Netherland. Joseph O’Neill
inside.
If I thought I’d shaken him off, I was mistaken. A nocturnal individual, Taspinar took to joining me in the lobby in the late evenings, assuming a prim upright position on a massive wooden armchair next to mine. Needless to say, his appearance provoked surprise and laughter from the transients. Taspinar enjoyed the attention but rarely responded. When a drunk Japanese asked if he could fly, he gave the man his usual dazed smile. ‘Of course, I would like to fly,’ Taspinar confided to me afterwards, ‘but I know I can’t. I’m not cuckoo.’
Actually, this last assertion was doubtful. I learned that before he’d become possessed by his angelic compulsion, Taspinar had spent some time in a mental asylum in New Hampshire. His father, a rich man who owned factories, had paid the fees, just as he now paid the allowance that permitted his son to live in frugal idleness. The sustaining fiction in this arrangement was that Taspinar was at graduate school at Columbia University, where he’d enrolled years ago. Once I had overcome the thought that midway through my life the only companionship I could count on was that of a person who, as he put it, could no longer bear the masculine details of his life, I grew to mildly enjoy the angel’s unexpectedly serene company. He and I and the murmuring widow in the baseball cap sat in a row like three crazy old sisters who have long ago run out of things to say to one another. Taspinar, it turned out, was a rather artless man who, in spite of his morbid confusion, easily accepted the small offerings of pleasure that daily life provided. He savoured his coffee, read newspapers avidly, found amusement in inconsequential events. With regard to my own situation, about which he made occasional enquiries but offered little comment, he was considerate. As my fondness for him grew, so did my anxiety. When his baroque anguish, too awful and strange for me to think about, became acute, he neglected himself. His frock (he owned three or four) went unchanged for days, his silver fingernail polish deteriorated to a fishy shimmer, his waxed back surrendered to emergent cohorts of hard little hairs. Most distressing of all was the state of his wings. His favourite white pair, in which he had first met me, somehow developed a list, and he took to wearing black bedraggled ones that made him look like a crow. One Saturday I took it upon myself to go to the East Village and buy him fresh plumage. I chose a white, rather magnificent set with shining long vanes. ‘Here,’ I said, stiffly tendering him the package in the lobby that evening. ‘I thought you might find these useful.’ Taspinar seemed very pleased, but I had made an error. My gift was never seen again. As for the cat, it was never seen again either.
Meanwhile I was making efforts to promote my own wellbeing. At Rachel’s transoceanic urging, I went to see a shrink, a nice fellow who offered me a peppermint every twenty minutes and subscribed to the fine, progressive notion that each day we have lived is a kind of possession and, if we are its alert custodian, brings us ever closer to knowledge of the slipperiest kind. I lasted three sessions. I started to take yoga classes at the YMCA across the street from the hotel. This went better, and when I touched my toes for the first time in years I felt a larger movement of life at my fingertips. I was determined to open myself to new directions, a project I connected with escaping from the small country of fog in which, at a point I could not surely trace, I’d settled. That country, I speculated, might have some meaningful relation to my country of physical residence, and so every second weekend, when I travelled to London to be with my wife and son, I hoped that flying high into the atmosphere, over boundless massifs of vapour or small clouds dispersed like the droppings of Pegasus on an unseen platform of air, might also lift me above my personal haze. That is, I would conduct a retrospective of our affable intercontinental dealings and assemble the hope and theory that the foundation of my family might after all be secure and our old unity still within reach. But each time Rachel materialised at her parents’ door she wore a preemptive expression of weariness, and I understood that the haze had travelled all the way to this house in west London.
‘How was the flight?’
‘Good.’ I fidgeted with my suitcase. ‘I managed to get a couple of hours of sleep.’ A hesitation, and then an English peck for each cheek; whereas once it had been our loving tic to kiss triply – left, right, and left again – in the Dutch style she found so amusing.
She would never, in the old days, have expressed curiosity about something as prosaic as a flight. Her truest self resisted triteness, even of the inventive romantic variety, as a kind of falsehood. When we’d fallen for each other it had not been a project of bouquets and necklaces and strokes of genius on my part: there were no ambushes by string quartets or surprise air tickets to a spit of Pacific coral. We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically. Our love started in drink at a party in South Kensington, where we made out for an hour on a mound of dark woollen overcoats, and continued in drink a week later at a pub in Notting Hill. As soon as we left the pub she kissed me. We went to my flat, drank more, and grappled on a sofa squeakily adrift on four wheels. ‘What’s that horrible noise?’ Rachel exclaimed with a ridiculous jerk of the head. ‘The castors,’ I said, technically. ‘No, it’s a mouse,’ she said. She was casting us in a screwball comedy, herself as Hepburn, whose bony beauty I recognised in her, me as the professor with his head up his ass. I looked the part: excessively tall, bespectacled, given to nodding and smiling. I have never entirely shed the gormlessness of that early role. She said, ‘Isn’t there somewhere less mousy we can go?’ Later that night, she said, ‘Talk to me in Dutch,’ and I did. ‘Lekker stuk van me,’ I growled. ‘On second thoughts,’ she said, ‘don’t talk to me in Dutch.’ When, months later, we sobered up and began to see others as a couple, her public fluency mesmerised me. She spoke in complete sentences and intact paragraphs and almost always in the trope of the tiny, well-constructed argument. She was obviously a brilliant lawyer. My own way with English she found moving for its clunking lexical precision; and she especially loved for me to spout a scrap of remembered Latin, the more nonsensical the better. O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint, agricolas.
One windy Sunday afternoon in March 2002, when I was in London for a long weekend, we van den Broeks went for a walk on Putney Common. It was the kind of uncomplicated family outing that fortified my belief that our physical separation might yet turn out to have been a bad joke. I suggested to Rachel, as we watched Jake ride ahead on his tricycle, that things were not going too badly. Her eyes were fixed forward and she made no reply. I said, ‘What I mean is –’
‘I know what you mean,’ Rachel said, cutting me short.
Jake got off his tricycle and ran to a swing. I lifted him into the seat and set him in motion. ‘Higher,’ he joyfully urged me.
Rachel stood beside me, hands in pockets. ‘Higher,’ Jake repeated every time he swung up to my hand, and for a while his was the only voice among us. His happiness on the swing was about the relief of communication as much as anything. He cleanly uttered his wish and cleanly it was granted. Our son, we’d recently been told, was tongue-tied: the arrival of certain consonants caused his tongue to scuttle back to the innermost parts of his mouth, re-emerging only in the safety of a vowel. An operation to cure this had been discussed and, in the end, rejected; for my own speech impediment, however, there was no optional quick fix. From our beginning, it had been Rachel’s place to talk freely and airily, mine to carefully listen and utter only solid things. This bargain acted as a kind of guarantee of our sentimental valuables and, in our minds, set us apart from bantering couples whose trinkety talk felt like a form of emotional dissipation. Now, searching for words as I propelled Jake skyward, I felt at a disadvantage.
‘We said we’d review things,’ I finally said.
‘Yes, we did,’ she said.
‘I just want you to know –’
‘I already know, darling,’ Rachel said quickly, and she waggled her lowered chin to relax the solid orb of tension that was invariably buried at the junction of her neck and right shoulder. There was an exhaustion about her throat I hadn’t seen before. ‘Let’s not do any reviewing,’ she said. ‘Please. There isn’t anything to review.’
Another little boy appeared among us, followed moments later by his mother. The little boy impatiently jangled the seat of the swing. ‘Hold on, hold on,’ his mother said. A baby, peeping out of a sling, already burdened her. Fractions of smiles passed between the adults. Ten