Excerpting
“I’m not the dancing kind,” I said. “You’ve always known that.”
“You danced at our wedding,” she answered immediately. “You were fine. You did that little shuffle thing with your feet.”
“She looked stricken; and I suppose, since I am now fully aware, thanks to our figuratively speaking marriage counselor, that the steamboat of marriage must be fed incessantly with the coals of communication, that I should have explained to my wife that I came from Holland, where I rarely saw dancing, and indeed that I’d been a little amazed to see how young Englishmen threw themselves around to music, dancing even with other men, and that this abandon was alien to me and that, perhaps, she might for this reason wish to bear with me. But I said nothing, thinking the matter inconsequential. It would certainly have astonished me to learn that years later I would look back on this episode and ask myself if it represented a so-called fork in the road – which in turn led me to drunkenly wonder if the course of a relationship of love was truly explicable in terms of right turns and wrong turns, and if so whether it was possible to backtrack to that split where it all went wrong, or if in fact it was the case that we are all doomed to walk in a forest in which all paths lead one equally astray, there being no end to the forest, an inquiry whose very uselessness led to another spasm of wayward contemplation…”
- an excerpt from “Netherland” by Joseph O’Neill
