‘Where is Finn?’ the boy said.
‘Finn has gone away for the weekend,’ Leo said.
‘Is he looking for his mummy?’
Leo smiled at the idea. ‘No.’
‘Does Finn miss you this weekend?’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Leo said.
‘Is your plate empty?’ The boy peered at the table.
‘Yes,’ Leo said.
‘’Scuse me. Don’t you want to stay and talk with me?’
‘I would like to, but I have to go.’
‘’Scuse me, are you going to go soon?’
‘Soon, yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I have to get on with my day.’
‘’Scuse me, is this your day?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Why are you going?’
‘I’ve lots to do.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m busy, I guess.’
The boy leapt to his feet and marched away. Leo watched as he stopped at each table and used his white stick to count the number of diners at the table. When he found another lone diner, the boy sat down opposite her and began to talk.
From over Leo’s shoulder came a woman’s voice. ‘You’re an angel.’ Leo turned to the woman. She smiled at him and momentarily placed a hand on his shoulder. She was his age and, like himself, more stylish than most of the other diners. She had swept back hair, greying elegantly. ‘The way you talked to that young man.’
‘I don’t have a son,’ Leo said, and turned away, back to the din of the room. He needed some air. He had a bad feeling.
At the base of the vast stone platforms supporting the Manhattan Bridge the water seemed to boil in the currents. At the water’s edge a man in shorts, the first pair Leo had seen this spring, spoke into a cellphone while walking a corgi with a wide pink fake diamond-studded collar and a pink lead. If he had known how to use the camera on his cell, he would have taken a picture. On Jack Street, Leo watched a film crew loading gear into a warehouse building. A plume of black smoke rose from the roof of the building into the blue. A young guy with a goatee beard in a Belstaff coat held a walkie-talkie to his lips, muttered, ‘Oh, shit, you serious? I hope we’re insured,’ and broke into nervous laughter. Fire crews arrived as Leo moved on. In Fulton Park, people lay flat out on the boardwalk in the sun and a Chinese bride and groom posed for photographs.
Leo noted his lack of fitness as he walked the incline between the waterfront and the Brooklyn Bridge. One of the benefits of being irretrievably single, he felt, was dispensing with any resolutions to get fit. In Cadman Plaza, he was drawn to the drumming of a woodpecker. He crossed the lawn to the periphery of a crowd looking up into the treetops. Leo watched the children, their bodies arched backwards at the will of their supple necks, their mouths hanging open. It was easy to tell the ones who could see the bird from the ones who couldn’t, and the ones pretending they could when they couldn’t. He would never be a father. This most obvious and least new of facts barged in on his day and hit him like a slow-moving vehicle, and, somehow, left him shocked all over again.
He had last walked across the Brooklyn Bridge in 1995, when he broke up with Rachel Stuart. He had walked across it in order to break up with her. ‘You don’t accept that anyone like me would choose you out of everyone in New York City,’ Rachel Stuart had shouted, across the bridge. ‘And that’s why you’re fucked!’ He looked now through the cables to the Housing Corp where, he was pretty sure, Finn lived. He saw a flash of silver on the bridge from the N Train loaded with every woman he had slept with and studiously avoided making pregnant, and he saw the magnificent city stacked up behind the Housing Corp and he imagined Finn on the streets below and pictured the calm perfection of Gramercy Park and wondered if he had devoted his adult life to the art of missing a trick.
The Queen Mary 2 was docked in Red Hook and reminded Leo of his and Joy’s arrival. The thought of his sister became the thought of William, alone in a hospital bed. His stomach turned. He took hold of the cables and closed his eyes and the bridge drifted downriver. He heard his breathing above the city, and the wisps of river air cupping his face, and he envisaged a day when Finn ran a gallery for him through his young, naïve eyes. Leo would attach one sole condition: that Finn only take on artists who knew how to draw and how to paint, people who knew what they were doing and who had ideas, for there was one thing Leo could not abide, and that was the so-called subversion of artistic craft by those who had none. But all that was for the future, on the unlikely chance that Finn would want to remain with Leo. But, if he didn’t, there were other Finns out there, and it was Leo’s job to find them and inspire them to do something, any little interesting thing with their life. He could do all this and remain a coward, a coward in residence at One Lex, a coward with lots of lovely art, and many books, a man who helped himself and helped others. And he would call Finn’s gallery ‘The Little Thief’ and he would only take twenty-five per cent. Or, maybe thirty-five. To be decided.
He opened his eyes. He took the small vibrating object from his pocket and from it came the calm of his sister’s voice, telling him that William was dead.
29
Jack seemed to have returned to his former self. This was less entertaining for Finn, but something of a relief. They stood on the sun-flooded platform at Jamaica, waiting for a connection. Nearby, an old man – he seemed impossibly old to both of them – leaned heavily against his walker. Finn watched the man, how his every breath seemed to threaten his balance, and decided that, if Huggy Bear had lived to be a hundred, this was him. Jack watched the old man too, saw him as a character who had slipped out of the pages of a James Baldwin book, into the outside world where he could not die and his face and body were forever ageing into a collapsed, wrinkled newborn heap. Jack stared, and the certainty and inconceivability of growing old commenced battle inside his head and left him unable to react when the old man rocked on his heels and lost hold of the walker. Finn moved fluidly, instinctively, beautifully across the ground, and as the old man fell backwards Finn ghosted beneath him and cradled the fall of his hard, dead, skeletal weight. Jack saw it all in slow motion, frozen, as if every setting in him prevented him moving towards drama. He watched his baby brother, seeing but not quite comprehending the certainty of Finn’s strength and compassion.
The stale smell of the old man’s blazer rose to Finn’s nose as the man’s wrinkled, cadmium-black neck arched backwards and his mouth fell open. In the strange, suspended silence, Finn asked himself if this was death, then heard a slow, raking breath in the old man’s throat. The old man’s eyes opened and then a smile, and somewhere beneath it the distant echo of his deep, husky laughter, and he shaped his swollen, desperate lips into an O and puffed out a long breath.
‘You take it easy,’ Finn soothed. He lay his large, muscular, high-veined hand on the old man’s cheekbone and pressed his thumb into the gentle dip where the man’s nose rose to his forehead, and all the while Jack watched in awe. The man’s smile was moist and helpless. He looked up at Finn with a baby’s trust.
‘What’s your name?’ Finn asked, as people closed in on the scene.
‘Amiri.’
‘Amiri?’
‘You got it,’ the old man whispered.
‘You want to get back on your feet, Amiri, or just die on us here?’
‘I’ll stick around.’
‘Anyone we can call?’
‘Twenty-six grandchildren.’
‘That’s a start.’
‘You holding me or hugging me?’ Amiri said.
‘Oh… hugging you,’ Finn replied.
There were eleven of them. Jack counted them later. Eleven of them in the photograph he took with his phone. Eleven grinning faces, gathered on a platform bench. At the centre of them, Amiri, an extraordinarily timeworn man leaning forward with a smile that could swallow the hardest heart, aimed straight between Jack’s eyes. Next to Amiri, Jack’s baby brother. Finn and the old man holding
hands. Finn’s mouth open in speech, his face blurred slightly in motion as he called out to Jack to get on with it. Around them, the group of men and women who had descended on the scene of the old man’s fall, slower than Finn, quicker than Jack. All smiles and laughing, in Jack’s direction, the ones laughing at how precise Jack was being, those who laughed when Finn said he was Prince Harry and the ones who believed him, all of them waiting for Amiri Morrison’s granddaughter to arrive. Jack stared at the photo most of the way home.
His stretch of East 94th Street was bathed in warm, spring afternoon hues, the beauty of the light in his south-and west-facing apartment a lucky accident that was lost on him. He could have lived in a basement.
He had never gone to bed this early in New York City, not for illness or lust. Finn placed a tray on Jack’s lap and seemed eager to leave. There was chicken and rice and stir-fried vegetables in a bowl and buttered bread.
‘Eat, then sleep,’ Finn said.
‘It didn’t occur to me you could cook.’ Jack’s voice was weak.
‘Of course it didn’t.’
‘It looks bloody good.’
‘See you later.’
‘Where you going?’
‘Out. Take a look at something.’
‘But you’re coming back here for the night. You’re staying here.’ The words fell perfectly between instruction and invitation.
Finn went to the apartment door. ‘Hey, Jack?’ he called out.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think I’m a little shit?’
‘No. Why?’
Finn reappeared in the bedroom doorway. ‘You said to Dilly’s dad that I could be a little shit.’
There was a little silence.
‘You have been; you aren’t any more.’
‘How have I been a shit?’
‘Oh… you know…’
‘No, I don’t.’
There was silence.
‘So… so… quiet. So… cold to Mum and Dad when they let us down. Totally unforgiving of them. They were just weak people. Your silences… that lasted for weeks and engulfed us all and made them so sad. The unspoken way you made clear you could live without them. Your rejection of all my help.’
‘What help? You fucked off and just sent me money.’
‘I’m a guy in my twenties, Finn. I don’t know what to do. I have no clue what to do for you. I’m an orphan too. I just want a brother.’ He had wanted to say that aloud for three years. Longer. For more than a decade. But he had not envisaged saying it to Finn. ‘I have a little money, nothing else to give.’
‘Plenty else,’ Finn said. ‘I don’t care about money. Just be there.’
‘Okay, but don’t punish me with silence the moment I fuck up.’
‘Okay,’ Finn said, making it sound so simple.
‘Do you think I’m boring?’
‘What?’
‘You told Dilly’s parents I was boring, while I was brushing my teeth.’
‘You can remember that?’
‘Do you?’
‘No.’
They stood in silence for some moments.
‘Yeah. You’re boring,’ Finn said. ‘This weekend you impersonated a crack addict, forced a God-fearing couple to watch Marlon Brando slam butter up a woman’s arse, and fell into a lasagne. Dullasfuck.’ He pointed at Jack’s food, ‘Eat it, I’m off.’
‘I’m going to ask Holly to marry me.’
Finn hesitated before returning to the bed and stabbing Jack’s fork upright into the food. ‘Eat,’ he said. ‘And don’t ask your girlfriend to marry you just because you’re freaked out about copping off with Mrs Parker.’
Jack went to deny it but stopped himself. He stared at the wall in front of him, the bare wall. He slumped. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s not a brilliant idea.’
‘Eat. Sleep. Don’t propose to anyone.’ Finn left.
It was only Finn’s second ride on the 7 Train out of Manhattan but it already felt familiar. He sat twisted in his seat waiting for the train to take the subterranean slope and strike daylight. When the view of Manhattan’s elegant outstretched body arrived, it stirred Finn’s sense of quest and he pressed his face to the smeared window of the carriage.
He decided against going into Kay’s Place café to use the restroom and regretted it by the time he reached the cemetery. He picked his way towards the western slope where the underbellies of planes descending towards La Guardia grated against the cemetery sky and he sought out a suitable spot to relieve himself. The ground was harder than he had allowed for and he watched as the contours of dry earth directed his piss in rivulets downhill to a family tomb that bore the name Corleone. He darted forward, overtook himself and kicked dry earth and twigs in the path of the stream, diverting it towards the Irish dead, of whom he had no movie-fuelled fear.
He went again to the highest point, and this time saw what he had been blind to on his first visit: that, allowing for the passing of forty years, in which the trees had doubled in size, he had possibly found the spot. The 1970 of the photograph was long gone. This was the view in 2006. This was his view. And for some reason it mattered. He didn’t have the mind to decipher why, only the instincts and bloody-mindedness to have found the place, a sea of souls laid out on the edge of the city which they had fashioned. The living and the dead. He had simply needed to see them together, and to find it for himself, to not be told.
This evening, New York City was the lyrics of a song written especially for him. They had deeper meaning for him than for anyone else; he was in communion with them as no other person could be. He took from his pocket the throwaway underwater camera Dilly loathed so deeply and took aim.
30
William’s diary was a plain brown notebook given by Fountains to all their employees each Christmas. Austere in design, the diary was redolent of the costume drama ironmonger shops springing up across lower Manhattan. Leo dismissed these shops on account of being able to remember when ironmongers just looked like this naturally. Now, basic goods like brooms, kitchen scissors, dishcloths and, yes, slim, plain notebooks, were sold for small fortunes in showrooms designed with a blend of prohibition era asceticism and what Dilly might have called a ‘Nordic-y, Wallpaper*-magaziney sorta feel’. The copywriters, creative directors, architects and designers who made Leo wealthy kept these shops in business.
Leo leafed through the feint-lined pages. The first four months of William’s 2006, the last of his life, had the same three weekly entries in his impeccable, miniature handwriting: the anti-drugs vigil, Susan French, the Victimless Crime meeting. The one exception to the routine was a quote from Voltaire: To doubt is uncomfortable, but certainty is absurd, scribbled in a weak, hospitalised scrawl, two days before he died.
Momentarily, Leo could not remember if he was in his apartment or at the gallery or in Madame Claudine’s café, but hints of vanilla told him. He raised his eyes and saw Willow gliding between the tables, saw guided missiles hugging the contours of the landscapes they were sent to destroy, and after that the nauseating sadness of William returned.
Finn arrived and followed Leo’s waning gaze. ‘Have you spoken to her yet?’
Leo glanced across the café at Willow and pulled an unconvincing expression of indifference. He slipped William’s diary into his pocket and lavished attention on his cup and saucer. ‘No, I haven’t, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that –’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘I haven’t said anything yet.’
‘You’re always wrong when you talk about her.’ Finn smiled, and Leo laughed under his breath and shook his head. ‘Talk to her,’ Finn said. ‘It’s simple.’
Nothing, Leo reflected, as he and Finn walked to work, was simple. But, the boy was finding the mating game easy right now so why spoil it for him? Leo too had found it easy once.
The winter had finally given up on Manhattan. The streets had turned the tables and were emanating heat. Leo remembered how he had relished th
e way Manhattan sweated in summer when he first experienced it. It reminded him of plentiful lovemaking with interesting, creative women. The only thing he could not recall was what the hell they had seen in him.
Astrid greeted Leo with a pained compassion which Finn noticed but did not understand. ‘You okay?’ she grimaced.
Finn studied Leo’s reply for clues.
‘I’m fine, thank you, Astrid, thank you,’ the older man said, ushering her concern away. He went to his office and beckoned Finn to follow. Inside, he sat the boy down and told him that his brother-in-law had died. He told him that he had decided to buy one of Dot Yi’s 3-D paintings from the Bovenkamp Gallery opposite, as a way of a marking the moment, an extravagance to cheer himself up.
Finn listened carefully and told Leo he was very sorry. But death was a eunuch that had lost its power to shock Finn. The big news was Leo’s ability to buy a thirty-thousand-dollar painting with loose change. Astrid joined them, leaning heavily against the doorframe to monitor the degree of confidence passing between her boss and her junior colleague.
‘You’re going to spend thirty thousand dollars on a painting, just like that?’ Finn said.
Leo smiled apologetically. ‘He’ll take twenty-four thousand from me.’
Finn began to speak but stopped himself. ‘Could…’
‘What?’ Leo asked.
‘Nothing,’ Finn said.
‘Maybe,’ Astrid said, ‘Finn wants to offer some sympathy for your loss, instead of talking about money? Yes, Finn, that’s right, paintings are expensive, a nurse’s wage for a year, we know, you’ve said that before. We get it. The price of art is disgusting. Get over it! You think it’s all crap but you’re being paid from the proceeds.’
Astrid walked away. Finn and Leo shared a wry smile.
‘You want sympathy?’ Finn asked.
‘Not really. It’s irritating.’
‘I agree. Which one are you going to buy?’
‘Number eight. What d’you reckon?’
Finn shrugged. ‘I like ’em all. They all look pretty much the same to me, but eight’s a good number.’
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