Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

Afterward, as was usual, Chuck drove me to wherever it was I was playing that day — Baisley Pond Park, perhaps, or Fort Tilden Park, or Kissena Corridor Park, or Sound View Park. Our field and those fields were in one continuum of heat and greenness.

Istrained the summer through a strainer that allowed only the collection of cricket. Everything else ran away. I cut back on my trips to England, inventing excuses that were easily accepted by Rachel. Whenever possible I took my lunch in Bryant Park, because in Bryant Park I could lie down on grass and inhale the scent of cricket, and look up at the sky and see a cricketer’s blue sky, and close my eyes and feel on my skin the heat that coats a fielder. Not once did I think about the park as the place, say, where my wife and I watched an open-air screening of North by Northwest with a cashmere blanket spread out beneath us, and the tiny baby asleep on the blanket, and wine, and food bought on the hoof at a Fifth Avenue deli, penned in by summer foliage and fine heaps of man-made lights and, as darkness fell and Cary Grant wandered into the Plaza, only the boldest and most select stars.

Work, too, went down the drain. I remember one weighty evening in El Paso. My hosts had gone to a lot of trouble. Nobody expressly said so, but a big brokerage deal was on the line. When the client asked me to stay for an extra day, I almost laughed. The next day was a Saturday. There was a cricket field to be tended in the morning and a cricket match to be played in the afternoon.

Nobody understands better than I that this was a strange and irresponsible direction in which to take one’s life. But I’m reporting what happened.

That season, 2003, I invariably played both days of the weekend — played in more matches, it may be, than anyone else at my club. My status grew with my visibility. I was offered, and I accepted, a position on the club’s fund-raising committee and immediately raised a record-shattering five thousand dollars by writing a check I pretended to have squeezed out of some crazy Indian guys at work. There were Indian guys at work but they weren’t crazy, and even if they had been crazy I wouldn’t have involved them in this part of my life, whose separateness was part of its preciousness. I became so embedded in the proceedings of the club, so transparently upstanding and unavoidable a presence, that by the end of the summer I had come under consideration — so I was told — for the position of suitor to one of the Guyanese member’s nieces. “Why not?” my informant said. “We know you.” He was kidding, yes, but also paying me a compliment.

Of course, he didn’t know me, just as I didn’t know him. It was rare for club members to have dealings that went beyond the game we played. We didn’t want to have any such dealings. When I accidentally ran into one of the guys working a till at a gas station on Fourteenth Street, there was awkwardness beneath the slapping of hands.

Beneath that, though, one might find kindness. One day our leg-spinner, Shiv, turned up drunk for a match. In a colloquy with the captain he revealed that his wife of ten years had left him for another man. We made sure that someone was with him in his empty house that night and all the nights until the following Saturday. That Wednesday I left work and rode a PATH train to Jersey City and from there rode a money-up-front taxi to Shiv’s house. Another guy from the club was already on the spot, cooking up a curry. The three of us ate together. When the cook went home to his family, I stayed on with Shiv. We watched television.

At a certain moment I asked Shiv if I could crash at his place. “I’m too tired to head back,” I said. He nodded, looking away. He knew what I was offering.

I sometimes wondered why the respect of these men mattered so much to me — mattered more, at the time, than anyone else’s respect. After that night with Shiv, I thought I had the answer to my question: these people, who in themselves were no better or worse than average, mattered because they happened to be the ones, should anything happen to me, whom I could prevail on to look after me as Shiv had been looked after. It was only after the fact that I figured out they’d already been looking after me.

Chuck merged, in my mind, with these other West Indians and Asians I played with, and I suppose their innocence became confused with his innocence, and his numbers game with the one we played on a field. There was a physical merger, too. Chuck loved to watch cricket and watched us whenever he could, keeping an eye on the play as he made phone calls. Now that he had quit umpiring, he became a follower of the team and assumed the right of a follower to give advice. One afternoon, after I’d struggled as usual to hit the ball through the outfield, he said to me, “Hans, you’ve got to hit the thing in the air. How else are you going to get runs? This is America. Hit the ball in the air, man.”

I tore open my pads’ Velcro straps and tossed the pads into my bag. “It’s not how I bat,” I said.

The last league game of the season was played on August’s first Sunday. It was hot, we were playing Cosmos CC, and we batted second. Four wickets fell and I was the next man in. I pulled a plastic chair into the shade of a tree and sat alone, bareheaded and sweating. I fell into that state of self-absorption that afflicts the waiting batsman as he studies the bowling for signs of cunning and untoward movement and, trying to recall what it means to bat, trying to make knowledge out of memory, replays in his mind bygone shots splendid and shaming. The latter predominated: in spite of the many matches I’d played that season, I’d never found myself in that numinous state of efficiency we evoke with a single casual word, “form.” There was a handful of shots I could look back on with pleasure — a certain flick off the legs, a drive that streaked through extra cover for four — but the rest, all the wafts and dishonorable pokes and thick and thin edges, was rubbish beneath recollection.

And on this day, when we were chasing almost two hundred fifty runs, a big target that required quick scoring on an outfield made especially sluggish by a wet summer, I was once again confronted by the seemingly irresolvable conflict between, on the one hand, my sense of an innings as a chanceless progression of orthodox shots — impossible under local conditions — and, on the other hand, the indigenous notion of batting as a gamble of hitting out. There are hornier dilemmas a man can face; but there was more to batting than the issue of scoring runs. There was the issue of self-measurement. For what was an innings if not a singular opportunity to face down, by dint of effort and skill and self-mastery, the variable world?

A cry went up in the field. A stump lay stricken on the ground. I lowered my helmet over my head and walked out.

“Go deep, Hans! Go deep!” somebody shouted from the boundary as I chalked my guard on the mat. The voice was Chuck’s. “Go deep!” he shouted again, demonstrating the shot with a swinging arm.

I took stock of my situation. There was the usual plotting afoot between the bowler and his captain, who was making adjustments to his field, moving one fellow a few paces to his right, bringing another in to a close catching position. Finally the traps were set and the wicket-keeper slapped his gloves and crouched behind the stumps. I settled into my stance.

The bowler, a specialist in fizzing Chinamen and thus a very rare specimen, ran up and turned his arm. I blocked the first two balls.

“Do it now!” Chuck called. “Do it now, Hans!”

When the third ball came looping down toward my legs, something unprecedented happened. Following the spin, I executed an unsightly, crooked heave: the ball flew high into the trees, for six. A huge cheer went up. The next ball, I repeated the stroke with a still freer swing. The ball flew even higher, clearing the sweetgums: there were shouts of “Watch it!” and “Heads!” as it bounced wildly in the tennis courts. I thought I was dreaming. What happened after that — I was soon out, and in the end we were defeated — ultimately didn’t count. What counted, after my disappointment about the match result had waned and the last beers had been drunk and the extra-hot Sri Lankan chicken curry had been finished and the matting had been rolled back up and stuffed into its box and I found myself, once again, in the privacy of my ferry ride, what counted was that I’d done it. I’d hit the ball in the air like an American cricketer; and I’d done so without injury to my sense of myself. On the contrary, I felt great. And Chuck had seen it happen and, as much as he could have, had prompted it.