Netherland (14 page)

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

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

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

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

I said, “I’m sorry—what?”

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

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

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

“How’s it going?” I asked him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shook my head.

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

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

We were once again making love when Danielle whispered something I didn’t follow. “I want you to be a gentleman again,” she whispered. “Will you do that for me?”

I must have signaled some agreement to this incomprehensible request, because she slipped off the bed and crouched to rummage in the clothes heaped on the floor—I wasn’t watching—and after a few seconds came back to me with refreshed spiritedness. Then she breathed into my ear the assertion, “Remember, I trust you,” and produced with a little jingle the belt she’d removed from my trousers. I took the belt, a length of black leather that was at once familiar and strange, and saw Danielle lying facedown on the bed, and began to perform the act I understood her to need. Every lash was answered by a small moan. If this gave me some unusual satisfaction, I can’t remember it now. I do recall a tunneler’s anxiety as to where and when it would all end, and that my arm began to tire, and that eventually, as I worked at beating this woman across the back, and the buttocks, and the trembling hams, I looked to the window for some kind of relief and saw the lights of distant apartments mingled in a reflection of the room. I was not shocked by what I saw—a pale white hitting a pale black—but I did of course ask myself what had happened, how it could be that I should find myself living in a hotel in a country where there was no one to remember me, attacking a woman who’d boomeranged in from a time I could not claim as my own. I recall, also, trying to shrug off a sharp new sadness that I’m only now able to identify without tentativeness, which is to say, the sadness produced when the mirroring world no longer offers a surface in which one may recognize one’s true likeness.

But, as I’ve said, I wasn’t shocked. The shock came later, when Danielle failed to respond to the two telephone messages I left for her.

I
t occurred to me one day that spring had arrived. I was steering my driving instructor’s old Buick through the West Village when I noticed flowers splashing color around the foot of a tree. An idea came to me. I asked Carl, my instructor—this was at the beginning of a two-hour lesson, the first of three I’d booked in preparation for my driving test—if we might drive to Staten Island.

“Fine by me,” Carl said doubtfully.

Carl was a fastidious Guyanese with polished leather shoes and a gray tweed jacket he never wore but instead hung on a hook over the backseat. “Driving here tricky,” he warned me at the outset. This aside, I discovered, he was reluctant to divulge any specific information relating to the motoring practices of New York. He was, however, keen to discuss his ongoing attempt to secure an appointment at the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services for a fingerprinting session: this was required, he reminded me, of all applicants for permanent resident alien status. Carl told me, as we headed at a lawful speed down the BQE, that he had been waiting two years to have his fingerprints taken. “They lost the file,” Carl said. “One day they say it in Texas, the next day they say it in Misery.”

“Misery?” I said.

“Misery,” Carl repeated. He hissed. “I do not like that place. I do not like it one bit.”

I understood him to be referring, here, not to Missouri but to the bureau’s headquarters at Federal Plaza. I’d been there myself earlier that month in order to cure the typographical error on my green card. In the dim, windy early morning I joined the queue of aliens in a cement basin at the foot of the tower. It was a cold wait. Clouds like rats ran across the sky. At last a man in a uniform appeared and goonishly scribbled a light-sensitive mark on the hand each of us offered him, as if we were entering a cheap nightclub—and indeed, within the jurisdiction of the federal building a negative dance was the rage, one which prohibited all blamelessly instinctive movement: in the course of that morning I saw one man removed from the building for looking out of the windows, another for leaning against the heating units, another for taking a telephone call. I duly received a corrected green card, which enabled me to return to the DMV to collect my learner permit, which left, as officialdom’s final hurdle between me and a driving test, a compulsory presentation on road safety. This turned out to be a four-hour lock-in at a Fourteenth Street basement with ridiculously small classroom desks, behind which the students—we were nearly all foreigners deep into adulthood—sat like imbecilic giants. Our lecturer, a destroyed-looking man in his sixties, appeared apologetically before us, and I am certain that a compassionate understanding tacitly arose among the students that we should do everything to assist this individual, an agreeable and no doubt clever man whose life had plainly come to some kind of ruin. Accordingly we were a well-behaved and reasonably responsive class and, an hour or so later, did our best to abide by his request not to sleep during the screening of two films, the first concerning the impossibility of driving safely when under the influence of drugs or drink, the second concerning the tremendous dangers of night driving. The lights were switched off, a screen was lowered, and the basement was transformed into a crappy bioscope. Unlike many of the others, I managed to stay awake; and could not help thinking, as I endured an ominous dramatization of the loss of vision produced by alcohol and by nightfall and the disastrous consequences thereof, of my father’s life ending in a smashup presumably just like those presented on the screen, and of the fact, unconsidered by me before, that on top of everything else his early death had given an unfairly morganatic quality to his marriage: he had been posthumously robbed, in his son’s sentiments, of a ranking equal to that of his wife. It’s our lucky day, my ancestor apparently used to say with that Dutch love of slipping into English phrases. I saw there would come a point when Jake would ask me about his paternal grandparents and it would fall to me to repeat just such scraps relating to my father, and to speak to him about his grandmother and perhaps even her late and only brother, Jake’s great-uncle Willem, whom I never knew, and with such small gusts of facts assist in the dispersion of his world’s delicious indistinctness—delicious, at least, in retrospect. For my comings and goings were frightening mysteries to my three-year-old son. My arrival, however closely anticipated, startled him; and from our first moment together he would be filled with a dread of my departure, which he could not comprehend or situate in time. He feared that any minute I might be gone; and always the thing he most feared would come to pass.