Netherland
Joseph O’Neill
In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal.In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off-kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the powercut and the Iraq war. Those years were difficult for Hans – his English wife Rachel left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and silences in their marriage, and he spent two strange years in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents.Lost in a country he'd regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in a most alien place – the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city's most marginal parks. It was during these games that Hans befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreamed of establishing the city's first proper cricket field. Over the course of a summer, Hans grew to share Chuck's dream and Chuck's sense of American possibility – until he began to glimpse the darker meaning of his new friend's activities and ambitions.‘Netherland’ is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between. It is a novel of a marriage foundering and recuperating, and of the shallows and depths of male friendship. With it, Joseph O'Neill has taken the anxieties and uncertainties of our new century and fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty and brilliance.
JOSEPH O’NEILL
Netherland
Contents
Cover (#uc49ced7a-89e2-5a15-abc7-84c5a96aaee6)
Title Page (#ucbc992bd-600e-51a1-a779-47079c2f066d)
Dedication (#u659af32e-c7c2-5875-b24d-8bf4cf8dd52b)
Epigraph (#u3ea7de54-3c14-534f-9165-cf2234992dcd)
Chapter 1 (#ub4175432-6bf8-5c87-9dc2-ab7d93605a1e)
Chapter 2 (#u1fe35c02-f74c-5982-bab7-aa7dcf75a6d3)
Chapter 3 (#ufbf801d2-5302-5f18-8731-773d076545d7)
Chapter 4 (#u0fdd95bc-6085-5d11-8ccf-ca009947f15e)
Chapter 5 (#u56087bc8-a949-51ac-be83-b86df83b50d9)
Chapter 6 (#u44421dfc-ee8e-59c3-9291-90cbe4f372b1)
Chapter 7 (#uf91752c4-d1f1-5c8f-99d5-3e860a06104c)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features… (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
All Over America (#litres_trial_promo)
Life at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo)
A Capricious XI of Favourite Books (#litres_trial_promo)
A Writer’s Life (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
Have You Read? (#litres_trial_promo)
If You Loved This, You Might Like… (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Dedication (#ulink_00708e85-1244-55a8-97cb-c14601b83bd7)
To Sally
Epigraph (#ulink_6a4eed2b-7147-548e-9cc7-d1ff9006945c)
I dream’d in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth;
I dream’d that was the new City of Friends
Whitman
Chapter 1 (#ulink_34f5bbdd-e58b-59e4-95eb-ddbaa3ae1ae2)
The afternoon before I left London for New York – Rachel had flown out six weeks previously – I was in my cubicle at work, boxing up my possessions, when a senior vice president at the bank, an Englishman in his fifties, came to wish me well. I was surprised; he worked in another part of the building and in another department, and we were known to each other only by sight. Nevertheless, he asked me in detail about where I intended to live (‘Watts? Which block on Watts?’) and reminisced for several minutes about his loft on Wooster Street and his outings to the ‘original’ Dean & DeLuca. He was doing nothing to hide his envy.
‘We won’t be gone for very long,’ I said, playing down my good fortune. That was, in fact, the plan, conceived by my wife: to drop in on New York City for a year or three and then come back.
‘You say that now,’ he said. ‘But New York’s a very hard place to leave. And once you do leave …’ The SVP, smiling, said, ‘I still miss it, and I left twelve years ago.’
It was my turn to smile – in part out of embarrassment, because he’d spoken with an American openness. ‘Well, we’ll see,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You will.’
His sureness irritated me, though principally he was pitiable – like one of those Petersburgians of yesteryear whose duties have washed him up on the wrong side of the Urals.
But it turns out he was right, in a way. Now that I, too, have left that city, I find it hard to rid myself of the feeling that life carries a taint of aftermath. This last-mentioned word, somebody once told me, refers literally to a second mowing of grass in the same season. You might say, if you’re the type prone to general observations, that New York City insists on memory’s repetitive mower – on the sort of purposeful post-mortem that has the effect, so one is told and forlornly hopes, of cutting the grassy past to manageable proportions. For it keeps growing back, of course. None of this means that I wish I were back there now; and naturally I’d like to believe that my own retrospection is in some way more important than the old SVP’s, which, when I was exposed to it, seemed to amount to not much more than a cheap longing. But there’s no such thing as a cheap longing, I’m tempted to conclude these days, not even if you’re sobbing over a cracked fingernail. Who knows what happened to that fellow over there? Who knows what lay behind his story about shopping for balsamic vinegar? He made it sound like an elixir, the poor bastard.
At any rate, for the first two years or so of my return to England, I did my best to look away from New York – where, after all, I’d been unhappy for the first time in my life. I didn’t go back there in person, and I didn’t wonder very often about what had become of a man named Chuck Ramkissoon, who’d been a friend during my final East Coast summer and had since, in the way of these things, become a transitory figure. Then, one evening in the spring of this year, 2006, Rachel and I are at home, in Highbury. She is absorbed by a story in the newspaper. I have already read it. It concerns the emergence of a group of tribespeople from the Amazon forest in Colombia. They are reportedly tired of the hard jungle life, although it’s noted they still like nothing better than to eat monkey, grilled and then boiled. A disturbing photograph of a boy gnawing at a blackened little skull illustrates this fact. The tribespeople have no idea of the existence of a host country named Colombia, and no idea, more hazardously, of diseases like the common cold or influenza, against which they have no natural defences.
‘Hello,’ Rachel says, ‘your tribe has come to light.’
I’m still smiling when I answer the ringing phone. A New York Times reporter asks for Mr van den Broek.
The reporter says, ‘This is about Kham, ah, Khamraj Ramkissoon …?’
‘Chuck,’ I say, sitting down at the kitchen table. ‘It’s Chuck Ramkissoon.’
She tells me that Chuck’s ‘remains’ have been found in the Gowanus Canal. There were handcuffs around his wrists and evidently he was the victim of a murder.
I don’t say anything. It seems to me this woman has told an obvious lie and that if I think about it long enough a rebuttal will come to me.
Her voice says, ‘Did you know him well?’ When I don’t answer, she says, ‘It says somewhere you were his business partner.’
‘That’s not accurate,’ I say.
‘But you were in business together, right? That’s what my note says.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘You’ve been misinformed. He was just a friend.’
She says, ‘Oh – OK.’ There is a tapping of a keyboard and a hiatus.
‘So – is there anything you can tell me about his milieu?’
‘His milieu?’ I say, startled into correcting her mooing pronunciation.
‘Well, you know – who he hung out with, what kind of trouble he might have gotten himself into, any shady characters …’ She adds with a faint laugh, ‘It is kind of unusual, what happened.’
I realise that I’m upset, even angry.
‘Yes,’ I finally say. ‘You have quite a story on your hands.’
The next day a small piece runs in the Metro section. It has been established that Chuck Ramkissoon’s body lay in the water by the Home Depot building for over two years, among crabs and car tyres and shopping carts, until a so-called urban diver made a ‘macabre discovery’ while filming a school of striped bass. Over the next week there is a trickle of follow-up items, none of them informative. But apparently it is interesting to readers, and reassuring to certain traditionalists, that the Gowanus Canal can still turn up a murder victim. There’s death in the old girl yet, as one commentator wittily puts it.
The night we receive the news, Rachel, in bed next to me, asks, ‘So who’s this man?’ When I don’t immediately answer, she puts down her book.
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I’m sure I’ve told you about him. A cricket guy I used to know. A guy from Brooklyn.’
She repeats after me, ‘Chuck Ramkissoon?’
Her voice contains a detached note I don’t like. I roll away onto one shoulder and close my eyes. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Chuck Ramkissoon.’
Chapter 2 (#ulink_f0b66a1d-21dc-562c-99c0-bd23835540db)
Chuck and I met for the first time in August 2002. I was playing cricket at Randolph Walker Park, in Staten Island, and Chuck was present as one of the two independent umpires who gave their services in return for a fifty-dollar honorarium. The day was thick as a jelly, with a hot, glassy atmosphere and no wind, not even a breeze from the Kill of Kull, which flows less than two hundred yards from Walker Park and separates Staten Island from New Jersey. Far away, in the south, was the mumbling of thunder. It was the kind of barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows cast by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe, yearn even for those days when you play cricket wearing two sweaters under a cold sky patched here and there by a blue tatter – enough to make a sailor’s pants, as my mother used to say.
By the standards I brought to it, Walker Park was a very poor place for cricket. The playing area was, and I am sure still is, half the size of a regulation cricket field. The outfield is uneven and always overgrown, even when cut (once, chasing a ball, I nearly tripped over a hidden and, to cricketers, ominous duck), and whereas proper cricket, as some might call it, is played on a grass wicket, the pitch at Walker Park is made of clay, not turf, and must be covered with coconut matting; moreover the clay is pale sandy baseball clay, not red cricket clay, and its bounce cannot be counted on to stay true for long; and to the extent that the bounce is true, it lacks variety and complexity. (Wickets consisting of earth and grass are rich with possibility: only they can fully challenge and reward a bowler’s repertoire of cutters and spinners and bouncers and seamers, and only these, in turn, can bring out and fully test a batsman’s repertoire of defensive and attacking strokes, not to mention his mental powers.) There is another problem. Large trees – pin oaks, red oaks, sweetgums, American linden trees – clutter the fringes of Walker Park. Any part of these trees, even the smallest hanging leaf, must be treated as part of the boundary, and this brings randomness into the game. Often a ball will roll between the tree trunks, and the fielder running after it will partially disappear, so that when he reappears, ball in hand, a shouting match will start up about exactly what happened.
By local standards, however, Walker Park is an attractive venue. Tennis courts said to be the oldest in the United States neighbour the cricket field, and the park itself is surrounded on all sides by Victorian houses with elaborately planted gardens. For as long as anyone can remember, the local residents have tolerated the occasional crash of a cricket ball, arriving like a gigantic meteoritic cranberry, into their flowering shrubbery. Staten Island Cricket Club was founded in 1872, and its teams have played on this little green every summer for over a hundred years. Walker Park was owned by the club until the 1920s. Nowadays the land and its clubhouse – a neo-Tudor brick structure dating back to the 1930s, its precursor having been destroyed by fire – are the property of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. In my time, a parks department employee, a phantom-like individual who was never seen, reportedly lived in the attic. The main room was rented out to a nursery school and only the basement and the beaten-up locker room were routinely made available to cricketers. Nevertheless, no other New York cricket club enjoys such amenities or such a glorious history: Donald Bradman and Garry Sobers, the greatest cricketers of all time, have played at Walker Park. The old ground is also fortunate in its tranquillity. Other cricketing venues, places such as Idlewild Park and Marine Park and Monroe Cohen Ballfield, lie directly beneath the skyways to JFK. Elsewhere, for example Seaview Park (which of course has no view of a sea), in Canarsie, the setting is marred not only by screeching aircraft but also by the inexhaustible roar of the Belt Parkway, the loop of asphalt that separates much of south Brooklyn from salt water.
What all these recreational areas have in common is a rank outfield that largely undermines the art of batting, which is directed at hitting the ball along the ground with that elegant variety of strokes a skilful batsman will have spent years trying to master and preserve: the glance, the hook, the cut, the sweep, the cover drive, the pull, and all those other offspring of technique conceived to send the cricket ball rolling and rolling, as if by magic, to the far-off edge of the playing field. Play such orthodox shots in New York and the ball will more than likely halt in the tangled, weedy groundcover: grass as I understand it, a fragrant plant wondrously suited for athletic pastimes, flourishes with difficulty; and if something green and grass-like does grow, it is never cut down as cricket requires. Consequently, in breach of the first rule of batting, the batsman is forced to smash the ball into the air (to go deep, as we’d say, borrowing the baseball term) and batting is turned into a gamble. As a result, fielding is distorted too, since the fielders are quickly removed from their infield positions – point, extra cover, midwicket and the others – to distant stations on the boundary, where they listlessly linger. It’s as if baseball were a game about home runs rather than base hits and its basemen were relocated to spots deep in the outfield. This degenerate version of the sport – bush cricket, as Chuck more than once dismissed it – inflicts an injury that is aesthetic as much as anything: the American adaptation is devoid of the beauty of cricket played on a lawn of appropriate dimensions, where the white-clad ring of infielders, swanning figures on the vast oval, again and again converge in unison towards the batsman and again and again scatter back to their starting points, a repetition of pulmonary rhythm, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors.
This is not to say that New York cricket is without charm. One summer afternoon years ago, I sat in a taxi with Rachel in the Bronx. We were making the trip to visit friends in Riverdale and were driving up Broadway, which I had no idea extended this far north.
‘Oh! Look, darling,’ Rachel said.
She was pointing down to our right. Scores of cricketers swarmed on a tract of open parkland. Seven or eight matches, eleven-a-side, were under way in a space that was strictly large enough for only three or four matches, so that the various playing areas, demarcated by red cones and footpaths and garbage barrels and foam cups, confusingly overlapped. Men in white from one game mingled with men in white from another, and a profusion of bowlers simultaneously whirled their arms in that windmill action of cricket bowlers, and multiple batsmen swung flat willow cudgels at once, and cricket balls chased by milky sprinters flew in every direction. Onlookers surrounded the grounds. Some sat beneath the trees that lined the park at Broadway; others, in the distance, where trees grew tall and dense at the edge of the common, gathered by picnic tables. Children milled, as it’s said. From our elevated vantage point the scene – Van Cortlandt Park on a Sunday – appeared as a cheerful pell-mell, and as we drove by Rachel said, ‘It looks like a Brueghel,’ and I smiled at her because she was exactly right, and as I remember I put my hand on her stomach. It was July 1999. She was seven months pregnant with our son.
The day I met Chuck was three years later. We, Staten Island, were playing a bunch of guys from St Kitts – Kittitians, as they’re called, as if they might all be followers of some esoterically technical profession. My own teammates variously originated from Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. That summer of 2002, when out of loneliness I played after years of not playing, and in the summer that followed, I was the only white man I saw on the cricket fields of New York.
A while back, the parks department had put a rivalrous baseball diamond in the south-west corner of Walker Park. Cricketers were not licensed to take the field until the completion of any authorised softball game. (Softball, my teammates and I observed with a touch of snobbery, was a pastime that seemingly turned on hitting full tosses – the easiest balls a cricket batsman will ever receive – and taking soft, glove-assisted catches involving little of the skill and none of the nerve needed to catch the cricket ball’s red rock with bare hands.) The match against the Kittitians, due to start at one o’clock, did not begin until an hour later, when the softball players – ageing and overweight men much like ourselves, only white-skinned – at last shuffled away. The trouble started with this hold-up. The Kittitians brought a large number of followers, perhaps as many as forty, and the delay made them restless, and they began to entertain themselves with more abandon than was usual. A group formed round a Toyota parked on Delafield Place, at the northern border of the ground, the men flagrantly helping themselves to alcoholic drinks from a cooler, and shouting, and tapping keys against their beer bottles in rhythm to the soca that rattled insistently from the Toyota’s speakers. Fearful of complaints, our president, a blazer-wearing Bajan in his seventies named Calvin Pereira, approached the men and said with a smile, ‘Gentlemen, you are very welcome, but I must ask you to exercise discretion. We cannot have trouble with the parks department. Can I invite you to turn off the music and come join us inside the ground?’ The men gradually complied, but this incident, it was afterwards agreed, influenced the confrontation for which those present will always remember that afternoon.
Before the start of play, one of our team, Ramesh, drew us into a circle for a prayer. We huddled with arms round one another’s shoulders – nominally, three Hindus, three Christians, a Sikh and four Muslims. ‘Lord,’ said the Reverend Ramesh, as we called him, ‘we thank You for bringing us here today for this friendly game. We ask that You keep us safe and fit during the match today. We ask for clement weather. We ask for Your blessing upon this game, Lord.’ We broke up in a burst of clapping and took to the field.
The men from St Kitts batted for just over two hours. Throughout their innings their supporters maintained the usual hullabaloo of laughter and heckling and wisecracks from the field’s east boundary, where they congregated in the leaves’ shadows and drank rum out of paper cups and ate barbecued red snapper and chicken. ‘Beat the ball!’ they shouted, and ‘The man chucking!’ and, raising their arms into the scarecrow pose that signals a wide ball, ‘Wide, umpire, wide!’ Our turn came to bat. As the innings wore on and the game grew tighter and more and more rum was drunk, the musical din started up again from the Toyota, where men had gathered once again, and the shouting of the spectators grew more emotional. In this atmosphere, by no means rare for New York cricket, the proceedings on and off the field became more and more combative. At a certain moment the visitors fell prey to the suspicion, apparently never far from the mind of cricketers in that city, that a conspiracy to rob them of victory was afoot, and the appeals of the fielders (‘How’s that, umpire? Ump!’) assumed a bitter, disputatious character, and a fight nearly broke out between a fielder in the deep and an onlooker who had said something.
It did not surprise me, therefore, when I took my turn to bat, to receive three bouncers in a row, the last of which was too quick for me and whacked my helmet. There were angry shouts from my teammates – ‘Wha’ scene you on, boy?’ – and it was at this point that the umpire recognised his duty to intervene. He wore a panama hat and a white umpire’s coat that gave him the air of a man conducting an important laboratory experiment – which, in his own way, he was. ‘Play the game,’ Chuck Ramkissoon evenly told the bowler. ‘I’m warning you for the last time: one more bumper and you’re coming off.’
Apart from spitting at the ground, the bowler didn’t respond. He returned to his mark, ran in to bowl, and delivered another throat-ball. With roars and counter-roars of outrage coming from the boundary, Chuck approached the captain of the fielding team. ‘I warned the bowler,’ Chuck said, ‘and he disregarded the warning. He’s not bowling any more.’ The other fielders ran in and noisily surrounded Chuck. ‘What right you have? You never warn him.’ I made a move to get involved, but Umar, my Pakistani batting partner, held me back. ‘You stay here. It’s always the same with these people.’
Then, as the argument on and off the field continued – ‘You thiefing we, umpire! You thiefing we!’ – my eye was drawn to a figure walking slowly in the direction of the parked cars. I kept watching him because there was something mysterious about this person choosing to leave at such a moment of drama. He was in no hurry, it seemed. He slowly opened the door of a car, leaned in, reached around for a few moments, then stood up straight and shut the door. He appeared to be holding something in his hand as he strolled back into the ground. People started shouting and running. A woman screamed. My teammates, grouped on the boundary, set off in every direction, some into the tennis courts, others to hide behind trees. Now the man was ambling over somewhat uncertainly. It occurred to me he was very drunk. ‘No, Tino,’ somebody shouted.
‘Oh shit,’ Umar said, starting towards the baseball diamond. ‘Run, run.’
But, in some sense paralysed by this unreal dawdling gunman, I stayed where I was, tightly gripping my Gunn & Moore Maestro bat. The fielders, meanwhile, were backing away, hands half raised in panic and imploration. ‘Put it down, put it down, man,’ one of them said. ‘Tino! Tino!’ a voice shouted. ‘Come back, Tino!’
As for Chuck, he now stood alone. Except for me, that is. I stood a few yards away. This required no courage on my part, because I felt nothing. I experienced the occasion as a kind of emptiness.
The man stopped ten feet from Chuck. He held the gun limply. He looked at me, then back at Chuck. He was speechless and sweating. He was trying, as Chuck would afterwards relate, to understand the logic of his situation.
The three of us stood there for what seemed a long time. A container ship silently went through the back gardens of the houses on Delafield Place.
Chuck took a step forward. ‘Leave the field of play, sir,’ he said firmly. He extended his palm towards the clubhouse, an usher’s gesture. ‘Leave immediately please. You are interfering with play. Captain,’ Chuck said loudly, turning to the Kittitian captain, who was a little distance away, ‘please escort this gentleman from the field.’
The captain tentatively came forward. ‘I coming now, Tino,’ he called out. ‘Right behind you. No foolishness, now.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Tino muttered. He looked overcome by exhaustion. He dropped the gun and left the field slowly, shaking his head. After a short break, play resumed. Nobody saw any reason to call the cops.
When the match ended, both teams came together by the old clubhouse and shared Coors Lights and whisky Cokes and Chinese takeout and talked gravely about what had taken place. Somebody called for quiet, and Chuck Ramkissoon stepped forward into the centre of the gathering.
‘We have an expression in the English language,’ he said, as silence began to establish itself amongst the players. ‘The expression is “not cricket”. When we disapprove of something, we say “it’s not cricket.” We do not say “it’s not baseball.” Or “it’s not football.” We say “it’s not cricket.” This is a tribute to the game we play, and it’s a tribute to us.’ By now, all chatter had ceased. We stood round the speaker, solemnly staring at our feet. ‘But with this tribute comes a responsibility. Look here,’ Chuck said, pointing at the club crest on a Staten Island player’s shirt. ‘“Lude Ludum Insignia Secundaria,” it says here. Now I do not know Latin, but I’m told it means, and I’m sure you’ll correct me, Mr President, if I’m wrong’ – Chuck nodded at our club president – ‘it means, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s only a game.” Now, games are important. They test us. They teach us comradeship. They’re fun. But cricket, more than any other sport, is, I want to say’ – Chuck paused for effect – ‘a lesson in civility. We all know this; I do not need to say more about it.’ A few heads were nodding. ‘Something else. We are playing this game in the United States. This is a difficult environment for us. We play where we can, wherever they let us. Here at Walker Park, we’re lucky; we have locker-room facilities, which we share with strangers and passers-by. Most other places we must find a tree or bush.’ One or two listeners exchanged looks. ‘Just today,’ Chuck continued, ‘we started late because the baseball players have first right to play on this field. And now, when we have finished the game, we must take our drinks in brown paper bags. It doesn’t matter that we have played here, at Walker Park, every year for over a hundred years. It doesn’t matter that this ground was built as a cricket ground. Is there one good cricket facility in this city? No. Not one. It doesn’t matter that we have more than one hundred and fifty clubs playing in the New York area. It doesn’t matter that cricket is the biggest, fastest-growing bat-and-ball game in the world. None of it matters. In this country, we’re nowhere. We’re a joke. Cricket? How funny. So we play as a matter of indulgence. And if we step out of line, believe me, this indulgence disappears. What this means,’ Chuck said, raising his voice as murmurs and cracks and chuckles began to run through his audience, ‘what this means is, we have an extra responsibility to play the game right. We have to prove ourselves. We have to let our hosts see that these strange-looking guys are up to something worthwhile. I say “see”. I don’t know why I use that word. Every summer the parks of this city are taken over by hundreds of cricketers but somehow nobody notices. It’s like we’re invisible. Now that’s nothing new, for those of us who are black or brown. As for those who are not’ – Chuck acknowledged my presence with a smile – ‘you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I say that I sometimes tell people, You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of the cricketer. Put on white to feel black.’ People laughed, mostly out of embarrassment. One of my teammates extended his fist to me, and I gave it a soft punch. ‘But we don’t mind, right, just so long as we can play? Just leave us alone, and we’ll make do. Right? But I say we must take a more positive attitude. I say we must claim our rightful place in this wonderful country. Cricket has a long history in the United States, actually. Benjamin Franklin himself was a cricket man. I won’t go into that now,’ Chuck said quickly, because a frankly competing hubbub had broken out amongst the players. ‘Let us just be thankful that it all ended well, and that cricket was the winner today.’
There the umpire stopped, to faltering applause; and soon after, everybody headed home – to Hoboken and Passaic and Queens and Brooklyn and, in my case, to Manhattan. I took the Staten Island Ferry, which on that occasion was the John F. Kennedy; and it was on board that enormous orange tub that I ran once again into Chuck Ramkissoon. I spotted him on the foredeck, amongst the tourists and romantics absorbed by the famous sights of New York Bay.
I bought a beer and sat down in the saloon, where a pair of pigeons roosted on a ledge. After some intolerable minutes in the company of my thoughts, I picked up my bag and went forward to join Chuck.
I couldn’t see him. I was about to turn back when I realised he was right in front of me and had been hidden by the woman he was kissing. Mortified, I tried to retreat without attracting his attention; but when you’re six feet five, certain manoeuvres are not easily accomplished.
‘Well, hello,’ Chuck said. ‘Good to see you. My dear, this is –’
‘Hans,’ I said. ‘Hans van den Broek.’
‘Hi,’ the woman said, retreating into Chuck’s arms. She was in her early forties with blond curls and a plump chin. She wiggled a set of fingers at me.
‘Let me introduce myself properly,’ Chuck said. ‘Chuck Ramkissoon.’ We shook hands. ‘Van den Broek,’ he said, trying out the name. ‘South African?’
‘I’m from Holland,’ I said, apologising.
‘Holland? Sure, why not.’ He was disappointed, naturally. He would have preferred that I’d come from the land of Barry Richards and Allan Donald and Graeme Pollock.
I said, ‘And you are from …?’
‘Here,’ Chuck affirmed. ‘The United States.’
His girlfriend elbowed him.
‘What do you want me to say?’ Chuck said.
‘Trinidad,’ the woman said, looking proudly at Chuck. ‘He’s from Trinidad.’
I awkwardly motioned with my can of beer. ‘Listen, I’ll leave you guys to it. I was just coming out for some fresh air.’
Chuck said, ‘No, no, no. You stay right here.’
His companion said to me, ‘Were you at the game today? He told me about what happened. Wild.’
I said, ‘The way he handled it was quite something. And that was some speech you gave.’
‘Well, I’ve had practice,’ Chuck said, smiling at his friend.
Pushing at his chest, the woman said, ‘Practice making speeches or practice with life-and-death situations?’
‘Both,’ Chuck said. They laughed together, and of course it struck me that they made an unusual couple: she, American and white and petite and fair-haired; he, a portly immigrant a decade older and very dark – like Coca-Cola, he would say. His colouring came from his mother’s family, which originated in the south of India somewhere – Madras, was Chuck’s suspicion. He was a descendant of indentured labourers and had little firm information about such things.
An event for antique sailing ships was taking place in the bay. Schooners, their canvas hardly distended in the still air, clustered around and beyond Ellis Island. ‘Don’t you just love this ferry ride?’ Chuck’s girlfriend said. We slipped past one of the ships, a clutter of masts and ropes and sails, and she and Chuck joined other passengers in exchanging waves with its crew. Chuck said, ‘See that sail there? That triangular sail right at the very top? That’s the skyscraper. Unless it’s the moonsail. Moonsail or skyscraper, one of the two.’
‘You’re an expert on boats, now?’ his girlfriend said. ‘Is there anything you don’t know about? OK, smarty-pants, which one is the jolly jumper? Or the mizzen. Show me a mizzen, if you’re so smart.’
‘You’re a mizzen,’ Chuck said, fastening his arm around her. ‘You’re my mizzen.’
The ferry slowed down as we approached Manhattan. In the shade of the huddled towers, the water was the colour of a plum. Passengers emerged from the ferry lounge and began to fill up the deck. Banging against the wooden bumpers of the terminal, the ship came to a stop. Everybody disembarked as a swarm into the cavernous terminal, so that I, toting my cricketer’s coffin, became separated from Chuck and his girlfriend. It was only when I’d descended the ramp leading out of the terminal that I saw them again, walking hand in hand in the direction of Battery Park.
I found a taxi and took it straight home. I was tired. As for Chuck, even though he interested me, he was older than me by almost twenty years, and my prejudices confined him, this oddball umpiring orator, to my exotic cricketing circle, which made no intersection with the circumstances of my everyday life.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_8f847cac-f731-5aed-a0b1-236de8a2b2e7)
Those circumstances were, I should say, unbearable. Almost a year had passed since my wife’s announcement that she was leaving New York and returning to London with Jake. This took place one October night as we lay next to each other in bed on the ninth floor of the Hotel Chelsea. We’d been holed up in there since mid-September, staying on in a kind of paralysis even after we’d received permission from the authorities to return to our loft in Tribeca. Our hotel apartment had two bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a view of the tip of the Empire State Building. It also had extraordinary acoustics: in the hush of the small hours, a goods truck smashing into a pothole sounded like an explosion, and the fantastic howl of a passing motorbike once caused Rachel to vomit with terror. Around the clock, ambulances sped eastward on West 23rd Street with a sobbing escort of police motorcycles. Sometimes I confused the cries of the sirens with my son’s night-time cries. I would leap out of bed and go to his bedroom and helplessly kiss him, even though my rough face sometimes woke him and I’d have to stay with him and rub his tiny rigid back until he fell asleep once more. Afterwards I slipped out onto the balcony and stood there like a sentry. The pallor of the so-called hours of darkness was remarkable. Directly to the north of the hotel, a succession of cross-streets glowed as if each held a dawn. The tail lights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit storefronts, the orange fuzz of the street lanterns: all this garbage of light had been refined into a radiant atmosphere that rested in a low silver heap over Midtown and introduced to my mind the mad thought that the final twilight was upon New York. Returning to bed, where Rachel lay as if asleep, I would roll onto my side and find my thoughts forcibly embroiled in preparations for a sudden flight from the city. The list of essential belongings was short – passports, a box full of photographs, my son’s toy trains, some jewellery, the laptop computer, a selection of Rachel’s favourite shoes and dresses, a manila envelope filled with official documents – and if it came down to it, even these items were dispensable. Even I was dispensable, I recognised with an odd feeling of comfort; and before long I would be caught up in a recurring dream in which, finding myself on a subway train, I threw myself over a ticking gadget and in this way sacrificed my life to save my family. When I told Rachel about my nightmare – it qualified as such, for the dreamed bomb exploded every time, waking me up – she was making some adjustment to her hair in the bathroom mirror. Ever since I’d known her, she had kept her hair short, almost like a boy’s. ‘Don’t even think of getting off that lightly,’ she said, moving past me into the bedroom.
She had fears of her own, in particular the feeling in her bones that Times Square, where the offices of her law firm were situated, would be the site of the next attack. The Times Square subway station was a special ordeal for her. Every time I set foot in that makeshift cement underworld – it was the stop for my own office, where I usually turned up at seven in the morning, two hours before Rachel began her working day – I tasted her anxiety. Throngs endlessly climbed and descended the passages and walkways like Escher’s tramping figures. Bare high-wattage bulbs hung from the low-lying girders, and temporary partitions and wooden platforms and posted handwritten directions signalled that around us a hidden and incalculable process of construction or ruination was being undertaken. The unfathomable and catastrophic atmosphere was only heightened by the ever-present spectacle, in one of the principal caverns of that station, of a little Hispanic man dancing with a life-size dummy. Dressed entirely in black and gripping his inanimate partner with grotesque eagerness, the man sweated and pranced and shuffled his way through a series, for all I know, of foxtrots and tangos and fandangos and paso dobles, intently twitching and nuzzling his puppet to the movements of the music, his eyes always sealed. Passers-by stopped and gawked. There was something dire going on – something that went beyond the desperation, economic and artistic, discernible on the man’s damp features, beyond even the sexual perverseness of his routine. The puppet had something to do with it. Her hands and feet were bound to her master’s. She wore a short, lewd black skirt, and her hair was black and unruly in the manner of a cartoon gypsy girl. Crude features had been inscribed on her face, and this gave her a blank, bottomless look. Although bodily responsive to her consort’s expert promptings – when he placed his hand on her rump, she gave a spasm of ecstasy – her countenance remained a fog. Its vacancy was unanswerable, endless; and yet this man was nakedly in thrall to her … No doubt I was in an unhealthy state of mind, because the more I witnessed this performance the more troubled I grew. I reached the point where I was no longer capable of passing by the duo without a flutter of dread, and quickening ahead into the next chasm I’d jog up the stairs into Times Square. I straightaway felt better. Unfashionably, I liked Times Square in its newest incarnation. I had no objection to the Disney security corps or the ESPN Zone or the loitering tourists or the kids crowded outside the MTV studio. And whereas others felt mocked and diminished by the square’s storming of the senses and detected malevolence or Promethean impudence in the molten progress of the news tickers and in the fifty-foot visages that looked down from vinyl billboards and in the twinkling shouted advertisements for drinks and Broadway musicals, I always regarded these shimmers and vapours as one might the neck feathers of certain of the city’s pigeons – as natural, humble sources of iridescence. (It was Chuck, on Broadway once, who pointed out to me how the rock dove’s grey mass, exactly mirroring the shades of the sidewalk concrete and streaked with blacktop-coloured dorsal feathers, gratuitously tapers to green and purple glitter.) Perhaps as a result of my work, corporations – even those with electrified screens flaming over Times Square – strike me as vulnerable, needy creatures, entitled to their displays of vigour. Then again, as Rachel has pointed out, I’m liable to misplace my sensitivities.
Lying on her side in the darkness, Rachel said, ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m taking Jake to London. I’m going to talk to Alan Watson tomorrow about a leave of absence.’
Our backs were turned to each other. I didn’t move. I said nothing.
‘I can’t see any other way,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s simply not fair to our little boy.’
Again, I didn’t speak. Rachel said, ‘It came to me when I thought about packing up and going back to Tribeca. Then what? Start again as though nothing has happened? For what? So we can have this great New York lifestyle? So I can keep risking my life every day to do a job that keeps me away from my son? When we don’t even need the money? When I don’t even enjoy it any more? It’s crazy, Hans.’
I felt my wife sit up. It would only be for a while, she said in a low voice. Just to get some perspective on things. She would move in with her parents and give Jake some attention. He needed it. Living like this, in a crappy hotel, in a city gone mad, was doing him no good: had I noticed how clinging he’d become? I could fly over every fortnight; and there was always the phone. She lit a cigarette. She’d started smoking again, after an interlude of three years. She said, ‘It might even do us some good.’
There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. Mornings we awoke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself overnight. Evenings, after Jake had been put to bed, we quietly ate watercress and translucent noodles that neither of us could find the strength to remove from their cartons; took turns to doze in the bathtub; and failed to stay awake for the duration of a TV show. Rachel was tired and I was tired. A banal state of affairs, yes – but our problems were banal, the stuff of women’s magazines. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women’s magazines.
‘What do you think? Hans, say something, for God’s sake.’
My back was still turned to her. I said, ‘London isn’t safe either.’
‘But it’s safer, Hans,’ Rachel said, almost pityingly. ‘It’s safer.’
‘Then I’ll come with you,’ I said. ‘We’ll all go.’
The ashtray rustled as she stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Let’s not make too many big decisions,’ my wife said. ‘We might come to regret it. We’ll think more clearly in a month or two.’
Much of the subsequent days and nights was spent in an agony of emotions and options and discussions. It is truly a terrible thing when questions of love and family and home are no longer answerable.
We talked about Rachel giving up her job or going part-time, about moving to Brooklyn or Westchester or, what the hell, New Jersey. But that didn’t meet the problem of Indian Point. There was, apparently, a nuclear reactor at a place called Indian Point, just thirty miles away in Westchester County. If something bad happened there, we were constantly being informed, the ‘radioactive debris’, whatever this might be, was liable to rain down on us. (Indian Point: the earliest, most incurable apprehensions stirred in its very name.) Then there was the question of dirty bombs. Apparently any fool could build a dirty bomb and explode it in Manhattan. How likely was this? Nobody knew. Very little about anything seemed intelligible or certain, and New York itself – that ideal source of the metropolitan diversion that serves as a response to the largest futilities – took on a fearsome, monstrous nature whose reality might have befuddled Plato himself. We were trying, as I irrelevantly analysed it, to avoid what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a pre-apocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington and, for that matter, Moscow. In my anxiety I phoned Rachel’s father, Charles Bolton, and asked him how he’d dealt with the threat of nuclear annihilation. I wanted to believe that this episode of history, like those old cataclysms that deposit a geologically telling layer of dust on the floors of seas, had sooted its survivors with special information.
Charles was, I believe, flummoxed – both by the substance of my enquiry and the fact that I’d chosen to pursue it with him. Many years previously, my father-in-law had been the Rolls-Royce-driving financial director of a British conglomerate that had collapsed in notorious circumstances. He had never entirely resurfaced from his consequent bankruptcy and, in the old-fashioned belief that he’d shot his bolt, he lurked about the house with a penitent, slightly mortified smile on his face. All financial and domestic powers now belonged to his wife, who, as the beneficiary of various trusts and inheritances, was charged with supporting the family, and there came into being, as the girl Rachel grew up, an axis of womanly power in the house from whose pull the sole male was excluded. From our earliest acquaintance Charles would raise a politely enquiring man-to-man eyebrow to suggest slipping off for a quiet pint, as he called it, in the local pub. He was, and remains, an immaculately dressed and most likeable pipe-smoking Englishman.
‘I’m not sure I can be much use to you,’ he said. ‘One simply got on with it and hoped for the best. We weren’t building bunkers in the garden or running for the hills, if that’s what you mean.’ Understanding that I needed him to say more, he added, ‘I actually believed in deterrence, so I suppose that helped. This lot are a different kettle of fish. One simply doesn’t know what they’re thinking.’ I could hear him tapping his pipe importantly. ‘They’re likely to take some encouragement from what happened, don’t you think?’
In short, there was no denying the possibility that another New York calamity lay ahead and that London was probably safer. Rachel was right; or, at least, she had reason on her side, which, for the purposes of our moot – this being the structure of most arguments with Rachel – was decisive. Her mythic sense of me was that I was, as she would point out with an air of having discovered the funniest thing in the world, a rationalist. She found the quality attractive in me: my cut-and-dried Dutch manner, my conversational use of the word ‘ergo’. ‘Ergonomics,’ she once answered a third party who’d asked what I did for a living.
In fact, I was an equities analyst for M——, a merchant bank with an enormous brokerage operation. The analyst business, at the time of our displacement to the hotel, had started to lose some of its sheen, certainly as the source of exaggerated status for some of its practitioners; and soon afterwards, in fact, our line of work became mildly infamous. Anyone familiar with the financial news of the last few years, or indeed the front page of the New York Post, may remember the scandals that exposed certain practices of stock tipping, and I imagine the names Jack B. Grubman and Henry Blodget still ring bells in the minds of a number of so-called ordinary investors. I wasn’t personally involved in these controversies. Blodget and Grubman worked in telecommunications and technology; I analysed large-cap oil and gas stocks, and nobody outside the business knew who I was. Inside the business, I had the beginnings of a reputation as a guru: on the Friday of the week Rachel declared her intent to leave for London, Institutional Investor ranked me number four in my sector – a huge six spots up from the year before. To mark this accolade, I was taken to a bar in Midtown by some people from the office: my secretary, who left after one drink; a couple of energy analysts named Appleby and Rivera; and a few sales guys. My colleagues were both pleased and displeased with my achievement. On the one hand it was a feather in the bank’s hat, which vicariously sat on their heads; on the other hand the feather was ultimately lodged in my hatband – and the supply of feathers, and the monetary rewards that went with them, were not infinite. ‘I hate drinking this shit,’ Rivera told me as he emptied into his glass the fifth bottle of champagne I’d bought, ‘but seeing as you’ll be getting most of my yearend fucking bonus, it gives me satisfaction on a wealth-redistribution basis.’
‘You’re a socialist, Rivera,’ Appleby said, ordering another bottle with a tilt of thumb to mouth. ‘That explains a lot.’
‘Hey Rivera, how’s the e-mail?’
Rivera was involved in an obscure battle to keep his office e-mail address unchanged. Appleby said, ‘He’s right to stand his ground. Goddamn it, he’s a brand. Have you registered yourself down at the trademarks bureau yet, Rivera?’
‘Register this,’ Rivera said, giving him the finger.
‘Hey, Behar says he’s going to tell the funniest joke he ever heard.’
‘Tell the joke, Behar.’
‘I said I’m not going to tell it,’ Behar said slyly. ‘It’s offensive.’
There was laughter. ‘You can describe the joke to us without telling it,’ Appleby counselled Behar.
‘It’s the nigger-cock joke,’ Behar said. ‘It’s hard to describe.’
‘Just describe it, bitch.’
‘So the Queen’s on Password,’ Behar said. ‘And the password is “nigger-cock”.’
‘Somebody tell Hans about Password.’
‘Somebody tell Hans about nigger-cock.’
‘So the Queen says’ – here Behar went into a twittering Englishwoman’s voice – ‘“Is it edible?’”
Rivera said, ‘Jesus, Hans, what’s going on?’
Panicking, I had suddenly lurched to my feet. I said, ‘I’ve got to go. You guys keep going.’ I gave Rivera my credit card.
He said, stepping away from the others, ‘You sure you’re OK? You’re looking…’
‘I’m fine. Have fun.’
I was sweating when I arrived back at the hotel. After a tormenting wait for the single working elevator, I hastened to our front door. Inside the apartment, all was quiet. I went directly to Jake’s room. He was askew in a mess of sheets. I sat down on the edge of his IKEA child’s bed and righted his body and covered him up. I was a little drunk; I couldn’t resist brushing my lips against his flushed cheeks. How hot his two-year-old skin was! How lovely his eyelids!
I went to my bedroom in a new state of excitement. A lamp burned by the bed, in which Rachel, prone, motionlessly faced the window. I circled the bed and saw that her eyes were open. Rachel, I said quietly, it’s very simple: I’m coming with you. Still in my coat, I knelt beside her. We’ll all go, I said. I’ll collect my bonus and then we’ll head off together, as a family. London would be just fine. Anywhere would be fine. Tuscany, Tehran, it doesn’t matter. OK? Let’s do it. Let’s have an adventure. Let’s live.
I was proud of myself as I gave this speech. I felt I had conquered my tendencies.
She didn’t move. Then she said quietly, ‘Hans, this isn’t a question of geography. You can’t geographise this.’
‘What “this”?’ I said masterfully, taking her hand. ‘What’s this “this”? There is no “this”. There’s just us. Our family. To hell with everything else.’
Her fingers were cool and limp. ‘Oh, Hans,’ Rachel said. Her face wrinkled and she cried briefly. Then she wiped her nose and neatly swung her legs out of bed and went quickly to the bathroom: she is a helplessly brisk woman. I removed my coat and sat down on the floor, my back resting against the wall. I listened intently: she was splashing running water over her face and brushing her teeth. She returned and sat in the corner armchair, clutching her legs to her chest. She had a speech of her own to give. She spoke as one trained in making legal submissions, in short sentences made up of exact words. One by one, for what must have been several minutes, her words came bravely puffing out into the hotel room, conveying the history and the truth of our marriage. There had been much ill feeling between us these last months, but now I felt great sympathy for her. What I was thinking about, as she embraced herself ten feet away and delivered her monologue, was the time she’d taken a running jump into my arms. She had dashed forward and leaped with limbs splayed. I nearly fell over. Almost a foot shorter than me, she clambered up my body with ferociously prehensile knees and ankles and found a seat on my shoulders. ‘Hey,’ I said, protesting. ‘Transport me,’ she commanded. I obeyed. I wobbled down the stairs and carried her the length of Portobello Road.
Her speech arrived at its terminus: we had lost the ability to speak to each other. The attack on New York had removed any doubt about this. She’d never sensed herself so alone, so comfortless, so far from home, as during these last weeks. ‘And that’s bad, Hans. That’s bad.’
I could have countered with words of my own.
‘You’ve abandoned me, Hans,’ she said, sniffing. ‘I don’t know why, but you’ve left me to fend for myself. And I can’t fend for myself. I just can’t.’ She stated that she now questioned everything, including, as she put it, the narrative of our marriage.
I said sharply, ‘Narrative?’
‘The whole story,’ she said. The story of her and me, for better and for worse, till death did us part, the story of our union to the exclusion of all others – the story. It just wasn’t right any more. It had somehow been falsified. When she thought ahead, imagined the years and the years…‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she said. She was tearful. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She wiped her nose.
I was sitting on the floor, my shoes stupidly pointing at the ceiling. The yelping of emergency vehicles welled up from the street, flooded the room, ebbed one yelp at a time.
I said disastrously, ‘Is there anything I can say that’ll make you change your mind?’
We sat opposite each other in silence. Then I tossed my coat onto a chair and went to the bathroom. When I picked up my toothbrush it was wet. She had used it with a wife’s unthinking intimacy. A hooting sob rose up from my chest. I began to gulp and pant. A deep, useless shame filled me – shame that I had failed my wife and my son, shame that I lacked the means to fight on, to tell her that I refused to accept that our marriage had suddenly collapsed, that all marriages went through crises, that others had survived their crises and we would do the same, to tell her she could be speaking out of shock or some other temporary condition, to tell her to stay, to tell her that I loved her, to tell her I needed her, that I would cut back on work, that I was a family man, a man with no friends and no pastimes, that my life was nothing but her and our boy. I felt shame – I see this clearly, now – at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavours, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible. I felt shame because it was me, not terror, she was fleeing.
And yet that night we reached for each other in the shuttered bedroom. Over the following weeks, our last as a family in New York, we had sex with a frequency that brought back our first year together, in London. This time round, however, we went about it with strangeness and no kissing, handling and licking and sucking and fucking with dispassion the series of cunts, dicks, assholes and tits that assembled itself out of our successive yet miserably several encounters. Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.
An awful sensibleness descended upon us. In December, we found the will to visit our loft to fetch some belongings. There were stories going round of abandoned downtown apartments overrun by vermin, and when I opened our door I was braced for horrors. But, dust-clouded windows aside, our old home was as we’d left it. We retrieved some clothes and at Rachel’s insistence picked out items of furniture for the hotel apartment, which I was to continue renting. She was concerned for my comfort just as I was concerned for hers. We’d agreed that whatever else happened, we wouldn’t be moving back to Tribeca. The loft would be sold and the net proceeds, comfortably over a million dollars, would be invested in government bonds, a cautious spread of stocks and, on a tip from an economist I trusted, gold. We had another two million dollars in a joint savings account – the market was making me nervous – and two hundred thousand in various checking accounts, also in our joint names. It was understood that nobody would take any legal steps for a year. There was a chance, we carefully agreed, that everything would look different after Rachel had spent some time away from New York.
The three of us flew together to England. We stayed with Mr and Mrs Bolton at their house in Barnes, in south-west London, arriving on Christmas Eve. We opened gifts on Christmas morning, ate turkey with stuffing and potatoes and Brussels sprouts, drank sherry and red wine and port, made small talk, went to bed, slept, awoke, and then spent an almost unendurable further three days chewing, swallowing, sipping, walking and exchanging reasonable remarks. Then a black cab pulled up in front of the house. Rachel offered to accompany me to the airport. I shook my head. I went upstairs, where Jake was playing with his new toys. I picked him up and held him in my arms until he began to protest. I flew back to New York. There is no describing the wretchedness I felt, which persisted, in one form or another, throughout my association with Chuck Ramkissoon.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_f00bdc3c-87b2-5c65-a78c-6ed58489b9f5)
On my own, it was as if I were hospitalised at the Chelsea Hotel. I stayed in bed for almost a week, my existence sustained by a succession of men who arrived at my door with beer and pizzas and sparkling water. When I did begin to leave my room – as I had to, in order to work – I used the service elevator, a metal-clad box in which I was unlikely to meet anyone other than a muttering Panamanian maid or, as happened once, a very famous actress sneaking away from an encounter with a rumoured drug dealer on the tenth floor. After a week or two, my routine changed. Most evenings, once I’d showered and put on some casual clothes, I went down to the lobby and fell listlessly into a chair by the non-operational fireplace. I carried a book but did not read it. Often I was joined by a very kind widow in a baseball cap who conducted an endless and apparently fruitless search of her handbag and murmured to herself, for some reason, about Luxembourg. There was something anaesthetising about the traffic of people in the lobby, and I also took comfort from the men at the front desk, who out of pity invited me behind the counter to watch sports on their television and asked if I wanted to join their football pool. I did join, though I knew nothing about American football. ‘You did real good yesterday,’ Jesus, the bellman, would announce. ‘I did?’ ‘Sure,’ Jesus said, bringing out his chart. ‘The Broncos won, right? And the Giants. That’s two winners you got right there. OK,’ he said, frowning as he concentrated, ‘now you lost with the Packers. And the Bills. And I guess the 49ers.’ He tapped a pencil against the chart as he considered the problem of my picks. ‘So I’m still not ahead?’ ‘Right now, no,’ Jesus admitted. ‘But the season’s not over yet. You could still turn it around, easy. You hang in there, you get hot next week? Shit, anything could happen.’
Not counting the lobby, the Chelsea Hotel had ten floors. Each was served by a dim hallway that ran from an airshaft on one side to, on my floor, a door with a yellowing pane of frosted glass that suggested the ulterior presence of a private detective rather than, as was actually the case, a fire escape. The floors were linked by a baronial staircase, which by virtue of the deep rectangular void at its centre had the effect of installing a precipice at the heart of the building. On all the walls was displayed the vaguely alarming artwork of tenants past and present. The finest and most valuable examples were reserved for the lobby: I shall never forget the pink, plump girl on a swing who hovered above the reception area gladly awaiting a push towards West 23rd Street. Occasionally one overheard by-the-night visitors – transients, as the management called them – commenting on how spooky they found it all, and there was a story that the hotel dead were secretly removed from their rooms in the middle of the night. But for me, returning from the office or from quick trips to Omaha, Oklahoma City, Cincinnati – Timbuktus, from my New Yorker’s vantage point – there was nothing eerie about the building or the community that was established in it. Over half the rooms were occupied by long-term residents who by their furtiveness and ornamental diversity reminded me of the population of the aquarium I’d kept as a child, a murky tank in which cheap fish hesitated in weeds and an artificial starfish made a firmament of the gravel. That said, there was a correspondence between the looming and shadowy hotel folk and the phantasmagoric and newly indistinct world beyond the Chelsea’s heavy glass doors, as if the one promised to explain the other. On my floor there lived an octogenarian person of indeterminate gender – it took a month of surreptitious scrutiny before I’d satisfied myself she was a woman – who told me, by way of warning and reassurance, that she carried a gun and would kick the ass of anybody who made trouble on our floor. There was also an old and very sick black gentleman (now dead), apparently a legendary maker of prints and lithographs. There was a family with three young boys who ran wild in the hallways with tricycles and balls and trains. There was an unexplained Finn. There was a pit bull that never went out without a panting, menacing furniture dealer in tow. There was a Croatian woman, said to be a famous nightlife personality, and there was a revered playwright and librettist, whom it almost interested that I knew a little Greek and who introduced me to Arthur Miller in the elevator. There was a girl with gothic make-up who babysat and walked dogs. All of them were friendly to me, the crank in the suit and tie; but during the whole time I lived at the hotel, I had only one neighbourly visitor.
One February night, somebody knocked on my door. When I opened it, I found myself looking at a man dressed as an angel. A pair of tattered white wings, maybe two feet long and attached to some kind of girdle, rose behind his head. He wore an ankle-length wedding dress with a pearl-adorned bodice, and white slippers with dirty bows. Mottled foundation powder, applied over his whole face, failed to obscure the stubble around his mouth. His hair fell in straggles to his shoulders. A tiara was out of kilter on his head and he seemed distraught.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I am looking for my cat.’
I said, ‘What kind of cat?’
‘A birman,’ the angel said, and the noun flushed out a foreigner’s accent. ‘A black face, and white, quite long fur. His name is Salvator – Salvy.’
I shook my head. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ll look out for him.’ I started to shut the door, but his despairing expression made me hesitate.
‘He’s been gone for two days and two nights,’ the angel said. ‘I’m worried he’s been kidnapped. These cats are very beautiful. They are worth a lot of money. All kinds of people come through this hotel.’
I said, ‘Have you put up a notice? In the elevator?’
‘I did, but somebody tore it down. That’s suspicious, don’t you think?’ He produced a cigarette from a niche in his outfit. ‘You have a light?’
He followed me into my apartment and sat down to smoke. I opened a window. The flossy edges of his wings trembled in the air current.
‘This is a nice apartment,’ he observed. ‘How much are you paying?’
‘Enough,’ I said. My rent was six thousand a month – not a terrible deal for a two-bedroom, I’d thought, until I found out it was far more than anybody else was paying.
The angel occupied a studio on the sixth floor. He’d moved in two weeks previously. His name was Mehmet Taspinar. He was Turkish, from Istanbul. He had lived in New York for a number of years, drifting from one abode to another. New York City, he informed me, was the one place in the world where he could be himself – at least, until recently. As he spoke, Taspinar sat very still on the edge of his chair, his feet and knees properly pressed together. He stated that he’d been asked to leave his last apartment by the landlord on the grounds that he was scaring the other tenants. ‘I think he believed I might be a terrorist,’ the angel said mildly. ‘In a sense, I can understand him. An angel is a messenger of God. In Christianity, Judaism, Islam, angels are always frightening – always soldiers, killers, punishers.’
I gave no sign of having heard this. I was making a show of reading work documents I’d pulled out of my briefcase.
Taspinar looked in the direction of the kitchenette. ‘You’re drinking wine?’
I said without enthusiasm, ‘Would you like a glass?’
Taspinar accepted and by way of recompense explained that he had dressed as an angel for two years now. He bought his wings at Religious Sex, on St Mark’s Place. He owned three pairs. They cost him sixty-nine dollars a pair, he said. He showed me his right hand, on each finger of which he wore a large yellow stone. ‘These were two dollars.’
‘Have you tried looking on the roof?’ I said.
The angel raised his misplucked eyebrows. ‘You think he might be up there?’
‘Well, the door at the top of the stairs is sometimes left open. Your cat could have got out.’
‘Will you show me?’ The wings wobbled as he stood up.
‘Just go right up the stairs until you come to the door. It’s very easy.’
‘I’m a little afraid,’ Taspinar said, hunching his shoulders pathetically. Although at least thirty, he had the slight, defenceless frame of a batboy.
I reached for my coat. ‘I’ve only got a few minutes,’ I said. ‘Then I’ve got to do some work.’
We climbed the stairs to the tenth floor and continued up to the small landing at the entrance to the roof. As I’d suspected, the door was open. We went through. I’d been up to the roof once before. It was divided into plots belonging to the people who occupied the mansard apartments, and they had turned it into a garden of sun decks, brick enclosures, potted plants and small trees. In the summer, it was a lovely place; it was winter now, and the cold was shocking. I carefully trod the frozen snow. Taspinar, wearing only his angel’s outfit and barefooted apart from his slippers, headed off elsewhere with small skipping steps. He began calling for his cat in Turkish. I advanced in the direction of a tree dotted with fairy lights and found a spot out of the wind. The lighted peak of the Empire State Building loomed ashen and sublime. I regretted not bringing a hat. Turning, I saw the angel disappear behind a turret and then reappear in madly feathery profile against the red glow of the YMCA sign across the street. He cried out the cat’s name: Salvy! Salvy!
I went inside.
If I thought I’d shaken him off, I was mistaken. A nocturnal individual, Taspinar took to joining me in the lobby in the late evenings, assuming a prim upright position on a massive wooden armchair next to mine. Needless to say, his appearance provoked surprise and laughter from the transients. Taspinar enjoyed the attention but rarely responded. When a drunk Japanese asked if he could fly, he gave the man his usual dazed smile. ‘Of course, I would like to fly,’ Taspinar confided to me afterwards, ‘but I know I can’t. I’m not cuckoo.’
Actually, this last assertion was doubtful. I learned that before he’d become possessed by his angelic compulsion, Taspinar had spent some time in a mental asylum in New Hampshire. His father, a rich man who owned factories, had paid the fees, just as he now paid the allowance that permitted his son to live in frugal idleness. The sustaining fiction in this arrangement was that Taspinar was at graduate school at Columbia University, where he’d enrolled years ago. Once I had overcome the thought that midway through my life the only companionship I could count on was that of a person who, as he put it, could no longer bear the masculine details of his life, I grew to mildly enjoy the angel’s unexpectedly serene company. He and I and the murmuring widow in the baseball cap sat in a row like three crazy old sisters who have long ago run out of things to say to one another. Taspinar, it turned out, was a rather artless man who, in spite of his morbid confusion, easily accepted the small offerings of pleasure that daily life provided. He savoured his coffee, read newspapers avidly, found amusement in inconsequential events. With regard to my own situation, about which he made occasional enquiries but offered little comment, he was considerate. As my fondness for him grew, so did my anxiety. When his baroque anguish, too awful and strange for me to think about, became acute, he neglected himself. His frock (he owned three or four) went unchanged for days, his silver fingernail polish deteriorated to a fishy shimmer, his waxed back surrendered to emergent cohorts of hard little hairs. Most distressing of all was the state of his wings. His favourite white pair, in which he had first met me, somehow developed a list, and he took to wearing black bedraggled ones that made him look like a crow. One Saturday I took it upon myself to go to the East Village and buy him fresh plumage. I chose a white, rather magnificent set with shining long vanes. ‘Here,’ I said, stiffly tendering him the package in the lobby that evening. ‘I thought you might find these useful.’ Taspinar seemed very pleased, but I had made an error. My gift was never seen again. As for the cat, it was never seen again either.
Meanwhile I was making efforts to promote my own wellbeing. At Rachel’s transoceanic urging, I went to see a shrink, a nice fellow who offered me a peppermint every twenty minutes and subscribed to the fine, progressive notion that each day we have lived is a kind of possession and, if we are its alert custodian, brings us ever closer to knowledge of the slipperiest kind. I lasted three sessions. I started to take yoga classes at the YMCA across the street from the hotel. This went better, and when I touched my toes for the first time in years I felt a larger movement of life at my fingertips. I was determined to open myself to new directions, a project I connected with escaping from the small country of fog in which, at a point I could not surely trace, I’d settled. That country, I speculated, might have some meaningful relation to my country of physical residence, and so every second weekend, when I travelled to London to be with my wife and son, I hoped that flying high into the atmosphere, over boundless massifs of vapour or small clouds dispersed like the droppings of Pegasus on an unseen platform of air, might also lift me above my personal haze. That is, I would conduct a retrospective of our affable intercontinental dealings and assemble the hope and theory that the foundation of my family might after all be secure and our old unity still within reach. But each time Rachel materialised at her parents’ door she wore a preemptive expression of weariness, and I understood that the haze had travelled all the way to this house in west London.
‘How was the flight?’
‘Good.’ I fidgeted with my suitcase. ‘I managed to get a couple of hours of sleep.’ A hesitation, and then an English peck for each cheek; whereas once it had been our loving tic to kiss triply – left, right, and left again – in the Dutch style she found so amusing.
She would never, in the old days, have expressed curiosity about something as prosaic as a flight. Her truest self resisted triteness, even of the inventive romantic variety, as a kind of falsehood. When we’d fallen for each other it had not been a project of bouquets and necklaces and strokes of genius on my part: there were no ambushes by string quartets or surprise air tickets to a spit of Pacific coral. We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically. Our love started in drink at a party in South Kensington, where we made out for an hour on a mound of dark woollen overcoats, and continued in drink a week later at a pub in Notting Hill. As soon as we left the pub she kissed me. We went to my flat, drank more, and grappled on a sofa squeakily adrift on four wheels. ‘What’s that horrible noise?’ Rachel exclaimed with a ridiculous jerk of the head. ‘The castors,’ I said, technically. ‘No, it’s a mouse,’ she said. She was casting us in a screwball comedy, herself as Hepburn, whose bony beauty I recognised in her, me as the professor with his head up his ass. I looked the part: excessively tall, bespectacled, given to nodding and smiling. I have never entirely shed the gormlessness of that early role. She said, ‘Isn’t there somewhere less mousy we can go?’ Later that night, she said, ‘Talk to me in Dutch,’ and I did. ‘Lekker stuk van me,’ I growled. ‘On second thoughts,’ she said, ‘don’t talk to me in Dutch.’ When, months later, we sobered up and began to see others as a couple, her public fluency mesmerised me. She spoke in complete sentences and intact paragraphs and almost always in the trope of the tiny, well-constructed argument. She was obviously a brilliant lawyer. My own way with English she found moving for its clunking lexical precision; and she especially loved for me to spout a scrap of remembered Latin, the more nonsensical the better. O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint, agricolas.
One windy Sunday afternoon in March 2002, when I was in London for a long weekend, we van den Broeks went for a walk on Putney Common. It was the kind of uncomplicated family outing that fortified my belief that our physical separation might yet turn out to have been a bad joke. I suggested to Rachel, as we watched Jake ride ahead on his tricycle, that things were not going too badly. Her eyes were fixed forward and she made no reply. I said, ‘What I mean is –’
‘I know what you mean,’ Rachel said, cutting me short.
Jake got off his tricycle and ran to a swing. I lifted him into the seat and set him in motion. ‘Higher,’ he joyfully urged me.
Rachel stood beside me, hands in pockets. ‘Higher,’ Jake repeated every time he swung up to my hand, and for a while his was the only voice among us. His happiness on the swing was about the relief of communication as much as anything. He cleanly uttered his wish and cleanly it was granted. Our son, we’d recently been told, was tongue-tied: the arrival of certain consonants caused his tongue to scuttle back to the innermost parts of his mouth, re-emerging only in the safety of a vowel. An operation to cure this had been discussed and, in the end, rejected; for my own speech impediment, however, there was no optional quick fix. From our beginning, it had been Rachel’s place to talk freely and airily, mine to carefully listen and utter only solid things. This bargain acted as a kind of guarantee of our sentimental valuables and, in our minds, set us apart from bantering couples whose trinkety talk felt like a form of emotional dissipation. Now, searching for words as I propelled Jake skyward, I felt at a disadvantage.
‘We said we’d review things,’ I finally said.
‘Yes, we did,’ she said.
‘I just want you to know –’
‘I already know, darling,’ Rachel said quickly, and she waggled her lowered chin to relax the solid orb of tension that was invariably buried at the junction of her neck and right shoulder. There was an exhaustion about her throat I hadn’t seen before. ‘Let’s not do any reviewing,’ she said. ‘Please. There isn’t anything to review.’
Another little boy appeared among us, followed moments later by his mother. The little boy impatiently jangled the seat of the swing. ‘Hold on, hold on,’ his mother said. A baby, peeping out of a sling, already burdened her. Fractions of smiles passed between the adults. Ten o’clock approached. Soon the playground would be alive with children.
‘Higher,’ my son said proudly.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_61dd8976-30b0-508f-8bf5-b9c930d5ef48)
There remained the problem of what to do with my alternate weekends in New York. Rivera decided I should play golf. ‘You look like Ernie Els,’ he said. ‘Maybe you could swing like him too.’ Stepping away from my desk, he made a triangle of his arms and shoulders. He was a small, compact lefty. ‘It’s all about rhythm,’ he explained. ‘Ernie’ – his backswing flew up with the word – ‘Els’: down, for the duration of the syllable, came the downswing. ‘See? Easy does it.’ Rivera, who was shopping for a lob wedge, took me to a golf centre by Union Square. At the practice facility, a graduated row of shiny irons stood on a rack. ‘Hit a ball,’ Rivera said, pushing me into a grotto of netting. A troglodyte, I twice swung and missed.
But a reminder of sports had been given to me, and one late-April day, while lowering a box of papers into the trunk of a taxicab, I noticed a cricket bat nestled against the casing of the spare tyre. It seemed like a mirage and I stupidly asked the driver, ‘Is that a cricket bat?’ As he drove, the cabbie – my future teammate Umar – told me he played every week for a Staten Island team. His glance entered the rear-view mirror. ‘You interested in playing?’ ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Sure.’ ‘Come along on Saturday,’ Umar said. ‘Maybe we can fix you up with a game.’
I memorised the time and the place without ever forming the intention of going. Then the first morning of the weekend came. It was a bright, warm day, European in its mildness, and walking past the flowering pear trees on 19th Street I was riddled by a longing for similar summer days in my youth, which were given over, at every opportunity, to cricket.
For cricket is played in Holland. There are a few thousand Dutch cricketers and they go about their game with the seriousness and organisation that characterises all of Dutch sport. The conservative, slightly stuck-up stratum of society, in which I grew up, especially loves cricket, and the players are ghosts of sorts from an Anglophile past: I am from The Hague, where Dutch bourgeois snobbishness and Dutch cricket are, not unrelatedly, most concentrated. We – that is, my mother and I – lived in a semi-detached house on Tortellaan, a quiet street near Sportlaan. From Houtrust, where the indoor skating rink was located and where I first held a girl’s hand in romantic earnest (not on the ice but in the cafeteria, where kids gathered to spend their pocket money on cones of frites met mayonnaise), Sportlaan led south towards the dunes and seaside hotels of Kijkduin. It also led, if you exercised your imagination, to Paris: one year, the hunched, bright-shirted racers of the Tour de France zoomed by like fantastically bicycling macaws. On the far side of Sportlaan were woods called the Bosjes van Pex, and in the woods was the home of a venerable football and cricket club, Houdt Braef Standt – HBS. I joined HBS at the age of seven, anxiously attending the membership interview with my mother. I am not sure what these encounters were designed to accomplish, but in any event I had no cause to worry. When the meeting was over the members of the committee gravely shook my hand and said, Welcome to HBS. I was thrilled. I was too young to realise they’d all known my father, who had been a member of the club for nearly forty years, and that it must have given them great pleasure to take his son under their wing. For that’s how these sports clubs functioned: they took on scores of boys almost as hatchlings and bestowed parental care and effort on them for years, even on those who were athletically hopeless. From September through April I played football, proudly wearing the club’s black shirt and black shorts bought at the sporting goods store on Fahrenheitstraat; and from May through August I played cricket. I loved both sports equally; but by my mid-teens, cricket had claimed its first place. We played on coconut matting wickets, and our outfields, used also for winter games, were sluggish; but there any resemblance to American cricket ended.
What ached me, as I paused on 19th Street two decades later, was the memory of lovely solitary cycle rides, on sunny and tranquil mornings like this one in Chelsea, through the fragmented brilliance of the woods around the HBS grounds, my red Gray-Nicolls bag resting between the handlebars of my bicycle, a lambswool sweater slung over my shoulders. Lacoste polo shirts, bright V-necked sweaters, brogues, diamond-patterned Burlington socks, corduroy trousers: I and men I knew dressed that way, even as teenagers. Then came a second memory, of my mother watching me play. It was her habit to unfold a portable chair by the western sightscreen and to sit there for hours, grading homework and occasionally looking up to follow the game. Although always friendly, she rarely spoke to the other spectators scattered along the boundary’s whitewashed planks, which, laid end to end, distantly encircled the batsman and marked the edge of his innings’ impermanent heaven. Your innings might be over in a second, as a life in eternity. Out, you trudged off miserably, irrevocably dismissed into the nothingness of the non-participant: the amateur cricketer does not enjoy, as the baseballer does, the glimmering prospect of numerous at-bats. You get only one chance, in the blazing middle. When neither fielding nor batting, I and a teammate or two would embark on a rondje – a stroll round the field – smoking cigarettes and acknowledging various parents and interested parties. My mother was known independently to many of the boys at the club because they were current or former pupils of hers.
‘Dag, mevrouw van den Broek. Alles goed?’
‘Ja, dank je, Willem.’
We were cordial, somewhat arrogant young men, in accordance with our upbringing.
My cricket career at HBS dwindled while I studied classics at Leiden University. When my first adult job, with Shell Oil, returned me to The Hague at the age of twenty-four, I had grown away from my club. I would not play cricket again until years later, when I went to London to become an analyst at D——Bank and joined South Bank Cricket Club, whose home, at Turney Road, was near Herne Hill, in the south of the city. On marvellously shorn Surrey village greens – the smell of grass when mown in May provokes in me pangs of emotion that I still dare not dwell on – we battled gently for victory and drank warm beer on the steps of ancient wooden pavilions. Once, after a shaky start to the season, I booked a private net at Lord’s. An elderly coach with the countenance of a butler fed balls into a bowling machine and declared, ‘Good shot, sir,’ each time my bat connected with one of the long hops and half-volleys the machine amiably spat out. All of it was agreeable, English and enchanting; but I quit after a couple of seasons. With my mother no longer watching, cricket was never quite the same again.
Rachel came to Turney Road once. She approached on foot across the green blankness of the sports ground. My team was fielding, and for an hour she sat by herself on the grass. I could sense her boredom from a hundred yards. Between innings, when the teams drank tea and ate cakes and sandwiches, she and I got together. I brought her a cup of tea and sat down with her, self-consciously detached from the rows of players seated at the main table. ‘Sandwich?’ I said, offering her one of mine, a gluey, cheesy thing that only a starving player could bring himself to eat. She shook her head. ‘How can you bear it?’ she blurted. ‘All that standing around.’ I smiled regretfully. Not wanting to spoil my afternoon, she said, ‘Although you do look nice in that hat.’ It was her only attempt at spectatorship.
To my surprise, my mother continued attending matches at HBS even when I no longer played. It had not dawned on her son that following his progress might not have been her main purpose. Though comfortable at the club, my mother never discovered the talent for jolliness that animated many of the older characters for whom the place was a home away from home. The clubhouse, with its billiards tables and borreltjes, was not for her. At stumps she would fold up her chair and make her way directly to the car park, smiling at the many familiar faces she saw. Only now do I appreciate how for her, too, there must have been balminess in the sights and sounds and rhythms of a full day’s cricket, in which unhurried time is portioned out by the ticking of ball against bat, and only now do I ask myself about the thoughts occupying her mind as she sat there with a red blanket over her knees, sometimes from eleven in the morning till six or seven in the evening. She was unrevealing about such matters. When she spoke about my father, it would only be to mention a small fact or two – how his job at the air ministry had bored him; how he liked to eat raw herring, slathered in onions and dangled vertically into the mouth, in Scheveningen; how he loved Cassius Clay. My father, Marcel van den Broek, was significantly older than my mother. She was thirty-three when they married, in 1966, and he was forty-three. In January, 1970, my father was the front-seat passenger in a car travelling near Breda, in the south of the country. There was an accident and he flew through the windscreen. He was killed. I was not yet two.
So I walked directly from 19th Street to the storage unit by Chelsea Piers where our loft furnishings had been dumped, and searched around for the cricketing gear I’d brought with me from Europe and which it had never occurred to me either to throw out or to use. The Duncan Fearnley trunk was in a corner at the back. The latches flipped up with a snap, releasing that bitter marmalade odour of neglected cricket apparel. It was all there, the old kit: the Slazenger Viv Richards batting pads with stuffing leaking from the seams; thick-fingered, sweat-darkened batting gloves; unwashed white socks; an anti-erotic jockstrap; and my HBS sweater, moth-eaten and shrunken, with the red V between two black Vs at the neck and, over the heart, two black ticks emblemising crows. I pulled out my old bat. It was more cracked than I remembered. The traces of long-gone cricket balls still reddened its blade. I gripped the worn rubber-sleeved handle with bare hands and crouched into a batting stance. Seeing a fast half-volley land by some boxed books, I strode with my left foot to the pitch of the ball and dreamily smashed it.
I checked my watch. It was not too late to catch a taxi to Staten Island.
When I arrived at Walker Park, I thought I’d come to the wrong place. There seemed no room, in the grassy opening visible from Bard Avenue, for cricket; then I saw the orange-pink batting track and realised, to my dismay, that this must be it.
I had made the mistake of being punctual. Except for two figures out in the middle of the field, who laboured with a metal hand-roller on the track – during the week, the locals heedlessly scuffed the clay – there was nobody around. I waited by the clubhouse in a state of discouragement. A full hour after the appointed time, a few more Staten Island players showed up. Umar, my sole contact, was not among them. The metal hatch to the basement was opened, and out of it were fetched plastic chairs, a couple of tables and, dramatically, the twenty-five-yard-long coconut-fibre matting, rolled into a giant bulging cigar-like cylinder. Six men carried the mat out to the middle, bearing it aloft on three stumps. The visiting team suddenly appeared, hanging around in the ominous aura that always surrounds opponents before a match. I decided to walk over to the home players hammering pins into the loops that fringed the mat. ‘Umar told me to come along,’ I announced. There was a brief discussion among the more senior men. ‘Speak to the captain,’ one of them said, directing me back to the clubhouse.
The captain, baffled by my presence, told me to wait a while. Now some of the players had changed into whites and were taking practice catches. Most of the home team appeared to be Indians. They spoke a rough English, to my ears barely comprehensible, that I took to be foreign to them. It wasn’t until later that I understood they were West Indians, not Asians, and their speech – a spiky dialect of grammatical short cuts and jewel-like expressions I’d never heard before – was conducted in their first and only language.
After a few secretive consultations between the captain and one or two others, it was suggested to me that I come back some other week and play a friendly match; this I did. I continued to play for the rest of the summer. Because my availability coincided with the cycle of away games, every fortnight I found myself going by taxi to Queens or Brooklyn or hitching a ride with teammates to more faraway destinations. We rendezvoused on Canal Street or in Jersey City. The minibus pulled up and a hand hung out of the passenger-seat window, inviting a slap. ‘Wh’appening, Hans, baby?’ ‘Whassup, Joey. Hey, Salim – thanks for picking me up.’ ‘Any time, man, any time.’ I squeezed in next to my teammates. Nobody complained: already I occupied the slot that groups of men reserve for the reticent good egg. Chutney music was playing, and to its relentlessly tinny and cheerful urgings we’d drive off to New Jersey, Philadelphia, Long Island. We sat mostly silently in the van, absorbed into the moodiness that afflicts competitors as they contemplate, or try to put out of their minds, the drama that awaits. What we talked about, when we did talk, was cricket. There was nothing else to discuss. The rest of our lives – jobs, children, wives, worries – peeled away, leaving only this fateful sporting fruit. Women were rarely present. Their moment came on Family Day, held at Walker Park on an August Saturday. Family Day was when the men repaid, at an outrageous bargain, the mothers and children who had suffered their absences during the season. The men cooked – fussily, on enormous transportable barbecue pits – and the wives, with heartbreaking good nature, played a chaotic game of cricket with the kids. There were foot races and hot dogs and paper plates loaded with curry chicken and dal puri. Everybody went home with a trophy.
In the world of men’s cricket, I surprised myself. Aged thirty-four, troubled increasingly by backache, I found I could still fling the ball into the wicket-keeper’s gloves with a flat throw from forty yards, could still stand under a skyer and hold the catch, could still run up and bowl outswingers at a medium pace. I could also still hit a cricket ball; but the flame of rolling leather, caught up in long weeds, almost always was quickly put out. The bliss of batting was denied to me.
Of course, it was open to me to make adjustments. There was nothing, in principle, to stop me from changing my game, from taking up the cow-shots and lofted bashes in which many of my teammates specialised. But it was, I felt, different for them. They had grown up playing the game in floodlit Lahore car parks or in rough clearings in some West Indian countryside. They could, and did, modify their batting without spiritual upheaval. I could not. More accurately, I would not change – which was uncharacteristic of me. Coming to America (I’d done so willingly, though not primarily on my own account: it was Rachel who’d applied for an opening with the New York office of her firm, and I who’d had to look for another job), I’d eagerly taken to new customs and mannerisms at the expense of old ones. How little, in the fluidities of my new country, I missed the ancient clotted continent. But self-transformation has its limits; and my limit was reached in the peculiar matter of batting. I would stubbornly continue to bat as I always had, even if it meant the end of making runs.
Some people have no difficulty in identifying with their younger incarnations: Rachel, for example, will refer to episodes from her childhood or college days as if they’d happened to her that very morning. I, however, seem given to self-estrangement. I find it hard to muster oneness with those former selves whose accidents and endeavours have shaped who I am now. The schoolboy at the Gymnasium Haganum; the Leiden student; the clueless trainee executive at Shell; the analyst in London; even the thirty-year-old who flew to New York with his excited young wife: my natural sense is that all are faded, by the by, discontinued. But I still think, and I fear will always think, of myself as the young man who got a hundred runs in Amstelveen with a flurry of cuts, who took that diving catch at second slip in Rotterdam, who lucked into a hat trick at the Haagse Cricket Club. These and other moments of cricket are scorched in my mind like sexual memories, forever available to me and capable, during those long nights alone in the hotel when I sought refuge from the sorriest feelings, of keeping me awake as I relived them in bed and powerlessly mourned the mysterious promise they held. To reinvent myself in order to bat the American way, that baseball-like business of slugging and hoisting, involved more than the trivial abandonment of a hard-won style of hitting a ball. It meant snipping a fine white thread running, through years and years, to my mothered self.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_10d6ab36-a640-5f47-bc1f-784adc971473)
Iran into Chuck again by accident. In the late summer, a friend of mine from a poker game I’d briefly belonged to, a food critic named Vinay, suggested that I might find amusement in joining him on his nightly forays for material. Vinay wrote a magazine column about New York restaurants, specifically, cheap, little-known restaurants: an enervating assignment that placed him on a treadmill of eating and writing and eating and writing that he couldn’t face alone. It did not matter to Vinay that I knew nothing about food. ‘Fuck that, dude,’ he said. Vinay was from Bangalore. ‘Just tag along and stop me from going mad. If we eat some fucking Gouda cheese, I’ll ask for your opinion. Otherwise just eat and enjoy yourself. It’s all paid for.’ So from time to time I went with him to places in Chinatown and Harlem and Alphabet City and Hell’s Kitchen or, if he was really desperate and able to overcome his loathing of the outer boroughs, Astoria and Fort Greene and Cobble Hill. Vinay was unhappy with his beat. He believed he ought to have been writing about the great chefs in the great restaurants, or educating the public about vintage wines or – his obsession – single malt whiskies. ‘I used to hate whisky,’ he told me. ‘My dad and his friends drank it all the time. But then I found out they weren’t drinking real whisky. They were drinking Indian whisky – look-like whisky. McDowell’s, Peter Scot, stuff that almost tastes like rum. When I got into Scotch – that’s when I began to understand what this drink is really about.’ Vinay found it distasteful to deal with the owners and cooks at the cheap places, immigrants who generally spoke little English and saw no particular reason to spend time talking to him. Also, the sheer variety of foodstuffs bothered him. ‘One night it’s Cantonese, then it’s Georgian, then it’s Indonesian, then Syrian. I mean, I think this shit is good baklava, but what the fuck do I know, really? How can I be sure?’ Yet when he wrote, Vinay exuded bright certainty and expertise. As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.
Similar misgivings, I should say, had begun to infect my own efforts at work. These efforts required me, sitting at my desk on the twenty-second floor of a glassy tower, to express reliable opinions about the current and future valuation of certain oil and gas stocks. If an important new insight came to me, I would transmit it to the sales force at the morning shout, just before the markets opened at eight. I stood at a microphone at the edge of the trading floor and delivered a godless minute-long homily to doubting congregants distributed amongst the computer screens. After the shout, I spent a half-hour on the trading floor going over the particulars.
‘Hans, this Gabon joint venture watertight?’
‘Maybe.’
Grins all round at this joke. ‘Who’s the CEO over there? Johnson?’
‘Johnson’s with Apache now. Frank Tomlinson is the new guy. Used to be with Total. But the FD is still the same guy, Sanchez.’
‘Huh. What kind of development costs we talking about?’
‘Five dollars a barrel, max.’
‘How they going to do that?’
‘The tax structure’s good. Plus they’re only paying a two-buck royalty.’
‘Yeah, well, I need a better story.’
‘You might want to try Fidelity. I was over there Monday. Tell them something about innovative horizontal drilling technology. That’s another story in itself, by the way – Delta Geoservices. Karen’s got the details.’
Somebody else: ‘I’ll take details on horizontal drilling from Karen all day, every day.’
‘So what’re you saying, Dutch or Double Dutch?’
I smiled. ‘I’m saying Double Dutch.’ To my disproportionate credit, this informal catchphrase of mine – ‘Dutch’ described an ordinary recommendation, ‘Double Dutch’ a strong recommendation – had entered the language of the bank and, from there, of certain parts of the industry.
I liked and respected my colleagues: the mere sight of them – the men close-shaven and prosperously thick about the waist, where ID badges and communication gadgets clustered, the women in subdued suits, all of them shouldering their burdens as best they could – was capable of filling me with joy. But by the fall of 2002, even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I’d placed under my life’s leaking ceiling, had become too small to contain my misery. It forcefully struck me as a masquerade, this endless business of churning out research papers, of blast voicemailing clients overnight with my latest thoughts on ExxonMobil or ConocoPhillips, of listening to oil executives glossing corporate performance in tired jargon, of flying before dawn to meet investors in shitty towns in the middle of America, of the squabbles about the analyst rankings, of the stress of constantly tending to my popularity and perceived competence. I felt like Vinay, cooking up myths from scraps and peels of fact. When, in October, my II ranking remained unchanged at number four, my private reaction was almost one of bitterness.
One Friday of that month, I found Vinay in a bad mood. He had, he told me, been asked to write a story about the eating places of taxicab drivers. The theory, apparently, was that here you had a class of men familiar with alien foods who exercised their choices from a vast selection of establishments and had no stake in the bourgeois dining enterprise: men supposedly driven by unfeigned primitive cravings, men hungering for a true taste of homeland and mother’s cooking, men who would, in short, lead one to the so-called real thing. Of course, I could not help thinking it simple, this theory of reality. Vinay had objections of a narrower kind. ‘Cab drivers?’ he said. ‘Have you ever heard one of these guys express an opinion that wasn’t complete bullshit? I told my editor, Dude, I’m from fucking India. You think in India we take our fucking dining cues from cab drivers? And then I’m like’ – Vinay laughed furiously – ‘Yo, Mark, the name’s not Vinnie, OK? It’s Vinay.’ Vinay buckled, as one must, and we found a taxi driven by a man from Dhaka who was prepared to take us to a place he liked. This exercise was repeated with several cab drivers. We’d look at a menu, eat a mouthful of food, and head out again in search of another lurching ride. Before long the night had assumed the character of an evil black soup, sampled somewhere along the line, whose bitty, fatty constituents rose sickeningly to the surface before sinking back again into a spoon-deep dark. Just before midnight, a taxi driver took us to Lexington and 20-something and wordlessly pulled up at yet another accumulation of double-parked yellow cars.
‘This is the last one, Vinay,’ I warned him.
We entered the restaurant. There was a buffet counter, a wilfully haphazard arrangement of chairs and tables and refrigerators, and framed, violently colourful photographs attached to the walls: schoolchildren, sitting under a tree, receiving instruction from a teacher pointing at a blackboard; an idyll in which a long-haired maiden perched on a swing; a city in Pakistan at night. At the rear was a further dining area where men, eating in silence, stared intently at a television screen. Almost all the patrons were South Asian. ‘Look at what they’re having,’ Vinay said despairingly. ‘Naan with vegetables. These guys are on a three-dollar budget.’ While Vinay examined the menu, I wandered off to look at the television. To my amazement – I’d never seen this before in America – they were showing a cricket match: Pakistan versus New Zealand, broadcast live from Lahore. Shoaib Akhtar, a.k.a. the Rawalpindi Express, was bowling at top speed to the New Zealand captain, Stephen Fleming. I settled ecstatically into a seat.
Moments later, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It took a second or two to recognise Chuck Ramkissoon.
‘Hey there, friend,’ he said. ‘Come join us.’ He was showing me a table occupied by a black man wearing a super’s shirt embroidered with the address of his building and his name, Roy McGarrell. I accepted Chuck’s invitation, and we were joined by Vinay, who arrived carrying a tray of gajrala and chicken karahi.
I urged Chuck and Roy to eat the food. ‘Vinay here’s paid to eat this stuff. You’d be doing him a favour.’
It turned out that Roy, like Chuck, was from Trinidad. ‘Callaloo,’ Vinay remarked absently, and Roy and Chuck started chortling with delight. ‘You know callaloo?’ Roy said. Addressing me, he said, ‘Callaloo is the leaves of the dasheen bush. You can’t get dasheen easy here.’
‘What about that market on Flatbush and Church?’ Chuck said. ‘You find it there.’
‘Well, maybe,’ Roy conceded. ‘But if you can’t get the real thing, you make it with spinach. You put in coconut milk: you grate the flesh of the coconut fine and you squeeze it and the moisture come out. You also put in a whole green pepper – it don’t be hot unless you burst it – thyme, chive, garlic, onion. Normally you put in blue crab; others put in pickled pigtails. You cook it and you bring out a swizzle stick and you swizzle it until the bush melt down into a thick sauce like a tomato sauce. That’s the old-time way; now we put it in a blender. Pour it on stewfish – kingfish, carite fish: mmm-hmm. You also eat it with yam, sweet potato. Dumpling.’
Chuck said to Vinay, ‘He’s not talking about Chinese dumplings.’
‘Our dumpling different,’ Roy said. ‘Chinese dumpling soft. We make our dumpling stiff.’
‘Callaloo,’ Chuck said wistfully.
‘We used to eat it at Maracas Bay,’ Roy said. ‘Or Las Cuevas. Maracas, the water more rough but the beach more popular. In Las Cuevas, the water calm. Easter time? Oh my Lord, it full. Sometime people walk for miles through the mountains to go there. You spend Easter Sunday and Easter Monday on the beach. You pack your bag with ingredients separate. You have your sweet drink – we call sodas sweet drink – and you pack your car and everybody take a bathing suit, and you go to the beach and spend the whole day eating, bathing. Oh my.’ He shuddered with pleasure.
‘I nearly drowned in Maracas once,’ Chuck said.
‘Them riptide there dangerous, boy,’ Roy said.
Chuck handed a card to Vinay. ‘Maybe you could come by my restaurant sometime.’
Vinay examined the card. ‘Kosher sushi?’
‘That’s what we do,’ Chuck said proudly. He leaned over to point at the card. ‘That’s where we are – Avenue Q and Coney Island.’
‘Business good?’ I asked.
‘Very good,’ he said. ‘We cater to the Jews in my neighbourhood. There are thousands and thousands of them, all observant.’ Chuck handed me a card, too. ‘I have a Jewish partner who has the confidence of the rabbi. Makes things a lot easier. But I tell you, getting kosher certification is a tough business. Tougher than the pharmaceuticals business, I like to say. You wouldn’t believe the problems that come up. Earlier this year we had some trouble with seahorses.’
‘Seahorses?’ I said.
Chuck said, ‘You know how you check nori, the seaweed you wrap the sushi in? You examine it over a light box, like an X-ray. And they found seahorse infestation in our supplier’s seaweed. And seahorses are not kosher. Neither are shrimps and eels and octopus and squid. Only fish with scales and fins are kosher. But not all fish with fins have scales,’ Chuck added. ‘And sometimes what you think are scales are in fact bony protrusions. Bony protrusions do not qualify as scales. No, sir.’ Roy and he laughed loudly at this. ‘What are we left with? Halibut, salmon, red snapper, mackerel, mahi-mahi, tuna – but only certain kinds of tuna. Which ones? Albacore, skipjack, yellowfin.’
Chuck wasn’t going to stop there. He believed in facts, in their momentousness and charm. He had no option, of course: who was going to listen to mere opinion coming from him?
‘What about fish eggs, roe?’ he said, showing off. ‘The eggs of kosher fish are generally shaped differently from non-kosher fish. Also, they tend to be red, whereas non-kosher are black. Then there are issues with rice, issues with vinegar. Sushi vinegar will often have non-kosher ingredients, or will be made using a non-kosher process. There are issues with worms in the flesh of the fish, with utensils, with storage, with filleting, with freezing, with sauces, with the broths and oils you pack the fish in. Every aspect of the process is difficult. It’s a painstaking business, I’m telling you. But that’s my opportunity, you see. I don’t mind complication. For me, complication represents an opportunity. The more something is complicated, the more potential competitors will be deterred.’
‘So you’re a restaurateur,’ I said, moving my chair to let pass two dramatically bearded and turbaned men who had risen to their feet to face up to whatever night toil awaited them.
‘I’m a businessman,’ Chuck quibbled agreeably. ‘I have several businesses. And what do you do?’
‘I work at a bank. As an equities analyst.’
‘Which bank?’ Chuck asked, filling his mouth with Vinay’s chicken. When I told him, he improbably declared, ‘I have had dealings with M——. What stocks do you analyse?’
I told him, eyeing the television: Fleming had just punched Akhtar through the covers for four runs, and a groan of disgust mixed with appreciation sounded in the restaurant.
‘Do you think there’s much left in the consolidation trend?’
I turned to give him my attention. In recent years, my sector had seen a rush of mergers and acquisitions. It was a well-known phenomenon; nevertheless, the slant of Chuck’s enquiry was exactly that of the fund managers who questioned me. ‘I think the trend is in place,’ I said, rewarding him with a term of professional wiliness.
‘And before M——you worked where?’ Chuck said. He was blithely curious.
I found myself telling him about my years in The Hague and London.
‘Give me your e-mail address,’ Chuck Ramkissoon said. ‘I have a business opportunity that might interest you.’
He handed me a second card. This read,
CHUCK CRICKET, INC.
Chuck Ramkissoon, President
He said, as I wrote down my own details, ‘I’ve started up a cricket business. Right here in the city.’
Evidently something showed in my expression, because Chuck said good-naturedly, ‘You see? You don’t believe me. You don’t think it’s possible.’
‘What kind of business?’
‘I can’t say any more.’ He was eyeing the people around us. ‘We’re at a very delicate stage. My investors wouldn’t like it. But if you’re interested, maybe I could use your expertise. We need to raise quite a lot of money. Mezzanine finance? Do you know about mezzanine finance?’ He lingered on the exotic phrase.
Vinay had stood up to leave, and I also got up.
‘So long,’ I said, mirroring Roy’s raised hand.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ Chuck said.
We stepped into the night. ‘What a crazy son of a bitch,’ Vinay said.
After the passage of a week or so, I received a padded envelope at my office. When I opened the envelope, a postcard fell out.
Dear Hans,
You know that you are a member of the first tribe of New York, excepting of course the Red Indians. Here is something you might like.
Best wishes,
Chuck Ramkissoon
Smothered by the attentiveness, I put the envelope back in my briefcase without further examining it.
A few days later, I caught the Maple Leaf Express, bound for Toronto, to Albany, where a group of investors awaited. It was a brown November morning. Rain spotted my window as we pulled away into the tunnels and gorges through which the Penn Station trains secretively dribble up the West Side. At Harlem, the Hudson, flowing parallel to the track, came into view. I had taken this journey before, yet I was startled afresh by the existence of this waterside vista, which on a blurred morning such as this had the effect, once we passed under the George Washington Bridge, of cancelling out centuries. The far side of the river was a wild bank of forest. Clouds steaming on the clifftops foxed all sense of perspective, so that it seemed to me that I saw distant and fabulously high mountains. I fell asleep. When I awoke, the river had turned into an indeterminate grey lake. Three swans on the water were the white of phosphor. Then the Tappan Zee Bridge came clumsily out of the mist, and soon afterwards the far bank reappeared and the Hudson again was itself. Tarrytown, a whoosh of parking lots and ballfields, came and went. The valley slipped back into timelessness. As the morning lightened, the shadows of the purple and bronze trees became more distinct on the water. The brown river, now very still, was glossed in places, as if immense silver tyres had skidded there. Soon we were inland, amid trees. I stared queasily into their depths. Perhaps because I grew up in the Low Countries, where trees grow either out of sidewalks or in tame copses, I only have to look at New York forests to begin to feel lost in them. I drove upstate numerous times with Rachel, and I strongly associate those trips with the fauna whose corpses lay around the road in great numbers: skunks, deer and enormous indecipherable rodents that one never found in Europe. (And at night, when we sat on a porch, gigantic moths and other repulsive night-flyers would thickly congregate on the screen, and my English wife and I would shrink into the house in amazement and fear…) My thoughts went back to a train journey I’d often made, in my student days, between Leiden and The Hague. The yellow commuter train ran through canal-crossed fields as dull as graph paper. Always one saw evidence of the tiny brick houses that the incontinent local municipalities, Voorschoten and Leidschendam and Rijswijk and Zoetermeer, pooped over the rural spaces surrounding The Hague. Here, in the first American valley, was the contrary phenomenon: you went for miles without seeing a house. The forest, filled with slender and thick trunks fighting silently for light and land, went emptily on and on. Then, gazing out of the window, my eye snagged on something pink. I sat up and stared.
I’d caught sight of a near-naked white man. He was on his own. He was walking through the trees wearing only underpants. But why? What was he doing? Why was he not wearing clothes? A horror took hold of me, and for a moment I feared I’d hallucinated, and I turned to my fellow passengers for some indication that might confirm what I’d seen. I saw no such indication.
I was relieved, then, at the appearance shortly afterwards of Poughkeepsie. I’d visited the town, with its merry name that sounds like a cry in a children’s game – Poughkeepsie! – for the first time that summer. In its bucolic outskirts a colony of Jamaicans maintained a cricket field on a lush hillside. It was the only privately owned ground we played on, and the farthest north we travelled. The trip was worth it. There was a bouncy but true batting track made of cement; rickety four-deep bleachers filled with shouting spectators; and the simplest wooden shack for a locker room. If you smashed the ball down the hill it landed among cows, goats, horses, chickens. After the match – marked by an umpiring crisis, inevitably – every player went to the clubhouse in downtown Poughkeepsie. The clubhouse was a cabin with a small bar. Prominent signs warned against the use of marijuana. Presently women appeared with platters of chicken and rice. We ate and drank quietly, half following a dominoes game being played with the solemnity that often marked the social dealings of West Indian cricket teams in our league. Our hosts were proud to take care of us, to offer us a territory of their own in this remote place, and we were grateful. The tilted pretty cricket ground, the shipshape clubhouse – such pioneering effort had gone into them!
Somewhere beyond Poughkeepsie I opened my briefcase to glance at work documents. Protruding from a pocket was Chuck’s gift. I opened the envelope and withdrew a booklet. Titled Dutch Nursery Rhymes in Colonial Times, the booklet was a reprint, made by the Holland Society of New York, of the 1889 original edited by a Mrs E. P. Ferris. I turned the pages with some curiosity, because I knew next to nothing about the ancient Dutch presence in America. There was a song in Dutch about Molly Grietje, Santa Claus’s wife, who made New Year koekjes, and a song about Fort Orange, as Albany was first known. There was a poem (in English) titled ‘The Christmas Race, A True Incident of Rensselaerwyck’. Rensselaerwyck was, I surmised, precisely the district through which my train was now travelling. Stimulated by the coincidence, I gave the poem my closer attention. It commemorated a horse race under ‘the Christmas moon’ at Wolvenhoeck, the corner of the wolves. The owners of the horses were a certain Phil Schuyler and a gentleman referred to only as Mijnheer: ‘Down to the riverbank, Mijnheer, his guests, and all the slaves / went trooping, while a war whoop came from all the Indian braves … / The slaves with their whale lanterns were passing to and fro, / Casting fantastic shadows on hills of ice and snow.’ In addition to this poem there were hymns, spinning songs, cradle songs, churning songs and trotting songs – songs you sang while trotting your child on your knee – apparently in use all over New Netherland, from Albany to Long Island to the Delaware River. One such song caught my attention:
Trip a trop a troontjes
De varkens in de boontjes,
De koetjes in de claver,
De paarden in de haver,
De eendjes in de water-plas,
De kalf in de lange gras;
So groot mijn kleine——was!
You sang your child’s name where the blank was. Adapting the melody of the St Nicholas song that every Dutch child hungrily learns (Sinterklaas kapoentje / Gooi wat in mijn schoentje …), I hummed this nonsense about pigs and beans and cows and clover to my faraway son, tapping my knee against the underside of the lowered tray as I imagined his delighted weight on my thigh.
The week before, Jake and I had played in his grandparents’ garden. I raked leaves into piles and he helped me bag the leaves. The leaves were dry and marvellously light. I added armloads to the red and brown and gold crushed in the plastic sack; Jake picked up a single leaf and made a cautious, thrilled deposit. At one point he put on his superhero frown and charged a hillock of leaves. Wading into its harmless fire, he courageously sprawled. ‘’Ook, ’ook!’ he screamed as he rolled in the leaves. I looked, and looked, and looked. Fronds of his yellow hair curled out from the hood’s fringe onto his cheeks. He wore his purple quilted jacket, and his thermal khakis with an inch of tartan turn-up, and his blue ankle boots with the zip, and the blue sweater with the white boat, and – I knew this because I had dressed him – his train-infested underpants, and the red T-shirt he liked to imagine was a Spiderman shirt, and Old Navy green socks with rubbery lettering on the soles. We gardened together. I demonstrated how to use a shovel. When I dug up the topsoil, I was taken aback: countless squirming creatures ate and moved and multiplied underfoot. The very ground we stood on was revealed as a kind of ocean, crowded and immeasurable and without light.
Blocks of colour stormed my window for a full minute. By the time the freight train had passed, the sky over the Hudson Valley had brightened still further and the formerly brown and silver Hudson was a bluish white.
Unseen on this earth, I alighted at Albany – Rensselaer with tears in my eyes and went to my meeting.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_22174186-d4f0-5dc9-8725-b43e351c4828)
Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day. It was into one such dreamlike, double-dealing evening in January 2003, at Herald Square, that I stumbled out of the building occupied by New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles. After years of driving rental cars with a disintegrating and legally dubious international licence issued in the United Kingdom, I had finally decided to buy and insure a car of my own – which required me to get an American driver’s licence. But I couldn’t trade my British licence (itself derived from a Dutch one) for an American one: such an exchange was for some unexplainable reason only feasible during the first thirty days of an alien’s permanent residence in the United States. I would have to get a learner permit and submit to a driving test all over again: which entailed, as a first step, a written examination on the rules of the road of the Empire State.
At the time, I didn’t question this odd ambition or my doggedness in relation to it. I can say quite ingenuously that I was attempting to counter the great subtractions that had lessened my life and that the prospect of an addendum, even one as slight as a new licence and a new car, seemed important at the time; and no doubt I was drawn to a false syllogism involving the nothingness of my life and the somethingness of doing. All that said, I didn’t let Rachel know what I was up to. She would have taken my actions as a statement of intent, and maybe she wouldn’t have been entirely wrong. It would not have helped much to point out that, if I was indeed embracing an American lot, then I was doing so unprogrammatically, even unknowingly. Perhaps the relevant truth – and it’s one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I’m sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me – is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.
Carried along, then, by the dark flow of those times, I approached the Department of Motor Vehicles. The DMV was in a building coated in black glass and chiefly identifiable by a large sign for Daffy’s, an entity I took to be somehow connected to Daffy Duck but which turned out to be a department store. I avoided Daffy’s – and Modell’s Sporting Goods, and Mrs Fields Cookies, and Hat & Cap, and Payless ShoeSource, other occupants of the eerily unfrequented mall known as the Herald Centre – by taking the express elevator to the eighth floor. A bell for the benefit of the blind burped at intervals as I rose. Then the elevator door halved and slid away and I stood before the DMV premises. There was a static turnstile like a monster’s unearthed skeleton, and there was a set of glass doors in constant use. Approaching these, I was barged into by a middle-aged woman making her exit.
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