by Helen Dewitt
Of course, this is the European fantasy of an American. When other languages need a word for a go-getter they use the word “go-getter,” which is the quintessential American thing to be.
If you have been insane there are so many things you can’t do.
He was able to write a brief e-mail of thanks and acceptance. He felt that he should say something along the lines of Dear Ralph, This is very exciting, but this he was not able to do.
Based on the two pages he had read, he was not a big fan of 2666.
He went outside and smoked a Marlboro.
He went inside and downstairs and lay down on the white bed.
Ralph too had seized on a phrase, “the next 2666.”
He used the phrase in an impetuous conversation with Cissy, who said, “Oh, I didn’t know you knew Dutch.”
“No no no,” Ralph said hastily, impatiently. “Something tells me I’m on the right track. For God’s sake don’t mention it to anyone who does, it might get back to the Eldridges. I’m just wrapping up reversion of rights, we don’t want them going behind our backs to Meulenhoff and picking up something else on the cheap.”
“Oh, okay,” said Cissy. Maybe there was an article on Words Without Borders or something.
Ralph made a vague soothing affectionate noise about her book and got off the phone and was soon talking to Rachel, who had seen the pages and loved them.
“Oh,” said Rachel, “I loved 2666.”
She did not ask if he knew Dutch or had even actually read 2666 because Ralph, the thing he could do was build castles in the air and get people to buy them. If he could build a castle in the air for Peter Dijkstra the genius would fly on a magic carpet.
“I know he’s protective of his work,” said Ralph. “I understand. And I would never do anything to jeopardize the creative process. The work must come first.”
Rachel made a vague soothing affectionate noise.
He said, “But sometimes there’s a moment when people get swept away, and if you miss it you’re fighting against the fact that it’s somebody else’s moment. I think this is his moment. This may sound crazy, but I think if I could even just get all the notebooks in a room, and let a few select people see them, that would be enough to do a deal. Right now there just isn’t enough. Not in today’s climate. But if they see there’s something substantial actually there, if the quality is there, no, I think that would work. But of course, aaargh, I can’t ask him to send the originals and copies are impossible so the only solution would be to bring him to New York but I know, I know, I know, he’s a very private person, how can you throw someone like that into the media maelstrom?”
All this because Rachel had apprenticed to a master of the vague soothing affectionate noise.
Peter Dijkstra lay on a very white bed with his head on his arm.
This would not do.
The go-getter had e-mailed him several times reiterating that the work must come first. Each iteration came with the rider that if there was anything else he felt able to show, anything at all, they could take advantage of a moment which might not come again.
He leapt suddenly to his feet. He took the notebook from which text had been typed and the file cards from which words had been strung together in the notebook. He placed them in his satchel. He left his room, took the stairs three at a time, strode through the breakfast room and out into the street and around the corner to a shop that sold stationery. He purchased a padded envelope. He placed notebook and file cards in the envelope.
As an afterthought he snatched up a postcard with a photograph of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (“Sisi”) and wrote painstakingly on the back: Dear Ralph, This is how it starts out and it has to stay where it starts out until it is ready to end. Regards, P.D.
He sealed the envelope, addressed it, strode storklike to the post office, paid postage for a method of delivery that was a little faster than normal without being exorbitant, handed over the envelope and strode storklike to the street. His head was not at all good but he was not positively stalking down the street saying out loud “When you say you know the work must come first what exactly do you mean?” That was something.
It was also something that he had not written Erbarmung!!!!!! Erbarmung!!!!!!! on the postcard.
It can’t be a good idea to implore an agent with heartrending appeals to Parsifal.
He lit a Marlboro.
Gil sat on the squashy old sofa, legs akimbo, forearms on thighs. He was wearing a very soft faded bluish t-shirt on which dolphins frolicked around the words DAYTONA BEACH Florida and soft faded frayed cut-offs. Rachel sat at the other end of the sofa; she wore the SUDO MAKE ME A SANDWICH t-shirt and soft faded white cut-offs, also frayed. Both were barefoot.
On a battered oak coffee table in front of the sofa were: 20-odd pages of double-spaced type; a basket of bagels with cream cheese and lox; a cafetière of very black coffee; a carton of half-and-half; a carton of grapefruit juice; a few cans of San Pellegrino with orange; a large bottle of Gerolsteiner. Plates, glasses, mugs, knives. Gil had suggested getting together over a late breakfast because he did not feel comfortable drinking vodka in front of Ralph.
A squashy old armchair, brother to the sofa, awaited Ralph. Meanwhile they were alone.
Ralph was late, late enough for Gil to start to hope he would not come.
“This is probably going to sound really precious,” said Gil. “But I’m not comfortable with this.”
“It’s not precious,” said Rachel. “Nobody is comfortable with Ralph. I mean, I only got into coding in the first place to keep myself sane. I would get off the phone after one of these marathon sessions and just tie myself to Boolean logic like a mast. And now that I have Barbara, she’s so professional and businesslike, she’s like a rock. But maybe. He was in an asylum all those years. If he had a whole book he could take it to Barbara, and it could be all right. But he doesn’t have a book. And anyway there would still be the whole thing of getting people whipped up to a frenzy over a Dutch writer, and the whole point of Barbara is she doesn’t do frenzy. So maybe frenzy is the price he has to pay to stay in this place Cissy found instead of an asylum. I mean, it could just be that way.”
“I guess.”
This was what he had always liked, she could sail effortlessly uncomplicatedly through. But he did not think he could tell lies for Peter Dijkstra, and he did not want to find himself somehow underwriting a book in Dutch he had never read as the next 2666.
The coffee was unreproachfully tepid.
Now that Ralph was living one day at a time he would often spend hours talking some poor desperate soul out of a crisis. You would arrange to meet and find yourself catching up on Dinosaur Comics on your iPhone, checking the time, catching up on A Softer World, checking the time, wondering whether there was anything new (please say yes, God, please) on Perry Bible Fellowship, getting a 503 Service Unavailable!!!!!!!, scouring around online to see whether this was permanent or what?????!!!!!!, noticing the time, only to have Ralph walk belatedly in or text or call to explain that Dale or Jane or Andy was suicidal and he had to be there for them. Not that Gil wanted any extra person to be suicidal, but if someone was suicidal anyway and Ralph had to be there for them rather than here for him it would Be. So. Great.
But no, the buzzer buzzed.
Ralph came eagerly down the long room in a glow of happiness, this Tom Cruise “I am a Thetan!!!!!!” kind of glow which, okay, somehow this was less creepy in the days when you knew he was doing drugs? But okay, okay, okay.
He wore a tan polo shirt with a crocodile on the breast, chinos, and sockless Topsiders, because he had never wanted to be a suit.
He took a padded envelope from his bicycle bag. “Here,” he said, eyes ablaze. “I’m sorry I’m late but when you see you’ll see.” He put it at the midpoint of the squashy sofa and sank into the squashy chair. (It was kind of like
Joseph Smith presiding over the display of a golden tablet from the Book of Mormon.)
Gil did not touch the envelope. Rachel picked it up and removed a notebook and a pack of some 70 file cards. She handed the notebook to Gil and began reading through the grid-ruled file cards, one by one.
Ralph gave them a lot of space to read in silence. It was weird holding in your hands things that had been in the hands of Peter Dijkstra, as if the Van Gogh Museum would let you take a painting off the wall. It was kind of weird holding them with Ralph expectantly watching — but no, Ralph suddenly noticed the cold thing of coffee and said ruefully “I am late, I’ll make fresh” and went off to the kitchen, so fine. Fine.
It’s true. You definitely got the feeling, holding these objects, that they had been in a room with a crazy guy, or rather a guy with the potential to be crazy who was trying to keep madness at bay. The writing was small and precise and clear, this slightly pedantic European handwriting that you would normally never see. Reading a typescript, you would miss this: it was like hearing excellent English spoken with a foreign accent. You saw the effort that had gone into the excellence. Precision, a bulwark. (The word “bulwark” was in fact on one of the cards.) You could see that maybe the visibility of the effort had to stay there for the completion, or even the continuation, of the work.
Ralph came back with fresh coffee.
Rachel put each file card back at the midpoint of the sofa as she finished it.
Ralph did not return to the squashy chair. He poured himself a mug of coffee and wandered tactfully off to browse bookshelves.
An experience you tend not to have at the Van Gogh Museum is of a security guard wandering tactfully off and rummaging through your backpack while you are staring your eyes out at paintings you have only seen in books and calendars and posters.
In some kind of weird activation of peripheral vision Gil not so much saw as sensed Ralph pausing by the 18 inches of shelving dedicated to Peter Dijkstra. Which was a good 13 inches more than were taken up by the stories and the novellas.
Gil had met Rachel in the gift shop of the Van Gogh Museum in the heat of the hype. She had picked up a paperback, Vincent Van Gogh, een leven in brieven.
He had seen her across a room but kept his distance. If you have never been to Amsterdam before and maybe never will be again you don’t want to smear the paintings with a lot of boy-meets-girl stuff. There were paintings on the walls that had been in a room with a crazy guy, a guy who never sold any paintings; you want to be alone with the craziness. He walked from room to room, seeing her across each room, keeping his distance.
The gift shop did seem like this space designed to ease the transition to the world of men.
She saw him and held up the book and smiled. (They had been so many places at the same time, it was like running into someone at the mall who was in five of your classes.) He asked if she knew Dutch. She said, “No, but maybe it’s better that way. It’s as if there were special words for colors that nobody else had ever used. Koningsblauw — I don’t even know how you say it, but maybe I just want to know it exists.” She showed him a page on which he saw the word Sterrennacht.
They did not agree to leave together but they left together. As they passed a bookshop Gil said “Wait!” and ran in and bought five books by Peter Dijkstra that had not been translated, because he might never be in Amsterdam again and he had to have them. If he had not met her it would never have occurred to him to buy books he could not read and probably never would and yet had to have.
Neither of them was stupid enough to tell anyone, even close friends, because you never know who will say something to someone and then it is out in the world, something that meant something all cartoonified and fatuous. But he looked at the pages of the notebook and thought of the Van Gogh Museum and keeping his distance and running into the bookstore.
He did not want to share this with Ralph and he also did not want Ralph to leap to conclusions re his apparent immersion in the oeuvre and suddenly it seemed it had to be one or the other.
Gil finished the notebook before Rachel finished the file cards. He put it at the midpoint of the sofa and picked up the file cards she had finished and when she had finished the file cards she picked up the notebook and when they had both finished they put the things in their hands back at the midpoint of the sofa.
Ralph returned to the squashy chair. “You see,” he said simply. “You see.” He said he had e-mailed Peter and asked how many more notebooks there were and there were about 50. (It was weird hearing him called “Peter.”)
He talked again about the moment and what he could do if Peter Dijkstra and his notebooks were brought to New York.
If Ralph had not been there they would have gone on passing the notebook and file cards back and forth in silent wonder. Or maybe one would have said, “Look at this,” and the other would have said, “Look at this.”
Ralph went on being there.
Instead of “Look at this” they got stuff like, the longer there was no actual deal, no major player with an option on the backlist, the greater the danger that someone would snap up the next 2666 for peanuts.
Gil stood up. He padded down the room to a shoe rack from which he took a pair of socks and a pair of Timberland boots which he slipped on before opening the door. Turning.
He said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t — This is too important for me. It would mean a lot to see the other notebooks, if he was willing to show them. If you think it would help, I can pay his airfare to New York and he can stay in the loft and you can show people the notebooks in the loft if that helps and I will move in with Rachel until it’s over. But I can’t do this other stuff and I can’t talk about this anymore.”
He closed the door behind him.
“Oh God,” said Ralph, “I didn’t mean —”
Rachel made a vague soothing affectionate noise.
Striding barelegged and booted down Vestry Street, down Hudson, Gil had this sudden paranoid image of the 50 notebooks, these Van Goghy things, these things it would be transcendent to sit quietly down with, on a big table in his loft with the five Dutch books placed inconspicuously by as if to imply without Gil even saying a word that he had read them in the original Dutch (such being his fanatical devotion to the genius) and could vouch for King Kong being the next 2666. This or that editor being ushered in and not even having the books pointed out by Ralph because they’d just quietly accidentally be there. But this was totally paranoid, right? Right? Because nobody would do something that icky, would they? Would they? Or should he take them to Rachel’s to be on the safe side? Or would giving in to paranoia make it worse? Or —
The Timberlands had propelled him east on Worth. They crossed West Broadway, turned south. He was just thinking that maybe he would do something totally normal such as go to Edward’s for a hamburger and fries, Edward’s being a block away, when he saw, sitting dreamily outside at Edward’s, Miss Total Weirdness. He sidestepped into the nearest doorway. Which turned out to be that (the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want) of a bar. It was maybe not totally normal to have a double vodka at 12:02, but fuck it.
One of the very few benefits of fame was that the bartender recognized him, so it did not matter that he had come out without any money.
Peter Dijkstra had recently discovered a nice fact. There is a German word, getigert, for a cat with striped fur. This immediately transforms one’s view of the animal. (This small domestic tiger.) This had led to other nice facts: the verb, tigern, means an activity which corresponds to the English words mooch, loiter (this on the authority of pons.eu), the French word flâner, all surely with radically different connotations from the Dutch word lanterfanten. A lord of the jungle, off the prowl, proceeding as chance takes him velvet-pawed through his domain, twitching his lordly tail — this is quite different, clearly, from, well, lanterfanten is also the word which goes into the English for fiddle w
hile Rome burns. And a flâneur, this is Baudelaire, this is an inhabitant of Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk, the Arcades Project. Jeepers!
He wrote getigert!!!!! on one file card and tigern, mooch, loiter, flâner, lanterfanten, and lummelen on another. At the bottom of the second file card he wrote Sp? It? And, presently: bighellonare?
Gil ordered a second Potocki and took it to a booth. (He loved booths. But who doesn’t love booths?)
The notebooks had, maybe discomfort isn’t something you can crystallize, but he felt really uncomfortable.
When he had read Rachel’s first book it was not exactly whether it was good or bad, but he wanted to feel he knew the most important thing about her, that every single detail was something she had picked out of the world. But the genius could not be in the details because the details were exactly what Ralph prided himself on attention to. So any detail could always have displaced some other detail, which was the detail Rachel had chosen before the detail attracted attention. How could someone just casually displace that? This was a guy who would pay $100 to have a crocodile on a polo shirt. To say that it wasn’t even that he liked crocodiles would be to miss the point, there was no way he would wear any shirt with a crocodile motif even if he did like crocodiles, or any shirt with any motif, unless it was an emblem you had to pay $100 to have on a shirt.
This had been, maybe “inchoate” is the word. For the unease. (Which was now, what, choate? Really?) He had thought he loved Peter Dijkstra’s work when he read the novellas and the stories, but when he saw the notebook and the file cards there was this sudden jolt, because this was English that Peter Dijkstra had actually picked and it was different from the English people had picked to share Peter Dijkstra with English readers.
