‘I’m Richard.’
‘Don’t be angry about me leaving. I was never going to be one of life’s warriors,’ William said.
The man got up and rubbed his eyes. ‘Warriors or worriers?’ he asked.
‘Josef, is it all an impossible dream?’
‘Tonight,’ the man said, ‘I would say that yes, it is. Are you gonna be okay?’
‘I believe I am,’ William said.
‘You should get back to bed.’ The man walked away.
William watched Josef cross the street in front of him. A train drew up in the middle of 44th Street and Josef boarded it. The train headed out to the slopes surrounding Manhattan, where it stopped and Josef disembarked to join other men on monochrome hills. The men were in black and white and the fields were toneless also, bedecked by beautiful long grey meadow grass, thick and musty like horse hair. Josef Potter mowed the grass with a hand-pushed lawn mower, then stopped to converse with another man. They looked easy and content together, and familiar. Men on deckchairs were scattered across the hills, looking down on the city with their legs stretched out in front of them and their hands clasped behind their head. The wild grass brushed against their ankles and the tips of the grass looked beautiful in the light which was moonlight and sunlight, and all the men were dead.
William watched them from the bench on the sidewalk and could not understand where between Hoboken and Union City these rolling hills above Manhattan could be, and why had he never noticed them before in all the years. Then came the pain again, in ripples that moved vertically through him, and the wild sweating of his scalp and face that melted him to his knees on the sidewalk. He felt a sadness deep and desperate and in supplication he asked one last favour of his God, to take away the pain.
He shuffled away through the embryonic drone of midtown at five in the morning. The low slate clouds smouldered with light poisoning. He took a bottle of Poland Spring from a garbage can and dregged it. He knew where he was going.
A pocket of wind was trapped in the empty lot alongside Susan French’s building. William picked his way through the trash and sat at the foot of an old cedar tree in a patch of yard behind the four-storey building where a bowl of exotic fruit sat in the kitchen window of the uppermost apartment, while the woman who had placed the fruit there lay her head and her mane of walnut hair on to William’s hospital pillow and sobbed and screamed out for her sweetheart.
26
Jack sat bolt upright in bed. The room was still black. He couldn’t see himself but he felt wide awake. Slowly, the trace of a dark garden appeared through the window. He raised his hand up in front of him and against the grey outlines of the window he could make out the movement of his fingers and he was more aware of himself existing than he had ever been, and less critical of it. He felt good. He felt great. In fact, he felt horny.
He lay back and watched the darkness, and recalled the finest sex he and Holly had had in their four years together. At least, he considered it their best sex, but he was, as in all matters, ready to hear the other side’s point of view. Indeed, a conversation with Holly about sex would be welcome. They had sex often enough – just about, at a push – but they never spoke about it. And who was he kidding? It was not often enough.
Their superlative union had, in his opinion, been that which occurred on the night he introduced her to curry. She had never eaten in an Indian restaurant and Jack had put great thought into taking her, for he loved curry and did not want this potential shared pleasure to be stillborn in any old curry house on 6th Street. He took her to Dawat, Madhur Jaffrey’s establishment, and when they got home she told him she had been pleasantly surprised by the food and would be pleasantly surprised if he were to join her in the shower. They hadn’t had a drink, so exactly which constituent ingredient of her sarson ka sag and murgh jahangiri triggered Holly’s abandon was not clear, but Jack lived in the hope that they would stumble upon it again.
He patted his clothes until he found his phone. It was five in the morning, too early to text Holly. He felt fantastic but he needed fresh air. He needed to walk. He dressed and found Stefano Parker asleep on the recliner, his hands folded across the remote control. Jack tiptoed past him and took a bunch of bananas out into the morning with him. He was ravenous again. The previous evening’s late-night movie feast was a hazy memory, as was the day that had preceded it.
The tastefully soft, community-endorsed street-lights of Long Beach glowed gentle green on the street, making the residents feel safe without disturbing their sleep. Jack ate the first banana and tossed the skin aside. It was the first piece of litter West Olive Street had seen in a long while, the first time Jack had littered in a long while, and the first time Ann Parker had seen such a thing from her bedroom window on the many mornings she had woken prematurely and kept vigil for anything of note outside. She watched Jack head down the street, and kept watching, without focus, even after he had gone. She washed her face even though it was too early and she went downstairs. She woke her husband and packed him off to bed, thanked him for protecting her. She had the place to herself. It would seem crazy to Stefano if he knew, but she liked these pre-dawn hours when she could walk around the open-plan alone without bumping into him.
The curved sky above the silent ocean bore a hint of colour, a dread deep blue that was enough to silhouette a ramp slanting from the boardwalk to the beach and the glide of a lone cormorant. Jack felt the oxygen break through his constricted breathing for the first time in weeks and, out of nowhere, the sight of the bird pushed him close to tears. He removed his shoes and walked on to the sand, which was cold beneath his feet. He glimpsed white where the waves were breaking and for a moment he was fishing beside his father and the world was theirs alone. He remembered a cormorant floating effortlessly across the water in the good times he and his father had spent at the reservoir before Finn’s birth transformed his mother and she descended from them. Miraculously, his memories of his parents were good ones. He had not forgotten the rest, of course he hadn’t, but he had wired himself to remember the good things – always the cormorant above the water, never the body found beneath it.
He sat on the sand and waited for the day to catch him up. If Finn hadn’t come to New York he’d not have the sand between his toes. If Finn weren’t alive, he’d be alone with Holly, and that would be alone indeed. If he let Finn slip away from him now, what would become of him? He heard a faint rumble and saw the shape of a man jogging with a three-wheeled pram. Jack walked on, his shoes hanging from one hand, the bananas from the other. Benches lined the boardwalk, hundreds of them, shoulder to shoulder. He sat on one and watched the sun come up. The bench was strewn with green and sky-blue ribbons, with origami rabbits and Easter eggs. A brass plaque read;
IRWIN MIAMI SHANE
I can see clearly now that lucky old son!
So whistle up a happy tune, fan our worries away
And watch over the monkey boys
831 forever, Susie
Tennis anyone?
Container ships appeared in silhouette on the horizon and the yawning ocean sky was redolent of the Sussex Levels back home. But Jack’s home was a sensation, not a place, something that had passed and left nothing to hold on to except for his brother, and that was like holding on to smoke. He watched the hue of the ocean change. He felt vivid, close to joy, close to tears. He shut his eyes, to prevent the waves breaking over him. He ate. In time, a warmth laced itself into a delicate, indecisive breeze which nudged him towards sleep but left him short of it, in the rare extravagance of a temporarily quiescent mind. There was no clock ticking, no thoughts or ideas. Just a dormant brain and a feeling of effervescence through his body and his blood and the vividness of daybreak and the hunger for food and a hunger he couldn’t name that teetered on the edge of happiness and lament.
When Jack opened his eyes he saw a woman lying flat on the sand, washed up overnight by a bone-dry sea. Her feet were bare and her sleeves rolled up, a cautious prelude to summer
. She smoked a cigarette. Two rangy adolescent boys stood in wetsuits talking to each other as they studied the shore break. They swam out on their boards and went through the motions on miniature, slow-peeling waves and dreamed of Mavericks and of older girls. Later, a family of Hasidic Jews stepped tentatively on to the sand as if it were the surface of the moon. The father beckoned his children and his wife to follow him. He played frisbee with his son while the mother sat with her four daughters. One of the girls stared with a look of enchantment at a woman in a striped sweater kneeling on the sand with her back pressed against the boardwalk wall, learning lines from a script. She gesticulated as she read. Then she ate fruit for breakfast and poured a drink from a flask, and Jack licked his lips at the thought of tea. Planes flew low and vast across the water and glinted silver in the sunlight as they turned to JFK. Jack walked down to the ocean edge and threw water over his head and face. The taste of salt quickened his thirst and he yearned for tea the way it tasted in the kitchen first thing on a schoolday morning, when he would be the only one up and would make a pot of strong brew for himself and his parents before he woke his brother and got him ready.
He walked back to West Olive Street, where Dilly’s mum was up, watching the street from the kitchen sink in her dressing gown. She offered him coffee and he asked for strong tea with a modesty and politeness that reinvented him in her eyes. She put two tea bags into the mug and studiously tried to fathom why any man would want to take a walk so early. Jack washed his face again over the sink and she handed him a towel. She took the plastic measuring cap from the draining board and measured out a 5ml dose of cough medicine.
‘Thank you,’ Jack said, ‘but it should be 20ml.’
‘Five,’ she said. ‘Look.’ She showed him the bottle. He read the label. This was strong stuff. Nuclear, as Eddy the doorman had said.
‘5ml every four hours,’ Ann repeated. ‘You really do not want to be overdoing this stuff.’
‘Would you call 20ml every hour overdoing it?’
She was too busy joining yesterday’s dots to reply. Jack watched the little expressions play across her face. ‘And on an empty stomach,’ he added.
‘No wonder you seemed a little…’ Her voice trailed off. She looked at him, apologetically, but was met by Jack’s smile and his kind, sane, gentle eyes looking at her. He laughed under his breath.
‘Crazy,’ she allowed herself to say, to her amazement.
He handed the cap back to her. ‘I think I’ll give it a miss.’
He took his tea to the couch and sat there. It tasted strong and good. She had sweetened it without asking. He looked out of the window at the trees in the garden. Everything still appeared vivid and unusually clear and the house seemed like a glass cube. His body was tingling and he felt light. The view seemed three-dimensional, the markings of the tree bark animal. Ann sat beside him on the couch. They watched the garden together. She looked down at her own legs, and at his legs, at the aubergine velour of the couch beneath them. She and Stefano had bought the couch from Kohl’s in Jefferson City eighteen years ago. She had wanted it instantly because it was deep and swallowed them up, and they had bounced up and down next to each other in front of an easily embarrassed salesman. She had pictured herself and Stefano sharing the couch into their old age but as they left the store Stefano saw his huge, fully reclining TV chair and fell in love with it. He bought it there and then. Now that she thought about it, she couldn’t be sure that they had ever sat on the couch together.
She looked at Jack, and found him looking at the glimpse of her breasts in the fold of her dressing gown. They moved towards each other in unison, kissed and groped and began to undress each other. They froze on hearing movement in the house, pulled their clothing back into place and sat motionless, side by side, in stunned silence. Finn ambled in, shuffling his feet across the carpet in that sleepy way Finn had always had and Jack had heard so many times.
‘Good morning,’ Finn said, and smiled, and scratched the back of his neck.
Breakfast on West Olive Street was a muted occasion that particular morning, with Stefano still asleep in bed and Ann hidden beneath trousers, a polo neck and a sleeveless puffa jacket. Her English guests ate grapefruit halves with serrated spoons. Stefano’s halved fruit sat at the head of the table beneath a glass dome fit for a holy relic. The phone rang and Ann hot-footed it across the open-plan to grab the receiver.
Finn leaned across to his brother. ‘You okay? There’s a funny atmosphere.’
Jack shrugged, which was suspicious. A shrug meant who cares or I dunno, and Jack never meant either of those things.
Stefano shuffled in and joined his wife at the phone. He patted down his hair and re-belted his dressing gown and looked at Ann with the who-is-it expression. She ended the call, ignored her husband and returned to the breakfast table. Through pursed lips she squeezed out the news that Dilly was not going to be coming at all this weekend. This did not shock Finn. Ann ate her grapefruit as though it were a lemon, then took her bowl to the kitchen.
Jack smiled politely over Finn’s shoulder at Stefano, who had his bare feet planted firmly in the thick carpet and stood scowling in the general direction of the dining table.
‘Morning, sir…’ Jack said, weakly.
Finn turned. ‘Good morning.’
Stefano grunted. He looked both confused and hacked off. Ann carried the coffee jug to the table and the house settled into that particular strained atmosphere which resulted from an Italian-American man in a foul mood breathing nasally at a nervous wife who had recently been interrupted while experiencing the first competent caressing of her breasts for more than a decade.
‘So,’ Stefano summarised, ‘your girlfriend’s not coming for the weekend.’ He leaned back and placed his hands on his hips. It was a gesture that suggested they fuck off out of his house. Jack needed no second invitation, Ann’s presence was freaking him out. Finn looked inside his grapefruit husk for the strength to accept that he would not retrieve the Hemingway book this weekend. He tried to tell himself it didn’t matter. Was there anything in it he couldn’t admit to?
Fuck it. He didn’t care. He was not ashamed of the book, and it was time to get out of here.
‘And who the hell is Naomi Wolf?’ Stefano asked.
‘No idea,’ said Finn.
‘A political writer,’ said Jack.
‘Why?’ said Ann.
Stefano clasped his temples. ‘Your daughter sent me an incomprehensible text message just now, it woke me up… said she was quoting Naomi Wolf. Were they at school? Was she that girl with the moustache?’
Jack patted the napkin against his lips and whined, ‘I’m gonna wet myself.’
Finn used his napkin too. ‘Let’s split.’
Jack pointed to the bedrooms. ‘We’re going now. Just grab our stuff.’
Ann could barely contain her whimpering gratitude. Finn grinned at her and then at Stefano, and followed Jack out of the room. The boys returned instantly, bags slung over their shoulders. ‘Thank you so much,’ they said, in unrehearsed unison, and walked out.
Stefano stared at the door and at the porch, long after the English men had gone, perplexed and thrilled by the abruptness of their exit.
‘No…’ Ann said.
‘No, what?’ Stefano asked.
‘What, dear?’
‘No? No what?’
She shrugged. ‘No… nothing.’
‘Sorry, what?’ Stefano scratched his balls. One of the pleasures of a guest-free house.
‘You’re tired,’ she said.
They drank coffee, at first in silence, and then with a soft, restful conversation in which they blamed Dilly for it all. It soothed them. They knew where they were when they were blaming her. Stefano returned to bed and Ann sat at the table, and remained there, staring at the bottle of cough medicine on the sink.
At the far end of West Olive Street, Finn and Jack stopped to take a look at their options. From a vantage point two blocks north
of them on West Park Avenue, a seventy-three-year-old woman pausing for breath saw them silhouetted against the glistening ocean, their bodies defocused and fluid against the silver-black swells of water, their limbs made loose and lithe like a paper cut-out of young boys playing on a beach, somewhere in the past. And it reminded her of a time by Kachess Lake with people she could no longer remember clearly, before she came east to find fame.
The boys looked northwards to the main strip, where the Manhattan train beckoned and the spring heat rose from the tracks and an elderly woman leant against her shopping trolley looking at them.
‘We in a hurry?’ Finn asked. ‘I haven’t seen the sea.’
‘No hurry.’
On West Penn Street, the red-brick tile-roofed houses and the crown of thorns ornamental trees and the lush lawns and spring bulbs and the country-style porches with swingchairs and shutters and the white-haired couple playing with their grandchildren made the morning seem a little unreal to Finn, and it struck him that Dilly’s parents had moved here twenty years prematurely. A girl cycled no-handed down the middle of National Boulevard, leaning back and slapping her palms against her thighs, and reminding Jack of the bike he owned as a child, of shouting Look, no hands! and of his mother applying sticking plaster one-handed, holding her glass in the other hand. The fire hydrants of Long Beach were painted the same pale blue as her nails. Against one there was a placard: LONG BEACH TEACHERS DESERVE A FAIR CONTRACT. The same slogan was tied to the railings on the seafront. Bikes and rollerblades were discarded at angles and in layers on the edge of the boardwalk. On the beach, volleyball nets were being erected. An elderly man trudged across the sand with a bright smile that didn’t belong to his gait. Screams of pleasure rose like buffeted balloons into the air. A woman kite-buggied across the firmest stretch of beach and four thick-set Italian men in Lacoste discussed her technique.
On the dunes beneath the boardwalk there was no litter where there might have been, no rolled-up sleeping bags or soiled blankets, only the dots and slivers of sunlight breaking through the decking above on to pristine sand. This, Finn suspected, was not a town that tolerated waifs or strays. He watched his big brother wander down to the surf and stare at the sea. Above him, the planes were slow and heavy and low in the mute blue sky.
Men Like Air Page 29