A Widow for One Year (53 page)

The woman novelist should be a writer of “big” novels. They are a parody of the proverbial wisdom that opposites attract. In this case, they can’t stand each other’s writing; their attraction is strictly sexual.

He should be younger than she is.

They begin an affair in Frankfurt and he comes with her to Holland, where she is going after the book fair to promote a Dutch translation. He doesn’t have a Dutch publisher—and he has been far less in the limelight in Frankfurt than
she
has been. Although she hasn’t noticed this,
he
has. He hasn’t been in Amsterdam since he was a student—a summer abroad. He remembers the prostitutes; he wants to take her to see the prostitutes. Maybe a live-sex show, too.

“I don’t think I want to see a live-sex show,” the woman novelist says.

It could be
his
idea to pay a prostitute to let them watch. “We could have our
own
live-sex show,” the short-story writer says. He seems almost indifferent to the idea. He implies that she might be more interested in it than he is. “As a
writer,
” he says. “For
research
.”

And when they’re in Amsterdam, and he’s escorting her through the red-light district, he keeps up a casual, lighthearted banter. “I wouldn’t want to see
her
do it—she looks inclined to bondage.” (That kind of thing.) The minimalist makes her think that watching a prostitute will be merely a naughty bit of hilarity. He gives her the impression that the most difficult part of it will be trying to contain their laughter— because, of course, they can’t reveal their concealed presence to the customer.

But I wonder how the prostitute would hide them so that they could see without being seen?

That will be
my
research. I can ask my Dutch publisher to walk with me through the red-light district—after all, it’s a thing tourists do. He probably is asked by all his women authors; we all want to be
escorted
through the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant. (The last time I was in Amsterdam, a journalist walked with me through the redlight district; it was
his
idea.)

So I will get a look at the women. I remember that they don’t like it when women look at them. But I’m sure I’ll find one or two who don’t absolutely terrify me—someone I can go back to, alone. It will have to be someone who speaks English, or at least a little German.

One prostitute might be enough, as long as she is comfortable about talking to me. I can imagine the act without seeing it, surely. Besides: it is what happens to the woman in hiding, the woman writer, that most concerns me. Let’s presume the bad boyfriend is aroused, even that he masturbates while they’re hiding together. And she can’t protest, or even make the slightest move to get away from him—without the prostitute’s customer knowing that he’s being watched. (Then how can he masturbate? That’s a problem.)

Maybe the irony is that the prostitute has at least been paid for how she’s used, but the woman writer is used, too; she has spent her money to be used. Well. Writers must have thick skins. No irony there.

Allan called. I coughed for him. Now that there is no immediate possibility for us to have sex—given the ocean between us—naturally I felt like having sex with him. Women are perverse!

I didn’t tell him about the new book, not a word. It would have spoiled the postcards.

[In another postcard to Allan, which was an aerial view of the Frankfurt Book Fair, boasting some 5,500 publishers from some 100 countries.]

NEVER AGAIN WITHOUT YOU.

LOVE,
RUTH

It’s the right look for someone who’s about to approach a prostitute. I appear to have an old disease to share.

My guidebook for Amsterdam informs me that the red-light district, known as
de Walletjes
(“the little walls”), was officially sanctioned in the fourteenth century. There are tittering references to the district’s “scantily clad girls in their shop windows.”

Why is it that most writing about the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is always so unconvincingly superior in tone? ( Amusement is as strong an expression of superiority as indifference is.) I think that any expression of amusement
or
indifference toward the unseemly is usually false. People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by
pretending
to be amused by it or indifferent to it.

“Everyone has a sexual hang-up, at least one,” Hannah once said to me. (But if
Hannah
has one, she never told me what it is.)

There are the usual obligations ahead of me in Amsterdam, but I have enough free time for what I need to do. Amsterdam isn’t Frankfurt; nothing is as bad as Frankfurt. And, to be honest, I can’t wait to meet my prostitute! There is the thrill of something like shame about this “research.” But of course I
am
the customer. I’m prepared— indeed, I’m fully expecting—to pay her.

[In another postcard to Allan, which she mailed from Schiphol Airport and which—not unlike the earlier postcard she mailed to her father, of the German prostitutes in their windows on the Herbertstrasse—was of
de Walletjes,
the red-light district of Amsterdam: the neon from the bars and sex shops reflecting in the canal; the passersby, all men in raincoats; the window in the foreground of the photograph, framed in lights of a purplish red, with the woman in her underwear in the window . . . looking like a misplaced mannequin, like something on loan from a lingerie shop, like someone
rented
for a private party.]

FORGET EARLIER QUESTION. THE TITLE IS
MY LAST BAD
BOYFRIEND
—MY
FIRST FIRST-PERSON NARRATOR. YES, SHE’S ANOTHER
WOMAN WRITER. BUT TRUST ME!

LOVE,
RUTH

The First Meeting

The publication of
Niet voor kinderen,
the Dutch translation of
Not for Children,
was the principal reason for Ruth Cole’s third visit to Amsterdam, but Ruth now thought of the research for her prostitute story as the all-consuming justification for her being there. She’d not yet found the moment to speak of her new excitement to her Dutch publisher, Maarten Schouten, whom she affectionately referred to as “Maarten with two
a
’s and an
e.
”

For the translation of
The Same Orphanage
—in Dutch,
Hetzelfde weeshuis,
which Ruth had struggled in vain to pronounce—she had stayed in a charming but run-down hotel on the Prinsengracht, where she’d discovered a sizable stash of marijuana in the small bedside drawer she’d selected for her underwear. The pot probably belonged to a previous guest, but such was Ruth’s nervousness on her first European book tour that she was certain the marijuana had been planted in her room by some mischievous journalist intent on embarrassing her.

The aforementioned Maarten with two
a
’s and an
e
had assured her that possession of marijuana in Amsterdam was barely a noticeable offense, much less an embarrassment. And Ruth had loved the city from the beginning: the canals, the bridges, all the bicycles, the cafés, and the restaurants.

On her second visit, for the Dutch translation of
Before the Fall of Saigon
—she was pleased that she could at least say
Voor de val van Saigon
—Ruth stayed in another part of town, on the Dam Square, where her hotel’s proximity to the red-light district had led an interviewer to take it upon himself to show Ruth the prostitutes in their windows. She’d not forgotten the blatancy of the women in their bras and panties at midday, or the “SM Specials” in the window of a sex shop.

Ruth had spotted a rubber vagina suspended from the ceiling of the shop by a red garter belt. The vagina resembled a dangling omelet, except for the tuft of fake pubic hair. And there were the whips; the cowbell, attached by a leather strap to a dildo; the enema bulbs, in a variety of sizes; the rubber fist.

But that was five years ago. Ruth had not yet had the opportunity to see whether the district had changed. She was now staying in her third hotel, on the Kattengat; it was not very stylish, and it suffered from a number of graceless efforts to be orderly. For example, there was a breakfast room that was strictly for the guests on Ruth’s floor. The coffee was cold, the orange juice was warm, and the croissants lay in a litter of crumbs—suitable only for taking to the nearest canal and feeding to the ducks.

On its ground floor and in the basement, the hotel had spawned a health club. The music favored for the aerobics classes could be detected in the bathroom pipes for several floors above the exercise facility; the plumbing throbbed to the ceaseless percussion. In Ruth’s estimation, the Dutch—at least while exercising—preferred an unrelenting and unvarying kind of rock music, which she would have categorized as an unrhymed form of rap. A tuneless beat repeated itself while a European male, for whom English was very much a foreign language, reiterated a single sentence. In one such song, the sentence was: “I vant to have sex vit you.” In another: “I vant to fook you.”

Her firsthand inspection of the gym had quickly dashed any tentative interest she might have had in it. A singles’ bar in the guise of an exercise facility was not for her. She also disliked the self-consciousness of the exercise. The stationary bikes, the treadmills, the stair-climbing devices—they were all in a row, facing the floor for the aerobics classes. No matter where you were, you could not escape seeing the leaping and the gyrations of the aerobic dancers in the plethora of surrounding mirrors. The best you could hope for would be to witness a sprained ankle or a heart attack.

Ruth decided to take a walk. The area around her hotel was new to her; she was actually closer to the red-light district than she realized, but she began walking in the opposite direction. She crossed the first canal she came to and turned onto a small, attractive side street—the Korsjespoortsteeg—where, to her surprise, she encountered several prostitutes.

In what seemed to be a well-kept residential area were a half-dozen windows with working women in their lingerie. They were white women, prosperous-looking if not in every case pretty. Most of them were younger than Ruth; possibly two of them were her age. Ruth was so shocked that she actually stumbled. One of the prostitutes had to laugh.

It was late morning, and Ruth was the only woman walking on the short street. Three men, each of them alone, were silently windowshopping. Ruth had not imagined that she could find a prostitute who might talk to her in a place that was less seedy and less conspicuous than the red-light district was; her discovery encouraged her.

When she found herself on the Bergstraat, once again she was unprepared—there were more prostitutes. It was a quiet, tidy street. The first four girls, who were young and beautiful, paid no attention to her. Ruth was aware of a slowly passing car, the driver intently looking over the prostitutes. But this time Ruth wasn’t the only woman on the street. Ahead of her was a woman dressed much as Ruth was—black jeans, black suede shoes with a stacked, medium-high heel. The woman, also like Ruth, wore a short, mannish leather jacket, but in dark brown and with a silk paisley scarf.

Ruth was walking so quickly that she nearly overtook the woman, who, on her arm, carried a canvas shopping bag from which a large bottle of mineral water and a loaf of bread protruded. The woman looked casually over her shoulder at Ruth; she gazed mildly into Ruth’s eyes. The woman wore no makeup, not even lipstick, and was in her late forties. As she passed them by, she waved or smiled to each of the prostitutes in their windows. But near the end of the Bergstraat, at a ground-floor window where the curtains were drawn, the woman abruptly stopped to unlock a door. She instinctively looked behind her before stepping inside, as if she were accustomed to being followed. And again she gazed at Ruth—this time with a more searching curiosity, and with what struck Ruth as something wantonly flirtatious in her at-first-ironic and then seductive smile. The woman was a prostitute! She was just now going to work.

Ruth once more walked past the prostitutes on the Korsjespoortsteeg. She was aware of more men on the street, none of whom would look at her or at one another. She recognized two of them; they had made the same circle she had. How many times would they return for a longer look? This, too, Ruth wanted to know; it was a necessary part of her research.

While it would be easier for her, alone, to interview a prostitute on a pleasant, unthreatening street such as this one, or on the Bergstraat, Ruth believed that the character in her novel—that
other
woman writer with her bad boyfriend—had best suffer
her
encounter in one of the worst of the rooms in the red-light district. After all, if the awful experience was to degrade and humiliate her, wouldn’t it be more appropriate—not to mention more atmospheric—if it happened in the sleaziest environment imaginable?

This time the prostitutes on the Korsjespoortsteeg regarded Ruth with wary stares and a barely detectable nod or two. The woman who’d laughed at Ruth when she’d stumbled gave her a cool, unfriendly appraisal. Only one of the women made a gesture that could have been construed as either beckoning or scolding. She was a woman of Ruth’s age, but much heavier; her blond hair was dyed. The woman pointed an index finger at Ruth and lowered her eyes in exaggerated disapproval. It was a schoolmarmish gesture, although there was no small amount of wickedness in the heavy woman’s smirking smile—she might have thought Ruth a lesbian.

When she again turned onto the Bergstraat, Ruth walked slowly in the hope that the older prostitute would have had time to dress herself—or to
un
dress herself, as the case might be—and to position herself in her window. One of the younger, more beautiful prostitutes winked openly at Ruth, who felt strangely exhilarated by such a mockingly salacious proposition. The pretty girl’s wink was so distracting that Ruth nearly walked by the older prostitute without recognizing her; in truth, the prostitute’s transformation was so complete that she was an altogether different woman from the plain person with a shopping bag whom Ruth had seen on the street only minutes ago.