Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  We were once again making love when Danielle whispered something I didn’t follow. “I want you to be a gentleman again,” she whispered. “Will you do that for me?”

  I must have signaled some agreement to this incomprehensible request, because she slipped off the bed and crouched to rummage in the clothes heaped on the floor—I wasn’t watching—and after a few seconds came back to me with refreshed spiritedness. Then she breathed into my ear the assertion, “Remember, I trust you,” and produced with a little jingle the belt she’d removed from my trousers. I took the belt, a length of black leather that was at once familiar and strange, and saw Danielle lying facedown on the bed, and began to perform the act I understood her to need. Every lash was answered by a small moan. If this gave me some unusual satisfaction, I can’t remember it now. I do recall a tunneler’s anxiety as to where and when it would all end, and that my arm began to tire, and that eventually, as I worked at beating this woman across the back, and the buttocks, and the trembling hams, I looked to the window for some kind of relief and saw the lights of distant apartments mingled in a reflection of the room. I was not shocked by what I saw—a pale white hitting a pale black—but I did of course ask myself what had happened, how it could be that I should find myself living in a hotel in a country where there was no one to remember me, attacking a woman who’d boomeranged in from a time I could not claim as my own. I recall, also, trying to shrug off a sharp new sadness that I’m only now able to identify without tentativeness, which is to say, the sadness produced when the mirroring world no longer offers a surface in which one may recognize one’s true likeness.

  But, as I’ve said, I wasn’t shocked. The shock came later, when Danielle failed to respond to the two telephone messages I left for her.

  It occurred to me one day that spring had arrived. I was steering my driving instructor’s old Buick through the West Village when I noticed flowers splashing color around the foot of a tree. An idea came to me. I asked Carl, my instructor—this was at the beginning of a two-hour lesson, the first of three I’d booked in preparation for my driving test—if we might drive to Staten Island.

  “Fine by me,” Carl said doubtfully.

  Carl was a fastidious Guyanese with polished leather shoes and a gray tweed jacket he never wore but instead hung on a hook over the backseat. “Driving here tricky,” he warned me at the outset. This aside, I discovered, he was reluctant to divulge any specific information relating to the motoring practices of New York. He was, however, keen to discuss his ongoing attempt to secure an appointment at the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services for a fingerprinting session: this was required, he reminded me, of all applicants for permanent resident alien status. Carl told me, as we headed at a lawful speed down the BQE, that he had been waiting two years to have his fingerprints taken. “They lost the file,” Carl said. “One day they say it in Texas, the next day they say it in Misery.”

  “Misery?” I said.

  “Misery,” Carl repeated. He hissed. “I do not like that place. I do not like it one bit.”

  I understood him to be referring, here, not to Missouri but to the bureau’s headquarters at Federal Plaza. I’d been there myself earlier that month in order to cure the typographical error on my green card. In the dim, windy early morning I joined the queue of aliens in a cement basin at the foot of the tower. It was a cold wait. Clouds like rats ran across the sky. At last a man in a uniform appeared and goonishly scribbled a light-sensitive mark on the hand each of us offered him, as if we were entering a cheap nightclub—and indeed, within the jurisdiction of the federal building a negative dance was the rage, one which prohibited all blamelessly instinctive movement: in the course of that morning I saw one man removed from the building for looking out of the windows, another for leaning against the heating units, another for taking a telephone call. I duly received a corrected green card, which enabled me to return to the DMV to collect my learner permit, which left, as officialdom’s final hurdle between me and a driving test, a compulsory presentation on road safety. This turned out to be a four-hour lock-in at a Fourteenth Street basement with ridiculously small classroom desks, behind which the students—we were nearly all foreigners deep into adulthood—sat like imbecilic giants. Our lecturer, a destroyed-looking man in his sixties, appeared apologetically before us, and I am certain that a compassionate understanding tacitly arose among the students that we should do everything to assist this individual, an agreeable and no doubt clever man whose life had plainly come to some kind of ruin. Accordingly we were a well-behaved and reasonably responsive class and, an hour or so later, did our best to abide by his request not to sleep during the screening of two films, the first concerning the impossibility of driving safely when under the influence of drugs or drink, the second concerning the tremendous dangers of night driving. The lights were switched off, a screen was lowered, and the basement was transformed into a crappy bioscope. Unlike many of the others, I managed to stay awake; and could not help thinking, as I endured an ominous dramatization of the loss of vision produced by alcohol and by nightfall and the disastrous consequences thereof, of my father’s life ending in a smashup presumably just like those presented on the screen, and of the fact, unconsidered by me before, that on top of everything else his early death had given an unfairly morganatic quality to his marriage: he had been posthumously robbed, in his son’s sentiments, of a ranking equal to that of his wife. It’s our lucky day, my ancestor apparently used to say with that Dutch love of slipping into English phrases. I saw there would come a point when Jake would ask me about his paternal grandparents and it would fall to me to repeat just such scraps relating to my father, and to speak to him about his grandmother and perhaps even her late and only brother, Jake’s great-uncle Willem, whom I never knew, and with such small gusts of facts assist in the dispersion of his world’s delicious indistinctness—delicious, at least, in retrospect. For my comings and goings were frightening mysteries to my three-year-old son. My arrival, however closely anticipated, startled him; and from our first moment together he would be filled with a dread of my departure, which he could not comprehend or situate in time. He feared that any minute I might be gone; and always the thing he most feared would come to pass.

  Carl and I took the top deck of the Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island. A crosswind blew strongly as we soared over the brown water of the Narrows. I wanted to glance left, beyond the towers of Coney Island, because the ocean when glimpsed from New York City is quite something, a scarcely believable slab of otherness; but Carl, sitting to my right, continued to demand my attention.

  “Two years they keep me waiting,” he said once more. “And my lawyer say maybe two years after that.”

  “I guess you have to persist,” I said, hoping to bring an end to the topic.

  He grinned inexplicably. “Yes, that’s what I have to do. Persist.” The grin grew even more hilarious. “I have to persist.”

  At Staten Island I negotiated the unruly toll plaza and drove up the slip road to Clove Road, where I turned right and continued up past the Silver Lake Golf Course to Bard Avenue. Staten Island is hilly, and Bard climbs and descends a hill, and at the bottom of the hill is Walker Park. There I stopped the Buick and got out alone.

  My immediate purpose was to find out what had happened to the daffodil bulbs that I and a few other volunteers from the cricket club had buried the previous November along a section of the park’s edge. The exercise made no practical difference to the club, since the flowers would bloom and go to ground before our own season got fully under way; but it was felt that an act of elective stewardship would strengthen our claim on the park, a claim which in spite of its longevity we regarded, I believe correctly, as always under threat from unfriendly forces.

  Green leaf blades were indeed rising out of the loose earth, and in one or two sunlit places a stem carried a packaged flower bud. For a while I inspected them: botanical dummy that I am, I could hardly believe my eyes. Then, surrendering to
another impulse, I walked over mucky grass to the strip of clay at the heart of the field. The clay, altogether battered, was pocked with pools and footprints. Wood fragments were buried in it. Very soon, in early April, our club secretary would pick up two Mexican day laborers from a street corner and pay them each a hundred bucks plus tip to heave picks and shovels and spread fresh clay, and then the heavy roller that had wintered in chains by the clubhouse would be released and dragged out and pushed slowly over the clay, pressing out moisture and flattening the surface, though not completely: you preserved the very slight convexity needed for the drainage of rainwater. Tufts of grass growing in the clay would be pulled up by hand and countless tiny surfacing stones and pieces of grit would be lightly raked away: then, given a few days of baking sun, you had a track fit for batting on and bowling on. With luck, the parks department would seed the barer parts of the field, and on a dry spring day a man on a lawn mower would wander the acreage lengthwise and trail a faint, fresh swath of grass and clover. By this time of year, the club’s Annual General Meeting, convened in the clubhouse, will have already taken place. The club officers—president, treasurer, club secretary, first and second vice-presidents, fixtures secretary, captain, vice-captain, friendly captains—have been elected by those present and those voting by proxy, and the election results have been noted in the minutes of the meeting, which may or may not record the more truculent points of order raised by members fueled by midday shots of rum. In the second week of April, after all the winter’s talking and forward planning and conjecture; after perhaps a Saturday–Sunday tour to Florida, whose lucky cricketers play year round; after all the phone calls and the club committee meetings and the preparatory buying and cleaning of whites and bats; after all of our solitary prefigurative frenzies; after the clocks have jumped forward by an hour; after all these things, the season will actually be upon us. Each of us is a year older. Throwing a ball is harder than we remember, as is the act of turning one’s shoulder to bowl a ball. The ball itself feels very hard: skyers struck in catching practice are a little frightening. Bats that were light and wandlike when picked up fantastically during the off-season are now heavy and spadelike. Running between the wickets leaves us breathless. Trotting and bending down after a moving ball hurts body parts we’d thought renewed by months of rest. We have not succeeded, we discover, in imagining out of existence cricket’s difficulty. Never mind. We are determined to make a clean try at things. We show in the field like flares.

  I’ve heard that social scientists like to explain such a scene—a patch of America sprinkled with the foreign-born strangely at play—in terms of the immigrant’s quest for subcommunities. How true this is: we’re all far away from Tipperary, and clubbing together mitigates this unfair fact. But surely everyone can also testify to another, less reckonable kind of homesickness, one having to do with unsettlements that cannot be located in spaces of geography or history; and accordingly it’s my belief that the communal, contractual phenomenon of New York cricket is underwritten, there where the print is finest, by the same agglomeration of unspeakable individual longings that underwrites cricket played anywhere—longings concerned with horizons and potentials sighted or hallucinated and in any event lost long ago, tantalisms that touch on the undoing of losses too private and reprehensible to be acknowledged to oneself, let alone to others. I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice.

  “We better get going,” Carl said. He had materialized at my shoulder. “The traffic going to be getting heavy.”

  He was right; we got caught up in a jam on the BQE beneath Brooklyn Heights. It didn’t matter. The clouds in motion over the harbor had left a pink door ajar and surface portions of Manhattan had prettily caught the light, and it appeared to my gaping eyes as if a girlish island moved toward bright sisterly elements.

  I was still receptive, apparently, to certain gifts. And I began, in my second Chelsea spring, to take a vague sauntering interest in my neighborhood, where the morning sun hung over the Masonic headquarters on Sixth Avenue with such brilliance that one’s eyes were forced downward into a scrutiny of the sidewalk, itself grained brightly as beach sand and spotted with glossy disks of flattened chewing gum. The blind people were now ubiquitous. Muscular gay strollers were abroad in numbers, and the women of New York, saluting taxis in the middle of the street, reacquired their air of intelligent libidinousness. Vagrants were free to leave their shelters and, tugging shopping trolleys loaded with junk—including, in the case of one symbolically minded old boy, a battered door—to camp out on warmed concrete. I was particularly taken, now that I dwell on these things, by the apparition, once or twice a week, of a fellow in his seventies who fished in the street. He was an employee of the fishing tackle store located beneath the hotel, and from time to time he waded into a bilious torrent of taxis to test fly rods. Always he wore suspenders and khaki trousers and smoked a cigarillo. When he flicked the rod—“This here is a four-piece Redington with a very fast action. It’s a hell of a weapon,” he once explained to me—it became possible, in the mild hypnosis induced by the line’s recurrent flight, to envision West Twenty-third Street as a trout river. The residents of the Hotel Chelsea also stirred. The angel, hitherto trapped indoors by the cold, went out and about in new wings and created a mildly christophanous sensation. March Madness lurched to its climax: the betting activities of the hotel staff assumed fresh vigor and complexity. Soon afterward, in April and May, there was the peculiar seasonal matter of bodies surfacing in the waters of New York—a question of springtime currents and water temperature, according to the Times. The bodies of four drowned boys came out of Long Island Sound. It was reported, too, that the corpse of a Russian woman had been found in the East River under the pier of the Water’s Edge Restaurant on Long Island City. She’d vanished in March while walking her father’s cocker spaniel. The cocker spaniel had itself gone missing, so when a headless dog washed up near the Throgs Neck Bridge, people reasoned that this corpse might belong to the Russian woman’s dog; but the headless dog turned out to be not a spaniel but a Maltese, or perhaps a poodle. On television, dark Baghdad glittered with American bombs. The war started. The baseball season came into view.

  Personally, things remained as they were. I failed my driving test. On the morning in question, Carl showed up in a car I’d never seen before, a 1990 Oldsmobile with a gearshift sprouting from the steering column—“The Buick being fixed,” he said—and things went downhill from there. We drove in rain to Red Hook, a rotten waterfront district of trucks, potholes, faded road markings, reckless pedestrians. “Good morning, ma’am,” I said to the examiner as she rolled into the passenger seat. She made no reply and, humming to herself in way that struck me as psychotic, began tapping my details into a handheld computer. On her lap, I saw, a portfolio was opened to a page of the Bible and a page of the traffic regulations booklet. “Drive into traffic,” the woman said. Following her instructions, I went halfway around the block. I executed an uneventful U-turn. The examiner sighed and tittered and tapped on the computer screen with a plastic stylus. “Turn left,” she said—and I understood she’d just directed me back to the starting point. I said, “You don’t want me to park?” We came to a final stop. The tapping ended and a scrolled ticket emerged from the machine. According to this document, in the course of driving around one block I had shown poor judgment approaching or at intersections; turned wide left; when changing lanes, failed to adequately observe or use caution; failed to yield to a pedestrian; failed to anticipate potential hazards; failed to exercise adequate vehicle control, viz., poor engine acceleration, abrupt braking, and poor use of gears. I had, in short, failed over and over and over again.