Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  As for Rachel, she was smiling, diplomatic, evasive, and always finding some reason to go indoors. She wore a long white skirt that blazed with roses. My impulse—albeit one secondary to the impulse to pick up the grilling contraption and throw it through the kitchen window—was to corner her, point out that this was torture, demand some consideration, and protest generally. But I had no confidence in my standing. I was an ex and bound, although I scarcely believed it, by the rules governing the conduct of exes.

  My father-in-law went on indistinctly about rugby. “Yes, I see,” I told him. What I was actually seeing was Martin’s appeal for my wife. He was a doer. He didn’t stand still. He ran around making things happen.

  Very carefully holding a cup of water in two hands, my son inched up to his hero and poured the water over the coals.

  “This is rather good,” Charles said cheerfully, placing his last sparerib on his plate. He moved away.

  I sat down on the grass with, I counted, my fifth glass of the Hungry Dog’s best Grüner Veltliner. Just as I’d decided to lie on my back and impersonate a dad grabbing forty deserved winks, Martin joined me.

  He gave me a sheepish blokey smile and pulled a tuft of grass out of the lawn.

  He said, “Bit awkward, this.”

  I didn’t reply. We must have sat there for a full minute without a word passing between us. Jake ran over and leaped on Martin’s back and began pawing at him.

  “Don’t tickle me, you little so-and-so,” Martin said, seizing him and pinning him down.

  “Come play, come play,” Jake shouted.

  “In a minute, I’m just talking to your dad, all right? In a minute, Jake.” To me he said, “I’ve got one of my own.”

  I’d heard this already: a fifteen-year-old daughter by the first Mrs. Casey. Rachel, if he married her, would be wife number three. This was my chink of light. I couldn’t picture Rachel as a third wife.

  “She’s a good girl,” Martin said. “I’ve got her working at the Dog.” He said clumsily, “Business is good.”

  Oh yeah? I wanted to say. Get back to me when you’re grossing ten thousand dollars per working day, asshole.

  “We’re thinking of opening a place in your old neck of the woods,” Martin said. “New York, I mean.”

  “You should think about Flatbush,” I said. “In Brooklyn. It’s the hot neighborhood. East Flatbush,” I added viciously.

  “East Flatbush?”

  “Very funny, Hans,” Rachel said.

  The great moment had arrived. My wife had joined us in her flowery skirt. She lowered herself into a nonaligned space. It was quite the fête champêtre as the three of us sat together.

  “Try the carrots,” Rachel said. I hadn’t touched the food on my plate. “They’re very good.”

  I didn’t want to make trouble, but neither did I want to eat. “Fuck the carrots,” I said.

  The predictable silence followed. Martin rose to his feet. “I’d better start cleaning up my mess,” he said.

  Rachel and I watched him leave. “Thanks for that,” Rachel said.

  I said, “This is my weekend with Jake. I’ll spend it how I choose. This is the last time you do this.”

  My wife got up and brushed cuttings of grass from her skirt. “You’re right,” she said, and she went over to Martin and kissed him on the cheek.

  The kiss was an attempt, very possibly altruistic and certainly characteristic, to deal in truth.

  Once, in the forthrightness of our earliest, most robust moments, she’d sought to belittle an old boyfriend by describing him as an “expert.”

  “What do you mean, ‘expert’?”

  “Oh, you know, one of those men who prides himself on getting any woman to come like a porn star.”

  “And did he?” I was scandalized.

  She gave no reply, and I heard myself insisting.

  Rachel said, “Well, yes, but…”

  “So I’m not an expert?”

  We were in bed, as was practically obligatory at that time. She propped her head on her hand as she gave my question her consideration.

  “No,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “But you’re better. More passionate.”

  She had decided that I could handle the truth, or that I should handle it. I did, just about. And though I cannot say it made me stronger, I have the comfort of knowing, with the benefit of hard-won hindsight, that something is going right if I am a little nervous as to what my wife may say next.

  However, on my Indian mountaintop, stirring a gin and tonic and pondering like Menelaus and King Arthur and Karenin my errant heartbroken wife, a stupider and far less generous thought came to me: What goes around, comes around.

  A monkey appeared. He was a gray-green, white-bellied, fluffy little fellow with a center parting and a frankly displeased expression. He crouched on the paling of the veranda for a few seconds, stared at me with his furious red face, and rolled away like an old tennis ball into the darkened grounds.

  The truth, since we were on the topic, my imaginary interlocutory wife and I, was that the Hans van den Broek drinking gin in the Western Ghats was not the same man as the New York Hans van den Broek. On an autumn morning a few months previously, I’d woken up with a whistle at my lips and a sense that I was…fine. The stock advice of the columnists in the women’s magazines had been vindicated: time had healed my wounds. A gloss: time spent in London, my matter-of-fact city. A notable consequence was that I began to see other women. (With little ado a couple of dates were consummated: there was an actress and there was a personnel manager, both met in wine bars, both cheerful and game, and both, incredibly, makers of the statement, “Well, that was jolly.”) Another consequence, since we found ourselves in the realm of stock situations, was that I conceived of myself no longer as the idiomatic man who stands between the rock and the hard place but as the more happily placed idiomatic man who can take it or leave it: “it,” here, being my marriage.

  Rachel and I hardly exchanged a word for the rest of the holiday.

  After the holiday, one Sunday afternoon in February, I dropped Jake off at his grandparents’ house. I was about to set off when his mother ran out to ask for a lift: her car was at the mechanic’s and she needed to drop by her office.

  It had been a very long time since we’d been truly alone with each other: a month back, in India, there had been Jake or, in shadow form, the jilter. Rachel wore a blue coat and a blue scarf and blue jeans, a new combination. The situation was so thick with novelty that it felt natural to ask her straight out about Martin.

  “He’s fucking someone else,” Rachel said.

  “Good,” I said. “That means I can fuck you.”

  She seemed to be searching for something in her coat pocket. “OK,” she said.

  We went to my flat. The arrangement repeated itself, about once a week, for two months. We fucked with the minimum of variety and history: our old bag of tricks belonged to those other lovers and those other bodies. I didn’t kiss Rachel’s mouth and she didn’t kiss mine; but she smelled me, smelled my arms and hair and armpits. “I’ve always liked your smell,” she stated in all neutrality. We hardly spoke, which worked in my favor. She remarked about Martin, “He’d say things that were actually stupid. It almost made me puke.” There was a thoughtful silence, and then our first shared burst of laughter in years.

  It wasn’t long afterward that we kissed. Rachel murmured mid-kiss, “We should see a marriage counselor.”

  Six months later we bought a house in Highbury. Chastened by the price—“Astronomical,” the estate agent admitted—I took it upon myself to wallpaper Jake’s room and two guest rooms. I became an expert wallpaperer and as a consequence something of a ponderer: few activities, I discovered, are more conducive to reflection than the unscrolling and measuring of a length of wallpaper, the cutting of it and the painting of glue on it, and the gluing of the cut paper to a wall so as to produce a pattern. Of course, I also found myself patterning the events that had
led to the mysterious and marvelous business of my putting up wallpaper while Rachel’s voice sounded through a house that was ours.

  It was not the case that I’d heroically bowled her over (my hope) or that she’d tragically decided to settle for a reliable man (my fear). She had stayed married to me, she stated in the presence of Juliet Schwarz, because she felt a responsibility to see me through life, and the responsibility felt like a happy one.

  Juliet turned her head. “Hans?”

  I couldn’t speak. My wife’s words had overwhelmed me. She had put into words—indeed into reality—exactly how I felt.

  “Yes,” I said. “Same here.”

  Though not exactly the same, I thought, stepping down from my stepladder and squinting at my handiwork. Rachel saw our reunion as a continuation. I felt differently: that she and I had gone our separate ways and subsequently had fallen for third parties to whom, fortuitously, we were already married.

  Jake and I spent the second day of our Indian expedition at a nature reserve. There was a boat safari on a lake, and from the boat we saw elephants and deer and wild pigs. Best of all, there were monkeys everywhere; Jake was a monkey fanatic and believed he could speak the language of monkeys. There was also the wonderful knowledge that the hills around us held tigers. The next morning we left well before sunrise. There wasn’t much going on, at this dark hour, aside from dogs skittering across the road. In the village, streetlights shone, and my son’s head on my lap was a waxing and waning moon; but presently all wayside illumination came to an end. The car and its dazzling forerunner went onward through the mountain forest. There, at the edge of the beam, I saw movement.

  Men were walking by the side of the road. They were on their way to work. They walked not in groups but alone, in a broken single file. They were almost unnoticeable, and when they were noticeable, it was only for an instant. Some of these men wore a shirt; some did not. Most wore a lungi arranged like a skirt. They were small and thin and poor and dark-skinned, with thin arms and thin legs. They were men walking in the forest and the darkness.

  For some reason, I keep on seeing these men. I do not think of Chuck as one of them, even though, with his very dark skin, he could have been one of them. I think of Chuck as the Chuck I saw. But whenever I see these men I always end up seeing Chuck.

  Marinello is the name of the ice-cream shop, or ijssalon, in The Hague where, after a shopping eternity at the Maison de Bonneterie, my mother would sweeten me with two scoops of chocolate ice cream. Marinello is also the name of the NYPD detective who telephones me about Chuck Ramkissoon. I’ve been trying to speak to him for a month. It’s the end of April. I heard from the Times reporter in late March.

  My immediate instinct, on this earlier occasion, is to fly to New York for the funeral. But the telephone directories don’t have a phone number for Anne Ramkissoon; only Abelsky is listed.

  “When he disappears,” Abelsky says right off the bat, “a guy says to me, Maybe he killed himself. I said, You idiot! Chuck isn’t a suicide guy! This guy has more life inside him than ten people! Then they find him in the river with his hands tied up. I tell this schmuck, I tell him, You see? I was right.” Abelsky wheezily inhales. “They never said what he died for.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What was the reason for death?” Abelsky asks scientifically. “Drowning? Or was he killed before?”

  I don’t have an answer. Abelsky continues, “When I get the news, I’m like a statue. He was a great employee. Full of ideas. Although I should have fired his ass a hundred times. I’m paying his salary and he sets up an office in the city? With no one else I would have allowed this! Nobody! Only Chuck!” Very reasonably he says, “But we adapted already. You gotta adapt, to stay in business. You gotta move with the times.”

  Abelsky, who tells me he doesn’t know about the funeral, gives me Anne Ramkissoon’s phone number.

  “What’s happening to her share of the business?” I ask.

  There is a pause. “The lawyers are investigating all of this. She will get what she is entitled, of course.”

  “Yes, she will,” I say.

  “Otherwise what?” Abelsky replies immediately. “Otherwise what? What gave you the right to talk?”

  I laugh at him, this shrunken businessman.

  He says in a wounded voice, “You think I killed him? You think I killed Chuck? What the hell!” he shouts. “Because I’m a Russian, I kill him? Because I yell at the guy? Always we were fighting! From the beginning, when he told me how to sell kosher fish to the Jews. What a guy!” There is more coughing and wheezing. Abelsky doesn’t sound good. “Nobody knew Chuck then,” he says, all tender emotion now. “He was a nobody. A nothing. But I saw something in this guy. He was a great guy, a terrific guy. If I find out the fuck who gone and did this, I’m going to kill him with my hands. That’s a promise I make to his wife.” This calms him, apparently, because he says, “I don’t know what you know about Chuck. But if you know like I know, you wouldn’t talk to me like this. But that’s OK,” he says, releasing me from culpability. “You only know what you know.”

  I know that I last saw Chuck on Thanksgiving Day, 2003. I’d rung him a few days before and told him, out of correctness more than anything else, that I was about to fly to England for good.

  “Let’s get together for the holiday,” Chuck said. “We’ll mark your departure.”

  It was agreed. I imagined a lunch in Flatbush, with Anne serving up the turkey and my host lecturing us on the significance of the day of national gratitude. What in fact happened was that I received a call from Eliza. She said I was to meet her and Chuck at his office on Twenty-seventh Street, whereupon we’d walk the few blocks to Herald Square and catch the tail end of the Macy’s parade. The rest of the agenda, of Chuck’s devising, remained undisclosed. When I responded to this last item with silence, Eliza said, “Yeah, me too.”

  Thanksgiving Day in New York, that year, was clear and windy. I walked through Chelsea’s streets with an exodist’s attentiveness. For the last time I took in the benign monumentalism of Seventh Avenue, and for the first time I noticed a row of small golden trees at the corner of Seventh and Twenty-fifth Street.

  On Fifth Avenue, Eliza was waiting for me outside the office building. “He’s saying meet him at Herald Square,” she said. “I mean, can you think of anything crazier?”

  It was a good question. Herald Square—or, rather, Thirty-second Street, where barriers and squad cars blocked further progress—was a scene of near-chaos. Spectators were massed on and around the ledges and windows of the skyscrapers, and on the street a great crowd, held back by cops and barricades, pushed and strained to see what was going on in the square. In this regard, I had no problem; I had the advantage of height. The parade seemed to have come to a halt. Ronald McDonald, thirty feet long, yellow-gloved, red-shoed, red-mouthed, red-haired, hovered and hovered over Herald Square, his right arm stuck in a terrible wave. Human Ronald McDonalds teemed beneath, holding the balloon ropes and gesturing and smiling at the multitudes. Immediately behind Old McDonald, as Jake used to call him, was a pink float on which princesses frantically gesticulated at us, and farther up, on Broadway, other airborne monsters could be made out—poor Charlie Brown poised to kick a football, and Chicken Little, and a giant fetuslike character, red-skulled and forward-leaning, who meant nothing to me. From behind a building, a marching band’s trumpets and drums carried over to us in a splintered din.

  “We’re never going to find him,” Eliza wailed. “Where is he?”

  The parade at last lurched onward. Ronald McDonald turned around the corner and flew into the gap of Thirty-fourth Street.

  I tapped Eliza’s arm. “Straight ahead,” I said.

  Chuck was on the far side of Thirty-third Street, on the east side of the square, where a few members of the public had been allowed to gather. He was watching the parade. We pushed toward him. “Hey!” Eliza shouted. “We’re over here!” Chuck turned to her voice and broke into
a grin. “Hey!” he shouted back faintly. “I’m coming.”

  We watched him approach a police officer and point in our direction. The officer shook her head. Chuck persisted, and we gave a thumbs-up to confirm his story. Still the police officer refused to let him cross. “Get going,” a cop on our side of the street said. “You got to keep moving. You too, ma’am.”

  “We’re just trying to hook up with that guy over there,” I explained.

  “What guy?” the cop said.

  “That guy, there. See? With the briefcase.” I was pointing.

  “I don’t see nobody with a briefcase,” the cop said, not even looking. “You want to go north, you go up Ninth Avenue. East is all blocked.”

  I phoned Chuck. “The cop says we have to go up Ninth. But there’s no way you’ll be able to cross Broadway.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Chuck said, giving me a salute. “I’ll figure it out. I’ll see you at Ninth and Thirty-fourth. Give me twenty minutes.”

  So we headed west. At Seventh Avenue, in front of Penn Station, we ran into another crush of people. Evidently this was the parade’s final stop. Bandsmen with huge drums wandered around, as did a pack of elves. I said sorry to a mermaid for stepping on her tail. Ronald McDonald was back, his giant rump tilted upward as he was lowered for deflation. Eliza and I instinctively drew closer to the spectacle. It was sharply breezy now, and the midget Ronald McDonalds holding the vertical ropes worked hard to steady the balloon. We were on the point of walking on when there was a loud collective gasp. I turned around just in time to see Ronald McDonald veering away and crashing into the barriers. There were screams. A man in a doughnut costume was knocked over and at least two women fell as they tried to get out of the way. Ronald McDonald drew back. Then he again came forward enormously, head first, turning in the draft so that his rigid beckoning arm swung round in a slow haymaker that scattered a mesmerized shoal of bystanders and ultimately connected with a fellow trying to film the debacle with a cell phone. That man fell to the ground, as did the police officer next to him who was trying to apprehend the fantastic yolk-yellow mitt with his bare hands, this last fall provoking a ducking young officer to draw his gun and point it at the amok Ronald McDonald, which led to a fresh burst of screams and panicky running and mass diving onto the asphalt and Eliza grabbing my arm.