Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

“What were his politics?” Rachel asks one day.

When we have this exchange, she is going through a phase of eating sticks of celery, and she crunches on just such a stick. I wait for her to finish crunching, and then I think carefully, because on this kind of subject, indeed on almost every subject, my wife is invariably on the money. It is my favorite of all her traits.

“We didn’t really talk about politics,” I say. I decide against mentioning the pointed, possibly opportunistic, remarks he made at that fateful first cricket match, because he never said anything similar again — which didn’t matter to me. The decisive item, if I’m going to be honest about this, was that Chuck was making a go of things. The sushi, the mistress, the marriage, the real estate dealings, and, almost inconceivably, Bald Eagle Field: it was all happening in front of my eyes. While the country floundered in Iraq, Chuck was running. That was political enough for me, a man having trouble putting one foot in front of the other.

“So what did you talk about?”

“Cricket things,” I say.

Rachel says, “What about us? Did you talk about us?”

“Once or twice,” I say. “But not really, no.”

“That’s just weird,” Rachel says.

“No, it isn’t,” I say. I’m tempted to point out that our dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessmen. My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but it’s the same quality that enables me to thrive at work, where so many of the brisk, tough, successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs about their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgmental offspring, and are, in sum, desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy. This chronic and, I think, peculiarly male strain of humiliation explains the slight affection that bonds so many of us, but such affection depends on a certain reserve. Chuck observed the code, and so did I; neither pressed the other on delicate subjects.

I refrained, in particular, from asking him about the one category of telephone communications I didn’t understand, incoming calls arriving on a separate phone (Chuck carried a mysterious second) and eliciting the tersest of responses from Chuck; calls which I soon had reason to connect to unexplained stops we made in the nether regions of Brooklyn.

Because from the beginning he ran so-called errands. Thus, without explanation, Chuck directed me, his driver, to addresses in Midwood and East Flatbush and Little Pakistan in Kensington, a couple of times taking us even as far as Brighton Beach. What happened, when we arrived, was always the same. “Pull over right here,” Chuck would say. He’d trot into a building and come back out within five minutes. “Drive on,” he’d say, slamming the passenger door. And then he’d start talking again.

It wasn’t until late July that he decided to give me a clue about what was going on.

He took a call on his mystery phone; said, “OK, understood” and then turned to me. “Chinatown.”

“Chinatown?”

“Brooklyn Chinatown,” he said, very pleased to have confused me.

I wasn’t aware of any Chinese quarter in Brooklyn. But it existed, I discovered, in a neighborhood where you might look up and see, beyond rooftops dipped westward, the Verrazano Bridge. We stopped in front of a grimly ordinary Chinese restaurant. “Some early lunch?” Chuck said.

We took a seat at the window of the restaurant’s miserable room. There were no other customers. A busboy was sweeping last night’s noodles into a pan.

“My father would never have been comfortable in a spot like this,” Chuck observed.

“Oh?” There was no sign of a waiter.

“He never went into a café except to do business, and he never did business unless there was a getaway. Look.” Chuck pointed over my shoulder. “No rear exit. Somebody comes in through the front door, you’re trapped.”

I wondered what he was talking about.

“That would have been my father’s first thought: How do I get out of here?”

Before I could respond, two men, Chinese or perhaps Korean, entered the restaurant. Chuck approached them and shook their hands, and the three men sat down at the back of the restaurant, outside my earshot. They spoke for a minute or so in a friendly way, with much grinning. Chuck wrote something on a slip of paper, tore the slip into two stubs, and presented a stub to the men. One of them passed him a packed envelope.

“Well?” I said to Chuck in the car. We’d skipped lunch. “What was that all about?”

“I was taking an order for food,” he said preposterously. “What else would I be doing?”

“Chinese restaurants order sushi now?”

“Fish,” Chuck said. “Everybody needs fish. Now drive on.”

In my flatfooted way, I have since figured it all out. By bringing me into the restaurant, by telling me about his father and making me view his transaction with the Chinese/Koreans and spinning me a yarn, Chuck was putting me on notice. On notice of what? Of the fact that something fishy was afoot. That I had the option of discontinuing our association. He guessed I wouldn’t. He guessed I’d continue to see him as I wanted to see him, that I’d offer him the winking eye you might offer your ham-handed conjurer uncle.

Rachel, whom I sometimes suspect of having mind-reading powers, is of course onto this. “You never really wanted to know him,” she remarks, still crunching on her celery. “You were just happy to play with him. Same thing with America. You’re like a child. You don’t look beneath the surface.”

My reaction to her remark is to think, Look beneath Chuck’s surface? For what?

In a spirit of legalistic fairness, Rachel continues, “Although I suppose in Chuck’s case you’d say, how could you be expected to know him? You were two completely different people from different backgrounds. You had nothing important in common.”

Before I can take issue with this, she points a celery stick at me and says, more amused than anything, “Basically, you didn’t take him seriously.”

She has accused me of exoticizing Chuck Ramkissoon, of giving him a pass, of failing to grant him a respectful measure of distrust, of perpetrating a white man’s infantilizing elevation of a black man.

“That’s just wrong,” I say, vehement. “He was a good friend. We had a lot in common. I took him very seriously.”

With no trace of harshness, she laughs. Suddenly she looks up: she thinks she has heard a cry coming from upstairs, and she stops chewing and listens. And there is Jake’s cry again—“Water, please!”—and off she goes. At the foot of the stairs, though, she turns to take a parting shot. “You know why you two got on so well? Pedestal.”

I have to smile at this, because it’s a Juliet Schwarz joke. Dr. Schwarz is our marriage counselor. Rachel and I saw her once a week for the first year of our reunion and still see her once a month at her office in Belsize Park, even though I happily find myself at an ever-growing loss as to what to talk about. Dr. Schwarz is a great believer in the idea of couples as mutual esteemers above all else. “This is your husband!” she once shouted to Rachel. “Pedestal!” she shouted, raising a horizontal arm. “Pedestal!”

At first, Rachel did not take to this kind of advice. She called Juliet Schwarz old-fashioned and bossy and biased in my favor. She questioned her doctorate. But evidently she listened to her, because one day I came home to find a sizable block of limestone in the hallway.

“What’s this?”

“A plinth,” Rachel said.

“A plinth?”

“It’s for you.”

“You bought me a plinth?”