Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  “So what did you talk about?”

  “Cricket things,” I say.

  Rachel says, “What about us? Did you talk about us?”

  “Once or twice,” I say. “But not really, no.”

  “That’s just weird,” Rachel says.

  “No, it isn’t,” I say. I’m tempted to point out that our dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessmen. My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but it’s the same quality that enables me to thrive at work, where so many of the brisk, tough, successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs about their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgmental offspring, and are, in sum, desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy. This chronic and, I think, peculiarly male strain of humiliation explains the slight affection that bonds so many of us, but such affection depends on a certain reserve. Chuck observed the code, and so did I; neither pressed the other on delicate subjects.

  I refrained, in particular, from asking him about the one category of telephone communications I didn’t understand, incoming calls arriving on a separate phone (Chuck carried a mysterious second) and eliciting the tersest of responses from Chuck; calls which I soon had reason to connect to unexplained stops we made in the nether regions of Brooklyn.

  Because from the beginning he ran so-called errands. Thus, without explanation, Chuck directed me, his driver, to addresses in Midwood and East Flatbush and Little Pakistan in Kensington, a couple of times taking us even as far as Brighton Beach. What happened, when we arrived, was always the same. “Pull over right here,” Chuck would say. He’d trot into a building and come back out within five minutes. “Drive on,” he’d say, slamming the passenger door. And then he’d start talking again.

  It wasn’t until late July that he decided to give me a clue about what was going on.

  He took a call on his mystery phone; said, “OK, understood” and then turned to me. “Chinatown.”

  “Chinatown?”

  “Brooklyn Chinatown,” he said, very pleased to have confused me.

  I wasn’t aware of any Chinese quarter in Brooklyn. But it existed, I discovered, in a neighborhood where you might look up and see, beyond rooftops dipped westward, the Verrazano Bridge. We stopped in front of a grimly ordinary Chinese restaurant. “Some early lunch?” Chuck said.

  We took a seat at the window of the restaurant’s miserable room. There were no other customers. A busboy was sweeping last night’s noodles into a pan.

  “My father would never have been comfortable in a spot like this,” Chuck observed.

  “Oh?” There was no sign of a waiter.

  “He never went into a café except to do business, and he never did business unless there was a getaway. Look.” Chuck pointed over my shoulder. “No rear exit. Somebody comes in through the front door, you’re trapped.”

  I wondered what he was talking about.

  “That would have been my father’s first thought: How do I get out of here?”

  Before I could respond, two men, Chinese or perhaps Korean, entered the restaurant. Chuck approached them and shook their hands, and the three men sat down at the back of the restaurant, outside my earshot. They spoke for a minute or so in a friendly way, with much grinning. Chuck wrote something on a slip of paper, tore the slip into two stubs, and presented a stub to the men. One of them passed him a packed envelope.

  “Well?” I said to Chuck in the car. We’d skipped lunch. “What was that all about?”

  “I was taking an order for food,” he said preposterously. “What else would I be doing?”

  “Chinese restaurants order sushi now?”

  “Fish,” Chuck said. “Everybody needs fish. Now drive on.”

  In my flatfooted way, I have since figured it all out. By bringing me into the restaurant, by telling me about his father and making me view his transaction with the Chinese/Koreans and spinning me a yarn, Chuck was putting me on notice. On notice of what? Of the fact that something fishy was afoot. That I had the option of discontinuing our association. He guessed I wouldn’t. He guessed I’d continue to see him as I wanted to see him, that I’d offer him the winking eye you might offer your ham-handed conjurer uncle.

  Rachel, whom I sometimes suspect of having mind-reading powers, is of course onto this. “You never really wanted to know him,” she remarks, still crunching on her celery. “You were just happy to play with him. Same thing with America. You’re like a child. You don’t look beneath the surface.”

  My reaction to her remark is to think, Look beneath Chuck’s surface? For what?

  In a spirit of legalistic fairness, Rachel continues, “Although I suppose in Chuck’s case you’d say, how could you be expected to know him? You were two completely different people from different backgrounds. You had nothing important in common.”

  Before I can take issue with this, she points a celery stick at me and says, more amused than anything, “Basically, you didn’t take him seriously.”

  She has accused me of exoticizing Chuck Ramkissoon, of giving him a pass, of failing to grant him a respectful measure of distrust, of perpetrating a white man’s infantilizing elevation of a black man.

  “That’s just wrong,” I say, vehement. “He was a good friend. We had a lot in common. I took him very seriously.”

  With no trace of harshness, she laughs. Suddenly she looks up: she thinks she has heard a cry coming from upstairs, and she stops chewing and listens. And there is Jake’s cry again—“Water, please!”—and off she goes. At the foot of the stairs, though, she turns to take a parting shot. “You know why you two got on so well? Pedestal.”

  I have to smile at this, because it’s a Juliet Schwarz joke. Dr. Schwarz is our marriage counselor. Rachel and I saw her once a week for the first year of our reunion and still see her once a month at her office in Belsize Park, even though I happily find myself at an ever-growing loss as to what to talk about. Dr. Schwarz is a great believer in the idea of couples as mutual esteemers above all else. “This is your husband!” she once shouted to Rachel. “Pedestal!” she shouted, raising a horizontal arm. “Pedestal!”

  At first, Rachel did not take to this kind of advice. She called Juliet Schwarz old-fashioned and bossy and biased in my favor. She questioned her doctorate. But evidently she listened to her, because one day I came home to find a sizable block of limestone in the hallway.

  “What’s this?”

  “A plinth,” Rachel said.

  “A plinth?”

  “It’s for you.”

  “You bought me a plinth?”

  “Pedestal!” Rachel roared. “Pedestal!”

  To revert: it’s true that I did not make inquiries into the deeper goings-on of Chuck Ramkissoon. It’s also true that Chuck was a friend, not an anthropological curiosity.

  In any case, there was no need for me to conduct inquiries. Chuck was only too happy to make disclosures about himself.

  He decided, for example, to let me in on his little racket.

  I was rolling the outfield one hot Sunday morning when a man approached. He was an ordinary fellow in his forties, black, in sneakers and a T-shirt, and he stood around looking ill at ease. I dismounted the roller and went to him.

  “Chuck there?” he said.

  I took him to the hangar where Chuck was taking photographs and measurements. We couldn’t see him and were about to step out when his voice called from somewhere, “Nelson!”

  They shook hands. Chuck said, “I got it right here, boy,” and from a buttock pocket he extracted a wad of bills. I watched him count off a bunch and hand them to Nelson with a great smile. Nelson was smiling, too. Chuck walked him to his car. There was a brief chat, and then the car pulled quickly away.

  “Well, he seems pretty happy,” I said.

  “He should be,” Chuck said.

  Tony wasn’t around. It was just Chuck and me on that field. We climbed
onto the roller, an ancient, peeling piece of equipment that moved on two drums filled with water. Chuck took the seat and I stood next to him on a small metal platform. The engine roared and we began to crawl toward the container shed.

  Chuck shouted, “You a gambling man, Hans?” When I shook my head, he said, “Not even scratchies?”

  “Maybe once or twice,” I said. I remembered rubbing a coin on a grid of silver boxes, hoping for the same dollar number to reveal itself three times in the gashes in the silver. It hadn’t, and I hadn’t cared; but the business had been sufficiently gripping to provide a clue as to why the hard-up half of New York was addicted to the experience—this being the impression I gained practically every time I had reason to step into a deli.

  Presently the roller eased into the shed. We started chaining it up. Chuck said, “How about weh-weh? You ever heard of that?” Chuck and I sat down on the two chairs he kept handy. We each opened a soda and drank thirstily. “It’s an old Trinidad game,” Chuck said. The weh-weh man, also known as the banker, he explained, wrote down a number from one to thirty-six on a piece of paper, folded the paper, and deposited it at an accessible location—a shop, say, or a bar, or a street corner. “My father was a weh-weh man,” Chuck said. “He liked to pick a spot by the river. It used to be popular, that river. Maybe it still is. People would go up there to the basins where you could dive, places full of millions fish. You went up there, you cooked by the river. There was catfish, crayfish in the water, but people hardly fished. You went there to lime. One time,” Chuck digressed, “my brother Roop went off and stole a duck late, late at night. We took the duck to the river, slaughtered it, cut its head off. I remember Roop holding it up by the foot and letting the blood run off. Then we plucked it and cooked it. A white duck,” Chuck recalled. “Nobody can lay claim to a white duck.”

  Once the winning number, or mark, was chosen, Chuck resumed, the runners would go out and collect the bets—which in those days might range from fifty cents to fifty TT dollars. At a fixed hour, the banker revealed, or “burst,” the mark. “Remember that guy with me at the restaurant in Manhattan? You were with the food critic.”

  “McGarrell,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Chuck said. “You remember his name. Anyhow, that’s how I know McGarrell. He came running down to our house to place a bet for his father. Everybody played weh-weh, even though it was illegal. I’m talking about the countryside here, miles away from Port-of-Spain or any other big town. Even my father played sometimes. Listen to this: one afternoon, it was raining heavily and we were all at home, sitting on the gallery. A one-eyed frog comes out of the rain, hopping up the step of the gallery. My father jumped.” Chuck leaped sideways, pointing at the ground. “‘Look that the frog! This is a mark for the weh-weh, boy.’ He put his hand in pocket and gave me seventy-five cents. ‘Put all this on crapaud,’ he said. And of course crapaud won.”

  You chose your numbers, Chuck told me, according to what you saw around you or, especially, what you saw in your dreams. There was an art to remembering your dreams, and some people were fanatical about it. “They wake up in the middle of the night and write it down, quick, before it’s gone.” If you saw a priest or a pundit, you played parson man, number 5; or if you saw a knife or a cutlass or broken glass, anything that cut, you played centipede, number 1. “Men would lie down just to dream for weh-weh,” Chuck Ramkissoon said. “More you sleep, more you dream, my father used to say.”

  Where was he going with this?

  Chuck said, “After my brother died, I helped out my father a lot. I was his right-hand man. He worked in the fields, you know. The weh-weh was a sideshow. But it was where most of the money came from. People trusted him. They liked him. I learned a lot just watching him talk to them, handle them. Deo Ramkissoon.”

  Chuck stood up and searched around for something. He said, “When I first began to save some money, I began to ask myself, What if I could set up a little weh-weh game here? People like to play, it reminds them of the old country. So I did. Small bets, very small bets, just for fun. I made it fun,” Chuck said. He told me that he devised an elaborate sign system tailored just for Brooklyn, with numbers corresponding to sights and scenes that daily surrounded the gamblers: a Haitian, cops making an arrest, a street fair, a game of cricket or baseball, an airplane, a graveyard, a drug dealer, a synagogue, “every kind of thing you see around here. People came to me with their dreams and I translated the dreams into numbers. People love that kind of thing. After a while,” Chuck said, “I figured out I could afford to take bigger bets. But I didn’t want to get into trouble. I stopped the small-time game and restricted myself to more serious customers. A boutique lottery, I call it. Very discreet, very select.” He wiped his hands clean of all dirt. “It isn’t just Trinis playing anymore. I get Jamaicans, Chinese. A lot of Chinese. When Abelsky joined me, the Jews became involved. They play five, ten, twenty thousand. Big bucks. It’s me they trust, not Abelsky,” Chuck said. “It’s my game. I’m the banker. I burst the mark.”

  “Why would people want to play?” I said. It felt strange asking him this question, since there were plenty of other things that needed saying. “Why not just play the regular lottery? Or go to Atlantic City?”

  “I give better odds,” Chuck said. He pulled out an old cricket bat and leaned it against his chair. “I provide a door-to-door service. It makes it more special. You know, people are desperate for something special.”

  I understood, now, the point of my driving lessons. It gave Chuck a measure of cover, maybe even prestige, to have a respectable-looking white man chauffeuring him while he ran around collecting bets all over Brooklyn. Apparently it had not bothered him that he was putting me at risk of arrest and imprisonment.

  “Door-to-door service,” I said. “Nice going, Chuck. You really had me there.”

  He laughed. “Come on, you were never in any danger of anything.” He bent down with a groan and picked up a box of old cricket balls.

  We walked together to the field’s center. This was how we ended each of our sessions of groundsmanship: by whacking a dozen balls to the edge of the field and studying the consistency of each sector of the field. We were making progress. The outfield was getting quicker and truer. In accordance with our routine, I took the bat and with one-handed underarm strokes scattered the balls in every direction. We circled the field together, picking up the balls dotted around the field like markers of hours. Neither of us spoke then, or ever again, about his lottery.

  Afterward, as was usual, Chuck drove me to wherever it was I was playing that day—Baisley Pond Park, perhaps, or Fort Tilden Park, or Kissena Corridor Park, or Sound View Park. Our field and those fields were in one continuum of heat and greenness.

  I strained the summer through a strainer that allowed only the collection of cricket. Everything else ran away. I cut back on my trips to England, inventing excuses that were easily accepted by Rachel. Whenever possible I took my lunch in Bryant Park, because in Bryant Park I could lie down on grass and inhale the scent of cricket, and look up at the sky and see a cricketer’s blue sky, and close my eyes and feel on my skin the heat that coats a fielder. Not once did I think about the park as the place, say, where my wife and I watched an open-air screening of North by Northwest with a cashmere blanket spread out beneath us, and the tiny baby asleep on the blanket, and wine, and food bought on the hoof at a Fifth Avenue deli, penned in by summer foliage and fine heaps of man-made lights and, as darkness fell and Cary Grant wandered into the Plaza, only the boldest and most select stars.

  Work, too, went down the drain. I remember one weighty evening in El Paso. My hosts had gone to a lot of trouble. Nobody expressly said so, but a big brokerage deal was on the line. When the client asked me to stay for an extra day, I almost laughed. The next day was a Saturday. There was a cricket field to be tended in the morning and a cricket match to be played in the afternoon.

  Nobody understands better than I that this was a strange and irrespon
sible direction in which to take one’s life. But I’m reporting what happened.

  That season, 2003, I invariably played both days of the weekend—played in more matches, it may be, than anyone else at my club. My status grew with my visibility. I was offered, and I accepted, a position on the club’s fund-raising committee and immediately raised a record-shattering five thousand dollars by writing a check I pretended to have squeezed out of some crazy Indian guys at work. There were Indian guys at work but they weren’t crazy, and even if they had been crazy I wouldn’t have involved them in this part of my life, whose separateness was part of its preciousness. I became so embedded in the proceedings of the club, so transparently upstanding and unavoidable a presence, that by the end of the summer I had come under consideration—so I was told—for the position of suitor to one of the Guyanese member’s nieces. “Why not?” my informant said. “We know you.” He was kidding, yes, but also paying me a compliment.

  Of course, he didn’t know me, just as I didn’t know him. It was rare for club members to have dealings that went beyond the game we played. We didn’t want to have any such dealings. When I accidentally ran into one of the guys working a till at a gas station on Fourteenth Street, there was awkwardness beneath the slapping of hands.

  Beneath that, though, one might find kindness. One day our leg-spinner, Shiv, turned up drunk for a match. In a colloquy with the captain he revealed that his wife of ten years had left him for another man. We made sure that someone was with him in his empty house that night and all the nights until the following Saturday. That Wednesday I left work and rode a PATH train to Jersey City and from there rode a money-up-front taxi to Shiv’s house. Another guy from the club was already on the spot, cooking up a curry. The three of us ate together. When the cook went home to his family, I stayed on with Shiv. We watched television.