The Benefactor

by Sebastian Hampson

  ‘Get out of here, Maggie,’ he said, the words sliding over themselves. ‘I’m not well.’

  ‘It’s Amira. I can leave the room for this week, Mr Calder.’

  The maid.

  With great effort, Henry hauled himself out of bed and stumbled towards the ensuite. His leg was still tight from yesterday’s cramp.

  ‘I have the flu,’ he called out, struggling to free himself from the shirt without ripping it. ‘Best to stay away.’

  ‘Sure, Mr Calder. Feel better. Do you want me to do anything about the dining table?’

  ‘No, no. Leave it.’

  He paused and thought about Amira. A woman whose very name he struggled to remember. He knew she’d confided in Martha: about her family’s emigration from Iran, where she’d been a schoolteacher; about her son’s battle with a chest condition, for which she had no insurance.

  ‘Thanks, though, Amira. I appreciate the work you’re doing.’

  Henry gave up trying to undress and collapsed to the tiles. He’d broken the tacit accord with himself, taken Ativan on top of far too much alcohol. He crawled back to his bare mattress, his dizziness so pronounced that the laws of gravity were inapplicable—the bed seemed to slip forwards, as if teetering on a ledge. He fell in and out of sleep for hours, until the vacuuming downstairs stopped and he could venture out of the bedroom.

  There was no sign of Maggie. Amira had left a single remaining wedge of the Berlin Wall on the cracked veneer of the dining table. A splash of red wine on the carpet marinated beneath chemical spray. A half-empty bottle of George T. Stagg stood on the kitchen bench, alongside the remnants of a broken snifter.

  Henry unscrewed the cap and went to pour what remained in the bottle down the sink, then hesitated. That wasn’t the point. He was the problem, and he couldn’t wash himself down a plughole. He no longer understood what caused him to drink. Grief? A convenient excuse.

  It was possible he’d come within the radius of his own death last night. Henry couldn’t remember what he’d been thinking, but he’d certainly known that nobody would find him in time. The mortal power he wielded, the ease with which he’d slipped into such a destructive daze—it frightened him.

  He found his cell phone and searched through the contact list for somebody to call. Timothy. His shrink. Christine. His finger hovered over his sister’s name, wondering what he might say to her now, in this state. If he could ask her what he’d done to end up here, why nothing was ever as simple and stable as he wanted. Whether he deserved that simplicity and stability.

  Another number. His mother’s nursing home in Boston, which he’d saved on the off-chance that they called him, rather than Christine, as next of kin.

  But his mother didn’t know him anymore. Nobody did.

  A key turned in the door. That sound had always signified one person’s entrance: Martha. He’d been waiting for her for so long this time—waiting for her to help him up, draw a bath, pick out the right clothes. Walk him up to Union Square for a glass of wine. Celebrating her return from this extended vacation. So glad to see him.

  Standing in the kitchen, imagining that he’d cooked a roast for her and was ready to serve it, Henry luxuriated in the bliss of this vision, this lucid dream. It couldn’t last, though. The hazy figure came into focus as she opened the door and stepped into the light, revealing herself, again, as just Maggie. And Henry could have collapsed again. He’d been so certain, this time, that Martha had come home for him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Maggie said.

  The question was understated enough, but Henry heard the caution in her voice and realised, vaguely, that he wasn’t wearing any trousers. He was also swaying uncontrollably.

  ‘I’ve…been better.’ His turn for understatement.

  ‘Yeah, no kidding.’

  Henry fell onto the sofa.

  ‘What happened?’ she said. ‘You went on another bender?’

  ‘Please don’t say anything for a minute. I’ll be fine. Maybe I’ll…I don’t know…go soak in the tub for a while.’

  ‘Can’t let you do that—unless you can guarantee you won’t pass out again and drown.’

  He couldn’t answer her.

  ‘Henry, go get some pants on. You can do that much. Is there any food in the house?’ She already knew there wasn’t. ‘You need to get something down. We’ll go to the diner across the street.’

  She made it seem like an imperative. He couldn’t deny her. The apartment was still rotating around him in a dizzy, drunken carousel of movement, and he felt a need to leave it, to straighten his damaged head out.

  Though he appreciated the slight hint of maternal instinct that must have driven Maggie to make that suggestion, Henry knew he couldn’t stomach the diner’s rubbery eggs and polythene sheets of melted American cheese. He supposed that was the best she knew—perhaps it was where she went for a greasy burger to cure her own hangovers.

  Instead they went to an Italian place on Sullivan Street, where Henry used to go with Martha on summer Sundays. It had been in the area longer than they had—one of Martha’s neighbours on Jane Street had introduced her to it. Henry and Martha always took the two rickety chairs out the front, the owner’s kittens brushing up against their legs as they unwrapped the sandwiches from their paper parcels. A light breeze agitated the canopy of trees above and blew through Martha’s hair. Henry could picture her so clearly—the ripped blue jeans rolled up to the calf, her crooked face.

  Surrounded by all the fad restaurants and design stores that had popped up across this neighbourhood in the past thirty years, the sandwich shop had a humility he thought Maggie would find appealing. It refused to keep up, to fit in. A handwritten list of everything they didn’t offer—chips, pickles, glasses of water, cutlery, plates, a bathroom—stood next to the menu. If ya don’t see it, we don’t have it, a note said by way of summary. As Henry went to order the sandwiches, he found another note next to the till: If you sometimes feel a little useless, offended or depressed…Always remember that you were once the fastest and most victorious little sperm out of millions.

  The owner was hanging around in the corner. After smiling at Henry a few times, which he didn’t return, the owner walked up and shook him by the hand.

  ‘Ciao, Henry,’ he said. ‘Don’t you remember me? I’m Walter. You been coming here ever since I started out as an apprentice, with Mattie, right?’ He turned to Maggie. ‘Is this her? No, sorry, I’m an idiot—this has to be your daughter.’

  ‘Of course, Walter,’ Henry croaked. ‘Nice to see you. This is my…friend. Maggie.’

  ‘What’s Mattie doing these days? Haven’t seen either of you in years. She used to come here alone and pull out a joint at the outside table, in front of everyone walking past. First time I told her to stop, second time I figured the hell with it, gave up and joined her.’

  Henry swallowed. ‘She came here alone?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘How recently?’

  ‘Not, like, decades ago. Maybe a few years. She played with the gattini, talked about life. She always wore these sunglasses and a Yankees cap—I had her picked for a Hollywood star or something, waiting for the paparazzi to show up.’

  Henry put up a hand and nodded, unable to humour Walter or put up a pretence of friendship. He and Maggie sat on the other side of the room. When his fresh-baked sfilatino arrived, loaded with basil and mozzarella and prosciutto and good olive oil, he could only pick at it.

  Maggie waited for him to break the silence.

  ‘I used to come here with my wife,’ he said eventually, without really thinking about it.

  ‘So I gathered.’

  ‘She had a nose for old places like this.’ He gestured around him at the shop, with its mess of old movie posters and books stacked in random piles. ‘I thought it was like having shared assets. When you’re with someone, what’s theirs becomes yours, whether you want it or not. And then when they’re gone, you’re stuck with it. Can’t get rid of it.’
/>   ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Henry.’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t worry about it. I’m not sure either. I didn’t realise she kept coming here without me. I don’t know why…this place feels empty, now. Like I don’t belong here.’

  The emptiness applied stupendously to this whole stupid relationship. Martha had once told him she didn’t like to think of herself as a married woman. She was happy because that part of her didn’t take precedence over her job, or anything else. He’d dismissed it as a typically Martha thing to say. But his idea of typical Martha wasn’t absolute, or straightforward.

  Maggie must have understood that. Why else would she have chosen to draw his wife in such a volatile way? He wondered if she’d kept that sketch—if he could ask to have it.

  ‘Maybe you would understand,’ he said, ‘as an artist. Have you ever seen this painting called The Rose? It’s by Jay DeFeo. One of the few women successful as abstract expressionists.’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘It’s quite literally a ton’s worth of paint, layers and layers of it, about a foot thick, and ten feet high. Took her eight years to make it. White in the middle, and then it gets darker and more layered and less structured the further it goes out, like it’s falling apart. That was my wife’s favourite painting. I haven’t thought about it for years. We went to see it at the Whitney. This…obscenity of paint. Didn’t matter how much I tried to understand it, what she saw in it—I couldn’t.’

  ‘So why were you trying to?’

  Good question. He’d always been trying to understand Martha’s interests, right from the beginning, when he’d noticed what she read: the Bill McKibben articles about global warming, the Salman Rushdie novels, Sylvia Plath’s poetry; Vita Sackville-West, Patti Smith anthologies. But his attempts to decipher this code, make these pieces into a coherent whole, hadn’t come to much.

  Perhaps he was giving himself too much credit. Perhaps he hadn’t tried anywhere near as hard as he could have. He examined the sandwich on the table in front of him, the unfussy hunk of bread sticking out from its tinfoil and greaseproof paper.

  ‘I didn’t understand Geoffroy,’ Maggie was saying. ‘Or what he saw—in me or anyone else. But I didn’t need to.’

  ‘No? Well, I’ve got a hunch that my wife was the more complex person, compared to your partner. So that’s not the fairest comparison.’

  ‘What makes you so sure? Everyone’s complex. You just think she was the most complex person in the world because you were close to her.’

  That wasn’t entirely true, Henry thought. He closed his eyes for a moment and pictured the young woman in the jazz club on Christopher Street, the one who’d danced one step away from him, and just a little faster. He hadn’t let that woman go anywhere. She’d remained with him, right up until her death.

  He’d never tried to learn much about her childhood, or anything she’d done before she turned up in the same Greenwich Village basement as him. It had seemed irrelevant now she was with him, within him. On the handful of occasions he’d met Cathy and Gus, he’d mistrusted them intensely, sensing tension between himself and all three Beaucanons without knowing from where, from whose end, it emanated.

  She’d also argued with him in front of her parents on one occasion, in a way that she wouldn’t normally have argued. Telling him off like a child because he’d made a joke about her job. He’d put it out of his mind, because he’d never been able to figure out why she’d done that.

  ‘You’re right,’ Henry said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that—didn’t mean to be rude about him.’

  He couldn’t meet her gaze. She wasn’t his wife. Their faces didn’t align as neatly as he wanted them to. He wasn’t here with Martha on a sunny summer Sunday, enjoying the breeze. He was huddled in a corner with Maggie, while outside a strong wind blew trash into the gutters.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘I will be,’ he said, forcing himself to remain upright in his seat to combat the waves of nausea. ‘What about you? Where were you last night?’ He paused, embarrassed. ‘Not that it’s any of my business.’

  ‘I stayed over at Beth’s in Bushwick. Stole a couple of bottles from work, smoked her bud. Read her poetry.’

  ‘I guess you’d like to be living with her.’

  Shifting the focus to Maggie, watching her squirm as she thought it over, made Henry feel better. Though she might not have appreciated the question, a glimmer of affection in her eyes suggested she had. And Henry liked to see affection in her—even if it wasn’t necessarily directed at him.

  It didn’t really matter what she wanted, Maggie thought. She’d started to doubt Beth’s interest in her, suspected it to be waning. Though they’d covered the usual subjects last night (Beth’s favourite writers, her dreams of travel, the stories about her friends and family and every successful or halfway successful person with whom she could claim some connection), Maggie hadn’t featured much. Any other quantity could have taken her place and left much the same imprint on Beth.

  Part of her wanted to keep up with Beth, to read the books she recommended and try to get into art school and go out to that club in Williamsburg she was always talking about. She’d enjoyed going to parties with Beth, to an extent. The molly and the drinking had numbed her enough to take on all those arts majors and graphic designers and wax-moustached, self-styled cocktail architects, even though she wasn’t entirely there with them, listening to them talk about the scenes she wasn’t part of, listening to their music without feeling it. The promise of being the biggest, loudest person in the room had cheated her more and more since the day Henry had found her jumping on that car roof and she’d been drawn into his monasticism, which was rubbing off on her more and more, she realised, with every hour they spent under the same roof. He’d instilled so much doubt in her, so much mistrust, if only because she could see herself becoming a victim of the same erasure, the same slow castration process.

  She recalled a passage she’d read in his memoirs: Kurt gave me one piece of advice, the day we started working together…‘Listen, Calder. There’s no harm in doing well. Know your talents and stick to them.’ She didn’t see before her a man who’d listened to that advice.

  He’d been giving her the strangest looks today, and then looked away when she caught him. Whatever he’d done last night, he seemed to have gathered his folds in tight now. She didn’t like to see him this way—not so much because she felt sorry for him, but because it made her uncomfortable. And he was right—what she’d been doing last night was none of his business.

  ‘Of course I’d rather be living with Beth,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, becoming slightly arch, as though she’d offended him, ‘that’s what I meant.’

  Maggie checked her phone. No reply from Beth to the text she’d sent an hour ago, her question, How do you really feel about me? hanging there like a piece of rotten fruit. ‘I have to ask you one thing,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s stupid.’

  ‘No, go on.’

  ‘How long did it take you to realise you were in love with your wife?’

  He took the question impassively, his face so lifeless that any reaction, no matter how slight, would have been hard for her to read. She thought, for a brief moment, that he was sniggering to himself as he prepared to respond, as though she’d reminded him of a private, cynical joke. He ripped the paper around his unfinished sandwich, pulling off shreds and rolling them between his fingers.

  ‘There’s no easy way to answer that,’ he said. ‘I don’t know when I first realised. And there are so many different types of love, too. Most of which you won’t have come across. Some of them are easier. Some people you want to have around all day, because you know they won’t be. Some people come and go as they please, and you’re okay with that. Doesn’t mean one kind of love is stronger than the other, or more valid.’ He seemed to be staring at her intensely, without meaning to, as though he’d slipped into an unconscious trance. ‘I didn�
�t understand everything about her.’

  He hadn’t answered her question, but Maggie presumed this meant he’d never truly realised, or never questioned it.

  ‘I have to go get ready for work,’ Maggie said. ‘Will you be okay on your own now?’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

  Out on the street they breathed in the cold air. At the corner of Prince Street he stopped her. ‘Let’s go this way—I want to walk up 6th Avenue. It doesn’t take much longer.’

  She didn’t argue, fearing he’d regressed so far he’d become lost if she let him wander the streets alone.

  6th Avenue wasn’t much to look at in the middle of winter—a big thoroughfare with no architectural charm, the basketball courts derelict, the storefronts cheap. For some reason, Henry was approaching his surroundings with a sense of childlike wonderment, as if seeing them for the first time.

  ‘So many great places here,’ he said. ‘Bar Pitti was back there. We used to go all the time in the summer, out on the terrace. Minetta Lane up here,’ he gestured to a creaky old tunnel of trees that closed in around a historical lane. ‘That was where I always wanted to get an apartment. Every time you walk down there it feels like you’re on a film set.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  ‘We couldn’t find the listings. Or they were the wrong ones, when they came up.’ He paused on the corner, becoming wistful, fixated on the Minetta Lane Theatre sign, its row of light bulbs glowing through the overcast weather.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Maggie said.

  ‘I suppose she wasn’t fully here with me.’ He broke his trance, raising his head. Something had cleared in his mind, though Maggie wasn’t sure what that could have been. ‘Let’s get home. I need to pack a bag.’

  ‘You’re going on a trip?’

  ‘I will be, yes. Tonight.’

  ‘Not sure that’s a good idea, but whatever.’

  As they were passing the West 4th Street subway, Henry almost bumped into somebody who was also moving fast, and busy with her phone. Maggie waited for him as he began apologising.