The Hummingbird and the Bear

by Nicholas Hogg

  ‘Lightning.’ Segur took a swig of beer. ‘The fucker’s gone if you give him a yard.’

  I drank my Miller before Segur finished his, and offered to get us another.

  ‘Pace yourself, buddy. Remember a football game can last three hours.’

  ‘Are you telling me you can’t keep up?’ I was bullshitting already, hiding myself in machismo.

  ‘Don’t worry about me. You want to get us some more brewskis then go ahead.’

  I had to slide past him to get to the aisle. I had to feel his hands on my shoulders when he steadied himself as I nudged my way through. In that moment I felt what Kay had, his hands on her, and shuddered.

  ‘Double up,’ he called down the row. ‘Buy us two each and save yourself a trip later.’

  As I went down the steps the Giants went deep, the spiralling football hanging above the pitch before Plaxico leapt and snatched it from the air, landing then pirouetting, sprinting from the cornerback into the end zone. The fans jumped and whooped and high-fived the score.

  Maybe it was the distance of our seats from the action, or maybe it was the half a dozen beers, but anything else of that game is just a faint recollection of tiny red and blue men on a green rectangle, like toy soldiers arranged on a table top.

  It was what happened in the parking lot that I remember.

  ‘First home game of the season and we got the W,’ Segur boasted after the final whistle. ‘Asshole or not, when Plaxico fires on all cylinders we got ourselves a player.’

  We filed down the steps, shuffled away with the other happy Giants supporters. This time I stood on the step above him, riding the escalator down from the upper tiers, both of us halfway to being fully drunk.

  ‘Could be a Super Bowl year?’ I offered, not feeling as if I were actually talking to him but rather making up words to fill the time. As the game had drawn on I’d downed more beers in the hope of numbing the oddness of sitting next to him, close enough to be touching, body heat through our clothes.

  Most of the fans flooding from the game were in a hurry to leave, but Segur was intent on finding a touch game to join. ‘Show you I still got an arm,’ he bragged, practising by throwing an invisible ball to invisible receivers when we got down to the entrance plaza. A grown man imagining himself saving a match, for a moment lost in his fantasy until he got hold of a real piece of leather, picking off a pass between two kids tossing a souvenir football back and forth.

  ‘He takes the interception and he is gone,’ he commentated on his own move, sidestepping fans. ‘Here you go, Sam.’ He arrowed a pass into my chest. I took it with both hands and tossed it to the kid whose ball it was.

  ‘What the fuck, Sam,’ he shouted over the crowd. ‘You fumbled. Shit. Gave away possession.’

  He was joking, I think, but the beer had definitely spiked his aggression.

  ‘It’s all about the pig skin, man.’ He was swaying, scanning the tarmac. ‘There.’ He pointed to some college kids playing five a side in the car park. ‘There’s our game.’

  Segur walked right in, said he had a Limey with him who needed to see a real sport.

  ‘It’s just touch, though,’ said a skinny blond guy in a hooded top. ‘But blocks are cool.’

  I played on one team and Segur the other. Marking me.

  ‘Come on, Sammy boy,’ he baited me, readying to block. I squared up, face to face. I could see the paleness of his blue eyes, broken veins in his nose.

  ‘Hut, hut, hut,’ called the quarterback. I stepped to go round Segur rather than through him, but he came off the line fiercely, two hands in my chest, a heavier man pumping me backwards. I swayed, deflected the brunt of his weight and went past. I dipped inside and the blond kid fired the ball into my chest as the black guy playing linebacker tagged me on the shoulder.

  ‘My Limey just burned you, man,’ called the blond quarterback to Segur. ‘First down,’ he bellowed, making the sign of the line judge.

  ‘Fucking lucky,’ cursed Segur.

  How quickly he’d turned ugly. How quickly the jovial drunk had gotten angry with a man who’d simply taken a pass in a game of parking lot touch.

  What would he do if he knew I’d slept with his wife?

  ‘Let’s go, then.’ Segur hurried the quarterback.

  ‘See what you got this time,’ answered the blond kid.

  Again Segur lined up opposite me, but this play dropping into a zone instead of man to man. On the snap I made a run past his outstretched arm, round the back and cutting into midfield. The quarterback was chased by a defensive tackle and threw out a looping pass that wobbled rather than spiralled. But I stopped and took the catch, turned to run and took two steps before Segur buried me with a full tackle. The ball cannoned from my hands. I crumpled face first on to the tarmac, my arms pinned by Segur’s. I came down on my left shoulder, my bad one, and scuffed my cheek. I heard the college kids saying, ‘What the fuck?’ and ‘Come on, man.’

  ‘Now that’s a fucking hit,’ Segur gloated, on my back, his weight pressing my cheek to the ground, his beer breath in my face.

  I flipped. I wanted him off. I levered myself up and elbowed him away, threw my arm back far and hard enough to catch him in the ribs.

  ‘Motherfucker,’ he spat.

  And then he snapped. Or maybe he already had. He cracked me on the temple, got a shot in before I turned and came over the top with a left. I caught him on the ear, pulled back to swing again before both of us were garotted away by the other players.

  ‘Cool it, guys.’

  A skinny redhead had me by the collar, and the black linebacker had Segur’s jacket bunched in his fists.

  ‘You’re supposed to be buddies, right?’

  ‘That was a cheap shot,’ I said, wrestling the kid from my collar and standing. ‘I wasn’t expecting a tackle.’

  Segur stood, too. ‘Way out of line,’ he said, raising his hands in apology. ‘I deserved the elbow.’ He rubbed his ear where I’d caught him with my punch. ‘And probably that, too.’

  ‘Shake on it,’ said the black guy, barely out of his teens and telling two grown men to shake hands.

  ‘Shit, Sam, I just get carried away playing football.’

  ‘Me too,’ I replied, stepping forward to shake his outstretched hand. ‘It was a good hit, I’ll say that much.’

  ‘A cheap shot, hitting a guy when he’s not looking.’

  I think we shook again before walking across the parking lot to the taxis. Segur looked dishevelled, almost like a tramp, in his torn jeans and dirty jacket. When he bent to pick up someone’s discarded can of Coors he really was a forlorn bum, not a millionaire who’d popped bottles of champagne at the Ritz Carlton. Then, and possibly only then, did I feel sorry for him. Because once we got in the taxi, and he finished that beer and looked for a while at the swamps and factories of New Jersey flying past the window, he suddenly turned and slurred, ‘Kay’s hot, right?’

  I pretended not to hear him. ‘What?’

  His eyes were bloodshot. Instead of a forty-something athlete he suddenly looked old, a man past his prime. ‘She’s some woman, Kay. I tell you I lucked out.’

  ‘I’m taken. Eyes for Jenni only.’

  ‘You’re not blind, though. She’s a great-looking woman.’

  ‘She is.’

  Segur looked back out of the window, at a passing coach full of fans. ‘And hell, there’s no one like her. Shit. You could fill Meadowlands with women and there wouldn’t be one as good as her.’

  ‘That’s quite a compliment,’ I acknowledged, wondering how long the journey back to Manhattan would take.

  ‘You know how I met her?’

  I didn’t. She’d nearly told me in the car back from the Catskills, but New York had gotten in the way.

  ‘Well keep it to yourself,’ he said, grinning. ‘She was tearing up the stage at a downtown strip club. Twirling a pole and slipping dollar bills into a thong.’

  I felt nauseous, feverish.

  ‘And I got
attached, I really did. I fell in love and thought that no other man should be seeing her naked except me. And bang. I offered her my life, more money than she’d ever need.’ Segur paused, then leant a little closer across the back seat. ‘And a man, a real fucking man, who’d take care of her no matter what, who’d never let her go.’

  I fantasized about pushing him from the speeding taxi, opening the door and shoving him on to the highway, then waving the driver on, all the way into Manhattan, her apartment.

  SEGUR THOUGHT HE OWNED her. That Kay belonged to him. He owned her as much as she did the toy horse her father had given her as a child. ‘I’d hold it to the window when we drove to my grandma’s,’ she told me on the way back from the Catskills. ‘Gallop him up and down the hills, pretend I was riding him across the fields.’

  Walking back from work that Monday after the Sunday football, hungover, grey clouds dulling what should be gleaming steel, because, like the sea, New York mirrors the sky, my mood was as downcast as the city. I’d been tying up loose ends in the office, wedding plans for an arranged marriage between two banks, companies as idiosyncratic as people counselled into an awkward pairing by our consultancy. Advised on a partnership by me, the adulterer.

  I rang her a dozen times.

  No answer.

  I sat in the window of a plastic Irish bar on 23rd Street across from their apartment building, watching the revolving door to see if she might step from the spinning glass. Yellow taxis flashed across my vigil, buses, bikes and freaks. Men living out of shopping trolleys. In the bar-room neon shamrocks glowed a putrid green, Gaelic football flashed on multiple TV screens. I drank Jameson, looking either at the amount of whiskey left in the tumbler or through the window at the top-hatted concierge in his white gloves, smiling at the residents. Twirling the door for seemingly everyone in the building but Kay. Or him.

  And by the time I was on my fifth or sixth double it was probably a good thing that I didn’t see either of them. Full of whiskey and half crazed. At Segur. At myself. At Kay for making me feel this way. Even at Jenni. Why couldn’t she stop me from what I was doing?

  I hazily recall walking into the kitchen looking for the lavatory. Lifting a bin lid and starting to unbuckle my belt. Then a barman, firmly on my elbow and pointing me out the door, hailing down a cab before I stumbled across that road and hammered at the windows of the Caroline, screamed her name, and made a big enough fool of myself for her to forget I was ever in her arms.

  That was the thought I opened my eyes to in the wreckage of a hangover dawn. Woken by ragged pigeons flapping about my balcony.

  I WAS AT MY desk with a whiskey-pounded headache, feeling the graze on my cheek from Segur’s tackle, thinking about how he’d met Kay, when she rang.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d call,’ I answered, dashing from the office into the corridor and bursting out of the fire exit on to the roof, no one to overhear me but the Midtown skyline, the mast of the Empire State Building spearing a rain cloud.

  ‘Weirdo,’ she called me, confused at how I’d answered the phone. ‘I said I’d ring.’

  It was Jenni, not Kay. Even though I’d seen her flash up on the screen, I’d somehow read Kay’s name.

  ‘You did, you did.’ I hurriedly repaired the conversation with talk of being stressed, overworked.

  ‘Well I’ll start running you a bath now, put a couple of Chardonnays in the fridge for when you get home.’

  I was due back in just over twenty-four hours. Due back in my flat with the woman I’d asked to marry me.

  ‘Three weeks has gone by so slowly,’ Jenni complained. ‘It seems like an eternity since I last saw you. But I guess it’s not that long, is it?’

  ‘Not even three weeks, actually.’

  ‘Long enough.’

  Long enough for what, I wondered.

  She laughed. ‘As long as you don’t bring back some American woman.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. They don’t get my jokes.’

  ‘Who does, except me? Oh, did you get a chance to meet up with Chris’s wife after the football game?’

  If I took the question on its exact syntax it wasn’t a lie to say, ‘No, I didn’t. I had a drink with Chris and came back here.’

  It was a truth. I didn’t meet her after the game.

  I met her after the call, later that night. She rang when I was walking down Sixth Avenue, when I was about to walk all the way to her apartment building on 23rd Street. When I was resolved to stride in, stone-cold sober, and knock on their door and tell Segur everything.

  Would I have really taken matters into my own hands if she hadn’t?

  ‘Catch the train to Brooklyn,’ Kay told me. ‘I’ll meet you outside Giovanni’s, the restaurant where I used to work.’

  There was no dilemma. I rode across Manhattan Bridge, scared, shaking as much as that rattling stretch of cabled steel. When I looked back over the East River the lights of the financial district seemed as cheap as an imitation Christmas tree.

  By the time I got to Giovanni’s it was already full of diners. I looked through the windows and tried to picture Kay waitressing.

  I was late, directed ten blocks in the wrong direction by an elderly Polish man. When Kay came out of the restaurant and saw me there on the sidewalk it was as if I’d been raised from the dead.

  ‘Sam,’ she snapped. ‘Don’t do that again.’ She hugged the breath from my lungs.

  It wasn’t until we were sitting at a table and she took her jacket off that I realized what had caused the reaction, the panic at my delay.

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming.’

  ‘What’s this?’ I saw blotches of red skin at the top of her arms.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Did he hit you?’ I asked. ‘Does he know about us?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Speak to me, Kay.’

  ‘After the football game. He came back drunk, angry. I thought the Giants had lost and he was pissed at that, but it was something else.’

  I mentioned the football in the lot, the scuffle.

  ‘More than you two,’ she said. ‘Things he sensed between us.’

  ‘The Catskills?’

  ‘He didn’t believe I was seeing my friend in Warwick.’

  Segur had tried to shake the truth from her, and the bruising on her arm was there because of me. I apologized for everything, for coming into her life and ruining it.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ she glowered, insisting I was making her life worth while, not destroying it. ‘Too long,’ she said. ‘Too many years with a man I thought was someone else. Who thought I was someone else.’

  I asked her if she knew me.

  ‘Enough to take a chance. To be here.’

  When the waiter came to the table carrying a bottle of red wine, I tried to turn my attention to the taste, sipping from the glass to confirm it was to my satisfaction. I could’ve been drinking vinegar and wouldn’t have known.

  And looking back on that moment, it’s as if I was already at the point in the future when Jenni would hear of this, when she’d say, ‘No woman in the world wanted you as much as she did right then. Not me.’

  ‘Come with me, Sam.’ That’s what Kay had said. ‘Come with me.’ She was leaning across the tablecloth, over the plates of free food the owner had presented us with after kissing her on both cheeks and asking why she hadn’t returned to see him sooner, a meal we’d barely touched.

  For the first and only time New York had stopped, and would only start again with my answer.

  ‘You really want that?’ I’d asked. ‘To leave? Go, just like that?’

  Her eyes welled, and she wiped her cheek with a napkin. ‘Do it, Sam. Come with me.’

  I reached over and took her hand. She laid her wrist limply on the table, as if waiting for me to either kiss it or cut it open.

  On the wet streets outside the restaurant, I’d flagged down a car to take us back to the city. There was rain on the windscreen, Manhattan neon warped by
the streaked drops that veined on the glass. Amber and gold, beads of red.

  Kay in the nook of my shoulder.

  It was then that I grasped, or at least thought I did, a difference between understanding someone and knowing them. And perhaps that was the reason I gave up everything that night. For something less tangible, maybe, but more felt. I’m not a churchgoer, a believer in a benevolent man with a beard of stardust hovering around the planet. Yet I wondered if faith, loving something that you can only imagine is there but trust will never abandon you, is the same as being in love with another person.

  I swapped the real for something imagined, the understood for what I believed was the known.

  Later that night I looked from the dark of my apartment to the snarl of traffic that roared across the intersection. I was afraid to turn the light on and see myself reflected in the window pane. Afraid this love was as fleeting as a bird hovering above the vows of a wedding.

  I WAS PACKED AND ready to leave New York. My own shoddy work or not, two banks would merge using a plan of action pitched by our consultancy. A success. I’d crocodile-smiled through a farewell drink with Lucas before heading back to my apartment and throwing my world into a bag. Suddenly the boardroom chess of men and women in suits, distractions from the business of living, seemed a trivial pastime now I was out of the game.

  After I handed the keys to the super and tipped him ten dollars, he wished me a safe trip back to England. I thanked him and wondered how long it would take me to get there.

  Outside Penn Station SWAT teams brandished machine guns, stood with dogs on leads. None of the lantern-jawed officers smiled at the odd tourist naïve enough to travel on the day before Thanksgiving. On a day al-Qaeda had reportedly plotted to blow up a subway train.

  I waited by men in black flak jackets and visored helmets. I searched the faces of Americans heading home for turkey dinner and pumpkin pie, their gathered families. And I knew I wanted nothing but us. I wanted who I was when she held me, kissed me. I wanted the voice I heard when I talked to her, the body I belonged to when I was inside her.