Netherland (23 page)

Meanwhile he is still expecting me to speak. So I speak. I say, “What do I think now? I think I have no regrets. None at all.”

Cardozo, I see, is considering this statement very seriously. I take the opportunity to finish my beer and make my move. We split, Cardozo heading for the Tube to Sloane Square, I going on foot to Waterloo Bridge and from there to the London Eye, where on this fine July evening I have arranged to meet my son and my wife.

O
ne Sunday morning, back in June, Rachel calls down from the storage room. She has been performing a thorough cleaning. If in doubt, throw it out, is Rachel’s slogan in such situations.

I go up to her. “I found this,” she says. In one hand she is holding my bat. “Do you still need this? And what about this thing?” In her other hand is my cricket bag, which she has pulled out of the storage room.

I take the bat from her. It’s still marked by New York dirt.

“Are you going to play this year?”

“I don’t think so,” I say, licking my finger and rubbing at the dirt, which continues to stick. I haven’t played since my return to England. It would feel unnatural, is my feeling, to separate myself from my family in order to spend an afternoon with understated teammates and cups of tea and something essentially nostalgic at stake; yet to throw out this odd paddle would also go against nature, even though its wood, faintly striped by a dozen grains, is now swollen with age and cannot have a sweet spot to speak of.

However, once I hold a bat in my hands I have trouble putting it down. I’m still carrying it when I step into my bedroom to check on Jake. He’s underneath our duvet, in the spot where most mornings I wake up to find, pressed against me, the following bundle: boy, bear, blanket. He is watching
Jurassic Park
for the thousandth time.

We watch half a scene together. Then, with no particular purpose in mind, I ask him a question.

“Do you know what this is?”

He looks up. “A cricket bat.”

I hesitate. I am recalling how I became hooked on the game: alone, with my own eyes. Until the age of nine I was merely a footballer and the summer sport a rumor not worth verifying. Then one day I was walking in the woods by my club and through the trees came the white flashes of boys mysteriously organized in a green space.

It occurs to me that Jake’s situation is different. He has a father, after all. There is no need for him to walk alone in the woods.

I say, “Do you want me to teach you how to play?”

He is drowsily following a rampaging tyrannosaurus. “OK.”

“This year, or next year?” He is only six. When he plays football he is still dreamy in the extreme and only kicks at the ball if woken up by a shout. It is like Ferdinand the Bull and the flowers.

There’s a pause. He turns to look at me. “Next year,” he says.

I feel unexpectedly glad. There’s no rush. It’s only a game, after all. “Fine,” I say.

Rachel’s voice climbs to me from afar. “Tea?”

I actually flinch. It comes to me, this question, as the pure echo of an identical offer she voiced three years ago.

“Tea?” Rachel asked.

This was in London, in her parents’ kitchen. I sat at the dining table with my son and his grandparents. Yes, please, I called back, gratified and a little puzzled by her kindliness.

For during the first week of that summer holiday—this was in early August 2003—Rachel had been in a politic mood. She was considerate and attentive and low-key and, like her parents, powerfully exercised by my preferences. Everybody was making an effort for Hans: and unwarrantedly and (in retrospect) suspiciously so, because, as previously noted, I’d been an absentee for much of that summer.

The tea was poured. I engaged Jake in conversation.

“Who’s your best friend at camp?” I said. “Cato?” I had heard all about Cato. I imagined him grave and severe, like Cato Uticensis.

Jake shook his head. “Martin is my friend.”

“Right,” I said. This was a new name. “Does Martin like Gordon the Express? How about Diesel?”

My son nodded emphatically. “Well that’s good,” I said. “He sounds like a very nice boy.” I looked at Rachel. “Martin?”

She sprang from her chair in tears and ran up the stairs. I had no idea what was happening. “You’d better go up,” Mrs. Bolton told me, exchanging furious glances with her husband.

My wife was lying facedown on her bed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have told you. That was awful. I’m so sorry.”

I fell into a chair. “How long?” I said.

She sniffed. “About six months.”

I came out with, “So it’s serious.”

She gave a small shrug. “It might be.” She quickly went on, “It’s the only reason I introduced him to Jake. I wouldn’t have, otherwise. Darling, I’ve got to move on. You’ve got to move on. We can’t go on like this, waiting for something to happen. Nothing’s going to happen. You know that.”

“I know shit, apparently.” I’d thought myself prepared for this eventuality; more accurately, thought myself no longer in possession of the emotion required truly to care.

Now Rachel was sitting up on her bed and looking down at the quilt. She had been growing her hair steadily since her return to London, and a glossy ponytail flopped down over a shoulder.

When she started to speak, I cut her off. “Let me think,” I said.

I closed my eyes. There was nothing to think except that she was not in the wrong; that another man had her love; that she was at this very moment undoubtedly wishing me very far away; and that my son would soon have another father.

“Who is he?” I said.

She gave me a name. She told me, without my asking, that he was a chef.

“I’ll leave tomorrow,” I said, and Rachel gave a horrible little nod.

I brushed Jake’s teeth with his dinosaur-themed toothbrush. I read him a story—at his insistence,
Where the Wild Things Are,
even though it frightened him a little, this story of a boy whose bedroom is overtaken by a forest—and calibrated his bedroom’s dimmer switch according to his instructions. “More light,” a voice softly commanded from his bedding, and I gave him more light. Rachel stood at the door, arms folded. Later, as I packed my belongings in the adjoining room, I heard a childish squeal of protest. “What’s going on?” I said. “Nothing,” Rachel said. “He’s just making a fuss.” I saw that she had completely lowered the dimmer. I restored the light in a rage. “I won’t have my son sleeping in the dark,” I said to Rachel in a near shout. “Jake,” I said, “from now you sleep with the light on, if that’s what you want. Daddy says so. OK?” He widened his eyes in assent. “OK,” I said. Trembling, I kissed him. “Good night, my boy,” I said.

He and I spent most of the following morning in the garden. For a while we played hide-and-seek, the ultimate object of which, of course, is not to remain concealed but to be found: “I’m here, Daddy,” my son cried out from behind the tree he always hid behind. Then, in furtherance of his obsession with space, the two of us searched the garden for his plastic planets and his plastic golden sun, balloons I’d blown into being earlier in the week. We found all of them except the runt world, Pluto, which once missing became my son’s favorite. I was craning into a hedge when I was joined by Charles Bolton. He kept me company for a minute or two, filling his pipe with tobacco while I, on my hands and knees, kept my head in the bushes. When I got up, clapping the dirt off my hands, my father-in-law stood there like perspicacity made flesh. He removed the pipe from his mouth.

“Some lunch before you go?” he said.

Rachel insisted on driving me to Heathrow. We sat together in silence. I did not think that it fell to me to talk.

Somewhere near Hounslow, she began to say things. She gave assurances about my place in my son’s life and about my place in her life. She told me of the agony in which she, too, found herself. She said something important about the need to reimagine our lives. (What this meant, I had no idea. How do you reimagine your life?) Each of her soothing utterances battered me more grievously than the last—as if I were traveling in a perverse ambulance whose function was to collect a healthy man and steadily damage him in readiness for the hospital at which a final and terrible injury would be inflicted. I stepped out at Terminal 3 and leaned my head into the car. “Good-bye,” I said, and it came out more dramatically than I’d intended. But it seemed finally to have ended, our paired adventure unto death, a truth at once undermined and supported by the bewildering ordinariness of what was left to me: an encounter with the woman at the check-in desk; a drink of water in a travelers’ lounge; an airplane seat.

An hour before landing, a stewardess came by with a basket of Snickers bars. I took one. It was cold and solid, and when I took my first bite I felt a painless crunch and the presence of something foreign in my mouth. I spat into my napkin. In my hand, protruding from brown gunk, was a tooth—an incisor, or three-quarters of one, dull and filthy.

Dazed, I called over an attendant.

“I found a tooth in my chocolate bar,” I said.

She looked at my napkin with open fascination. “Wow…” Then she said carefully, “Are you sure it’s not yours?”

My tongue lodged itself in an unfamiliar space.

“Shit,” I said.

The tooth was graying in my pocket when I arrived back at the hotel. My first impression, on entering the lobby, was that the Chelsea had been invaded by theatergoers and lady golfers from the Midwest. It turned out that these sporty-looking men and women in Bermuda shorts and baseball caps were from the FBI and were here to arrest the drug dealer from the tenth floor. All of this was explained to me by the angel. I had barely seen him all summer, but here he was in his favorite chair. It was not a reassuring sight. His wings were tipped with dirt and his toenails had grown long and yellow. Something about his person—his feathers, or perhaps his feet—reeked. Sitting in the neighboring armchair was a small, dark-haired woman in her sixties. With her careful coiffure and chic gold bracelet and Gucci handbag, I took her to be one of those unfortunates who check into the Hotel Chelsea in the mistaken belief that it is a normal establishment with normal amenities. “This is my mother,” the angel said, flopping a wrist in her direction. I shook Mrs. Taspinar’s hand. “How do you do,” I said with as much conventionality as I could muster, as if an ostentatious show of
comme il faut
might minimize her son’s aberrancy and the dark, inordinately troubling gap in my smile and the collapse of law and order betokened by the detectives surrounding us and, this particular slope being a slippery one, the hellishness of the world.

She smiled up at me and made a remark in Turkish to her son.

“My mother is here to take me home,” the angel said. He was worrying the hem of his wedding dress as he watched the federal agents. “She thinks I should return to Istanbul and find a wife there. Maybe become a doctor. Or work in computers.”

The angel’s mother gave an excruciated laugh. “Have you been to Istanbul?” she asked me in a feminine, slightly lilting voice.

“No,” I said. “I hear it’s a wonderful city.” I felt terribly sorry for her.

“It is,” she said. “It is quite beautiful. Like San Francisco, with many hills and bridges.”

A moment followed in which the angel and his mother and I made a dumbstruck triangle.

“Well, I must go,” I said, picking up my travel bag. “It was very nice meeting you.”

At that moment there was a commotion by the front desk. A bunch of feds were spilling out of an elevator, and in their midst, head lowered and wrists bound by a plastic loop, was the ginger-bearded man who so loved horses.

“Hang in there, Tommy,” somebody called out to him. There was a Laurel and Hardy moment as men took turns squeezing through the glass doors, and then the ginger-bearded man was gone. He left no dog behind him. Evidently the date hadn’t worked out.

The next day, a Thursday, I asked the guys at the front desk about the in-house dentist. “He’s good,” I was told.

By lunchtime, a fake new tooth, as discolored as its neighbors, had materialized over the chip in my lower gum. The dentist, masked and gloved, hovered in and out of his little floodlight for the best part of an hour. It was unexpectedly reassuring to receive his deepest consideration. He nattered about his salmon-fishing vacations in Ireland, which by coincidence had been precisely the pastime of my Dutch former dentist and led me to wonder if there was a connection between angling and tinkering with teeth. Certainly he seemed as happy as a fisher, this New York practitioner, and why not? One of the great consolations of work must be its abbreviation of the world’s area, and it follows that it must be especially consoling to have one’s field of vision reduced to the space of a mouth. At any rate, I was very envious.

And I didn’t want to go to work. Perhaps operating under an oral inspiration, I decided instead to fix my bathtub’s drain, which for weeks had been almost fully blocked. I walked to a hardware store and bought a state-of-the-art plunger and attacked the drain like a maniac: instead of shriveling in minute increments, the bathwater now escaped in a tiny silver twister. This failed to satisfy me. I called in one of the hotel handymen. After somberly assessing the problem, he returned with a snake, that is, a length of wire he slithered into the depths of the hole in order to extract whatever might be down there. At that moment, the bathroom fell dark.

We went out into the hallway, where the fuses were located, and it became apparent that all the lighting in the hotel had failed. It turned out that the whole of the city—indeed most of northeast America, from Toronto to Buffalo to Cleveland to Detroit—had mislaid its power. We did not learn this until some while later; our immediate sense was that more disastrous violence had been perpetrated on the city. I joined the people collected in the hallways, which were lighted only by the distant brown skylight above the staircase, and somebody speculated authoritatively that the Indian Point power station had been hit and shut down. I thought about packing a bag at once and trying to escape the island on foot, or by boat, or running over to the Thirtieth Street heliport and paying whatever it took to clamber into a chopper, Saigon style. Instead, I found myself at a tenth-floor window surveying the panicked, immobilized traffic on West Twenty-third Street with the apartment’s tenant, a pretty, conventional-looking woman in her thirties named Jennifer. Presently Jennifer said, “There’s only one thing to do in a situation like this, and that’s drown our sorrows.” She brought out a bottle of coldish white wine and for an hour we watched the confusion on the street. “I’m leaving this city,” she declared at one point. “This is it. This is the final straw.” Then the good news reached us that in fact no disaster had occurred, and Jennifer said, “There’s only one thing to do in a situation like this, and that’s celebrate.” She produced another bottle of wine.