Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

And there was Rachel to look at — in particular, Rachel’s back, which I’d forgotten was spotted with unusually large, lovely freckles, as if she were part Dalmation. Most afternoons we relocated by motor rickshaw to the swimming pool of a luxury hotel, and as we zipped through the coconut groves that covered the entire coastal region and gave one the false impression of a jungle, I’d peek over at my wife, think about offering a rupee for her thoughts, and think again. Very often during those rickshaw rides her eyes would be closed. She slept indiscriminately: on the beach, by the pool, in her room. It seemed as if she were trying to sleep her way through the holiday — even through Christmas morning, with Jake tearing open the gifts Father Christmas had left for him on my balcony. On somebody’s recommendation, I went with my son to a nearby fishing village for a Church of India Christmas service. The church, by far the proudest building in the locality, sat on the top of a hill. It had a tall creamy tower and a cavelike interior painted in pinks and blues. Other than the floor, there was nowhere to sit. From time to time a crow flapped in to join the congregation, perched on a ceiling beam, and flapped out again. All proceedings were spoken in Malayalam, a chattering language filled with buzzing and drilling sounds — until, at the conclusion of the service, the children’s choir suddenly struck up a rendition of “Jingle Bells” and the words “snow” and “sleigh” flew up into the heat.

I wanted to tell Rachel all about it; but when we returned, at noon, she was still in bed.

Occasionally she was communicative. The poverty troubled her, she said — as did her perception that I, by contrast, was not at all troubled. When I haggled, pro forma, with a lungi salesman, she broke in, “Oh, for God’s sake, just pay him what he’s asking for.” It was I who had to deal with the fruit hawkers, because Rachel could not bear to look into their mouths, abounding in rotted black teeth, or their eyes, abounding in unthinkable need. She half apologized one evening. “I’m sorry. I just find it oppressive being an economy. The nanny”—we’d hired an English-speaking Assamese woman to babysit for Jake for a few hours every morning—“the drivers, the waiters, the deck chair boys, all these people selling stuff on the beach…I mean, every stupid spending decision we make has a huge impact on their lives.” We were sharing a nightcap bottle of Kingfisher on the balcony of her hotel room. Jake was asleep in my room. Before us, at eye level, were palm fronds. Between the fronds, on the sky-black sea, fishing boats lined up dozens of lights. Rachel swallowed directly from the huge bottle. “You don’t seem at all bothered,” she said. “You’re just happy splashing in the water.”

That much was true. I was very taken by the waves, which had a sweet, sickening taste and were ideal for bodysurfing, an activity I’d never even known existed: you waited in waist-deep water for the large benign breaker that might carry you, coasting on your torso, all the way to frothing shallows. It’s fair to say that I became a little obsessed. At lunch, invariably taken on the second floor of a restaurant overlooking the water, I’d interrupt Rachel’s reading in order to say, Look, that’s a great wave there.

Rachel said, funnily, “You’re becoming something of a wave bore, did you know that?”

One afternoon I approached the sea and saw that seaweed was washing ashore, and also that the sand was littered with triangles of purple matter which I took a moment to identify as fish. I walked on, into the sea. All kinds of things were floating in the water — coconut shells, a comb, a rotting flip-flop. A storm had done this. Seeing a white plastic bag ahead of me, I resolved to pick it up and throw it out onto the beach. It was not a plastic bag. It was a dog — a sizable puppy, turning to pulp, drifting with its four legs dangling plumb. I withdrew to the land.

The next day, women wearing glum municipal jackets over their saris swept up the sand and disposed of the storm trash. The sea cleared up. When I reentered the water in the afternoon, Rachel, as tiny and pale and skinny as I’ve seen her, came with me. “All right,” she said, frowning and smiling at once, “show me how it’s done.”

“There’s nothing to it,” I said. Along came a slightly menacing wave, perfect for surfing. “Here we go,” I said. “You just push…”

I raised my arms, put my head down, and caught the wave. I surfaced twenty yards away, exhilarated.

Rachel hadn’t moved. Rejoining her, I said, “You’ll catch the next one.”

“I think I’ll swim for a while,” she said, and she floated away from me on her back and closed her eyes. She slept even in the ocean.

On the first day of 2005, I set off with the boy to the mountains. The driver of our mock Jeep took us through rice fields and thereafter, climbing up, up, up, successively through shadowy forests of rubber trees, and tea farms, and spice gardens. Jake sat between me and the driver, thrilled and talkative at first but eventually falling into silence and car sickness. The journey was slow, bumpy. It was evening by the time we’d checked into an old colonial hunting lodge.

That night, as my son slept among his new toys — these toys peopled his somnolent mutterings, as did dinosaurs and monkeys — I sat on the veranda and thought about his mother. “No messages,” the hotel manager had volunteered before our departure earlier in the day. “Messages?” I said, puzzled. Laughing, he replied, “Your wife is always asking if I have received a message for her.” “Have we?” “Not yet,” the manager said. “But if it comes, I will let you know immediately.”

In this way I received confirmation of my suspicion, which was that Martin had jilted Rachel.

I’d met him only once, on a damnably sunny day six months earlier. The encounter was a trap, because — and this had been my only sticking point in our parental cooperation — I’d refused to have any contact with him. Without prior consultation (Rachel said, “You’d only have got yourself into a tizzy”), I found myself attending a barbecue held in the back garden of Grandma and Grandpa Bolton. While I skulked around, desperately prolonging my interactions with food and drink and pressing Charles Bolton for his views on the new rugby season, my rival made himself at home at the grill, making only the most modest, self-effacing, family-friendly fare. Jake appointed himself his sidekick and, wearing an apron that came down to his feet, waited for the word to turn a sausage. The gift I’d brought — one of the most prestigiously obscure, hard-to-find members of the Thomas the Tank Engine clan — lay unattended on the patio. I was conscious for the first time of a cuckold’s prickling pair of horns.

As for Rachel, she was smiling, diplomatic, evasive, and always finding some reason to go indoors. She wore a long white skirt that blazed with roses. My impulse — albeit one secondary to the impulse to pick up the grilling contraption and throw it through the kitchen window — was to corner her, point out that this was torture, demand some consideration, and protest generally. But I had no confidence in my standing. I was an ex and bound, although I scarcely believed it, by the rules governing the conduct of exes.

My father-in-law went on indistinctly about rugby. “Yes, I see,” I told him. What I was actually seeing was Martin’s appeal for my wife. He was a doer. He didn’t stand still. He ran around making things happen.

Very carefully holding a cup of water in two hands, my son inched up to his hero and poured the water over the coals.

“This is rather good,” Charles said cheerfully, placing his last sparerib on his plate. He moved away.