Dear Mr. M (19 page)

As soon as they had gathered at the bus stop the next afternoon with their bags and duffels, it started raining softly. Only a drizzle at first, but a few minutes later they saw the rain rolling in curtains across the fields from the direction of Retranchement. There was no shelter for them to huddle beneath, they did their best to keep dry under the trees on the deserted village square. Laura closed her eyes and listened to the rain rustle through the leaves. She had gone upstairs early the night before, but barely slept a wink all night. Downstairs in the living room she'd heard Michael on his saxophone and Ron playing his guitar, punctuated occasionally by laughter, and also the sound of someone throwing up into a bucket in the little hallway between the kitchen and living room. At breakfast that morning Lodewijk had been quieter than usual, and after pushing away the plate of bacon and eggs David had made for them, he stood up with a groan and said, almost in a whisper, that he was going out for a breath of fresh air.

“Do you want me to go with you?” Stella asked.

Lodewijk closed his eyes and shook his head—a shake barely perceptible to the naked eye, followed by more groaning, as though the slightest movement caused him pain. “No, just leave me,” he whispered.

The attic was divided into three bedrooms, separated only by thin wooden walls. In other words, you could hear everything: snores, sighs, farts—and the friends always left the doors open till way past midnight in order to go on talking. The girls had a room to themselves; David, Michael, Ron, and Herman slept in the big room in two beds and on two mattresses on the floor. Lodewijk had the smallest room all to himself. It was only big enough for a single bed. Sometimes he would complain loudly that the others were making too much noise.

“Maybe there are people here who would kind of like to sleep!” he shouted—but he didn't actually close his door.

It was almost light out when the others finally came upstairs. Laura turned to face the wall and heard Stella—or at least she assumed it was Stella—come into the bedroom, then the sound of a zipper: a drawn-out sound, the sound of someone doing their utmost to open a bag as quietly as possible.

Somewhere in the hallway or outside the door there was whispering, but she couldn't make out what was being said—let alone by whom.

“She's asleep,” Stella whispered back.

The zipper was closed again, the planks in the wooden floor creaked softly when Stella took the few steps that brought her to the doorway. Now Laura heard a soft squeaking, a sound she hadn't heard that whole week, but she knew immediately what it was.

They're closing the door!
Except for the soft squeaking, she heard only the pounding of her own heart beneath the blankets.
They're closing the door so I can't hear what they're going to do…

With a short, dry click, the door closed.

Laura counted to ten, her heart pounding faster and louder, then rolled over slowly—the bed, too, creaked at the slightest movement.

Gray daylight was coming through the red-and-white checkered curtains of the attic window, touching the floor—and Stella's bed, where her travel bag lay atop the blankets. Without making a sound, Laura lowered her feet to the floor. A few seconds later she was at the door and pressing her ear against the wood.

At first she could make out no distinct noises, then came a shuffling and the sound of one of the other doors opening and closing again.

“You want to take your bag with you, Lodewijk?” The voice was Herman's, he didn't seem to be trying to speak softly at all. “Maybe you still want to brush your teeth or something?”

“Shh!” That was Stella. Laura pressed her ear to the wood so hard it hurt; for a long time there was nothing, until suddenly she heard David's voice.

“The bed all the way at the back, Lodewijk. The one that's still all messed up, that's Herman's. Are you feeling any better, or do you want a bucket beside the bed?”

But there was no reply; a little later still the two doors closed, one right after the other, and then everything was still.

Laura remained with her ear to the door for another half hour, then went to the window and pushed aside the checkered curtains. It was fully light out now, over the garden lay a thin mist; in the distance, beyond the branches of the apple tree, the sky was turning pink and purple. Laura felt her eyes sting.
Don't,
she said to herself, but her lower lip had already begun to tremble.

“Oh, goddamn it!” she said. “God, god, god, goddamn it!”

“You think that bus is really going to come?” Herman asked. “Or is it the way it always is with public transport, that they think:
Aw, who's going to take a bus on a day like today? You know what, let's just stay in the garage.
”

Laura watched as Herman wandered over to the bus stop, his hands in the pockets of his jeans; then she looked at Stella, who was acting as though she hadn't heard Herman.

They were putting up a good front. At breakfast, too, Laura had watched for signals, for outward signs like blushing or bags under their eyes, or something much clearer than that, scratch marks or hickeys. But there was nothing. They acted normal—everyone was acting normal. Maybe that was it, she'd thought, that they were all doing their very best to act normal.

They were hushing it up. They were keeping it under wraps. It had been tacitly agreed that no one would talk about it. A tacit agreement among all those present, except for Laura. David had not given her even one meaningful or conspiratorial glance when she finally came down to breakfast, the last one to appear—a role usually reserved for him. In fact, he hadn't looked at her at all, he had gone on much longer than necessary with smearing his slice of brown bread, first with butter, then with peanut butter. Laura heard the wood in her chair creak when she sat down—that's how quiet it was—until Michael asked David to pass the butter. The silence and the acting normal could mean only one thing, and that was the conclusion Laura quickly drew: they were sparing her, at least they were trying to spare her, but precisely by sparing her they were confirming exactly what Laura was afraid of.

Or wasn't that it at all? Here on the village square, doubt suddenly struck. Were the others all standing together, had they all moved away from her, or had Laura herself gone and stood a few yards from the biggest tree, the better to see Herman as he walked through the rain to the bus stop? She'd had less than two hours' sleep, her eyes were half shut, and in the pit of her stomach something zoomed, an empty, hungry feeling, even though she'd eaten a bigger breakfast than usual. Could she be imagining the whole thing? Were her senses in a tizzy from lack of sleep, was she seeing things that weren't there? After all, everyone had acted
normal,
at the breakfast table Herman and Stella had exchanged no more glances. Or did the absence of such glances point to the very worst? She didn't know what to think. After breakfast everyone had gone to pack their bags, she had straightened up the house and mopped the floor, even Herman had helped out: he had carried the dishes the others had dried to the living room and spent a lot of time neatly arranging things in the crockery cupboard with the glass doors.

“Laura?” he had called out at one point.

And when she approached, her heart pounding, he held up a coffee cup for her to see; she had tried to look straight at him without lowering her eyes or averting her gaze—without bursting into tears.

“Hmm?” she said.

“The cup I broke while I was drying it? The cup that used to belong to your grandma?”

“Hmm?” she said again, because she hadn't the slightest idea what he was talking about.

“I glued it. Good as new, isn't it?”

Now Laura looked at her friends as they huddled under the tree. At Stella. Did Stella know about the cup? Or had Herman kept it a secret from her?

“What day is it today?” Herman shouted from the bus stop. “Saturday, right?”

Everyone turned to look at him. Everyone but Laura, because she had already been keeping an eye on him for the last five minutes. “On Saturday, the bus only comes once every three hours,” Herman shouted. “We've been standing here like idiots for half an hour.”

And then it happened. A car came from the direction of Retranchement. A green car, Laura had no idea what make it was, but that didn't matter anyway, because Herman was already holding up his hand. He raised his thumb.

Later she would remember the whole thing like a movie played in slow motion, frame by frame, without any way to run it back.

The green car stopping. The window opening. On the passenger side. Two men in the car. Herman leaning down to look through the window. Herman holding up two fingers for all to see.

“There's only room for two!” he shouted.

Here the film stopped completely, with all of them looking at each other.

“Stella!” Herman shouted. “Stella, don't just stand there. Come on, let's go!”

A little less than a month later, in the last week of September, the junior classes left for their field trips. That whole month Laura had done her best not to let on; not to David, Ron, Michael, and Lodewijk, but especially not to Stella. She did her utmost to remain Stella's “closest friend,” hard as it was at times for her to listen to Stella's stories about Herman; how much fun he was, what a great sense of humor he had, which movies and concerts they'd gone to, how their relationship had at first met with disapproval from her parents—who were now separated completely—but how Herman, for example, didn't let himself be intimidated by her father, the psychologist. One time her father had reluctantly agreed to have Herman come along to dinner at the trendy restaurant where he took his daughter every two weeks, to help her get used to his new girlfriend, twenty years younger than he (and a former patient). At one point the conversation turned to choosing a profession, to what Stella and Herman wanted to do after they finished high school. Stella wasn't quite sure, but said that in any case she wanted “at least four children,” upon which her father gave her another of his pitying looks.

“And you know what Herman said?” Stella said to Laura—it was around eleven o'clock, Stella had called her friend right after she came back from the restaurant.

“No, what?” Laura was sitting on her bed with her knees pulled up, eyes closed, chewing on her thumbnail, but there wasn't much thumbnail left to chew.

“He said: ‘Now that's what I call a clear plan. Large families, I'm all for them.' And then he started talking about his own parents, about how depressing things were at home, how he couldn't stand being the only child anymore, stuck in between all the bickering or, even worse, the long silences. He said: ‘When there's a divorce, when the father goes looking for someone younger, for example, four children can turn to each other for support.' And then he looked at my father and at Annemarie, that's her name, Annemarie. I thought I was going to choke. But it was so good of him. Don't you think? To dare to say something like that?”

“Yeah,” Laura said. “Ow!” She had bit into the exposed skin under her nail.

“Later on, Herman started talking about psychologists,” Stella went on. “About how it wasn't really a profession at all. You don't become a psychologist, he said, you either are one or you're not.”

Laura was only half listening as she sucked on her bleeding thumb. Then Stella began telling her about Herman and kissing. Laura had closed her eyes even tighter when her friend told her that Herman was sort of clumsy in everything he did. “He's so thin, too,” she said. “You can feel everything. But at the same time, he's so sweet. You know, a while back we'd been messing around in my room for a long time, we went pretty far, my mother had gone out to see a play with one of her girlfriends and they could come home any moment, every once in a while we lay there and stayed quiet to see if we heard the door, and then I ran my hand over his hair in the dark and over his face and suddenly I felt something wet around his eyes. He'd just been lying there crying, without a sound. ‘What's wrong?' I asked him, and you know what he said? He said: ‘Nothing. I was just lying here thinking about how happy I am.' Don't you think that's sweet? I almost started crying too. Sometimes he acts tough and cracks those nasty jokes, but he's really very sensitive.”

What Laura really felt like now was hanging up; she held her hand in front of her mouth so Stella wouldn't hear her groan, but Stella just rattled on. That's the way she always was on the phone: even if you didn't say anything back, not even “yeah” or “no,” or even little grunts of confirmation, just so the other person knew you were still listening. Anyone but Stella, for example, would have asked if Laura was still there:
Hey, are you still there? You still listening?
Not Stella. Stella's own voice—her own story—was enough for her.

Meanwhile, the story had meandered on to another evening, yet another evening when Herman and Stella had been alone at her mother's house. How they had watched a movie on the couch, and how they had tried to go further, further than they had before, not just long, wet French kisses and petting, but really far.

“Sure, okay!” Laura suddenly responded to an imaginary voice. “I'll be there in a minute.”

“He had his hand on my butt,” Stella went on. “And from there he moved his fingers up front. Real sweet, real slow, and I had his…I'd been teasing him there a little with my fingers, not quite tickling him, but I could tell by his breathing, we were probably both thinking that it might happen that night, but then suddenly—I'd move my fingertips up a little—suddenly I felt it, this sort of tremor went through his body, and then I felt it on my fingers…What did you say?”

“My father,” Laura said. “My father wants me to come down for dessert. I have to go now.”

“Okay, sleep tight.”

That was one of the advantages of Stella never listening. She also never objected to what you said: that eleven-thirty, for example, was awfully late for dessert.
Sleep tight.
She probably hadn't even heard what Laura said.

On the fourth day of the Paris trip, after the requisite visits to the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and Versailles, they had dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in the Quartier Latin and ended up with a little group at the hotel bar. Miss Posthuma hadn't even gone along to the restaurant: after their endless walk through the gardens at Versailles she had said that she was “worn out,” that tonight she was going to “hit the hay” early—the same way she had the first three nights too. At the hotel entrance Harm Koolhaas had announced that he was going out for a stroll. When Jan Landzaat asked if he wanted him to come along, the social studies teacher said there was no need for that. “Just a little stroll along the Seine,” he said. “A little fresh air.” Laura had seen the two teachers wink at each other.

The six of them were sitting and standing around the bar; first there had been eight of them, but Lodewijk and Stella had gone upstairs around eleven. Mr. Landzaat ordered a Pernod, David and Herman were drinking beer, and otherwise there were only the two girls from the parallel junior class, Miriam Steenbergen and Karen van Leeuwen, both with a glass of white wine with ice on the bar in front of them. Laura wasn't sure what to order, not until Jan Landzaat handed her his glass for a taste. Later she could no longer be completely certain what had come first, the glass with the unfamiliar beverage that tasted of a mixture of pears and anise at her lips and then on her tongue, or the thought of the hands of a ten-to-fifteen-years-older man on her body—the mouth with the long teeth against her mouth.

“I'll have the same,” she said as she looked into the history teacher's eyes—a long look, longer than normal in any case; she couldn't see herself, of course, but she felt her eyes smolder, and Jan Landzaat did not look away. He looked back, long too, longer than might strictly speaking be appropriate for a teacher to look at one of his students.

“Un Pernod, s'il vous plaît,”
he told the barman, without taking his eyes off her. For just a moment his hand rested on her forearm, quite quickly, then he pulled it back, but she knew the others must have seen it. Maybe not Miriam and Karen, who were busy talking to each other, but David and Herman for sure; ever since Stella had gone upstairs, Herman had been looking at her more—maybe she was imagining it, but even when she couldn't clearly see him, she felt his gaze wander in her direction from time to time.

She had never thought of Jan Landzaat as a real possibility; he was attractive, the fact that he was married and had two young children formed no moral hindrance for Laura; how he explained or didn't explain things at home was his own business. There had to be a kernel of truth to those rumors about his behavior at the Montessori Lyceum, otherwise they wouldn't have existed, she told herself. The history teacher was a
womanizer,
even if Laura didn't know the English word for grown men who felt attracted mostly to seventeen-year-old girls.

Jan Landzaat presented himself. The opportunity presented itself. That, in the end, was the primary but also the only reason why she took the elastic band out of her ponytail and shook her hair free; she would see how far things went, she thought, as she placed a cigarette between her lips and asked the teacher for a light.

She didn't have to check to see whether the others had noticed. It was quiet at the bar, the conversations had lulled—between Miriam and Karen, but above all the conversation between David and Herman. All eyes were on her, she knew that.