Netherland (17 page)

It made me uneasy, this kind of talk, and I was capable of experiencing a Samaritan urge to save him. It was a fleeting urge. I had troubles of my own, and Chuck’s companionship functioned as an asylum. And if it happened one night, this taking of his shelter, it happened the night of the 2003 Annual Gala of the Association of New York Cricket Leagues, held at the Elegant Antun’s, Spring-field Boulevard, Queens.

I found myself, that Friday night in late May, traveling with a clueless but cooperative Kyrgyz limousine driver. On the Long Island Expressway I guided him past the red neon signs of Lefrak City and a certain Eden Hotel, past Utopia Parkway, and then, following instructions I’d been given, down the turnoff at exit 27. There we instantly became confused by a succession of signposts placed in accordance with a bizarre New York convention that struck me again and again, namely, that all directions to motorists should be so located and termed as to disorient everyone except the traveler who already knows his way. Propelled into a Nassau County nowhere, we made our way back to Queens and finally ran into Hillside Avenue, from where the route was more or less clear. I was dropped off in front of a freestanding houselike structure. Its edges, arranged in a confusion of gables and recessed façades, were outlined by strings of fairy lights, and its walls were coated with a pale substance that looked like icing Hansel’s dipping finger might scoop. It was ten o’clock. I stepped past two long-coated bouncers and entered the Elegant Antun’s.

A group of teenagers came laughing out of double doors straight ahead and for an instant I peeped at a whirling bride. My own function was on the floor above. Ahead of me on the staircase walked an immense fellow in cream shoes, a cream suit, and a cream bowler hat. He was accompanied by a pair of six-foot women in vivid long sparkling dresses and tall heels. The women’s bared shoulders were broad and powerful and the laces crossing their backs were pulled tight by very black muscles that shifted with each climbing step. “These Jamaican women,” someone would later confide to me, “they look like they just run over from Belmont.”

It was, as they say, a big night. A table had been set aside for the umpiring fraternity, which had arrived in white dinner jackets and sat together like a conclave of ship’s stewards. A Brooklyn assemblywoman was present, as were representatives of the parks department and, we were assured, the Mayor’s Office—this last mentioned an individual with a developing mustache who seemed barely out of his teens and, I heard, was later seen throwing up in the men’s room. Air Jamaica was in attendance, and Red Stripe, and other supportive corporations. But mostly the diners were cricket men and their women—players and officers of the American Cricket League, the Bangladeshi Cricket League, the Brooklyn Cricket League, the Commonwealth Cricket League, the Eastern America Cricket Association, and the Nassau New York Cricket League; of the New York Cricket League, the STAR Cricket League, the New Jersey Cricket League, the Garden State Cricket League, and the Washington Cricket League; of the Connecticut Cricket League and the Massachusetts State Cricket League; of my very own New York Metropolitan and District Cricket Association; and, by particular invitation, Mr. Chuck Ramkissoon, whose guest I was.

I made my entry just in time to hear a voice announce, “Please stand for the national hymn,” and every person rose for a recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Immediately afterward the master of ceremonies solemnly proposed a prayer for “our troops abroad, who are tonight putting their lives at risk for our freedom,” and people were silent for a few seconds before sitting down for dinner.

I remained standing, however, unable to find my table. Then, out of a corner, I saw Chuck’s waving arm.

I joined my party just as a waitress with a badge stating
ASK ME ABOUT NEW YEAR’S EVE
took orders for chicken or baked salmon and, depending on the answer, placed a red or blue gambling chip next to the orderer’s plate. Chuck, in black tie, introduced me—“Hans van den Broek, of M——Bank”—to a smiling Indian businessman named Prashanth Ramachandran, and to Dr. Flavian Seem, a retired Sri Lankan pathologist who was, Chuck informed me as we ordered cocktails at the open bar, the manager of the angel fund backing his venture. There were two Guyanese brothers (importers of burnt sugar, almond essence, sorrel syrup, and, they were very pleased to tell me, baby Edam cheese) and their wives, but the most arresting presence at our table was an elegant young woman in a silver frock who, if I am not mistaken, was named Avalon. She had come with Chuck and, despite being five inches taller than him and at least twenty years younger, she communicated an unaccountable pleasure in his and his guests’ company. The penny only dropped when Chuck explained that Avalon was, as he put it, “the top girl at Mahogany Classic Escorts. You ever use them?”

“I might start,” I said.

“You should,” Chuck said. “These are girls with refinement, from the islands. College graduates, nurses. Not your American rubbish.”

By this point it was midnight, and we were sitting half drunk at our table watching Avalon dancing with an ecstatically immobile Dr. Seem. The dance floor was crowded. Everybody had been liberated from an hour of presentations during which colossal trophies mounted with golden batting and bowling cricketers and forming a divine throng on the high table were gradually dispersed to the centurions and hat-trickers and champions and other winners seated at the lower tables, so that wherever one looked, as one digested chicken or salmon, golden little chaps brazenly swiped at invisible balls or precariously tiptoed on one foot as they toppled into the act of bowling. The more I drank, the more entranced I became by the parallel world of these figurines, whose shimmering devotion to their cricketing business grew more poignant by the minute. I must have made a forlorn impression, because a stranger who claimed to recognize me kindly sat down next to me and, having ascertained that I’d lived in London, reminisced at length about his years in Tooting.

Avalon was now dancing with Chuck. Dr. Seem, sitting next to me, said, “Are you a scientist?”

He appeared satisfied when I told him I wasn’t. “I have devoted my life to scientific study,” he told me. He was slender and fine-fingered like so many Sri Lankans, and he delicately spread open a hand on the tablecloth. “I’m trained to see things as they are. To understand the biological realities. When I look at this, I see the biological reality.”

“Which is what?” I asked, reflecting that I was possibly the only person contained by the apparent world who was unable to see through it.

“Deception,” Seem said. “Deception dictated by nature. Our dancing ladyfriend, for example,” Seem said, referring to Avalon. “False!” he madly cried. “False!”

He stood up and went to get himself another drink. I gazed at the dancers and recalled Rachel’s complaint that I never danced. That was long ago. We had returned from some party. Jake, maybe six months old, was sleeping in his cot next to our bed.

“I’m not the dancing kind,” I said. “You’ve always known that.”

“You danced at our wedding,” she answered immediately. “You were fine. You did that little shuffle thing with your feet.”

She looked stricken; and I suppose, since I am now fully aware, thanks to our figuratively speaking marriage counselor, that the steamboat of marriage must be fed incessantly with the coals of communication, that I should have explained to my wife that I came from Holland, where I rarely saw dancing, and indeed that I’d been a little amazed to see how young Englishmen threw themselves around to music, dancing even with other men, and that this abandon was alien to me and that, perhaps, she might for this reason wish to bear with me. But I said nothing, thinking the matter inconsequential. It would certainly have astonished me to learn that years later I would look back on this episode and ask myself, as I did at the Elegant Antun’s, if it represented a so-called fork in the road—which in turn led me to drunkenly wonder if the course of a relationship of love was truly explicable in terms of right turns and wrong turns, and if so whether it was possible to backtrack to that split where it all went wrong, or if in fact it was the case that we are all doomed to walk in a forest in which all paths lead one equally astray, there being no end to the forest, an inquiry whose very uselessness led to another spasm of wayward contemplation that ended only when I noticed Chuck leading a hobbled Dr. Seem back into the chair next to mine.

“Hamstring,” Dr. Seem said. He flexed his leg, then sadly put it down. “For ten years this is giving me a problem. Ten years.”

“A bad situation,” Chuck said.

Seem gave a hand a bitter twirl. “My dancing days are finished now.”

“Nonsense,” Chuck said. “You sit down, take a little rest, maybe a little drink, and watch, in five minutes you’ll be up on your feet.” Chuck gave me a severe look. “Hans—your turn. Look at Avalon. She’s tired of old men. Go.”

I responded automatically—biologically, Dr. Seem might say. I danced with Avalon.

That is, I clumsily moved around in her vicinity, glimpsing in the grins of those nearby the encouragement usually reserved for children. I was the only white person present, and reinforcing a stereotype. Avalon herself politely smiled and laughed and gave no sign of noticing my lumbersomeness, and then, out of pity or professionalism, she turned her back to me and lightly gyrated her ass against my thighs in rhythm with the rapid jingling soca that now replaced the American pop, the DJ shouting, “All you wine! Wine that boom-boom!” and all the middle-aged women started to back their handsome asses into their middle-aged men with an air of great seriousness, as if an especially grave phase of the evening had been entered. Maybe it had. A rapt Chuck quickly walked onto the dance floor, his black face blackened still further by pursed black lips and half-sealed black eyelids. He approached without hesitation a woman in her fifties, and instantly they began to shimmy in tandem next to me and Avalon. The soca tinkled and blared. Solidarity with my small round Trinidadian counterpart surged through me. Emboldened, I gave in to the situation and its happiness—gave in to the song, to the rums and the Coca-Colas, to Avalon’s smooth skillful butt, to the hilarity of remarks made by Dr. Flavian Seem and Prashanth Ramachandran, to the suggestion that we go on, after the gala, to some further place; and to the crush of hips and legs in Chuck’s stretch limo; and to the idea that we swing by, since we’re all dressed up, the all-fours club down on Utica on the far side of Great Eastern Parkway, where the speechless all-fours players have been playing all day and signal to partners by picking their ears and rubbing their noses, their women hanging around drinking and eating and very ready to go home; and to persuading some characters from the all-fours club to come out and fête with us at the limo driver’s place down on Remsen and Avenue A; and to stopping on the way there at Ali’s Roti Shop for roti and doubles and stopping at Thrifty Beverages to load up with beer and four bottles of rum and, because there is no limit to our hunger, stopping also at Kahauné Restaurant and Bakery to order a delivery of tripe and beans, patties, and curry goat; and to the invitation, once inside the home of the limo driver, who is named Proverbs, to join in a card game called wapi, and to losing nearly two hundred dollars playing wapi; and to the truth of the remarks “Boy, it have a good wapi there tonight” and “Mankind does be serious about the wapi game, boy” and to an ephemeral mouth belonging to a girl with a diploma in lifesaving; and to six laughing pairs of hands that picked up my wrecked body and dropped it on a couch; and to water splashed on my face at six in the morning; and finally to the proposition, made by Chuck as we walked behind a gang of boisterous Hasidic boys in the first warmth of the weekend, that we sweat it all off at a
banya
just a few blocks from his house.

“Half an hour in the sauna,” Chuck argued, “and you’ll be like a new man.”

A yellow cab came freakishly into view.

The Russian baths were in a blockish cement building next door to a gas station on Coney Island Avenue. To get to the locker room you walked through a large open area with two pools—one a Jacuzzi trembling with warm currents, the other a cold pool into which an attendant was dumping ice. Structural columns were decorated with oval plaster moldings of Hellenic figures, and on the largest wall was a mural in which Greek maidens of antiquity struck beautiful poses by an immense waterfall that poured into a green valley. None of this, so far as I could see, bore any relation to the customers of the spa, a handful of pale-skinned men who sat in apparent exhaustion on plastic chairs.

We emerged from the locker room with rented towels tied around our waists. “Where shall we go?” Chuck said. There were Russian, Turkish, and American options. Chuck showed me the Turkish bath first. Save for an ill-looking man who sat by a bucket of water, it was empty. Next was the Russian sauna, where one man was slapping another with a bouquet of oak leaves. “It’s still early,” Chuck said.

The American steam room was the place to be. At least six others were present. They wore conelike hats and poured water into the ovens in defiance of a sign specifically forbidding this. I sat down next to a fellow in soaked underpants.

The heat was extreme. I sweated heavily and without pleasure. I was about to suggest to Chuck that we leave when an unusual-looking man came in. He was fat, and yet great folds of excess skin wilted from his stomach and back and limbs. He looked unstuffed, an abandoned work of taxidermy.

Chuck said, “Mikhail! Come, sit down.”

Mike Abelsky joined us with a great sigh. He said to me, in a strong accent that was part Brooklyn and part Moldova, “You’re the Dutch guy. I heard about you. You,” he said, pointing at Chuck, “I wanna talk to.”

“We’re taking a bath,” Chuck said. “Relax.”

“Relax? I got my wife’s relatives living at my house and you want me to relax?” Abelsky placed a cone on his head. “I don’t wanna sleep in other people’s houses and I don’t want other people to sleep in my house. I wanna walk around in my house in my underpants. Now I gotta wear pajamas: I don’t wanna wear pajamas. I don’t wanna put on the T-shirt. When I go to the bathroom, I wanna sit with my newspaper. What do I get? Somebody banging on the door, ‘I wanna shower.’ What the fuck do they wanna take a shower for? Let them take a shower in their house!” Abelsky looked at me without interest. “I only understand one relative in the world,” he stated. “It’s the parents. The rest, they’re only interested in using you.”