I Saw a Man (11 page)

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.

The Parsons end-of-year photography show was held at a gallery in Chelsea. A broad industrial space on the first floor of a decommissioned warehouse. Ryan accompanied Samantha, moving through the crowds like a fish in the wrong shoal. They were going out for dinner afterwards, and Samantha was painfully aware of how angular his suit looked among the hoodies and T-shirts, and how exposed she felt in her own strapless top. She watched him look. He paid close attention to the hung work, his eyebrows raised in quizzical amusement, as if everything he saw held a secret joke. When Samantha saw him nod at another student’s father as they crossed in front of a print, she’d felt more like his daughter than his lover.

Before they’d left for dinner Ryan bought one of Samantha’s
Mirage
prints: Manhattan’s skyline miniature on a far horizon, escalating between two hackberry leaves, gigantic in the foreground, an ibis taking flight across the South Tower of the World Trade Center. “For Greenwich,” he’d said, as they’d stepped onto the street. “It’ll look good there.” He swung his jacket about her shoulders. “Above the fireplace, or maybe in the kitchen.”

When they’d woken the next morning, Ryan had asked Samantha to accompany her photograph. It was time, he said, for him to move out of the city, and he wanted her to move with him. His place in Greenwich had been empty for three years. They were lying in bed in his apartment, the hum of the air-conditioning already contending with the heat outside. From where she lay she could see the tops of the trees in Central Park. “It’ll be great,” Ryan said, running the knuckle of his forefinger along her jaw. “C’mon, trust me.”

Samantha said yes, as much because she didn’t know what else she’d do if she didn’t as through any desire to stay with him. Her father, having neglected the child of his first marriage, was now absorbed in the lives of those from his second. Her mother, meanwhile, had broken it off with the doctor and returned to Britain. In the apartment on MacDougal they’d all talked about finding assistant positions, of sending portfolios to photo editors. But so far nothing had come of it. After three years of studying, the months ahead of Samantha were empty, unknown. Ryan was offering to fill them. They moved to Greenwich the next month. A few weeks later, on a bench beside Long Island Sound, Ryan proposed, and again Samantha said yes.

Whenever she travelled back into Manhattan to visit her Parsons friends or her old flatmates, Samantha felt fortunate. Many of them were working in retail stores now, or waiting tables. Some had found jobs in galleries, organising private views, sitting for long hours at front desks in cavernous spaces. One of them was stripping in a lap-dancing bar. Life after university had been pared of the certainties of their student days. The aspirations they’d once fostered seemed suddenly out of reach. In comparison, Samantha had few worries. No rent to pay. A steady relationship. And time. This is what Ryan had also promised her. Time to pursue her photography, free of the constraints of shifts in a diner or a cocktail bar, or any of the whole messy business of living.

But on her return journeys to Greenwich, twisting the engagement ring on her finger, Samantha often found herself staring for long minutes through the train’s windows. How had she come to call the destination on her ticket home? It was not her home. And it wasn’t Ryan’s, either. The house was too large, too unlived in. Like all the houses in their neighbourhood, it felt outsized, as if it had been built for a larger species than humans. Their neighbours were older, polished, and settled. Some had children of Samantha’s age, or even grandchildren who came to stay on vacations. When she and Ryan visited them for drinks, her heels sinking into their soft lawns, Samantha had to resist breaking the scene. She wanted to scream or tear off her clothes, just to see what would happen when their calm waters were disturbed.

From Monday to Friday every week Ryan woke at six-thirty a.m., showered, dressed, and drove his Porsche Boxster down Interstate 95 to work in the city. Sometimes he stayed there overnight too. Samantha would get up later, alone in the echoing house. She began making plans for photographic projects.

―

“I wanted to try and get under its skin,” Samantha said, shifting a leg from under her. “Have you ever been there? Greenwich?”

Michael shook his head. “No.”

“It’s beautiful. But—” She broke off, frowning. “It’s as if the place is vacuum-sealed. Like there’s no way in.”

―

For a few weeks she tried photographing the wives in their cars: tiny women lost in monstrous SUVs, their painted nails clutching the steering wheels like the feet of caged birds. Stopped at the lights, checking their lipstick in the parking lot. But Ryan soon put a stop to that. A member of his country club said something to him after a tennis match. It was a passing remark, but enough, about his wife preferring to look at paparazzi photos rather than be in them. “For chrissakes, Sam,” Ryan had said when he’d come home. He was still in his shorts and T-shirt, a sweat patch between his shoulder blades like the map of a long country. He poured himself a neat bourbon. “Set up a darkroom, hire a studio, do whatever you need. But just leave their fucking wives alone, will you?”

―

“I should have known, really,” Samantha said, laughing at her younger self. “But I was so naïve. For a bit, anyway.”

“Known?” Michael asked.

The TV was playing in the kitchen. Josh was watching a sports quiz. The intermittent sound of buzzers and applause reached them where they sat in the front room.

Samantha sighed. “Let’s just say Ryan wasn’t very good at choices.” She paused, correcting herself. “No, actually he was good at choices. Very good. He just never saw them as exclusive, that’s all. I mean, when he bought that place in Greenwich he didn’t sell the apartment in Manhattan. And when he couldn’t decide between a Lexus and a Porsche? He just bought one of each.”

She smiled weakly, looking down at her feet. “And when he proposed to me he carried on screwing his secretary.”

―

There’d been something in the woman’s voice that had made Samantha ask her directly. Something in the way she’d responded when she’d told her who she was. A knowledge. Ryan was in a meeting, the girl said, but could she take a message? Samantha paused for a moment, then asked her outright. “Are you,” she said, trying her best to keep her voice calm, “fucking my fiancé?”

There was an intake of breath at the end of the line, a brushing of fingers across the mouthpiece. “It’s all right,” Samantha had reassured her. She was sitting in the kitchen in Greenwich. A sprinkler on the lawn was spraying the window with dashes of water. The droplets caught the light with the fire of diamonds. They were probably about the same age, Samantha remembered thinking, she and this girl sitting at her desk high above Manhattan. She wondered what she looked like. Had Ryan wanted something different? Dark hair, dark eyes? Or, if they’d ever met, would Samantha have seen echoes of her own features, her own colouring? Another her, but there, not here. “Really, it’s okay. But I do need to know,” she said. “Now.”