Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

“Hamstring,” Dr. Seem said. He flexed his leg, then sadly put it down. “For ten years this is giving me a problem. Ten years.”

“A bad situation,” Chuck said.

Seem gave a hand a bitter twirl. “My dancing days are finished now.”

“Nonsense,” Chuck said. “You sit down, take a little rest, maybe a little drink, and watch, in five minutes you’ll be up on your feet.” Chuck gave me a severe look. “Hans — your turn. Look at Avalon. She’s tired of old men. Go.”

I responded automatically — biologically, Dr. Seem might say. I danced with Avalon.

That is, I clumsily moved around in her vicinity, glimpsing in the grins of those nearby the encouragement usually reserved for children. I was the only white person present, and reinforcing a stereotype. Avalon herself politely smiled and laughed and gave no sign of noticing my lumbersomeness, and then, out of pity or professionalism, she turned her back to me and lightly gyrated her ass against my thighs in rhythm with the rapid jingling soca that now replaced the American pop, the DJ shouting, “All you wine! Wine that boom-boom!” and all the middle-aged women started to back their handsome asses into their middle-aged men with an air of great seriousness, as if an especially grave phase of the evening had been entered. Maybe it had. A rapt Chuck quickly walked onto the dance floor, his black face blackened still further by pursed black lips and half-sealed black eyelids. He approached without hesitation a woman in her fifties, and instantly they began to shimmy in tandem next to me and Avalon. The soca tinkled and blared. Solidarity with my small round Trinidadian counterpart surged through me. Emboldened, I gave in to the situation and its happiness — gave in to the song, to the rums and the Coca-Colas, to Avalon’s smooth skillful butt, to the hilarity of remarks made by Dr. Flavian Seem and Prashanth Ramachandran, to the suggestion that we go on, after the gala, to some further place; and to the crush of hips and legs in Chuck’s stretch limo; and to the idea that we swing by, since we’re all dressed up, the all-fours club down on Utica on the far side of Great Eastern Parkway, where the speechless all-fours players have been playing all day and signal to partners by picking their ears and rubbing their noses, their women hanging around drinking and eating and very ready to go home; and to persuading some characters from the all-fours club to come out and fête with us at the limo driver’s place down on Remsen and Avenue A; and to stopping on the way there at Ali’s Roti Shop for roti and doubles and stopping at Thrifty Beverages to load up with beer and four bottles of rum and, because there is no limit to our hunger, stopping also at Kahauné Restaurant and Bakery to order a delivery of tripe and beans, patties, and curry goat; and to the invitation, once inside the home of the limo driver, who is named Proverbs, to join in a card game called wapi, and to losing nearly two hundred dollars playing wapi; and to the truth of the remarks “Boy, it have a good wapi there tonight” and “Mankind does be serious about the wapi game, boy” and to an ephemeral mouth belonging to a girl with a diploma in lifesaving; and to six laughing pairs of hands that picked up my wrecked body and dropped it on a couch; and to water splashed on my face at six in the morning; and finally to the proposition, made by Chuck as we walked behind a gang of boisterous Hasidic boys in the first warmth of the weekend, that we sweat it all off at a banya just a few blocks from his house.

“Half an hour in the sauna,” Chuck argued, “and you’ll be like a new man.”

A yellow cab came freakishly into view.

The Russian baths were in a blockish cement building next door to a gas station on Coney Island Avenue. To get to the locker room you walked through a large open area with two pools — one a Jacuzzi trembling with warm currents, the other a cold pool into which an attendant was dumping ice. Structural columns were decorated with oval plaster moldings of Hellenic figures, and on the largest wall was a mural in which Greek maidens of antiquity struck beautiful poses by an immense waterfall that poured into a green valley. None of this, so far as I could see, bore any relation to the customers of the spa, a handful of pale-skinned men who sat in apparent exhaustion on plastic chairs.

We emerged from the locker room with rented towels tied around our waists. “Where shall we go?” Chuck said. There were Russian, Turkish, and American options. Chuck showed me the Turkish bath first. Save for an ill-looking man who sat by a bucket of water, it was empty. Next was the Russian sauna, where one man was slapping another with a bouquet of oak leaves. “It’s still early,” Chuck said.

The American steam room was the place to be. At least six others were present. They wore conelike hats and poured water into the ovens in defiance of a sign specifically forbidding this. I sat down next to a fellow in soaked underpants.

The heat was extreme. I sweated heavily and without pleasure. I was about to suggest to Chuck that we leave when an unusual-looking man came in. He was fat, and yet great folds of excess skin wilted from his stomach and back and limbs. He looked unstuffed, an abandoned work of taxidermy.

Chuck said, “Mikhail! Come, sit down.”

Mike Abelsky joined us with a great sigh. He said to me, in a strong accent that was part Brooklyn and part Moldova, “You’re the Dutch guy. I heard about you. You,” he said, pointing at Chuck, “I wanna talk to.”

“We’re taking a bath,” Chuck said. “Relax.”

“Relax? I got my wife’s relatives living at my house and you want me to relax?” Abelsky placed a cone on his head. “I don’t wanna sleep in other people’s houses and I don’t want other people to sleep in my house. I wanna walk around in my house in my underpants. Now I gotta wear pajamas: I don’t wanna wear pajamas. I don’t wanna put on the T-shirt. When I go to the bathroom, I wanna sit with my newspaper. What do I get? Somebody banging on the door, ‘I wanna shower.’ What the fuck do they wanna take a shower for? Let them take a shower in their house!” Abelsky looked at me without interest. “I only understand one relative in the world,” he stated. “It’s the parents. The rest, they’re only interested in using you.”

“You’re looking well,” Chuck said.

“I look like shit,” Abelsky said. “But I gotta do the reduction operation if I want to live. Now I can’t eat shit. Look at this,” he said. He pinched his loose breast tissue with disgust. “I’m like an old woman.” He looked at me again. “Once I was a wrestler.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, in the Russian army. Also at home, with my brothers. I beat the shit out of them.” All this was said humorlessly. “The only guy I didn’t beat up was my father, out of respect. For money I let him beat me up.”

My hangover was getting to me. I didn’t understand what he was talking about.

“I used to take beatings for my brothers,” Abelsky explained. He rubbed his neck and examined the sweat on his hand. “If my big brother scratched the car, he paid me to take the beating. My father was aware about what was going on, but still he would beat me. He used to beat the shit out of me. I laughed in his face. He couldn’t get to me. He could beat me and beat me, but still I would laugh. What did I care? I was rich.” He added bitterly, “That was Moldova. A nickel makes you a big shot. You wanna be rich in this country, you gotta win the Mega.”

“Tell him what the Mega is,” Chuck said. I understood what he was up to: he wanted me to see the kind of man he had to deal with. It’s possible, too, that he wanted to show me off to Abelsky — indeed that the whole encounter had been orchestrated. Chuck had this idea I was a catch.