Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

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.