Netherland. Joseph O’Neill
about the traffic of people in the lobby, and I also took comfort from the men at the front desk, who out of pity invited me behind the counter to watch sports on their television and asked if I wanted to join their football pool. I did join, though I knew nothing about American football. ‘You did real good yesterday,’ Jesus, the bellman, would announce. ‘I did?’ ‘Sure,’ Jesus said, bringing out his chart. ‘The Broncos won, right? And the Giants. That’s two winners you got right there. OK,’ he said, frowning as he concentrated, ‘now you lost with the Packers. And the Bills. And I guess the 49ers.’ He tapped a pencil against the chart as he considered the problem of my picks. ‘So I’m still not ahead?’ ‘Right now, no,’ Jesus admitted. ‘But the season’s not over yet. You could still turn it around, easy. You hang in there, you get hot next week? Shit, anything could happen.’
Not counting the lobby, the Chelsea Hotel had ten floors. Each was served by a dim hallway that ran from an airshaft on one side to, on my floor, a door with a yellowing pane of frosted glass that suggested the ulterior presence of a private detective rather than, as was actually the case, a fire escape. The floors were linked by a baronial staircase, which by virtue of the deep rectangular void at its centre had the effect of installing a precipice at the heart of the building. On all the walls was displayed the vaguely alarming artwork of tenants past and present. The finest and most valuable examples were reserved for the lobby: I shall never forget the pink, plump girl on a swing who hovered above the reception area gladly awaiting a push towards West 23rd Street. Occasionally one overheard by-the-night visitors – transients, as the management called them – commenting on how spooky they found it all, and there was a story that the hotel dead were secretly removed from their rooms in the middle of the night. But for me, returning from the office or from quick trips to Omaha, Oklahoma City, Cincinnati – Timbuktus, from my New Yorker’s vantage point – there was nothing eerie about the building or the community that was established in it. Over half the rooms were occupied by long-term residents who by their furtiveness and ornamental diversity reminded me of the population of the aquarium I’d kept as a child, a murky tank in which cheap fish hesitated in weeds and an artificial starfish made a firmament of the gravel. That said, there was a correspondence between the looming and shadowy hotel folk and the phantasmagoric and newly indistinct world beyond the Chelsea’s heavy glass doors, as if the one promised to explain the other. On my floor there lived an octogenarian person of indeterminate gender – it took a month of surreptitious scrutiny before I’d satisfied myself she was a woman – who told me, by way of warning and reassurance, that she carried a gun and would kick the ass of anybody who made trouble on our floor. There was also an old and very sick black gentleman (now dead), apparently a legendary maker of prints and lithographs. There was a family with three young boys who ran wild in the hallways with tricycles and balls and trains. There was an unexplained Finn. There was a pit bull that never went out without a panting, menacing furniture dealer in tow. There was a Croatian woman, said to be a famous nightlife personality, and there was a revered playwright and librettist, whom it almost interested that I knew a little Greek and who introduced me to Arthur Miller in the elevator. There was a girl with gothic make-up who babysat and walked dogs. All of them were friendly to me, the crank in the suit and tie; but during the whole time I lived at the hotel, I had only one neighbourly visitor.
One February night, somebody knocked on my door. When I opened it, I found myself looking at a man dressed as an angel. A pair of tattered white wings, maybe two feet long and attached to some kind of girdle, rose behind his head. He wore an ankle-length wedding dress with a pearl-adorned bodice, and white slippers with dirty bows. Mottled foundation powder, applied over his whole face, failed to obscure the stubble around his mouth. His hair fell in straggles to his shoulders. A tiara was out of kilter on his head and he seemed distraught.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I am looking for my cat.’
I said, ‘What kind of cat?’
‘A birman,’ the angel said, and the noun flushed out a foreigner’s accent. ‘A black face, and white, quite long fur. His name is Salvator – Salvy.’
I shook my head. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ll look out for him.’ I started to shut the door, but his despairing expression made me hesitate.
‘He’s been gone for two days and two nights,’ the angel said. ‘I’m worried he’s been kidnapped. These cats are very beautiful. They are worth a lot of money. All kinds of people come through this hotel.’
I said, ‘Have you put up a notice? In the elevator?’
‘I did, but somebody tore it down. That’s suspicious, don’t you think?’ He produced a cigarette from a niche in his outfit. ‘You have a light?’
He followed me into my apartment and sat down to smoke. I opened a window. The flossy edges of his wings trembled in the air current.
‘This is a nice apartment,’ he observed. ‘How much are you paying?’
‘Enough,’ I said. My rent was six thousand a month – not a terrible deal for a two-bedroom, I’d thought, until I found out it was far more than anybody else was paying.
The angel occupied a studio on the sixth floor. He’d moved in two weeks previously. His name was Mehmet Taspinar. He was Turkish, from Istanbul. He had lived in New York for a number of years, drifting from one abode to another. New York City, he informed me, was the one place in the world where he could be himself – at least, until recently. As he spoke, Taspinar sat very still on the edge of his chair, his feet and knees properly pressed together. He stated that he’d been asked to leave his last apartment by the landlord on the grounds that he was scaring the other tenants. ‘I think he believed I might be a terrorist,’ the angel said mildly. ‘In a sense, I can understand him. An angel is a messenger of God. In Christianity, Judaism, Islam, angels are always frightening – always soldiers, killers, punishers.’
I gave no sign of having heard this. I was making a show of reading work documents I’d pulled out of my briefcase.
Taspinar looked in the direction of the kitchenette. ‘You’re drinking wine?’
I said without enthusiasm, ‘Would you like a glass?’
Taspinar accepted and by way of recompense explained that he had dressed as an angel for two years now. He bought his wings at Religious Sex, on St Mark’s Place. He owned three pairs. They cost him sixty-nine dollars a pair, he said. He showed me his right hand, on each finger of which he wore a large yellow stone. ‘These were two dollars.’
‘Have you tried looking on the roof?’ I said.
The angel raised his misplucked eyebrows. ‘You think he might be up there?’
‘Well, the door at the top of the stairs is sometimes left open. Your cat could have got out.’
‘Will you show me?’ The wings wobbled as he stood up.
‘Just go right up the stairs until you come to the door. It’s very easy.’
‘I’m a little afraid,’ Taspinar said, hunching his shoulders pathetically. Although at least thirty, he had the slight, defenceless frame of a batboy.
I reached for my coat. ‘I’ve only got a few minutes,’ I said. ‘Then I’ve got to do some work.’
We climbed the stairs to the tenth floor and continued up to the small landing at the entrance to the roof. As I’d suspected, the door was open. We went through. I’d been up to the roof once before. It was divided into plots belonging to the people who occupied the mansard apartments, and they had turned it into a garden of sun decks, brick enclosures, potted plants and small trees. In the summer, it was a lovely place; it was winter now, and the cold was shocking. I carefully trod the frozen snow. Taspinar, wearing only his angel’s outfit and barefooted apart from his slippers, headed off elsewhere with small skipping steps. He began calling for his cat in Turkish. I advanced in the direction of a tree dotted with fairy lights and found a spot out of the wind. The lighted peak of the Empire State Building loomed ashen and sublime. I regretted not bringing a hat. Turning, I saw the angel disappear behind a turret and then reappear in madly feathery profile