Men Like Air

by Connolly, Tom

  31

  Joy called Leo at seven in the morning. Her voice was girlish and evangelical. ‘Leo, I have realised something. He is blameless. He died when he went under that truck. That is when he left us. What happened after that was not William and I will not have any reference made to it.’ She asked him to go with her to the Club after work that evening. ‘I know it’s so not your thing, but –’

  But of course he said he’d go with her.

  They walked hand in hand, silently. Leo curled his free hand into a loose grip. At a certain biting point, where the muscles in his hand contracted as far as they could without registering there was nothing there, the tension in his palm and fingers created the illusion of the weight of William’s hand in his, if you chose to believe it.

  The Club was empty. Joy had chosen her moment carefully. They sat at the back, in ornate pews veneered a sickly orange that did not do justice to the timber, and angled to encourage their bodies to slide off the seat on to their knees. She bowed her head in prayer and Leo raised his to the roof beams. A chandelier of energy-efficient bulbs illuminated nothing but themselves, and the barest sheen of light coated the empty pews. Dust danced in the beams of early evening sun that licked the soundless altar. Leo studied the stained glass. He was no expert, but this place struck him as post-William Jay Bolton, probably the work of one of a WJB’s great admirers, recreating his style under his living nose. Leo had no issue with the followers, those who were inspired by the greats to be versions of them. It was a wonderful thing, to have the dedication and the craft to follow, the modesty to be a version. Not everyone could be the genius, the creator of something new. The followers deserved admiration and thanks, the originators awe and the lion’s share of the money, although Leo knew it often didn’t work that way.

  Leo was doing his best to appear comfortable and it amused his sister. She asked him where they should put the ashes. ‘I mean, I think you’ll go there more than me so it must be somewhere you love.’

  He shrugged, lost for ideas.

  ‘I never gave it any thought,’ she said. ‘I presumed we’d die together.’

  She didn’t pray for long. Memories, anger, the splintered glass of disbelief at being a widow, made it impossible. The reality of William’s departure was a repeating blow to the stomach, immune to her grit. She squeezed Leo’s hand as he studied the corners of the church where the light dissipated to nothingness and gave a saturated intensity to the colours of the banners and to the texture of the side altar. Leo thought of John Piper’s Romney Marsh churches, even of Kuniyoshi’s women and, in the gloomiest parts of the place, of Tisnikar. Colour without light. He was seeing paintings in everything, once more.

  Joy watched her brother’s face and saw something at work in him again, a glimpse of the keen mind that had consumed and deciphered and admired the visual information it was fed. She had never been in the Club out of hours before and was grateful for the nearest thing to silence life could offer her nowadays. They were both discovering that loss stuck to every part of a person and could only be ignored for so many moments at a time, for as long as a couple of stiff drinks and a few hours’ sleep afforded, for the length of one of Finn and Astrid’s same-room different-planet conversations, for the few seconds upon waking before they each remembered it all anew and his disappearance flooded back into them. William.

  The best way they had both stumbled upon to forget the undertow of grief pulling at their ankles was to torment themselves with the chance of it all, to imagine someone saying to the driver of that truck, ‘Let’s say Wednesday instead of Thursday,’ or, ‘Take 68th Street, not 72nd.’ Torture was preferable to acceptance. It kept William close and their minds busy enough with the fact of his death to make them disengage from the truth of it. In this way, Leo and Joy were, without consulting or knowing it, swimming again in the same DNA.

  The clear view of nothingness that William had spied beneath that truck played on Joy’s mind but she discovered she could talk herself out of it. She knew he was possibly right about what he had seen, and she respected his greater experience in the matter now that he was gone, having not respected it at all when he was alive, such was the beatification afforded the dead. She doubted it made any difference.

  They left the Club and she said that she doubted she’d return.

  Leo was surprised.

  ‘I mean, I’ll go somewhere else. Where I’m anonymous. Maybe somewhere more traditional. Maybe nowhere.’

  They walked back to the apartment arm in arm. She told him that the idea of a oneness that lasted forever remained a good idea, a clever one, a fine escort through life. She wasn’t prepared to abandon it merely on the grounds of its being fictitious. To die in hope was possibly good enough – hadn’t William said so himself, when he was high as a kite?

  To Leo’s ear, all her doubt and compromise sounded very healthy indeed.

  ‘I need a drink,’ she said, and found her own high, a lovely, strange, out-of-focus buzz, walking along a busy Tenth Avenue on this spring day with her thoughts a blur. ‘I feel very safe,’ she added.

  ‘You are,’ he said.

  ‘I think of this as Clinton now. Hell’s Kitchen was where my beautiful William lived. It no longer exists.’

  As was the pattern in these early days, she drank a little, fell asleep quickly and woke an hour later, close to midnight. She had thought about other men when William was in hospital but did so no longer, now that her late husband was restored to perfection in death. She walked lightly around the apartment so as not to wake Leo on the couch. At five past midnight, with the living room window open and offering up to her the final fresh breezes the city would allow for some months, she no longer wanted to live here and wondered if she might have Leo’s spare room at One Lex to come back to if she went on some trips. She leaned out to get a glimpse of the Empire State Building, remembered the first time she and William had seen this view, shoulder to shoulder at this window. From that moment, they had been committed to another – this one, when he or she would look at the view alone – and she recognised the expertise people possessed to treat death as something pertaining to everyone but themselves. Even now, she realised, even bereft of William, she was relieved not to be the dead one.

  When Leo woke, it was because Joy was tapping his arm. ‘Leo, Leo…’ She was kneeling on the floor, staring at him, a Tupperware food box on her lap. She looked like a little sister with a big idea. ‘Come with me,’ she whispered.

  He hauled himself off the couch, dressed and watched her place the food box carefully in a backpack. He knew what was inside. ‘That can’t be all of him,’ he said.

  ‘No, just a little bit. Over time we’ll put him everywhere.’

  He followed her, walking in her slipstream through the empty first hour, to the city’s most famous attraction.

  ‘You don’t do heights,’ he said.

  She replied, ‘You don’t do cliché, yet here we are, about to throw William off the Empire State Building.’

  She ascended to a height for the first time in a quarter of a century, her vertigo disarmed by the greater force of grief, her hand gripping Leo’s. She stepped out into the chill, thin air but kept close to the side of the building. She removed the backpack and handed Leo the container.

  ‘You go do it. I can’t go to the edge.’

  He looked out at the night sky to feel the direction of the breeze. ‘I need to go round to the next side,’ he said.

  She smiled and nodded.

  ‘You want to come?’

  She shook her head. ‘You do it for me. I don’t need to watch.’

  He walked purposefully away, concentrated on doing the job right and keeping an eye out for the staff, whose reaction he could not predict and wished to avoid. He found an empty section of the lookout and took the lid off and in one smooth, confident action held the box out over the drop and tipped it. The ashes caught the breeze perfectly, swooped then flew gracefully away. He spoke William’s name under his
breath then heard the shuffle of Joy’s feet as she appeared round the corner, staying away from the edge. He smiled at her, with tears in his eyes.

  ‘I want to go now,’ he said, softly. ‘It’s too sad.’

  ‘Wait for me on the street,’ she said. ‘I’m going to go once round. I wanna do it.’

  He made an expression to ask if she was sure. She was. He went inside to the elevators, hugging the food box tight to his stomach.

  She looked out across the top of the city towards the dark domed sky and the twinkling distant lights that felt like a childhood, and that illusion of seeing the curvature of the planet. It stirred a thrill in her and she was elated to discover that not all life’s treasures would be blunted from now on. Already, she could imagine William’s ashes draped softly across the city. She edged around the next corner, where two young lovers stared into each other’s eyes and adored each other and the young man said, ‘King Kong,’ and the woman with him laughed. And then the tall young man, brutally pretty, glanced at Joy and their eyes met and it threw her into confusion because she felt she knew this boy but could not place him and, suddenly, the hinges seemed to be coming off her world. She could not possibly know him but it haunted her, until she saw that what she recognised was not the boy but the unsmiling truth that it would all end so quickly and how recent it was that she and William had been young lovers. She allowed the devastation of that realisation to do its worst to her, and turned to the setting to inspire her, to guide her at least, to an understanding that she had to embark on a new life now, and not on a lifelong memorial to William Fairman. She took a breath and walked to the edge and gripped the side and looked down at the streets beneath her and she saw that she feared nothing any more, not even oblivion, and that her love affair with New York City had come to an end.

  32

  Many things had rendered Finn speechless in his life but none had undone him with their beauty. The delicate, eggshell sinews of Amy’s hand in his were a miracle that did not diminish a second or third time. It was a whole world in itself. They said little as they walked, other than to share the occasional observation, all of which amounted to nothing more than another way of saying I like you. He pointed out to her the café where Leo’s crush worked as a waitress.

  ‘We all know a waitress is the ultimate kind of woman,’ she said. She liked the way his mouth made the tiniest move to smile when he liked what he heard.

  She gazed up at the ornate stonework of Maison Claudine and the offices above it and the two of them looked at the tops of buildings all the way across town to the Gay Hussar and as Finn craned his neck to the sky he felt like he got it. He got it, that if someone hadn’t taken a photograph of Calvary Cemetery and hung it on a wall then already his life would be poorer. And he got it, all these unfathomable people who put their eye to a camera, made up a tune, brushed paint on to canvas, carved detail into stone that no one would ever see. It wasn’t what he wanted from life for himself – too flimsy, too contingent on other people’s opinions – but thank Christ some people were up for going through all that shit. Movies were a part of all that and he’d never felt embarrassed admitting he loved them. He cried at the end of The Truman Show and felt hope for himself. He watched an old film called Birdy and wanted to climb into the screen. And sometimes, because of what these people did, the thing they made for you to look at, because of a photo hanging on a wall forty years after it was taken, you found yourself watching a grandmother and her grandson dipping chips into ketchup and seeing that old lady spending time with that young boy became the blueprint for your future, for what you wanted to matter in your life, for where your priorities were going to lie. Because of five minutes in a worn-out diner on the way to Calvary Cemetery, you knew that you were going to spend your life encouraging kids, teaching them to be fit, to be strong, to be safe, to know how to fight so that they didn’t need to fight, teaching them to watch great films and take a look at some art and treat old people well and treat their girlfriends and boyfriends well. All this, from a photograph.

  Amy installed Finn at a small corner table in the window and she went to work. The owner of the Gay Hussar greeted him with eyes that seemed to know something he did not, and from time to time, she put in front of him a small bone china plate with a savoury treat to eat, and each time she told him something new about the Lower East Side: that Trotsky had lived here (Finn didn’t enquire who he might be); that there wasn’t a single building on the Lower East Side that had not hosted a reported murder; that there was once an orchard where Finn now sat; that at the start of the twentieth century it had been the most densely populated place on earth. If Finn hadn’t thought she would eat Jack alive, he’d have introduced the two of them.

  Amy brought him tea and rested her forehead against his arm again as if trying to shift some of the thoughts inside her head on to him. He thought he heard her say that he was beautiful, as she walked away. He was somewhere uncharted with her, had never heard such tenderness. Finn took a book from the shelf of second-hand paperbacks and arched his broad, muscular back over the table as he opened it and read the first line: In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems.

  He stopped, and had to reach for his next breath. He watched the steam rise up off the tea. How could such beauty be created from words? How could a line of words he didn’t necessarily understand have a taste? A sweet, exotic, beautiful taste that made the world open up in front of him? Everything around him fell perfectly silent, as in the aftermath of a collision, that unexpected quietness immediately after carnage. But this was the violence of beauty crashing into him, breaching his world and leaving him altered, floating on his back in the calm floodwaters of that languorous god, not yet aware that not only would he read this book to the end but because of this book, because of this writer, he would read for the rest of his life.

  At six o’clock, the owner served him a cocktail but Finn didn’t touch it. He read for three chapters then put music on the jukebox. Amy replaced his untouched cocktail with a bottle of beer, which lasted him all night. He tried not to watch her too much as she worked but he found it difficult. The restaurant filled up and they sat Finn on a stool at one end of the bar and he read the book and each next page was, suddenly, the priority in his life. Cozy and Siouxsie turned up late and they swapped numbers with Finn and didn’t stay long and Cozy slapped Finn on the back and looked him in the eye as if to fortify him and Finn didn’t know why. Amy took Finn back to her apartment, a small, neatly configured nest in Mapleton. They lay on the bed in their clothes. They looked at each other and he scanned the miraculous detail of her eyes. They both were still and silent, save for the moments when their fingers curled together or they whispered some safe tender thing. Finn undid the topmost button of her grey, cashmere cardigan, and she whispered, ‘The thing is…’ but said no more. But it was enough to stop him. His index finger traced a repeated circuit around the edge of the next button.

  ‘What’s the thing?’ he asked.

  She looked at him as though she’d prefer for the world to end than to tell him. She forced herself to smile. ‘Nothing,’ she said, and she kissed him and she put both hands on the buckle of his belt to undo it, and he was so much bigger than her that she disappeared in his arms and it was exactly where she wanted to be and he felt capable of good things. Later, he watched her as she lay tucked against her chest with her eyes closed, and he couldn’t tell if she was asleep or not until she whispered, ‘You’re so lovely.’

  He watched the rise and fall of her back, the arrowhead of tiny hairs at the top of her vertebrae, the pale skin of her back and buttocks, and he said, ‘No, I am not.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ she whispered. ‘Why say that?’

  After some while, when she squeezed his finger to beckon him on, he told her. ‘I came to New York City to beat up my brother, to hurt him… really hurt him.’

>   ‘Why?’

  ‘I wanted him to know what it felt like.’

  She squeezed again but to no effect. So she asked him, ‘And how do you know what it feels like?’

  ‘From my uncle. My brother sent me to live with him.’

  ‘How hurt?’

  ‘Big hurt.’

  She thought for some time before she asked, ‘Did your brother know?’

  He did not answer that question. She slid up the bed and wrapped her arms around him and pressed his forehead into her body and they lay there for a long time. She threaded a strand of his hair behind his ear again and again until they slept and occasionally the noises of the street nudged them awake or the voices of her roommates through the walls. The sounds were redolent of a future that had already begun, lived far from Finn’s memories. That was why Finn loved the noises of New York City, because they were so very definitely not the noises of home.

  Amy moved and rested her head on Finn’s chest. She positioned her left leg between his thighs and her negligible weight on one half of his body. She could feel the contours of his ribs and chest muscles supporting her. She rose and fell on his breathing. She stroked his tummy and the pubic hair that ran up to it.

  ‘He didn’t know,’ she said.

  ‘He was my brother. I wanted to go with him.’

  ‘Did you tell him that?’

  She watched his lips part and believed she could see the last of some dead old air squeezed out between them by the words that followed.

  ‘No, he didn’t know.’

  ‘Does he know now that you were hurt?’

  ‘No. He doesn’t know a thing.’

  The silence returned and they were both comfortable in it but soon, anyway, she stirred.

  ‘I wanna make you some tea,’ she said.