Netherland

Chapter 4

On my own, it was as if I were hospitalised 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 rumoured 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 non-operational 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 anaesthetising 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 airshaft 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 centre 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 23rd 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 make-up 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 neighbourly 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.’

‘Will you show me?’ The wings wobbled as he stood up.

‘Just go right up the stairs until you come to the door. It’s very easy.’

‘I’m a little afraid,’ Taspinar said, hunching his shoulders pathetically. Although at least thirty, he had the slight, defenceless frame of a batboy.

I reached for my coat. ‘I’ve only got a few minutes,’ I said. ‘Then I’ve got to do some work.’

We climbed the stairs to the tenth floor and continued up to the small landing at the entrance to the roof. As I’d suspected, the door was open. We went through. I’d been up to the roof once before. It was divided into plots belonging to the people who occupied the mansard apartments, and they had turned it into a garden of sun decks, brick enclosures, potted plants and small trees. In the summer, it was a lovely place; it was winter now, and the cold was shocking. I carefully trod the frozen snow. Taspinar, wearing only his angel’s outfit and barefooted apart from his slippers, headed off elsewhere with small skipping steps. He began calling for his cat in Turkish. I advanced in the direction of a tree dotted with fairy lights and found a spot out of the wind. The lighted peak of the Empire State Building loomed ashen and sublime. I regretted not bringing a hat. Turning, I saw the angel disappear behind a turret and then reappear in madly feathery profile against the red glow of the YMCA sign across the street. He cried out the cat’s name: Salvy! Salvy!

I went inside.

If I thought I’d shaken him off, I was mistaken. A nocturnal individual, Taspinar took to joining me in the lobby in the late evenings, assuming a prim upright position on a massive wooden armchair next to mine. Needless to say, his appearance provoked surprise and laughter from the transients. Taspinar enjoyed the attention but rarely responded. When a drunk Japanese asked if he could fly, he gave the man his usual dazed smile. ‘Of course, I would like to fly,’ Taspinar confided to me afterwards, ‘but I know I can’t. I’m not cuckoo.’

Actually, this last assertion was doubtful. I learned that before he’d become possessed by his angelic compulsion, Taspinar had spent some time in a mental asylum in New Hampshire. His father, a rich man who owned factories, had paid the fees, just as he now paid the allowance that permitted his son to live in frugal idleness. The sustaining fiction in this arrangement was that Taspinar was at graduate school at Columbia University, where he’d enrolled years ago. Once I had overcome the thought that midway through my life the only companionship I could count on was that of a person who, as he put it, could no longer bear the masculine details of his life, I grew to mildly enjoy the angel’s unexpectedly serene company. He and I and the murmuring widow in the baseball cap sat in a row like three crazy old sisters who have long ago run out of things to say to one another. Taspinar, it turned out, was a rather artless man who, in spite of his morbid confusion, easily accepted the small offerings of pleasure that daily life provided. He savoured his coffee, read newspapers avidly, found amusement in inconsequential events. With regard to my own situation, about which he made occasional enquiries but offered little comment, he was considerate. As my fondness for him grew, so did my anxiety. When his baroque anguish, too awful and strange for me to think about, became acute, he neglected himself. His frock (he owned three or four) went unchanged for days, his silver fingernail polish deteriorated to a fishy shimmer, his waxed back surrendered to emergent cohorts of hard little hairs. Most distressing of all was the state of his wings. His favourite white pair, in which he had first met me, somehow developed a list, and he took to wearing black bedraggled ones that made him look like a crow. One Saturday I took it upon myself to go to the East Village and buy him fresh plumage. I chose a white, rather magnificent set with shining long vanes. ‘Here,’ I said, stiffly tendering him the package in the lobby that evening. ‘I thought you might find these useful.’ Taspinar seemed very pleased, but I had made an error. My gift was never seen again. As for the cat, it was never seen again either.

Meanwhile I was making efforts to promote my own wellbeing. At Rachel’s transoceanic urging, I went to see a shrink, a nice fellow who offered me a peppermint every twenty minutes and subscribed to the fine, progressive notion that each day we have lived is a kind of possession and, if we are its alert custodian, brings us ever closer to knowledge of the slipperiest kind. I lasted three sessions. I started to take yoga classes at the YMCA across the street from the hotel. This went better, and when I touched my toes for the first time in years I felt a larger movement of life at my fingertips. I was determined to open myself to new directions, a project I connected with escaping from the small country of fog in which, at a point I could not surely trace, I’d settled. That country, I speculated, might have some meaningful relation to my country of physical residence, and so every second weekend, when I travelled to London to be with my wife and son, I hoped that flying high into the atmosphere, over boundless massifs of vapour or small clouds dispersed like the droppings of Pegasus on an unseen platform of air, might also lift me above my personal haze. That is, I would conduct a retrospective of our affable intercontinental dealings and assemble the hope and theory that the foundation of my family might after all be secure and our old unity still within reach. But each time Rachel materialised at her parents’ door she wore a preemptive expression of weariness, and I understood that the haze had travelled all the way to this house in west London.

‘How was the flight?’

‘Good.’ I fidgeted with my suitcase. ‘I managed to get a couple of hours of sleep.’ A hesitation, and then an English peck for each cheek; whereas once it had been our loving tic to kiss triply – left, right, and left again – in the Dutch style she found so amusing.

She would never, in the old days, have expressed curiosity about something as prosaic as a flight. Her truest self resisted triteness, even of the inventive romantic variety, as a kind of falsehood. When we’d fallen for each other it had not been a project of bouquets and necklaces and strokes of genius on my part: there were no ambushes by string quartets or surprise air tickets to a spit of Pacific coral. We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically. Our love started in drink at a party in South Kensington, where we made out for an hour on a mound of dark woollen overcoats, and continued in drink a week later at a pub in Notting Hill. As soon as we left the pub she kissed me. We went to my flat, drank more, and grappled on a sofa squeakily adrift on four wheels. ‘What’s that horrible noise?’ Rachel exclaimed with a ridiculous jerk of the head. ‘The castors,’ I said, technically. ‘No, it’s a mouse,’ she said. She was casting us in a screwball comedy, herself as Hepburn, whose bony beauty I recognised in her, me as the professor with his head up his ass. I looked the part: excessively tall, bespectacled, given to nodding and smiling. I have never entirely shed the gormlessness of that early role. She said, ‘Isn’t there somewhere less mousy we can go?’ Later that night, she said, ‘Talk to me in Dutch,’ and I did. ‘Lekker stuk van me,’ I growled. ‘On second thoughts,’ she said, ‘don’t talk to me in Dutch.’ When, months later, we sobered up and began to see others as a couple, her public fluency mesmerised me. She spoke in complete sentences and intact paragraphs and almost always in the trope of the tiny, well-constructed argument. She was obviously a brilliant lawyer. My own way with English she found moving for its clunking lexical precision; and she especially loved for me to spout a scrap of remembered Latin, the more nonsensical the better. O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint, agricolas.

One windy Sunday afternoon in March 2002, when I was in London for a long weekend, we van den Broeks went for a walk on Putney Common. It was the kind of uncomplicated family outing that fortified my belief that our physical separation might yet turn out to have been a bad joke. I suggested to Rachel, as we watched Jake ride ahead on his tricycle, that things were not going too badly. Her eyes were fixed forward and she made no reply. I said, ‘What I mean is –’

‘I know what you mean,’ Rachel said, cutting me short.

Jake got off his tricycle and ran to a swing. I lifted him into the seat and set him in motion. ‘Higher,’ he joyfully urged me.

Rachel stood beside me, hands in pockets. ‘Higher,’ Jake repeated every time he swung up to my hand, and for a while his was the only voice among us. His happiness on the swing was about the relief of communication as much as anything. He cleanly uttered his wish and cleanly it was granted. Our son, we’d recently been told, was tongue-tied: the arrival of certain consonants caused his tongue to scuttle back to the innermost parts of his mouth, re-emerging only in the safety of a vowel. An operation to cure this had been discussed and, in the end, rejected; for my own speech impediment, however, there was no optional quick fix. From our beginning, it had been Rachel’s place to talk freely and airily, mine to carefully listen and utter only solid things. This bargain acted as a kind of guarantee of our sentimental valuables and, in our minds, set us apart from bantering couples whose trinkety talk felt like a form of emotional dissipation. Now, searching for words as I propelled Jake skyward, I felt at a disadvantage.

‘We said we’d review things,’ I finally said.

‘Yes, we did,’ she said.

‘I just want you to know –’

‘I already know, darling,’ Rachel said quickly, and she waggled her lowered chin to relax the solid orb of tension that was invariably buried at the junction of her neck and right shoulder. There was an exhaustion about her throat I hadn’t seen before. ‘Let’s not do any reviewing,’ she said. ‘Please. There isn’t anything to review.’

Another little boy appeared among us, followed moments later by his mother. The little boy impatiently jangled the seat of the swing. ‘Hold on, hold on,’ his mother said. A baby, peeping out of a sling, already burdened her. Fractions of smiles passed between the adults. Ten o’clock approached. Soon the playground would be alive with children.

‘Higher,’ my son said proudly.

Chapter 5

There remained the problem of what to do with my alternate weekends in New York. Rivera decided I should play golf. ‘You look like Ernie Els,’ he said. ‘Maybe you could swing like him too.’ Stepping away from my desk, he made a triangle of his arms and shoulders. He was a small, compact lefty. ‘It’s all about rhythm,’ he explained. ‘Ernie’ – his backswing flew up with the word – ‘Els’: down, for the duration of the syllable, came the downswing. ‘See? Easy does it.’ Rivera, who was shopping for a lob wedge, took me to a golf centre by Union Square. At the practice facility, a graduated row of shiny irons stood on a rack. ‘Hit a ball,’ Rivera said, pushing me into a grotto of netting. A troglodyte, I twice swung and missed.

But a reminder of sports had been given to me, and one late-April day, while lowering a box of papers into the trunk of a taxicab, I noticed a cricket bat nestled against the casing of the spare tyre. It seemed like a mirage and I stupidly asked the driver, ‘Is that a cricket bat?’ As he drove, the cabbie – my future teammate Umar – told me he played every week for a Staten Island team. His glance entered the rear-view mirror. ‘You interested in playing?’ ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Sure.’ ‘Come along on Saturday,’ Umar said. ‘Maybe we can fix you up with a game.’

I memorised the time and the place without ever forming the intention of going. Then the first morning of the weekend came. It was a bright, warm day, European in its mildness, and walking past the flowering pear trees on 19th Street I was riddled by a longing for similar summer days in my youth, which were given over, at every opportunity, to cricket.