Men Like Air

by Connolly, Tom

  ‘I wanna go up the Empire State Building with you,’ he said.

  ‘Come on, then,’ she said.

  ‘Now? At midnight?’

  She shrugged. ‘Sure.’

  He didn’t move. She sat up and reached for her clothes. She smiled at him. ‘Come on,’ she repeated.

  As he watched the night’s subterranean laggards framed against yellow-lit walls on the subway platforms they hurtled through, she was unsure of the small distance between her swaying body and Finn’s, and of how far away he seemed.

  What, Finn asked himself, was the word his brother had used? Atrophy? The atrophy of the imagination. The failure to imagine being the other person. Was that all Jack was guilty of: an inability to conjure up those remedies Finn had never even asked for?

  ‘You okay?’ she asked him.

  ‘I was thinking about what you said to me.’

  She waited for him to tell her more but he didn’t seem to see the need, and she found that attractive. She found everything about him attractive and, as they rode the elevator to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, she told him she wanted to be in bed with him again and he said that he did too, very much, and they kissed and rose into the sky.

  She took his hand and led him out to the northward view and she looked into the deep dark knot of the Park at night.

  ‘The thing is…’ she said.

  ‘What is the thing?’ he asked, softly. And because she looked sad and nervous he wished to reassure her, so he said, ‘Whatever it is, it’s alright.’

  And the trees in the Park were hidden in the blackness that was their own selves, and they swayed the sighing noise of the invisible urban breeze and the thing was that Amy was moving to San Francisco.

  And when she finished telling him, and now he knew that San Francisco was the thing, he hugged her to him, and something inside him departed, some tumorous thing that was good to be rid of, and he felt the buoyancy that hung between joy and sadness. He cried a little when she did but it was alright. It was all okay. It was life. She was going, but they had met, and this was the next thing his life was turning out to be. It was still wonderful. She had wanted him enough to not tell him earlier, and that was what he chose to see. He smiled at her, and held her tighter to him so that he could look out across the city without being watched by her, without her scrutinising his every unclear expression for clues to how he felt. An orphan grows tired of being interpreted. He did not feel let down. He would not add her to the list of bruises. She was one of life’s joys, yet not one that could seduce him to leave this city.

  He watched the tail-lights and the headlamps in the veins beneath him, the flow of the city’s arteries, reduced at night to a resting beat. And he saw that in all this tangled mass there was another human being out there with the same blood flowing through his veins as his own, one person left on the planet made of the same cells. And one day, as Leo had experienced, one of them, Jack or Finn, would cease, the blood would stop flowing, the life would leave them and they would leave life, and Finn knew now that he wanted to know this man who was his brother for his entire life and that if he did so he’d find an end to the longing that had threatened to extinguish him every day of his life so far. And, if he was to die first, he wanted his brother by him. And if not… Finn had a premonition of the excruciating pain of one morning waking up to a world without Jack in it. Hopefully dear God, hopefully, that was many years distant, but he welcomed that pain too, the feeling that a part of himself had been cut out of him and stolen, welcomed it as the scar bequeathed by love; he would bear whatever pain that loss would serve up for him one day in return for a lifetime with his brother, and he would beg the stars every night for that desperate day when two brothers were prised from each other to be as far away from tonight as possible, so that they had as much time together as there could possibly be and as little time apart.

  And when Amy asked him if he was okay he said, ‘Yes,’ and when she asked him again what he was thinking about he said, ‘King Kong,’ and she laughed with moonlight eyes because she knew it wasn’t true. And as he held her, turning his head to one side as she nestled against his chest, he glimpsed a woman staring at him and he stared back at her because she was the precise image of the woman he had always dreamed his mother could have become.

  They ate pizza on 28th Street and they made love again and stayed awake, kissing with the very tips of their tongues. She held him tight before they parted on the street corner against the glints of sunlight on tarmac wet from a shower at sunrise. Their heads ached with the need for sleep. She went to work and Finn rode the 6 uptown to Carnegie Hill and walked right past Eddy the doorman, who told him to wait until he’d buzzed up. Finn turned his back and waited for the elevator, with the ease of a man made love to.

  Jack made tea, which they drank in easy silence. Finn fell asleep on the couch and Jack moved around the apartment the way you would move around a sleeping child. The building felt solid and firm beneath his careful steps. He went to his room to get a duvet to lay over Finn and found his cellphone vibrating to alert him to the sight of twenty-one text messages received from Dilly in the space of an hour.

  Call me it’s urgent.

  Call me please.

  Please help me.

  Help me.

  Help.

  He switched his phone off, felt guilty about it and turned it on again. As he took himself out of the apartment to the hushed corridors to call her, the buzzer rang. He grabbed it before Finn stirred.

  ‘Young lady here to see you,’ Eddy the doorman announced, brimming with aggression. ‘She’s been trying to call you all day. I’m sending her up.’

  Jack was quick and firm. ‘No. I’m coming down. You do not send people up without my say-so. I’m coming down.’

  He hung up and walked softly to place the bedding over his brother, who remained deep in sleep.

  In the lobby it was immediately clear to Jack that a doe-eyed Eddy had swallowed Dilly’s version of the world without chewing and found in it brand new reasons to dislike the English boys.

  ‘Hey,’ Jack said, smiling politely at Dilly.

  ‘Hey,’ Dilly said. She was calm and bright and kissed Jack on the lips.

  ‘Let’s talk outside,’ Jack said.

  ‘Let’s talk up in the apartment,’ she said. ‘Is Finn there?’

  ‘No.’ He ushered her towards the entrance.

  ‘Is he not?’ Eddy asked. ‘I thought he was.’

  Dilly turned back to Eddy. ‘Thanks for what you said and for the offer, but I’m not interested in dating anyone right now.’

  Eddy flushed up nice and pink, nice and quick. ‘Of course, of course…’ he agreed, swatting the subject away. ‘Absolutely. I wasn’t suggesting a date, just coffee really, nothing.’

  ‘Oh.’ Dilly sounded confused. ‘I thought you said dinner, tonight?’

  ‘No,’ Eddy insisted, laughing nervously.

  ‘It confounds me that you’re still single,’ Jack said to Eddy, and walked Dilly outside.

  He bathed his face in sunshine, hoping that when he opened his eyes whatever reason Dilly had for being here would have disappeared. He was aware that he would be a hostage to his conscience as soon as she fleshed out her request for help but, confident that he had the skills to keep her out of Finn’s life, he engaged.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Need you to take me to the Madhouse.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I have to go to the Cross Centre – it’s a clinic for anxiety and stress stuff, like, disorders, make of the title what you will.’

  ‘Why are you asking me?’

  She felt stung by his directness. ‘It’s forty blocks south and I’m in a fresh-air phase of my life. I thought you and Finn could walk me.’

  ‘I’ll walk you,’ he said, determined to lead her away from the building in which his brother lay sleeping.

  The sun had nothing getting in the way of it and the city. People were bringin
g their lunches outside for the first time in the year.

  ‘Doesn’t it drive you crazy that your beautiful, amazing brother never answers his cellphone?’

  Jack shrugged.

  ‘Why are you walking so fast?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jack said, ‘just want to get you to this place, I suppose.’

  ‘Relax, soldier, I’m still going to be a loon, whenever we get there.’

  Jack adjusted down to a walk that was just a little bit unnaturally slow, and Dilly now had trouble not walking ahead of him. They loped out of step with each other for half an hour to the safe haven of Turtle Bay and a hushed estate of low, sterile modern buildings.

  ‘Home again, home again, jiggety jig,’ she muttered.

  The look of the place was not entirely new to her. She had spent time in its sister clinic in Seattle when she’d had a period of not being able to cope. She had panic attacks sometimes. When they got bad, she came to a place like this.

  Jack waited in a domed reception area filled with light while Dilly went off to see a woman called Frances. People of all ages sat around Jack in high-backed armchairs reading magazines and sleeping at uncomfortable angles. Jack called Finn and apologised for being out so long and heard his brother’s dribbly voice whisper, ‘S’ok bro, no sweat,’ and yawn, and a woman stood over him and smiled a short, clipped, functional smile, before saying, ‘No phones allowed in here.’

  ‘Sorry. Just calling my brother.’

  ‘Not in here. Your brother could be your dealer.’

  ‘No, I’m not a… you know…’

  ‘You’re not a what?’

  ‘A… patient. I’m with a friend. I’m normal.’

  She smiled forcefully and with no warmth. ‘I’m happy for you, being normal, but no phones.’

  ‘Got it. I didn’t mean…’

  The woman departed, prowling forward to the next part of her morning and stopping at the front entrance where she transformed and burst into warm, expressive laughter and threw her arms around another woman. ‘Look at you, all dressed up for the outside world!’ The women squeezed each other tight and howled with laughter and whooped up their day. Watching them made Jack feel light, as if his veins were filling with love, and he didn’t know if it was the thought of his brother sounding so at home in his apartment or the warmth of the sun through the high glass ceiling or something about those two women hugging farewell or how little time he’d spent in the office recently. He took a look at the people around him and he knew the option was there if he chose it, to think back on his parents and all the drinking and the shouting and the terrible waste, but it was a subject of exhaustive boredom to Jack, and he was more curious about the deep pool of compassion inside him that had revealed itself in this stifling, sun-filled room in Turtle Bay. How had it taken him twenty-five years and a million people passing through his line of sight to realise that everybody was like him and he was like everybody else – to be liberated at last from the idea that he was meant to have answers for everyone? He saw the vanity of it, the arrogance of it, this impression that he was gliding above the surface of human life trying to fix things but unable to get a foothold on the ground and look people in the eye. How tiring it had been to be Jack all this time, and how lonesome.

  He felt closer to his parents in here, saw how easily they could have been different if his mother had been offered this sort of help, and accepted it, and saw that he himself might, like her, become unrecognisable to his true self, if luck was not a lady.

  Near to the entrance was an office and a reception desk. On a table to one side were pamphlets about the clinic. He was aware of the danger of impetuous acts, ill-founded resolutions, but he also knew his own mind and his own strength, and he clearly saw his relationship to this place, now and stretching into the future. He filled out the volunteer form and provisionally said that he could do two sessions per week. It would be his secret, for now at least. It was the first decision he had ever made with confidence. Filling in the form had the same clandestine quality as kissing Mrs Parker on the couch in Long Beach. The memory of that kiss and her hands on his pants was all the more pleasurable for its illicitness. It was not just her smell, the fleshy kiss, the nakedness that had felt great, but the insanity of it, the stupidity, the absence of common sense.

  Dilly appeared. She had been crying. She marched outside. Jack followed at his own pace and joined her on a small bank of grass where Dilly hugged her knees and screwed her eyes up against the sun.

  ‘Such a nice day…’ she said. ‘Thanks for coming. I’m going back in for a session later on so I’ll just hang here. I don’t know how you’re fixed but it’s great having an intelligent, mature, good-looking man beside me if you can stick around.’

  ‘No, I want to get back. You gonna be okay?’

  She had expected him to want to stay. ‘Of course I’ll be okay. I’ve had to be, all my life. I’ve always been alone and had nothing.’

  Jack pictured her parents’ house on West Olive Street. ‘You’ve a roof over your head whenever you need it. You’ve got family. You had an education, got nice clothes. That’s not nothing.’

  She sat in silence for some time, trying to remind herself who Jack was and how he fitted into the tangle of histories and tall stories that made up the windblown branches of her mind.

  ‘They neglected me. They abused me. Made me extremely ill. I’ve always been alone.’

  ‘They abused you?’ he asked.

  ‘You said it.’

  ‘No,’ Jack said, ‘I didn’t say it, you said it.’

  She didn’t reply. He was gentle. ‘That’s not true, is it, what you said? Is that a lie?’

  ‘Well, it depends on semiotics, I guess. But yes, it’s a lie.’

  They sat in silence. She shut her eyes and felt the breeze and the warmth. He watched her face, watched it hold itself at the perfect intersection of a smile and a grimace.

  ‘Dilly…’ he began.

  ‘Yes, Jack,’ she said, like a child who knew she was about to be lectured. She turned to look at him with a face that threatened to burst out laughing.

  ‘You… are not my problem or Finn’s. He and I both deserve a shot at happiness and you would get in the way of that, I feel. You have to turn for help to those who care about you. I don’t want that to be me and I won’t allow it to be Finn. I’m sorry if that’s unkind.’

  She looked away and chewed on an imaginary piece of gum.

  ‘Yeahhhh…’ she said. She got up and returned inside. Jack watched her go. He phoned Ann Parker and told her where her daughter was, and Ann, who did not seem surprised, thanked him and said that she and Stefano would come immediately. He made his way back to Second Avenue and stood there a moment, with slippers on his feet and not a cent in his pockets, and set about finding his way back to Finn.

  33

  On the warmest day of September, the day of the picnic, Finn’s copy of Hemingway short stories arrived, complete with a birthday card. It sat in Jack’s mailbox with the words ‘totally private’ written in red above Finn’s name. Dilly had, eventually, been as good as her word. Finn was not to know (and would never find out) that before posting the book to him she had photocopied every page of it, in the office of the visiting professor of fine art at the Institute of Arts and Sciences in Zagreb, with whom she was having an affair while she studied for her Foundation. With the photocopied pages, she had created a sixteen-by-eight-foot mixed media collage out of Finn’s scrawled handwriting and Hemingway’s prose and a splattering of her own Pollockesque paint. The piece was entitled Loverboy and gained her another distinction and a romantic weekend on the Adriatic.

  Finn had considered a variety of options for the book’s disposal (throwing it overboard from the Staten Island ferry, or one page into each garbage bin he passed on a day’s walking through the Boroughs, burying it in Carl Schurz Park) but he didn’t want to delay, nor get arrested in the mayor’s backyard, and there was nothing to equal seeing it
burn in front of his eyes. He used Astrid’s metal shredding bin, in the small yard out the back of the gallery. Leo and Astrid watched covertly, and she kissed goodbye to her bin, but they had learned over the course of the summer to not always ask Finn what he was up to or why.

  They drank coffee at breakfast, although Leo had offered champagne, and toasted Finn’s birthday as the book’s ashes got whipped up by the breeze. Mid-morning, Leo took Finn to Madame Claudine’s and put his hand on his shoulder as he told the proprietor it was the young man’s twentieth birthday. She kissed Finn on both cheeks and held his hand for a moment, as she asked him, ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Today,’ he asked, ‘or with my life?’

  ‘On your birthday.’

  ‘We’re going for a picnic,’ Finn said.

  ‘He wants to show us something,’ Leo added, and basked in the fleeting thought that Madame Claudine might mistake Finn for his son.

  They sat in easy silence together, the two men. There was plenty Leo had thought of trying to say to Finn, but none of it had yet won a rightful place. There was time ahead for that. He handed Finn an envelope. ‘I know that money can seem cold, but only you know what you want.’

  Finn looked Leo in the eye, and expressed his thanks this silent way. Then he ripped open the envelope childishly, to make Leo smile. He was caught out by what was inside.

  ‘That is… incredible. Thank you. It’s so much.’

  ‘You’re welcome, Finn.’

  Finn stared at the bills. ‘It’s so much…’ he whispered again. He watched Leo stand at the counter and buy cakes for the picnic with a jauntiness to him that made Finn want to tease. He watched him for as long as he could go unnoticed.

  They closed the gallery at lunchtime and walked in the warm late summer sun through Chelsea to the uptown C. ‘I would like us to go for walks together, the three of us, from time to time,’ Leo said. ‘This is the first time we have all been out together like this, in the open air, with things to look at and sounds to hear. We are going to do this regularly, at least once a week, just walk and talk for a while.’