by Owen Sheers
“That’s what I mean,” Samantha said, tapping the table. “Too quick. Giuliani isn’t stupid. He knew if they were off the streets of Manhattan, maybe Brooklyn, too, then that’s all that mattered. Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Shit.” Josh ducked his head below the table. A concave lens lay beside his plate.
“The fucking screw fell out,” he said from under them.
Samantha shook her head and drank the last of her wine.
“Got it!” Josh emerged again, his face flushed. A miniature screw was balanced on the tip of his index finger. For a few moments none of them spoke. Michael returned to the magazine, while Samantha stood and began clearing the table. Fitting the loose lens into the frame, Josh twice tried to drop the screw’s thread into place. Both times it fell to the table instead.
“I’ve got a screwdriver for that,” Michael said after Josh’s second attempt. “In my blade kit. It’s magnetic.”
“Well, look at you, James Bond,” Samantha said from the dishwasher.
“Thanks, Mike, that’d be great.” Josh pushed back his chair. “I haven’t got time to—” he continued as he walked out of the kitchen.
“I can take them—” Samantha started.
“I said it’s fine Sam,” Josh called from down the hall, cutting her off. “No drama. I’ll fix ’em tomorrow.”
The next day Michael called round early at the Nelsons’ front door. He knew the girls would be having breakfast in the kitchen and his appearance at the back of the house would only give Samantha another distraction as she tried to feed and dress them before taking Rachel to school. It was Josh who answered his knock. He was recently showered, the hair above his temples still damp. He wore a laundry-pressed shirt, red tie, and polished shoes. Together with an unfamiliar pair of glasses and a fresh shave, he looked like the younger brother of the man with whom Michael had eaten the night before.
“For your glasses,” Michael said, holding up the screwdriver. Its miniature size and transparent yellow handle made it look like a toy from a cracker.
“Ah, thanks, Mike,” Josh said, taking it from him. He nodded at the towel over Michael’s shoulder. “Going for a swim?”
“Thought I might,” Michael said. “Seeing as I’m up. Beat the crowds.”
“Well, all right for some, that’s all I can say,” Josh said as he went into the front room. From where Michael stood on the doorstep he could see the edge of the desk inside its door, Josh’s glasses folded on its corner. Josh put the screwdriver next to his glasses and came back into the hallway. Samantha, in the kitchen at its far end, gave Michael a silent wave. She was standing at the island, pouring milk into a couple of bowls. Michael raised a hand in reply, but the sound of a spoon hitting a table had already made her look away.
“Lucy, please—” Michael heard her say as she slipped out of sight.
“Well, see you later,” he said to Josh.
“Yeah, see you around, Mike,” Josh replied, closing the door. “Don’t swim too hard, now.”
―
That had been two days ago. Michael hadn’t seen Josh or Samantha since. Josh had worked late for the last couple nights. And Samantha, as far as Michael could remember, had left for a spa weekend with her sister, Martha, on Friday morning. From what he understood, it was a trip that had been decreed more than offered by Martha. Along with several of Samantha’s friends, Martha thought her little sister needed a break. To get away for a few days. She and Josh had been having a difficult time. They’d never spoken of it when Michael was in their house, and Josh rarely shared details of their marriage on the jogs he and Michael took on the Heath. But for several weeks now, he’d detected the surface tremors of a deeper disturbance. The last time they’d had dinner, the night Josh’s glasses had broken, he’d sensed it in the air, and in the girls, too, sensitive to the edge in their father’s voice. In Samantha herself, he’d seen no outward change. She and Josh had bickered over the cooking, but no more than usual, and she’d held the same determination she always applied to her arguments in their conversation. But when she hadn’t been talking, when she’d been watching and listening, that was when Samantha had seemed more fragile than Michael had seen her before. Her skin had lost its lustre and the muscles of her jaw were tense. The lightest touch in the wrong place, he remembered thinking, would have been enough to send her fractures running.
―
In the end it had been Samantha with whom Michael had talked the most at that first party in November. Aside from her few initial questions she’d remained largely silent as he’d discussed BrotherHoods with Tony, Maddy, and the others. Alert and listening, but quiet. As the party had begun to thin, however, she’d remained in the front room to say her good-byes, as if she was reluctant to leave Michael, or to speak to anyone else for too long before she’d spoken more to him. Eventually Tony and Maddy had also left, Tony helping his wife into a heavy fur coat before following another couple out the front door and into the winter dusk of the street.
There was something of a royal departure in their exit. Samantha kissed them on both cheeks, but with a formality at odds with Josh’s extravagance—his hugging of Tony and his grasping of Maddy’s shoulders as he told her, “It’s been so good to see you guys. Really, it’s been far too long. Far too long.” Maddy nodded her assent with closed eyes, absorbing his enthusiasm with a benevolent smile.
When Josh showed them to the door, Samantha and Michael were left in the room alone. Putting down her glass, Samantha moved between the side lamps, turning them on. She seemed distracted, brittle. Tony’s voice came to them through the windows. “If you say so, Josh,” he called through a laugh. “But I’ll believe it when I see it!” Samantha drew the curtains.
“Coffee?” she asked, as she turned on the lamp beside an armchair.
“Yes,” Michael replied, surprised by his own reluctance to leave. “Thanks.”
They drank their coffees on the sofa. “So Tony really liked you,” Samantha said, prising off her heels and tucking her stockinged feet under her thighs. She pulled a cushion across her stomach and held it there, like a baby, close against her.
“He liked my book,” Michael said. “Which isn’t the same thing as liking its author.”
Samantha smiled, a tired acceptance. “Well, whatever, you’re lucky. Tony doesn’t like many people.” She took a sip of her coffee before adding, “He prides himself on his taste.”
She said the last word as if its own flavour was bitter.
“Josh said they’ve known each other since college?”
“Yes. Tony was best man at our wedding.”
She shifted her position, leaning in closer to Michael as she did. His head felt light with wine and he realised that she, too, must have been more than a little drunk.
“Josh has always looked up to Tony,” she said. Then she laughed suddenly. “And not just literally, either!”
“And Maddy?” Michael asked. “Have you known her long, too?”
Samantha raised an eyebrow. “No. No, Maddy’s more recent. She’s his second wife. Mind you,” she said, as if acknowledging the achievements of a rival, “he’s her third husband.”
“Impressive,” Michael said, although it sounded more impossible to him than impressive. With Caroline gone, he couldn’t imagine the existence of a second, let alone a third, wife. Marriage felt like a finite resource to him, a rare ore he’d already exhausted with Caroline’s going.
“It must be wonderful,” Samantha said.
He looked up and realised she’d been staring at him. She was smiling in a new way, as if she was proud of him. “To live by your writing. To live by what you want to do.”
Her emphasis suggested the idea was as impossible to her as Maddy’s third marriage had been to Michael.
“It can be,” he said. “But often it isn’t. Being your own boss. I don’t know, that isn’t always a freedom.”
She looked at him as if he hadn’t understood her. “Perhaps,” she said, look
ing away to the bookshelves across the room. The lamp at her side lit the fine hairs on her cheek and her upper lip. She wore diamond earrings, small, neat. Her cheekbones were high, and Michael saw how once she must have been beautiful, in quite a remarkable way.
“What would that be for you?” he asked her. “Your ‘do’?”
“My ‘do’?” she said, laughing. “Christ, where to begin?”
―
Samantha’s parents, she’d told Michael that evening, had divorced when she was eight years old. From then on much of her holidays from boarding school in Sussex were taken up with travelling between them. Her mother remarried a New York doctor, leading to Samantha spending a chain of summers and Christmases in Montauk and Vermont. These were the environments of her teenage experiences. On a windy beach at the bottom of a cliff with a surfer, the hairs on his stomach dusted with salt. In woodland huts softened by fir trees and snow. Drinking her first beer as she ate a lobster roll, watching the last train carriages clatter in from Manhattan towards the end of the Long Island line.
From eight to eighteen, despite her frequent visits to the East Coast, Samantha no more than brushed against Manhattan itself. The city was her point of arrival and departure, but never anything more. A handful of afternoons touring the Fifth Avenue window displays in winter, another handful in a bright and sticky Central Park Zoo in summer. A total of twenty days, half of them hot, half of them freezing.
“I suppose that’s why I chose Parsons,” she said, uncurling her legs but still holding the cushion across her stomach. “I mean, I could have gone anywhere closer to home. Central Saint Martins, Kensington and Chelsea. Not Oxbridge, I suppose. I don’t think they do photography, do they? Anyway, that’s not the point. I was determined. New York or bust.” She shook her head. “God, my poor parents. I must have been a right pain in the arse.”
Her teenage desire had been fuelled not just by her own glimpses of Manhattan but also those of others. The work of Nan Goldin, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand. Through the lenses and frames of these photographers, New York became a kaleidoscope of event for her, a maelstrom of the human and the built. All through her first year at Parsons she’d worked diligently to follow their example, spending whole days immersed in the chemical scent of the darkroom. But then one day towards the end of the summer semester, stepping back from her pegged prints bathed in the red bulb, Samantha had seen that she had nothing new to say, or to see. She was twenty years old and beyond the bar or the bedroom it was her first discovery of her adult self.
“Lucky, in a way,” she said, undoing her hair. Running a hand through it, her fingers worked to untangle a knot, as if arranging threads on a loom. “I mean, some people spend their entire lives not learning that. Imagine, all those years producing crap, without knowing it.”
“Those photos in the hall,” Michael said. “You took those, didn’t you?”
She looked at him as if he was trying to catch her out. “Yes.”
“They’re not crap,” he said. “They’re good.”
She nodded slowly, allowing him his point. “They’re not bad. But that’s what I mean. I wouldn’t have taken them if I hadn’t first realised everything else I was doing was so derivative. I mean, it really was, honestly. Terrible stuff. I suppose those are all right. But that’s why they’re on the wall. Because they’re the only ones that were.”
―
In her final year, Samantha had to submit two end-of-course projects. The first of these she titled The Choice. For three weeks she sat in a Midtown deli between Lexington and Third. Arriving early, she’d position herself at a table next to the chilled food cabinets of sandwiches stretching the length of one wall, their shelves white with light. Taking a novel from her bag to read, and putting another on the table on which she angled her camera, she’d wait, the Midtown traffic washing the avenues, the button of a cable release under her thumb, under the table.
Over a single lunch hour she sometimes took as many as fifty or sixty photographs, the noise of the deli obscuring the slide and click of her shutter. The framing of most of them was out, her contact sheets full of chins and the tops of heads. But sometimes she’d capture a face in its entirety, features and skin tones from across the world, from all walks of life, from the basement to the penthouse. And all of them looking into the brightness of those shelves. All of them wearing expressions of thought, confusion, sometimes even wonder, as if they were looking into an ark, not a fridge.
For her second project, Mirage, Samantha left the city to see the city. Once or twice a week, sometimes after a whole day in the deli, she’d catch the A train east into Queens and Jamaica Bay. With a tripod strapped to her rucksack, she’d tramp out into the salt marshes to spend the evening crouching there, framing Manhattan’s keyway skyline between the leaves and bushes as planes landed at JFK above her and flocks of waterbirds broke across the sky.
―
“I fell for the city all over again out there,” she said, adjusting herself to allow Lucy to join them. Lucy nestled into her, fitting herself into the curves of her mother’s body before bowing her head to the pages of a picture book, sucking on the knuckle of a forefinger as she did. Samantha placed a hand on her daughter’s belly and held her close, just as she’d held the cushion.
Josh’s colleagues had left by now, and Michael was the last remaining guest. He’d been about to go himself, but then Josh brought them both another drink, a Baileys for Samantha and a whisky for him. So he’d stayed, and Samantha had continued talking. As she did, Michael could hear Josh in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher, turning on the radio. From somewhere upstairs came the sounds of a DVD, the bright talk of a Disney movie.
“It looked—” Samantha frowned and shook her head again. “God, I haven’t thought about this for ages.”
“It looked?” Michael asked.
“Manhattan. From out there in the marshes. It looked, oh, I don’t know. Vulnerable. Small. I suppose that’s what I was going for. I wanted it to look like an Inca ruin, something like that.”
“You did.”
“Maybe.”
“So what happened?”
“Happened?”
“I mean, why did you stop? You did stop, didn’t you?”
Samantha laughed. “I got engaged. That’s what happened.” She looked down at Lucy, stroking her head. Lucy didn’t look up from her book. “Why don’t you go and watch the film with Rachel, honey?” Samantha said. “It’s Finding Nemo. You like that, don’t you?”
Without a word, Lucy slid off the sofa and went to join her sister. As she went, Michael gestured towards her. “Well, that didn’t turn out so bad.”
“Oh,” Samantha said. “Not to Josh. That was years later. No, this was to Ryan.” She gave a short sniff of a laugh. “Ryan McGinnis.”
―
On some evenings in her final year at Parsons, Samantha would come home from Queens, or from a session in the darkroom, to find a note on the table of her shared apartment on MacDougal—Trading night? The note would have been left by one of her two housemates. Occasionally Samantha would leave the same note for them. The phrase had become a joke to them, established a few weeks after they’d moved in together. But since then it had increasingly become something of a way of life, too, an escape. The three of them, all art students, were young, attractive, and living in downtown Manhattan. But they were also broke, the interiors of the Zagat-rated restaurants and cocktail bars they passed each day far beyond their means and reach.
“It was terrible, really,” Samantha said, shaking her head at the memory. “If Rachel or Lucy ever did something like that I’d be livid. But at the time it seemed only fair. I mean, they were on safari downtown, so why shouldn’t we do a little hunting, too? That’s how we saw it, anyway.”
―
The men they chose were often barely more than boys themselves. Graduates working the lower rungs of Wall Street. All three of them—Samantha and her housemates—walked miles through the city every
week. One of them, a girl called Jade from Ohio, had swum for the state as a schoolgirl. They had firm bodies, good legs. So it was never difficult to get attention. “A short dress from Century 21, arch the back, high heels. Pathetic, really, but that was all it took. We saw it all as another trade I guess.” She paused, drank from her Baileys. “And I think they did, too.”
The men paid for the drinks, the checks. Sometimes, in that final year, the drugs. In return, Samantha and her housemates gave them attention. A display of attraction. But that was all. Most trading nights ended with one of them raising an arm as if officiating at a race and the three of them climbing into a cab, scribbled numbers and business cards in their purses. Occasionally, though, four bodies rode that cab, not three, the night’s trading having evolved for one of them into a more significant exchange.
At thirty-one, Ryan McGinnis aspired to the gravitas of middle age the way his older colleagues wished they could recapture their youth. After ten years as a currency trader for JP Morgan, he owned an apartment on the Upper East Side and a five-bedroom antebellum house in Greenwich, Connecticut. When he’d first met Samantha, Ryan had been drawn to her accent and the shape of her neck. But also to her knowledge of art and Europe. Three times a week he trained in a gym with a view over Central Park, mixing creatine with his protein drinks in the changing room. He shaved his chest and had a CD pack of Teach Yourself Italian on his bedroom shelf. He made Samantha laugh and looked at her in a way that made her feel prized.
Unlike the other men Samantha had brought home from their trading nights, Ryan wanted more. Within weeks of his buying her a French 75 on the rooftop of 60 Thompson, placing it in front of her like a checkmate, her life had changed. She knew it was impossible to live in New York and not feel the slipstream of the money flowing through its veins, to escape either its residual heat or the shadows cast by its light. But with Ryan, Samantha suddenly found herself at the financial heart of the city. As a consequence her life became strangely split, between the final weeks of her student days—completing course work, hanging prints, sending off CVs and portfolios—and a nightlife of privilege. Cipriani, the Rainbow Room, diamond earrings left on her pillow in the morning.
