Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  One February night, somebody knocked on my door. When I opened it, I found myself looking at a man dressed as an angel. A pair of tattered white wings, maybe two feet long and attached to some kind of girdle, rose behind his head. He wore an ankle-length wedding dress with a pearl-adorned bodice and white slippers with dirty bows. Mottled foundation powder, applied over his whole face, failed to obscure the stubble around his mouth. His hair fell in straggles to his shoulders. A tiara was out of kilter on his head and he seemed distraught.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I am looking for my cat.”

  I said, “What kind of cat?”

  “A Birman,” the angel said, and the noun flushed out a foreigner’s accent. “A black face, and white, quite long fur. His name is Salvator—Salvy.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll look out for him.” I started to shut the door, but his despairing expression made me hesitate.

  “He’s been gone for two days and two nights,” the angel said. “I’m worried he’s been kidnapped. These cats are very beautiful. They are worth a lot of money. All kinds of people come through this hotel.”

  I said, “Have you put up a notice? In the elevator?”

  “I did, but somebody tore it down. That’s suspicious, don’t you think?” He produced a cigarette from a niche in his outfit. “You have a light?”

  He followed me into my apartment and sat down to smoke. I opened a window. The flossy edges of his wings trembled in the air current.

  “This is a nice apartment,” he observed. “How much are you paying?”

  “Enough,” I said. My rent was six thousand a month—not a terrible deal for a two-bedroom, I’d thought, until I found out it was far more than anybody else was paying.

  The angel occupied a studio on the sixth floor. He’d moved in two weeks previously. His name was Mehmet Taspinar. He was Turkish, from Istanbul. He had lived in New York for a number of years, drifting from one abode to another. New York City, he informed me, was the one place in the world where he could be himself—at least, until recently. As he spoke, Taspinar sat very still on the edge of his chair, his feet and knees properly pressed together. He stated that he’d been asked to leave his last apartment by the landlord on the grounds that he was scaring the other tenants. “I think he believed I might be a terrorist,” the angel said mildly. “In a sense, I can understand him. An angel is a messenger of God. In Christianity, Judaism, Islam, angels are always frightening—always soldiers, killers, punishers.”

  I gave no sign of having heard this. I was making a show of reading work documents I’d pulled out of my briefcase.

  Taspinar looked in the direction of the kitchenette. “You’re drinking wine?”

  I said without enthusiasm, “Would you like a glass?”

  Taspinar accepted and by way of recompense explained that he had dressed as an angel for two years now. He bought his wings at Religious Sex, on St. Mark’s Place. He owned three pairs. They cost him sixty-nine dollars a pair, he said. He showed me his right hand, on each finger of which he wore a large yellow stone. “These were two dollars.”

  “Have you tried looking on the roof?” I said.

  The angel raised his misplucked eyebrows. “You think he might be up there?”

  “Well, the door at the top of the stairs is sometimes left open. Your cat could have got out.”

  “Will you show me?” The wings wobbled as he stood up.

  “Just go right up the stairs until you come to the door. It’s very easy.”

  “I’m a little afraid,” Taspinar said, hunching his shoulders pathetically. Although at least thirty, he had the slight, defenseless frame of a batboy.

  I reached for my coat. “I’ve only got a few minutes,” I said. “Then I’ve got to do some work.”

  We climbed the stairs to the tenth floor and continued up to the small landing at the entrance to the roof. As I’d suspected, the door was open. We went through. I’d been up to the roof once before. It was divided into plots belonging to the people who occupied the mansard apartments, and they had turned it into a garden of sundecks, brick enclosures, potted plants, and small trees. In the summer, it was a lovely place; it was winter now, and the cold was shocking. I carefully trod the frozen snow. Taspinar, wearing only his angel’s outfit and barefoot apart from his slippers, headed off elsewhere with small skipping steps. He began calling for his cat in Turkish. I advanced in the direction of a tree dotted with fairy lights and found a spot out of the wind. The lighted peak of the Empire State Building loomed ashen and sublime. I regretted not bringing a hat. Turning, I saw the angel disappear behind a turret and then reappear in madly feathery profile against the red glow of the YMCA sign across the street. He cried out the cat’s name: Salvy! Salvy!

  I went inside.

  If I thought I’d shaken him off, I was mistaken. A nocturnal individual, Taspinar took to joining me in the lobby in the late evenings, assuming a prim upright position on a massive wooden armchair next to mine. Needless to say, his appearance provoked surprise and laughter from the transients. Taspinar enjoyed the attention but rarely responded. When a drunk Japanese asked if he could fly, he gave the man his usual dazed smile. “Of course, I would like to fly,” Taspinar confided to me afterward, “but I know I can’t. I’m not cuckoo.”

  Actually, this last assertion was doubtful. I learned that before he’d become possessed by his angelic compulsion, Taspinar had spent some time in a mental asylum in New Hampshire. His father, a rich man who owned factories, had paid the fees, just as he now paid the allowance that permitted his son to live in frugal idleness. The sustaining fiction in this arrangement was that Taspinar was at graduate school at Columbia University, where he’d enrolled years ago. Once I had overcome the thought that midway through my life the only companionship I could count on was that of a person who, as he put it, could no longer bear the masculine details of his life, I grew to mildly enjoy the angel’s unexpectedly serene company. He and I and the murmuring widow in the baseball cap sat in a row like three crazy old sisters who have long ago run out of things to say to one another. Taspinar, it turned out, was a rather artless man who, in spite of his morbid confusion, easily accepted the small offerings of pleasure that daily life provided. He savored his coffee, read newspapers avidly, found amusement in inconsequential events. With regard to my own situation, about which he made occasional inquiries but offered little comment, he was considerate. As my fondness for him grew, so did my anxiety. When his baroque anguish, too awful and strange for me to think about, became acute, he neglected himself. His frock (he owned three or four) went unchanged for days, his silver fingernail polish deteriorated to a fishy shimmer, his waxed back surrendered to emergent cohorts of hard little hairs. Most distressing of all was the state of his wings. His favorite white pair, in which he had first met me, somehow developed a list, and he took to wearing black bedraggled ones that made him look like a crow. One Saturday I took it upon myself to go to the East Village and buy him fresh plumage. I chose a white, rather magnificent set with shining long vanes. “Here,” I said, stiffly tendering him the package in the lobby that evening. “I thought you might find these useful.” Taspinar seemed very pleased, but I had made an error. My gift was never seen again. As for the cat, it was never seen again either.

  Meanwhile I was making efforts to promote my own wellbeing. At Rachel’s transoceanic urging, I went to see a shrink, a nice fellow who offered me a peppermint every twenty minutes and subscribed to the fine, progressive notion that each day we have lived is a kind of possession and, if we are its alert custodian, brings us ever closer to knowledge of the slipperiest kind. I lasted three sessions. I started to take yoga classes at the YMCA across the street from the hotel. This went better, and when I touched my toes for the first time in years I felt a larger movement of life at my fingertips. I was determined to open myself to new directions, a project I connected with escaping from the small country of fog in which, at a point I could not surely trac
e, I’d settled. That country, I speculated, might have some meaningful relation to my country of physical residence, and so every second weekend, when I traveled to London to be with my wife and son, I hoped that flying high into the atmosphere, over boundless massifs of vapor or small clouds dispersed like the droppings of Pegasus on an unseen platform of air, might also lift me above my personal haze. That is, I would conduct a retrospective of our affable intercontinental dealings and assemble the hope and theory that the foundation of my family might after all be secure and our old unity still within reach. But each time Rachel materialized at her parents’ door she wore a preemptive expression of weariness, and I understood that the haze had traveled all the way to this house in west London.

  “How was the flight?”

  “Good.” I fidgeted with my suitcase. “I managed to get a couple of hours of sleep.” A hesitation, and then an English peck for each cheek; whereas once it had been our loving tic to kiss triply—left, right, and left again—in the Dutch style she found so amusing.

  She would never, in the old days, have expressed curiosity about something as prosaic as a flight. Her truest self resisted triteness, even of the inventive romantic variety, as a kind of falsehood. When we’d fallen for each other it had not been a project of bouquets and necklaces and strokes of genius on my part: there were no ambushes by string quartets or surprise air tickets to a spit of Pacific coral. We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically. Our love started in drink at a party in South Kensington, where we made out for an hour on a mound of dark woolen overcoats, and continued in drink a week later at a pub in Notting Hill. As soon as we left the pub she kissed me. We went to my flat, drank more, and grappled on a sofa squeakily adrift on four wheels. “What’s that horrible noise?” Rachel exclaimed with a ridiculous jerk of the head. “The casters,” I said, technically. “No, it’s a mouse,” she said. She was casting us in a screwball comedy, herself as Hepburn, whose bony beauty I recognized in her, me as the professor with his head up his ass. I looked the part: excessively tall, bespectacled, given to nodding and smiling. I have never entirely shed the gormlessness of that early role. She said, “Isn’t there somewhere less mousy we can go?” Later that night, she said, “Talk to me in Dutch,” and I did. Lekker stuk van me, I growled. “On second thoughts,” she said, “don’t talk to me in Dutch.” When, months later, we sobered up and began to see others as a couple, her public fluency mesmerized me. She spoke in complete sentences and intact paragraphs and almost always in the trope of the tiny, well-constructed argument. She was obviously a brilliant lawyer. My own way with English she found moving for its clunking lexical precision; and she especially loved for me to spout a scrap of remembered Latin, the more nonsensical the better. O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint, agricolas.

  One windy Sunday afternoon in March 2002, when I was in London for a long weekend, we van den Broeks went for a walk on Putney Common. It was the kind of uncomplicated family outing that fortified my belief that our physical separation might yet turn out to have been a bad joke. I suggested to Rachel, as we watched Jake ride ahead on his tricycle, that things were not going too badly. Her eyes were fixed forward and she made no reply. I said, “What I mean is—”

  “I know what you mean,” Rachel said, cutting me short.

  Jake got off his tricycle and ran to swing. I lifted him into the seat and set him in motion. “Higher,” he joyfully urged me.

  Rachel stood beside me, hands in pockets. “Higher,” Jake repeated every time he swung up to my hand, and for a while his was the only voice among us. His happiness on the swing was about the relief of communication as much as anything. He cleanly uttered his wish and cleanly it was granted. Our son, we’d recently been told, was tongue-tied: the arrival of certain consonants caused his tongue to scuttle back to the innermost parts of his mouth, reemerging only in the safety of a vowel. An operation to cure this had been discussed and, in the end, rejected; for my own speech impediment, however, there was no optional quick fix. From our beginning, it had been Rachel’s place to talk freely and airily, mine to carefully listen and utter only solid things. This bargain acted as a kind of guarantee of our sentimental valuables and, in our minds, set us apart from bantering couples whose trinkety talk felt like a form of emotional dissipation. Now, searching for words as I propelled Jake skyward, I felt at a disadvantage.

  “We said we’d review things,” I finally said.

  “Yes, we did,” she said.

  “I just want you to know—”

  “I already know, darling,” Rachel said quickly, and she waggled her lowered chin to relax the solid orb of tension that was invariably buried at the junction of her neck and right shoulder. There was an exhaustion about her throat I hadn’t seen before. “Let’s not do any reviewing,” she said. “Please. There isn’t anything to review.”

  Another little boy appeared among us, followed moments later by his mother. The little boy impatiently jangled the seat of the swing. “Hold on, hold on,” his mother said. A baby, peeping out of a sling, already burdened her. Fractions of smiles passed between the adults. Ten o’clock approached. Soon the playground would be alive with children.

  “Higher,” my son said proudly.

  There remained the problem of what to do with my alternate weekends in New York. Rivera decided I should play golf. “You look like Ernie Els,” he said. “Maybe you could swing like him, too.” Stepping away from my desk, he made a triangle of his arms and shoulders. He was a small, compact lefty. “It’s all about rhythm,” he explained. “Ernie”—his backswing flew up with the word—“Els”: down, for the duration of the syllable, came the downswing. “See? Easy does it.” Rivera, who was shopping for a lob wedge, took me to a golf center by Union Square. At the practice facility, a graduated row of shiny irons stood on a rack. “Hit a ball,” Rivera said, pushing me into a grotto of netting. A troglodyte, I twice swung and missed.

  But a reminder of sports had been given to me, and one late April day, while lowering a box of papers into the trunk of a taxicab, I noticed a cricket bat nestled against the casing of the spare tire. It seemed like a mirage and I stupidly asked the driver, “Is that a cricket bat?” As he drove, the cabbie—my future teammate Umar—told me he played every week for a Staten Island team. His glance entered the rearview mirror. “You interested in playing?” “Maybe,” I said. “Sure.” “Come along on Saturday,” Umar said. “Maybe we can fix you up with a game.”

  I memorized the time and the place without ever forming the intention of going. Then the first morning of the weekend came. It was a bright, warm day, European in its mildness, and walking past the flowering pear trees on Nineteenth Street I was riddled by a longing for similar summer days in my youth, which were given over, at every opportunity, to cricket.

  For cricket is played in Holland. There are a few thousand Dutch cricketers and they go about their game with the seriousness and organization that characterizes all of Dutch sport. The conservative, slightly stuck-up stratum of society in which I grew up, especially loves cricket, and the players are ghosts of sorts from an Anglophile past: I am from The Hague, where Dutch bourgeois snobbishness and Dutch cricket are, not unrelatedly, most concentrated. We—that is, my mother and I—lived in a semidetached house on Tortellaan, a quiet street near Sportlaan. From Houtrust, where the indoor skating rink was located and where I first held a girl’s hand in romantic earnest (not on the ice but in the cafeteria, where kids gathered to spend their pocket money on cones of frites met mayonnaise), Sportlaan led south toward the dunes and seaside hotels of Kijkduin. It also led, if you exercised your imagination, to Paris: one year, the hunched, bright-shirted racers of the Tour de France zoomed by like fantastically bicycling macaws. On the far side of Sportlaan were woods called the Bosjes van Pex, and in the woods was the home of a venerable football and cricket club, Houdt Braef Standt—HBS. I joined HBS at the age of seven, anxiously attending the membership interview with my mother. I am not sure wh
at these encounters were designed to accomplish, but in any event I had no cause to worry. When the meeting was over the members of the committee gravely shook my hand and said, Welcome to HBS. I was thrilled. I was too young to realize they’d all known my father, who had been a member of the club for nearly forty years, and that it must have given them great pleasure to take his son under their wing. For that’s how these sports clubs functioned: they took on scores of boys almost as hatchlings and bestowed parental care and effort on them for years, even on those who were athletically hopeless. From September through April I played football, proudly wearing the club’s black shirt and black shorts bought at the sporting-goods store on Fahrenheitstraat; and from May through August I played cricket. I loved both sports equally; but by my midteens, cricket had claimed its first place. We played on coconut-matting wickets, and our outfields, used also for winter games, were sluggish; but there any resemblance to American cricket ended.