The following day, my restlessness led me to step out for a stroll in the fading light. It was April and cool, and I wore corduroy trousers and a diamond-patterned sweater, both culled from the teenager’s wardrobe that lived on in the pine cupboard of my bedroom. Dressed, then, like Rip Van Winkle, I walked along the curving block. The redbrick houses, semidetached and built in the 1940s, were arranged as quartets, with two corner houses sandwiching two other houses. Each house was fronted by a small inexpressive garden and a thigh-high redbrick wall, and a pedestrian could peer without difficulty through curtainless ground-floor windows, where typically a dense jungle of potted plants met the eye. People lived in these houses for decades: you moved in with young children and you stayed put into your old age. I turned left onto Kruisbeklaan. Every weekday afternoon a tremor of ball games had run through our quarter; this street was the old epicenter. I passed by the house formerly inhabited by my friend Marc, who, according to my mother, had realized his youthful ambition to become a pharmacist: she had entered a drugstore and had recognized, in the features of the graying man behind the counter, the well-mannered piano-playing youngster who had occasionally rung the doorbell twenty and more years before. They enjoyed a short, friendly conversation, my mother reported, and then each went about his and her business. A little farther down the street was the house in which four brothers, fine sportsmen who for years formed the backbone of our club, had lived in a turmoil of bats and fights and balls and football boots; and other houses I anachronistically identified as the homes of Michael, and of Leon, and of Bas, and of Jeffrey, and of Wim and Ronald who were brothers, and of all the others in our gang. I found it idiotically distressing that a sharp finger whistle could no longer summon them outdoors into a playful twilight. An ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to take nothing less than a mortal action. The suspicion came to me for the first time that they were figures of my dreaming, like the loved dead: my mother and all these vanished boys. And after Mama’s cremation I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one’s dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead.
And it must have been around this time, too, that I became subject to the distractedness that further damaged me and, of course, my family. It is tempting, here, to make a link — to say that one thing led to another. I’ve never found such connections easy. (It’s not a problem I have at work, where I merrily connect dots of all kinds; but the task there is much simpler and subject to rules.) In fairness to my sacked, peppermint-proffering shrink, it may be that this last infirmity goes back to my upbringing. The pleasantness of my Holland was related to the slightness of its mysteries. There obtained a national transparency promoted by a citizenry that was to all appearances united in a deep, even pleased, commitment to foreseeable and moderate outcomes in life. Nowadays, I gather from the newspapers, there are problems with and for alien elements, and things are not as they were; but in my day — age qualifies me to use the phrase! — Holland was a providential country. There seemed little point in an individual straining excessively for or against the upshots arranged on his behalf, which had been thoughtfully conceived to benefit him from the day he was born to the day he died and hardly required explanation. There was accordingly not much call for a dreamy junior yours truly to ponder connections. One result, in a temperament such as my own, was a sense that mystery is treasurable, even necessary: for mystery, in such a crowded, see-through little country, is, among other things, space. It was in this way, it may be supposed, that I came to step around in a murk of my own making, and to be drifted away from my native place, and in due course to rely on Rachel as a human flashlight. She illuminated things I’d thought perfectly well illuminated. To give an example, she was the one, all those years ago, who brought cinema and food to my attention. Undoubtedly I had already watched movies and eaten lunch; but I hadn’t located them in the so-called scheme of things.
In my New York confusion I sometimes asked myself if matters might have been different if someone older, or at least someone more attentive than I to the way things are put together, someone with relevant knowledge, had taken my youthful self aside and put him on notice of certain facts; but no such person came forward. My mother, though watchful, and though a teacher, was not one for offering express guidance, and indeed it may be thanks to her that I naturally associate love with a house fallen into silence. It was possible, too, I further speculated, that a father might have done the trick — that is, an active, observable predecessor in experience, one moreover alert to the duty of handing down, whether by example or word of mouth, certain encouragements and caveats; and even now, when I’m beginning to understand the limits of the personal advice business, I am led to consider, especially when I stroll in Highbury Fields with Jake, a skateboarding boy of six these days, what I might one day transmit to my son to ensure that he does not grow up like his father, which is to say, without warning. I still have no firm idea, not least because I have no firm idea whether my own descent into disorder was referable to an Achilles’ heel or whether it’s a generally punishable folly to approach life trustingly — carelessly, some might say. All I know is that unhappiness took me unawares.
There was no question of malaise when I agreed to migrate from London, in 1998: in the American calendar, the year of Monica Lewinsky. I arrived in New York in November, just over a month after Rachel had started at the Times Square office. We were installed in temporary lodgings on the Upper West Side and I had a couple of empty weeks to fill before I took up my position at M—. I had never been to New York before and I was capable of marveling even at the traffic lights on Amsterdam Avenue, a red muddle that as you crossed the street organized itself into eternally tapering emerald duos. If I was not trying out the part of flâneur I was watching the C-SPAN coverage of the impeachment proceedings. The spectacle, which eventually had at its center the strange character named Kenneth Starr, grew ever more transfixing and inexplicable. I never puzzled out the hatred apparently inspired by the president, whose administration, so far as I could tell, had done little more than oversee the advent of an extraordinary national fortunateness. It was quickly my impression, in this last regard, that making a million bucks in New York was essentially a question of walking down the street — of strolling, hands in pockets, in the cheerful expectation that sooner or later a bolt of pecuniary fire would jump out of the atmosphere and knock you flat. Every third person seemed to have been happily struck down: by a stock market killing, or by a dot-com bonanza, or by a six-figure motion picture deal for a five-hundred-word magazine article about, say, a mystifying feral chicken which, clucking and pecking, had been found roosting in a Queens backyard. I too became a beneficiary of the phenomenon, because the suddenly sunken price of a barrel of oil — it went down to ten bucks that year — helped create an unparalleled demand for seers in my line. Money, then, had joined the more familiar forms of precipitation; only it dropped, in my newcomer’s imagination, from the alternative and lucky heavens constituted in the island’s exhilaratory skyward figures, about which I need say nothing except that they were the most beautiful sight, never more so than on those nights when my taxi from JFK crested on the expressway above Long Island City, and Manhattan was squarely revealed and, guarded by colossal laughing billboards, I pitched homeward into its pluvial lights.