Men Like Air
Page 35
‘Sure thing, Forrest Gump…’ Finn said.
‘Not between November and March we’re not,’ Astrid said.
‘It will make me supremely happy,’ Leo said, ignoring them. ‘I can show you both off.’
And he meant it. And they both knew it, and glanced at each other.
They took the 7 out to Queens and Finn left his seat to stand at the doors and look out as the train climbed clear of the East River and curled over Hunters Point with a dramatic look back over its shoulder at Manhattan, and then on to Sunnyside.
‘Said it once, saying it again,’ Astrid confided to Leo, ‘this is a very weird venue for a picnic.’
‘His birthday, he gets to choose,’ Leo muttered. ‘It’ll do us good.’
‘How?’
Leo shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea.’
‘I think I preferred the old days, when you were miserable and didn’t engage,’ she said.
Finn led them from 40th Street station to Kay’s Place where a handsome, wide-eyed, rough young man was waiting for them. He had on a shirt and tie, beach shorts and flip-flops. A scar ran from the corner of his eye to his temple.
‘This is Glenn; he just got out of prison yesterday,’ Finn said.
Glenn and Finn stood shoulder to shoulder, equally upright and powerful, but Glenn looked more hard and more vulnerable.
Leo shook Glenn’s hand. ‘Welcome back, if that’s the right way to put it.’
‘Works fine for me,’ Glenn said.
He shook Astrid’s hand and kissed her on both cheeks, as if he’d been released from finishing school. She had never felt hands so rough.
Glenn held a large flat box of cheap milk chocolates with a ribbon on, which he handed immediately to Finn. ‘Happy birthday,’ he said.
‘Thanks, man.’
They all took a seat, save for Leo, who went to the counter and ordered their drinks from a resilient-looking woman who looked as if she owned the place and who said of Glenn, ‘That man drinks a lot of coffee, even for these parts.’
Finn took a text from Jack, apologising that he was running late from work. He opened the lid of the chocolates and offered one to Astrid.
‘At two in the afternoon?’ she asked.
Finn shrugged.
‘It’s half-empty,’ Astrid said.
Finn looked in the box. It was more than half-empty.
‘I was starving,’ Glenn said. ‘Sorry.’
‘You’re fine,’ Finn said, containing a grin. He hardly knew him, but Glenn made him laugh.
‘Why would you want to celebrate your birthday in a cemetery?’ the newly liberated man said.
‘Good question,’ Astrid said.
Finn shrugged. ‘I just like it.’ His phone rang. ‘Hey, Jack!’ he said to it. ‘You’re where?’ Finn leaned towards the window and peered out. ‘I can see you… it’s not a problem… we’re just chilling… don’t worry about it…’
Jack was still on the phone, apologising for being late, when he entered the café. Both men hung up and Jack marched towards his brother with a velocity that seemed to make an embrace inevitable, but he stiffened up at the last and touched his brother’s elbow as he said, ‘Sorry I’m late and happy birthday again, bro.’
‘Thanks, Jacky.’
The five of them walked along Greenpoint Avenue to Calvary. Finn guided them through the cemetery to the slope at the far end and from the top of it they stood and took in the view before them, the sea of tombs and the long, elegant, floating city. A silence came over them, awe-inspired.
Finally, Astrid said, ‘It’s incredible.’
Finn delved into his pocket and took from it a crumpled photocopy of Arthur Tress’s photo of the cemetery. Leo loved to see this, the way the photo was folded so messily in Finn’s pocket when he loved it so much.
‘This is the spot,’ Finn said.
‘What is that?’ Glenn asked.
‘It’s the best photo ever taken.’ Finn handed it to him. ‘And the man that took it stood right here to take it.’
They all peered at the photo and agreed that it was a good-’un. Like Leo, Astrid could see that Arthur Tress had taken the photograph from a higher vantage point than the one where they stood. She looked around. Maybe he’d hired a cherry-picker or even scrambled up on to the Expressway. She kept these thoughts to herself because Finn was happy where he was, and because he was exactly the sort of person who would, given half a reason, climb up on to the Expressway, and she did not want her little thief getting himself hurt or arrested.
There were elm trees on the brow of the slope. They laid out a rug in the shade, alongside a bench. Leo had his cakes from the café, Finn a carrier bag with crisps, nuts, bananas and an extraordinarily large bag of onion rings. Astrid produced salads, raw carrots and a pot of bulgur wheat. Glenn’s sausage rolls had, like the chocolates, been started by him on his journey out from the hovel. Jack had brought sandwiches with the crusts cut off, for which he was teased, plus a coolbag with beer and champagne.
Jack took off his suit jacket and his tie. He swigged a beer and it went to his head in the afternoon sun. Glenn placed a mini sausage roll and an onion ring in his mouth simultaneously, and sat back against a grave. He patted the top of the headstone. ‘It’s what he would have wanted,’ he said, with a full mouth. He held up another sausage roll towards Finn, as if toasting him. ‘Awesome party venue, this, Finny. Nothing weird about this, nothing at all.’
Jack held his beer aloft. ‘Happy birthday, Finn.’ The others raised their plastic cups to him. They lazed in the sun and Jack spoke to the blue skies. ‘I read that this cemetery was created by St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1848 and there were fifty burials a day, half of them Irish children under seven years of age. There’s three million people here now.’
‘They filmed The Godfather here,’ Finn said. ‘Don Corleone’s funeral.’
‘One guy I bunked with in prison was in for trying to kill his neighbour’s cat,’ Glenn said.
‘That’s disgusting,’ Astrid said.
‘He got so fed up with this cat disturbing him that he tried to hang it,’ Glenn said. ‘And I always thought, like, how hard can it be to kill a cat?’
‘It’s disgraceful,’ Astrid reiterated.
‘I know, but what I wanted to ask him, except he was kinda untalkative, was how can you attempt to kill a cat? You know what I’m saying? How can you fail to kill a cat? When you’re a hundred-kilo human being, how hard is it to kill a cat?’
‘It’s an interesting angle,’ Jack said, lying back again and smiling at the sky over his head, and aware that Finn was laughing to himself. Glenn sank his teeth into a pastry from Maison Claudine. It mixed with the salty taste of onion rings. ‘Christ almighty,’ he said, ‘this tastes holy.’
Something brought William to the surface of Leo’s thoughts. He was never far from them. Something as simple, perhaps, as Leo’s wish for William to be here, or a make-believe that William could see him now, so off-piste (by Leo’s standards) and so interested. In the five months since William’s death, Leo had received postcards from Joy in Niagara Falls, Vancouver, San Francisco, Yosemite, New Orleans, Hilton Head, Brandy Wine, Boston and Maine. When in Manhattan, she saw a few friends and made her plans with a certain anger inside her that Leo felt he had no right to question when he was incapable of feeling any such thing. He admired her for it, and there was something in seeing her a widow that finally made him see his sister as an adult. Her postcards were full of talk of William, what he would like, what he would find interesting, what he would laugh at. She saw the country for both of them and Leo didn’t doubt that at night she talked William through it, in the hope that their current separation was temporary. She did not acknowledge the loneliness which Leo presumed she felt.
He sometimes these days imagined a future as a grandpa to Finn’s kids. Today, on this summit, he admitted that it was something he hoped for. Today, he told himself, looking at the view and seeing his name on every tomb, today the dead
are born. It took standing in a graveyard for him to find a guttural hunger for life. And it took a lot on Astrid’s part to let go of the gallery for one afternoon and the possible things that could be neglected, and to recline on the fresh grass and not worry about green stains on her dress, and to sigh when her work phone rang, because she was feeling so light and happy in the moment before it did.
She handed the phone to Leo. ‘It’s George White at Fountains,’ she said.
Leo took the call and wandered a few paces away from the picnic. As he listened to George, he watched Glenn, whose eyes were shut against the sun and who looked at peace in this setting, just another slab of granite protruding from the lawns. And, when George and Leo had concluded their business, Leo asked if the vacancy created by William’s passing had yet been filled.
Jack and Finn wandered away together, along the brow of the slope, to the very pinnacle of the cemetery. There, Jack gave Finn his birthday present, an envelope with a card and, written in it, the words October 1st to October 22nd 2006.
‘What about it?’ Finn asked.
‘On October 1st you and me are flying to California, and we are going to drive from LA to San Francisco, drive Big Sur. We’re going to go wherever you like, Yosemite, Vegas, Northern California, or down to San Diego. We’ve both got the time off work, it’s sorted. That’s your present. Three weeks with me.’
Finn laughed. ‘Shit. What have I done wrong?’ He slid the card into his back pocket and sucked in the air and smiled at the city. ‘That’s fantastic,’ he muttered. ‘Thank you.’
Leo took a seat beside Glenn. Astrid joined him, and sat by her boss’s side. ‘What do you do, Glenn?’ Leo asked.
‘All sorts.’
‘I know a company looking for someone. It’s almost the best job in the world. They might need some young blood, if you scrub up well.’
‘I scrub up fine. What is it?’
‘Archivist. You sort out thousands of photos and articles about the past and the beauty of it is you can be all alone if you like, music on, no interference. You can spend all day in your own thoughts.’
‘That’s not a good idea,’ Glenn said, his voice laced with derision. ‘That literally sounds like the worst job in the world for me. It’s a fucking terrible idea.’ He glanced at Astrid. ‘No offence.’
Leo watched as a rim of sunlight kicked against the upper reaches of the Chrysler Building. He looked at the shadows adorning the northeast faces of the city, imagined the streets in shade beneath them, the teeming sidewalks. The people. The lives. The risks. The victories. The relationships. ‘You’re right,’ he muttered, ‘it’s a terrible job, living in the past.’ He looked at Glenn, who was unmoved and disinterested. ‘How can I get things so wrong at my age?’
‘You mean men don’t grow old and wise? That’s a shocker,’ Glenn said.
Astrid laughed.
‘Sausage roll?’ Glenn said, offering the packet.
‘No, thanks,’ she said, turning to him. ‘Macrobiotic seaweed and pine kernel salad?’
‘No, thanks. Boyfriend?’
‘No, thanks. I’ve decided not to have one for at least a year.’
‘That’s the life,’ Glenn muttered.
She laughed to herself. At herself. They both lay back, on either side of the picnic, and let the warmth lie upon them as the sunlight moved free of the elm trees and threw yellow patterns into their eyelids. Leo retreated to the bench and sat behind the two of them. Finn watched him, from the granite ridge above the cemetery where he sat with Jack, not quite touching, enjoying the silence. Finn picked out individual tombs in the valley and pictured the funeral parties at them on the days of interment. He formed a series of movie scenes in his imagination, one set in the fifties, then another in the seventies. The mourners departing from this field of tombs and returning to New York City, fanning out, dispersing across the streets and buildings. Where were they all today? What had they done with the intervening years and with those resolutions people made at funerals? How quickly did the time go, really? Not as fast as older people said, surely? But why would they all say it if it weren’t true? One day he would miss his parents and one day, with the memory of them faded, he would start to love them simply for being his parents (and simply because he would be more forgiving). He would apologise to them for his coolness, for not loving unconditionally, even though he felt no guilt for it and knew he would not have survived them any other way.
And for what he had done to his uncle the morning he left with Dilly for New York, he would have to pay. And, although it would preclude Finn from entering the United States again for some years, New York City had already bestowed its gift upon him, in the form of a belief that anything was possible. And it had done so without Finn staying long enough for the love affair to wane. Jack would stand by him, would return to England with Finn and two years later, in 2008, be not unhappy at having left AIG, and be training in medicine. The brothers would move together into a flat in North London and inform no one from their wider family that they were there. House rules would be set, most important of which were that Jack got to have sex in the flat first as he was paying the mortgage (‘Alright,’ Finn would say, ‘but I’m not waiting forever…’) and that once a week, without fail, the two boys would sit down to a roast dinner together. Finn would arrive home one evening with a ‘Home Is Where the Heart Is’ doormat that Ann and Stefano Parker would have been proud of and it would make the boys roar. Occasionally, Finn would grow a beard and shave one smooth track through it.
A breeze picked up, brushed over the graves and settled again, like a bird. Jack stared at the city above the graves and it was as if he had just arrived. From this vantage point, he had the sensation that he had not yet stepped inside New York City, that he was still finding his way. It seemed as if it was Finn who was bringing him here, leading him by the hand, Finn showing him this place they would live together for a short while but long enough to create memories that would never leave them. It all began here in Calvary Cemetery and Jack couldn’t explain why. He looked at his brother. Finn was safe and well. Jack had kept the promise he had made to their father. He had been true to what his father had asked of him on the cold surface of the road at Castleton’s Oak, with the final breath of his sad, tormented life.
Jack’s head dropped. It occurred to him now how clearly he loved the name ‘Finn’, how much that word meant to him, that word which was the last to ever escape his father’s lips. He put his arm around his brother’s shoulder and allowed his body to press against the ballast of Finn’s physique and he let go of his weight and released his neck from the burden of carrying his thoughts and his family and he began to sob. He allowed Finn to take him in his arms. And he experienced the weightless joy of succour for the first time in his life.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Tim Craig: friend, confidant and conduit to fine music and words.
My thanks to Oliver Corell for the Coastguards Cottage where much of this book was written, and to Susie Lowe at the Landing, Treacle in Hove, Toad Hall on Grand, the Morning Star on Second Avenue and the Rose Main Reading Room. Above all, my love and thanks to Imelda Liddiard for being a constant and generous host in Manhattan and for sharing her lifelong knowledge of New York City with me over many years.
My deepest thanks to Jenny Hewson and Rochelle Stevens, and to Rosie Price, Matt Turner and Peter Strauss. And to Nick Perry and Jennie Shellard. And to the great Arthur Tress.
Profound thanks to my editor, Vicky Blunden.
Deborah Rogers
I was working on Deborah’s notes on this book when she died. I was privileged to be represented by her for my first five years as a novelist. The day she called me into the unique room that was her office to say she wanted to represent me is one of the happiest memories of my life. Thank you, Deborah.
The writing of this book was supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
About the Author
Also by Tom Connolly
The Spider Truces
Copyright
First published in 2016 by
Myriad Editions
www.myriadeditions.com
Copyright © Tom Connolly 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Copyright © Angela Carter 1992, from Expletives Deleted, Chatto & Windus 1992; essay ‘Envoi: Bloomsday’ first published in New Society magazine 1982. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Angela Carter c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN
‘Lady Lazarus’. Copyright © Sylvia Plath 1962, from Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, Faber and Faber 1981
Grateful thanks to Patrick Mimran for permission to quote from his Chelsea billboard project (copyright © Patrick Mimran)
‘Those Winter Sundays’. Copyright © Robert Hayden 1966, from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation
From Independence Day by Richard Ford, published by Alfred A. Knopf. Copyright © Richard Ford 1995. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN
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