Read Online Netherland by Joseph O'Neill - Free Book Online Page A

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