Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

―

“Michael Turner? The Michael Turner who wrote BrotherHoods ?” Tony pumped Michael’s hand harder as he said yes, that was right, he’d written BrotherHoods.

When Michael and Josh had reentered the party Michael had said he thought he should be going after all. But Josh had been insistent. He must meet Tony. He was taking over the digital arm of a company here. He’d love him; he was a great guy. Josh had known him since sophomore year. Michael was a writer, Tony was a publisher. So of course he should meet him. With a hand on Michael’s shoulder once more, Josh had guided him back into the talk and the drink of the front room.

Tony Epplin was a tall, balding man with the hollowed cheeks of a distance runner. On being introduced to Michael, described by Josh as “our writer neighbour,” he’d extended a polite but wary hand. On hearing Michael’s name, however, his expression discovered a new vitality.

“It’s great to meet you,” he said, finally letting go of Michael’s hand. “That was a great book. I loved it, I really did.”

“You two know each other?” Josh asked, looking up at Tony from between them.

“Yeah,” Tony said. “Well, no. Not each other. But Michael’s book? I know that for sure. It was a big deal. Everyone knew it.”

Michael thought he saw a glimpse of their teenage dynamics in Josh’s reaction. Smiling and nodding, he turned to look at Michael as if seeing him for the first time. “Yeah? That so? You should have said!” Tony, Michael felt, had long been in possession of a taste to which Josh aspired, perhaps since those early sophomore years.

“Hey, Maddy? Maddy?”

A woman, as tall as Tony, turned towards them. Michael had never seen her before, but he still felt he knew her, having often met women like her in Manhattan, at drinks parties on the Upper East Side, or sleek in evening dress at the Met. She was slender-necked, the crow’s feet about her eyes somehow a mark of knowledge more than age.

“Maddy? Can you come here a moment?” Tony said to her. “Guess who Josh’s neighbour is?”

Maddy came over, parting the bodies between them with fingertip touches on their backs. She wore many rings, mostly gold, with emeralds and amethysts inlaid in their galleries. Michael saw Samantha tracking her approach from over another man’s shoulder. She seemed alert, ready to intervene at the first sign of trouble.

“This is my wife, Maddy,” Tony said. “And this,” he continued, laying a hand on Michael’s shoulder, “is Michael Turner. The guy who wrote BrotherHoods ?”

“Oh,” she said, offering her hand. “Yes. What a wonderful book.” Her voice was as self-possessed as her beauty, slow and natural. “Weren’t they making a film of it?” she asked.

As Tony and Maddy told him how much they’d enjoyed certain passages of BrotherHoods, and how Tony had once missed his subway stop while reading it, Michael became aware of the room’s interest contracting around their conversation. Tony’s voice was strong and confident, rising above the other talk. His attention to Michael began to draw the attention of others, too. In the focus of his and Maddy’s questions, and in the ripples it sent through the other guests, Michael felt a resonance once more of the success to which the lives of Nico and Raoul had led him.

Samantha came to join them. Out of the corner of his eye Michael saw Josh turn to say something in her ear. She slipped an arm about his waist, giving him a squeeze as if to congratulate him on his discovery.

“How did you first meet them?” Tony asked, giving a twitch of his chin in professional interest. “Was it a commission?”

Josh had left them to get a couple of drinks. As he returned he handed Michael another glass of wine. Michael thanked him, took a sip, then began telling Tony about his trip up to Inwood Hill Park that day, about the cop on Dyckman and the story he’d told him about two brothers who’d left Arden Street glittering with smashed glass and car alarms. “I think it was the name of the street,” Michael said, when Tony pressed him on why he’d followed that particular story. “It seemed so incongruous. And yet suitable, I suppose.”

“Why?” Maddy asked from her husband’s shoulder.

“I don’t know. I’ve always associated Arden with the forest in As You Like It. A transgressive environment, a place to break the rules.” He laughed at himself. “A bit of a stretch, I know, but—”

“Stories breed stories!” Tony said, turning to Maddy. “Isn’t that what I always say? Stories breed stories. Always have, always will.”

Maddy closed her eyes and gave the slightest of nods to confirm her husband’s assertion. When she opened them again she was looking directly at Michael. He felt adolescent in her gaze.

Soon Josh and Samantha were asking him questions too. They’d both lived in New York when they were younger. Josh had lived on the Upper West Side when he’d crossed the river from New Jersey, and Samantha had studied at Parsons downtown. Michael was surprised to learn she knew many of the streets he was talking about. How did he conduct his research? She wanted to know. Did the police ever accuse him of being implicated?

Someone else — Janera, the young lawyer — cut in, explaining that journalists, and therefore writers, she guessed, had a right not to disclose their sources. Michael wasn’t convinced this would have applied to him and Nico and Raoul, but he stayed quiet as the conversation moved on. When Josh asked him what he was working on now, Michael told him about Oliver Blackwood. The older blazer-wearing guest said he’d known Oliver at university. “He was,” he said, “an annoying little shit, even then.”

Perhaps it was the drink, or just the relief of having been asked the question he’d feared for so long, but as the talk opened up — to Oliver, neuroscience, other books and writers — Michael, held in a cat’s cradle of voices, and with an end-of-day light washing the room, felt something give within him. It was a subtle slippage, no more than a flake dislodging from a cliff. But it was movement nevertheless, a falling away. He was still far from at ease in these surroundings. In New York, at this type of gathering, it had always felt as if the occasion’s energy was fuelled by questions. The people around him had been on quests, searching. The effervescence of their enquiries had always settled him, made him less anxious about his own unanswered horizons. At the Nelsons’ that day, however, the party appeared to comprise those who’d found their answers. Whatever they’d set out to discover was now theirs. Their search was over, and as such, despite their praise for him, Michael, as he had in Maddy’s gaze, felt juvenile in their presence.

He continued to field their questions, answering Tony, Josh, Janera as fully as he could. He hadn’t talked this much for months. As he did, his imaginings of what Caroline would have said, too, had she been there, shadowed his words. And then what she’d have said later too, as they walked home together, or got into bed, what she’d have said about the people they’d met. How she’d have described them, judged them, done impressions of them: Maddy’s imperial stance, Josh’s eager hosting.

Whenever Michael thought of Caroline like this, projecting their past into an impossible present, although he had trouble seeing her he could always hear her voice clearly. Even now, beneath the crowded talk in the Nelsons’ front room, he could hear her, like a subterranean stream running under a city. Her laugh. Her migrating swallow of an accent, her low whisper in his ear, telling him it was time to go.

―

The morning she’d left for Pakistan, Michael hadn’t seen her leave, only heard her. The taxi had come at four in the morning. He’d wanted to be up with her, to kiss her good-bye at the door. But Caroline had got ready without waking him, so the first he’d known of her going was a kiss on his forehead, followed by her hushed voice, telling him simply, “See you in a couple of weeks, love.” And then she was gone.