As they do in a couple when that I becomes We.
From facilitating a workshop where I suggested that men representing sectors as big as continents, men running operations in Asia, the Americas and the Middle East as if ruling their own fiefdoms, would now be managed by the new bank as if office juniors, I returned to my desk and there was Jenni, popping up on MSN Messenger: Hey there workaholic, don’t forget the good fiancée.
We rattled off a conversation, back and forth exchanges on the daily normalities usually shared in a mobile call at lunch, text messages or a chat in the evening over TV. She told me about her mother and her wonky hip, how the kittens had grown big enough to climb from their cardboard box and swing on the curtains. And what seemed banal, tedious compared to donning a disguise and trailing men home from work, was in fact a break from that state of hypertension. It was the steady heartbeat of routine, two people sharing a life.
We both signed off I love you, Jenni folding away her laptop in bed, while I logged off and turned down beers with colleagues who’d get me drunk and no doubt drag me to a strip club. I needed more connection with someone than slipping bills into stocking tops, and once out of the office rang Ruben, a friend who’d recently lost his job with Merrill Lynch.
‘I’m a man of many hobbies,’ he laughed when I asked how he was doing. ‘I think it’s called life, that thing that happens outside of work.’
I wondered if he fancied coming out for a drink.
‘Sure, but fuck the city. Get yourself on the Q train, I’ll meet you at Atlantic.’
I took him up on the offer, catching the Express from 34th Street out to Brooklyn, jammed with the commuters shuttling from Manhattan to the gentrified suburbs of Park Slope. I’d known Ruben from my first spell in New York, when times were good for those buying and selling mortgages. A hyperactive, fiercely intelligent and career-driven man, I wondered how he’d adapted to being jobless.
‘Sammy boy,’ he greeted me on the Atlantic Avenue plaza, a jazz soundtrack piping up from the brass band playing on the concourse. ‘Now you’re really in New York.’ He wore scruffy Nikes, a pair of jeans and a leather jacket over the top of a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt.
‘Who the hell are you?’ I joked, not admitting I had to look twice to recognize him out of a suit.
‘A man of leisure.’ He laughed. ‘And I know things are bad when they call in the Brits.’
I felt good in his presence, he was easy company.
‘Miyuki’s cooking teriyaki chicken, but we got time for a beer first.’
I followed him into a dim Irish bar called O’Connor’s at the bottom of Fifth Avenue. A football game flickered soundlessly on a screen above the counter. Indie rock thudded about the narrow room while a tattooed barman wiped down the counter and folded away his tips.
‘Two bottles of Brooklyn,’ Ruben ordered, turning to me and saying, ‘You gotta have the local brew.’
We took a booth seat, touched bottles and drank.
‘Man,’ he started. ‘You gotta get out of this work thing. I tell you, best thing that ever happened to me was this crash.’
‘You make it sound as if you’re retiring.’
‘For a month or two.’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’
‘Miyuki wants a house husband?’
‘Well I’m not getting a job in the city right now. You’re more likely to see Elvis on Wall Street than a want ad.’
‘You got the cash to sit back for a while?’
Ruben grinned, then leant over the table, closer. ‘I did all right, okay.’ But he only acknowledged his luck with a brief smile. ‘And I know I’m not the only one. Look at Lehman. Kaput, fucked. Two thousand seven Fuld was CEO of the year. Last month he was up before some House committee. You know what he told them? That he earned sixty million in wages and, and two hundred and forty million selling stock.’
‘Before it turned to toilet paper.’
‘A financial tsunami, that’s what he’s calling it. And you gotta love that. That’s as good as Clinton getting his dick sucked and denying sexual relations. Financial fucking tsunami. Come on, man, as if it was out of his control. A CEO of an investment bank saying that is like Zeus throwing down a lightning bolt and going, “What the fuck? Where did that come from?”’
‘But I’m guessing you did pretty well from the fallout.’
He picked at the label on his bottle, and I asked if he was feeling guilty about it.
‘Look, a week before we go under I get my bonus. I know we’re sinking, I know others are getting fucked while I’m collecting.’
Ruben drank again. I told him he was telling me stuff I already knew. ‘We’re in a game,’ I said. ‘We know that. Winners and losers. Half the reason I got into the job was the competition, proving myself.’
‘Bang,’ said Ruben, sitting up straight. ‘Adaptive market theory.’
I knew enough bits and pieces of economic theory to bluff most conversations, but this was a new strand of thought.
‘Competition, you said, getting into the money game to prove yourself, to win. That’s Darwin. That’s adaptive market theory. People not numbers. Investor analysis is changing. The mathematicians, the physics professors, they’ve thrown in the towel. Numbers didn’t predict any of this. Not the bubbles, the panics and the manias.’
‘The crash.’
‘Exactly. Because people don’t do what they’re supposed to.’
He had me now, my attention, and I asked him to explain.
‘Natural selection. Competition and reproduction.’
‘Survival of the richest.’
‘Markets are like the ecosystem. Investors compete for profits, the natural resources. Different investors are different species. The hedge-fund manager and the market-maker go tooth and claw for the prey.’
There and then, it was easy to agree with the idea. ‘A system measured by its ruthlessness,’ I said. ‘We evolve to stay alive.’
‘Or sell a piece of shit mortgage.’ Ruben shrugged his shoulders and held out his hands. What to do with it all.
‘You’re in a getaway car,’ I said. ‘A fast one.’
‘Clean across the border, bro. Gone.’ He finished the bottle, a gesture of disappearance. ‘And you got your own bank job in the works?’
‘Planning the getaway,’ I said, overtly joking, but my insides suddenly coiling.
Ruben was about to say something when a text buzzed his phone. ‘Miyuki.’ The screen illuminated his face. ‘It’s chow time.’
We walked the tree-lined avenue beneath a dark blue sky, past Chinese, Thai, Indian and Mexican restaurants, even an English-owned fish and chip shop, and up the hill towards Prospect Park. Ruben, ambling, mellow as a stoned man compared to his once frenetic city personality, nodded hello to a woman carrying a chihuahua in her handbag. ‘Five years ago this was a bad neighbourhood. Now we’ve got toy dogs in tartan jackets.’
‘Is that what money’s for?’
‘Wait till you see what Miyuki’s been spending my bonus on.’
I followed Ruben up to his brownstone apartment. At the top of the steps his wife, petite and pretty in that contained and precise Japanese way, opened the door. ‘Good to see you, Sam.’
We hugged.
‘And how’s Jenni?’
‘She’s great,’ I assured her. ‘Looking forward to the wedding.’ Jenni had flown out to New York several times on my last extended stay here. Apart from our upstate ski trips and tours of New York’s Michelin-starred restaurants, she’d met and, as she usually does, charmed my colleagues and their partners.
Ruben slapped me on the back. ‘Joining the married club.’
‘You’re a lucky man!’ laughed Miyuki.
‘That’s what everyone keeps telling me.’
I slipped off my shoes and took a seat at the kitchen table. Miyuki returned to the hob and Ruben poured wine. We talked some more about weddings and I told them about Mark and Briony’s extravagant bash, the horse and carriage, the marquee, how the
happy couple got inside just before the skies darkened and split.
‘So romantic,’ gushed Miyuki, serving hunks of glazed chicken. ‘I bet Jenni was so excited.’
I told them she was. I told them about the day as if it had been relayed to me by someone else. A version of me had been there, arm in arm with Jenni listening to the service, throwing confetti. But then another man arrived and hid with a woman in a field on a sunlit morning.
With an after-meal slouch Miyuki and Ruben sat together on a big armchair while we watched the McCain versus Obama presidential debate. I had one eye on the screen, the jerky, almost puppet-on-a-string twitches of McCain, the candour and confidence of Obama, generous to his opponent in the way a father might patiently educate his slow child, and the other eye on Miyuki curled over Ruben like a cat. Not jealous, just curious, studying how two people had grown into one.
‘McCain,’ Ruben snapped. ‘Gets called brave for dropping bombs on villages.’
‘And he was such a playboy,’ added Miyuki. ‘You know his wife had a car accident and got put in a wheelchair.’
‘So he fucking leaves her.’ Ruben shook his head. ‘Leaves her for that psycho Cindy.’
‘Imagine her as First Lady.’ Miyuki laughed.
I made gestures of expected disbelief and carried on watching Obama dismantle McCain. I wasn’t about to wade into a conversation about morally bankrupt men who leave wives behind.
When the debate closed and the two candidates shook, with the presumed triumph of boxers punching the air before the judges’ decision, Ruben said he’d do the dishes and suggested Miyuki show me her sea horses.
‘Sea horses?’
‘About twenty,’ she enthused, already heading from the lounge and beckoning me to follow. ‘Always my dream to keep them, and now we have the extra space and Sam’s bonus.’
The back bedroom had been transformed into a walk-in aquarium. Tanks filled with clumps of green weed and sea horses lined the walls.
‘They only eat shrimp,’ said Miyuki, sprinkling a handful on to the water. They eddied to the bottom, some falling on to the obligatory model castle where translucent sea horses bobbed over the ramparts.
‘Don’t you think they’re beautiful?’
I crouched and put my face closer to the tank. A pale gold sea horse, propelled by its fluttering dorsal fin, swam towards the glass. I studied the dark roving eyes, each moving independent of the other, while it studied my own face, floating like a moon over that subaquatic kingdom of plastic castles and swimming horses.
‘You know it’s the male that has the babies?’
‘The man?’
Miyuki clipped the roof back. ‘They have a pouch in their stomach. After they dance with the female, and if they’ve danced funky enough, she puts her eggs into his pocket and he gives birth instead.’
Again, I bent down to the tank. ‘I never knew that,’ I confessed, watching a skinny pipefish zip past where the sea horses picked at the shrimp with their bony snouts.
‘And you know they’re not like McCain.’ Miyuki chuckled. ‘Sea horses are together for life. What’s the word?’
‘Monogamous.’
‘They’re monogamous. Same partner for ever.’
Miyuki bent to the tank, beaming, watching the sea horses twirl and flutter, gently bump one another and glide in the current, tails hooked together.
Coming back from Ruben and Miyuki’s, standing on the open platform at 4/9th Street station watching the Brooklyn streetlights twinkle and wobble as if refracted through water, I pictured the sea horses bobbing around in the night sky. I could see them right there above the tracks, dancing, tails intertwined. And inside their translucent skin I watched the beat of their delicate organs.
Despite the chill wind cutting through my clothes, the home-cooked meal warmed my body like a log fire burning in the hearth. Not just the heat of the food, but the whole cliché of the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach kind of thing. Soul food on a cold night. I wanted to hold Jenni, cuddle up with her in an armchair made for one.
I rode the train into Manhattan content, convinced, that I’d rid myself of the fixation, of her.
And when a succession of homeless men, toes poking from beaten sneakers, dragging body odour like a comet’s tail of stench, trudged through the carriage and stopped to deliver their Spare some change? A dollar, a dime, a penny pitch, I gave them all the money I had on me, emptying my pockets. I also wondered which of them slept in a doorway because the woman they’d wronged had thrown them out of theirs.
Rising from 42nd Street station into the meretricious neon of Times Square, the tourist gawpers and bulbs of advertising, the ticker-tape news of folding banks, I was more resolved than ever to get over my hormone burst, my adolescent desire. I had a fine woman, a woman too good for me, waiting at home.
THE DAY AFTER I declared my good intentions, the day after Miyuki cooked teriyaki chicken and showed me her sea horses, I was sitting in a meeting when my phone buzzed in my pocket. Not wishing to incur the wrath of Ben Lucas, one of these red-faced managers who constantly appear to be on the verge of a heart attack, by being caught reading a text, I let the message sit in my jacket for over an hour. I guessed it was a goodnight from Jenni as early evening New York equals bedtime in London.
When Lucas wrapped up the seminar, a briefing which had turned into a troop-rallying speech from a man who liked to spur on his teams like a fist-pumping basketball coach, I walked into the corridor and checked my phone. The number was unrecognized. The message read, Would you rescue my shoe if it fell in a river?
I felt as if I was falling, my organs weightless in my body.
‘Anyone home?’ Lucas had been calling my name without my even registering him. He looked at the phone in my hand. ‘I get it. Transatlantic love texts from your woman.’
I snapped it shut. ‘Something like that.’
He laughed, spoke, said things I didn’t listen to. ‘Capeesh?’
‘Loud and clear.’
He slapped me on the shoulder. ‘Good having you here, Sam. But too much work and no play is bullshit. About time you joined us for a few drinks.’
‘Friday.’
‘Friday. A man could die of thirst between Wednesday and Friday. I know why you’re not drinking, it’s because you can’t get a warm pint in this country.’
‘You might be right,’ I replied, gripping the phone in my pocket. ‘But you know why American beer is served so cold?’
He turned to hear the answer as he jumped in the elevator.
‘So you can tell it from piss.’
He laughed and called me a bastard before the doors shut. I walked back to my desk and read the message again. Then I checked the number, confirmed it was a US mobile. I was kidding myself with this detective work. It was her. Segur must have mentioned bumping into me, and Kay had scrolled his address book for my number.
‘Shit,’ I said aloud. The Guatemalan office cleaner briefly glanced up from her dusting, not that interested in hearing another man in finance swearing at his desk.
On the walk back to my apartment I twirled the phone between my fingers. I opened my door and threw it on the bed where it lay like someone waiting, a lover.
Then I went to the gym to burn off my doubts, strengthen my resolve.
When I came back from bench pressing and chin-ups, squats and sit-ups, thirty minutes on the heavy bag till my knuckles hurt, I was pumped with adrenalin, the rush of a workout. But on seeing the phone again I knew I’d failed. Failed to douse the desire. I left the phone on the bed as I showered, washed and scrubbed. I got hard thinking about her, not Jenni. But this erection was comfort to my conscience. That was all it was, I thought, lust.
So I stroked myself and focused on Jenni. By coming with the image of her I’d kill the Kay hard-on. I thought of the time we climbed on to the roof of a starlit Greek ferry, the hidden cove in Devon where Jenni worked on me until we both collapsed and blissfully dozed while seagulls squawked a
nd circled above.
But when I came it was Kay who flashed in my head, her legs wrapped round my back as I thrust inside her.
I took a towel off the rail, walked into the bedroom and picked up the phone.
Yes, I texted. Yes I would.
Finally, too tired to wait any longer for a reply, I fell on the bed and let go of my phone. I dreamed of clouds like smoke from burning plastic. Or a pyre of bodies. That was the leaden sky of my sleep, an expanse of roiling grey above a barren wood. No birds or green leaves, just a million naked branches. Like scoured bones. And between those pale trunks I could see a woman making her way through the dead forest, lost. When I followed her I had to fight my way through the rattling branches to keep up. She wore a yellow dress, ragged and torn. Was it Kay? Or Jenni? I couldn’t see her face.
Then I was woken by the text, a short vibration on the bedside dresser. It was just before dawn. I was surrounded by office blocks and skyscrapers, not dead trees. I scrolled to the message.
What if my shoe fell in the Hudson River?
This time I didn’t debate whether to text back. I typed, Then I’d definitely need a kiss for returning it, and hit send. In my half-awake state it seemed unreal to question my acts. I simply replied.
Within seconds she answered, The Bethesda Fountain, Central Park. Noon. K.
Before I had time to think about what she’d just done, what we’d just done, my phone buzzed again.
Wakey wakey lazy bones.
It was Jenni. A sweet good morning text to start my day.
First timers in New York often gush about the city giving them the sensation of being in a film. Seeing the Empire State Building flashed with sun, the yellow cabs and wraiths of steam that really do plume from the grates and manhole covers, they assume movie star status, believe, for a moment, in their own selves on a silver screen with a downtown backdrop.
The Hummingbird and the Bear Page 8