*
From Bryant Park I walked up to Baldwin’s Formals on 45th and Sixth, pushed open the door and announced to the young Asian tailor that I needed to hire a tuxedo.
‘What kind of event, sir?’ he asked, hands pressed together, tape measure dangling round his neck.
‘An awards dinner,’ I replied. ‘Something simple.’
I was shown an array of jackets, from wedding tails to flamboyant white creations.
‘Can I try on the two-button Ralph Lauren?’
‘Nice lines. The lapel works with their laydown collar shirt, too.’
‘You’re the expert.’
He showed me to the fitting rooms, slipped the tape measure from his neck and set about calling out my numbers to the other sales assistant.
‘Not too tight,’ I requested.
‘No problem,’ he said, kneeling to measure my inside leg. ‘Thirty-four.’
I felt like a cow at auction, my presence in the world defined by inches, what space my flesh occupied. I took the clothes into the fitting room and tried them on. Down to my underwear I turned to the mirror slowly, and saw my body. Taut from walking, press-ups and sit-ups, a diet from nerves that began the day I met Kay. I studied the scalpel mark on my right shoulder, an operation to keep me playing rugby when I should have retired, now a pink caterpillar of sewn-up skin.
‘How are we doing, sir?’ called the assistant from beyond the curtain. ‘A good fit?’
I wondered what Kay would think of seeing me naked, if she ever would. Then I buttoned the shirt and pulled up the trousers, slipped on the tuxedo and stepped out before the assistant.
‘Perfect.’
He tugged on the jacket sleeves, checked the cut at the sides. Again, I saw myself in the mirror, and barely recognized the man staring back.
THE YELLOW CAB DROPPED me outside the marble steps of the Ritz Carlton foyer. A top-hatted concierge opened the door, welcomed me with a ‘Good evening, sir’, and swept an open palm towards the entrance should I get lost between the taxi and the hotel.
‘Evening.’ I greeted the other dinner guests, men dressed as penguins, as I was myself, in black and white tuxedos, accompanied by trophy wives, mistresses parading as wives, and wives in their fifties trying to look thirty in dresses from shop windows on Fifth Avenue.
I followed jackets and high heels up the staircase to the reception area on the second floor. Bow-tied waiters balanced trays of champagne. I recognized names and faces from the Premier League of world banking, the uber-CEOs with more financial clout than entire countries. If money had a smell this was it. The off-season tans and glowing smiles. Height and size, a physical bulk in wealth. And even the small men swaggering like giants, because a figure in a bank account filled their frame, a voice, the raucous laugh from a row of zeros and a decimal point.
Scanning for Segur and Kay, I had the desire to run out of the room and be done with it, escape the tension and the lies.
But above the sound of a grand piano, jazz accompaniment to begin an evening of back-slapping and self-congratulations, Segur called out my name. ‘Sam the man.’
I turned as he scooped two glasses of champagne off a tray and strode over. ‘Look at you in a tux.’ He passed me a drink.
‘Good of you to invite me.’
‘You’re doing me the favour on such short notice. And hey, you clean up pretty good.’
Segur stepped back and admired the tuxedo. ‘Could have shined your shoes, though,’ he added, joking but condescending, perhaps getting points back because I had ‘cleaned up’ pretty well, was suddenly feeling smug that yes, I was ten years younger than him.
‘Let’s go find the boys.’ He put that big hand on my shoulder and guided me towards the function room. ‘You know we all feel the irony of this whole dinner.’
‘A financial securities awards dinner.’
He leant closer. ‘A celebration of the system that’s fucking the economy up the ass.’
‘And what a week,’ I feigned, my interest in the world of money waning by the hour. ‘If the market falls any faster we’ll need parachutes.’
Segur laughed, then greeted other men standing with glasses of champagne, portly men beside slim women dripping with gold and precious stones. And when I stepped back from the hellos it suddenly appeared ridiculous. A magic show where I could see behind the curtain, the mirrors and the trapdoor. From the Wall Street players, the bankers and brokers, to the homeowners about to be kicked out of houses they deluded themselves into believing they could afford. Not that I too wasn’t part of the mirage.
‘This is Hal Gibson.’
I shook hands with a man who had teeth as white and shiny as a cartoon shark.
‘Watch this one,’ said Segur. ‘Could walk away with CEO of the year.’
‘Not if you’ve been slipping brown envelopes into jacket pockets.’
Segur smirked. ‘Learned it all from you, Hal.’
We walked on, into the main reception room. I heard snippets of conversation about job cuts and bonuses, banks on the brink of going down, the captains, the first officers, the men in command rowing away with the treasure while the deckhands drowned.
And there she was, the siren in the bay. In a red, strapless dress. Her dark skin gleaming.
‘Say hello to Kay,’ said Segur, pointing her out as if I hadn’t noticed her. ‘But don’t drive her anywhere, please.’ He laughed, apologized for leaving me to ‘talk some bull with a Dutchman’.
Kay was sitting beside the woman I was accompanying. With the skill of an Oscar-winning actress she said hello as if we hadn’t even met since that day in August.
‘Sam.’ She stood. ‘It’s great you could make it.’ We leant and air-kissed cheeks. And how strange it was to greet so coldly. To lean in like mannequins and barely touch. ‘This is Margot.’
I greeted my ‘date’ with the same formality as I had Kay.
‘I’m the jilted one, if you’re wondering.’ Margot was already tipsy. Bloodshot eyes and a smudge of mascara on her cheek. ‘But if I’ve swapped my son of a bitch husband for an Englishman I’m in luck.’ She laughed a smoker’s cackle. And Kay smiled, caught my eye long enough to acknowledge what had happened between us in the park.
‘You have a drink, Sam?’
My champagne glass was almost empty. Kay got the attention of a waiter, but he was carrying a tray of breadsticks.
I saw a full glass unattended on the table. ‘Shall I grab this one?’
‘I think that’s Chris’s,’ said Margot.
Automatically I reached out and took the drink. I knocked back half the glass, staring at Kay. ‘I’m sure he’ll get another from the bar.’
Margot laughed. Kay looked away, did the thing with her hands on the tablecloth, each one gripping the other hard.
I SLIPPED OUT OF work early the next day, gave Lucas some story about a secret meeting with a phantom stakeholder from the acquired bank who had dirt on a couple of his own men, and headed for the Hudson River. I criss-crossed blocks down from the Port Authority bus station, past defunct lots and concrete underpasses, empty garage forecourts fenced off with rusting razor wire, shuttered doors flaking paint. Perhaps this district boomed when the economy did, I’m not sure. But I know now that if you look back at shiny Manhattan from there it looks like the border between two different countries. At least until you get to the water, where a landscaped riverside is home to rollerbladers and cyclists, the ubiquitous New York runner.
I took out the note Kay had slipped inside my jacket pocket when we’d danced, when Segur had passed her over to me as if she were a piece of real estate I could use for the evening.
Then I followed the Hudson River Park south, the view of the Jersey shoreline across the water on my right, apartment blocks of the West Village on my left. Just after the Chelsea Piers sports centre rotted piles jutted from the water like the stumps of a razed forest, or the tops of ancient trees that poke through sand on stretches of the Yorkshire coast.
My stomach knotted, and for a second my knees felt as if they were made of jelly. I could collapse here and never stand again.
But instead I lengthened my stride, speeded up in the hope of outrunning my conscience, passing more joggers and dog walkers, two policemen on horseback, a tiny Asian woman in a leotard tap-dancing on a plank of wood she’d laid down on the concrete.
By the time I got to the Rockefeller Park I was thirsty and drank from a water fountain. I still had ten minutes before Kay was due to meet me there and popped into the public toilets to check my hair. Looking in the mirror I couldn’t recall the last time I was concerned about my appearance with Jenni. The thought held my attention for about a second, the time it took for me to turn from the mirror and walk into the park, a green spit of land on the edge of the Financial District, two blocks over from Ground Zero.
I looked around, beyond the paths, a bandstand and the basketball courts, but couldn’t see a phone. I opened the note again. Rockefeller Park. The phone. 4 p.m.
Maybe the phone had been removed since she last came here. I walked down to the plaza, dotted with bronze sculptures, a pair of feet, half a head and a clenched fist, a tortoise and a giant coin.
And a bronze phone sitting on a stone table. This was what she meant. I sat by the sculpture as if I expected it to ring, waiting for her to call and say she was running late. Because after fifteen minutes I was fidgety, checking my mobile to see if she’d texted. After thirty minutes I was worried she wasn’t going to show, that I was waiting at the wrong place. I wanted to call her, but if she wanted to speak to me she could call me, too.
I was looking at the sculpture of a bronze bulldog growling at a bronze cat when she appeared. And appeared was the right word. As if a woman had walked from my mind.
She apologized, said my name. ‘I was terrified you wouldn’t wait.’
She was over half an hour late, but I was hardly going to complain. ‘I think I’d have been here until a cop kicked me out for being a tramp.’
Again, I sensed a kiss hello wasn’t right.
‘I don’t have long,’ she said. ‘Let’s go by the water.’
We followed a path across the park to the Hudson River and sat on a bench facing Jersey City. Towers and office blocks marched into the bay towards the Statue of Liberty, very green beneath the overcast skies.
‘You enjoy last night?’
‘Not sure “enjoy” is the right word,’ I answered, watching laden barges ferry stone upstream, screeching gulls diving in their wake. ‘No. I didn’t,’ I added flatly, thinking about how Segur had put his arm round her. ‘And you?’
‘When he told me you were coming I was afraid.’
‘Why did you walk off in Central Park?’
She looked at the passing boats, those swooping gulls. ‘I couldn’t keep hold of myself, my feelings.’
‘I guessed you had second thoughts, changed your mind.’
A mother with a pushchair and wobbling toddler walked in front of the bench. Kay smiled at the little girl, and when the woman was out of earshot she said, ‘I didn’t want to make you feel guilty, mess up your world.’
‘My pretend world.’
‘Is it? You have a life waiting for you. Finish your time in New York, then go back to your fiancée and make some wedding plans.’
I shook my head. ‘Remember what I said on the hill, about being an actor in your own life? Suddenly I don’t feel that. All the jolly pretence has gone.’
She reached over and firmly took my hand. How abruptly my life in England seemed so wrong. A diary-filled future of work and marriage. Days watching computer screens then commuting home to a woman who didn’t know who I was. I looked at Kay’s fingers round mine and lifted her hand to my lips, kissed her skin.
I could’ve asked her why she was seeing me, why she was doing this. Instead I told her that I wanted every single part of her body. ‘You. All of it.’ Then I leant over and kissed her cheek, her neck, inhaled her.
‘Sam,’ she said. ‘Sam.’
And when she repeated my name, uttered it so gently into my ear, I wondered if I’d ever known how much another person could confirm my very presence in the world.
‘Kiss me,’ I asked, begged.
She pushed her tongue into my mouth, curled it round my teeth. She pressed the full force of who she was against me. And I pressed back hard, the blood racing in my veins, that rush as if a sea were kept beneath my skin.
‘Mommy,’ shouted the little girl. The mother and child had come back. ‘What are they doing?’
She stood and stared, blond hair and big blue eyes. We both laughed nervously. It was a good question.
‘Come on, sweetie,’ called the smiling mother. ‘Let’s go feed the squirrels.’
Once she’d gone past we stood.
‘We attract interruptions,’ said Kay.
‘We are the interruption.’
We headed towards the moorings, a small harbour. I wanted to hold her hand as we walked, but when I reached for it she said, ‘Not here. We’re not that far from Wall Street.’
I didn’t want to ask about Segur, but I did. ‘Is he still at work?’
Kay bit her bottom lip. ‘He’s in Boston today, but the guys he works with might be around.’
‘Is that why you didn’t text? You’re afraid of being found out?’
She tapped the railing as she walked, impatient, frustrated. ‘Aren’t you?’
I asked her what he’d do if he knew.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t want to think about it right now.’ She beckoned me on, and as I followed I clenched my fists in my pockets, tensed before a future I finally acknowledged was coming.
When we got to the yachts we stopped and stood, awkwardly apart, surrounded by darting office workers starting their journey home. Kay turned and looked out to the river. Lights on the New Jersey shore shone in the gloom. A speck of setting sun burned orange between leaden cloud, the reflection leaking on to the river’s grey surface like a fiery slick.
She said, ‘It’s the sunset being carried out to sea.’
I watched the river slide past, plastic bottles and bobbing driftwood. ‘Can you get away?’ I asked. ‘For a night. One night.’
Kay turned, looked beyond my shoulder, perhaps scanned the plaza for a familiar face. Then she reached for the lapel of my jacket, turning it over and over.
‘We owe ourselves that much,’ I said.
That evening I changed the wallpaper image on my phone. A photo of Jenni, proudly standing on top of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. Her father had paid for the weekend trip last year. ‘A celebration,’ he said, ‘of marrying my daughter off to a man who can hold a cricket bat.’
Joking aside, I knew he was happy, that he approved of my proposal with a plastic ring fallen from a Christmas cracker.
And when I think back to that Easter weekend in Scotland, the silk sheets of the five star hotel, the wild salmon and malt whisky, I mourn for us both. Jenni, intelligent and funny, beautiful. A woman to spend a life with, to have children with, to live for.
But the sadness for myself, the man who took a hilltop photo of the woman he loved, is as if I am mourning the death of someone I knew, a good-natured and well-meaning friend. Dead and buried. Laid to rest in a suit and tie.
Catching the subway to pick up a rental car from 86th Street, the very day I should have been catching a flight to go skiing with Jenni in Italy, I wondered if there was time for that body to be resurrected.
Could I return from a weekend with Kay in the Catskills and pull him from the earth, dust down his suit and present him again before his fiancée?
KAY WAITED ON THE steps of the Natural History Museum between two giant shrubs cut into the shapes of Tyrannosaurus rex. And on time. She wore a black beret and a slim-fitting tan suede jacket. I thought I’d driven on to the set of a 1950s film, a chauffeur calling to pick up Lau
ren Bacall or Greta Garbo. She came skipping down to the car and opened the door.
‘You look fantastic,’ I said, leaning across to take her bag.
‘I feel it,’ she answered, giving me a quick kiss before the getaway. She was so excited she stomped her feet. I’d have done the same if I weren’t driving.
‘North,’ I said, pulling out. ‘And this time I know the way.’ I’d meticulously gone through the road atlas, making sure I knew every inch of highway until we got to the cabin I’d booked in the heart of the Catskills, a small town called Phoenicia, a short drive from Woodstock.
‘And no swerving for geese.’
‘Straight through.’ I chopped the road in front of the car with my hand, thoughts of that day in the Cotswolds playing as I made my way to the Henry Hudson Parkway, driving parallel to the water until crossing the George Washington Bridge.
‘Don’t you love bridges?’ asked Kay, looking out of the window. ‘I always feel lighter, somehow.’
The rippled water sparkled. Sun shone through patches of cloud, flared on green hills in the distance.
I felt lighter, too. As though if I wound down the window I’d be blown from the car like a feather.
Kay looked from the river to the sky. I had to watch the traffic coming off the bridge, but managed a glance across to see her smiling, relaxed, more than at any moment since we’d met. I reached for her wrist, lifted it to my lips and kissed her.
‘Where the hell am I?’ I asked.
‘Right here,’ she answered. ‘In my world. The sign says you’re entering New Jersey, but it’s a lie.’
Coming off the bridge I could barely concentrate on the directions, honked at by taxis and trucks for erratically changing lanes. I accelerated aggressively, darted through the snarl of cars.
‘Look at you,’ said Kay. ‘Driving like a New Yorker already.’
The Hummingbird and the Bear Page 11