handled it was quite something. And that was some speech you gave.”
“Well, I’ve had practice,” Chuck said, smiling at his friend.
Pushing at his chest, the woman said, “Practice making speeches or practice with life-and-death situations?”
“Both,” Chuck said. They laughed together, and of course it struck me that they made an unusual couple: she, American and white and petite and fair-haired; he, a portly immigrant a decade older and very dark—like Coca-Cola, he would say. His coloring came from his mother’s family, which originated in the south of India somewhere—Madras, was Chuck’s suspicion. He was a descendant of indentured laborers and had little firm information about such things.
An event for antique sailing ships was taking place in the bay. Schooners, their canvas hardly distended in the still air, clustered around and beyond Ellis Island. “Don’t you just love this ferry ride?” Chuck’s girlfriend said. We slipped past one of the ships, a clutter of masts and ropes and sails, and she and Chuck joined other passengers in exchanging waves with its crew. Chuck said, “See that sail there? That triangular sail right at the very top? That’s the skyscraper. Unless it’s the moonsail. Moonsail or skyscraper, one of the two.”
“You’re an expert on boats, now?” his girlfriend said. “Is there anything you don’t know about? OK, smarty-pants, which one is the jolly jumper? Or the mizzen. Show me a mizzen, if you’re so smart.”
“You’re a mizzen,” Chuck said, fastening his arm around her. “You’re my mizzen.”
The ferry slowed down as we approached Manhattan. In the shade of the huddled towers, the water was the color of a plum. Passengers emerged from the ferry lounge and began to fill up the deck. Banging against the wooden bumpers of the terminal, the ship came to a stop. Everybody disembarked as a swarm into the cavernous terminal, so that I, toting my cricketer’s coffin, became separated from Chuck and his girlfriend. It was only when I’d descended the ramp leading out of the terminal that I saw them again, walking hand in hand in the direction of Battery Park.
I found a taxi and took it straight home. I was tired. As for Chuck, even though he interested me, he was older than me by almost twenty years, and my prejudices confined him, this oddball umpiring orator, to my exotic cricketing circle, which made no intersection with the circumstances of my everyday life.
T hose circumstances were, I should say, unbearable. Almost a year had passed since my wife’s announcement that she was leaving New York and returning to London with Jake. This took place one October night as we lay next to each other in bed on the ninth floor of the Hotel Chelsea. We’d been holed up in there since mid-September, staying on in a kind of paralysis even after we’d received permission from the authorities to return to our loft in Tribeca. Our hotel apartment had two bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a view of the tip of the Empire State Building. It also had extraordinary acoustics: in the hush of the small hours, a goods truck smashing into a pothole sounded like an explosion, and the fantastic howl of a passing motorbike once caused Rachel to vomit with terror. Around the clock, ambulances sped eastward on West Twenty-third Street with a sobbing escort of police motorcycles. Sometimes I confused the cries of the sirens with my son’s nighttime cries. I would leap out of bed and go to his bedroom and helplessly kiss him, even though my rough face sometimes woke him and I’d have to stay with him and rub his tiny rigid back until he fell asleep once more. Afterward I slipped out onto the balcony and stood there like a sentry. The pallor of the so-called hours of darkness was remarkable. Directly to the north of the hotel, a succession of cross streets glowed as if each held a dawn. The taillights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit