Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

She was a woman of around my age, with pale brown skin and large eyes made a little mournful by the shape of her brow.

“Yes, I have lived in London,” I said.

“In Maida Vale?” she said.

I was about to say no, and then I remembered. About eight years previously, just before I came to know Rachel, I’d stayed at a friend’s flat in Little Venice while workmen painted my new place in Notting Hill.

“For about two weeks,” I said, smiling involuntarily.

She smiled back, and in smiling became distinctly pretty. “I thought so,” she said, wrapping her coat tighter about her. In a polite tone, she went on, “We once shared a cab. From…” She named a nightspot in Soho. “You gave me a ride home.”

I remembered the club well — it had been something of a haunt of mine — but I didn’t remember this woman, or having shared a taxi with anybody like her. “Are you sure?” I said.

She laughed. Not without embarrassment, she said, “You’re called Hans, right? It was an unusual name. That’s why I remember.”

It was my turn to feel embarrassed, but most of all I was amazed.

Although she never took a seat, the woman and I talked for a few minutes longer, and it was very easily agreed that she would drop by one evening. She had, she said, always been curious about the Chelsea Hotel.

If I feel able to state that I didn’t give the matter any further thought — that I wasn’t planning anything — it’s because, a few evenings later, when the house phone in my apartment rang and Jesus at the front desk told me I had a visitor called Danielle, I had no idea what he was talking about. Only at the last second, as I went to answer the cough of my doorbell, did it occur to me who the visitor might be — and that I’d never gotten around to asking her for her name.

I opened the door. “I was passing by,” she said, and mumbled some further statement. “If I’m intruding…”

“Of course not,” I said. “Come in.”

She wore a coat that may have been different from the coat I’d first seen her in but had the same effect, namely to make it seem as if she’d just been rescued from a river and blanketed. My own getup was shabby — bare feet, T-shirt, decaying tracksuit bottom — and while I changed, Danielle wandered around my apartment, as was her privilege: people in New York are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they’re invited to step into. In addition to the generous ceiling heights and the wood floors and the built-in closets, she undoubtedly took in the family photographs and the bachelor disarray and the second bedroom with its ironing board and its child’s bed covered by a mound of wrinkled office shirts. I imagine this answered some questions she had about my situation, and not in an especially disheartening way. Like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing. But of course not every woman is interested in this sort of refurbishment project, just as not every man has only one thing on his mind. About Danielle, I remember, my feelings were no more specific than a pleasant anxiousness. She hadn’t caught me, obviously enough, at a very erotic moment in my life. I had never been much of a pickup artist — a few ghastly encounters in my twenties had seen to that — and the alternative prospect of a euphoric romance not only exhausted me but, in fact, struck me as impossible. This wasn’t because of any fidelity to my absent wife or some aversion to sex, which, I like to think, grabs me as much as the next man. No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity’s enormous momentum. I had nothing new to murmur to another on the subject of myself and not the smallest eagerness about being briefed on Danielle’s supposedly unique trajectory — a curve described under the action, one could safely guess, of the usual material and maternal and soulful longings, a few thwarting tics of character, and luck good and bad. A life seemed like an old story.

I emerged, fully dressed, from my bedroom. “Let me show you the building,” I said.

Together we descended, as the wide-eyed transients did, the streaky gray marble steps. While Danielle surveyed the sulfurous, wildly expressive canvases, I found myself freshly eyeing the pipes and wires and alarm boxes and electrical devices and escape maps and sprinklers that cluttered the wall of each landing. These tokens of calamity and fire, taken in conjunction with the fiery and calamitous art, gave a hellishly subterraneous aspect to our downward journey, which I had undertaken only once or twice before on foot, and I was almost startled when we reached the bottom of the stairs not to run into chuckling old Lucifer himself and instead to find myself on the surface of the earth and able to walk out directly into the cold, clear night. We stood for a moment under the awning of the hotel, stamping our feet. I could think of nothing better than to suggest dinner.

With no clear sense of a destination we made our way to Ninth Avenue. At Twenty-second Street, we entered an Italian restaurant. Danielle removed her coat and I saw that she wore a short skirt, black wool tights, and knee-length leather boots. A tiny metal star was lodged in the crease above a nostril.

A waiter brought pasta and a bottle of red wine. The room’s acoustics, which turned surrounding chatter into a roar, forced us to shout to make ourselves heard, so that our conversation formally shared many of the characteristics of a bitter argument. Toward the end of the meal, Danielle, who seemed to be enjoying herself in spite of everything, caught me staring at the first-aid notice that was fixed to the wall behind her. “Don’t you think that’s a little bizarre?” I offered. Danielle turned and looked and laughed, because the photographs in the notice made it appear as if the choking victim was actually strangling herself while being attacked from behind by a larger woman. Danielle said something I didn’t catch.

I said, “I’m sorry — what?”

She yelled back, “Somebody should bring out a book called The Heimlich Diet. You know, you eat as much as you want, and then somebody—” She demonstrated the maneuver with a jerk of her arms.

“That’s a good one,” I said, nodding and smiling. “The Heimlich Diet.”

Afterward, I drifted back toward the chute of white neon letters that spelled HOT L; Danielle walked beside me, smoking a cigarette. It would be difficult for me to overstate the weirdness of that stroll, a weirdness hardly alleviated by the scene that awaited us on our reentry into the hotel. A party was taking place in the lobby. The occasion was the third birthday of a terrier named Missie who lived on the second floor, and Missie’s owner, a friendly man in his sixties whom I knew only as an elevator cohort, placed champagne glasses in our hands and said, “Missie absolutely insists.” The lobby was crowded with hotel residents human and canine. The angel was there, as was the eminent librettist, and I also recognized an artist who wore dark sunglasses night and day, and two teenage sisters who had once babysat for Jake, and a concert pianist from Delaware, and a fellow with a seat on the stock exchange, and the Iranian husband and wife whose spliffs gave a certain floor its aroma, and the film star who’d recently separated from his film star wife, and a couple who made baroque wallpaper, and the murmuring widow. Whoever owned a dog had brought that dog down to the lobby. An enormously gentle borzoi was barging around, and I seem to remember a cinnamon-patched mutt, a pair of tiny hairless bright-eyed pugs, an affenpinscher, spaniels, an ancient battered paw-licking chow, and, standing by the fireplace, a specimen of one of those miniaturized breeds that are apparently programmed to tremble helplessly. From time to time a chorus of barking broke out and the dog owners would look down and themselves bark reprimands in unison. My immediate inclination was to gulp down one drink and get out. Danielle, however, became involved in a discussion with a maker of papier-mâché dolls and then with a photographer of African scenes, and I found myself in long conferences of my own with, first, a dentist who practiced out of a hotel apartment and, second, a ginger-bearded fellow I’d seen around the place who declared himself to be on a “dog date” with a half beagle, half Rottweiler.