Men Like Air

by Connolly, Tom

  He tried to sleep but his thoughts dwelt on the prospect of spending eternity avoiding his mum and dad. New realm, same old shit.

  17

  Jack’s health deteriorated in a barefaced refusal to comply with his recovery schedule. He fell asleep during Holly’s morning call and spent the rest of the day feverish and looking back on stuff he didn’t care to remember. In the margins of sleep, vivid, accurate pictures of his home town appeared like a pop-up book fallen out of his blind spot. Between the two halves of the town, below the terraces of tall, despairing Victorian houses that lined the West Ridge and the East Hill, was the scar that could be seen from space, the alluvial plain that prised open the gorge that split the town. At the base of the ancient flow of the plain was the chalk bowl that seemed to have swallowed up houses and roads that never existed, and banked precariously around its edge was the sink estate where Jack and Finn were born and which Jack’s brother loved very much and where the grey blocks of flats and squeezed-thin houses held their breath above the drop.

  Behind the teeth of slate houses on the edge of the grinning bowl, in a triangle of unclaimed land where the children gorged on blackberries in late summer and the adults fly-tipped in winter, stood five enduring beech trees, corralled by the estate into nothing more than their distant memories of ancient forest. One tree stood apart from the rest, in the others’ shadow but with views across the foot of the alluvial plain to the sea and the fishing boats and amusement arcades and the shingle beach. Young Jack climbed to a bough five feet off the ground, and his parents applauded. He sat there often and pondered his life and tried to make sense of his parents’ behaviour.

  His parents called the beech tree ‘Jack’s tree’, and Jack loved that for the illusion it offered that his parents might be watching him climb the tree or aware of him sitting in it. When Finn started to walk, Jack’s mother told her eldest, ‘One day you can teach Finny to climb your tree,’ and Jack logged it for the future. His mother was never truly sober after Finn was born. When she drank, Jack climbed the beech tree and sat five feet above the world. When she couldn’t cope, she gave the boy to her elder son and if it was dry on the ground Jack lay beneath the tree shoulder-to-shoulder with Finn and they watched the branches sway and the patches of sky between the boughs and the sunlight blind them, and they talked in cathedral whispers.

  On a Saturday lunchtime, when Jack and Finn’s parents were each in their beds and Jack was resigned to not getting his homework done, the two boys zigzagged their way down the slope of the forests in the scrub, squeezing the resin out of the nodules on the pine trees and inhaling it until their eyes watered. They ate sandwiches beneath Jack’s tree, and afterwards, with the taste of the pine transferred from their fingers to their mouths, they spat globs of resin on to the ground from the first bough of the great tree and swung their legs. Their father stepped into the backyard wearing his dressing gown and slippers and smoking a cigarette. He looked half-heartedly beyond the fence for his children and Finn spat out a little more bile and climbed to the next bough.

  ‘Hey,’ Jack whispered, ‘be careful.’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘I know you’re okay,’ Jack laughed, ‘but you’re also only six. That’s too high, come down.’

  ‘I wanna see…’ Finn said.

  ‘That’s way too high,’ Jack said.

  ‘Come on,’ Finn said and he kept on climbing, without hesitation, as if he did not possess the ability to doubt his footing.

  ‘One of us better stay down here,’ Jack said.

  After that, Finn used to sit in the crown of the tree watching the temper of the estate and the shapes of the sea and the shadows that lurked beneath the water, and Jack would sit on the low bough, craning his neck upwards to keep watch on his baby brother, burdened with the jitters that seeing Finn up there should have given his parents. Sometimes in summer their mother would look out over the fence and laugh to the rattle of ice cubes and call her little Finny a monkey up there in the sky and wave across the wasteland at her clever, grown-up son and call out to him, ‘Isn’t he a mad monkey, that little one, eh, Jack?’ And Jack would look up to his little brother, at what his body could do.

  The next year, when Jack turned thirteen, his parents moved them out of the estate to the beginning of the end, and Jack bid the beech tree good riddance and didn’t return for five years until the night the men on the reservoir found his mother, and his father committed himself to the Herculean task of drowning his sorrow. On that night, the boys slipped away from the cul-de-sac with their sleeping bags and returned to their first home and slept beneath the beech trees, watching the planes come in from Europe and a few stars that penetrated the glow of the town and the drift of the clouds, and listening to the throaty rumble of the TV from their old living room and the repeated rhythms of canned laughter. Jack suspected, that night, that he would use his father and his brother as an excuse to keep himself to himself during the university years he was embarking upon. His instinct was right. He turned down Manchester for London and returned home most weekends in his first two years, to shield Finn and to scrape his father up off the floor. His chronic shyness with the women who found him handsome and evasive went unchallenged and unrepaired by his absence from life outside of the lecture theatre, and in his final year he moved back home and commuted. That was Finn’s happiest time, and Jack knew it. In the evenings, the boys went running together, silent but for their breathing which was in perfect harmony and which allowed Jack to forget for one more hour that he felt close to breakdown. He had lost a mother and a brother, and gained a drunkard and a son, and it all felt too lonely to sustain.

  He remained at home when he got his first job in the City. A girlfriend in the office was put off by the apparent indifference of Jack’s refusal to stay over more than once a week or take her home to his raddled father and increasingly feral brother. Then came Holly, who had fallen for Jack’s looks, manners and compulsive tidiness, and marched into his office to announce she had a spare ticket for a Rachmaninov concert at the Royal Festival Hall which she would take him to in return for dinner and that he’d be able to get the late train back home to the coast. She spoke of the proposed date as if she already knew it would be an ordeal for him. From the start, she seemed to understand him and made no demands that would challenge his duties. In Holly, Jack saw the chance of escape the moment she voiced her intention to move back to New York City, which was in the interval, that first evening. For Holly, he would create a new, brighter version of himself, in which his humble beginnings were the central myth, one which he cemented by taking her back to the estate the day before they left for America, to show her the house he had started from and the tree he had ‘taught Finn to climb’.

  Jack had thought a great deal about his baby brother coming to visit him in New York, had imagined that day he’d take Finn to Inwood Hill Park to see the rocky outcrops, and to Pelham Bay and the Palisades to share his knowledge of the Inwood marble, the Manhattan schist and the Fordham gneiss in a way that Finn would find interesting, though Jack didn’t yet know how that would be. He had pictured the two of them standing together on these rocks that New York City was built on and he had hoped that something about it would anchor them there. This would happen thanks to his own ability to be fascinated by these things and to understand them, and something would somehow make Finn finally love this about him. Instead, Jack was waking up to the idea that if you were nineteen and pissed off and had a choice between a geology lesson from your brother (but it was not that, it was much more than a lesson, and this was what pained Jack: his inability to present it as what it really was) and a sexual education from an older woman, then a nineteen-year-old would have an easy choice to make. Instead of being Finn’s rock in New York City, Jack had no idea where his kid brother was, and he realised, finally, in the depths of his flu, that he had no right to know. And that this could be how it was always going to be.

  18

  William took the few st
eps with Joy to his new daily pick-up point outside Ladder Company 21, where he had already established a tendency to nod, imperceptibly, at the seven steel plaques on the wall. It was eight-forty-five on the bip. His car would arrive between eight-forty-five and eight-fifty and deposit him in the cargo area beneath Fountains by nine. He was bang on time. This was his new routine, courtesy of George White, almost one week in, and he hated it.

  ‘He might as well put me in an orange boiler suit.’

  They were signed up to the Club’s on-line petition to close down Guantanamo but had not gotten too involved owing to feeling safer for the place existing. Joy pulled a sad face and teased him: ‘Poor you’. He smiled at his own petulance but the smile creased his mouth like nausea. She cuddled him and agreed it wasn’t funny.

  He loved the old routine. Routine made sense of Manhattan. Without it, how could they know which way to turn in the infinite city? Routine made devotion possible; how else to steer clear of the other people they might have become?

  Until the intervention of George White, William had walked hand-in-hand with his wife every morning to the health store where, as often as not, the guys outside the Municipal Taxi Drivers’ Association hollered to Joy and she called back as she unlocked the place. During this salvo, William would try to look at ease by staring with forced assurance along 43rd Street at the health club or, at this time of year, the sublime blossom, as if he’d seen something fascinating that left him, oh, hardly aware of the men flirting with his wife and her expertise with them. Or, he’d gaze imperiously southwards down Ninth Avenue at the Port Authority’s arsehole.

  Joy had worked at Complementary for twenty-five years. Her first job in New York was as a legal secretary but she’d resigned from it on realising she didn’t like to be in tall buildings, a noteworthy discovery for someone seeking office work in Manhattan. She had made it up the Empire State Building only twice, with Leo when they first arrived (when the excitement of everything and the supportive arm of her big brother covered her fear), and with William, immediately after he proposed to her in the Red Flame, and the queasiness of that latter occasion had prompted her to rule out ascending to great heights again.

  Complementary had little custom in the early years other than a few pale regulars. But that was Hell’s Kitchen. In the Clinton-Hell’s Kitchen hybrid of 2006, business was good. Stevie Logan, the owner, paid Joy and Adele a little more these days, was apologetic for the change of pace that success had brought and allowed Joy to bail out once or twice a month and take the ferry to Sandy Hook where she walked on the beach with her shoes off. William was unaware of these excursions and used to leave her every morning and stride through Hell’s Kitchen to Fountains, feeling as though he owned this part of town, confident in the nirvana of each day being the same as the last. But now, his day began by watching Joy walk away to enjoy their routine without him. She appeared unfaithful and, as she disappeared around the corner on to Tenth Avenue, a sickening realisation hit him: that this temporary set-up was going to run and run. The Boltons weren’t, by the look of it, going to die any time soon, and William’s working life might confine him to the attic for years. This was a prison sentence. George White had messed up, big time.

  He called Leo. ‘George White has screwed up!’ William announced, to Leo’s voicemail, then hit a wall with his plan of action, and hung up.

  Hell’s Kitchen lay beneath a clean cover of low, blinding cloud. Over New Jersey hung a drape of charcoal grey. The join in the weather hovered over the far bank of the Hudson and the city remained caught between winter and spring. A puddle of oil on the sidewalk reflected the characterless sky and a coil of blackened rope snaked through it. On the mesh fencing a sign in yellow and black advertised a two-day bodyguard-training course. From beneath the soles of William’s Cheltenham brogues, through the concrete and steel of the Dyer Avenue underpass, came the growl of engines in the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. He loved the noises of New York City by day, and was untroubled by them at night. He was lucky in that respect and thanked God for sound sleep. Beyond the NJ Transit parking lot, the lead patina roofline of the Croatian Catholic church reflected on the underside of the clouds, painting them a faded green. Further down 38th Street, a line of men pushing hot-dog trolleys emerged from a warehouse alley and headed into midtown. He counted them, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen in total, all of them a little beaten-up but sparkling chrome in the April sunshine as the car from Fountains turned the corner and pulled up beside him. Alone on the back seat, it dawned on him that without the walk to and from work, and his strolls around the store and to lunch, he might age rather rapidly. He let out a sudden breath, a combination of fear and disgust, and called Leo again.

  ‘What’s up? That message was not very… you,’ Leo said.

  ‘You got it?’

  ‘Just this second listened to it. George White is screwing you?’

  ‘Screwing up.’

  ‘Tell me, Will.’

  William looked at the back of the driver’s head. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Right…’ Leo said. ‘You mean you can’t because you can be overheard.’

  ‘Yes, I mean that.’

  ‘Let me speak to George for you.’

  ‘I don’t know…’ William said, and was on the very edge of accepting the offer when Leo said, ‘You know, it’s actually the idiot who made the complaint we need to speak to.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘George can’t change the fact that he’s told them you’re fired. But, given that you’re not fired, if the man who got you fired could be asked to have you reinstated, George doesn’t have to do anything, except let you go back to how it was. Think about it, Will.’

  William did just that, as he negotiated the abandoned torchlit stairwell. Although he welcomed the exercise, the climb had nearly killed Susan and she had not returned since. For that reason alone he now hated the 18th Street stairwell.

  He couldn’t get on with his work. His music collection offered up nothing he wanted to hear and he found himself gazing at Susan’s mattress and trying to mastermind a way of getting through the store and up through the office levels to his attic without being seen. Among the floral patterns of the bedding the idea came to him of going to see old Mrs Bolton, and not her son. He dismissed it as crazy. But that night he failed to make love to Joy for the first time in his life, and the next morning he felt car-sick on the way to the store. He savoured a cigarette at the small open window and blew smoke up towards the gods. The Promised Land was the place where nothing had changed and his lust for it so strong that he could see none of the reasons not to go see the old lady himself, to get reinstated in the job he had not lost.

  He dug out her letter, wrote down the address and, although taking the initiative did not sit comfortably with him, found himself loose on the streets, walking uncertainly from the store to return the universe to its axis, with the intention of stopping off at Complementary to talk it through with Joy.

  He stopped beneath the Port Authority bridge and buttoned up his jacket against the howl of trucks around and above him. Through the glass walls of the Project Find Seniors’ Day Centre, a woman mouthed into a microphone to elderly folk bowed over their bingo cards in a room of scattered plastic tables lit an epileptic green. It was so important to stay fit, he reminded himself, another good reason to walk the entire way to the old lady’s place and, he now decided, not stop to discuss this with Joy, who he suspected would talk him out of it.

  He had not thought through what he would say to Mrs Bolton, and his ability to go with the flow and riff this thing out was something he questioned as he tackled the saturnalia of construction in the backside of the Trump Tower. He was not one of life’s riffers. A billboard offered him luxury two- to five-bedroom residences starting at three million dollars. The air space was owned by a vast film poster for The Da Vinci Code. Nothing looked right to him on Central Park West. People talking on the sidewalk beside him sounded distant. A bus passed in silence. On
the walls of the Ethical Society he read an inscription, Dedicated to the ever-increasing knowledge and practice and love of the right, and the word right seemed to be testing him. He looked south to reassure himself that the lines of midtown remained straight and true. He reminded himself that a mere twenty blocks away was his wife and that all was well. But it was a little harder to breathe in this part of town, he was convinced of it. By his standards, he was at altitude.

  In an attempt to gather his thoughts, he took a seat in Le Pain Quotidien and was charmed by the interior as well as by the name, naturally, to an extent he would not have permitted had he known it was a franchise. He asked for an English breakfast tea.

  ‘We don’t have it, we have Brussels breakfast, it’s identical, in fact it’s actually more English if you know what I mean.’ His waiter was Eastern European and bookish and likeable.

  William smiled gratefully. ‘Thank you, that’ll be fine.’ When it arrived, his tea was in a pot, with a large bowl to drink from and a small bowl for the used teabag. William asked what he was supposed to drink out of and the waiter pointed to the large bowl. Foreseeing only awkwardness, William requested a cup and saucer.

  ‘We don’t have them.’

  ‘A mug?’

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘Anything with a handle?’

  ‘No, man, I’m sorry. It’s our thing.’

  ‘It’s fine. Thank you.’

  ‘You okay?’ the waiter asked.

  William looked confused. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re shaking.’

  ‘Am I? Well, I just need that tea, I guess.’

  A woman wheeled a buggy into the café. She was alone, and talking aloud. ‘He and I are simply not ever going to be compatible in that regard but need that be the end of the total world? What do you think? Because I think we have great synergy and there’s a great deal of harmony there despite how he sometimes likes to portray me and that’s a helluvalot to have together. And the other stuff, I mean, we can work on it or live without it or, you know, other people, whatever, but we are very secure together and have a great place we wouldn’t afford alone, and a good time. I don’t know what you think…’