Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  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.

  I emerged, fully dressed, from my bedroom. “Let me show you the building,” I said.

  Together we descended, as the wide-eyed transients did, the streaky gray marble steps. While Danielle surveyed the sulfurous, wildly expressive canvases, I found myself freshly eyeing the pipes and wires and alarm boxes and electrical devices and escape maps and sprinklers that cluttered the wall of each landing. These tokens of calamity and fire, taken in conjunction with the fiery and calamitous art, gave a hellishly subterraneous aspect to our downward journey, which I had undertaken only once or twice before on foot, and I was almost startled when we reached the bottom of the stairs not to run into chuckling old Lucifer himself and instead to find myself on the surface of the earth and able to walk out directly into the cold, clear night. We stood for a moment under the awning of the hotel, stamping our feet. I could think of nothing better than to suggest dinner.

  With no clear sense of a destination we made our way to Ninth Avenue. At Twenty-second Street, we entered an Italian restaurant. Danielle removed her coat and I saw that she wore a short skirt, black wool tights, and knee-length leather boots. A tiny metal star was lodged in the crease above a nostril.

  A waiter brought pasta and a bottle of red wine. The room’s acoustics, which turned surrounding chatter into a roar, forced us to shout to make ourselves heard, so that our conversation formally shared many of the characteristics of a bitter argument. Toward the end of the meal, Danielle, who seemed to be enjoying herself in spite of everything, caught me staring at the first-aid notice that was fixed to the wall behind her. “Don’t you think that’s a little bizarre?” I offered. Danielle turned and looked and laughed, because the photographs in the notice made it appear as if the choking victim was actually strangling herself while being attacked from behind by a larger woman. Danielle said something I didn’t catch.

  I said, “I’m sorry—what?”

  She yelled back, “Somebody should bring out a book called The Heimlich Diet. You know, you eat as much as you want, and then somebody—” She demonstrated the maneuver with a jerk of her arms.

  “That’s a good one,” I said, nodding and smiling. “The Heimlich Diet.”

  Afterward, I drifted back toward the chute of white neon letters that spelled HOT L; Danielle walked beside me, smoking a cigarette. It would be difficult for me to overstate the weirdness of that stroll, a weirdness hardly alleviated by the scene that awaited us on our reentry into the hotel. A party was taking place in the lobby. The occasion was the third birthday of a terrier named Missie who lived on the second floor, and Missie’s owner, a friendly man in his sixties whom I knew only as an elevator cohort, placed champagne glasses in our hands and said, “Missie absolutely insists.” The lobby was crowded with hotel residents human and canine. The angel was there, as was the eminent librettist, and I also recognized an artist who wore dark sunglasses night and day, and two teenage sisters who had once babysat for Jake, and a concert pianist from Delaware, and a fellow with a seat on the stock exchange, and the Iranian husband and wife whose spliffs gave a certain floor its aroma, and the film star who’d recently separated from his film star wife, and a couple who made baroque wallpaper, and the murmuring widow. Whoever owned a dog had brought that dog down to the lobby. An enormously gentle borzoi was barging around, and I seem to remember a cinnamon-patched mutt, a pair of tiny hairless bright-eyed pugs, an affenpinscher, spaniels, an ancient battered paw-licking chow, and, standing by the fireplace, a specimen of one of those miniaturized breeds that are apparently programmed to tremble helplessly. From time to time a chorus of barking broke out and the dog owners would look down and themselves bark reprimands in unison. My immediate inclination was to gulp down one drink and get out. Danielle, however, became involved in a discussion with a maker of papier-mâché dolls and then with a photographer of African scenes, and I found myself in long conferences of my own with, first, a dentist who practiced out of a hotel apartment and, second, a ginger-bearded fellow I’d seen around the place who declared himself to be on a “dog date” with a half beagle, half Rottweiler.

  “How’s it going?” I asked him.

  “Pretty good, so far,” the ginger-bearded man said. “It’s only our second date.” He shrugged. “We’ve got a week of cohabitation coming up. That’s going to be the real test.”

  We both looked at the dog. It seemed very friendly. Its shaking tail was permanently at a vertical, exposing a pale pink asshole.

  “I wonder if I don’t need a more masculine dog,” the man said thoughtfully.

  We were standing next to a painting of a horse’s face, the very memory of which makes me want to go back and study it once again, for this horse’s face, with its pale, dolorous nose set against darkness, seemed to promise to the person who studied it long enough some transcendental revelation. “You ever groomed a horse?” the ginger-bearded fellow asked, whereupon he was moved to recall his boyhood in Colorado, when he had spent more than one summer working on a dude ranch. He told me you brushed a horse with a variety of brushes, and that the coat of a horse will release small clouds of dirt, and that he used a special mane comb to comb the manes, but very gently, because hairs in a mane break so easily. My eyes were all the while directed at the painted horse, and only when my friend stopped speaking did I turn and see him stroking a tear from his eye.

  By the time Danielle and I were reunited—in order, so I assumed, to say good-bye—I’d drunk four or five plastic cups of champagne. Whether it was the alcohol or the unusual texture of the evening (she said with mock bitterness, “I finally feel like I’ve arrived in New York. It’s only taken me four years”), Danielle was in a state of happy excitement, and it seemed only right that she should follow me into the elevator and into my apartment and that we should begin kissing and, very soon afterward, fucking.

  Viewed narrowly, our first actions were unusual only in that my partner seemed intent, on the one hand, on being held tight, and on the other hand specialized in a squirming
maneuver that forced me to lunge for her and, in fact, to pursue her onto the floor as she twisted away from me and slid headfirst over the bed’s edge. All the while she seemed terribly dazed by some private series of thoughts, and this double slipperiness of body and spirit made it entirely unexpected that she came to lie alongside me in tranquillity, smoking a cigarette.

  She said, “You really don’t remember that cab ride?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why should you?” she said, sending a cloudy zephyr to the ceiling. “I’m not sure why I remember it myself.”

  There followed a pause during which, I decided, this woman was considering the retrospective significance of a taxi journey up the Edgware Road many years ago. Her hand made its way to my thigh and tenderly applied pressure there. “Anyhow, I think that’s why I trust you,” she said, her nearest eye darting at me and then back at the ceiling. “Because you were a complete gentleman.” The phrase made her laugh loudly, and she began to make a leisurely, more sensual motion with her hand. I reached out to touch her breasts, and it astonished me how much pleasure this gave me. Suddenly, in spite of all the notions with which I’d dismissed the possibility, this woman had my attention. I was fully alert now and fully aware of her particularity. The silver stream of hair bravely flowing from a spring in her crown, the labia like secret crinkled sticks of licorice, the ins and outs of her Anglo-Jamaican parentage, the few details I’d been told of her New York existence (her apartment on Eldridge Street; her job as a visual creative for an advertising company; her habit of buying lingerie from a tiny, venerable Jewish store on Orchard Street) now struck me as treasurable. Our touching progressed to more purposeful, thrilling contact, and it was in the middle of this subjectively remarkable development—I was being kissed! Kissed by a beautiful woman who wanted to kiss me!—that I became conscious of a kind of vertigo. It arose from the very completeness of my gladness, which was erasing, along with my wretchedness, everything attached to the wretchedness, which was everything of importance to the person I understood myself to be. Once, long ago, an old university friend of mine, a gay man, confided to me that he had only barely survived a catastrophic depression brought about by a love affair with a woman, the effect of which had been to smash utterly the identity he had constructed at such cost to himself and his parents. I was now in danger of clambering onto the same boat. I dizzily sensed my life to date being set at naught—either that or set on its head, since I was confronted with a turning upside down of my last decade, which very possibly I had completely misread, and whose true sweep, it was now possible to conceive, went from a forgotten London night in 1995 to a serendipitous winter’s morning in New York, 2003. This was, perhaps, an extreme reaction to my situation; but nonetheless it was my reaction, which I suppose puts me in the romantic camp.