Netherland (20 page)

“Well,” Chuck said, “that’s something I want to talk to you about. Anne? Listen to me. Are you listening? I’m going to tell you something important. Listen to me now.” “I’m listening,” Anne said. She was covering a bowl of curried rice with cling wrap. “Put that down for a moment,” Chuck said. Without hurrying, Anne placed the bowl in the refrigerator. “Yes?” she said, now moving to the sink. Chuck said, “I want to rest here. In Brooklyn. Not Trinidad, not Long Island, not Queens.” Anne did not react. “Did you hear me? In Brooklyn. A cremation, and then an interment of the ashes. Actual burial, I’m saying. No columbarium, no urn garden. I want a real headstone, rising from real turf, with an appropriate inscription. Not just ‘
CHUCK RAMKISSOON, BORN
1950,
DIED
’ whenever—2050.” He looked at me as if he’d just had a brainstorm. “Why not? Why not die a centurion?”

Anne was rinsing dishes.

“Will you respect my wishes?” Chuck said to her.

She remained impassive. I later heard, in the course of some discussion or other, that Anne had already arranged to be buried in Trinidad with her three unmarried sisters. A plot had been bought outside San Juan, their hometown. The four women had even agreed on the outfits each would wear in her coffin. How Chuck was supposed to fit into this underground sorority was unclear.

“Anyhow, you heard me make my declaration with Hans as my witness,” Chuck said. “I’ll put it in writing, so there’ll be no confusion.”

Anne said provocatively, “The graveyard in the city all full up. It full up in Brooklyn, it full up in Queens. You want to be buried in this country, you be buried in Jersey.”

“Who told you that?” Chuck cried. “There’s space at Green-Wood Cemetery. I know this for a fact. I made inquiries.”

Anne said nothing.

“What is it? You think I should spend all eternity in Jersey?”

Anne started laughing. “I just thinking of them parrot. You and them parrot.”

I said, “Parrots?”

Chuck, smiling at his wife and shaking his head, didn’t reply immediately. “There are parrots at the cemetery,” he said. “Monk parakeets. You sometimes see them around here in the summer—small green birds. Actually, you hear them,” Chuck said. “Squawking in the trees. It’s quite unmistakable.”

I must have looked doubtful, because Chuck insisted, “There’s another colony a few blocks from here, at Brooklyn College, and another one down in Marine Park. Years, they’ve been here. Why not? You get wild turkeys in Staten Island and the Bronx. Falcons and red-tailed hawks on the Upper East Side. Raccoons in Prospect Park. I’m telling you, one day, and it won’t be long now, you’re going to have bears, beavers, wolves, inside the city limits. Remember what I said.” Chuck, wiping his mouth, added, “Anyhow, you’ll see the parrots for yourself.”

Anne said, “He don’t want to be tramping round a graveyard.”

“It’s not a graveyard,” Chuck said. “It’s a historic cemetery.”

We got up and went out for a drive.

That is, I drove and Chuck talked—incessantly, indefatigably, virtuosically. If he wasn’t talking to me he was talking on the phone. An intercontinental cast of characters passed through the old Cadillac. From Bangalore there came calls from a man named Nandavanam, who, in association with the Mr. Ramachandran I’d met at Antun’s, apparently was in the process of finalizing a million-dollar sponsorship deal with an Indian corporation. From Hillside, Queens, there was George el-Faizy, an Alexandrian Copt who had produced preliminary drawings of the arena and the rehabilitated hangars for next to no money and still drove a taxi four days a week and indeed had first met Chuck when the latter had hopped into the said taxi on Third Avenue. And, from a private jet to-ing and fro-ing between Los Angeles and London, there was Faruk Patel, the guru on whose top-secret multimillion-dollar participation the further expansion of the cricket venture depended. Even I had heard of Faruk, author of
Wandering in the Light
and other money-spinning multimedia mumbo jumbo about staving off death and disease by accepting our oneness with the cosmos. I couldn’t quite believe Chuck had this mogul on the line (and in fact Chuck usually spoke to Faruk’s associates); but he had, because it was Chuck Ramkissoon who’d found out that beneath the mystical Californian quackery was a cricket nut with millions of dollars to play with, and who’d tracked down Faruk in Beverly Hills and cornered him and sold him on the idea of the Cricket World Cup coming to New York City and extracted from him a letter of comfort which he proudly showed me. And then there were strictly local characters—lawyers and realtors and painters and roofers and fishmongers and rabbis and secretaries and expediters. There was an official from the Bureau for Immigrant Sports and a man at Accenture and Dr. Flavian Seem of the angel fund. He, Chuck, talked all these people into being—and, if necessary, nonbeing: when Abelsky called, which he repeatedly did, Chuck invariably ignored the call. “I’ve made this man this rich,” he once said, “and this is what I have to put up with. You know when I met him he was driving a limousine? A bum from Moldova who couldn’t wipe his own caca-hole.” If his phone, instead of buzzing, gurgled a few bars of “Für Elise,” he rarely answered, because this was Eliza’s ring tone. “Limits,” he told me. “These things must have limits. But not business. Limits in business are limitations.” He liked nothing better than to put bare feet on the dashboard and hit me with an aphorism. Or a fact. Chuck was a know-it-all on everything from South African grass varieties to industrial paints. His pedagogic streak could be gratuitous: he wouldn’t hesitate, for example, to inform me about Holland’s history of flooding, or to draw my attention to the importance of some pipeline under construction. Best of all, though, he loved to give speeches. I began to understand how he’d been able to extemporize an oration that first day we met: because he was constantly shaping monologues from his ideas and memories and fact-findings as if at any moment he might be called upon to address the joint houses of Congress. As early as June he told me of his preparations for his December presentation to the National Park Service in support of his application to build the cricket arena (“Phase Two” of his great scheme, Phase Three being the operation of the facility). The precise content was top secret. “I can’t tell you anything about it,” he said, “except that it’s going to be dynamite.” Dynamite? Clueless Chuck! He never quite believed that people would sooner not have their understanding of the world blown up, not even by Chuck Ramkissoon.

“What were his politics?” Rachel asks one day.

When we have this exchange, she is going through a phase of eating sticks of celery, and she crunches on just such a stick. I wait for her to finish crunching, and then I think carefully, because on this kind of subject, indeed on almost every subject, my wife is invariably on the money. It is my favorite of all her traits.

“We didn’t really talk about politics,” I say. I decide against mentioning the pointed, possibly opportunistic, remarks he made at that fateful first cricket match, because he never said anything similar again—which didn’t matter to me. The decisive item, if I’m going to be honest about this, was that Chuck was making a go of things. The sushi, the mistress, the marriage, the real estate dealings, and, almost inconceivably, Bald Eagle Field: it was all happening in front of my eyes. While the country floundered in Iraq, Chuck was running. That was political enough for me, a man having trouble putting one foot in front of the other.

“So what did you talk about?”

“Cricket things,” I say.

Rachel says, “What about us? Did you talk about us?”

“Once or twice,” I say. “But not really, no.”

“That’s just weird,” Rachel says.

“No, it isn’t,” I say. I’m tempted to point out that our dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessmen. My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but it’s the same quality that enables me to thrive at work, where so many of the brisk, tough, successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs about their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgmental offspring, and are, in sum, desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy. This chronic and, I think, peculiarly male strain of humiliation explains the slight affection that bonds so many of us, but such affection depends on a certain reserve. Chuck observed the code, and so did I; neither pressed the other on delicate subjects.

I refrained, in particular, from asking him about the one category of telephone communications I didn’t understand, incoming calls arriving on a separate phone (Chuck carried a mysterious second) and eliciting the tersest of responses from Chuck; calls which I soon had reason to connect to unexplained stops we made in the nether regions of Brooklyn.

Because from the beginning he ran so-called errands. Thus, without explanation, Chuck directed me, his driver, to addresses in Midwood and East Flatbush and Little Pakistan in Kensington, a couple of times taking us even as far as Brighton Beach. What happened, when we arrived, was always the same. “Pull over right here,” Chuck would say. He’d trot into a building and come back out within five minutes. “Drive on,” he’d say, slamming the passenger door. And then he’d start talking again.

It wasn’t until late July that he decided to give me a clue about what was going on.

He took a call on his mystery phone; said, “OK, understood” and then turned to me. “Chinatown.”

“Chinatown?”

“Brooklyn Chinatown,” he said, very pleased to have confused me.

I wasn’t aware of any Chinese quarter in Brooklyn. But it existed, I discovered, in a neighborhood where you might look up and see, beyond rooftops dipped westward, the Verrazano Bridge. We stopped in front of a grimly ordinary Chinese restaurant. “Some early lunch?” Chuck said.

We took a seat at the window of the restaurant’s miserable room. There were no other customers. A busboy was sweeping last night’s noodles into a pan.

“My father would never have been comfortable in a spot like this,” Chuck observed.

“Oh?” There was no sign of a waiter.

“He never went into a café except to do business, and he never did business unless there was a getaway. Look.” Chuck pointed over my shoulder. “No rear exit. Somebody comes in through the front door, you’re trapped.”

I wondered what he was talking about.

“That would have been my father’s first thought: How do I get out of here?”

Before I could respond, two men, Chinese or perhaps Korean, entered the restaurant. Chuck approached them and shook their hands, and the three men sat down at the back of the restaurant, outside my earshot. They spoke for a minute or so in a friendly way, with much grinning. Chuck wrote something on a slip of paper, tore the slip into two stubs, and presented a stub to the men. One of them passed him a packed envelope.

“Well?” I said to Chuck in the car. We’d skipped lunch. “What was that all about?”

“I was taking an order for food,” he said preposterously. “What else would I be doing?”

“Chinese restaurants order sushi now?”

“Fish,” Chuck said. “Everybody needs fish. Now drive on.”

In my flatfooted way, I have since figured it all out. By bringing me into the restaurant, by telling me about his father and making me view his transaction with the Chinese/Koreans and spinning me a yarn, Chuck was putting me on notice. On notice of what? Of the fact that something fishy was afoot. That I had the option of discontinuing our association. He guessed I wouldn’t. He guessed I’d continue to see him as I wanted to see him, that I’d offer him the winking eye you might offer your ham-handed conjurer uncle.

Rachel, whom I sometimes suspect of having mind-reading powers, is of course onto this. “You never really wanted to know him,” she remarks, still crunching on her celery. “You were just happy to play with him. Same thing with America. You’re like a child. You don’t look beneath the surface.”

My reaction to her remark is to think, Look beneath Chuck’s surface? For what?

In a spirit of legalistic fairness, Rachel continues, “Although I suppose in Chuck’s case you’d say, how could you be expected to know him? You were two completely different people from different backgrounds. You had nothing important in common.”

Before I can take issue with this, she points a celery stick at me and says, more amused than anything, “Basically, you didn’t take him seriously.”

She has accused me of exoticizing Chuck Ramkissoon, of giving him a pass, of failing to grant him a respectful measure of distrust, of perpetrating a white man’s infantilizing elevation of a black man.

“That’s just wrong,” I say, vehement. “He was a good friend. We had a lot in common. I took him very seriously.”

With no trace of harshness, she laughs. Suddenly she looks up: she thinks she has heard a cry coming from upstairs, and she stops chewing and listens. And there is Jake’s cry again—“Water, please!”—and off she goes. At the foot of the stairs, though, she turns to take a parting shot. “You know why you two got on so well? Pedestal.”

I have to smile at this, because it’s a Juliet Schwarz joke. Dr. Schwarz is our marriage counselor. Rachel and I saw her once a week for the first year of our reunion and still see her once a month at her office in Belsize Park, even though I happily find myself at an ever-growing loss as to what to talk about. Dr. Schwarz is a great believer in the idea of couples as mutual esteemers above all else. “This is your husband!” she once shouted to Rachel. “Pedestal!” she shouted, raising a horizontal arm. “Pedestal!”

At first, Rachel did not take to this kind of advice. She called Juliet Schwarz old-fashioned and bossy and biased in my favor. She questioned her doctorate. But evidently she listened to her, because one day I came home to find a sizable block of limestone in the hallway.

“What’s this?”

“A plinth,” Rachel said.

“A plinth?”

“It’s for you.”

“You bought me a plinth?”

“Pedestal!” Rachel roared. “Pedestal!”

To revert: it’s true that I did not make inquiries into the deeper goings-on of Chuck Ramkissoon. It’s also true that Chuck was a friend, not an anthropological curiosity.