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When the match ended, both teams came together by the old clubhouse and shared Coors Lights and whisky Cokes and Chinese takeout and talked gravely about what had taken place. Somebody called for quiet, and Chuck Ramkissoon stepped forward into the centre of the gathering.
‘We have an expression in the English language,’ he said, as silence began to establish itself amongst the players. ‘The expression is “not cricket”. When we disapprove of something, we say “it’s not cricket.” We do not say “it’s not baseball.” Or “it’s not football.” We say “it’s not cricket.” This is a tribute to the game we play, and it’s a tribute to us.’ By now, all chatter had ceased. We stood round the speaker, solemnly staring at our feet. ‘But with this tribute comes a responsibility. Look here,’ Chuck said, pointing at the club crest on a Staten Island player’s shirt. ‘“Lude Ludum Insignia Secundaria,” it says here. Now I do not know Latin, but I’m told it means, and I’m sure you’ll correct me, Mr President, if I’m wrong’ – Chuck nodded at our club president – ‘it means, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s only a game.” Now, games are important. They test us. They teach us comradeship. They’re fun. But cricket, more than any other sport, is, I want to say’ – Chuck paused for effect – ‘a lesson in civility. We all know this; I do not need to say more about it.’ A few heads were nodding. ‘Something else. We are playing this game in the United States. This is a difficult environment for us. We play where we can, wherever they let us. Here at Walker Park, we’re lucky; we have locker-room facilities, which we share with strangers and passers-by. Most other places we must find a tree or bush.’ One or two listeners exchanged looks. ‘Just today,’ Chuck continued, ‘we started late because the baseball players have first right to play on this field. And now, when we have finished the game, we must take our drinks in brown paper bags. It doesn’t matter that we have played here, at Walker Park, every year for over a hundred years. It doesn’t matter that this ground was built as a cricket ground. Is there one good cricket facility in this city? No. Not one. It doesn’t matter that we have more than one hundred and fifty clubs playing in the New York area. It doesn’t matter that cricket is the biggest, fastest-growing bat-and-ball game in the world. None of it matters. In this country, we’re nowhere. We’re a joke. Cricket? How funny. So we play as a matter of indulgence. And if we step out of line, believe me, this indulgence disappears. What this means,’ Chuck said, raising his voice as murmurs and cracks and chuckles began to run through his audience, ‘what this means is, we have an extra responsibility to play the game right. We have to prove ourselves. We have to let our hosts see that these strange-looking guys are up to something worthwhile. I say “see”. I don’t know why I use that word. Every summer the parks of this city are taken over by hundreds of cricketers but somehow nobody notices. It’s like we’re invisible. Now that’s nothing new, for those of us who are black or brown. As for those who are not’ – Chuck acknowledged my presence with a smile – ‘you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I say that I sometimes tell people, You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of the cricketer. Put on white to feel black.’ People laughed, mostly out of embarrassment. One of my teammates extended his fist to me, and I gave it a soft punch. ‘But we don’t mind, right, just so long as we can play? Just leave us alone, and we’ll make do. Right? But I say we must take a more positive attitude. I say we must claim our rightful place in this wonderful country. Cricket has a long history in the United States, actually. Benjamin Franklin himself was a cricket man. I won’t go into that now,’ Chuck said quickly, because a frankly competing hubbub had broken out amongst the players. ‘Let us just be thankful that it all ended well, and that cricket was the winner today.’
There the umpire stopped, to faltering applause; and soon after, everybody headed home – to Hoboken and Passaic and Queens and Brooklyn and, in my case, to Manhattan. I took the Staten Island Ferry, which on that occasion was the John F. Kennedy; and it was on board that enormous orange tub that I ran once again into Chuck Ramkissoon. I spotted him on the foredeck, amongst the tourists and romantics absorbed by the famous sights of New York Bay.
I bought a beer and sat down in the saloon, where a pair of pigeons roosted on a ledge. After some intolerable minutes in the company of my thoughts, I picked up my bag and went forward to join Chuck.
I couldn’t see him. I was about to turn back when I realised he was right in front of me and had been hidden by the woman he was kissing. Mortified, I tried to retreat without attracting his attention; but when you’re six feet five, certain manoeuvres are not easily accomplished.
‘Well, hello,’ Chuck said. ‘Good to see you. My dear, this is –’
‘Hans,’ I said. ‘Hans van den Broek.’
‘Hi,’ the woman said, retreating into Chuck’s arms. She was in her early forties with blond curls and a plump chin. She wiggled a set of fingers at me.
‘Let me introduce myself properly,’ Chuck said. ‘Chuck Ramkissoon.’ We shook hands. ‘Van den Broek,’ he said, trying out the name. ‘South African?’
‘I’m from Holland,’ I said, apologising.
‘Holland? Sure, why not.’ He was disappointed, naturally. He would have preferred that I’d come from the land of Barry Richards and Allan Donald and Graeme Pollock.
I said, ‘And you are from …?’
‘Here,’ Chuck affirmed. ‘The United States.’
His girlfriend elbowed him.
‘What do you want me to say?’ Chuck said.
‘Trinidad,’ the woman said, looking proudly at Chuck. ‘He’s from Trinidad.’
I awkwardly motioned with my can of beer. ‘Listen, I’ll leave you guys to it. I was just coming out for some fresh air.’
Chuck said, ‘No, no, no. You stay right here.’
His companion said to me, ‘Were you at the game today? He told me about what happened. Wild.’
I said, ‘The way he handled it was quite something. And that was some speech you gave.’
‘Well, I’ve had practice,’ Chuck said, smiling at his friend.
Pushing at his chest, the woman said, ‘Practice making speeches or practice with life-and-death situations?’
‘Both,’ Chuck said. They laughed together, and of course it struck me that they made an unusual couple: she, American and white and petite and fair-haired; he, a portly immigrant a decade older and very dark – like Coca-Cola, he would say. His colouring came from his mother’s family, which originated in the south of India somewhere – Madras, was Chuck’s suspicion. He was a descendant of indentured labourers and had little firm information about such things.
An event for antique sailing ships was taking place in the bay. Schooners, their canvas hardly distended in the still air, clustered around and beyond Ellis Island. ‘Don’t you just love this ferry ride?’ Chuck’s girlfriend said. We slipped past one of the ships, a clutter of masts and ropes and sails, and she and Chuck joined other passengers in exchanging waves with its crew. Chuck said, ‘See that sail there? That triangular sail right at the very top? That’s the skyscraper. Unless it’s the moonsail. Moonsail or skyscraper, one of the two.’
‘You’re an expert on boats, now?’ his girlfriend said. ‘Is there anything you don’t know about? OK, smarty-pants, which one is the jolly jumper? Or the mizzen. Show me a mizzen, if you’re so smart.’
‘You’re a mizzen,’ Chuck said, fastening his arm around her. ‘You’re my mizzen.’
The ferry slowed down as we approached Manhattan. In the shade of the huddled towers, the water was the colour of a plum. Passengers emerged from the ferry lounge and began to fill up the deck. Banging against the wooden bumpers of the terminal, the ship came to a stop. Everybody disembarked as a swarm into the cavernous terminal, so that I, toting my cricketer’s coffin, became separated from Chuck and his girlfriend. It was only when I’d descended the ramp leading out of the terminal that I saw them again, walking hand in hand in the direction of Battery Park.
I found a taxi and took it straight home. I was tired. As for Chuck, even though he interested me, he was older than me by almost twenty years, and my prejudices confined him, this oddball umpiring orator, to my exotic cricketing circle, which made no intersection with the circumstances of my everyday life.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_8f847cac-f731-5aed-a0b1-236de8a2b2e7)
Those circumstances were, I should say, unbearable. Almost a year had passed since my wife’s announcement that she was leaving New York and returning to London with Jake. This took place one October night as we lay next to each other in bed on the ninth floor of the Hotel Chelsea. We’d been holed up in there since mid-September, staying on in a kind of paralysis even after we’d received permission from the authorities to return to our loft in Tribeca. Our hotel apartment had two bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a view of the tip of the Empire State Building. It also had extraordinary acoustics: in the hush of the small hours, a goods truck smashing into a pothole sounded like an explosion, and the fantastic howl of a passing motorbike once caused Rachel to vomit with terror. Around the clock, ambulances sped eastward on West 23rd Street with a sobbing escort of police motorcycles. Sometimes I confused the cries of the sirens with my son’s night-time cries. I would leap out of bed and go to his bedroom and helplessly kiss him, even though my rough face sometimes woke him and I’d have to stay with him and rub his tiny rigid back until he fell asleep once more. Afterwards I slipped out onto the balcony and stood there like a sentry. The pallor of the so-called hours of darkness was remarkable. Directly to the north of the hotel, a succession of cross-streets glowed as if each held a dawn. The tail lights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit storefronts, the orange fuzz of the street lanterns: all this garbage of light had been refined into a radiant atmosphere that rested in a low silver heap over Midtown and introduced to my mind the mad thought that the final twilight was upon New York. Returning to bed, where Rachel lay as if asleep, I would roll onto my side and find my thoughts forcibly embroiled in preparations for a sudden flight from the city. The list of essential belongings was short – passports, a box full of photographs, my son’s toy trains, some jewellery, the laptop computer, a selection of Rachel’s favourite shoes and dresses, a manila envelope filled with official documents – and if it came down to it, even these items were dispensable. Even I was dispensable, I recognised with an odd feeling of comfort; and before long I would be caught up in a recurring dream in which, finding myself on a subway train, I threw myself over a ticking gadget and in this way sacrificed my life to save my family. When I told Rachel about my nightmare – it qualified as such, for the dreamed bomb exploded every time, waking me up – she was making some adjustment to her hair in the bathroom mirror. Ever since I’d known her, she had kept her hair short, almost like a boy’s. ‘Don’t even think of getting off that lightly,’ she said, moving past me into the bedroom.
She had fears of her own, in particular the feeling in her bones that Times Square, where the offices of her law firm were situated, would be the site of the next attack. The Times Square subway station was a special ordeal for her. Every time I set foot in that makeshift cement underworld – it was the stop for my own office, where I usually turned up at seven in the morning, two hours before Rachel began her working day – I tasted her anxiety. Throngs endlessly climbed and descended the passages and walkways like Escher’s tramping figures. Bare high-wattage bulbs hung from the low-lying girders, and temporary partitions and wooden platforms and posted handwritten directions signalled that around us a hidden and incalculable process of construction or ruination was being undertaken. The unfathomable and catastrophic atmosphere was only heightened by the ever-present spectacle, in one of the principal caverns of that station, of a little Hispanic man dancing with a life-size dummy. Dressed entirely in black and gripping his inanimate partner with grotesque eagerness, the man sweated and pranced and shuffled his way through a series, for all I know, of foxtrots and tangos and fandangos and paso dobles, intently twitching and nuzzling his puppet to the movements of the music, his eyes always sealed. Passers-by stopped and gawked. There was something dire going on – something that went beyond the desperation, economic and artistic, discernible on the man’s damp features, beyond even the sexual perverseness of his routine. The puppet had something to do with it. Her hands and feet were bound to her master’s. She wore a short, lewd black skirt, and her hair was black and unruly in the manner of a cartoon gypsy girl. Crude features had been inscribed on her face, and this gave her a blank, bottomless look. Although bodily responsive to her consort’s expert promptings – when he placed his hand on her rump, she gave a spasm of ecstasy – her countenance remained a fog. Its vacancy was unanswerable, endless; and yet this man was nakedly in thrall to her … No doubt I was in an unhealthy state of mind, because the more I witnessed this performance the more troubled I grew. I reached the point where I was no longer capable of passing by the duo without a flutter of dread, and quickening ahead into the next chasm I’d jog up the stairs into Times Square. I straightaway felt better. Unfashionably, I liked Times Square in its newest incarnation. I had no objection to the Disney security corps or the ESPN Zone or the loitering tourists or the kids crowded outside the MTV studio. And whereas others felt mocked and diminished by the square’s storming of the senses and detected malevolence or Promethean impudence in the molten progress of the news tickers and in the fifty-foot visages that looked down from vinyl billboards and in the twinkling shouted advertisements for drinks and Broadway musicals, I always regarded these shimmers and vapours as one might the neck feathers of certain of the city’s pigeons – as natural, humble sources of iridescence. (It was Chuck, on Broadway once, who pointed out to me how the rock dove’s grey mass, exactly mirroring the shades of the sidewalk concrete and streaked with blacktop-coloured dorsal feathers, gratuitously tapers to green and purple glitter.) Perhaps as a result of my work, corporations – even those with electrified screens flaming over Times Square – strike me as vulnerable, needy creatures, entitled to their displays of vigour. Then again, as Rachel has pointed out, I’m liable to misplace my sensitivities.
Lying on her side in the darkness, Rachel said, ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m taking Jake to London. I’m going to talk to Alan Watson tomorrow about a leave of absence.’
Our backs were turned to each other. I didn’t move. I said nothing.
‘I can’t see any other way,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s simply not fair to our little boy.’
Again, I didn’t speak. Rachel said, ‘It came to me when I thought about packing up and going back to Tribeca. Then what? Start again as though nothing has happened? For what? So we can have this great New York lifestyle? So I can keep risking my life every day to do a job that keeps me away from my son? When we don’t even need the money? When I don’t even enjoy it any more? It’s crazy, Hans.’
I felt my wife sit up. It would only be for a while, she said in a low voice. Just to get some perspective on things. She would move in with her parents and give Jake some attention. He needed it. Living like this, in a crappy hotel, in a city gone mad, was doing him no good: had I noticed how clinging he’d become? I could fly over every fortnight; and there was always the phone. She lit a cigarette. She’d started smoking again, after an interlude of three years. She said, ‘It might even do us some good.’
There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. Mornings we awoke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself overnight. Evenings, after Jake had been put to bed, we quietly ate watercress and translucent noodles that neither of us could find the strength to remove from their cartons; took turns to doze in the bathtub; and failed to stay awake for the duration of a TV show. Rachel was tired and I was tired. A banal state of affairs, yes – but our problems were banal, the stuff of women’s magazines. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women’s magazines.
‘What do you think? Hans, say something, for God’s sake.’
My back was still turned to her. I said, ‘London isn’t safe either.’
‘But it’s safer, Hans,’ Rachel said, almost pityingly. ‘It’s safer.’
‘Then I’ll come with you,’ I said. ‘We’ll all go.’
The ashtray rustled as she stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Let’s not make too many big decisions,’ my wife said. ‘We might come to regret it. We’ll think more clearly in a month or two.’
Much of the subsequent days and nights was spent in an agony of emotions and options and discussions. It is truly a terrible thing when questions of love and family and home are no longer answerable.
We talked about Rachel giving up her job or going part-time, about moving to Brooklyn or Westchester or, what the hell, New Jersey. But that didn’t meet the problem of Indian Point. There was, apparently, a nuclear reactor at a place called Indian Point, just thirty miles away in Westchester County. If something bad happened there, we were constantly being informed, the ‘radioactive debris’, whatever this might be, was liable to rain down on us. (Indian Point: the earliest, most incurable apprehensions stirred in its very name.) Then there was the question of dirty bombs. Apparently any fool could build a dirty bomb and explode it in Manhattan. How likely was this? Nobody knew. Very little about anything seemed intelligible or certain, and New York itself – that ideal source of the metropolitan diversion that serves as a response to the largest futilities – took on a fearsome, monstrous nature whose reality might have befuddled Plato himself. We were trying, as I irrelevantly analysed it, to avoid what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a pre-apocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington and, for that matter, Moscow. In my anxiety I phoned Rachel’s father, Charles Bolton, and asked him how he’d dealt with the threat of nuclear annihilation. I wanted to believe that this episode of history, like those old cataclysms that deposit a geologically telling layer of dust on the floors of seas, had sooted its survivors with special information.
Charles was, I believe, flummoxed – both by the substance of my enquiry and the fact that I’d chosen to pursue it with him. Many years previously, my father-in-law had been the Rolls-Royce-driving financial director of a British conglomerate that had collapsed in notorious circumstances. He had never entirely resurfaced from his consequent bankruptcy and, in the old-fashioned belief that he’d shot his bolt, he lurked about the house with a penitent, slightly mortified smile on his face. All financial and domestic powers now belonged to his wife, who, as the beneficiary of various trusts and inheritances, was charged with supporting the family, and there came into being, as the girl Rachel grew up, an axis of womanly power in the house from whose pull the sole male was excluded. From our earliest acquaintance Charles would raise a politely enquiring man-to-man eyebrow to suggest slipping off for a quiet pint, as he called it, in the local pub. He was, and remains, an immaculately dressed and most likeable pipe-smoking Englishman.
‘I’m not sure I can be much use to you,’ he said. ‘One simply got on with it and hoped for the best. We weren’t building bunkers in the garden or running for the hills, if that’s what you mean.’ Understanding that I needed him to say more, he added, ‘I actually believed in deterrence, so I suppose that helped. This lot are a different kettle of fish. One simply doesn’t know what they’re thinking.’ I could hear him tapping his pipe importantly. ‘They’re likely to take some encouragement from what happened, don’t you think?’
In short, there was no denying the possibility that another New York calamity lay ahead and that London was probably safer. Rachel was right; or, at least, she had reason on her side, which, for the purposes of our moot – this being the structure of most arguments with Rachel – was decisive. Her mythic sense of me was that I was, as she would point out with an air of having discovered the funniest thing in the world, a rationalist. She found the quality attractive in me: my cut-and-dried Dutch manner, my conversational use of the word ‘ergo’. ‘Ergonomics,’ she once answered a third party who’d asked what I did for a living.
In fact, I was an equities analyst for M——, a merchant bank with an enormous brokerage operation. The analyst business, at the time of our displacement to the hotel, had started to lose some of its sheen, certainly as the source of exaggerated status for some of its practitioners; and soon afterwards, in fact, our line of work became mildly infamous. Anyone familiar with the financial news of the last few years, or indeed the front page of the New York Post, may remember the scandals that exposed certain practices of stock tipping, and I imagine the names Jack B. Grubman and Henry Blodget still ring bells in the minds of a number of so-called ordinary investors. I wasn’t personally involved in these controversies. Blodget and Grubman worked in telecommunications and technology; I analysed large-cap oil and gas stocks, and nobody outside the business knew who I was. Inside the business, I had the beginnings of a reputation as a guru: on the Friday of the week Rachel declared her intent to leave for London, Institutional Investor ranked me number four in my sector – a huge six spots up from the year before. To mark this accolade, I was taken to a bar in Midtown by some people from the office: my secretary, who left after one drink; a couple of energy analysts named Appleby and Rivera; and a few sales guys. My colleagues were both pleased and displeased with my achievement. On the one hand it was a feather in the bank’s hat, which vicariously sat on their heads; on the other hand the feather was ultimately lodged in my hatband – and the supply of feathers, and the monetary rewards that went with them, were not infinite. ‘I hate drinking this shit,’ Rivera told me as he emptied into his glass the fifth bottle of champagne I’d bought, ‘but seeing as you’ll be getting most of my yearend fucking bonus, it gives me satisfaction on a wealth-redistribution basis.’
‘You’re a socialist, Rivera,’ Appleby said, ordering another bottle with a tilt of thumb to mouth. ‘That explains a lot.’
‘Hey Rivera, how’s the e-mail?’
Rivera was involved in an obscure battle to keep his office e-mail address unchanged. Appleby said, ‘He’s right to stand his ground. Goddamn it, he’s a brand. Have you registered yourself down at the trademarks bureau yet, Rivera?’
‘Register this,’ Rivera said, giving him the finger.
‘Hey, Behar says he’s going to tell the funniest joke he ever heard.’
‘Tell the joke, Behar.’
‘I said I’m not going to tell it,’ Behar said slyly. ‘It’s offensive.’
There was laughter. ‘You can describe the joke to us without telling it,’ Appleby counselled Behar.
‘It’s the nigger-cock joke,’ Behar said. ‘It’s hard to describe.’
‘Just describe it, bitch.’
‘So the Queen’s on Password,’ Behar said. ‘And the password is “nigger-cock”.’
‘Somebody tell Hans about Password.’
‘Somebody tell Hans about nigger-cock.’
‘So the Queen says’ – here Behar went into a twittering Englishwoman’s voice – ‘“Is it edible?’”
Rivera said, ‘Jesus, Hans, what’s going on?’
Panicking, I had suddenly lurched to my feet. I said, ‘I’ve got to go. You guys keep going.’ I gave Rivera my credit card.
He said, stepping away from the others, ‘You sure you’re OK? You’re looking…’
‘I’m fine. Have fun.’
I was sweating when I arrived back at the hotel. After a tormenting wait for the single working elevator, I hastened to our front door. Inside the apartment, all was quiet. I went directly to Jake’s room. He was askew in a mess of sheets. I sat down on the edge of his IKEA child’s bed and righted his body and covered him up. I was a little drunk; I couldn’t resist brushing my lips against his flushed cheeks. How hot his two-year-old skin was! How lovely his eyelids!
I went to my bedroom in a new state of excitement. A lamp burned by the bed, in which Rachel, prone, motionlessly faced the window. I circled the bed and saw that her eyes were open. Rachel, I said quietly, it’s very simple: I’m coming with you. Still in my coat, I knelt beside her. We’ll all go, I said. I’ll collect my bonus and then we’ll head off together, as a family. London would be just fine. Anywhere would be fine. Tuscany, Tehran, it doesn’t matter. OK? Let’s do it. Let’s have an adventure. Let’s live.
I was proud of myself as I gave this speech. I felt I had conquered my tendencies.
She didn’t move. Then she said quietly, ‘Hans, this isn’t a question of geography. You can’t geographise this.’
‘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 any more. 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 endeavours, 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 round 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 south-west 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.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_f00bdc3c-87b2-5c65-a78c-6ed58489b9f5)
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?’
