Netherland (3 page)

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 signaled 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 fox-trots and tangos and fandangos and paso dobles, intently twitching and nuzzling his puppet to the movements of the music, his eyes always sealed. Passersby 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 on 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 vapors 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 gray mass, exactly mirroring the shades of the sidewalk concrete and streaked with blacktop-colored dorsal feathers, gratuitously tapers to 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 vigor. 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 anymore? 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 analyzed it, to avoid what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic 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 inquiry 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 inquiring 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 likable 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 afterward, 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 analyzed 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 year-end 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 counseled 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 English-woman’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 geographize this.”