Some people have no difficulty in identifying with their younger incarnations: Rachel, for example, will refer to episodes from her childhood or college days as if they’d happened to her that very morning. I, however, seem given to self-estrangement. I find it hard to muster oneness with those former selves whose accidents and endeavors have shaped who I am now. The schoolboy at the Gymnasium Haganum; the Leiden student; the clueless trainee executive at Shell; the analyst in London; even the thirty-year-old who flew to New York with his excited young wife: my natural sense is that all are faded, by the by, discontinued. But I still think, and I fear will always think, of myself as the young man who got a hundred runs in Amstelveen with a flurry of cuts, who took that diving catch at second slip in Rotterdam, who lucked into a hat trick at the Haagse Cricket Club. These and other moments of cricket are scorched in my mind like sexual memories, forever available to me and capable, during those long nights alone in the hotel when I sought refuge from the sorriest feelings, of keeping me awake as I relived them in bed and powerlessly mourned the mysterious promise they held. To reinvent myself in order to bat the American way, that baseball-like business of slugging and hoisting, involved more than the trivial abandonment of a hard-won style of hitting a ball. It meant snipping a fine white thread running, through years and years, to my mothered self.
I ran into Chuck again by accident. In the late summer, a friend of mine from a poker game I’d briefly belonged to, a food critic named Vinay, suggested that I might find amusement in joining him on his nightly forays for material. Vinay wrote a magazine column about New York restaurants, specifically, cheap, little-known restaurants: an enervating assignment that placed him on a treadmill of eating and writing and eating and writing that he couldn’t face alone. It did not matter to Vinay that I knew nothing about food. “Fuck that, dude,” he said. Vinay was from Bangalore. “Just tag along and stop me from going mad. If we eat some fucking Gouda cheese, I’ll ask for your opinion. Otherwise just eat and enjoy yourself. It’s all paid for.” So from time to time I went with him to places in Chinatown and Harlem and Alphabet City and Hell’s Kitchen or, if he was really desperate and able to overcome his loathing of the outer boroughs, Astoria and Fort Greene and Cobble Hill. Vinay was unhappy with his beat. He believed he ought to have been writing about the great chefs in the great restaurants, or educating the public about vintage wines or — his obsession — single malt whiskeys. “I used to hate whiskey,” he told me. “My dad and his friends drank it all the time. But then I found out they weren’t drinking real whiskey. They were drinking Indian whiskey — look-like whiskey. McDowell’s, Peter Scot, stuff that almost tastes like rum. When I got into Scotch — that’s when I began to understand what this drink is really about.” Vinay found it distasteful to deal with the owners and cooks at the cheap places, immigrants who generally spoke little English and saw no particular reason to spend time talking to him. Also, the sheer variety of foodstuffs bothered him. “One night it’s Cantonese, then it’s Georgian, then it’s Indonesian, then Syrian. I mean, I think this shit is good baklava, but what the fuck do I know, really? How can I be sure?” Yet when he wrote, Vinay exuded bright certainty and expertise. As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.
Similar misgivings, I should say, had begun to infect my own efforts at work. These efforts required me, sitting at my desk on the twenty-second floor of a glassy tower, to express reliable opinions about the current and future valuation of certain oil and gas stocks. If an important new insight came to me, I would transmit it to the sales force at the morning shout, just before the markets opened at eight. I stood at a microphone at the edge of the trading floor and delivered a godless minute-long homily to doubting congregants distributed among the computer screens. After the shout, I spent a half hour on the trading floor going over the particulars.
“Hans, this Gabon joint venture watertight?”
“Maybe.”
Grins all round at this joke. “Who’s the CEO over there? Johnson?”
“Johnson’s with Apache now. Frank Tomlinson is the new guy. Used to be with Total. But the FD is still the same guy, Sanchez.”
“Huh. What kind of development costs we talking about?”
“Five dollars a barrel, max.”
“How they going to do that?”
“The tax structure’s good. Plus they’re only paying a two-buck royalty.”
“Yeah, well I need a better story.”
“You might want to try Fidelity. I was over there Monday. Tell them something about innovative horizontal drilling technology. That’s another story in itself, by the way — Delta Geoservices. Karen’s got the details.”
Somebody else: “I’ll take details on horizontal drilling from Karen all day, every day.”
“So what’re you saying, Dutch or Double Dutch?”
I smiled. “I’m saying Double Dutch.” To my disproportionate credit, this informal catchphrase of mine—“Dutch” described an ordinary recommendation, “Double Dutch” a strong recommendation — had entered the language of the bank and, from there, of certain parts of the industry.
I liked and respected my colleagues: the mere sight of them — the men close shaven and prosperously thick about the waist, where ID badges and communication gadgets clustered, the women in subdued suits, all of them shouldering their burdens as best they could — was capable of filling me with joy. But by the fall of 2002, even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I’d placed under my life’s leaking ceiling, had become too small to contain my misery. It forcefully struck me as a masquerade, this endless business of churning out research papers, of blast voice-mailing clients overnight with my latest thoughts on ExxonMobil or Conoco-Phillips, of listening to oil executives glossing corporate performance in tired jargon, of flying before dawn to meet investors in shitty towns in the middle of America, of the squabbles about the analyst rankings, of the stress of constantly tending to my popularity and perceived competence. I felt like Vinay, cooking up myths from scraps and peels of fact. When, in October, my II ranking remained unchanged at number four, my private reaction was almost one of bitterness.
One Friday of that month, I found Vinay in a bad mood. He had, he told me, been asked to write a story about the eating places of taxicab drivers. The theory, apparently, was that here you had a class of men familiar with alien foods who freely exercised their choices from a vast selection of establishments, and had no stake in the bourgeois dining enterprise: men supposedly driven by unfeigned primitive cravings, men hungering for a true taste of homeland and mother’s cooking, men who would, in short, lead one to the so-called real thing. Of course, I could not help thinking it simple, this theory of reality. Vinay had objections of a narrower kind. “Cabdrivers?” he said. “Have you ever heard one of these guys express an opinion that wasn’t complete bullshit? I told my editor, Dude, I’m from fucking India. You think in India we take our fucking dining cues from cabdrivers? And then I’m like”—Vinay laughed furiously—“Yo, Mark, the name’s not Vinnie, OK? It’s Vinay.” Vinay buckled, as one must, and we found a taxi driven by a man from Dhaka who was prepared to take us to a place he liked. This exercise was repeated with several cabdrivers. We’d look at a menu, eat a mouthful of food, and head out again in search of another lurching ride. Before long the night had assumed the character of an evil black soup, sampled somewhere along the line, whose bitty, fatty constituents rose sickeningly to the surface before sinking back again into a spoon-deep dark. Just before midnight, a taxi driver took us to Lexington and Twenty-something and wordlessly pulled up at yet another accumulation of double-parked yellow cars.