One July evening at a restaurant overlooking the Amstel he was wrestling with, and growing increasingly disinterested in, thick tubes of breaded and fried veal, the mustard sauce over them too thin to be of much help. Lydia was devouring a steak and then abruptly set down her fork. He realized she was watching him and had been for some time—he was drifting melancholic.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I seem to have lost my appetite. This isn’t agreeing with me.” He gestured toward his plate.
“Order something else.”
He hesitated and said, “No, I don’t believe so. But please. It’s pleasure enough to sit with you.”
She dabbed her lips with her napkin. “What do you say, shall we walk?”
They strolled along the river canal, the street quieted with the dinner hour. Henry was pensive and she left him be but for her hand slipped in his elbow, a light touch, not possession but companionable. He wanted silence, but not to be alone. He’d been shaken, just after they’d been seated in the restaurant by a sudden glimpse across the room of Olivia at a table with two other women, she the one facing him. That table was a good distance back, and he and Lydia were near the front windows, splashed with light from the river but there she was, plain as day. His first incongruous thought was What are you doing here? He suppressed a desire to rise and approach. Pretending to study the menu, he used the opportunity to shield his eyes from Lydia and study this apparition. Who, realizing his attention, looked up. Her eyebrows lightly frowned as she always did, and then she gave the brief smile that only signaled greeting and nothing more, certainly no invitation and returned to conversation with her friends. Then Olivia began to fade and the stranger emerge but the resemblance was too strong to be cast aside. He’d tried to settle into his meal, the veal a hasty choice with no understanding of what he’d ordered before it arrived, but he couldn’t. His hands felt slow, thickened clumsy fingers. Twice more he glanced at the woman. The first time it seemed she was waiting for him, the frown reappearing. The second time she’d shifted her chair enough so she was partly blocked by the backs of her companions.
He and Lydia walked. Among the apparently endless things that bound them, this love of walking, how he’d first seen her on the boat, was an easy and effortless thing to slip into together. Along with silence. Lydia was brightly direct and vocal when she chose to be but was not bothered by silence—in fact he’d already learned she was as comfortable with silence as he was. His silences had always demanded to be sought out—hers were an ingrained part of her.
It was pleasantly cool in the early evening shade thrown by the buildings next to them, the sunlight falling across the canal and lighting the tight high houses opposite. A few men poled boats on the river and twice slow-moving tugs nudged barges slowly past them, upstream, heading inland. A few other couples also strolled hand in hand. Henry was calming as he strode along. Another great pleasure of Lydia was that despite her being near a foot shorter then he was, her legs covered ground easily. He never felt he was pressing her, never felt he should slow his pace or if lost in thought suddenly find himself alone and turn to see her struggling on behind. She was right there with him.
Of course it had not been Olivia. Nor a ghost or some spectral warning. So what then, of this chance resemblance? Only that? Or some greater projection of his mind?
Or both. And not of his mind but of his clamorous thunderous heart. A heart not without its weaknesses, its faults and frailties but nevertheless a true heart. A heart that strived to be true.
He stopped without warning and Lydia stumbled free from her gentle hold of him, caught herself and turned.
He was about to speak when she said, “My God, Henry, are you all right? Your face is dreadfully pale. Do you need to sit down?”
“No,” he said and pulled his handkerchief and wiped his brow. “I’m fine, now. I just had a moment, was all.”
She was in a pearl evening dress with tiny beads sewn along her cleavage, a rose shawl over her bare shoulders. Her face intent, upturned. “What sort of moment? You’re white as a sheet.”
He had to smile. “I imagine I am. In the restaurant there was a woman across the room who looked exactly like Olivia. The resemblance was startling. It was discomfiting, to say the least.”
Her face serious, she said, “I’d think so.”
“It’s never happened to me before. And no, I don’t think she was a ghost or anything like that. In fact, once she was aware of a stranger gawking at her she did what most anyone would do and repositioned her chair to be out of my line of sight.” He was recovering a bit. “You know, on the one hand it would seem likely that somewhere in the world might be a woman who would strongly resemble her, just given the sheer numbers. And yet I’ve never in my life met anyone who really looked like anyone else. At least after a moment of study. But then think about it—neither of my daughters look like their mother, although there are bits and pieces, physical and otherwise that are familiar, in the most direct sense of the word. People talk of so-and-so looking like one parent or another but that’s because we know what we’re searching for.”
She was silent a moment, pensive. Then, “I’ve always been intrigued by the old idea, Plato’s, wasn’t it? That we’re only half-beings, that male and female were once one and we spend our lives seeking that missing half.” She paused again and said, “And when you do find that one, and then lose her. Or him. Where does that leave you? Forever again abandoned? Or can there be more than one?”
He was the silent one now, studying her. “Go on,” he said.
“It seemed to me that no, there couldn’t be. After all, if only two particular halves make a certain whole, how could there be? But then I started thinking about the idea of who we are. Of who I am. The I of each of us. There’s a constant, of course, but there’s also some mutability. Am I ever quite the same person I was yesterday? Or perhaps it works differently. Perhaps we hold too rigidly to the breaking down of time into days and months, even years. When I look back over my life so far I see it as one thing rolling into another, but I also see it as being periods. Cycles of time. Parts of your life that begin at a known, or even not-known-at-the-moment point, and go on for so many years, and then you realize that time has ended. Sometimes that ending just slips away and other times it comes rapid and unexpected.”
She stopped. Somewhere during this she’d taken her eyes from him and had been looking off down the river, appearing to watch a barge and tug coupled moving upstream into the distance. When she stopped talking her eyes came back fully upon him just as he was swallowing hard. “There are many ways that can happen, Henry.” And she reached and touched his arm. He nodded. She said, “People never fully leave you. Sometimes that’s a good thing, Henry. Sometime’s it’s not.”
He managed a smile. “And sometimes it leaves you seeing ghosts.”
She smiled. “Yes. Ghosts. They do come, and in many forms. Sometimes walking about Amsterdam I think I spy the young girl who first came here so many years ago and fell in love with the city.”
He’d straightened up, replaced his handkerchief and they resumed walking. He said, “And that would be you.”
“Oh yes. I was still a schoolgirl. And while it was some years before I returned, it never left my mind. Somehow I knew it was a place to return to and somehow, also, whether by the fortune of events or some other understanding, I didn’t return until it was the very best, perhaps the only place to go.”
Casually he said, “That part does sound intriguing.”
She tapped his arm with her knuckles. “Don’t fish. Allow me my schoolgirl.”
“A delicious vision, no doubt.”
A quick smile and she said, “Actually I was an ugly duckling. Stringbean arms and legs and no bosom to speak of. If I passed for a boy it would’ve been a scrawny one. Although of course I still had my hair long. And there were the undergarments that would’ve accentuated what I didn’t posses by nature but even then there was a bit of an obstinate streak in me.”
“Obstinacy? Or self-determination?”
“Thank you. But I was fifteen. It was the summer before I went to Russia and while I was hardheaded and determined to remain in Europe that attitude failed me when I considered my appearance. I was still with the first chaperone, the British cold-cup-of-tea, but I must give Eugenie credit—she bluntly told me not to concern myself, that time would take care of what time can take care of and for the meanwhile I should attend to my brain. Which I mostly did. Now, look at you—I was trying to tell you a story of a young girl’s first visit here and you’ve got me rummaging around in the drawers of my memory.”
“A lovely place.” The sun was still streaming over the upper reaches of the city and the cloudless sky held flocks of shale-colored pigeons and above those the white floating spirals of gulls. The bricks were dull blood in the shade although the heat of the day still rose from them.
She paused them both and said, “Are you so certain all those young women you taught were as safe as you make them out to be?”
His chin came up a bit. “Absolutely.” His eyes hard upon her, then softened as he said, “Although I’ve no idea what would’ve happened if you’d been among them.”
“Nothing,” she said. “You aren’t that kind of man and I was not the woman I am today.”
He nodded. “Fair enough. Tell me of your schoolgirl.”
She grinned and waved her hand, a dismissal prior to the telling. She resumed walking, their hands still linked. “When the school year ended Eugenie wanted to take me to England for the summer. But because I disliked her bossy ways, I insisted we go to Rome. Which did not please her at all. Oh, God, it was hysterical. Rome in the summertime. Dreadful and stinking and empty as could be. She hauled me relentlessly around to all the sights with an enthusiasm for her duty that was cruelly funny in hindsight. The whole city to me was nothing more than a gorgeous but decayed sewer. Not at all the sort of place a fifteen year old girl would want to be. And of course I wasn’t quick enough about such things then to question where all the people were—it still seemed a huge city to that little backwoods girl. And all the alarming black-boxed warnings in the newspapers—the death counts from malaria and other nasty things. It never occurred to me to insist we get out into the countryside, up in the hills and mountains, away from the swamp of Rome. Because I didn’t know such places existed until the next year in Lausanne when I told my school-mates about my summer. And that was when I fired her. Or wrote letters demanding my father do so. Anyway, I’m off track—”
“No, no,” he said. “This is wonderful. Keep going.”
Lydia glanced and shrugged, grinning. “I pretended to break down and holed up in my room for several days until she feared I was getting sick and then one morning when she brought me cold beef bouillon for breakfast I burst out crying and demanded we leave. I told her I wanted clear bright air and refused to be dragged around her precious England but wanted to be in one place, one place that would satisfy me. Still, it was enough to crumble what pigheadedness remained in her and she suggested here. Anything sounded much better than where I was. So I came to Amsterdam. And was amazed. Oh what a difference it was to come into Amsterdam in midsummer after Rome. We spent that last month here and every day, even when it rained, was spectacular. I do think, I honestly do, that even then I knew it was a special place and that one day I’d return here.”
Henry walking alongside, seeing that young girl, a part of him wishing he could’ve been here to have actually seen her. So he said in echo, “Which eventually you did. And when was that?”
Only then realizing their ambling had not been idle or capricious but directed ever so gently for they stood in the grand square of the Dam before the Royal Palace, behind them the rising wonder of the Hotel Krasnapolsky. The towers of Nieuwe Kerk rose into the evening rose-colored light, the sun still striking down here and warm, the throngs pressing down or out of Kalverstraat—shopping as an evening outing.
“Ah,” he said, trying to conceal his surprise. “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig. Am I dropping you off so early? Does the story end before it begins?”
But her face remained solemn. She appeared to be appraising him once more before speaking. Perhaps she just wanted the pause, for then she said, “I’d like you to come up. I seem to be in the mood to talk this evening. If you want.”
Somewhere they’d lost each other’s hands. Now deeply serious he reached and ran a finger along her jaw and took the finger away. “I wish,” he said, “you felt you didn’t have to ask me that.”
She looked off across the Dam. Then back to him. “The asking,” she said, “has nothing to do with you. Shall we go?” And took his hand but did not lead him—they walked side by side to the broad stairs up to the entrance of the hotel. Through the spread doors and across the lobby to the elevators, toward one with the cage open, the boy upon his stool watching them come as if he’d known they were his and his alone the moment they entered the hotel. He cranked the cage shut and without asking began to lift them up toward her floor.
The front sitting room was hot, the large windows overlooking the square and even though the windows were cranked open the air had died as the day did. He followed her down the short hall past the bathroom and the small dayroom which held a soft chair for reading and a secretary for a woman with much personal correspondence, as well as a set of bookshelves that appeared to have been brought in— not a regular feature. And then the spacious bedroom with broad louvered closet doors, another smaller bathroom adjacent, the crisply made bed and nightstands, a pair of lounge chairs with a standing lamp and cigarette table between them and a bank of high narrow windows that were opened to the north side, catching and drawing in cooler air. It wasn’t dark in the room but off-white and muted blue cast over into grey shadow and she left the lights off.
“Make yourself comfortable,” she said and stepped out of her shoes and lifted her dress over her head, leaving her in stockings and a waist-slip and thin chemise. He contented himself, as he had before, with removing his jacket, collar and tie, rolling up his shirtsleeves and, seated on the far edge of the bed where she was already curled upright with her legs tucked under her, removed his shoes and socks and garters and rolled his trouser legs up two turns before sliding around to face her, crosslegged.
A moment, long, easy, cool in the interior twilight, Henry with his fingers laced in his lap, Lydia resting one palm flat on the bed, the other laid on her covered thigh.
Finally she said, “For so long it seemed I just kept meeting the wrong man. There’d be a spark, an interest, usually mutual and as things went along I’d realize that while my independence was attractive, it was an attraction that included some version of taming me. Domesticity. And Henry, for all my bluster I desire that as much as the next person. Perhaps I made poor choices but the idea of being a challenge for someone to conquer was never what I had in mind. And, not to put too fine a face on it, it’s true that being a woman of independent means also invited a certain appraising eye, often from those well-accomplished in appearing quite other than as they actually are. One result of which was I learned to make my way through initial levels of those attractions with a bit of the actress about me—which was perhaps unfair but ultimately justified. And there were a couple of times when everything seemed almost to click into place and then didn’t, and I realized I’d gained a bit of a reputation, ill-founded as far as I was concerned but there you have it. And I had my friends, male and female both, who accepted me just as I was. Which can be a great source of relief under such circumstances. And so, slowly but inevitably I just gave up on love, on a single love. I was lonely sometimes but never in want of companions.”
She paused and looked at him. “Companions in all the meanings of the word.”
“And why not,” he offered, as much reassurance as was needed. He said, “Go on.”
She smiled. “They say when you stop looking ...”
“When it’s the last thing expected.”
“Exactly” Another pause taking Henry in and his eyes bold upon her. She said, “So I met Duncan. Duncan Bryce-Meraux. Not British or French as the name suggests but from an old New Orleans family. Before I met him I knew nothing of that city or its cultural and social levels. Let’s just say Duncan was a kindred soul, a black sheep, set loose somewhat the same way I was, to roam the continent and basically get him out of New Orleans. I was twenty-seven, the summer of 1910. He was staying with some friends in an old family home in Normandy. It was a grand house, a chateau really. With a moat. Quite enchanting. I’d met him in Paris and two days later we took the train out and were met at the station by a luxurious automobile. And he insisted on driving and they let him. Turned out later he’d never learned how to drive, he just did it. That was Duncan. Two days later he had me driving the thing. Shining black eyes and a dandy mustache and long almost medieval locks of curly black hair. He was a wonder to be with. Smart as smart can be but with a delightful off-center sense of humor that was a natural part of him, a glibness played straight if you will. Henry, I fell deeply in love. Oh, he was a god and I his goddess. I knew a few of his friends as light acquaintances and others by name and that too seemed right. As if in meeting him I’d also pierced the veils of pretense and social chattering. Those people simply didn’t care what anyone thought of them. And what a time we had. It was all so wonderful. Because, whatever we were doing, wherever we were, there were the hours and hours alone, just the two of us. His spontaneity was even greater than mine. We went to Nice and Monte Carlo and then when the heat got too bad he took me to Brittany, to Saint Malo, which I’d never even heard of. When the autumn rains came, one morning he spread a sheaf of tickets on the bed and we were off to Morocco, to a wonderfully run-down ancient house in Tangiers. Where we spent the fall tramping about the bazaars and living like lords on pennies, with a whole crew running the house. And we couldn’t talk to them and they couldn’t talk to us but everything got done. A magic carpet. The most wonderful savory foods. We didn’t drink a drop all winter—he told me we could easily obtain wine or spirits but we’d risk offending the staff. I was intoxicated anyway—it didn’t matter. Although he brought home a water-pipe and a thing you cupped between your fingers called a chillum and we smoked hashish. Which is where I learned there are good things in life you just haven’t encountered yet. The hashish, oddly, presented no issue for the house boys and the shrouded woman who cooked. As the winter went on I rose more and more out of myself, feeling not so much more free but unleashed—the exact opposite of what I’d felt with other men. I’d wake in the morning with the horns calling the faithful to prayer at dawn and watch him sleep. It was, he was, a miracle and yet what I’d always known would happen. I remember thinking that I was blowing apart, that I could walk off into the desert hills and spin like a dervish and never stop. That he’d brought all that to me.
“Then it grew cold, the wind blowing off the desert, sand coloring the sky, grit between your teeth, in every plate of food. And he was restless—it was time to go. So we returned to Paris, where we stayed a few days while he took care of what he said was business. One evening he took me to dinner with friends, who I understood were business associates in some vague way—a refined gentleman and his wife in their late forties. I met their children who then were sent off to bed before we dined. Although there was one other guest—a young woman, a girl really, in her middle teens or thereabouts who I’d assumed was the children’s governess. It struck me as odd that she’d be asked for dinner but she was charming with me, although she ignored Duncan—I only saw that in hindsight. And Monsieur was very solicitous toward me, which seemed to irritate the girl. Oh, she was a pretty one! And Madame, ah Madame. Such a great beauty, one of those women who as age creeps are transformed from beauty into elegance until you can’t tell the difference. And she also was attentive, focused on me as if I was indeed the sole purpose of the evening. Duncan was almost lounging, the half-smile of his that indicated he was thoroughly delighted with the proceedings. It was very strange, very casual and yet formal and with a curious atmosphere, not a tension in the air but the feeling was more to me as if there was an inner layer to it all that I didn’t fully understand. Of course I thought I did. Both the man and his wife, but, as you’d expect the wife in particular wanted to know all about me. I felt I was being introduced to another level, a different inner circle of Duncan’s life. Although Madame seemed to be unable to recall my name and kept referring to me as Duncan’s petite amie.”
She paused here. It was growing dark and she leaned and bent and switched on one of the bedside lamps, a low glow throwing itself up her corner of the room, the shadows not abated but retreated. She turned further and bent to the bottom of the nightstand, her slip rising to show her garters and the swell of her bottom and came up with a bottle of Armagnac and a single glass. Henry sat silent while she poured the glass amber half-full. She’d offer some when she was ready. She wasn’t disregarding him but rather drawn fully into herself. He waited, silent. The air cooler, pleasant through the bank of high windows, the high slice of sky now also the charcoal slate of pigeons.
She sipped and set the glass on the table, turning her eyes back to him. And here, finally, quietly, he said, “What happened?”
She lighted a cigarette and blew a small cloud toward him as if to obscure his question. But her voice was tight and keen. “The next day we returned to Normandy to stay with his friends there. I was a silly ass and thought if ever there was going to be a time this rounding of the cycle would prove to be it. I truly thought he was going to ask me to marry him and I’d worked it out in my head. I had no plans to be coy or hard to get. We knew each other, that was how I intended to respond. For two days it was the same old high times and I actually thought everyone else knew, that they were all in on it. Duncan had smuggled in hashish and the second night we all smoked that and drank endlessly out of the cellar and ended up sometime after midnight calling out the stable-boy and mounting up and riding across the starlit fields, splashing in low streams, jumping hedgerows. A mad wild dash. It was cold but we were insensible. The horses plunging beasts in the night, raising us all close to the stars. And then back for a late or early breakfast. Cooked this time by the gang of us in the huge kitchen. And while we were eating, everybody just clumped around with plates and glasses, Duncan led me off into a pantry of some sort where we made wonderful love. I remember coming back out and the faces turned laughing toward us and I thought Yes, they do all know.
“I slept late and woke about noon, alone. I went down through the house and it was very quiet. Not a soul in sight. I found tepid tea in the kitchen and wandered about until I heard my name being called and found Yvor, who owned the house, seated in the library with a book open upside down on his lap. I asked where everyone was, where Duncan was. I still thought something was being concocted, something special. But Yvor shut the book and stood and told me he was growing weary of Duncan, if only the rascal wasn’t so charming and then looked at me and told me I wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last. I pulled myself tight and there was suddenly a strange luminosity in the air, as if the remains of the hashish and wine from the night before had surged back into me and very coolly asked if he might explain himself more clearly. He shrugged and asked if I had not met them the other night, the baron and his wife and the baron’s little mistress and when I was silent he said Of course there were rumors that Elise enjoyed her husband’s conquests in her own particular ways but of course was largely content with Duncan. With his attentions but also his peccadilloes and that he, Yvor, couldn’t figure out whether Elise put up with them because they bound Duncan more strongly to her or simply because she found them amusing. The truth, he suspected, was some complex intertwining between the husband and wife and the freedoms they allowed themselves and each other—that there had to be secret balances because while Philippe seemed to change girls as frequently as he wished, Elise had owned Duncan for eight years now, ever since her previous lover had committed suicide. Then Yvor looked at me and said, there was nothing to worry about that with Duncan, was there?
“Henry, have you had the feeling where everything is closing in on you and you can’t breathe? That’s how I felt. I understood and I didn’t understand. Yvor came over and gently put his hands on my shoulders as if to steady me and explained that while everyone, and I knew what he meant by that, was charmed and delighted by Duncan there were also those—and clearly Yvor was among them—who felt pity for him also. And so tolerated him. I think it was then I screamed. A terrible howl from my heart. And I pulled away and raced up the stairs and started throwing things into my trunk and then began to drag it thumping down the stairs and Yvor came and lifted it from me and carried it down. We stopped in the grand hall and I asked where he was. Yvor shrugged and said perhaps Paris but most likely somewhere else. And then I became very cool, a strange floating sensation as if I was watching myself and I asked Yvor if he might drive me to the station. And he said Of course and asked if I needed any other help and I looked at him and said I’d never taken help from a man and never would. He studied me a moment, as if seeing me anew and then I told him if we didn’t leave immediately I’d start screaming again and he walked over and lifted something out of my hand, some ceramic I’d picked up without realizing and told me smashing things wouldn’t help. So he drove me out—it was one of those beautiful early winter days, the sort of weather that seems to mock one’s emotions. Yet it calmed me and I said it was clear I’d been deceived, that Duncan was far, far from the man I’d thought he was. And Yvor said, quietly, his eyes on the road, that Duncan wasn’t even the man he thought he was and that one day it would fall down all around him. And so finally I turned to him and asked Why. Yvor raised his driving glove and flicked his fingers, as if tossing away something small or foul and said matter of factly But Duncan has no money, you see? And so enters Elise and her husband. I started to ask something but Yvor was ahead of me and told the story they all knew and had no reason to doubt it unless it was even worse. Ten years before, Duncan was about to be married, in the great cathedral in New Orleans when he stopped at the altar and turned from the priest and his pregnant bride-to-be and announced he would not go through with it. He told it as if it were his great adventure, with the father and brothers of the girl chasing him through the streets with pocket derringers and how he hid in an empty beer barrel until it was night and he was able to slip to the wharves and get passage to France with the honeymoon money in his pocket and once here, once he arrived in Paris he’d wired for more money only to learn that his father had cut him off. Again, Yvor looked at me and then said Perhaps after all it was the life that was meant for him—that we all find not the lives we want but the ones we make. He was very kind at the station and tried to pay for my ticket, offered me money again but I was already gone from there. I thanked him and kissed him gently and wished him well. Then I took the train to Paris and as the afternoon grew dark and night came I realized I only wanted to disappear. So sometime after midnight in the Gare du Nord I bought another ticket. For Amsterdam. That’s when I came back here. That’s when I knew I’d found my home.”
Henry pushed one leg out straight toward her and leaned forward and stretched himself. Finally he said, “That was a while ago.”
She said, “I know.”
“But you still return to Paris. Did you ever see or hear of him again?”
She looked at Henry and slowly shook her head and then said, “I didn’t go back for a while. It wasn’t hard. I avoided certain places and saw only old friends. And the next year the war broke out.” She took a swallow of the Armagnac and said, “But damn it, Henry. He wasn’t going to steal Paris from me as well.”
Then she began to cry.