Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

All of which may explain why I began to dream in all seriousness of a stadium, and black and brown and even a few white faces crowded in bleachers, and Chuck and me laughing over drinks in the members’ enclosure and waving to people we know, and stiff flags on the pavilion roof, and fresh white sight-screens, and the captains in blazers looking up at a quarter spinning in the air, and a stadium-wide flutter of expectancy as the two umpires walk onto the turf square and its omelette-colored batting track, whereupon, with clouds scrambling in from the west, there is a roar as the cricket stars trot down the pavilion steps onto this impossible grass field in America, and everything is suddenly clear, and I am at last naturalized.

I’M STILL WORKING AT M—. IT WAS SURPRISINGLY uncomplicated to arrange for a transfer to London and to start up again, this time in a corner office that permits me, depending on which way I spin my chair, to admire St. Paul’s Cathedral or the Gherkin.

Of course, it felt strange to be back. In the first week I was sitting at one of the long tables that litter the bank’s cafeteria — we lunch in rows, like monks — when I noticed a familiar-seeming face a few spots away. I was almost through with my lunch before I realized, with a little shock, that this was the same S.V.P. who’d ominously stepped into my cubicle half a decade before.

I felt a strong impulse to approach him, say something about our shared exilic lot. But what to say, exactly? I was thinking it over when he got up and left.

Since then I’ve seen him around quite regularly — he’s with the M-and-A crowd and every now and then puts his name to a fairness opinion — but in two years I have not spoken to him. I still haven’t figured out what there might be to say.

My work these days is directed at the activity in and around the Caspian Sea: on the map on my office wall, black stars stand for Astrakhan and Aktau and Ashgabat. Last year, the bank ordered a promising young analyst, Cardozo, to fly over and help me grow the operation. Cardozo, from New York out of Parsippany, New Jersey, loves it here. He has a flat in Chelsea and a girlfriend from Worcestershire who has forgiven him his exotic name. He wears pink shirts with pink silk cuff links. He twirls a tightly furled brolly on sunny days. His pinstripes grow bolder and bolder. I wouldn’t be amazed to see a signet ring turn up on his pinkie.

I understand something about what’s going on with Cardozo, because when I arrived in London in my twenties I too felt like a performing extra. There was something marvelous about the thousands of men in dark suits daily swarming down Lombard Street — I even remember a bowler hat — and something decidedly romantic about the leftover twinkle of empire that went from Threadneedle Street to the Aldwych to Piccadilly and, like tardy starlight, perpetrated a deception of time. At Eaton Place, in drizzle, I half expected to run into Richard Bellamy, MP; and when I say that in Berkeley Square I once listened for a nightingale, I’m not joking.

But nobody here holds on to such notions for very long. The rain soon becomes emblematic. The double-deckers lose their elephants’ charm. London is what it is. In spite of a fresh emphasis on architecture and an influx of can-do Polish plumbers, in spite, too, of the Manhattanish importance lately attached to coffee and sushi and farmers’ markets, in spite even of the disturbance of 7/7—a frightening but not a disorienting occurrence, it turns out — Londoners remain in the business of rowing their boats gently down the stream. Unchanged, accordingly, is the general down-the-hatch, who-are-we-fooling lightheartedness that’s aimed at shrinking the significance of our attainments and our doom, and contributes, I’ve speculated, to the bizarrely premature crystallization of lives here, where men and women past the age of forty, in some cases even the age of thirty, may easily be regarded as over the hill and entitled to an essentially retrospective idea of themselves; whereas in New York self hood’s hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks: that you might have no climbing boots to hand was beside the point. As to what this point actually was, I can only say that it involved wistfulness. An example: one lunchtime, Cardozo, mulling over popping the question to his Worcestershire girlfriend, points out a beautiful woman in the street. “I’ll no longer be able to go up to her and ask her out,” he says, sounding dazed. Plainly the logical response is to inquire of Cardozo exactly when was the last time (a) he asked out a girl on the street, and (b) she said yes, and (c) he and she went on to greater things; and in this way bring home to him that he’s being a dummy. I say no such thing, however. We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one’s life?

On a recent Friday, Cardozo and I knock off work early and walk in the direction of the river. It is an English summer’s evening of the best sort, in which the day cloudlessly slips past nine o’clock and the price of a barrel of oil, scandalously ticking over in the seventies, seems to have not the slightest bearing on the world. The lanes south of Ludgate Hill are crowded with happy gangs of drinkers, and at Blackfriars we decide to stop for a quick one. An interval of this kind is most natural in this unwieldy city, where to be in one’s home is, in terms of society, more or less to be like the fellow washed up on the little island with the single palm tree.

Cardozo and I take our drinks outside and stand around in the sunlight and the fumes. We get on very well. He coins flattering, if ridiculous, professional nicknames for me (the Dopester, the Ax) and in return I clue him in on the little tricks that go into holding oneself out as an augur in the matter of world affairs, which more than ever is what our line of work requires. I seem to have an aptitude for the act: voice a firsthand opinion about the kebabs of Baku and people will buy almost anything you follow up with; and if, at a dinner party, I talk about West Texas intermediate crude or the disgustingness of the Volga, or drop the name Turkmenbashy (the man, I add at that moment, who renamed January after himself), even my wife’s ears will prick up. But there is usually no call for my show of expertise. At the said dinner party — and so much, in this city, revolves around these drinky, smoky, chronic get-togethers of friends who have known one another since college, if not school, days — the talk invariably concerns itself with ancient running jokes or the doings of old so-and-so, whom everybody except me knows, and I’m only able to chime in when the topic switches to, say, the traffic, which everybody bitterly agrees is worse than ever and not at all relieved by the private buses that have been released like cattle onto the London streets or indeed by the congestion charge, and then of course there is the galling and wondrous fact that one’s taxi home will cost more than a flight to Italy — an observation that quickly leads to the subject of holidays. Nowadays I spend a lot of time discussing gîtes, and plages, and ruins. I don’t remember anyone in New York talking about his vacation for longer than a minute.

This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with weighing the felicities of Brittany against those of Normandy. But in London, it must be recognized, escape — to the country, to warmer climes, to the pub — is a great, bittersweet theme. Sometimes this results in a discussion of New York City, in which case I’m quite happy to listen to somebody report excitedly on the Chrysler Building or the jazz riches of the Village or the distinctive largeness of experience that a simple walk down a Manhattan street can summon. Here, too, my opinion is rarely sought. Although it’s not a secret that I lived for some time in the city in question, I’m not accorded any unusual authority. This isn’t because I’ve been back for a while but, rather, because I’m precluded by nationality from commenting on any place other than Holland — one of those parochialisms, I am pissed off to rediscover, that remind me that as a foreign person I’m essentially of some mildly buffoonish interest to the English and deprived, certainly, of the nativity New York encourages even its most fleeting visitor to imagine for himself. And it’s true: my secret, almost shameful feeling is that I am out of New York — that New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin. It may be that this is what I like best about Cardozo, that he accords me the status of fellow émigré. “Pedro,” he murmurs as he reads the baseball reports in the Herald Tribune, rightly trusting that he need say nothing more.