Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

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.”