphone. If you’ve got something interesting to say, wait for the beep. If you haven’t, don’t bother. He hung up, texted Finn on Dilly’s number asking him to call, and headed home, feeling faint again. Dilly soon called.
‘Hey, Jack Sprat,’ she said.
‘Is that Dilly?’
‘Who else?’
‘Sure. Okay. I hope you are well. Can I talk to Finn?’
‘You hope I am well? Is that, like, a question? Are you asking me if I am well or, you know, informing me of your hope that that is the situation, my being well?’
‘It means how are you?’
‘Good, thank you. How are you, Jack Sprat?’
He couldn’t stand her. ‘Is Finn there?’
‘Not right now. You coming to join us at Long Beach? I’d like to see you.’
‘It’s kind of you and your parents, but can you just get Finn to call me?’
‘Okay, Jack Sprat, be well.’ She hung up.
Back on the platform at 68th Street station, he saw a young woman reading a book and a man attempting to get her attention by waving his arm across her line of sight.
‘Excuse me… miss?’ Th
e man had a soft voice. ‘Excuse me, miss?’
The woman looked up from her book.
‘You have the face of an angel,’ the man said. He smiled an evangelical smile. ‘I had to tell you.’
The man was clean-cut but his sincerity unnerved the woman, Jack could see it in her forced smile. It was a smile designed to avoid antagonising the man, to curtail his unwelcome attention, a smile balanced so as not to stir either hostility or encouragement, a smile that tried to convince itself there was nothing to be afraid of. It was a lot of work for one smile.
Jack glared at the man, and wondered what he possibly hoped the woman’s response might be.
Thank you, that means so much to me.
Thank you, you wanna grab a coffee?
Thank you, do you want my number?
Thank you, I think I could love you.
Thank you, let me blow you.
‘The face of an angel…’ the man repeated, stepping closer to the woman.
She pretended not to hear him and stared hard at her book, which was trembling.
Jack stepped towards them. ‘How about mine?’ he asked the man. ‘What does my face look like?’
The young man sized Jack up and the woman took the opportunity to walk away, down the platform.
‘She seems uneasy,’ Jack said. ‘It would be nice to leave her be.’
‘I disagree,’ said the man. He followed after the young woman.
‘Please…’ Jack said, his voice cracking a little, under the strain of having to beg a man not to scare a woman, having to beg a strange woman to tell his own brother to call him, beg his girlfriend to be less like him and elevate them on to some more abandoned level of existence that he was incapable of reaching.
Men Like Air Page 20