Netherland. Joseph O’Neill

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ