The Benefactor

by Sebastian Hampson

  ‘You actually think that?’ She removed her sunglasses, leaning up and trying to get in his frame, her eyes wide. ‘No, seriously: there’s not a shade of pride colouring that thought? So…okay, even if we take school off the table for a moment, it seems logical enough to me that you should build something of your own—some contribution to society.’

  It struck Henry, for the first time in three years of dating her, that Martha played looser with these thoughts than perhaps she should have. He supposed that was because these thoughts hadn’t been directed so pointedly at him before today.

  ‘Easy observation to make from your perspective,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand how important it is to build up connections in New York. It takes time, and it will pay off.’

  ‘This is just my opinion, Henry, and sure, maybe I’m being too idealistic, but actions speak louder than words when it comes to making the world a better place, and that’s all a magazine is—words. Words and pretty pictures and advertisements. You’ve got so much to contribute. Whether or not you’re making useful connections, who could say…you’re wasted there.’

  ‘Boy. Tell me how you really feel about my job.’

  ‘Henry, I know you’re not happy there—you haven’t been for a long time now, and it worries me that you won’t talk about it. If we’re getting married, now’s the time we have to start trusting each other.’

  So that was where the attack had come from. Since proposing, Henry had found the flow of their conversations less natural—as though she were hanging around waiting for him to drop some deep, philosophical reflection at the end of each sentence. Not that he didn’t want to offer such thoughts up. He simply didn’t have them.

  He would have told her about the situation at work, straight up, if he’d had a clearer idea himself. He’d been trying to pin Kurt down for a meeting to discuss financial realities for several months without success. Each time the meeting had been cancelled at the last minute, and Henry found himself tagging along to a client dinner instead. Rowdy affairs, those dinners—conducted beneath a shroud of cigar smoke. Impossible to arrange any sort of private moment.

  He’d begun to suspect that this magazine was a fluff project for Kurt rather than a serious commitment. His family’s real estate investments gave him a fine back door to slip out through, while Henry and his staff would be left to pick up the pieces—at best. At worst they’d have nothing left to pick up.

  Kurt was supposed to have taken him in, plugged Henry into the criss-crossing grid of power players who comprised New York’s media elite and their bankrollers. Rather than forming his own connections, though, Henry felt that he’d been consigned to maintaining Kurt’s.

  ‘It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said. ‘But you might not think much of what I have to say.’

  ‘Why not? I see how hard you work. And how little you’re getting out of it. Every time I’ve asked you’ve told me you’re sniffing out another position. Now I’m not sure if that can possibly be true.’

  There was a reason for that, one he couldn’t communicate to Martha. And it had to do with his old college friend, the one who’d introduced him to Kurt in the first place.

  ‘I’d like my work to be significant,’ he said, working hard to cram a whole lot of other thoughts into the one sentence. ‘If you’d grown up in a place like suburban Massachusetts and you’d had a chance at this kind of influence, you would’ve gone after it too.’

  ‘The magazine’s failing. I’m not stupid, Henry. You took a pay cut. I put it together from the bank statements. This is my future too, you know. Our shared livelihood.’

  ‘I never thought you were stupid. It’s…my failure, my responsibility. I have to fix it up. And I will. It’s temporary. That’s why I didn’t tell you.’

  ‘How the hell does that work?’ Her eyes narrowed on him again. ‘Listen, you owe them nothing. You have money tied up in a dying business, so you might as well lose it now rather than later.’

  ‘It’s more political than that. Especially if I want to stay in publishing.’

  ‘Okay. So you stick in journalism…fine. You can’t keep playing the caretaker, though. You’re better than that. You’ve always wanted more than just the…illusion of success. Right?’

  Her declaration deserved more examination than she might have believed, Henry thought. He couldn’t differentiate between real success and fake success—not when they were the same thing, the key to a convincing performance being the management of expectations. If he was honest with himself, he supposed he wasn’t managing anyone’s expectations at this point.

  They continued to wait in silence. Henry had a good tolerance for silence, when he didn’t wish to talk, but he could see Martha found it maddening. She went to speak several times, her chest rising sharply and falling again as she U-turned away from whatever bold thought had crossed her mind. She was more diplomatic than he gave her credit for.

  Martha gave her fiancé’s argument due consideration, though his refusal to answer her questions was growing tiresome. The influence of which he spoke must have punched at a different weight for Henry. She’d wanted to work together with him on some project to attain that influence, ever since they first discussed their ambitions. Still he allowed her no more access to his little vault of plans than the occasional glimpse, the information always redacted.

  She saw herself, a few years from now, visiting a war zone with Henry. The Middle East, perhaps, if the tensions in Iraq and Iran and Kuwait continued to grow. Both of them making the trip for business, for the same simple ideological reasons. They wouldn’t have to be there for long—long enough to witness the results of her efforts, to get a handle on the situation, to ask serious questions of the Kurdish villagers whose lives had been ruined by airstrikes, and to relay this information to their financial backers. Then to make sure the journalists got a few provocative pictures.

  He must have wanted to see that world too. She’d joined Henry at a few parties, found his colleagues to be a fearful group, trapped under the spell of their tenacious leaders and unwilling to talk about bigger questions except in the abstract. Yes, it must have been awful over in Africa or wherever.

  She supposed her own point about the illusion of success was as relevant to her as to anyone else. But in her case it was a means to an end, part of a greater mission.

  The tow truck arrived half an hour later. Martha explained the problem to the mechanic in German while Henry hung around on the verge and finished his pack of cigarettes, seeming to watch the cars pass by, transfixed. She watched them as well, out of the corner of her eye, trying to see what he saw. The families. Two children crowded by the rear window of a station wagon to stare at them, wet mouths fogging up the glass.

  ‘He doesn’t have the part,’ Martha explained to Henry once she’d shown the mechanic the damage. ‘And when the belt snapped it damaged the engine. Full repair job.’

  ‘So that’s the rental company’s responsibility. We leave it, they take care of it. But then where do we go? We’re in the Juras—can’t be halfway there yet.’

  ‘We could hitch to Belfort, or Basel, and then get a coach to Burgundy.’

  ‘Are you kidding? That’ll take all day. And they won’t let us in the restaurant dressed like this.’ He rubbed his temples. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘No? Sounded as though it was someone’s fault.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that. Come on. You got my hopes up for a nice day together. You can’t blame me for being disappointed.’

  ‘I am too, buddy—don’t forget I went out of my way to do this for you.’

  He took her hand. ‘You did. And I’m grateful. So grateful.’ His watery expression pleaded with her. It always got to her when this happened, surprised her, because no other man she’d ever met crumpled up as quickly as he did. ‘You understand me. Too well for your own good, sometimes.’

  ‘Yes.’ She toyed with him, holding him at a distance, and made sure
the mechanic was occupied with the car before coming in closer. ‘Henry, I can get you out of this situation. You want a plan? Here’s a plan. The skeleton of one, anyway. You keep an eye out for any opening you can push yourself into at the sort of publication you want to work at. One with a good reputation and some gravitas, somewhere you can do serious work, really establish yourself. Cover the stories nobody else will, because they’re too afraid. Tell me: why do you admire your favourite architects?’

  ‘Because space can transform you—transform your life—when it’s done right. It’s somehow purifying, refining—for the soul, I mean.’

  ‘So do the same thing with words.’

  The mechanic called her over. She let go of Henry, neither needing nor anticipating his response, trusting that he would follow her. He glanced briefly at the verge on which they’d been sitting, waiting, thinking they would have to return there.

  ‘Martha,’ he said, ‘what are we going to do about this?’

  ‘I have no idea. Let’s see what happens.’

  SWIMMING in the big indoor pool at the Chelsea Piers sports centre afforded Henry a fine enough view. The windows faced onto the Hudson. Ferries, trash barges and pleasure yachts drifted past the drab New Jersey landscape on the other side of the river. The city in motion as always.

  He would stop to admire it for a few minutes before diving in, but was usually distracted from the view by his semi-naked silhouette in the glass, superimposed over the Hudson’s rippling waters. He was in reasonable shape, he thought, even if the swim team doing laps were in better shape. That was only natural, given their youth. Lithe and supple, the way he must have been at their age, though he couldn’t really remember. He wasn’t the type to pore over old yearbooks.

  Henry had been a swimmer most of his life, playing water polo in college. He’d kept it up, especially in recent years after he’d contracted gout in his knees and could no longer run, coming here regularly since the complex opened in 1995, relishing the discipline. Six in the morning, a hundred lengths. Then straight to the office, the residual chlorine mixed with his bespoke cologne, feeling as though he’d already accomplished something. Proving it to himself. And to everyone else.

  Now, immersed in the water, he stretched his ageing muscles, stroke after stroke, his senses numb, aware of nothing more than the pool’s floor beneath him and the faint thud of his heartbeat. He enjoyed the cyclicality, the rhythm, as each lap gave way to the next.

  Afterwards he felt spent, wrung-out, his footsteps shaky. This morning he’d been more distracted than usual, his routine thrown out of alignment. Last night he’d received an unexpected phone call from Timothy Fogel, his old friend and the photographer who’d ended up as Her’s creative director. He was back in town from Milan as of last week and insisted on coming over for a drink that afternoon. The message mentioned he was living in Park Slope.

  Henry could picture it already. So Brooklyn it hurt. Brownstone with a stoop. Cracked brown leather upholstery and exposed brick walls, a collection of guitars he’d forgotten how to play, records never removed from their wrapping, recycled industrial chic furniture that cost several times what it was worth. A perennial faddist, Timothy had dispensed with the trappings of old money in favour of something more superficially bourgeois-bohemian. Or so Henry read it. But he was also a fine example of how you couldn’t take the Livingston, New Jersey, out of the boy.

  Though Fogel had been his closest friend for years, Henry was apprehensive about seeing him. They’d had a few years of patchy email contact, their plans to meet up always seeming to fall through at the last moment. They’d both been busy, of course.

  Henry had been glad to accept the idea, though the old flame of fraternal excitement he normally would have felt after hearing from Timothy was dampened this time. Henry didn’t assign photographs to any of his other contacts, but Fogel came up on his phone with an enormous cigar hanging out of his mouth, pulling a middle finger for the camera. Henry had taken that photograph years ago, at some party, and he was so proud to have captured his friend so succinctly that he’d always kept it.

  He resolved that it would be good to see Fogel, to reminisce about their sportsmanly triumphs, their many long days and nights of crushing it, while at Her.

  That pervasive smell of chlorine and the high-ceilinged pool room, with its watery echoes and the slippery sound of bare footsteps, reminded Henry of the first time he’d met Timothy: during a water polo match when they were freshmen at Boston University. The concentrated timeframe and high-speed violence of a water polo game had always made it a daunting prospect for Henry—nothing like the peaceful rhythms of swimming laps. It was all about bending the rules, if not outright flouting them, especially in the early seventies, when the sport was new to the club league and barely regulated. The referee couldn’t see much of what was going on beneath the choppy surface of the water. In order to survive, once the initial shock of his opponents’ brutality had worn off, Henry soon figured out how to work this to his advantage.

  As a training exercise, at the start of Henry’s second semester on the team, the coach had split the team in two and had them play a friendly match—friendly in name only. Perhaps deliberately, he’d also made a point of pitching the new team members against the ones who’d played last season.

  The water polo uniform stripped everyone of their identifying characteristics more successfully than others. The cap hid their haircuts, leaving them distinguishable by nothing but their build. You were judged not merely by your washboard abdominals in this sport, but by the length of your legs, the meat on your shoulders. And it was all devastatingly on show. Henry had always wished for a more impressive physique. He was conscious of the imperfections when he stood alongside the rest of his team, always removed from them and unable to participate in their bickering and gossiping and joking measurement of each other’s packages.

  College felt like more of an extension of high school than the fast track to adult freedom Henry had imagined. The same rules applied, even if they were no longer being handed down by a bunch of disinterested teachers. And while he could make a decent impression at mixers and dorm parties, he remained detached, searching for the conversation in his head that never came naturally.

  This wouldn’t stop him from trying to impress his teammates. Once they were in the water and the coach had tossed the ball to begin the first period, Henry cut through the water and struck out on offence rather than sticking to his usual defence position. When the ball came his way, he did his best to follow their rehearsed plan of attack with a judicious pass, choking out expletives through a mouthful of water as his team failed to get in the right formation in time, and he was tackled and quickly kicked in the stomach, knocking out his remaining wind.

  ‘Come on, Calder,’ one of his teammates shouted. ‘You’re ruining it for us. Pass the goddamn ball, you clown.’

  Henry ignored their jeers and persevered. As they progressed into the second period, he gave up on his faltering teammates, charging out with a few daring attempts to score on his own. One went through. The rest resulted in tackles, players holding him back by his suit and a quick succession of goals by the other team.

  But the greatest insult came before they’d approached the final period. Ignoring his coach’s instructions, Henry took possession of the ball as often as he could, refusing to pass unless he had to. He struck out with the ball bouncing between his arms, a rush of adrenaline affecting his judgement, focusing not on strategy but on the power he felt he could wield in his legs and forearms.

  But this left him alone on the opposition side of the pool. He searched for somewhere to pass, finding nobody but a circle of hostile players, one of whom had picked him out and was about to attack. Before Henry could do anything, the boy seized him, wrapping his legs around Henry’s midriff, and elbowing him in the ribs. In the tussle to retrieve the ball, it ricocheted off the water’s surface and struck Henry hard on the nose.

  Blood clouded the water, appear
ing more dramatic than it was. Though dazed, Henry couldn’t help but savour a little victory. The coach had stopped the game and taken Henry’s opponent aside for a dressing-down. Nerves buzzing, Henry grudgingly left the water and watched, not caring if his nose was broken, as the game went on and his side scraped together a win.

  No credit went to him. In the changing room, Henry was ignored, as always. He usually left in a hurry, and that evening he’d planned to head over to his sister’s place in South End for dinner. He was looking forward to seeing her. He hadn’t since before the first semester, and he needed to vent his feelings about college, his anxiety and loneliness and growing apathy. Christine was the only person he could trust to keep his unhappiness a secret.

  ‘Hey,’ someone said, and a hand appeared on his shoulder out of nowhere, so that he flinched. It belonged to a serious kid with big wet eyes and bushy brows, hair cropped tight and already speckled with grey. ‘You all right? Really didn’t mean to hit you in the face like that.’

  ‘I’m not complaining,’ Henry muttered. ‘It did us more good in the end.’

  ‘This isn’t my sport,’ the kid said. ‘I’m a lacrosse man, but I couldn’t get on the team this year. Believe me, if we were on the field right now, you would’ve gone down with no fight.’

  ‘I believe it.’ Henry eyed the ostentatious watch on his wrist. ‘Nice piece. Daytona?’

  ‘Oh, thank you, thank you. It’s white gold.’ He reflexively polished it against his sleeve. ‘I’m Timothy.’

  ‘Henry.’

  They shook hands—an oddly delicate way to come into contact mere minutes after wrestling in a swimming pool.

  ‘Sorry you had to get chewed out,’ Henry said. ‘See you around, maybe.’

  He wrung the last of the water out of his swimsuit and slung the duffel bag over his shoulder. His nose continued to tingle as he stepped out into the cool New England evening, the breeze coming off the Charles River cutting at his cheeks.