Netherland (29 page)

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

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

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

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

“What guy?” the cop said.

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

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

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

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

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

The gust of air subsided; Ronald McDonald’s handlers reined him in.

Eliza said, “Did that really happen?”

We laughed most of the way to Ninth Avenue.

Chuck was not to be found at the agreed place. Eliza asked me, “So, did you like my albums?” I did, I told her. She’d done a good job. The story of my son, as she put it, was now gathered in a single leather-bound volume inscribed with his initials.

Eliza flexed a bicep triumphantly. “What did I tell you?”

“You’ve got the knack,” I agreed. I didn’t tell her that while her work gave me joy—who can resist images of one’s laughing child?—it also documented my son’s never-ending, never truly acceptable self-cancellations. In the space of a few pages his winter self was crossed out by his summer self which in turn was crossed out by his next self. Told thus, the story of my son is one that begins continuously, until it stops. Is this really the only possible pagination of a life?

Chuck was late, then very late. We called him repeatedly, with no answer.

“OK, now I’m worried,” Eliza said. We’d been waiting almost an hour.

“He just got screwed up by the crowds,” I said, kissing Eliza good-bye. “His phone battery probably died.”

That was Thursday. On Saturday, I called Chuck again; I still hadn’t heard from him. “Hey, it’s me,” I asserted to the voice mail. “I’m on the plane, just getting ready for takeoff. Where are you? What the hell happened to you? Anyhow, take care. Bye.”

The aircraft went into reverse; taxied; rumbled innocently out of New York’s clear sky.

It’s not quite true to say that Chuck out of sight was Chuck out of mind. I did think about him. I concluded that his Thanksgiving no-show was merely the newest manifestation of his whimsicality and didn’t hold it against him, just as I didn’t hold it against him, or me, that in the end all I got out of him was an e-mail:

Good luck with everything! Sorry about

Thanksgiving. I got held up. Speak soon.

Chuck

We never spoke. Every once in a while, in the grip of affectionate curiosity, I’d search the Web for a mention of Chuck Ramkissoon. I found none—which told me that his cricket project was going nowhere. A pity, but there it was. There were other things to think about.

Then I’m told that his body has been found in the Gowanus Canal and that it was put there very soon after I left New York.

Immediately after talking to Abelsky, I ring Anne Ramkissoon’s number. Another woman answers and it’s a while before Anne comes to the phone. I am looking at St. Paul’s Cathedral. The afternoon is another dull one, with white clouds mottled by smaller gray clouds.

Anne accepts my condolences. “Do you need any help with anything?” I say. “Anything you need.”

“It all taken care of,” she says. “I ready for this. The bishop taking care of everything.”

“And the funeral? I’d like to be there.”

She says squarely, “My husband body going back to Trinidad. He going to rest with his people.”

I feel under an obligation to speak up. “But, Anne,” I say, “you heard him. He wanted to be cremated, in Brooklyn. I was there when he said it, remember? I was his witness.”

“You his witness?” Anne says. “Everybody his witness. Everybody witness Chuck. I his wife. I waited for him for two years. Nobody else waiting; not you, not the police. I waiting.”

It has not occurred to me until this moment to think carefully about what it might mean to be the widow Ramkissoon.

“They bring my husband out of the Gowanus Canal,” she goes on. “Who put him there? Not me. His witness put him there. Now I lost him,” she says. “I have to live with this. You go back and live your life. What I do? Where I go?”

“I’m so sorry, Anne,” I say.

Do I need to declare to her, to all whom it may concern, that I am distraught? That, although I may not have missed him for two years, I now miss Chuck terribly? Do I declare that I loved Chuck? Is this what is required?

Or perhaps I should more concretely declare that, having spoken to Anne, I leave the office early, at three-thirty, and walk all the way home, uphill and in light rain, and that in Highbury Fields I stand for twenty minutes in my raincoat, thinking about whether I should fly to Trinidad for the burial. That when I arrive home I touch Jake on the head and tell Paola, our nanny, that I’m going to my bedroom and should be left in peace. Perhaps I should declare that I call the New York Police Department and am put through to a Detective Marinello, who promises to call me back but doesn’t. That when Rachel comes home from work she senses immediately that something is up, and that at nine o’clock we sit down together with a glass of wine. Perhaps I should declare that we proceed to talk about Chuck Ramkissoon and that thoughts of Chuck come to me at all hours in the months thereafter. What is the declaration that is in order here?

It doesn’t take long to tell Rachel about the good times: how Chuck and I met in remarkable circumstances, how we stayed in touch, how we came to collaborate in heat and grass and fantasy. To all of this she listens quietly. It’s when I tell her about the day of the parrots, as I mentally label the worst day, that she interrupts me.

“Go over that one more time,” she says, examining the shadow in the wine bottle and dispensing one half of the shadow into each of our glasses. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”

My wife is a lawyer, I remember. “I don’t know what I saw,” I say. “I just saw that this guy had been roughed up. And his office as well.”

“Why?”

I give her a blink. “I don’t know. They were into something. They had a real estate business, so maybe…” I say, “Chuck liked to diversify. He liked to get into all kinds of things. Things that were not necessarily…” As best and briefly as I can, I explain the weh-weh and, as I see it, my unwitting role in it.

Rachel can’t quite believe what she hears. She shakes her head and purses her lips and leans on an elbow. “It doesn’t look very good, does it?” she decides to say. “You drive him around while he runs his numbers game? What were you thinking?” She says, “Darling, this man was a gangster. No wonder he ended up the way he did.”

Now on top of everything else I’m anxious as hell and running a hand through my hair, and my wife leans over to take this hand and hold it between hers. “Oh, Hans, you silly goose,” she says. “It’ll be all right.” But she also says that she’s calling a New York attorney first thing tomorrow. (Which she does. The attorney opines that as a practical matter I have nothing to fear and charges us two thousand dollars.)

When I go on with my account, Rachel interrupts me once again. She seems aghast. “You continued to see him? After what happened?”

I recognize the accusation on the tip of her tongue: that I have a temperamental disposition to pardon that simplifies things for me and is certainly a symptom of moral laziness or some other important character weakness. And she’d be right, in general, because I’m a man to whom an apology of almost any kind is acceptable.

“Just hear me out,” I say.

In October—two months after what I’d thought had been my last dealings with Chuck—my electronic diary gave me a week’s notice of the personal day I’d set aside, back in the summer, for a driving test in Peekskill, a town upstate (the farther away from Red Hook the better, I reasoned). I confirmed the date. Why try out for an American driver’s license just before you’re leaving the country? This is Rachel’s question, too, and there’s no answer I can give her.

I traveled in a rented car up the Saw Mill and Taconic parkways. My preparatory examination of the road map had turned up such place-names as Yonkers, Cortlandt, Verplanck, and, of course, Peekskill; and set against these Dutch places, in my mind, were the likes of Mohegan, Chappaqua, Ossining, Mohansic, for as I drove north through thickly wooded hills I superimposed on the landscape regressive images of Netherlanders and Indians, images arising not from mature historical reflection but from a child’s irresponsibly cinematic sense of things, leading me to picture a bonneted girl in an ankle-length dress waiting in a log cabin for Sinterklaas, and redskins pushing through ferns, and little graveyards filled with Dutch names, and wolves and deer and bears in the forest, and skaters on a natural rink, and slaves singing in Dutch. Then out of nowhere came the loud blast of a horn—I’d swerved halfway into the next lane—and this dreaming came to a sudden end as I steered back and gave my attention to tarmac and automobiles and the real-time journey on which I found myself.

My arrival at Peekskill came, as planned, an hour before the appointed time. I familiarized myself with the streets and practiced parking. The town was built on steep hills by the Hudson, and it soon became clear that the principal hazard facing drivers was that of sliding down toward the river—indeed, it was my impression that the fundamental challenge facing the whole community was to resist the immense gravitational force drawing all of its constituents, organic and inorganic, toward the watery abyss that constantly came into view. This struggle appeared to have taken a toll on the townspeople, who hung out in front of unaccountably run-down dwellings and wandered through barren shopping precincts with the lassitude of a population in shock. There seemed to be an abnormal concentration of impoverished black residents and a bizarre absence of the satisfied middle-class whites I associated with outposts of the City, as New York is called by people living in such places, and all in all I was put in mind of a town in East Anglia I’d once visited with my wife: arriving there at night, I was taken aback, in the light of morning, by a scene of exclusively white people, all color and shape drained from their faces, shuffling here and there with an ill-omened, idiotic slowness, so that it seemed to me a species of zombie had established itself in that place. This inexcusable dread did not escape Rachel, who quietly said, after I had passed some comment, “There’s nothing wrong with these people.”

My driving examiner on this occasion was a polite old white guy who asked me in a bizarrely defeated voice if I had foreign driving experience, and I told him that, yes, I had. He beckoned the car forward, made me turn a corner, and asked me to park. I did so clumsily, anxious not to violate the ridiculous rule whereby the slightest contact between tire and curb results in automatic failure.

“Not great,” I suggested.

“Yeah, well,” the old guy said. “I always used to tell my students, take a bogey on the parking. Never screw around with the out-of-bounds.” He directed me back to the starting point, and only after I’d come to a stop did I realize that he was intent on giving me my license.

“Thank you,” I said, a little overcome.

“Drive safely,” he said, and got out of the car.

I was examining my temporary New York license when there was a rap on the window. It was Chuck Ramkissoon.

I watched with astonishment as he opened the door and sat beside me. He removed his India cricket cap—sky blue streaked with the saffron, white, and green tricolor—and paused for effect. “What?” he said. “You think I’d miss my student’s moment of glory?”

Chuck, who’d agreed back in August to supply his car for the test, was not one to forget a date; and a call to my office had told him all he needed to know.

“I took the train,” he said. “You’re going to have to drive me back.”

What was I supposed to do? Throw him out?

“Yes,” Rachel says. “That’s exactly what you should have done.”

Nothing was said as Chuck and I got under way. Then, hard by the river at the outskirts of Peekskill, there appeared two immense semi-spherical roofs escorted by a thin, strikingly tall chimney: from our angle, two mosques and a minaret.