Netherland (16 page)

“I’m lactose intolerant,” Rachel explained.

“Since when?” I said.

“Since forever,” she said. “You remember how I always had stomach cramps? That was the lactose.”

I was bowled over. I had never considered the possibility of undiscovered factors. Then one night, lying in Jake’s bed with ears pricked, I overheard a conversation about Rachel’s weekly meetings with her psychotherapist, meetings which, although not secret, were not usually subject to discussion. Nevertheless Rachel’s mother, who as a Tory councilor had taken a special interest in the drains and culverts of southwest London and therefore was to be credited with determination, had decided to broach the matter. “What does he say about Hans?” I heard her ask. “We’re not talking about him,” Rachel replied. “We’re talking about stuff that happened before we ever met.” There was a silence. Rachel said, “Mum, there’s no need to look like that.” My wife’s voice dimmed as she traveled from the kitchen to the sitting room. “This isn’t about you and Dad,” I faintly heard. “There are other—”

Other? Other what? I was too flabbergasted to sleep. So far as I was aware, the course of Rachel’s life, prior to its confluence with mine, was almost fully comprehended by the facts set forth in her aptly named curriculum vitae: a private girls’ school, a wander-year in India, successful stints at university and law school, and, at Clifford Chance, an articled clerkship that led to the litigator’s job she’d very much wanted. Her parents’ marriage had throughout stayed intact; she’d benefited from the love of an older brother, Alex, who although living in China for more than a decade had always cheered her on from afar; she’d sailed in and out of a couple of relationships with decent if ultimately merely instructive young men; and of course she’d lived in undisastrous old England. Where, then, was the problem? Where was the intolerable lactose? In the fortnight that followed I became transfixed by this news of my wife’s clandestine preexistent injuries. I’d assumed that some unilateral failing of mine had been at the bottom of our downfall; now it seemed that some malfunction of Rachel’s might also have been operative. I concluded, feverishly, that here was a development—an unknown hinterland to our marriage which, if jointly and equally explored, might lead to discoveries that would change everything; and the prospect filled me with a theorist’s lunatic excitement and those daydreams of room service and afternoons gobbling blackberries and pineapple slices while we navigated the uncharted reaches of our psyches.

On my next visit to London, therefore, I lay awake until Rachel’s parents had gone to bed and she had shut the door of her bedroom—two doors away from Jake’s, on the top floor. It was early April; I could hear her sash window rattling as it was raised.

I crept out into the hallway and tapped on her door.

“Yes?”

She was in bed, a novel in her hands. For a second or two I looked around. It was still a young schoolgirl’s room. The bookcase was loaded with skinny oversize hardbacks about showjumping. There was a turntable and a dusty stack of LPs. The walls were thronged by identical blue tulips. They had once made a great impression on the two of us, these tulips.

She was regarding me with a dogged expression. Her eyes and cheekbones and T-shirt were drained of color.

Bedsprings sounded as I sat down on the bed. I said, “How are things?”

“Me?” she said. “I’m fine. Tired, but fine.”

“Tired?”

“Yes, tired,” Rachel said.

And it had happened again, one of those planned conversations that go quickly awry, that leave you alone with rage, a clarifying rage in this instance, in which it all came back in a harsh light: our fading marriage, the two New York years in which she withheld from me all kisses on the mouth, withheld these quietly and steadily and without complaint, averting even her eyes whenever mine sought them out in emotion, all the while cultivating a dutiful domesticity and maternal ethic that armored her in blamelessness, leaving me with no way to approach her, no way to find fault or feelings, waiting for me to lose heart, to put away my most human wants and expectations, to carry my burdens secretly, she not once in my mourning mentioning my mother, even that time when I wept in the kitchen and dropped a bottle of beer on the floor out of pure sorrow. She merely wiped the floor with paper towels and said nothing, brushing her free hand against my shoulder blade—my shoulder blade!—as she carried the soaked paper to the trash can, never holding me fast, refraining not out of lack of humanity but out of fear of being drawn into a request for further tenderness, a request that could only bring her face-to-face with some central revulsion, a revulsion of her husband or herself or both, a revulsion that had come from nowhere, or from her, or perhaps from something I’d done or failed to do, who knew, she didn’t want to know, it was too great a disappointment, far better to get on with the chores, with the baby, with the work, far better to leave me to my own devices, as they say, to leave me to resign myself to certain motifs, to leave me to disappear guiltily into a hole of my own digging. When the time came to stop her from leaving, I did not know what to think or wish for, her husband who was now an abandoner, a hole-dweller, a leaver who had left her to fend for herself, as she said, who’d failed to provide her with the support and intimacy she needed, she complained, who was lacking some fundamental wherewithal, who no longer wanted her, who beneath his scrupulous marital motions was angry, whose sentiments had decayed into a mere sense of responsibility, a husband who, when she shouted, “I don’t need to be provided for! I’m a lawyer! I make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year! I need to be loved!” had silently picked up the baby and smelled the baby’s sweet hair, and had taken the baby for a crawl in the hotel corridor, and afterward washed the baby’s filthy hands and soft filthy knees, and thought about what his wife had said, and saw the truth in her words and an opening, and decided to make another attempt at kindness, and at nine o’clock, with the baby finally drowsy in his cot, came with a full heart back to his wife to find her asleep, as usual, and beyond waking.

In short, I fought off the impulse to tell Rachel to go fuck herself. I produced some remark about Jake which we both might cling to, and for a minute or two we did this, and then I went back to my son.

It had become my habit, during my stays in London, to take many photographs of him. On the flights back, I examined these so-called Kodak moments as the jet crossed the Arctic emptiness at a terrific altitude and suffused me with a terrestrial’s nervousness not much allayed by the flight information monitor and its figure of an aircraft millimetrically bleeding a red trail as it crept upon the void. Once home, I tossed the packets of photos into a cardboard box that held all my photographs, including black-and-white shots dating back to the mysterious blankness of the sixties and seventies and showing a boy with blond hair poised to blow out candles at birthday parties. I never went through the box properly, had no idea what to do with any of these so-called mementos. There were, I knew, people who organized such things into files and folders, cataloged hundreds of examples of their kids’ schoolwork and paintings, created veritable museums. I envied them—envied them for their faith in that future day when one might pull down albums and scrapbooks and in the space of an afternoon repossess one’s life. So when the cardboard box began to overflow, I ran it over to the office of Chuck Ramkissoon’s mistress and commissioned her to put the pictures of Jake into some kind of order. The pictures of Rachel I couldn’t face.

“Sure,” Eliza said. “You have anything special in mind?”

“Just do what you do,” I said, getting to my feet.

“That’s what I like,” Eliza said. “Creative leeway. Lets me look at the pictures, look at the client…” She gave me a confidential glance and reached into a shelf. “I’ll show you what I’m talking about.”

I sat down once again and followed her fingers as they turned stiff brown pages. Between these were semitransparent leaves, the slenderest of mists that lifted to reveal an earlier Eliza with bell-bottoms and a ball of curling hair and a hippie (her word) husband. This man, the first husband, transported sets for a ballet company, and the two of them traveled around the country in a tractor-trailer: she pointed out the tractor-trailer and, standing rigidly in snow, a dog. “We got a dog in Billings, Montana, and we named him Billings,” Eliza explained. She left the doomed transporter of ballet sets (he was afterward shot dead in Rhododendron, Oregon) and took up with another, even more itinerant, man—a preacher who was also, she learned too late, a drug addict. This brought us to the second volume, which began with scenes from a Las Vegas wedding. Eliza and the preacher, a hat-wearing, ferociously bearded ringer for Father Abraham of Father Abraham and the Smurfs, ended up in New Mexico, near the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and became the caretakers of a ranch next to D. H. Lawrence’s old property. “It was intense,” Eliza said. “I painted—I was going through this Georgia O’Keeffe thing, I guess—and he took drugs. It killed him in the end. Look at him here, just a week before he died.” The eyes of the second husband regarded me from a drawn face. “I guess I’m bad luck,” Eliza said. She opened a third album. This was devoted to her romance with Chuck: here they were at a charity cycle ride; at the top of a mountain, with backpacks; at Niagara Falls. I counted three winters. “That’s my apartment,” Eliza said. “It’s like a gypsy home, only neat and beautifully arranged. Basically I’m very bohemian.”

“Yes, I can see that,” I said.

Eliza put away the albums. “People want a story,” she said. “They like a story.”

I was thinking of the miserable apprehension we have of even those existences that matter most to us. To witness a life, even in love—even with a camera—was to witness a monstrous crime without noticing the particulars required for justice.

“A story,” I said suddenly. “Yes. That’s what I need.”

I wasn’t kidding.

Exiting, I took the ten steps to Chuck’s suite. A young South Asian guy answered the door.

“No Chuck?” I said.

“He’s out,” he said, standing guard by the door. This was, I guessed, Chuck’s director of operations. The air behind him carried a film of cigarette smoke.

“Tell him Hans dropped by,” I said, surprised at my disappointment. “Just to say hello.”

Yes, I wanted to see Chuck Ramkissoon. Who else was left?

I
t’s the case that a person’s premature death brings him into view. His tale has come to a sudden end and becomes intelligible—or, more accurately, invites special attention. Some years ago, word reached me that a former football teammate at HBS, a kid I’d played with in a succession of junior teams from ages eight to fifteen but whom I hadn’t given a thought to since, had suffered a fatal heart attack. He was thirty-two years old and died while watching television in his home in Dordrecht. His name was Hubert and the main fact about him was that he’d been a very small, gifted
laatste man
—last man, or sweeper—who skipped around tacklers with speedy twinkling steps. You couldn’t take the ball off him. He had a craggy smile and closely cut hair, and he liked to horse around in the showers with towels and shampoo. Hubert! Longing for information, I made a couple of calls to The Hague. I learned the following: he had gone on playing football at HBS, for a range of senior teams, until the age of twenty-seven, at which point he found a job in Dordrecht as an IT consultant. He stayed in touch with one or two fellows from the club but had not been seen around. He lived alone. At the time of his death he hadn’t been watching television but, to be exact, a video.

For months I was haunted by this summary. I still think of Hubert sometimes, and still find it unbearable that he died by himself; although for all I know he remained until the very last the same happy fellow he’d been in the days I knew him. Knowledge, here, is a relative matter. I never once ran into Hubert outside the bounds of sports. This circumscription applied to almost all of my football-playing friends, even though I knew their fathers and rode to matches in their fathers’ cars and received words of encouragement, even love, from their fathers, cries from the touchlines that I can still hear.

Goed zo, Hans! Goed zo, jongen!

My point, I suppose, is the self-evident one that Hubert came to preoccupy me in a way and to a degree he would not have if he’d lived. But with Hubert, all thoughts soon come to a stop—not only for lack of information but also for lack of weight. Not so with Chuck. He is, in memory, weighty. But what is the meaning of this weight? What am I supposed to do with it?

I can see him now, waiting for me on the wooden steps of his porch. He is wearing a cap from his collection of caps, and shorts from his collection of shiny athletic shorts, and a T-shirt from his collection of T-shirts. Chuck covered up his extreme industry with a wardrobe suggestive of extreme leisure.

“So,” he says, “what’s the story?”

“There is no story,” I say, sitting next to him.

He looks at me with a cocked head, as if I’ve thrown down a challenge. “There’s always a story,” he says. Whereupon he feels for the buzzing phone at his breast.

He told his own story constantly, and the autobiography might succinctly, and clankingly, have been titled
Chuck Ramkissoon: Yank.
His legend was transparently derived from the local one of rags and riches. He couldn’t afford the luxury of knowingness. “Blood, sweat, and tears,” Churchillian Chuck told me more than once. “A fat coolie from the bush. No job, no money, no rights.” Arriving in the United States with his wife, Anne—it was 1975, they were twenty-five and just married—he started working on the first day of his supposed honeymoon. “I had a cousin—actually, the friend of a cousin—taking care of me. Painting, plastering, demolition, cement work, roofing, you name it, I did it. I’d come home to Brownsville with this white face and grit on my hands. I couldn’t wash it out, you know. For years my hands were always dirty. Then I got my big break. It was my wife, actually, who got it for me.” I’d nod my head, encouraging him, relaxing already at the prospect of another of his lulling monologues. “She was a babysitter for this high-end Manhattan couple. They needed work done to their summer place on the Island. I gained their confidence and I took the job. It was my first job as chief contractor. Then I did their new apartment on Beach Street. Soon everybody else in the building wanted me as well. They liked me. It’s a people business, Hans. I ran a team of Bangladeshi cement guys. I had Irish painters—well, the main guy was Irish, a terrific guy, his men were Guatemalans—I had Russian plasterers, I had Italian roofers, I had Grenadan carpenters. All from Brooklyn. Everybody was happy. I made real money for the first time in my life. This was around the time I got my citizenship and could finally crawl out from under my rock. Well, let me tell you, even through the property crash I was busy. That’s when I decided to buy and fix up buildings on my own account—in ’92. I knew prices would come back. I knew there was money to be made. I foresaw the Brooklyn boom, Hans. I saw it as clearly as you see me now. I focused on Williamsburg, which was full of the kind of run-down commercial buildings I wanted, buildings with high profit potential. But they were owned by Jews. I had no access. Nobody wants a black landlord in the neighborhood. So I hooked up with Abelsky. I met him at the Russian baths, this big fat guy who never stopped moaning.” Chuck started laughing. “You know what we call a guy like that in Trinidad? We call him a pawmewan. A poor-me, self-pitying guy. The guy was unbearable. A disaster area. Nobody at the baths wanted to talk to him. Nobody wanted to whack him with the twigs. ‘Come on, guys, give me a break. Dimitri, I’m begging you. Boris—come on, Boris. Please. Just a few whacks.’ No. They wouldn’t go near him.” Chuck howled happily. “I’m telling you, those Russian guys preferred my company. And believe me, they weren’t happy having me around. Anyhow, I look at this guy, this pariah, and I say to myself, Here’s a guy who’s so desperate he’d work with a coolie. So I befriend him. That’s why I went to the baths in the first place, to meet Jews. Where else was I going to meet them? Remember—think fantastic.” We’d be driving, and he’d be upright in the passenger seat now, stiff with pride. “So I set up a real estate company with Abelsky and I cut him in for twenty-five points to be my frontman. Of course, I took care of everything. Abelsky’s job was to stay in the background and act like a big shot too busy to handle the details. And listen to him today: he actually thinks he is a big shot! When all he’s ever done is lend me his Jewish name! Which isn’t even that Jewish!” Chuck, not amused, said, “Our sushi business? Abelsky & Co. The real estate company? Abelsky Real Estate Corporation. We made money, of course. We still own three buildings, in prime locations. We have six people at Avenue K and we’re looking to hire two more.” Chuck waggled a finger. “But this cricket thing, this is a different deal. This is the big time. I don’t need Abelsky for this. I don’t want him involved. What does Abelsky know about the cricket market? No, this is my project, this has got my name on it.”