The Benefactor

by Sebastian Hampson

  ‘Are you still in touch with him?’ Henry said, carefully.

  ‘No way. Whatever, I told you he’s a relic. I needed to make him feature. I was doing it for him.’

  ‘What do you mean? Doing the exhibition for him?’

  ‘Forget it. I didn’t think you’d be so interested.’

  Henry hadn’t thought he would be either.

  ‘So you edited a design magazine in the eighties,’ she said, her fingers drifting over to the pile of papers, shuffling them. ‘How did you meet this Kurt Wilder guy? You jump straight from moving to New York to working with him—there are some big gaps in the story.’

  ‘I met him while I was at college. Friend of Timothy Fogel’s. It’s all in there.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘Pretty sure it is. We all hung out together, had some ridiculous times. I mean, he was a genuine nut, but we were good friends.’

  She didn’t seem convinced by this, and flicked through the manuscript as if searching for evidence to disprove this claim.

  ‘Late start today?’ he said. ‘I didn’t hear you come in last night.’

  ‘Long shift. I had to cover for Beth because her parents were in town. And get this—I was running around like crazy, but we haven’t received any stock in days. The customers are getting mad.’

  ‘Sounds like your boss isn’t paying his bills. And if he’s underpaying his staff, too, I’d suggest getting out of there.’

  ‘Aha. But where to?’

  Henry couldn’t help her. He’d never been in her position, unqualified for anything, relying on uncertainties for survival. A wild idea took hold of him: he could pull strings to get her into NYU, pay her tuition. The flash of brilliance he’d seen in that triptych, which hadn’t left him, deserved to thrive in an environment that would nurture her talent, that wouldn’t dumb it down and sell it off as a commodity.

  But there was no way he could justify sinking all that capital in an unreliable investment. If she were decisive, driven, committed, perhaps—but he had no faith she’d ever stop flailing around.

  He wished to retain his distance, tell her that her situation was irreparable, set in the sort of concrete that would continue to dry, faster and faster, until she made it to the end of her third decade alive. Against what he believed to be true, however, that would feel somehow disingenuous. In this case, perhaps, the truth didn’t have to conform around a shape recognisable to him alone.

  ‘All right,’ he said, pulling up one of the dining chairs. ‘I got screwed over, when I started out in New York. Kurt Wilder wasn’t really much of a friend. I didn’t care for the guy at all, to tell you the truth. I kept the place running on fumes while he propped up his lifestyle on the proceeds. One day I went into his office and asked him, straight up, what plans he had for me. He had nothing to say, so I left, and they folded.’

  This brief summary made no mention of the glass of wine he’d thrown in Kurt’s face when they ran into each other at Lutèce a few months later and Kurt had pretended not to recognise him. Thrown with such force that the wine went up his nostrils, stopping him dead, making him splutter, and for a brief second Henry had watched as the wine dripped out onto his white Brioni shirt. It had been a clean, controlled movement, fuelled more by disdain than anger. Henry had never lived it down, and he was certain it still came up at dinner parties as an amusing, scandalous little rumour—an unexpected moment of irrational anger.

  Nor could he bring himself to mention how much Martha had helped him through that time. How they’d stayed up late, plotting a way for him to recover his reputation, find a new, better job. She hadn’t judged him for losing his cool, hadn’t viewed it as a sign of weakness.

  Despite trying her best to grasp his intention, Maggie didn’t see how any of this applied to her. There was no way she could be picky about her situation when it was predetermined, when everybody was going to be difficult and screw her over. Except perhaps Beth, for whom Maggie had a lot of patience. They’d dropped acid at the party the other night, then gone out on the roof and watched the night sky, swigging from a quart of tequila that they soon forgot about and talking plainly about how attracted they were to each other, how their connection was unique and deserved to be explored. The sound of traffic on the streets below had turned into a rainforest waterfall, and the deep magenta of Beth’s lipstick had become a matter of extreme importance, speaking to Maggie—literally telling her secrets about life, the sort of secrets the woman who’d applied that lipstick never would, that now Maggie couldn’t remember.

  She didn’t give a damn if anyone had plans for her. She made her own plans. She thought of her time with Geoffroy—how he’d made such a big deal out of seducing her, following the usual narrative of stupid but self-assured guy meeting brilliant but incomplete girl, and convincing himself that she was also following it. His big arms, his overbearing facial hair, the shark’s tooth he’d picked up in Haiti or wherever and wore around his neck, as if he had every right to. Yet it had been so easy to lose herself in him and envisage a future in which they weren’t divergent forces but co-conspirators. Giving him what he desired in exchange for a sense of grounding, of stability. That feeling, and not the man himself, had been seductive enough to scare her.

  ‘So you don’t think I should publish it?’ Henry said, picking up the printout.

  ‘I didn’t say that. It takes a lot of courage to look at yourself closely. I couldn’t. Not that closely.’

  ‘You’re afraid of what you’d find.’

  ‘I wouldn’t find what I wanted to see.’

  ‘Well, you’re young.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She checked her phone, smiling to herself as she saw Beth had replied to her last text with something funny, running her finger across the screen as though she could touch Beth through her words. ‘I’m running late for work. Should get changed.’

  As she was changing her top in the guestroom, Maggie snapped a photograph of herself with one breast hanging out of her bra and sent this to Beth. It wasn’t until after she’d sent it that she realised the bedroom in the background wouldn’t fit the profile of a struggling artist. She checked it over, finding she’d composed it to hide enough of the details.

  Part of her wished she could reveal her true self to Beth. But in this environment she wasn’t her true self—not if true and best were synonymous. And not if the man who’d furnished her with this bedroom was part of a whistle-stop tour on the way to somewhere else.

  Henry folded up the printouts, which he’d gone through with the lightest touch of his fountain pen—the one he’d always reserved for the monthly editorial. Then he went to his desk, flipped open his laptop and set to work. The document was there on the screen, waiting for him. He scrolled through and read over an anecdote about going to a journalist’s book launch at MoMA with Kurt, who’d pointed out every face he needed to memorise, effortlessly distinguishing them from those that could be forgotten at once. It was an exaggerated account of real events—Henry had done most of the research about who was who in New York on his own, or with the help of others, but the version he’d written was better. Innocence and experience, a familiar trope that rang true without trying.

  Could he delete these thousands of words and begin again? Hold himself to a higher standard?

  Henry closed his laptop. Wheeling the chair around, he tried to take in his surroundings as though they were new. The city breathing in and out. The muffled sound of Maggie opening drawers. The sight of her sketchpad, back on the coffee table now, surrounded by pencils.

  So much had happened in this room over the years. Henry’s few stiff attempts to host dinner parties. Conversations long since forgotten. Maggie’s tools were the lone suggestion that anything of lasting importance, anything more than talking and drinking and sex on the coffee table, could ever have taken place here.

  Maggie emerged from the guestroom. ‘How come you haven’t opened that package?’ she said as she passed the stack of mail by the door.


  Henry had forgotten about the plain box on the sideboard. After Maggie had slipped out, he inspected it, popping the lid and lifting a heavy object from beneath a wad of plastic wrapping and putting it down carefully on the table. It could have been one of Maggie’s installations: a hunk of concrete, spray-painted on one side with a fragment of the word Freiheit.

  He’d never seen it before, but he knew instantly it belonged to Martha. For a moment, Henry imagined an unsettling scenario in which she’d sent it to him from beyond the grave. There was no letter in the box, no card. The concrete had cracked, left to break apart, unpreserved for twenty years, even though it belonged in a museum. Henry felt the edges where chunks had crumbled off, rough against his fingers.

  It came back to him now—that week they’d spent in Geneva. They’d returned from their failed trip to Ronchamp in time for Martha to go to work, leaving Henry to fester in his bitterness and disillusionment about never making it to the Le Corbusier chapel, or Burgundy. He hadn’t moved from their hotel by the lake all week while she conducted her meetings.

  A grey fog had descended, so thick that it obscured the jet d’eau fountain and the rest of this corporate box of a town. He relaxed, finding more enjoyment in baths and room service than he would have expected. Guilt crept in on him as he stared out at the small radius of blocks visible of the foreign city waiting patiently to be discovered.

  But he’d been working so hard and for so many months without a break that he felt this vacation settle on him like a gentle hand, pushing away thoughts of deadlines and conflict and the daily list of crises Kurt went around propagating. It was the same relief that used to come after a hard semester at college, when he’d hung up his swimming trunks and packed away his textbooks in favour of his mother’s cooking and the suffocating sanctuary of her company. Peace reigned.

  Martha called him after her last meeting on Friday to explain that she’d delayed their flight home until Monday and booked tickets to Berlin for the weekend. She’d seen the photographs—East Germans climbing and dancing in front of the Brandenburg Gate. A queue of Trabants passing through the checkpoints.

  Henry didn’t agree to this plan, annoyed by Martha’s assumption that he would go wherever she went, on no notice. He didn’t want to go anywhere. They should be spending their final days in Geneva together, he argued. Sleeping in, taking the day off. Not going to gawp like tourists at what was happening. Their being there wouldn’t somehow make those events more significant.

  What began as the simplest of disagreements metastasised as Henry reminded her how badly her last attempt at an adventure had ended, the disastrous trip to Ronchamp. And he didn’t care about the plight of East Germans. Not enough to join in their celebration.

  Martha remained adamant that she would regret it forever if she didn’t go, arguing the way he imagined she argued with her adversaries at work. No space for negotiation, hanging up when he told her it was selfish. Henry spent the weekend alone in the empty hotel suite, no longer a sanctuary, hoping that she might change her mind and return early. He’d never felt such a collapse in his soul, as though a keystone chunk had been pulled out and thrown into the murky lake beyond the windows. He went without food and drank a few whiskies in the afternoon.

  They hadn’t discussed it once they got home, retreating into their jobs. But Henry saw her now, the sharpest image of Martha he’d seen in a long time, walking down the jetway a few paces ahead of him, wearing her most no-nonsense business coat. Blending in with the other passengers. Unrecognisable from behind. Her steps so fast he couldn’t match them.

  Henry turned the box over to find the return address. Cathy Beaucanon, South Battery, Charleston.

  So Martha had brought home this souvenir of the wall and given it to her parents. He wouldn’t see it, sparing him the confrontation it would inevitably provoke—she knew he couldn’t handle it. He’d reassured himself, after her death, that their love was intact, their marriage unshaken. They understood one another, two thriving hemispheres, east and west. The ugly piece of the Berlin Wall had no place here. Henry left it in the middle of the lacquered dining table, until he could find somewhere to hide it.

  Turning away, he felt another twist of pain in his leg and staggered against the table. Freiheit stared up at him, goading, next to the folded-up pages of his memoirs.

  Henry picked up the concrete slab and smashed it repeatedly against the table, the impact reverberating up his arms. The lacquer broke, shards of concrete falling in a shower of dust.

  THE power went out.

  Henry didn’t notice immediately. He was in a meeting, thirty floors above West 57th Street, and the afternoon sun shone in through his window.

  He’d brought in his deputy, Michelle Darrow, and the writer for a meeting to discuss the latest cover story, a feature on Ottelia del Biondo. Henry’s brief had been precise: cover Sforza’s collection, including a few passing references to Ottelia’s work as a UNICEF ambassador and a recently-struck sponsorship deal with the company. After endless haggling, Sforza’s board of directors had finally—more than five years after Henry and Martha had first met with Ottelia—committed a small portion of the company’s profits to sub-Saharan education initiatives. As UNICEF’s new deputy director of external affairs, Martha had pressed the profile piece on him so it would coincide with her forthcoming announcement of the Sforza deal.

  He’d been happy to accommodate her, but was anxious to keep the focus on Ottelia’s new collection rather than her politics. Fogel’s photographs showcased the pieces in a Moroccan souk, the sophisticated monochrome gowns hanging off the models juxtaposed against mounds of colourful spices and bolts of busy fabric. Morocco wasn’t sub-Saharan, of course, but that didn’t matter. Africa was an alluring idea in this case, more an aesthetic than a real place. Timothy had nailed the brief, and Henry had signed off on the visuals without hesitation.

  The writer, on the other hand, had failed to grasp his vision. She was apprehensive in his office, not sure how to compose herself, her skin red and blotchy beneath the make-up she’d obviously spent a long time applying in her bathroom mirror (perhaps touching it up in the subway window).

  ‘I’m not sure how we’ve ended up here,’ Henry said, ‘but I couldn’t have been clearer: the tone needs to be positive, engaging, not dry. You’ve given us too many facts and figures. The worst crime you can commit in this world is to be boring.’

  ‘Not that poverty and famine are boring,’ Michelle said. ‘I think what Henry’s trying to say is that we need a lighter touch. The issues speak for themselves.’

  ‘Ottelia’s charity work is one thread in the weave,’ Henry said. ‘The primary focus is making the collection desirable. What you’ve given us here isn’t fashion enough.’

  ‘Why have the lights gone out?’ Michelle said.

  ‘Must be a power outage,’ Henry said.

  ‘Should we evacuate?’

  ‘No,’ he said, feeling his flow had been interrupted. ‘Give it a moment, the backup generator will come on. This can’t wait, though—I need a new version of this story on my desk when I get back from vacation, and I need it to be perfect.’

  Michelle had ignored him and got up to peer through the window. ‘Power’s out across the street too.’

  Henry went to join her. Beyond the window blind, the whole street had gone dark, the neon signs of Times Square ten blocks south eerily extinguished.

  ‘Fuck,’ he muttered. ‘It’s the whole city.’ He turned back to the writer. ‘We’re done. Go home now, before sundown.’

  ‘Oh God.’ The writer broke her silence. ‘It’s al-Qaeda.’

  ‘Stay calm,’ Michelle said. ‘The most important thing is that we evacuate the building in an orderly fashion.’

  Henry fumbled for his cell phone, his stomach turning. Reception down. His desk phone took two tries to connect, and when it did, the call dropped out. He tried again, and again, until he heard Martha’s voice. ‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘Are you safe?�
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  ‘I’m fine, Henry. It’s nothing but a blackout. I’m on my way home and I’ll see you there. We need to talk.’

  ‘And I thought the blackout was ominous.’

  ‘It’ll be all right, but…I’d rather discuss it face to face. And we shouldn’t be tying up the lines, you know that. No panic. Hear me?’

  Fogel caught up to Henry at the stairwell. He’d been finding more and more frequent excuses to drop in from California, on the company’s dollar, always with the expectation that Henry and Martha would put him up in the guestroom and then take him out to dinner. Henry had drawn the line on the last few occasions, making up excuses until Timothy got the hint and started booking hotel rooms.

  ‘Funny place, New York,’ he said. ‘Biggest city in the world and we’re held together with nothing. One too many AC units and the grid gets overloaded. Why’s everyone so nervous? Happens all the time. They obviously didn’t live through ’77—you’re hiring too many graduate students.’

  ‘After 9/11? I don’t think this kind of thing will ever feel normal again.’

  ‘True. Have you called Martha?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s getting home okay?’

  ‘She will be. Appreciate your concern.’

  The Scots Presbyterian in Henry didn’t so much hold a grudge as swallow it like a bitter pill. It was nearly ten years now since he’d seen his friend make a pass at Martha, the poison spreading slowly through him until it tainted every moment he spent in Timothy’s company.

  Yet Henry couldn’t help himself—he kept up the dirty martinis and the cigars, inviting Fogel around for nightcaps, celebrating and commiserating and bitching about their colleagues. But whenever he left the room, or when Martha did and Timothy followed her out, the paranoia coursed through him as he imagined what his friend’s hands were doing. It was bound to have happened. The real question was whether it had happened once, twice, three times.