“NO, NO, NO! You are so wrong!” Mattijs’s face had crumpled in fury. A sudden flush of red rushed over his cheeks and forehead as twin jets of blue cigarette smoke erupted from his nostrils, forming an ominous halo over the downy rake of his knitted yellow eyebrows.
“You look funny.” I giggled. Perhaps I could fight him with humor, like the Boom Chicago people said they were doing with the Bush administration. “You’re like Donald Duck when he gets mad and turns into the devil.”
“Fuck you!” Mattijs shouted. “I am not the monster!” A fresh cloud of smoke burst from his throat, hitting me directly in the face. Sputtering, I fled to the other side of the room.
Things at home had become a little tense. The canceling of the play, while not entirely unexpected, had put us all in a foul mood, and I sensed that Jeroen and Mattijs had begun to view my presence in the apartment not simply as a mere inconvenience but as a talking, walking symbol of the government’s rejection of their art. I tried to share their disappointment, but I found it pretty hard to feel sorry for them as I dressed in fourteen layers of wool and prepared to stand outside in the freezing rain for several hours attempting to convince strangers who were (a) drunk, (b) weeping, or (c) under the influence of psychedelic drugs of their irresistible desire to watch overpriced sketch comedy. I was staying out late, trying to give us some space from each other (and enjoying the newfound social life that was the redeeming aspect of my job), but as I was required to wake with the household, I rarely operated on more than two or three hours of sleep and was almost always hungover, which had turned me into a terrible roommate. I had guiltily abandoned the fastidious neatness I had struggled mightily against my nature to maintain. I no longer bothered to fold up the futon every day. Dirty dishes collected on the coffee table until a scorching look from Jeroen sent me scurrying to the sink. It was the decline of my grade school desk all over again, except this time the desk belonged to someone else.
Our first major fight was over a small plastic bag of rubbish hanging from the doorknob in the living room. I tried to remain calm. “It’s just there in case I need to throw something away in the night!” I screamed, in a calm manner. “It’s not my fault that you’re only allowed to take the trash out once every two weeks in this goddamn country!”
“I DON’T WANT TO HEAR YOUR EXCUSINGS!” Mattijs had shouted. “THERE IS NO EXCUSING FOR FILTH!”
“THE PRIORITIES OF THIS COUNTRY ARE FUCKED!” I screamed back. “YOU SELL KIDDIE PORN IN SUPERMARKETS, BUT IF YOU PUT THE TRASH OUT ON THE WRONG FUCKING DAY THEY’LL SEND YOU TO PRISON!”
“THE KIDDIE PORN IS IN BELGIUM, YOU STUPID AMERICAN!” Mattijs bellowed.
That had made us both laugh hard enough to put it behind us, and besides, sweet Jeroen had managed to intervene before things escalated beyond repair. But this time, it seemed, I had gone too far.
I had been scheduled to promote at the Heineken Brewery that afternoon, a coveted post. The last time I was there I had managed to talk a huge stag party of red-cheeked Mancunians into coming to the show instead of spending their last night in town watching exhausted-looking women peel bananas with their labia, and made enough money to keep myself in tinned soup for almost two weeks. But this time, rain kept me home. Jeroen and Mattijs were out, teaching an acting class at a local high school, so I went into their office to use the computer. My e-mail was filled with depressing news from friends about how great everyone was: how so-and-so was assistant directing for Joe Mantello; how someone else had booked a recurring role on a prime-time drama. To cheer myself up, I decided to read about the war. I skimmed the headlines of the New York Times. On the home page was an article about Jerry Falwell, who had proclaimed from his pulpit that, while God was certainly on the side of life when it concerned the discarded embryos of white American Christians, he was avowedly pro-death when it came to fully born Iraqi civilians.
I chuckled. I had always gotten a kick out of Falwell; in 1989, I had even named my hamster after him. “This is my hamster, the Reverend Jerry Falwell,” I would say to my parents’ friends when they came over, and I would be rewarded with an uncomfortable laugh, my favorite kind. Suddenly, I was fighting back tears. What was the matter with me? Was I homesick? Did I miss my parents? Did I actually want to go home? Desperate for a distraction, I hastily clicked the link to Jerry Falwell’s website, which made me laugh out loud. The reverend had never exactly been what you might call a “hardbody,” but in the vanity portrait that decorated his home page he looked like a molten blob of Crisco that someone had hurled against the mottled backdrop of my fourth-grade school picture. At the top of the screen was a link cheerily titled “Ask Jerry!” which led to a page with a place where one could write directly to the reverend himself. A wonderful joke occurred to me. I moved the cursor to the glowing white box in the center of the window.
Dear Your Honorable Reverend Falwell,
I am a good Christian woman who loves the Lord. Many months ago, I became friends with two friendly Dutchmen. Because of some ongoing personal problems, I thought a change of scenery would help me figure out some things, and they took me into their home in Amsterdam.
Dear Reverend, at the time I met these men, I thought they were good and respectable Gentiles like myself, but over time, I have realized that they are in fact homosexuals in love with each other. As I am sure you are aware, this is strongly condemned by the Bible. While I am not a homosexual myself, I am afraid that I am risking my immortal soul by being among them. Unfortunately, due to some personal problems, I am financially unable to return to my home at this juncture. Reverend Falwell, please tell me what to do. Or at the very least, send me enough money for a plane ticket. I am not a beggar, but as the Bible says, ask and you shall receive.
You are an inspiration to me and countless other born-again Christian Gentile people like me.
Mrs. Cheryl Pot
Tulsa, OK
As I pressed SEND the phone rang: Antonio, calling to tell me that Luke the Australian was suspected of having succumbed to the advances of the Portuguese vampires. They had been seen leaving Boom together around 2:30 a.m. by Lester, the cheerful Yorkshireman who ran the sound booth, and today at dinner Luke was observed to have two visible bite marks on either side of his neck. In Antonio’s forensic opinion, said bite marks could not have been made by the same person.
“One bite is very faint, with the very small tooths,” said Antonio. “The bite of a woman. The other is bigger, more deep. I am for sure it is the bite of a man.”
“How’s Luke?”
Antonio thought for a moment. “Very quiet.”
The key must have turned in the lock, but I didn’t hear it. Nor did I remember that my sent message was still easily visible on the screen of their desktop until I heard the bellowing from the office.
Mattijs was livid. “You are so wrong in what you have done! This is our computer that we allow you to use! We bring you into our home, and this is how you repay us?”
I was about to shout back that it was just a joke when Jeroen staggered out of the office. His face was puffy and streaked with tears. A large bead of snot trembled sorrowfully on his philtrum like a fairy’s tear.
“How could you write such a thing?” He sounded as though someone was choking him. “After all this time?” Mattijs flew to Jeroen’s side and stroked his neck as though he were a wounded puppy.
“It’s not supposed to be me!” I cried. “It’s Cheryl Pot, of Tulsa! A fictional Gentile! Not me!”
“It’s not that you write this,” hissed Mattijs. “It’s that this computer is for our work. For you to disrespect our office, I cannot forgive you right now.”
How could this be happening? “I didn’t think you would get so angry. I was just being funny.”
“Funny?” Mattijs hissed. “How is it funny to write such things on the Internet where they can never, never be erased?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just funny. Like a performance piece.” When I was in university, claiming that something was a “performance piece” could get you out of almost anything. I had successfully pleaded the “performance piece defense” the time I got caught stealing a chicken caesar wrap from the snack bar on campus, and when I once went for nine days without taking a shower, that was a “performance piece” too. “This is an exercise to see what it’s like to have people be repulsed by me,” I had said, “not the result of being locked out of my apartment for a week and a half and having lost all personal pride.”
“You know what I think?” Jeroen said. His voice was frigid. “I think that you don’t think of anyone but yourself.”
“I . . . that’s not true,” I stuttered.
“I think it is,” said Jeroen. “And I think I don’t want to see your face anymore right now.”
“But . . .” I felt the tears beginning to well up in my throat. “I didn’t mean . . .”
“Just go,” said Jeroen.
“What?”
“I SAID, JUST GO!”
I had never heard Jeroen shout before. He had always been my ally, my protector against Mattijs’s habitual irrationality. It was like seeing your father cry.
The Contradictory Nature of the Dutch National Character
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
“Holland is one of the queerest countries under the sun. It should be called Odd-land or Contrary-land, for in nearly everything it is different from other parts of the world.”
—From Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge
Perhaps it makes sense that a people living on land that by rights should be at the bottom of the ocean should have in their nature a proclivity toward contradiction. While the Netherlands certainly doesn’t hold a monopoly on counterintuitive irrationality, the country has truly made it into an art form.
I know this might sound condescending, but I actually mean this as a huge compliment. Unlike some countries I could mention, Dutch irrationality doesn’t start wars or execute children; at its most perplexing, it simply gives ungrateful expats weary of being unable to find a place to buy tampons after six p.m. something to bitch about. Or to bring up obnoxiously to their Dutch friends in the heat of the moment, biting the hand that feeds them and leaving said expat feeling lonelier, more self-loathing, and more vulnerable to terrible decision-making than ever before.
The following discussion topics are meant to spur lively debate among your coworkers, book club (especially your book club), prison pen pals, and even with yourself, should you suffer from multiple personality disorder, or spend a lot of time alone.
My bicycle was outside, but I was too shaken to ride. Wounded, I walked slowly down the Van Woustraat, but by the time I had crossed the small ugly park at the end of the road and veered past the shops and cafés of the Utrechtstraat, I was nearly running, propelled by fury. Yes, I was in the wrong. Yes, I had done something hurtful and stupid. But what was also hurtful was that my closest friends had purposefully misunderstood me, refused to acknowledge that I was trying my best. What was stupid was that I was stuck in this fucking country, freezing, starving, miserable. I was wasting the good years, the fearless years, when everything seems possible and, by virtue of belief, is; that brief, blessed convergence of youth, of beauty, of charmed foolishness, before the world gets small again; your dreams compressed by limitation and regret until they are nothing more than a half-forgotten frivolity, like a penny you put in one of those machines on the boardwalk at the beach. A cheap souvenir imprinted with the image of a place you scarcely remember. And what was I even doing this for? To find myself? How? Let’s be honest: I wasn’t exactly trekking the Himalayas or sailing into the heart of the Amazonian jungle here: I was working a shitty job and being randomly harassed by creepy men, two things I had been doing just fine at in New York, thank you very much. And what the hell did “finding myself” even mean? The entire concept was so callow, so indulgent, so disgustingly bourgeois. My mother was right. Who was I to think I was missing? Yet here I was, and I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t leave for the same reason people couldn’t leave a marriage that had died long ago: because all this couldn’t have been for nothing. This couldn’t turn into just another of my missed opportunities, another experience from which I had managed to wring every drop of failure and mundanity, another self-pitying anecdote to recount over drinks in a depressing succession of increasingly dingy bars. I knew that life isn’t like the movies. Plot devices don’t just appear when you need them to. But someone, something, had to come next.
“Rachel!” The voice was faint, but clearly male. Had Jeroen changed his mind? Was I allowed to come home?
“Yo, Rachel! Over here!”
Sitting at a small table outside a nearby café was my old buddy Tommy. I hadn’t seen him since we’d been drinking together before I went with the fake European all those months ago. Overjoyed, I flung myself into his outstretched arms, enveloping myself in the hazy fragrance of marijuana and original-scent Tide. “Where your head at, woman?” he muttered. “I called your name like a million times. Wait, are you crying?”
“What are you doing here?” I asked, wiping my eyes.
“Vacation,” he said. “Visiting some peeps.”
“Did you even know I was here?”
“I do now,” Tommy said. “Sit down. Let’s get you a drink.”
Tommy was with a couple of other guys. One of them, a tall fellow with lank black hair and a heavy beard, was Tommy’s friend Arthur, whom I knew slightly from New York. We nodded hello.
“Dude,” Tommy said, putting his head in his hands. “This weed is kicking my weak ass. These fucking coffee shops are serious, yo. I am so tripped out right now.”
“Too tripped out to introduce me to your friend?” said the other guy, who wasn’t Arthur. He had a warm, raspy voice, and was grinning at me good-naturedly.
“Oh, dude, sorry,” said Tommy. “This our boy Pete. Haven’t you guys ever met?”
Like me, Pete was an American living in Amsterdam, having moved about a year ago from New York. Obviously, we had friends in common, although our paths had never crossed.
“Do you like it?” I asked. “If you’ve been here for a year already you must feel sort of . . . I don’t know . . . at home, right?”
Pete was tearing his beer mat into tiny shreds, making a small, orderly pile on the slats of the café table. “Sometimes I just don’t know,” he said, suddenly shifting his gaze up to me. His blue eyes were very bright through their lattice of bloodshot veins. “Like what I’m doing here, you know? I wake up every morning and wonder if I’m wasting my life.” I was startled by his sudden tone of intimacy. It had been a while since I’d been around other Americans. I had nearly forgotten our habit of sharing our psychological traumas with perfect strangers. Americans size each other up by how much we’re willing to share. “Hello, nice to meet you, I hate myself.” Europeans, on the other hand, walk around naked and give their children chocolate penises to suck, but public confession, not to mention self-flagellation, went out with the Crusades. They already know it’s all just vanity in a tearful package.
Tommy was staring glassily at the canal, his slack jaw a grotto for mosquitoes. Beside him, Arthur had produced an X-Acto knife from one of the many functional pockets of his military-grade knapsack and was meticulously carving the Heineken symbol from the center of his own beer mat—carefully feeling the H, the e, the small red star that dotted the i. They both seemed to have forgotten we were there.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here either,” I said softly.
Pete smiled lazily. “Maybe you’re finding yourself.”
I scoffed. “Do I look like some kind of hippie?”
Pete sat back in his chair, searching my face. “You look like you know a lot of things.”
“Fuck off.”
“No, I like it. I like smart girls.”
“That’s very highbrow of you. Personally, I’m only attracted to sexual compulsives with bulging biceps and the barest rudiments of spoken language. You know. The autistic gym teacher type.”
Pete held up his hands. “We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. Have it your way.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to be obnoxious. It’s just been a bad day.”
Arthur lifted his beer mat to his face, peering out from the ghostly Heineken-shaped hole with one eye. Tommy emitted a low gurgle of laughter as his head lolled lazily to one side. “Do you think it’s cool if I piss in the canal?” he asked.
“It’s a little early in the evening for that,” said Pete. “Why don’t you just go inside?”
Arthur rose eagerly. “I’ll come with you.”
Tommy scoffed. “What are we, chicks? You wanna stand in front of the mirror and tell each other how cute we look?”
“You didn’t answer my question,” said Pete, when they had gone.
“You didn’t ask me one.”
“Look,” said Pete. “You could talk to me. I know what it’s like. I’m probably the only other person who knows exactly what it’s like. And I want to talk about it. I need to talk about it. Don’t you? I mean, what the fuck?” He smiled, jutting his shoulders up and turning his palms to the gray sky. Inside me, something softened. He was awfully disarming, and now that I thought about it, awfully cute.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I thought I’d come here for a while, just to have a change of pace. I thought I’d have an acting job, but it fell through.”
“Why didn’t you go back?”
“Because I’m a failure,” I said, with a loose, desperate laugh. “I failed New York. I got stuck on the outside of the tornado.”
“What tornado?”
Suddenly, I felt embarrassed. “Like, New York City’s a tornado. And some people get caught on the inside and make it all the way down—”
Pete interrupted, “And other people wind up getting spat out from the other side?”
“Something like that.”
“But how do you know you’re on the wrong side?” he asked seriously. “Maybe it’s too early to tell.”
“No,” I said. “I used to think it was all random, which side you wound up on, but it’s not. It’s all money, and connections, and knowing how to work them. Some people are just born on the inside, and some people aren’t.”
“Is that what you think?”
“That’s what I know,” I said fervently. “But I didn’t feel like sticking around just to prove my point. I didn’t want everyone around to watch me fail.”
Pete frowned. “Don’t you think everybody is more worried about how they’re doing than they are about you? Isn’t that kind of self-absorbed?”
“Oh my god, yes,” I exclaimed. “But like I always say, of course I’m self-absorbed. I’m awake.” Pete laughed. “Please!” I said. “Don’t let me torture you anymore with my tales of woe. I told you I was boring! Let’s talk about you! What about you? Why are you here?”
Pete blinked hard. “I guess it was . . . you know . . . love.”
“You’ve got a thing for tall, skinny blondes?” I said. “How unusual.”
“Well, my girlfriend doesn’t really look like that,” Pete said. “That’s why I moved over here. To be with my girlfriend. She’s Dutch.”
“Oh, right.” Now it was my turn to shred a beer mat. “You have a girlfriend.”
“We met in New York,” he continued, “and we were there for the first few years, so when she wanted to move back here, I figured it was only fair.”
I gathered the beer mat shreds into the shape of a heart. “Are you going to get married?”
“Well, we kind of are already,” said Pete sheepishly. “I mean, we’re not married, but we’re, you know, domestic partners. From a legal standpoint, it’s very similar here.”
“Good,” I said perkily. “Good for you. How long have you been together?”
“Almost six years.”
“Six years. That’s a long time.”
He leaned forward intently in his chair, bringing his face uncomfortably close to mine. I felt my cheeks flush. “It is such a long time. I never thought it would be this long. And I’ve never cheated on my girlfriend . . . but six years. Six years. How do people do it?” It should have been a rhetorical question, but somehow I felt like he expected an answer. His hand lay flat on the table, very close to mine, and I could feel the air around it grow warm, as if his body were a radiator coursing with a fresh burst of steam.
“I don’t know,” I said helplessly. A small knot, like a pang of hunger, was beginning to form in my stomach. “Nobody ever wanted to go out with me that long.”
“You know what I think?” Pete said throatily. “I think something major is going to happen to you here. Something big. You look . . . you look lucky. I’m, like, almost jealous of you. Here you are, all on your own. Anything could happen. Something that takes you totally by surprise.”
“I hope not,” I said. “In my experience, most surprises are bad.”
“That’s pretty pessimistic.”
“It’s logical,” I said. “Good things are never really a surprise. They’re the things you fantasize about. You never daydream about terrible things happening. That’s why they’re always a shock.”
He grinned. “I think you’re wrong.”
“And I think you’re crazy.”
“Nah,” said Pete, still grinning. “I’m just a Pisces.”
Before I had time to formulate an appropriate response to the enigmatic imbecility of this remark, Tommy had reappeared. Arthur trailed behind him, calmly sipping a fresh beer. “I’m starving,” Tommy exclaimed, hoisting his T-shirt up and vigorously kneading a hand over his gently rounded belly. “This weed, dude. I need to fucking chow.”
“I know a good place,” said Pete, looking at me. “It’s traditional Dutch, but good. Lace curtains, candles, you know.”
“Gezellig,” I finished.
He smirked at me. “Echt gezellig. You got a fiets?”
“It’s a few blocks away. We can go get it.”
“Don’t bother. You can ride on the back of mine.”
“I don’t ride on the back of anyone’s fiets,” I said. “It’s a matter of personal pride.”
There’s a reason that Dutch cuisine has never really caught on in other parts of the world: it’s basically a combination of the worst elements of British and German food, mixed up with kale and gravy, and then pureed.
“But if you smoke enough weed, anything tastes good,” said Tommy, as he speared a piece of stringy meat from its perch on a pile of unidentifiable mashed tubers on the edge of his plate. “Maybe that’s why they legalized it, so people would eat. You know, like how they give it to chemotherapy patients.”
“Right,” I said. “Or people with that wasting disease you get from AIDS.”
“Dude,” murmured Arthur. “It would suck to have AIDS.”
After dinner, it seemed like a good time for some serious drinking and, eager to show off my knowledge of hidden Amsterdam, I wrangled the whole group over to the Habibi, a small bar off the Leidseplein that had become Antonio’s new favorite. Antonio had recently been appointed captain of one of Boom Chicago’s fleet of rickety tourist boats, and in preparation for his new life on the high seas, he had grown a beard, a gleaming spade-shaped thicket of black hair that reached halfway down his neck. “It makes me look more like a sailor,” he said. It also made him look more like a terrorist and was garnering him some suspicious glances on the street, particularly if he was carrying a backpack or anything that looked sharp. The Habibi, however, which catered mostly to an after-hours clientele of Egyptian cab drivers, was free of such hostility. “Yesterday, one man ask me to his home for feast of Ramadan,” Antonio said proudly. “What I do if he asks do I want to marry his daughter? Already I have one wife, but for these people it make no difference.”
Abdullah the bartender greeted us as we settled at the bar, beside a nonoperational hookah the size of an emperor penguin. “You have new boyfriend?” he asked me, casting a narrowed eye in Pete’s direction as he brought over a round of arak. “I like old boyfriend. He have nice beard.”
“I like Antonio too,” I said. “But he’s not my boyfriend. He’s married.”
Abdullah frowned. “Very bad. Very bad you step out with married man. You know better than this.”
I dropped a big handful of change in the tip jar, which to my relief cheered Abdullah up enough to drop the subject. If I needed a lecture on the traditional morals of the Levant, I could always call my mother.
It was at least four by the time we oozed out of the Habibi. Arthur stumbled heavily against the bridge, sending several bicycles to the ground like a cascading row of dominos. Tommy looked ashen, gripping on to the railing next to him for dear life. Pete, surprisingly alert, shrugged apologetically. “It’s really late.”
“I know,” I said. “I should go home.”
“Do you think your roommates are still pissed off?”
My roommates. I had almost forgotten about our fight. “Jeroen and Mattijs are not just roommates,” I added fiercely. “They’re my best friends.”
“Sure. But whatever they are, if things are tense, it’s probably not the best idea to go home in the middle of the night and wake them up. My girlfriend’s away, and I’ve already got these jokers staying with me.” Pete gestured toward Tommy, who leaned over the edge of the bridge, unhinging his jaw like a feeding python as a graceful arc of vomit swooped from his mouth into the rippled murk of the canal. “You’re welcome to crash at my place too, if you want.”
I am a jealous person by nature, but the moment we crossed Pete’s threshold I was gripped with an envy I had never experienced. It was nothing like the baffled covetousness I felt upon seeing a sprawling vacation house in Newport or the well-born undeserving at the Academy Awards. That was just aspirational nonsense. But this, this was the home I had dreamed of in my realistic fantasies. Not some Elle Décor Cote D’Azur compound with an infinity deck littered with India Hicks lounge chairs and the languid scions of deposed royal dynasties, but a perfect replica of what I had always believed I might actually have one day: the black-and-white tiled kitchen with hanging copper pans, the cozy L-shaped sofa, and especially, the man puttering around the kitchen with his mussed hair and frayed sweater, humming softly as he made our tea. There was something monstrous inside my chest, beating its claws against my rib cage in a horrible tattoo. Why don’t I have this? Why not me?
Arthur and Tommy had collapsed on the sofa without a word the moment we came inside. They were both already sound asleep.
“We’re the ones who should pass out,” Pete said. “They’re still on New York time.” He handed me my tea in a flowered porcelain cup, drinking his own from an earthen mug an unlovely shade of brown. “I thought I’d give you the good china. It’s for ladies.” I took a sip.
“This is a very nice place,” I said.
“Thanks.” He reddened slightly. “We . . . we spent a lot of time on it. You know, fixing it up.”
“Where is your girlfriend?” I ventured.
“She’s at her parents’ in Amersfoort.”
“When is she coming back?”
Pete shrugged. “Tomorrow, I guess. Maybe Sunday.”
“She has good taste,” I said. My voice sounded strange to me, tinny, as if I were listening to myself on an answering machine. “It’s a lovely home.”
“Yeah.” Pete picked a piece of lint off his shirt. “That’s her thing.”
“You can tell,” I said. “I’ve never had that kind of touch . . . you know, knowing what kind of throw pillows to get. Having the right plates for things. And everything I have I ruin. Like people say they kill plants? I kill housewares. When I moved into my first apartment, I spent hours going to flea markets and garage sales, looking for these perfect objects. I’ve always had this thing about finding these perfect objects, like they’re the key to something.”
“To what?”
“To . . . life. I don’t know.”
“Are you sure you don’t just like to shop?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, but that’s the whole philosophy behind shopping, isn’t it? You try to collect the possessions that seem to belong to the person you want to be, and you think you’ll become that person. I remember I bought this old cookie jar from Mexico—orange, with big hand-painted flowers. And I had this art deco dressing table that I found in an antique store with the big mirror and wood inlays. The handles on the drawers were shaped like seashells. At a garage sale I got green lamps with red shades; they looked like jade. And in my mind, I saw it all so clearly, how beautiful all these things would look together, with the lamps on either end of the dressing table, the jar filled with hairpins and bracelets and, you know, pretty little things. But when I finally moved in and put them all together, it just looked all wrong. I thought it would be sort of whimsical and elegant, but it looked . . . well, it looked like a bunch of old shit someone had bought at a garage sale. Anyway, in two months, I’d lost the lid to the cookie jar and one of the lamps shattered, the other shorted out when I spilled beer on it. The seashell handles had broken off and the drawers of the dressing table were splintered.” I sighed. “Anywhere I live for more than a month ends up looking like the inside of someone’s coat pocket. Dark and filthy and covered with lint and crumpled paper and little pieces of dried-out tobacco. It’s just the way I am.”
Pete was staring at me intently. “It doesn’t have to be.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Maybe someday I’ll find a lovely wife who makes a lovely home.”
“I should go to bed,” he said suddenly, although he didn’t move away. “Do you . . . do you need some pajamas or anything? I could give you a T-shirt or—”
“I’m fine.”
We stared at each other. I could hear his breath over the soft chorus of the boys’ snores. When he spoke, the word matched it, shallow, asthmatic. I could hardly hear what he said.
“Kusje?”
The Dutch diminutive has a way of making a concept so innocent, so small. A biertje is just a harmless little beer, nothing that could cause you to make a fool of yourself or pass out in a pool of your own vomit. Vriendje, the word for “boyfriend,” is literally a “little friend,” conveying no trace of the volcanic chaos and cruelty lovers casually inflict on each other. A kusje, a little kiss; absent of anything adulterous or complicated, as innocent as a small child offering a dandelion to his mother. Just a little kiss. What was the trouble with that?∆
He breathed it again. “Kusje?”
His mouth was warm. It left my lips with a trembling sensation of exposure. When I was little, my parents had a lava lamp in the basement, and my sister and I used to creep downstairs and stare at it, convinced that the pulsating, glowing bubble inside was alive and evil, plotting to break free and destroy us all. Now, clenching every muscle in my body against the strange, nauseous surge of lust that had welled up in response to Pete’s kiss, I felt like that same bubble was inside me, gurgling swampily from my vulva to my rib cage and back again. Hold it together, vulva! I told myself sternly. You’re the last line of defense. If this thing gets out, we are all going to die.
“We should go to sleep now,” I said.
He cleared his throat gruffly. “You can come in the bedroom with me, if you want.”
“I’m very tired,” I said. “I really think I should go to sleep.”
“Don’t you want to sleep in the bed?”
“No!” I pressed myself painfully against the mound of blankets beneath me on the living room floor. “I like the floor! It’s good to sleep on the floor!”
“All right, then. Sleep tight.”
I sighed with relief as I heard the smooth click of the bedroom door locking behind him. He had taken me at my word, thank God. Pete was just a guy. A cute guy who reminded me of home. But he was also a guy with a girlfriend, a girlfriend who was probably a lovely person and had decorated this lovely apartment and had probably chosen the Laura Ashley–inspired duvet upon which I was now splayed, unclenching my now-aching genitals and practicing emotional self-mutilation over my brief and senseless urge to hastily fuck her boyfriend. Sighing, I gave my pelvic bone a disciplinary spank. As usual, I must have misread the situation. Probably Pete had just intended to give me a chaste little good night peck. Probably he had aimed for my cheek and missed. And as for his offering the bed, why, he was probably just being chivalrous. What a sad commentary, I thought to myself as I drifted off to sleep, blanketed by Arthur’s soft snores from the sofa, that after all these tawdry adventures with uncircumcised Austrians, Swiss men seeking paid companionship, and polyamorous Italian oral surgeons/recreational rapists, I couldn’t even recognize a true gentleman when he tried to put his tongue in my mouth.
I was a bit anxious when I arrived back at Jeroen and Mattijs’s that morning, but it wasn’t necessary. I apologized for being an asshole, sloppy, exculpating hugs were enthusiastically exchanged, and by the time Tommy phoned to ask if I wanted to meet up again that night for dinner, peace was fully restored.
“Pete’s girlfriend is back,” Tommy said. “She’s coming to dinner.”
“Did you meet her?” I asked, with false cheer. “What’s she like?”
“Like a mom,” Tommy said.
“Oh,” I said, relieved but strangely deflated. It all made sense. There were a lot of guys—lost, arty types like Pete—who had those sort of very maternal girlfriends, solid girls who looked after them, saw that they ate, listened patiently and encouragingly to their endless, simultaneous litanies of self-aggrandizement and self-pity. I had never been very successful in my attempts to become such a girlfriend, being plenty self-aggrandizing/pitying myself. “Is she pretty?”
Tommy snorted. “I never wanted to fuck my mommy.”
Dinner was at a noisy Thai restaurant near the train station. We had scarcely managed to arrange ourselves around the table before Pete’s girlfriend, a broad, pleasant-looking blonde swathed in an enormous cardigan of fawn-colored wool, immediately commandeered the single menu card, instructing her foreign guests on what we would like best to eat.
“Tommy will prefer something spicy, I think,” she was saying firmly. “Arthur, you will like the peanut sauce, but if you order this dish, you must not share any of it with Peter. Peter is allergic.”
Across the table, Tommy caught my eye meaningfully. “Mommy,” he mouthed.
The Girlfriend gazed at me coolly, biting her lower lip perplexedly before she looked back down at the menu. Half-standing, I leaned across the table, hoping to convince her that I was perfectly capable of selecting my own meal, when I felt a fly brush the back of my thigh beneath my skirt, lingering at the crease where my panties met my skin. I reached down to swat it away.
The fly was Pete’s hand.
The lava-lamp sex demon in my belly sprang to life, fully lucid and screaming for blood, a wrenching surge of heat scalding my insides like a mouthful of boiling liquid. I had fallen in love before and didn’t recall the sensation feeling so much like the symptoms of impending anaphylactic shock, but then, I had never before been seated across from my beloved’s long-term girlfriend as she lectured me about the nutritive properties of shrimp pad thai. Panicked, I glanced sideways toward Pete, who smiled blandly as he plunged his hand past the sagging elastic of my underpants, cradling my trembling, sweat-beaded buttock against his cool palm. I thrust my knuckles against the edge of the table for balance as Pete’s warm fingers edged steadily forward, creeping dangerously into the hollow of my thigh.
“Is it possible for you to eat pork?” the Girlfriend asked, cocking her head ruminatively to one side. “I know of course that many Jewish people like yourself will not eat it. Perhaps you can explain to me why this is? I have always thought it is really a shame for you, because it is a very nutritious and affordable meat.”
“Excuse me,” I croaked. “I’ll be right back.”
In the antiseptic safety of the single-stall bathroom I crouched over the toilet, gripping the sides with both hands to keep myself upright. I tried to meditate on the placid half-moon at the bottom of the bowl, forcing the cool, faintly urine-scented air in and out of my lungs, and when the urge to vomit had passed, I splashed some cold water on my face and smoothed my hair in the mirror over the sink.
There was a soft knock at the door.
“Slechts een minuut,” I stuttered. “Just a minute.”
“It’s me,” Pete muttered hoarsely. “Please. Let me in.”
My fingers trembled as I undid the lock. He catapulted toward me, and we thudded against the cool-tiled wall in a frantic embrace. Our mouths were speaking a private language our heads couldn’t hope to understand, and when he moved his lips away to explore my neck, my face, my breasts, my own moved up and down in a pulsating circle, like a hungry bird, until he brought them back. The nauseous burning at the pit of my stomach was gone. Everything was right. His warm, piney breath, the cool skin of his neck against my burning wrist: It was all right, inevitable yet surprising, like a wild, perfect poem. There was no uncomfortable clinking of alien teeth, no embarrassing barrage of empty endearments, no unwelcome bearded friend hiding in tiny zebra underpants behind the door. There was, however, I thought as he unlatched my bra, something else, someone who was probably currently instructing her guests on the way to properly hold a set of chopsticks, someone whom I couldn’t get out of my mind even as Pete’s mouth closed tightly over my rigid nipple.
“Your girlfriend,” I gasped, summoning all the remaining ragged fibers of my moral sensibility to wrench his head away from my breast, “is sitting right outside.”
Pete sighed the broken sigh of the Deflating Erection. It was a sound I knew well, having heard it often in high school when I would casually mention that I was still a virgin. “I know,” he said. “Believe me, I know.”
“Well?” I said desperately. I needed his help. I was running on fumes here. I had about five more seconds before I no longer cared if I was going to hell. “Shouldn’t that mean something to . . . to somebody?”
Pete clasped his hands roughly on either side of my face, and I threw my head back in an approximation of the poster from Gone with the Wind, a pose I had practiced in front of the mirror throughout the entire summer of 1989. This was the first time in my real life I’d ever had a chance to use it. “Look,” he said throatily. “Things haven’t been good between us in a long time. I told you. For months, I’ve been asking myself, why am I even here? Why don’t I just go home? And now I know: It was because everything in my life so far, every decision I’ve ever made, everything that’s ever happened to me, even meeting her, was because one day it would lead me to you.” He brought my hand to his lips. “Don’t you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
It’s always been easy for me to narrate certain sexual encounters, the kind that seem to become amusing cocktail party anecdotes even while they are happening, as if I can hear the cruel, titillated, gin-and-tonic laughter even while he’s still ineptly fiddling with an obstinate zipper, a stubborn clasp. But to verbally express what happens during one of the real ones is almost impossible. You can use all the usual descriptive verbs—the melting, the burning—or revert to elaborate metaphorical sequences involving fire and water and tender pink flowers with dew-moistened petals. But the most eloquent statement I have ever heard on this matter was a medical study in which a group of scientists (Dutch scientists, by the way) found that at the pinnacle of orgasm, a woman’s brain registers no activity at all. Her neural activity at the moment of climax is equal to that of someone in a vegetative state.
As we left the restaurant and headed to our bikes, Tommy pulled me roughly to one side. “Did you fuck him in the bathroom?”
“What?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Don’t bullshit me. Did you fuck him in the bathroom?”
“No,” I said truthfully. “I didn’t.” Tommy released my arm.
“Just do me a favor,” Tommy said. “Don’t fuck him until we leave. Will you do that for me?”
I softened a little. “Do you think she noticed anything?” Pete and the Girlfriend stood several yards in front of us, gazing at each other lovingly as he unfurled her bicycle chain from a rusty lamppost.
“No,” Tommy said. “You weren’t gone that long, and she was too busy telling Arthur how hot he should order his curry.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. It must be awkward for you. I mean, she’s a friend of yours.”
Tommy guffawed. “She’s not my friend! You and Pete are my friends, and as far as I can tell, she makes him miserable. And he can’t stop talking about you.”
“Really?”
“Dude. All fucking day he’s asking me about you. What’s she into? What’s she like?”
“What did you say?”
“I said you were awesome.” Tommy shrugged. “And that all the guys we went to school with were totally in love with you, but you were totally picky and intimidating.”
I giggled. “Is that true?”
“Fuck no,” said Tommy. “But like I said. He’s my friend and you’re my friend, and I can see what’s happening. Just please don’t fuck him before we’re gone. It’s the least you can do. I’m not that girl’s biggest fan, but I’d feel awfully weird eating her oatmeal in the morning knowing I’m the ultimate cause of the demise of her relationship, you know?”
That was a Sunday. Early Tuesday morning, Tommy and Arthur boarded their flight home. By lunchtime, Pete was standing on the welkom mat of our apartment, holding a bottle of wine and a bunch of black-eyed Susans in a paper cone. That afternoon, even Helga didn’t dare to bang on the floor.
My small collection of friends was not particularly encouraging about this new development in my life. While they managed to restrain themselves from emblazoning a scarlet A across my breast and dragging me in manacles through the town square, they nevertheless found ways to express their disapproval, with varying degrees of success. Over dinner one night, Jeroen and Mattijs told me the sad story of a female friend of theirs who had been involved with a married man for fifteen years.
“She is a wonderful woman,” Jeroen said gravely. “Beautiful. Talented. She has everything going for her. But finally, the lies, the sneaking around, she cannot take it anymore. She tells him he must choose. It will be her, or the wife.” Jeroen paused dramatically. “He chooses the wife, of course. And so she has no love, no baby, no nothing. And now she is forty-two, something like this, and she will be alone forever.”
“She has been asked to write a book by a big publishing company,” Mattijs piped up. “A novel of fiction based on this time. They give her quite a lot of money, actually. They think it will be a best seller.” He stopped himself when he saw the look of feral glee spreading across my face. “Perhaps this wasn’t the best example.”
Beta Mattijs chose to convey his crushing disappointment in my lack of sexual morals as he was getting a lap dance at La Coquette, a hidden strip club in the red-light district where Antonio had brought us.
“You shouldn’t fuck around with a guy who has a girlfriend,” Beta Mattijs had said, as the naked teenager wedged between his legs swept into a deep bow, thrusting her buttocks brusquely against his forehead.
“You ought to be grateful.” I quickly swiveled my stool so that my back faced the poles. The six-foot-tall Russian had again taken the stage, and she had already seized my mittened hand and pressed it to the silicone dome of her naked breast twice that night. I had a standing policy to remain completely bundled up at all times when in the red-light district, as I felt the sheer ludicrousness of my red mittens/yellow coat/green hat ensemble broadcast the fact that not an inch of the flesh below it was available for purchase. I looked like a big fuzzy traffic light. “If I had a real boyfriend, do you think he’d let me hang out here with you?”
Antonio fingered my sleeve. “I always like this coat. It remind me to Winnie-the-Pooh.”
Beta Mattijs’s girl jerked herself away from his visible erection to yell in a consonant-heavy language at the scrawny, olive-skinned boy who crouched against the wall, bathed in a jet of devilish red light. Without a word, the boy retreated dolefully into the darkened hallway leading to the alley. He could not have been more than ten years old. “My leetle bro-zer,” said the girl regretfully, replacing her hand over the lumpy outline of Beta Mattijs’s scrotum. “He eez supposed to wait outside.”
Antonio stood up, knocking over his drink. “Here is boring. Let us go now instead to one sex show. On the Old Side for Burg’s Wall* there is a woman who writes the word ‘FUCK’ on the stomach of a man with one Sharpie that she hold inside her pussy. While she does this, she is dressed like Cher.”
“Why don’t you call Summer?” I asked Antonio, once Beta Mattijs’s dancer had tucked his moist twenty-euro note inside her studded codpiece and we’d pawed our way through to the street. I had met Antonio’s American wife a couple of times before, and we had really seemed to hit it off. That was what I needed most of all, I thought, a girl to talk to. A nice, supportive American girl who would understand that I was just following my heart, which in the cheerfully amoral logic of the Hollywood romantic comedy was the only thing I could do. Summer would know that I wasn’t the sadistic, Lycra-clad bimbo in this situation. I was the lovably neurotic Heroine saving the Hero from the suffocating embrace of the wrong woman! I had messy hair and a rickety bicycle and a coat made from the clumps of hair clogging the communal showers at the Jim Henson Home for Retired Muppets!
Antonio looked uncomfortable. “Summer doesn’t know I am with you tonight. I tell her about you and this guy.” Antonio shrugged. “She doesn’t like me to hang out with someone who does such a thing.”
My cheeks flushed. “I see.”
Hastily, Antonio patted my arm. “She likes you very much, really. She just do not trust you right now.”
I couldn’t blame her. While I was fully aware that my personality was cluttered with more than its fair share of bullshit, I had always prided myself on the thought that, beneath it all—beneath the hysteria and selfishness and periodic compulsion to symbolically immolate myself like a dull-witted, melancholic phoenix—I was essentially a good person. I didn’t think I had it in me to knowingly hurt another person in any serious way. Now I had been tested, and I had failed. I was not a good person. I was a bad person who deserved bad things to happen to me, and yet here I was, for the first time in recent memory, incredibly happy. Sure, I felt guilty, but the guilt, to put it bluntly, was quite literally being fucked out of me. Every time the Girlfriend’s face flashed before my mind’s eye, Pete’s hand would suddenly be down my pants. On the few days a week when Jeroen and Mattijs had classes to teach, we would lie on my futon in the living room for hours, staring mistily into each other’s eyes.
“I want to marry you,” Pete would say, trailing his fingertip over my collarbone and down the side of my breast. “I almost feel like you’re my wife.” If I experienced a pang of empathy for the girl who actually was like his wife, who shopped for his groceries and took his shirts to the dry cleaner, I slapped it back sternly. She was just some girl I had dinner with once, I reminded myself. I didn’t even know her last name. “We’ll live in Ireland. It’s beautiful there, and artists don’t have to pay income taxes. That’s why Bono never gave up his residency.”
Sometimes, Pete seemed susceptible to the same wrenching guilt I suffered from. On those days, after we had sex, he would cry, inching his body away from me across the fitted sheet, and I would have to comfort him, rocking his head against my breast until he stopped. It never took long. The guilt you feel over a bad thing that also makes you deliriously happy is the easiest thing in the world to assuage. If it wasn’t, the world would be a very different place.
Lest I get too delirious, my mother called.
“Daddy and I are coming to visit,” she said. “We’ll be there the week before Thanksgiving. Try to eat some actual meals and do your laundry before then. I have no desire to relive the time you came home from college weighing eighty pounds and smelling like a homeless person.”
“I thought you said you’d never come back to Europe after your honeymoon,” I said, “when that French guy tried to make you pay for sitting on a park bench.”
“The French are a bunch of sniveling anti-Semites,” my mother said dismissively. “The Dutch are totally different. Besides, Northwest just merged with KLM and we can pay for almost the whole thing on frequent-flier miles. And Daddy can write the rest off as a business expense. It doesn’t make sense not to come.”
“Well, I’ll be happy to see you.”
She sighed. “Is there anything you need to tell me before we come?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re not riddled with track marks and dancing in your underwear in some store window, are you?”
“No,” I said. “Are you?”
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” my mother said. “I just want to know ahead of time, so I can brace your father.”
“Actually,” I said, “I’m wonderful. I’ve met someone and I’m in love.”
“Oh? And what did his grandfather do during the war?”
“You just said the Dutch were different,” I said. “And anyway, he’s an American.”
“What’s he doing over there?”
This is where things got tricky. “He moved over here about a year ago to be with his girlfriend at the time. She’s Dutch.”
“Is he a drug addict? Why didn’t he go home when they broke up?”
I took a deep breath. “They haven’t actually broken up yet. They still live together. But it’s basically over between them. He just has to do it the right way.”
There was a long, terrible pause before my mother spoke. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You should be ashamed every single moment of every single day.”
I tried to bring some levity to my voice. “It’s sort of a dull background of shame with occasional intense flare-ups.”
“Sounds like lupus.”
“That’s right,” I said. “My relationship is like lupus.”
“You know, you had a cousin who died of lupus,” my mother said. “It was very, very sad.”
“Mom,” I said urgently, “I know this must sound terrible. But this is for real. All along I knew something had to happen, something was making me stay, and now I know what it was. I was supposed to find this guy. He says it was our destiny.”
My mother let out a groan. “Oh, please. Will you give me just a small break?”
I was suddenly furious. “Do not quote lines from Parenthood at me right now! Do not! I’m telling you something important! I have met the love of my life.”
“I thought,” my mother said, “that you went there to find yourself.”
In a way, she was right. I had come to Europe to try to find myself, but how was that distinguishable from finding Pete? How else should we be defined but by the people we love? I had wandered, aimless, looking for something, and here it was. This was my purpose. This was my narrative. I’d be a fool not to grab onto it with both hands. I’d squeeze the life out of it before I’d ever let it go.
That year, Boom Chicago was throwing a huge Halloween party in the main theater. Though mainly intended as a friendly gesture to homesick American staff and friends, pretty much anyone was welcome; the irresistible urge of people to get dressed up in pumpkin costumes and make bad decisions with each other knows no nationality. The party was to have DJs, dancing, an open bar, and a costume competition with a cash prize, for which contestants were instructed to come dressed as “the scariest thing” they could imagine. After a few days of careful rumination, during which I considered the feasibility of going as a suicide bomber (too threatening), a broken condom (too sticky), and a malignant tumor (but how?), I settled on something sure to be a hit with this crowd: I would go dressed as “The Dutch Language.” Mattijs let me have the pair of old wooden clogs he kept out on the balcony, and I bought a white T-shirt with long sleeves, white tights, a white skirt, and a white little Dutch girl cap from a souvenir shop, which I covered with all the Dutch words I knew, carefully lettered in black Sharpie. Pete came over a couple of hours before the party to help me get ready.
“I’m going to carry some extra Sharpies with me through the night and let people write Dutch things on me,” I explained excitedly. “You know, like I was a cast. Or one of those autograph books.”
Pete chuckled, fanning his hand over the phrase he had just written across the back of my upper thigh. I twisted vainly, trying to read it. “What does it say?”
“It says, Ik hou van jou,” he said. “I love you.”
I seized his hands. “Come with me,” I said. “Please. Just this once.”
“I can’t.” He shook his head. “She’s having a bunch of her girlfriends over for dinner.” We almost never spoke the Girlfriend’s name aloud when we were together. Pronouns seemed at once kinder and more dismissive.
“Perfect,” I replied. “It’s a girls’ night. She doesn’t need you there. Come on. I know you can’t spend the night or anything, but . . . everyone is dying to meet you. Just tell her you’re going out with some friends.”
Pete looked sad. “That’s the thing. She knows I don’t have any other friends.”
“No one?”
He shook his head again. “That’s why I have you.”
The party was packed. It seemed like every English-speaking expat in Amsterdam was there, and my costume was filled with obscene Dutch phrases and suggestions in no time. I refused when Luke the Promiscuous Australian offered me a tab of Ecstasy, but from the looks of the various configurations of sweaty goblins and witches writhing firmly against each other’s bodies on the dance floor, it appeared I was the only one who had. When little Hattie, dressed in a slightly soiled toga and with pupils dilated to the size of peanut M&M’s, came running over to tell me that her latest middle-aged lover wondered if I’d be interested in joining them in some kind of terrifying ménage à trois, I fled to the upstairs office, where Kat, resplendent in a very realistic devil costume, was furiously making out with a large bald man dressed as Albus Dumbledore.
“Is it okay if I use your phone?” I asked.
“Of course you can! I love you!” Kat shrieked plunging her red-taloned hands into the underpants of her magical companion.
Pete was furious when he answered. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I could hear the drops of his saliva sizzle against the receiver. “Why are you calling me here?”
“I just thought maybe you could sneak away and come to the party. Even just for an hour or something.”
Pete snorted. “She’s already fucking suspicious. She found your number in my cell phone a couple of days ago, and now she’s telling all her girlfriends about this obnoxious American who has a crush on me. They think I don’t understand them, but I do.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I don’t mean to make problems for you.”
He sighed. “Oh, come on. Of course you do. Listen, I’ll meet you tomorrow in the park, okay? Don’t call here again tonight or there’s going to be trouble.”
Kat and Dumbledore had moved into the supply closet. As I slowly made my way back down to the party, I could hear their whispered words of love through the half-shut door.
When I arrived at the park the next morning, Pete was waiting for me on our bench by the lily pond. He jumped to his feet when he saw me and enfolded me in a tight embrace.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, when we came apart. “I hate having to do that to you.”
“Do what?” I asked diffidently.
“You know. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”
“It doesn’t,” I said, but Pete didn’t seem to hear me.
“It’s like I’m under fucking surveillance. She reads all of my e-mails, she listens to all my voice messages. If I leave the house, she asks me where I’m going a million times. It’s like she doesn’t trust me anymore.”
“Right,” I said. “I can see how that would be hard to understand.”
“It’s not just because of you. It’s always been like this. It’s only now that I see how fucked up it is.” Pete suddenly seized my hand and pressed it to his face. “Please, please don’t be mad at me. I need you. You’re like the only thing in my life that reminds me I’m still me.”
Pete had brought along his new digital camera to show me. As we sat on the bench for the next half hour or so, talking and cuddling, he took a steady stream of pictures.
“Stop it,” I said finally. “I’m so hungover. I must look horrible.”
“You look beautiful,” he said, flipping through the photos. “God. Look at this one. Look at us.” I leaned over to see the image. So this was what other people saw when they looked at us. A girl with a red scarf that picked up the rose in her cheeks, her brown hair curling tenderly around her jaw. The man gazed down into her face with a soft smile, his lips halfway to hers. We were a perfect vision of young love, a still from a romantic movie.
Pete deleted the picture.
“What are you doing?” I cried.
He looked at me, perplexed. “I have to delete them all, or she’ll find them. She uses this camera too.”
I wanted nothing more in that moment than to grab the camera out of his hands and thrash him repeatedly over the head with it, until man and machine both were reduced to unrecognizable pulp, but that wasn’t going to do any good. Neither was screaming, or crying, or threatening, or anything I might have done at home. He might start to feel like I was more trouble than I was worth, and where would that leave me? Our affair had become the fragile symbol for this whole endeavor. If I left Pete or, worse, if he left me, I might as well pack my sad little duffel bags and go home, although as I desultorily cycled toward Boom for my afternoon shift, I thought that going home didn’t actually seem like such a bad idea.
There was a dead pigeon in the alley where I parked my bike, lying on the cobblestones beside a large mound of gravel and silt. The streets of Amsterdam were littered with the carcasses of birds that had met a gruesome end beneath an oncoming tram or against the fender of a speeding bicycle, but this one was different. It lay perfect and uninjured, its wings intact, its beak slightly open. Stripping off one of my mittens, I picked up the little body in a sheet of crumpled tissue and set it carefully on the pile of gravel, where it wouldn’t be crushed. If I were a character in a novel, the bird would be a symbol for something, the demise of my innocence, the impossibility of love. But this wasn’t a novel, I reminded myself. It didn’t mean anything. It was just a dead pigeon that had fallen from the sky.
I checked my e-mail in the office. There was a single new message in my inbox, and although it seemed unlikely, I was seized with hope that it was from Pete. Maybe he’d managed to save the picture and send it to me. Maybe he understood how much I needed him to be real.
“Dear Ms. Cheryl Pot,” the message read. “We deeply appreciate your continued support for the work and ministries of the Reverend Jerry Falwell. Your generous Faith Partner gift helps us reach the lost with the Gospel of Jesus Christ through our worldwide television outreach and ministries.”
They suggested a starting donation of $250.