Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

“For your glasses,” Michael said, holding up the screwdriver. Its miniature size and transparent yellow handle made it look like a toy from a cracker.

“Ah, thanks, Mike,” Josh said, taking it from him. He nodded at the towel over Michael’s shoulder. “Going for a swim?”

“Thought I might,” Michael said. “Seeing as I’m up. Beat the crowds.”

“Well, all right for some, that’s all I can say,” Josh said as he went into the front room. From where Michael stood on the doorstep he could see the edge of the desk inside its door, Josh’s glasses folded on its corner. Josh put the screwdriver next to his glasses and came back into the hallway. Samantha, in the kitchen at its far end, gave Michael a silent wave. She was standing at the island, pouring milk into a couple of bowls. Michael raised a hand in reply, but the sound of a spoon hitting a table had already made her look away.

“Lucy, please—” Michael heard her say as she slipped out of sight.

“Well, see you later,” he said to Josh.

“Yeah, see you around, Mike,” Josh replied, closing the door. “Don’t swim too hard, now.”

―

That had been two days ago. Michael hadn’t seen Josh or Samantha since. Josh had worked late for the last couple nights. And Samantha, as far as Michael could remember, had left for a spa weekend with her sister, Martha, on Friday morning. From what he understood, it was a trip that had been decreed more than offered by Martha. Along with several of Samantha’s friends, Martha thought her little sister needed a break. To get away for a few days. She and Josh had been having a difficult time. They’d never spoken of it when Michael was in their house, and Josh rarely shared details of their marriage on the jogs he and Michael took on the Heath. But for several weeks now, he’d detected the surface tremors of a deeper disturbance. The last time they’d had dinner, the night Josh’s glasses had broken, he’d sensed it in the air, and in the girls, too, sensitive to the edge in their father’s voice. In Samantha herself, he’d seen no outward change. She and Josh had bickered over the cooking, but no more than usual, and she’d held the same determination she always applied to her arguments in their conversation. But when she hadn’t been talking, when she’d been watching and listening, that was when Samantha had seemed more fragile than Michael had seen her before. Her skin had lost its lustre and the muscles of her jaw were tense. The lightest touch in the wrong place, he remembered thinking, would have been enough to send her fractures running.

―

In the end it had been Samantha with whom Michael had talked the most at that first party in November. Aside from her few initial questions she’d remained largely silent as he’d discussed BrotherHoods with Tony, Maddy, and the others. Alert and listening, but quiet. As the party had begun to thin, however, she’d remained in the front room to say her good-byes, as if she was reluctant to leave Michael, or to speak to anyone else for too long before she’d spoken more to him. Eventually Tony and Maddy had also left, Tony helping his wife into a heavy fur coat before following another couple out the front door and into the winter dusk of the street.

There was something of a royal departure in their exit. Samantha kissed them on both cheeks, but with a formality at odds with Josh’s extravagance — his hugging of Tony and his grasping of Maddy’s shoulders as he told her, “It’s been so good to see you guys. Really, it’s been far too long. Far too long.” Maddy nodded her assent with closed eyes, absorbing his enthusiasm with a benevolent smile.

When Josh showed them to the door, Samantha and Michael were left in the room alone. Putting down her glass, Samantha moved between the side lamps, turning them on. She seemed distracted, brittle. Tony’s voice came to them through the windows. “If you say so, Josh,” he called through a laugh. “But I’ll believe it when I see it!” Samantha drew the curtains.

“Coffee?” she asked, as she turned on the lamp beside an armchair.

“Yes,” Michael replied, surprised by his own reluctance to leave. “Thanks.”

They drank their coffees on the sofa. “So Tony really liked you,” Samantha said, prising off her heels and tucking her stockinged feet under her thighs. She pulled a cushion across her stomach and held it there, like a baby, close against her.

“He liked my book,” Michael said. “Which isn’t the same thing as liking its author.”

Samantha smiled, a tired acceptance. “Well, whatever, you’re lucky. Tony doesn’t like many people.” She took a sip of her coffee before adding, “He prides himself on his taste.”

She said the last word as if its own flavour was bitter.

“Josh said they’ve known each other since college?”

“Yes. Tony was best man at our wedding.”

She shifted her position, leaning in closer to Michael as she did. His head felt light with wine and he realised that she, too, must have been more than a little drunk.

“Josh has always looked up to Tony,” she said. Then she laughed suddenly. “And not just literally, either!”

“And Maddy?” Michael asked. “Have you known her long, too?”

Samantha raised an eyebrow. “No. No, Maddy’s more recent. She’s his second wife. Mind you,” she said, as if acknowledging the achievements of a rival, “he’s her third husband.”

“Impressive,” Michael said, although it sounded more impossible to him than impressive. With Caroline gone, he couldn’t imagine the existence of a second, let alone a third, wife. Marriage felt like a finite resource to him, a rare ore he’d already exhausted with Caroline’s going.

“It must be wonderful,” Samantha said.

He looked up and realised she’d been staring at him. She was smiling in a new way, as if she was proud of him. “To live by your writing. To live by what you want to do. ”

Her emphasis suggested the idea was as impossible to her as Maddy’s third marriage had been to Michael.

“It can be,” he said. “But often it isn’t. Being your own boss. I don’t know, that isn’t always a freedom.”

She looked at him as if he hadn’t understood her. “Perhaps,” she said, looking away to the bookshelves across the room. The lamp at her side lit the fine hairs on her cheek and her upper lip. She wore diamond earrings, small, neat. Her cheekbones were high, and Michael saw how once she must have been beautiful, in quite a remarkable way.

“What would that be for you?” he asked her. “Your ‘do’?”

“My ‘do’?” she said, laughing. “Christ, where to begin?”

―

Samantha’s parents, she’d told Michael that evening, had divorced when she was eight years old. From then on much of her holidays from boarding school in Sussex were taken up with travelling between them. Her mother remarried a New York doctor, leading to Samantha spending a chain of summers and Christmases in Montauk and Vermont. These were the environments of her teenage experiences. On a windy beach at the bottom of a cliff with a surfer, the hairs on his stomach dusted with salt. In woodland huts softened by fir trees and snow. Drinking her first beer as she ate a lobster roll, watching the last train carriages clatter in from Manhattan towards the end of the Long Island line.

From eight to eighteen, despite her frequent visits to the East Coast, Samantha no more than brushed against Manhattan itself. The city was her point of arrival and departure, but never anything more. A handful of afternoons touring the Fifth Avenue window displays in winter, another handful in a bright and sticky Central Park Zoo in summer. A total of twenty days, half of them hot, half of them freezing.