Netherland (13 page)

In short, I was a political-ethical idiot. Normally, this deficiency might have been inconsequential, but these were abnormal times. If New Yorkers were not already jumpy enough from the constant reminders of the code orange level of terrorist threat, there was another peril to concern us: the fires underfoot. The extraordinary quantities of snow and street salt were combining, apparently, to eat away at the municipal electrical system, with the result that, all winter and into the spring, underground wires caught light and flames spreading under the streets blew up thousands of manholes on sidewalks from Long Island City to Jamaica to the East Village, the detonations shooting cast-iron manhole covers fifty feet into the air. It was Chuck Ramkissoon who alerted me to this danger. After our January outing he’d placed me on his electronic mailing list, and two or three times a week I was one of around a dozen—“Dear friends,” he called us—to receive messages about whatever was on his mind: cricket, American history, birding, sales of Brooklyn real estate, meteorological phenomena, interesting economic data, resonant business stories (there was an item, perhaps for my special benefit, about Arctic gas), and eye-catching miscellanea such as the business of the electrical inferno. He signed them all,

C
HUCK
R
AMKISSOON

President, New York Cricket Club

Chuck Cricket Corp. had been replaced by a grander entity.

Often Chuck’s e-mails simply provided links to Web sites he found interesting, but when the message was concerned with his cricket undertaking he might give us the benefit of his own musings. One such memorandum was headed
NOT AN IMMIGRANT SPORT
. Its text—still preserved in my electronic filing cabinet—was as follows:

Cricket was the first modern team sport in America. It came before baseball and football. Cricket has been played in New York since the 1770s. The first international team sports fixtures anywhere were cricket matches between the USA and Canada in the 1840s and 1850s. In those days cricket matches in New York were watched by thousands of fans. It was a professional sport reported in all the newspapers. There were clubs all over the country, in Newark, Schenectady, Troy, Albany, San Francisco, Boston, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Baltimore and Philadelphia. In Philadelphia alone there were dozens of clubs and the magnificent facilities of Philadelphia Cricket Club, Merion Cricket Club and Germantown Cricket Club are still standing today. (The fields are mostly used for lawn tennis.) It was not until the First World War that the sport went into sharp decline for complicated reasons.

So it is wrong to see cricket in America as most people see it i.e. an immigrant sport. It is a bona fide American pastime and should be regarded as such. All those who have attempted to “introduce” cricket to the American public have failed to understand this. Cricket is already in the American DNA. With proper promotion, marketing, government support etc awareness of the game could easily be reawakened. American kids could once again play their country’s oldest team sport!

One recipient of this missive copied his reply to all of Chuck’s addressees:

Whoever

Could you please stop sending me crazy junk mail?!

Although I glanced at them, I didn’t respond to Chuck’s communications. My instinct was to keep him at a distance, at that distance, certainly, that we introduce between ourselves and those we suspect of neediness. I was wondering, for example, when he was going to ask me for money for his cricket scheme. But I was also drawn to Chuck. I had him down as a lover of contingencies and hypotheses, a man cheerfully operating in the subjunctive mood. The business world is densely margined by dreamers, men, almost invariably, whose longing selves willingly submit to the enchantment of projections and pie charts and crisply totted numbers, who toy and toy for years, like novelists, with the same sheaf of documents, who slip out of bed in the middle of the night to pitch to a pajama’d reflection in a windowpane. I’ve never been open to the fantastical aspect of business. I’m an analyst—a bystander. I lack entrepreneurial wistfulness. In other respects, of course, I’m as faraway as they come. That winter, for example, when the cricket World Cup was being played in southern Africa and several old teammates of mine played for the Netherlands against the great Indians and Australians, I imagined that events long ago had taken a different turn and that in my youth I’d discovered the great secret of batting—something to do with the position of the head, maybe, or the preliminary movement of the feet, or a special dedication of memory—with the result (I imagined further on those black mornings when I woke early to follow the Dutch matches on
cricinfo.com’s
live scoreboard) that I was now one of those orange-clad Hollanders stationed on the pale lawns of Paarl and Potchefstroom, and that when Brett Lee, say, took twenty sprinted strides towards me, and leaped, and hurled the white one-day ball at my toes, the ninety-two-mile-per-hour blur came into focus and hung before me like a Christmas bauble, and with a simple push of my long-handled bat I sent the ball gliding to the boundary’s white rope. How many of us are completely free of such scenarios? Who hasn’t known, a little shamefully, the joys they bring? I suspect that what keeps us harmless from them is not, as many seem to believe, the maintenance of a strict frontier between the kingdoms of the fanciful and the actual, but the contrary: the permitting of a benign annexation of the latter by the former, so that our daily motions always cast a secondary otherworldly shadow and, at those moments when we feel inclined to turn from the more plausible and hurtful meanings of things, we soothingly find ourselves attached to a companion farfetched sense of the world and our place in it. It’s the incompleteness of reverie that brings trouble—that, one might argue, brought Chuck Ramkissoon the worst trouble of all. His head wasn’t sufficiently in the clouds. He had a clear enough view of the gap between where he stood and where he wished to be, and he was determined to find a way across.

However, and to repeat, this wasn’t on my mind at the time—Chuck himself wasn’t on my mind. Other people were, among them Rivera. One morning he came into my office and shut the door and told me he was going to be fired.

I gave the statement my consideration. Rivera, I knew, had recently received a disappointing ranking from the sales force, and this had been followed by a poorly received research paper on Nigeria; but he analyzed midcap stocks, a sector different from mine, and I wasn’t on anything like close enough terms with his boss, Heavey, to judge with any certainty what this might mean. That said, Rivera obviously had reason to worry. We all did. The value of analysts is a matter of opinion, and opinions on Wall Street are at least as fickle as they are anywhere else.

“They’re giving my job to Pallot,” Rivera said.

He stood by the window looking out at the dropping sleet, a little guy in a clean white shirt. His skinny, hairy hands were in the pockets of his pants, gripping and gripping something. Not knowing what to say, I got up and stood next to him, and for a while we surveyed, twenty-two floors down, the roving black blooms of four-dollar umbrellas.

“Sit tight,” I said. “These things blow up and blow away.”

But in early March I came back from two days in Houston and saw that Rivera was gone; Pallot had indeed taken over his desk. When I telephoned Rivera and offered to take him out for a drink, he found a reason to duck out. He was ashamed, was my impression. “Listen, I’m OK,” he said. “I’ve got a bunch of irons in the fire.”

All of this bothered me a lot. One night I went out with Appleby to a bar on the Lower East Side, anxious to talk about Rivera’s fate and scheme in his favor. Appleby, however, had arranged to meet up with friends. He passed the evening telling them jokes I couldn’t quite hear or get, and from time to time they stepped out onto the sidewalk to smoke cigarettes and make calls to carousers elsewhere in the city, returning with reports of parties in Williamsburg and SoHo and, as the night whirled away, leaving me on the rim of things. I drank up and left them to it.

No, Rivera was my only true work buddy, perhaps my only true buddy anywhere—even Vinay, my whiskey-loving dining friend, had decamped to Los Angeles. In all my time in America I had not received a single social call from those I’d designated as my London friends; and neither, it’s true to say, had I called them. With Rivera, I made an effort. I phoned and e-mailed him repeatedly but, as far as getting to meet him was concerned, without success. It wasn’t long before he stopped responding. Then I heard he’d moved back to California, where he’d grown up, and then Appleby, who was something of a rumorer, was fairly sure he’d gone down to San Antonio to work for an oil company. But nobody knew one thing or another for a fact, and the moment came when I realized that Rivera had joined those who had disappeared from my life.

I suppose it was this kind of upset, together with that winter’s more rhythmical miseries, which drew me into the comforting routine, on those days when I had extra time on my hands, of lingering over breakfast at the Malibu Diner, a restaurant one block east of the hotel. The Malibu was run by Corfiotes—to be exact, by people from an isle off Corfu—and sometimes I would be engaged in conversation by one of owners, a fellow with heart trouble who read Greek newspapers because, he told me, after nearly thirty years of living in America he was still foxed by the Roman alphabet. The owner’s son-in-law had an ex-brother-in-law, and it was this man, a fellow in his late fifties named George, who was my regular waiter. He had a little mustache, a black vest, and a red, clean-looking face. My dealings with George were limited by the very depth of our mutual understanding: he automatically brought me scrambled eggs and whole wheat toast and liberally refilled my coffee; I tipped him heavily and without comment. The one fact he disclosed about his life was that he had not long ago become divorced and as a consequence was as happy as he’d ever been. “I can smoke now,” he explained. “I smoke five packs a day.” The most remarkable thing about the Malibu was the mirror that covered the entire wall of the back room and duplicated in its glass the whole interior of the diner, with the strange result that newcomers were subject to a powerful temporary illusion that the back room did not actually exist and was no more than a trick of reflection. This unsettling misapprehension perhaps contributed to the relative scarcity of customers at the rear of the diner, where I came to regard a particular table as my own. There were a few other repetitive presences. Every Saturday, people prone to extreme credit card debt and other forms of improvidence convened at the very rear of the restaurant to discuss their squandering ways and give one another encouragement and support. My most constant dining companions, though, were the blind people who lived in a special residence up the street (
A VISIONARY COMMUNITY
was inscribed on the frontage) and bravely ventured outdoors with white sticks scratching ahead of them, which is why I came to think of my neighborhood as the quarter of the blind. Most days two or three unsighted persons—women, almost without exception—would find their way to one of the tables near to me and order huge, complex breakfasts. They ate indelicately, fingering sunny eggs and lowering their faces to the food. My favorites among them were two fast friends, a black woman and a white woman, who both wore bobble hats and swayed from side to side like sailors as they walked. The white woman, in her sixties and the elder by at least ten years, still had a fragment of vision: she examined the menu as if it were a diamond, raising it an inch from her left eye. The black woman, who moved with one hand held fast to the elbow of her consort, went about in utter blindness. When she stretched open her eyelids with her thumbs, yellowish eyeballs turned in the sockets. The two of them always conducted a cheerful, intelligent conversation that I would listen to quite contentedly for an hour or more on those weekends when I had nothing to do. It was during one such session of eavesdropping that a woman I didn’t recognize stopped at my table and asked me, in an English accent, if I had once lived in London.

She was a woman of around my age, with pale brown skin and large eyes made a little mournful by the shape of her brow.

“Yes, I have lived in London,” I said.

“In Maida Vale?” she said.

I was about to say no, and then I remembered. About eight years previously, just before I came to know Rachel, I’d stayed at a friend’s flat in Little Venice while workmen painted my new place in Notting Hill.

“For about two weeks,” I said, smiling involuntarily.

She smiled back, and in smiling became distinctly pretty. “I thought so,” she said, wrapping her coat tighter about her. In a polite tone, she went on, “We once shared a cab. From…” She named a nightspot in Soho. “You gave me a ride home.”

I remembered the club well—it had been something of a haunt of mine—but I didn’t remember this woman, or having shared a taxi with anybody like her. “Are you sure?” I said.

She laughed. Not without embarrassment, she said, “You’re called Hans, right? It was an unusual name. That’s why I remember.”

It was my turn to feel embarrassed, but most of all I was amazed.

Although she never took a seat, the woman and I talked for a few minutes longer, and it was very easily agreed that she would drop by one evening. She had, she said, always been curious about the Chelsea Hotel.

If I feel able to state that I didn’t give the matter any further thought—that I wasn’t planning anything—it’s because, a few evenings later, when the house phone in my apartment rang and Jesus at the front desk told me I had a visitor called Danielle, I had no idea what he was talking about. Only at the last second, as I went to answer the cough of my doorbell, did it occur to me who the visitor might be—and that I’d never gotten around to asking her for her name.

I opened the door. “I was passing by,” she said, and mumbled some further statement. “If I’m intruding…”

“Of course not,” I said. “Come in.”

She wore a coat that may have been different from the coat I’d first seen her in but had the same effect, namely to make it seem as if she’d just been rescued from a river and blanketed. My own getup was shabby—bare feet, T-shirt, decaying tracksuit bottom—and while I changed, Danielle wandered around my apartment, as was her privilege: people in New York are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they’re invited to step into. In addition to the generous ceiling heights and the wood floors and the built-in closets, she undoubtedly took in the family photographs and the bachelor disarray and the second bedroom with its ironing board and its child’s bed covered by a mound of wrinkled office shirts. I imagine this answered some questions she had about my situation, and not in an especially disheartening way. Like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing. But of course not every woman is interested in this sort of refurbishment project, just as not every man has only one thing on his mind. About Danielle, I remember, my feelings were no more specific than a pleasant anxiousness. She hadn’t caught me, obviously enough, at a very erotic moment in my life. I had never been much of a pickup artist—a few ghastly encounters in my twenties had seen to that—and the alternative prospect of a euphoric romance not only exhausted me but, in fact, struck me as impossible. This wasn’t because of any fidelity to my absent wife or some aversion to sex, which, I like to think, grabs me as much as the next man. No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity’s enormous momentum. I had nothing new to murmur to another on the subject of myself and not the smallest eagerness about being briefed on Danielle’s supposedly unique trajectory—a curve described under the action, one could safely guess, of the usual material and maternal and soulful longings, a few thwarting tics of character, and luck good and bad. A life seemed like an old story.