Netherland (4 page)

“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 anymore. 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 endeavors, 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 around 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 southwest 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.

O
n my own, it was as if I were hospitalized 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 rumored 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 nonoperational 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 anesthetizing 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 air shaft 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 center 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 Twenty-third 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 makeup 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 neighborly 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.”