Netherland (15 page)

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.

Carl waited until we’d reached downtown Manhattan before speaking up. He rubbed the windshield. “Well,” he said, “I guess you have got to persist.” He cried out with laughter.

There was no movement in my marriage, either; but, flying on Google’s satellite function, night after night I surreptitiously traveled to England. Starting with a hybrid map of the United States, I moved the navigation box across the north Atlantic and began my fall from the stratosphere: successively, into a brown and beige and greenish Europe bounded by Wuppertal, Groningen, Leeds, Caen (the Netherlands is gallant from this altitude, its streamer of northern isles giving the impression of a land steaming seaward); that part of England between Grantham and Yeovil; that part between Bedford and Brighton; and then Greater London, its north and south pieces, jigsawed by the Thames, never quite interlocking. From the central maze of mustard roads I followed the river southwest into Putney, zoomed in between the Lower and Upper Richmond Roads, and, with the image purely photographic, descended finally on Landford Road. It was always a clear and beautiful day—and wintry, if I correctly recall, with the trees pale brown and the shadows long. From my balloonist’s vantage point, aloft at a few hundred meters, the scene was depthless. My son’s dormer was visible, and the blue inflated pool and the red BMW; but there was no way to see more, or deeper. I was stuck.

Coincidentally, whenever I actually arrived in London I’d be treated as though I’d survived a rocket trip from Mars. “I’m beat,” I’d admit over dinner, and Rachel’s parents would bob their heads in assent and mention the arduousness of my journey and—my cue to head upstairs to Jake’s room—jetlag. Everyone was grateful for jetlag. I slept with Jake, our mismatched backs pressed together, until I felt small hands heaving at my shoulder and a boy’s serious voice informing me, “Daddy, wake up, it’s morning time.” At breakfast I’d express regret about my early bedtime. “Jetlag,” somebody would wisely say.

Often I did not go to sleep. I lay with an arm in the space beneath Jake’s neck, feeling him warm up and drop into fast, whispered breathing. I’d get out of bed and go to the window. The rear of the Boltons’ house was separated by gardens from the nearest road, but there was a gap in the vegetation through which passing cars, themselves out of sight, animated fleeting trapezoids of light on the high brick wall of an adjoining property. I’d count off four or five such cartoons and then go back into bed and lie still, listening in like a spy on the conversation that carried up from downstairs along with the clatter of dishes and bursts of television music. I was hunting for clues about Rachel’s life. Within six months of returning to England she’d taken a job as a lawyer for an NGO concerned with the welfare of asylum seekers. Consequently she worked civilized hours that permitted her to take lunchtime strolls around Clerkenwell, which she declared to be much changed. This material aside, I had very little information about her. All we talked of, really, was our son: of his white-blond hair, streaked now with browns and golds and growing long, of his friends at nursery school, of his riveting toddler’s doings. And, now that the invasion of Iraq had actually taken place, the subject of politics was dropped and with it a connective friction. We rubbed along without touching. Of what one might suppose to be a crucial question of fact—the question of other men—I had no knowledge and did not dare make inquiries. The biggest, most salient questions—What was she thinking? What was she feeling?—were likewise beyond me. The very idea that one’s feelings could give shape to one’s life had become an odd one.

There came a moment, not long after the Danielle episode and in the first stimuli of spring, when I was taken by lightheaded yearning for an interlude of togetherness, a time-out, as it were, during which my still-wife and I might lie together in a Four Seasons suite, say, and work idly through a complimentary fruit basket and fuck at leisure and, most important, have hours-long, disinterested, beans-spilling, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may conversations in which we’d examine each other’s unknown nooks and crannies in the best of humor and faith. It’s possible that this fantasy originated in a revelation Rachel made one Saturday when she and Jake and I were shopping in Sainsbury’s. She’d piled multiple cartons of soymilk into the cart, and this puzzled me.