Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  It was in the course of the paper-round that she met her gentleman friend Jeroen. “I was very curious,” Jeroen told me at the reception he hosted after the cremation. “Who was this woman who delivered the paper every Saturday? It was so mysterious. Don’t forget, she wasn’t much older than you are now. And so beautiful: tall, blond, athletic. Always well dressed. My type of woman. But coming to my door with the newspaper? This was intriguing.” We were in Jeroen’s flat in Waldeck, on the fifth floor of the notoriously long apartment block known to all as the Wall of China. It was just us two; everybody else had gone home. He unsteadily poured another shot of jenever. “After a few weeks of watching her come and go, I decide to make my move.” Jeroen lit a cigarette. “You don’t mind me telling you this, do you?”

  “No,” I said, although naturally enough I was hoping he would skip certain details.

  “So here’s what I do,” Jeroen said, a wide yellow-and-brown smile in his cadaverous face. Within three months he, too, would be dead. “I dress in my best clothes. Sports jacket, shirt, tie. I polish my best shoes. I put a goddamned handkerchief in my breast pocket. Then I wait. At four o’clock, I hear the garden gate open. It’s Miriam. Just as she comes to the door, I open it. ‘Thank you,’ I say. She just smiles and goes back to her bicycle. I run after her and open the gate. I’m on my way out, you see, that’s my story. I don’t want her to think I’m ambushing her. I introduce myself. ‘And your name is…?’ Miriam van den Broek, she says, getting on her bicycle. And then she rides off.” Jeroen laughed and adjusted his spectacles. “Perfect, I thought. She’s reserved but friendly. Like you,” he said, pointing his cigarette at me. “You see, with reserved people, it’s simple: you have to be direct. So the next week, I’m waiting for her again. I’ve had a haircut. I’ve brushed my teeth. Here she comes, up the garden path. I open the door and accept the newspaper. ‘Would you like to go to dinner?’ I say. I’m not messing around, you see. I’m too old for that, and I’m guessing she is, too. This is what I’ve learned on the subject of women: never delay. The more quickly you act, the greater the chance of success. She smiles and walks back to her bicycle. Then she stands there, like this, like a schoolgirl.” Jeroen sprang up and stood upright, his blue, frozen-looking hands gripping invisible handlebars. “‘Why not?’ she says. Why not. I’ll never forget it.” A convulsion of coughing overtook him, and he lowered himself into a chair. “The rest you know,” he said, exhausted. Which I didn’t, in point of fact. I had very little idea about what passed between them. I didn’t know, for example, why five years later he and my mother had put an end to things.

  She had regained enough energy, on our return to Tribeca, to ask immediately if she might take the baby for a walk.

  “Are you sure?” Rachel said.

  “We’ll just go around the block,” my mother said. “Come, Jake,” she said, lifting the baby into the stroller.

  After an hour or so they had not returned. This was worrying. Rachel said that I should go out and look for them.

  I found my mother a couple of blocks away, looking distressed.

  “What happened?”

  “I got lost,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  “All these buildings look the same,” I said, and I accepted her arm in mine and pushed the stroller home.

  Now Chuck was driving us through Brooklyn. I heard myself tell him, “My wife is seeing another guy.”

  He showed no surprise, even though it was the first time I’d raised directly the subject of my marriage. After a moment, he said, “What do you want to do about it?”

  “What can I do?” I said hopelessly.

  He gave his head a categorical shake. “Not can do: first figure out what you want to do. It’s Project Management 101: establish objectives, then establish means of achieving objectives.” He glanced at me. “Do you want her back?”

  I said, “Let’s say I do.”

  “OK,” he said. “Then you should go back to London. Right away. It’s a no-brainer.”

  I thought, No-brainer? What would happen in London? A seduction with flowers? A ravishment? Then what?

  “Otherwise,” Chuck, growing emphatic, said, “you’re in danger of having regrets. My bottom line is, no regrets.”

  This was on Atlantic Avenue, by Cobble Hill, in traffic.

  “It wouldn’t be the same,” I said.

  “It’s never the same,” Chuck said. “Even if everything goes well it’s never the same. Right?” He tapped my knee. “Let me tell you something: these things have a funny way of working out. You know the best thing that happened to me and Anne? Eliza.”

  I wanted to talk about my situation, not Chuck’s. I also wanted something other than the usual from him.

  He concentrated on overtaking a bus. Chuck was a speedy, dodgy driver. “Anne and me,” he continued, “we’ve known each other since we were babies. She’s been with me through thick and thin. When we were living in Brownsville with Mike Tyson beating up people on the streets, she didn’t complain once. So we’re together for life. But my theory is, I need two women.” He wore the most solemn expression. “One to take care of family and home, one to make me feel alive. It’s too much to ask one woman to do both.”

  “That’s very big of you,” I said.

  He gave a snort of amusement. “Listen, what can I tell you? After a certain point, their agenda changes. It’s all about kids and housekeeping and what have you. With Anne, it’s that damn church. We’re the romantic sex, you know,” he said, fighting a burp. “Men. We’re interested in passion, glory. Women,” Chuck declared with a finger in the air, “are responsible for the survival of the world; men are responsible for its glories.” He turned the Cadillac south, onto Fifth Avenue.

  We drove through Park Slope. A plotter’s grin formed on his face. We took a sharp turn, passed under a huge pair of arches, and halted at a prospect of grass and tombstones.

  He had brought me to Green-Wood Cemetery.

  “Look up there,” Chuck said, opening his door.

  He was pointing back at the entrance gate, a mass of flying buttresses and spires and quatrefoils and pointed arches that looked as if it might have been removed in the dead of night from one of Cologne Cathedral’s more obscure nooks. In and around the tallest of the trio of spires were birds’ nests. They were messy, elaborately twiggy affairs. One nest was situated above the clock, another higher up, above the discolored green bell that tolled, presumably, at funerals. The branches littered a stone façade crowded with sculptures of angels and incidents from the gospels: a resurrected Jesus Christ prompted Roman soldiers to cover their faces with their hands. Come forth, a second Jesus exhorted Lazarus.

  “Parakeet nests,” Chuck said.

  I looked more carefully.

  “They come out in the evening,” Chuck assured me. “You see them walking around here, pecking for food.” As we waited for a parrot to show, he told me about the other birds—American woodcocks and Chinese geese and turkey vultures and gray catbirds and boat-tailed grackles—that he and his buddies had sighted among the sepulchres of Green-Wood during his birding days.

  I was half listening, at best. It had turned into a freakishly transparent morning free of clouds or natural inconsonance of any sort. Huge trees grew nearby, and their leaves intercepted the sunlight very precisely, so that the shadows of the leaves seemed vital and creaturely as they stirred on the ground—an inkling of some supernature, to a sensibility open to such things.

  There still was no sign of parrots. Chuck said, “This is by the by. There’s something else I want to show you.”

  We followed a roaming lane through a spread of hills and lawns: evidently directness is undesirable in a graveyard. “This is like a Hall of Fame for retailers,” Chuck said. “There are Tiffanys here. You have the Brooks brothers. You have Steinway. Mr. Pfizer. Mr. F. A. O. Schwarz. Wesson, the rifle guy, is out here.” The Cadillac was now traveling in what seemed like circles. A gravedigger wandered by with a shovel.
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br />   “OK,” Chuck said, stopping. He opened the glove compartment and pulled out a camera. “Right here. I think this is it.”

  I followed him off the path. Walking over burned grass, we went past an obelisk, past an angel guarding a plot with outspread wings, past the graves of ex-individuals named Felimi, Ritzheimer, Peterson, Pyatt, Beckmann, Kloodt, Hazzell. We stopped at an angular column several feet high and topped by a globe—an oversize baseball, judging from its meandering seam. The column bore an inscription:

  IN MEMORIAM HENRY CHADWICK FATHER OF BASEBALL

  “Do you know about Chadwick?” Chuck said. “He wrote the first rules of baseball.” Chadwick, Chuck said with that explanatory fluency of his, was the English immigrant and Brooklyn man who as a cricket reporter for the Times inaugurated baseball coverage in that newspaper and went on to popularize and modernize the sport of baseball. “What’s interesting about this guy,” Chuck said, wiping a handkerchief across his mouth, “is he was a cricket nut, too. He didn’t think it was America’s fate, or America’s national character, or what have you, to play baseball. He played cricket and baseball. They were totally compatible as far as he was concerned. He didn’t see them as a fork in the road. He was like Yogi Berra,” Chuck said not at all humorously. “When he came to a fork in the road, he took it.”

  I’d heard the Yogi Berra line a million times before. My attention was given over to the small square stone in the grass—a maverick slab of crazy paving, one might have thought—on which Chuck had carelessly placed a foot. It was a gravestone. A word was engraved on it:

  DAISY

  Chuck handed me his camera and stood next to Chadwick’s tomb with hands clasped behind his back. I took the picture—took several, at his insistence—and returned the camera to him. “Very good,” Chuck said, studying the picture viewer. He would post the images on his forthcoming Web site, newyorkcc.com, and, he said, deploy them in the slide show he was preparing for his great presentation to the National Park Service.

  He started to say something on this subject when his second phone rang. He took the call beyond my earshot, dangling a flip-flop from one foot. When he snapped shut his phone, he said, “So here’s my thinking, Hans.” His hands were in the pockets of his shorts and he was looking at Chadwick’s grave. “I’m thinking a cricket club might not be big enough. To get the attention of the NPS, I mean. It might seem exclusive; small-time. People might feel it has nothing to do with them.” He quickly said, as if I might interrupt him, “But they’d be wrong. And that’s what I’ve got to make them see. This isn’t just a sports club. It’s bigger than that. My own feeling—and listen to me on this before you say anything, Hans, this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot—my own feeling is that the U.S. is not complete, the U.S. has not fulfilled its destiny, it’s not fully civilized, until it has embraced the game of cricket.” He turned to face me. “Do you know the story of the Trobriand Islanders?”

  “Of course,” I said. “It’s all people talk about.”

  “Trobriand Island is part of Papua New Guinea,” Chuck said professorially. “When the British missionaries arrived there, the native tribes were constantly fighting and killing each other—had been for thousands of years. So what did the missionaries do? They taught them cricket. They took these Stone Age guys and gave them cricket bats and cricket balls and taught them a game with rules and umpires. You ask people to agree to complicated rules and regulations? That’s like a crash course in democracy. Plus—and this is key—the game forced them to share a field for days with their enemies, forced them to provide hospitality and places to sleep. Hans, that kind of closeness changes the way you think about somebody. No other sport makes this happen.”

  “What are you saying?” I said. “Americans are savages?”

  “No,” Chuck said. “I’m saying that people, all people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket. What’s the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle. I really believe this. Everybody who plays the game benefits from it. So I say, why not Americans?” He was almost grim with conviction. In a confidential tone, he said, “Americans cannot really see the world. They think they can, but they can’t. I don’t need to tell you that. Look at the problems we’re having. It’s a mess, and it’s going to get worse. I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. With the New York Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in U.S. history. Why not? Why not say so if it’s true? Why hold back? I’m going to open our eyes. And that’s what I have to tell the Park Service. I have to. If I tell them I’m going to build a playground for minorities, they’re going to blow me away. But if I tell them we’re starting something big, tell them we’re bringing back an ancient national sport, with new leagues, new franchises, new horizons…” He faltered. “Anyhow, that’s what I’m doing here, Hans. That’s why I’m ready to do what it takes to make this happen.”

  I didn’t immediately dwell on his final statement. I was too taken aback by the Napoleonic excess of the peroration, the dramatization as much as the content of which had disturbed me: the man had set up a graveside address, for God’s sake. He had premeditated the moment, rehearsed it in his mind, and seen fit to act it out. It was flattering, in a way, that he’d gone to such trouble; but he’d lost me, and I felt I had to speak up. I had to warn him.

  I said, “Chuck, get real. People don’t operate on that level. They’re going to find it very hard to respond to that kind of thinking.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, laughing and looking at his watch. “I believe they will.”

  Let’s remember I was in a bad mood. I said, “There’s a difference between grandiosity and thinking big.”

  I might as well have punched him on the nose, because for the only time in our acquaintance he looked at me with hurt surprise. He began to say something and decided against it.

  I could see what had happened. I had knocked him off his pedestal. I had called into question his exercise of the New Yorker’s ultimate privilege: of holding yourself out in a way that, back home, would be taken as a misrepresentation.

  I said, “That came out wrong. I meant to say…”

  He waved me down good-naturedly. “I understand exactly. No problem.” He was smiling, of that I’m sure. “We’d better go. It’s getting hot out here.”

  We left the cemetery. My strong inclination was to catch a train back to Manhattan, but Chuck drove directly onto the BQE and said something about running late and having to see quickly to a business matter. It’s clear to me, now, that he’d already decided on the form of his retribution.

  After twenty minutes we came to a stop somewhere in Williamsburg.

  “This shouldn’t take long,” Chuck said. He went briskly into the nearest building.

  I waited in the car. After ten minutes, Chuck had not returned. I stepped outside and looked about me in that state of prepossession almost any unfamiliar New York place was capable of bringing about in me, even a place like this section of Metropolitan Avenue, where trucks gasped and groaned past commercial buildings of no note. Chuck had entered one of these, a two-story effort in brick with a signboard proclaiming the presence of the FOCUS LANGUAGE SCHOOL. The school, which seemed closed or dormant, was situated above an open warehouse. Inside the warehouse, a solitary Chinese man sat on a pile of pallets and smoked a cigarette as he contemplated cardboard boxes marked HANDLE WITH CHUTION. I passed a quarter of an hour on the roaring sidewalk. Still no Chuck. A pair of Coke-drinking cops walked by. The Chinese man rolled down the warehouse door, exposing a blaze of graffiti. I decided to buy a bottle of water in the deli across the street.

  I was coming out of the deli when Abelsky, in Judaic white shirt and black trousers, waddled by. To be accurate: I saw a baseball bat first, carried in a man’s hand. Only then was I moved to recognize Abelsky. He went to the lang
uage school building and pressed the doorbell. The door opened, and Abelsky went in.

  I drank from my water bottle and waited. It’s true to say, I had an uneasy feeling. After another ten minutes, I telephoned Chuck.

  “Is this going to take much longer?”

  He said, “No, we’re pretty much done here. Why don’t I buzz you in? We’re having coffee.”

  I walked up a staircase covered by a new gray carpet. There was a landing that led into a tiny hallway lined with bulletin-boards and posters. I remember a photograph of grinning students bunched together with their thumbs up, and a classic snap of downtown Manhattan with the legend, for the benefit of the passing Martian, NEW YORK.

  Abelsky’s voice came from a room at the rear of the building—DIRECTOR, the sign on the door stated. Abelsky was standing to one side of the room, pouring himself a cup of coffee from a coffee beaker. He’d shrunk further since the time I’d met him at the baths, and the effect was to make him even more shapeless.

  Chuck was sitting behind the desk, rocking on a leather chair. He raised a hand in greeting.

  The office, a windowless box, was more or less destroyed. A filing cabinet had been upended and its contents were strewn everywhere. A framed map of the United States lay on the floor, its glass in pieces. Somebody had smashed a potted plant against the photocopying machine.

  “You got NutraSweet?” Abelsky yelled out to no one that I could see. “I gotta have NutraSweet.”