Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

I was swimming at the foot of a mountain. From thousands of feet in the air the mountain plunged directly into the water and sank into an endless dimness beneath me.

Like a chump in a horror movie, I slowly turned around. Confronting me was the vast green gloom of the open sea.

In a panic I bolted back to the cove.

“Catch anything?” Floris asked. I shook my head shamefully. “No problem, jongen, ” Floris said. “Gianni and I got lucky.”

The killed fish was cooked over a campfire and seasoned with thyme growing wild in the pine forest. Afterward it was time to sleep. The men lay down under the pines. The most comfortable sleeping berth, in the boat, was reserved for me.

What happened next, on the little wooden boat, was what came back to me on the synagogue roof — and what I once told Rachel about, with the result that she fell in love with me.

She revealed this in the week after Jake was born. We were up in the middle of the night. Jake was having trouble falling asleep. I held him in my arms.

“Do you want to know exactly when I fell in love with you?” Rachel said.

“Yes,” I said. I wanted to know about the moment my wife fell in love with me.

“In that hotel in Cornwall. The Something Inn.”

“The Shipwrecker’s Arms,” I said. I could not forget the name and what it called before the imagination: treacherous lights on the land, the salvage of goods at the expense of the drowned.

My wife, on the point of sleep, murmured, “Remember when you told me about being in that boat at night, when you were little? That’s when I fell in love with you. When you told me that story. At that exact moment.”

A small anchor fixed the boat to the bed of the cove. I lay on my side and closed my eyes. The rocking of the boat by the waves was soothing but unknown. The men on the shore were asleep. Not the twelve-year-old, though. He shifted and lay on his back and decided to look up at the sky. What he saw took him by surprise. He was basically a city kid. He had never really seen the night sky for what it is. As he stared up at millions of stars, he was filled with a dread he had never known before.

I was just a boy, I said to my wife in a hotel room in Cornwall. I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.

The angel was gone. Discounting the moon, discounting the Milky Way, I was alone. My hands searched out the surface of the roof. Rachel, I said to myself. I cried out softly, Rachel!

I did not see Mehmet Taspinar again. He left in the morning with his mother. His vacated room was cleaned up and rented out that very day to two rich girls freshly enrolled at NYU.

In my last American August one thunderstorm followed another: I can still picture a suddenly green, almost undersea atmosphere, and hailstones hopping like dice on asphalt, and streams crisscrossing Chelsea, and huge photographical flashes visiting my apartment. It’s hard to believe, from my Englander’s perspective, in those subtropical weeks, when the humid air could be so blurred with reverberated light as to leave me with a mild case of color blindness. Everyone scurried in the shadowed fraction of the city. Few things were more wonderful than hopping into a cold summer cab.

With all that rain and heat, Brooklyn almost returned to the wild. Pools welled up in basements; weeds overran planted things. Mosquitoes, fizzing and ravenous and bearing the West Nile virus, emptied the gardens and porches at twilight. A block over from the Ramkissoon home, on Marlborough Road, a tree knocked down by lightning flattened an old lady, killing her.

And the grass on Chuck’s cricket field kept on growing. Chuck reported this fact to me a week or so after my return from England. “Mowing time,” he said.

I wasn’t in the mood. Despair busies one, and my weekend was spoken for: I was going to lie down on the floor of my apartment in the draft of the air conditioner and spend two days and nights traveling a circuit of regret, self-pity, and jealousy. I was obsessed, needless to say, with Rachel’s lover — Martin Casey, the chef. A definite article is appropriate because Martin Casey was sufficiently well known that Vinay, whom I rang in LA in the hope of some inside information, immediately said, “Sure, Martin Casey.”

“You’ve heard of him?”

I’d Googled the name and found out that it belonged to the proprietor-chef of a gastropub, the Hungry Dog, in Clerkenwell, which was around the corner from Rachel’s office (and where, I surmised, they’d met). But I had not been able to get a clear picture of his standing.

“The guy specializes in boiled potatoes and turnips and beetroots,” Vinay told me. “Old English vegetable ingredients. Very interesting.” He said pompously, “I’d classify him as a cook, not a chef.”

No doubt, I thought, he was also an expert in reviving Anglo-Saxon erotic traditions. A sensualist who embodied a classic yet contemporary approach to carnal pleasure.

I told Vinay the score.

“Oh, fuck that,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Jesus. Martin Casey.”

“Yep,” I said, feeling brave.

Vinay, excited, said, “The dude’s short. He’s a fucking dwarf, Hans. You’re going to blow him out of the fucking water.”

It was good of Vinay to say this, but Vinay, in spite of his own six feet, had a terrible record with women and was, I knew for a fact, a bonehead about anything he couldn’t eat or drink. Moreover there was nothing dwarfish about the Casey I’d uncovered online, a healthily tubby, attractive man in his forties with ruffled black hair and, in one photograph, a crew of fantastically good-and talented-looking sous-chefs who stood ranged behind him like merry pirates.

I told Chuck I couldn’t make it. “I’ve got stuff to take care of,” I said.

“OK,” he said with a surprising readiness.

The following Sunday morning, at eleven o’clock, the house phone rang. It was you-know-who, calling up from the lobby.

“I told you, I can’t do this,” I said. “I’ve got a plane to catch.”

“What time?”

“Five,” I said reluctantly.

“No problem. I’ve canceled the mowing — too wet. I’ve got a special program. You’ll be home by two, at the latest.”

“Listen, Chuck, I don’t want to,” I said.

“I’m parked outside,” he said. “Get down here.”

This time Chuck drove. It was a fine day. The East River from the Brooklyn Bridge was a pure stroke of blue.

I thought of my mother, whom I thought of whenever I crossed that bridge.

Two weeks after Jake was born, she made her first and last visit to America. It had taken a number of carefully suggestive calls on my part to persuade her to make the trip, which loomed, as it did for many of her generation, as a voyage of terrific proportions. From the moment she arrived, she seemed downcast and preoccupied in a way that struck me as uncharacteristic, although I could not be sure, since I had not seen my mother in three years. To divert her, I proposed a bicycle ride; and once mounted on a rented bicycle she rode strongly enough, certainly for a woman of sixty-six. We rode to Brooklyn. We admired the brownstones of Brooklyn Heights (“If I lived here, this is where I would live,” said my mother), and after eating a bagel with smoked salmon (“So this is the famous bagel”) we set off on the return journey. It was a cloudy morning in late September. A slight wind was in our faces as we crept up the incline of Brooklyn Bridge. A third of the way across, we stopped. We stood next to each other, bicycles at our side, and somewhat formally observed the sights. A mist had thickened over New York Bay. I explained to my mother that the island directly ahead was Governors Island, and that beyond it, lost in silver murk, was Staten Island. My mother asked about the docking facilities that were just visible in the distance, and I identified New Jersey for her.