A Father's Affair (6 page)

‘Red or white?’ I shouted to the kitchen.

‘Red first, then white with the fish. And I bought a dessert wine.’

‘You must love us very much.’

‘Either that or I have a drink problem.’

Ellen arrived with windblown hair, looking flushed.

‘Headwind,’ she apologized.

Monika hugged her. ‘It’s so
good
to see you again. God, you look good! Don’t you want to put on something dry? You’re all sweaty. Come on, I’ve got
something for you.’ I went to the kitchen to uncork the wine.

Maybe you could say that that’s how it started: with Monika dressing Ellen up in her own clothes. They must have stood in front of the floor-length mirror together and tried out one outfit
after the other – later on, the bed was covered in clothes. They were giggling and shrieking.

‘Be there in a minute, okay?’ (Ellen.)

‘Pour us a glass of wine!’ (Monika.)

I watched the three young magpies chasing each other around the crown of the chestnut. The tree was shaking in the wind. The house filled with mirth.

‘Look,’ Monika said. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’

Ellen did a little pirouette. She
was
beautiful. She was wearing a short, sleeveless, off-white dress, a birthday present from Monika’s mother. ‘Just like my mother to give
me a dress that makes me look pale and skinny,’ Monika had grumbled. She’d never worn the thing.

Ellen had a deep tan; her dark hair made her look a lot more like a woman named Monika than Monika did.

‘Keep it. God, aren’t you beautiful. Isn’t she, Armin?’

‘Yeah.’

I handed them their glasses.

‘To a wonderful evening.’ (Ellen.)

‘To a safe homecoming.’ (Monika.)

‘To us.’

‘So how was Ecuador?’

That was the question that made Ellen cry.

This is the Ecuador she took us to that evening. High mountains with eternal snow at the summits. Thin air. Stony soil that barely supports life. Indians in woollen ponchos and
black hats. The Holy Virgin weeping on every street corner. Change as slow as the wearing away of rock by the wind.

‘So one day we went to the market in Otavalo,’ Ellen said. ‘It’s the most famous market in South America. You can buy really great Indian stuff there: clothes and
baskets, jewellery made of glass and gold. We got into town early in the morning on the bus from Quito, and by noon there was no doubt about it: the market in Otavalo was going to be part of our
Ecuador programme.’ (‘We’ was Ellen and her colleague Niko Neerinckx, whom she had a crush on but who left her love unrequited – though we only heard about that much later
in the evening, when things like that no longer seemed like intimacies, just things you shared without thinking.)

‘Niko bought a few souvenirs,’ Ellen told us, ‘and wanted to go back to the hotel to work on his notes and write a few postcards. I decided to go to the monastery of San
Francisco, which is this big colonial building in the centre of Quito. In front of the statue of Jodocus Rijke, the founder of the monastery, there was a woman begging. She had a little boy with
her, about ten years old, with these big empty eyes. I gave her some change, and we started talking. She said she needed the money for her sister, who was in the
cárcel de mujeres
,
the women’s prison, on the north side of town. I asked why her sister was in jail. For dealing drugs, she said. She’d been in there for three years, and she still had seven years to go.
The whole time she was talking, that little boy just sat there staring at me. This is her son, the woman said. He hasn’t spoken a word since his mother went to prison. If I wanted to, the
woman said, I could go with her at the end of the afternoon to visit her sister. She’d like it if an
extranjera
came to visit. I said I’d go, and I promised to meet her back at
the statue after I’d visited the churches and chapels inside the monastery. “Say a prayer for my sister,” the woman said. “Her name is Felicia.”’

Ellen took a sip of wine and stared at the wall. When she started talking again, her voice sounded different. More fragile. ‘In the chapel of Señor Jesús del Grande
Poder,’ she said, ‘I lit a candle for Felicia. And later I went and visited her in the
cárcel
, with her sister and the little boy who didn’t say anything. It was
so . . . It was so horrible.’

She started crying without making a sound. Monika moved over beside her and put an arm around her.

‘That woman was a living corpse. At night the rats had bitten her feet and the wounds were . . . The smell, I’ll never forget it . . . And that poor boy, he just sat there. The way
he looked at his mother! And she didn’t want to see him. She avoided looking at him.’

Ellen pressed her face against Monika’s breast.

‘Oh, girlie,’ Monika said, ‘girlie, girlie.’ And Ellen cried and Monika kissed her hair and signalled to me with her eyes. I sat down on the other side and put my arms
around both of them, and Monika said: ‘That’s better.’ And Ellen looked up and smiled through her tears.

We kissed until the tears dried up. Then we sat down at the table. That’s how it started.

‘Yes,’ Ellen says. ‘That’s how it started.’

It’s as if we’ve walked into a room together and the door has swung shut behind us. We sit beside each other on the couch, still as can be. We’re listening to the ticking of
the clock. The clock is ticking away the seconds of fourteen years ago.

Under the table our feet continued the exploration. Across the table our eyes and lips told different tales. Monika was relating the latest gossip from The Small World. I said
something about biotechnology and the
Escherichia coli
bacterium. Monika said I was spoiling her appetite, and changed the subject by asking Ellen about Andean cuisine. As it turned out,
that spoiled her appetite, too. (The most popular dishes in Ecuador are
yaguarlocro
, soup with pieces of blood sausage, and
cuy
, roast guinea pig.)

We ate and drank and otherwise spoke of nothing. We drank the dessert wine on the floor, Monika and I leaning against the couch, Ellen across from us. Monika laid her legs across Ellen’s
knees. Ellen laid a hand on my leg. I laid my head on Monika’s shoulder. Candles glowed, the wind brought rain, it was early August but the evening smelled of autumn.

When the dessert wine was finished, Monika asked Ellen: ‘Do you want to sleep here?’

‘Yeah, that’s a good idea,’ she said.

I opened another bottle of red and put on a record. Joan Armatrading sang, ‘It could have been better’, but it couldn’t have been.

‘You can,’ Monika said when the wine was finished and the only thing that broke the silence was the sound of a tram on its way to the terminus, ‘sleep on the couch. But you can
also sleep in our bed.’

Ellen looked at me. ‘Sure,’ I said.

‘Okay, that’s good,’ Ellen said.

‘I knew right then what was going to happen,’ Ellen says.

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Didn’t you?’

‘No . . . I didn’t have a clue.’

‘Then you didn’t know Monika very well.’ It’s out before she realizes it. She quickly lays her hand on my leg. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that
way.’ But I’m not letting myself be yanked out of the past, I’m not going to let in the pain of right now, not now that I’m wallowing in the innocence of back then.

‘How did it happen?’ I ask. ‘How do you remember it?’

‘Monika said that the two of you always slept in the nude, but that you could put something on if I felt better about that. And I said no, you don’t have to. I like sleeping naked,
too.’

‘No one asked me a thing,’ I say.

‘No,’ Ellen says. ‘It was Monika’s party. The whole evening was Monika’s party.’

‘You’re right.’

Never have I met anyone who could be so commanding, but who made sure at the same time that nothing happened you didn’t want to happen. (Although what you
did
want didn’t
always happen, because you didn’t get around to deciding for yourself what that was. Much later, I realized that had occasionally made me feel left out, but by then Monika had been dead for a
long time. And her death made me feel left out a lot more. Her death made all her faults completely irrelevant – all except one, I know now. But I push away that thought, too.) I say,
‘I liked the way your breasts were so white, compared to the rest of your body.’

‘And your skin was softer than I’d expected a man’s to be. And Monika was so beautifully white, almost translucent.’

‘Yeah. Almost translucent,’ I say. And then, ‘I guess she’s the one who started.’

‘No,’ Ellen says. ‘It was me.’

‘You? Really?’

‘Yeah. I was lying in the middle. I could stroke your legs and her . . .’

‘Her what?’

‘Her . . . uh . . .’

‘Is that how it started?’

‘Yeah. My hand landed right on her . . . uh . . . her pubes. I could tell she liked that. And I could tell you liked it when I touched your leg.’

‘You know,’ I say, ‘before that night I’d never been to bed with anyone except Monika.’

‘No! You’re kidding! Really? Jesus, that’s so sweet.’

‘Wasn’t Monika the one who said I should lie in the middle?’

‘Yeah. It was her party the whole time. And maybe she felt a bit threatened, with her best girlfriend lying there beside her boyfriend, naked in bed.’

‘That’s right,’ I say, ‘she told me that later on. That she was afraid I’d fall in love with you. She was in love with you, but she said that was different. I
didn’t find it threatening. Weird, huh?’

‘Monika got excited by looking at how I touched you,’ Ellen says.

‘She always got excited when I touched myself,’ I say.

‘Really? Oh, I don’t have that at all.’

‘No, I know.’ We both laugh about that. It’s a laugh of relief. I top up our glasses. But the door is still locked, we’re still caught in the events of fourteen years
ago.

‘I thought her kisses were really exciting. She moved her tongue really slowly, but really – how can I put it? – determinedly.’

‘It excited me to watch you two kiss,’ I say. ‘I’d never seen Monika kiss anyone else. Fortunately.’ And once again I push away all thoughts of the present. I want
to think the way I thought then, feel what I felt then.

‘Monika asked whether I wanted to see how you two did it,’ Ellen said.

‘Yeah, that intimidated me a bit.’

‘But it was Monika’s party, so . . .’

‘Yeah.’

‘I liked the way you did it. So carefully.’

‘That was partly because you were there. We didn’t always do it that carefully, of course.’

‘I liked it that you two didn’t want to come.’

‘Yeah, that would have been shutting you out.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But you didn’t come then, either, did you?’

Ellen doesn’t say anything. Takes another sip of wine.

‘What? You mean you . . . No, really?’

Ellen almost chokes on her wine. ‘Oh yeaaah!’ she cackles. ‘Oh-yes-indeed-I-did! But then I’d been lusting around for a month in Ecuador, remember? Longing for that
terribly attractive but oh-so-unreachable Niko. And when I saw the two of you going like that . . . Jesus, Armin, I’m sorry, but I had to think about Niko, and then . . .’

‘So that’s why you started going on about him.’

‘Yeah. That’s why.’

‘I thought that was so sweet.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

When Ellen told us about her unrequited love, Monika had said, ‘I have something to tell you guys, too.’

That little smile was playing at the edges of her lips again, the smile that enraged other people, but which I loved every bit as much as her brazenness.

‘I’m pregnant,’ Monika said.

Ellen and I looked at her, looked at each other.

‘I’m two weeks late,’ Monika said. ‘This morning I did one of those tests. I’m expecting.’

‘Jesus, Monika! Really?’

‘Yeah, really!’

‘But why didn’t you say?’

‘This is a much better moment, isn’t it?’

‘My God!’

‘Congratulations.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Oh! Oh wooow!’

‘Where’s the wine? We must drink to this!’ But the wine was finished and Monika said she wasn’t going to drink another drop for the next seven and a half months.

We laid our heads on Monika’s stomach, first me, then Ellen. We listened and spoke quiet words. I kissed her cunt. Her cute, girlish cunt.

‘Yeah,’ Ellen says. ‘She had a cute, girlish cunt.’

The door opens. It’s Bo. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he says.

‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ Ellen asks. (It’s gone so fast, I think. Bo drinking wine!)

‘Yuh,’ Bo says. He’s wearing an oversized T-shirt (‘I’m Bart Simpson. Who the hell are you?’) and sweat pants. He sits down in an easy chair and folds his
legs under him. He’s getting tall. He’s definitely going to be taller than I am. He takes a sip of wine.

‘Not bad,’ he says. And then, ‘Is this a bad moment?’

‘No, Bo, this isn’t a bad moment.’

C
hildren and cars have one thing in common: women don’t love them any more or any less than men do, just differently. Monika got angry at Bo
more often than I did, but she also forgave him more easily. And if I manoeuvred her into a situation where she had to choose between him and me, she always chose him, without question. (Upon which
I would sit in a corner and mope demonstratively, as if not Bo but I were the child that needed her unconditional love – and maybe that was right.)

Monika was also deeply in love with her canary-yellow Renault 5, in which she had escaped her suffocating youth in Roermond. That I one day wrote that car off in a collision with a brand
spanking new BMW 524 Turbo Diesel was pure coincidence, however, and had nothing to do with jealousy.

I’d taken Bo to the woods at Spanderswoud, where we’d spent the day in the company of mushrooms, bracket fungi, leprechauns, dung beetles and spider webs. How
we’d hit on it I can’t remember, but by the time we were driving back into Amsterdam talk had turned to love. I said, ‘Love is what makes life. Without love, everything dies.
That’s been scientifically proven.’

Bo was sitting in the back, safely strapped into his car-seat. He was probably watching the traffic tear by, or playing with a chestnut. I wouldn’t even rule out the possibility that he
was asleep: our little talks sometimes took the form of long, uninterrupted monologues on my part (‘a lot of hot air’, Monika called them).