to bed, we quietly ate watercress and translucent noodles that neither of us could find the strength to remove from their cartons; took turns to doze in the bathtub; and failed to stay awake for the duration of a TV show. Rachel was tired and I was tired. A banal state of affairs, yes – but our problems were banal, the stuff of women’s magazines. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women’s magazines.
‘What do you think? Hans, say something, for God’s sake.’
My back was still turned to her. I said, ‘London isn’t safe either.’
‘But it’s safer, Hans,’ Rachel said, almost pityingly. ‘It’s safer.’
‘Then I’ll come with you,’ I said. ‘We’ll all go.’
The ashtray rustled as she stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Let’s not make too many big decisions,’ my wife said. ‘We might come to regret it. We’ll think more clearly in a month or two.’
Much of the subsequent days and nights was spent in an agony of emotions and options and discussions. It is truly a terrible thing when questions of love and family and home are no longer answerable.
We talked about Rachel giving up her job or going part-time, about moving to Brooklyn or Westchester or, what the hell, New Jersey. But that didn’t meet the problem of Indian Point. There was, apparently, a nuclear reactor at a place called Indian Point, just thirty miles away in Westchester County. If something bad happened there, we were constantly being informed, the ‘radioactive debris’, whatever this might be, was liable to rain down on us. (Indian Point: the earliest, most incurable apprehensions stirred in its very name.) Then there was the question of dirty bombs. Apparently any fool could build a dirty bomb and explode it in Manhattan. How likely was this? Nobody knew. Very little about anything seemed intelligible or certain, and New York itself – that ideal source of the metropolitan diversion that serves as a response to the largest futilities – took on a fearsome, monstrous nature whose reality might have befuddled Plato himself. We were trying, as I irrelevantly analysed it, to avoid what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a pre-apocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington and, for that matter, Moscow. In my anxiety I phoned Rachel’s father, Charles Bolton, and asked him how he’d dealt with the threat of nuclear annihilation. I wanted to believe that this episode of history, like those old cataclysms that deposit a geologically telling layer of dust on the floors of seas, had sooted its survivors with special information.
Charles was, I believe, flummoxed – both by the substance of my enquiry and the fact that I’d chosen to pursue it with him. Many years previously, my father-in-law had been the Rolls-Royce-driving financial director of a British conglomerate that had collapsed in notorious circumstances. He had never entirely resurfaced from his consequent bankruptcy and, in the old-fashioned belief that he’d shot his bolt, he lurked about the house with a penitent, slightly mortified smile on his face. All financial and domestic powers now belonged to his wife, who, as the beneficiary of various trusts and inheritances, was charged with supporting the family, and there came into being, as the girl Rachel grew up, an axis of womanly power in the house from whose pull the sole male was excluded. From our earliest acquaintance Charles would raise a politely enquiring man-to-man eyebrow to suggest slipping off for a quiet pint, as he called it, in the local pub. He was, and remains, an immaculately dressed and most likeable pipe-smoking Englishman.
‘I’m not sure I can be much use to you,’ he said. ‘One simply got on with it and hoped for the best. We weren’t building bunkers in the garden or running for the hills, if that’s what you mean.’ Understanding that I needed him to say more, he added, ‘I actually believed in deterrence, so I suppose that helped. This lot are a different kettle of fish. One simply doesn’t know what they’re thinking.’ I could hear him tapping his pipe importantly. ‘They’re likely to take some encouragement from what happened, don’t you think?’
In short, there was no denying the possibility that another New York calamity lay ahead and that London was probably safer. Rachel was right; or, at least, she had reason on her side, which, for the purposes of our moot – this being the structure of most arguments with Rachel – was decisive. Her mythic sense of me was that I was, as she would point out with an air of having discovered the funniest thing in the world, a rationalist. She found the quality attractive in me: my cut-and-dried Dutch manner, my conversational use of the word ‘ergo’. ‘Ergonomics,’ she once answered a third party who’d asked what I did for a living.
In fact, I was an equities analyst for M——, a merchant bank with an enormous brokerage operation. The analyst business, at the time of our displacement to the hotel, had started to lose some of its sheen, certainly as the source of exaggerated status for some of its practitioners; and soon afterwards, in fact, our line of work became mildly infamous. Anyone familiar with the financial news of the last few years, or indeed the front page of the New York Post, may remember the scandals that exposed certain practices of stock tipping, and I imagine the names Jack B. Grubman and Henry Blodget still ring bells in the minds of a number of so-called ordinary investors. I wasn’t personally involved in these controversies. Blodget and Grubman worked in telecommunications and technology; I analysed large-cap oil and gas stocks, and nobody outside the business knew who I was. Inside the business, I had the beginnings of a reputation as a guru: on the Friday of the week Rachel declared her intent to leave for London, Institutional Investor ranked me number four in my sector – a huge six spots up from the year before. To mark this accolade, I was taken to a bar in Midtown by some people from the office: my secretary, who left after one drink; a couple of energy analysts named Appleby and Rivera; and a few sales guys. My colleagues were both pleased and displeased with my achievement. On the one hand it was a feather in the bank’s hat, which vicariously sat on their heads; on the other hand the feather was ultimately lodged in my hatband – and the supply of feathers, and the monetary rewards that went with them, were not infinite. ‘I hate drinking this shit,’ Rivera told me as he emptied into his glass the fifth bottle of champagne I’d bought, ‘but seeing as you’ll be getting most of my yearend fucking bonus, it gives me satisfaction on a wealth-redistribution basis.’
‘You’re a socialist, Rivera,’ Appleby said, ordering another bottle with a tilt of thumb to mouth. ‘That explains a lot.’
‘Hey Rivera, how’s the e-mail?’
Rivera was involved in an obscure battle to keep his office e-mail address unchanged. Appleby said, ‘He’s right to stand his ground. Goddamn it, he’s a brand. Have you registered yourself down at the trademarks bureau yet, Rivera?’
‘Register this,’ Rivera said, giving him the finger.
‘Hey, Behar says he’s going to tell the funniest joke he ever heard.’
‘Tell the joke, Behar.’
‘I said I’m not going to tell it,’ Behar said slyly. ‘It’s offensive.’
There was laughter. ‘You can describe the joke to us without telling it,’ Appleby counselled Behar.
‘It’s the nigger-cock joke,’ Behar said. ‘It’s hard to describe.’
‘Just describe it, bitch.’
‘So the Queen’s on Password,’ Behar said. ‘And the password is “nigger-cock”.’
‘Somebody tell Hans about Password.’
‘Somebody tell Hans about nigger-cock.’
‘So the Queen says’ – here Behar went into a twittering Englishwoman’s voice – ‘“Is it edible?’”
Rivera said, ‘Jesus, Hans, what’s going on?’
Panicking, I had suddenly lurched to my feet. I said, ‘I’ve got to go. You guys keep going.’ I gave Rivera my credit card.
He said, stepping away from the others,