But when your own life takes on a dramatic quality beyond the everyday, and perhaps this is the lure of many affairs, not that I counted what I was doing as one, the scene is superfluous and character is king, the chemistry between leading man and leading lady.
However, the New York stereotypes were certainly represented on set. From the overweight cop at a hot dog stand to the Fifth Avenue trophy wives dashing from limousines to designer stores. These extras were there when I crossed the road and walked into Central Park, past the T-shirt sellers and portrait artists, the clip-clopping carriages toting European tourists with digital cameras pointed at skylines and NYPD patrol cars.
And the horse-drawn carriages also carried my memories of that day in August, the joyous bride and groom swirled in confetti, talk of my own wedding.
On the ice rink, not yet cold enough to be open to the public, the blank whiteness waited to be coloured by skaters, by amateur couples fumbling around in hats and gloves, couples flown across continents to circle a frozen pond in a fairy-tale city.
As Jenni and I had done two winters ago, when she’d joined me on a short break to celebrate her latest promotion.
When I looked down on the rink I peered through time itself. I swear I could see us looping the ice, hand in hand. What if I’d looked up on that January day and considered the future? Could I have pictured myself sneaking off to rendezvous with another man’s wife, lying my way out of interviews and seminars to risk the love of my fiancée for an illicit meeting? The way I felt about Jenni then I’d have laughed at the suggestion of my chasing someone else. But here I was, and there I was. A man in love on an ice rink. A man on his way to another woman.
Deeper into the park that guilt was replaced by worry. While I walked towards her, I scanned the paths and bushes for him. I was jittery, paranoid enough to wonder if I was being followed. What if Segur had found out that Kay had texted and this was a set-up? Perhaps he was hiding in the park, skulking in the undergrowth and watching me walk into his trap.
So nervous I was sweating in my jacket on a cold day.
IT WAS THE WEEK before our engagement party, before friends and family raised and clinked glasses to the declaration of our love, that I sat on the bed watching Jenni dress.
‘Get over it,’ she snapped, pulling clothes from the wardrobe.
‘It’s strange,’ I replied. ‘That’s all.’
She was heading into Hammersmith to meet some of those friends, one of whom, Mike, happened to be her ex from university.
‘And Clara,’ she reiterated. ‘The three of us are having a drink before she flies to Brazil.’
‘You already told me.’
Watching her lift a bra strap over her shoulder, my imagination whirred with scenarios. From Mike and Jenni hugging their hellos and feeling a flame reignited, to them waving Clara through the departure gates and stealing away to a hotel for a one-for-old-times’-sake fuck.
Before I even commented that she seemed to be putting on more lipstick than usual I knew the words were war talk.
‘What the fuck, Sam.’
But I still said them.
She spun round. I was sitting, head down. She stood over me in her boots. ‘Just think about what you’re saying. Think about me. And think about your fidelity, or lack of it.’
She swore she’d never been unfaithful.
‘Not once. Not with you. Not with Mike. And not even with Philip fucking Cross from the sixth form.’
The ‘fucking around period’ that Jenni called my university years was not a state of being I wanted to return to. One-night stands and blurred memories, condoms, morning-after pills and fear of STDs. But after two years’ work in the plastics factory, the all-nighters drinking and taking drugs merging into dawn shifts before I raced to college to study for my A levels, arriving on campus was as good as unpacking a suitcase in a holiday hotel.
I wanted, needed, to be with women, I knew that much about my messed-up self, but had no concept of a relationship.
‘You know, I think I’d be happier about it if you’d just been shagging them and not craving some love at first sight, or first kiss, or whatever it was you thought you wanted after a few hours in the union bar.’
I thought that telling Jenni that my conquests were emotional, that all I wanted was to be needed by another for a night, would exclude me from the playboy tag.
‘Oh it does,’ she’d say, during one of the many arguments we had throughout our second year together, a period of resistance from both our hearts. ‘But what does it mean? That I’m not enough for you?’
‘No,’ I’d protest. ‘Not true.’
‘Siobhan wasn’t. And fucking hell, she brought other women into the relationship for you.’
I disagreed. I argued. I told Jenni she was the only woman I wanted, needed, loved.
ABOVE THE FOUNTAIN, PIGEONS roosted on the wings of a bronze angel. A few tourists wandered, took pictures, bought overpriced cans of Coke from the burger carts. When I saw her sitting on the wall by the lake edge, tearing up a pretzel and throwing it to the ducks, my stomach fluttered. I walked down the steps and across the terrace as if on a stage before a hushed audience. The spotlight of the low sun cast my shadow. Kay saw it and turned. ‘Hey, you.’
A sharp thrill to hear her voice.
She checked her watch. ‘You’re three minutes fashionably late.’
She stood. She wore a mid-length suede jacket with black leggings and black boots. We nervously hugged and kissed hello, like two cousins meeting only at Christmas times. Then she stepped back, looked me up and down and said, ‘You’re here,’ gesturing to the New York skyline with open hands.
I looked at the scene, towers steaming from air-conditioning units, sparks of helicopters and planes the only marks on a bright blue sky.
‘So quiet for the middle of the city,’ she said. ‘Imagine the apartment blocks and offices are castle ramparts, and Central Park is the courtyard.’
I looked around, thought of standing in castle grounds.
‘Do you know what I mean?’
I said I did. ‘We’re back in the fairy tale from the field.’
She smiled. ‘Do you want to take a walk?’
I thought she might hold my hand, but she kept hers in her pockets. Perhaps someone she knows might see us?
Or perhaps she wanted to meet so she could say what fools we were, risking it all for a kiss?
We walked round the lake, alongside weeping willows that draped their branches in the water. Stacked neatly by the boathouse, rental skiffs had been turned over to mark the end of the season.
‘Let’s go in the Ramble,’ she said, pointing to the overgrown maze of winding paths that ran behind the restaurant.
I said sure. I wanted to get lost in there. No, I wanted us to lose ourselves in there. Lose the regret I had in my gut for even showing up. Lose the third person who seemingly strolled by my side.
We passed comments on the leaves, copper tipped and bronze, clinging to branches or slowly twirling through the air. Squirrels, busily scampering about with acorns, stopped and cocked their ears when we walked by.
‘They have no memory of where they hide their food,’ I said.
‘They must.’
‘That’s why they bury hundreds. Come winter it’s just a lucky dip.’
‘No memory of what’s going to keep them alive?’
And as she pondered this I again studied her wide mouth and full lips. The sight, sound and smell of her was undoing things inside my body at a subatomic level.
When she looked across and saw I was rapt with her she quickly looked away, focusing on the mosaic of fallen leaves stuck to the path.
Wordlessly we followed the trail to the lake on the west side of the park. We went past a handful of strolling tourists and locals walking dogs before coming out on the water’s edge, cordoned off from the public by a plastic mesh fence.
‘I hate this,’ said Kay, grabbing the top it and shaking it. ‘Come on.’
In one swift movement she swung her leg over. ‘Before a cop sees us.’
I jumped after her. Memories of running from school as a child, adventures into the out of bounds. I followed her through the undergrowth, and once we were down by the lakeside the trees hid our trespass.
‘I love this spot.’
It was almost a windless day. The Manhattan skyline mirrored on the glassy surface. On the other shore we could see joggers, a woman sitting reading a book, and an elderly couple ambling along with linked arms, each with a walking stick in their outside hand.
‘We forgot the sandwiches, again,’ said Kay, sitting cross-legged on a rock and facing the water, inviting me to do the same.
I sat beside her. For the first time since the airport goodbye in August we touched, brushing thighs. I felt hot, that same melting sensation deep in my chest. But unsure what Kay wanted from our meeting I resisted reaching over for her. Either from fear of rejection, or some remnant of guilt about Jenni. Though I have to be honest with myself and say it was most probably not the latter. There and then, in Kay’s intoxicating presence, all sense of right and wrong had been suspended.
‘Did you get my postcard?’ she suddenly asked, picking small stones from the dirt and tossing them into the water.
‘The Statue of Liberty.’
‘The lady in the harbour. I was surprised how long it took me to choose the picture. Why not the Empire State building or the Brooklyn Bridge?’
‘They’re male things. Bridges and towers.’
‘So I sent a woman instead of a phallus.’ She smiled. ‘Good.’
I picked a stone up, too. ‘It was a shock, seeing it there on my desk.’
‘Did I scare you?’
I tossed the stone into the water. ‘I tried to throw it away.’
We watched the ripples spread across the lake, and I asked her why she posted it.
‘To make that day real,’ she answered. ‘Worth something.’
‘I’d have sent a picture of Buckingham Palace in return.’
‘But no address.’
‘Just Chris’s business card.’ By simply uttering his name I cheapened what we were doing, harmless as it was at that point, two people sitting by a lake.
‘And you just happened to be in a cafe on 23rd Street when he came in for coffee?’
I felt like a stalker. ‘People do strange things.’
When I bent to pick up another stone, she reached out and took my hand in hers. She inspected the back, the palms. ‘You have a lot of scars for a finance man.’ She ran her fingers along the creases. ‘I like your hands.’ Pressing her palm against mine, she saw my long fingers, slender, but most broken at some time or another.
I was only just listening. Her touch was electrifying, volts in my being.
‘This is supposed to be your life line,’ she said, tracing a fingernail over the deep crease in my palm. ‘Yours gets stronger toward the edge of your hand.’
‘I’m going to get better as I get older, like a good wine.’
‘What about mine?’ She turned over her hand. ‘See how it’s all splintered at the start, strong in the middle, then suddenly stops.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s rubbish.’ I hated seeing the halt of her crease, the end.
‘I always worried about it when I was younger, running out like that.’
I turned her hand over. ‘Why would you think that?’
She looked away to lower Manhattan, squinted at the golden storeys of glass. Then she pulled her coat tighter across her chest from the cold. ‘I have a good life, so do you?’
‘Depends how we’re defining “good”.’
‘Compared to what I had, that’s one way to define it.’
The history of her, a cause for why I was willing to risk it all with Jenni, was what I wanted. I needed to hear why my body had brought me here. ‘You tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine,’ I said, the jokey tone masking my fear of finding things out.
‘You wouldn’t believe me.’
‘Make it a story then,’ I suggested. ‘Imagine you’re talking about someone else.’
She thought about this. She studied my face while she considered what to tell me. ‘No,’ she said abruptly, shaking her head. ‘Whatever happened in that field, under that umbrella, that was us. Me and you. No story. Everything I say to you is the truth.’
At that moment, on that particular day, we’d still done nothing wrong. Or had we? Though no physical betrayal of our lovers had occurred since the kiss at Heathrow, do the thoughts of another qualify as infidelity? Conscious or not. What if one wakes in the dead of night, as I had beside Jenni, from the pulsing dreams of a different bed, a different woman?
‘I’m from a small town in California, just outside of San Diego. West coast girl. I grew up with mountain ranges, not skyscrapers. My mom tried really hard with me, but she was all alone and things were hard with no father around. She thought the only break for a woman working as a secretary at a car dealership was another man coming along.’
‘Where was your dad?’
‘Jail most the time. He lost his job at a sawmill, started drinking, thought it a good idea to drive drugs across the Canadian border.’ Kay scratched at the rock with her pebble. ‘See, I come from good stock.’
‘Yeah, and I’m a real thoroughbred, too.’
And then I let her talk. I listened as if I were in her story. As if I were her. She told me how aged only sixteen she moved up to Seattle, swept north with the grunge scene, the wrong crowd.
‘I got a job working a bar with fake ID and a tattoo.’
‘Why did you leave home?’
Kay shook her head. ‘The guy my mom was seeing. I knew something was going to happen.’ She paused, left this part of the story and jumped ahead, told me how she met a guy in a band who talked her into quitting high school, promised her she could go on the statewide tour that never happened.
‘And then came the drugs. Fun at first. No one takes acid because they hate it. And good weed, stuff from the hills. The Seattle sound was playing on radios all over the world and my only worry was getting high.’
‘Something changes?’
‘I was young, okay? Remember that when I tell you I got involved with a Mexican guy, a drug dealer. I thought it was all so darkly glamorous. And, not that I knew it at the time, I was getting back at my mom for inviting a man into our house who checked me out every time I walked into the living room.’ She took a deep breath, looked to see if I was listening, understanding. ‘The “something changes” was heroin. One minute it was all acid and weed, then best friends were stealing each other’s TVs to buy deals.’
I’d never taken heroin, but seen enough of it, known kids from school who’d withered into old men over the course of a few years jacking up. Kay had smoked it at first, kidded herself that it wasn’t an addiction. Then before long she was injecting.
She looked at me for confirmation that I understood, believed her. Perhaps she was looking for judgement, for the moment I’d back away.
‘We’ve all messed up,’ I said.
‘But some messes can’t be cleaned up, can they?’
She was probably right, but I wasn’t going to agree.
‘Have I turned you off yet?’
No, she hadn’t. From the pang at the base of my spine when I saw her again, to a history others would’ve hidden. I was no saint, either. She’d turned me on to who she was, started colouring in the sketched woman. I told her this.
‘Well, you’re still sitting here.’
I was. The knowledge she’d lived out as much drama, if not more, as I had wasn’t something that made me want to move.
‘And I just tried to scare you away, tell you things I never share. With anyone.’
I asked her if Chris was that anyone.
‘He knows enough, put it that way.’ Her body seemed to jolt on his name. ‘Anyway, maybe I’ve started explaining why we’re hiding by a lake in Central Park. A married woman who seemin
gly wants for nothing, and a man about to marry his perfect fiancée.’
I looked away. I didn’t want to think of Jenni and look at Kay simultaneously. And while I wanted to ask Kay about Segur, why she was with him and how much he knew of her past, I had no desire to bring him further into the conversation. I studied the lake bed. ‘Are there any fish in here?’
‘Nice change of subject.’
It wasn’t. ‘Perhaps there are things we should avoid.’
‘For now,’ she said. ‘But not for too long. It’s who we are, the people we live with.’
She angled her head to look me deep in the eyes. Her hand was palm down on the rock, and I reached out and took it in mine. We gripped, testing, as if babies trying out their grasp. But we were still awkward, fearful, afraid of what a kiss might do.
‘We should walk some more,’ she said, standing and brushing a dead leaf from her jacket.
I followed her up from the lake edge. We climbed back over the fence, returning to the winding path that cut between the trees and rocky knolls. I felt we’d left something behind by the water. A moment that had happened minutes ago was already years old.
‘So you just got transferred to the New York office?’
‘I was asked, and at first I declined.’
‘What changed your mind?’
I let the answer hang for a while, a pause. ‘The letter K.’
I was close to grabbing her right there, kissing her. Kissing her hard. I wanted her hair in my hands, her tongue in my mouth. But the timing seemed wrong. I sensed she was waiting, turning over the idea in her own mind. Right and wrong, logic versus desire.
We came out of the Ramble by the Swedish Cottage, a timber cabin oddity in the middle of Central Park that was home to a puppet theatre production of Neverland. Just past the cottage was the open-air Delacorte Theatre, famous for running Shakespeare plays through the summers. We stopped before the bronze of Romeo and Juliet, two elongated figures captured arm in arm, lips not quite touching.
I said, ‘I suppose I can admire their dedication as lovers.’
The Hummingbird and the Bear Page 9