I Saw a Man by Owen Sheers

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.
    “I suppose that’s why I chose Parsons,” she said, uncurling her legs but still holding the cushion across her stomach. “I mean, I could have gone anywhere closer to home. Central Saint Martins, Kensington and Chelsea. Not Oxbridge, I suppose. I don’t think they do photography, do they? Anyway, that’s not the point. I was determined. New York or bust.” She shook her head. “God, my poor parents. I must have been a right pain in the arse.”
    Her teenage desire had been fuelled not just by her own glimpses of Manhattan but also those of others. The work of Nan Goldin, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand. Through the lenses and frames of these photographers, New York became a kaleidoscope of event for her, a maelstrom of the human and the built. All through her first year at Parsons she’d worked diligently to follow their example, spending whole days immersed in the chemical scent of the darkroom. But then one day towards the end of the summer semester, stepping back from her pegged prints bathed in the red bulb, Samantha had seen that she had nothing new to say, or to see. She was twenty years old and beyond the bar or the bedroom it was her first discovery of her