Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

Often I did not go to sleep. I lay with an arm in the space beneath Jake’s neck, feeling him warm up and drop into fast, whispered breathing. I’d get out of bed and go to the window. The rear of the Boltons’ house was separated by gardens from the nearest road, but there was a gap in the vegetation through which passing cars, themselves out of sight, animated fleeting trapezoids of light on the high brick wall of an adjoining property. I’d count off four or five such cartoons and then go back into bed and lie still, listening in like a spy on the conversation that carried up from downstairs along with the clatter of dishes and bursts of television music. I was hunting for clues about Rachel’s life. Within six months of returning to England she’d taken a job as a lawyer for an NGO concerned with the welfare of asylum seekers. Consequently she worked civilized hours that permitted her to take lunchtime strolls around Clerkenwell, which she declared to be much changed. This material aside, I had very little information about her. All we talked of, really, was our son: of his white-blond hair, streaked now with browns and golds and growing long, of his friends at nursery school, of his riveting toddler’s doings. And, now that the invasion of Iraq had actually taken place, the subject of politics was dropped and with it a connective friction. We rubbed along without touching. Of what one might suppose to be a crucial question of fact — the question of other men — I had no knowledge and did not dare make inquiries. The biggest, most salient questions — What was she thinking? What was she feeling? — were likewise beyond me. The very idea that one’s feelings could give shape to one’s life had become an odd one.

There came a moment, not long after the Danielle episode and in the first stimuli of spring, when I was taken by lightheaded yearning for an interlude of togetherness, a time-out, as it were, during which my still-wife and I might lie together in a Four Seasons suite, say, and work idly through a complimentary fruit basket and fuck at leisure and, most important, have hours-long, disinterested, beans-spilling, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may conversations in which we’d examine each other’s unknown nooks and crannies in the best of humor and faith. It’s possible that this fantasy originated in a revelation Rachel made one Saturday when she and Jake and I were shopping in Sainsbury’s. She’d piled multiple cartons of soymilk into the cart, and this puzzled me.

“I’m lactose intolerant,” Rachel explained.

“Since when?” I said.

“Since forever,” she said. “You remember how I always had stomach cramps? That was the lactose.”

I was bowled over. I had never considered the possibility of undiscovered factors. Then one night, lying in Jake’s bed with ears pricked, I overheard a conversation about Rachel’s weekly meetings with her psychotherapist, meetings which, although not secret, were not usually subject to discussion. Nevertheless Rachel’s mother, who as a Tory councilor had taken a special interest in the drains and culverts of southwest London and therefore was to be credited with determination, had decided to broach the matter. “What does he say about Hans?” I heard her ask. “We’re not talking about him,” Rachel replied. “We’re talking about stuff that happened before we ever met.” There was a silence. Rachel said, “Mum, there’s no need to look like that.” My wife’s voice dimmed as she traveled from the kitchen to the sitting room. “This isn’t about you and Dad,” I faintly heard. “There are other—”

Other? Other what? I was too flabbergasted to sleep. So far as I was aware, the course of Rachel’s life, prior to its confluence with mine, was almost fully comprehended by the facts set forth in her aptly named curriculum vitae: a private girls’ school, a wander-year in India, successful stints at university and law school, and, at Clifford Chance, an articled clerkship that led to the litigator’s job she’d very much wanted. Her parents’ marriage had throughout stayed intact; she’d benefited from the love of an older brother, Alex, who although living in China for more than a decade had always cheered her on from afar; she’d sailed in and out of a couple of relationships with decent if ultimately merely instructive young men; and of course she’d lived in undisastrous old England. Where, then, was the problem? Where was the intolerable lactose? In the fortnight that followed I became transfixed by this news of my wife’s clandestine preexistent injuries. I’d assumed that some unilateral failing of mine had been at the bottom of our downfall; now it seemed that some malfunction of Rachel’s might also have been operative. I concluded, feverishly, that here was a development — an unknown hinterland to our marriage which, if jointly and equally explored, might lead to discoveries that would change everything; and the prospect filled me with a theorist’s lunatic excitement and those daydreams of room service and afternoons gobbling blackberries and pineapple slices while we navigated the uncharted reaches of our psyches.

On my next visit to London, therefore, I lay awake until Rachel’s parents had gone to bed and she had shut the door of her bedroom — two doors away from Jake’s, on the top floor. It was early April; I could hear her sash window rattling as it was raised.

I crept out into the hallway and tapped on her door.

“Yes?”

She was in bed, a novel in her hands. For a second or two I looked around. It was still a young schoolgirl’s room. The bookcase was loaded with skinny oversize hardbacks about showjumping. There was a turntable and a dusty stack of LPs. The walls were thronged by identical blue tulips. They had once made a great impression on the two of us, these tulips.

She was regarding me with a dogged expression. Her eyes and cheekbones and T-shirt were drained of color.

Bedsprings sounded as I sat down on the bed. I said, “How are things?”

“Me?” she said. “I’m fine. Tired, but fine.”

“Tired?”

“Yes, tired,” Rachel said.

And it had happened again, one of those planned conversations that go quickly awry, that leave you alone with rage, a clarifying rage in this instance, in which it all came back in a harsh light: our fading marriage, the two New York years in which she withheld from me all kisses on the mouth, withheld these quietly and steadily and without complaint, averting even her eyes whenever mine sought them out in emotion, all the while cultivating a dutiful domesticity and maternal ethic that armored her in blamelessness, leaving me with no way to approach her, no way to find fault or feelings, waiting for me to lose heart, to put away my most human wants and expectations, to carry my burdens secretly, she not once in my mourning mentioning my mother, even that time when I wept in the kitchen and dropped a bottle of beer on the floor out of pure sorrow. She merely wiped the floor with paper towels and said nothing, brushing her free hand against my shoulder blade — my shoulder blade! — as she carried the soaked paper to the trash can, never holding me fast, refraining not out of lack of humanity but out of fear of being drawn into a request for further tenderness, a request that could only bring her face-to-face with some central revulsion, a revulsion of her husband or herself or both, a revulsion that had come from nowhere, or from her, or perhaps from something I’d done or failed to do, who knew, she didn’t want to know, it was too great a disappointment, far better to get on with the chores, with the baby, with the work, far better to leave me to my own devices, as they say, to leave me to resign myself to certain motifs, to leave me to disappear guiltily into a hole of my own digging. When the time came to stop her from leaving, I did not know what to think or wish for, her husband who was now an abandoner, a hole-dweller, a leaver who had left her to fend for herself, as she said, who’d failed to provide her with the support and intimacy she needed, she complained, who was lacking some fundamental wherewithal, who no longer wanted her, who beneath his scrupulous marital motions was angry, whose sentiments had decayed into a mere sense of responsibility, a husband who, when she shouted, “I don’t need to be provided for! I’m a lawyer! I make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year! I need to be loved!” had silently picked up the baby and smelled the baby’s sweet hair, and had taken the baby for a crawl in the hotel corridor, and afterward washed the baby’s filthy hands and soft filthy knees, and thought about what his wife had said, and saw the truth in her words and an opening, and decided to make another attempt at kindness, and at nine o’clock, with the baby finally drowsy in his cot, came with a full heart back to his wife to find her asleep, as usual, and beyond waking.