“I might manage two of those at a time,” she said. “But never all simultaneously.” He didn’t think that was funny. She hadn’t known what a wedding meant in England: hats and child attendants and a dinner party to celebrate her engagement in which the women had to actually leave the dining room before the port was passed. No doubt they had all voted for Brexit. “You don’t have to obey,” said Michael Valert, “but I hope you’ll consider children. I hope you’re not so liberated as all that.” Then, with a depth of feeling that startled her, he said, “I think we could all use something to look forward to.”
They were joined in the church by a young rector with the booming voice of an old prophet, or actor, or train conductor, or possibly rector—Sadie had no experience with rectors. She knelt before him and thought of how much her little Yiddishe mama would have hated to see her do it. Then she stood up and they were married.
A month later they were in Holland, in Amsterdam: Jack and Sadie, honeymooners, newlyweds, middle-aged. Jack’s phone said aloud, in its sexy English accent, “Prepare to turn right.”
“But are you?” Sadie asked. “Prepared.”
“Never.”
“I didn’t think so.” She hooked her arm in his. With his other arm he pulled along their thunking suitcase.
They were staying in a houseboat across from the Anne Frank House.
“Does it move?” she asked.
“Does it move?” He’d always had a way of repeating her questions back, sometimes with love and sometimes with contempt and sometimes with wonder at the question itself. That was the case now. “No, I don’t—it must be moored.”
“Prepare to turn right,” said the phone. Then, “Turn right.”
Canal after canal, bakery after souvenir shop. You couldn’t deny it: Holland was Dutch. “Looks good,” said Jack, examining a menu outside a café, “we should come back,” but Sadie was looking at the canal in front of them.
“I like a canal,” she said.
“You hated Venice.”
“Yes. True. Let Venice sink! Are we almost there?”
“Nearly. Prinsengracht. That’s our address.”
Houseboats all along the canal. Jack had asked his Dutch brother-in-law, Piet, for advice on where to stay, but Piet was from Rotterdam, had gone back there after his wife’s death, insisted that Amsterdam was a Mickey Mouse city. “Come to Rotterdam,” Piet said, and they would, after Amsterdam.
There it was: a white houseboat. It looked good, but you never really knew till you got in. Jack texted the landlady, and they went to a nearby bar to wait for her. When you fly overnight to Europe you’re allowed to have beer for breakfast. That was one of their inviolable rules.
Beer for breakfast was what they had instead of children; trips to Europe every three years, indulgence. In nearly twenty years they had lived through the varieties of international practicalities: traveler’s checks, phone cards, internet cafés—how devoted they’d been to internet cafés!—paying for wireless in coffee shops, cheap burner phones they needed to top up in shady convenience stores, and now: nothing. Their cell phone company offered unlimited data. They had filled their wallets with euros from an ATM at the airport and had credit cards with no international transaction fee. They would never be lost. They still could be cheated.
Occasionally Sadie thought about the life they might have had with children. No better, probably. She was nearly forty. A child was unlikely but, yes, you elderly Valerts, technically possible, though none of your business. Jack was forty-six, his possibilities undimmed, except for the ones that involved fame and fortune. They’d chosen Amsterdam so that they could see Piet afterward, and because it was a city they had no memories of. They lived in America and wished they lived elsewhere. They’d always thought they might someday. Now elsewhere, geopolitically speaking, was narrowing to England, which was, according to Jack, as bad as where they were. Surely not, said Sadie. “I wish it weren’t,” said Jack.
Another reason to be legally married: the despots of the world still cared about things like that. They might need proof that they belonged together.
The landlady was a tall woman in her fifties, in a black crocheted cap shaped like a riding helmet. “Welcome!” she said as they crossed the street to the quay, pausing for a woman in a business suit on a bicycle, a dreadlocked white man on a bicycle, the handsomest old man Sadie had ever seen on a bicycle. “I am Cari. Your first time in Holland?”
“Yes,” said Sadie.
“Yes,” said Jack. “Well, I was here as a kid.”
“Goot!” said Cari. “The lock!” She brandished a key on a small block of wood, and with her other hand cupped the padlock on the boat’s hatch, fit them together, looked at first Jack and then Sadie to see if they understood this mystery: key, lock, access. They nodded.
She pulled up the hatch to reveal a small ladder down and announced, “You must always go backward,” while descending forward. “Two hands. Here we go.”
The inside of the boat was beautiful, painted in thick white blurring paint. The couches were white, the floor, the cabinets. The room was bigger than their living room at home, though low-ceilinged, with a line of square windows on both sides. The decorative pillows were pony patterned. Cari began to open cupboards—“You have a dishwasher, refrigerator. At night you put the padlock on the inside of the hatch, when you leave, on the outside. Garbage you deliver to the bridge—well, at any rate it is all here.” She patted a binder.
“It’s lovely,” said Jack.
“Yes, it is,” said Cari. She looked around the room. “It is very lovely.”
She shook their hands, and then went up the ladder and out the hatch. “Shall I close?” she called down. “You have the lock!”
“Yes, please,” said Jack.
The rules: Beer for breakfast. Don’t carry your passports on you. Unpack as soon as you can. Sadie sat down on the sofa.
“Don’t fall asleep!” Jack said.
“I won’t.”
The bed was beneath the wheelhouse, king-sized, on a shelf. Jack reckoned he would only just be able to sit up in bed, though Sadie would have no problem. Another rule: in any bed in any part of the world, they took their habitual sides, no matter how splendid or miserable. In this case, Sadie would face the water, and he the stone wall. That was all right. He took the little ladder to the right of the bed up to the old wheelhouse, now a sitting area with benches and a tiny bar and a framed picture of Anne Frank. Windows all around. To his right people walked along the quay and dodged cyclists; ahead, a huge church; to the left, the Anne Frank House, or the buildings all around the Anne Frank House, the front building that had always hidden it, the modern addition for admissions, with its gift shop and café.
Life was rotten, he thought, but happily, because Amsterdam was excellent, cold, the sky blue, his wife by law beer-sleepy in a boat, he in a glass box, ready to be admired. Look at that man! He has rented a boat for his wife!
You might change your life at any moment; they had. They could continue to. Before they’d met, Sadie was unpassported, untraveled: Europe, Jack thought (grandly, accurately), was a present he’d given her. To move is to change. Even if they had a child—this was his secret, that he’d begun to dream of children—they could tuck a kid under one arm and keep going. What could ever stop them from traveling, in this wide world? Plenty, it turned out: themselves, the world, the people in charge. Downstairs Sadie had already taken off her shoes and was reading a book on the elegant sectional sofa.
“How is it?” he asked.
“Not sure.”
“What’s it about?”
“Not sure about that, either.” She put it aside. “Nice boat. Deluxe. Good job.”
“It is nice, isn’t it? Wait till you see the wheelhouse. Well done, me,” he said to himself.
“Well done, you,” she answered.
He began to unpack the suitcase, putting his shirts in one little cupboard and Sadie’s dresses in another. He stepped into
the bathroom to set out the cosmetic case—“Heated floors!” he said delightedly, unsure whether that was something one should take delight in—and returned to her on the sofa.
“Here,” he said.
“You packed my slippers!” They were gray boots lined with artificial fur of a nearly malign softness. He knelt at her feet and put them on her with pantomime uxoriousness.
“I thought you might be happy to have them,” he said. “I like your hair.”
“Thank you.”
“What color would you call that?”
“Amethyst,” she said. She’d had it done once they were married, once nobody could disapprove. “That’s what the girl called it. I thought I was too old.”
“You’re not,” he said severely. “Maybe I’ll dye my hair amethyst. Carnelian. Agate.”
That was a joke. His hair was the sort of thick silvery gray that made people say, of men, He’s aged well. He said again, “You’re not too old.”
“And yet here I am in my bedroom slippers.” She closed her eyes in pleasure. “You’ve been here before?”
“When I was a teenager.”
“Oh. You didn’t say.”
“My father accidentally walked us through the red-light district. It was a traumatic experience. We should probably go out,” he said. “So we don’t fall asleep.”
“But it’s so nice on our boat,” said Sadie, stretching like the house cat she was. “How’s the bed?”
“The bed is also nice.”
“It’s our honeymoon,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”
They woke up—an hour later? Three?—to daylight out the window by Sadie’s head. Porthole, thought Sadie. But square: Did portholes have to be round? Her feet were hot. She was wearing her slippers but nothing else. She felt—glad. She wasn’t sure gladness was an emotion she was familiar with. Happiness and joy, yes, durable, recognizable; gladness was thinner than that, historical, but useful. A shim to even out a wobbly sad table. She was glad they were in Amsterdam. She was glad that they had married.
“That’s the Anne Frank Hoos,” said Jack, pointing across her body.
“Hoos?”
“Hu-ees. I don’t speak Dutch.”
“You certainly don’t.”
“We should go out in the world,” he said, and kissed her shoulder.
He wore a green shirt that she had ordered for him off the internet, intended for a Norwegian cheesemonger, and a pair of corduroys of a color he’d favored since he was three, brownish red. She had bought her flowered Swedish dress in New York City.
“Quite picturesque for a bridge where you leave garbage,” he said as they stopped at its peak. They looked down at the moored barges on the margins of the canal and the tourist barges gliding down the middle.
“Where are the pot dealers?” said Sadie. “Where are the sex workers?”
“In the red-light district.”
“Poor kid,” she said, a cheek on his bicep; he was so much taller than she was, “were you scarred for life?”
“You tell me, Doctor,” he said.
“What time does the Anne Frank House close?” she asked. “Maybe we could go there now.”
“Not sure. Let’s see.”
But it turned out that the Anne Frank House sold tickets only online—it said so on the doors around the side—and when Jack checked on his phone he discovered it was booked up for two weeks. “Dammit. But it says they release some tickets every day. We’ll try tomorrow. I guess we should have done some research.”
“Never,” she said, because they never did, not ahead of time. Never consulted a guidebook, combed through a website (except for accommodation). They were exactly the same in this respect, one of the pleasures of their life together, their love of happenstance. How, when traveling, they congratulated themselves on their luck!
They got a free tourist map from a nearby souvenir shop and examined the spiderweb of Central Amsterdam.
“We avoid this,” said Jack, pointing to the center.
“But what if we want to go to a sex show?” she said.
“Ha ha.”
But what if? she thought.
Sadie had somehow not bothered to imagine Amsterdam at all, beyond bicycles and picturesque houses, though she had an image in her head of the red-light district left over from high school: a friend had gone to Amsterdam and said she’d passed the prostitutes in their windows, which Sadie had imagined as ordinary residential windows, with sashes; she could see women in their lingerie leaning, resting their breasts on the sills.
They walked along the canal, past little design stores and souvenir shops and bars. The sunset was peachy, blue, a parfait, perfect. Every bar was their ideal bar. They passed a lit-up grocery store and went in to get supplies and walked out, swinging the white plastic bags on their wrists. They crossed again in front of the Anne Frank House.
“We’ll crack you!” said Jack, and then, “Jesus, listen to the man.” He stopped. “Do you feel different?”
“Different how?”
“Different married.”
“Oh, that. No,” she said.
“I do.”
“That’s because your parents are alive.”
He didn’t say anything to that.
“Poor Thomas,” said Sadie suddenly. “Poor Robin.” Robin was Thomas’s twin brother.
“Poor all of us,” said Jack.
There was a liquor store around the corner, selling mulled wine dispensed from the sort of stainless-steel suburban samovar that Sadie remembered from elementary school functions. “This is very good,” the liquor-store proprietor promised them, working the spigot. He was in his forties, with a saddlebag goatee, wider at the bottom. “This will make you love each other truly.”
“What if we already love each other truly?” asked Jack.
“Why, I don’t know,” said the shopkeeper. “You’d be the first instance in my shop.”
The walls were lined with bottles. Jack pulled a Dutch liqueur from a shelf. “My father would appreciate this place,” he said, and just then an American man walked in, looked around, and said, “Do you sell bread?”
“Do I sell bread?” the shopkeeper said. “Do I sell bread? Look around you, man! What sort of place do you believe you have found yourself in? No, no, don’t go away, you’re in luck. We have here on exhibition a mythical creature: the man and wife in truly love with each other. Look!” said the shopkeeper. “Marvel!”
“I love my wife,” said the bread-seeking American.
“No,” said the liquor-store owner, “you don’t.”
In the middle of the night Sadie jolted awake. It took a moment to realize that the dark, dazzled field she was looking at was the surface of the canal. Nobody was on the street in front of the Anne Frank House. Wait. Here came a man and woman, walking along, no idea that Sadie was watching. She felt like a character in a European movie: perhaps the couple would dance. Perhaps one would murder the other, then toss the body into the canal. They kept on without talking. She looked at the water. A glittering something floated winkingly along the surface, sparkling, Tinker Bell gone for a dip—no, a slowly turning plastic bottle.
She’d lied: she did feel different married, in an entirely practical way. For all the years of their life together, they’d never fully merged their finances—she’d arrived with debts, student and credit card, of which she’d felt ashamed, and burdened by—and she’d had a series of jobs, never particularly lucrative: working at oddball magazine after oddball magazine, writing for an alternative alternative newspaper—the actual alternative newspaper, the good one, had folded years ago—and lately she was teaching editing at Bunker Hill Community College. Jack had tenure at BU, and was kindly, and paid for most things. She hated the kindliness. Perhaps they would apply for joint everything, but no matter: now, if they divorced, she could get some of his money. She had no plans to, but she wondered at the thought of it. They were family now. She could demand things of him, because they were also hers.<
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“Goddammit,” said Jack in the morning, sitting on a white chair in the white kitchen, peering at his phone.
“What’s the matter?”
“Fucking Anne Frank,” he said to be funny, then thought better of it, “House. I’m about the thousandth in line to buy tickets for today.” He showed her the screen. It had a little animation of a stick figure walking.
“That doesn’t sound promising.”
“It doesn’t. I already bought tickets for the Van Gogh Museum for later today. Everything’s timed. Shall I make you a coffee, darling?”
“Yes please.” She picked up her book and read it while Jack stared at his phone and made a coffee in the little humming coffee maker. The book had been recommended by a friend, and Sadie found it simultaneously fascinating and boring, a near and mere transcript of life. She wasn’t sure she hated the book, but she hated books like it, though she’d never read any of them—they were international, these books, Norwegian and English and Irish and Canadian, novels in which people bought coffee and had long conversations and felt sorry for themselves and reached no conclusions. How we live now, if by we you meant white people without much in the way of money problems. She, Sadie, was one of those. Perhaps if she had read it at home, she would have been riveted. Or perhaps she was riveted: she kept picking it up to read it, to see if anything had happened while she’d been away, she missed it in a way she didn’t miss other books.
“You want milk in this?” Jack asked.
“I got cream,” she said.
“I am sorry to report,” said Jack, “that you got buttermilk.”
“Oh. I should have known. Milk’s great, thank you.”
“Goddammit,” said Jack, looking at his phone.
In the Van Gogh Museum, Sadie leaned on the wall and declared, “This whole city is pitching.” It was a new shining building, crammed with people, near the Rijksmuseum. The boat did move, it turned out, a gentle rocking from side to side, barely noticeable on board, which got into your own personal canals and knocked you off balance later.
“I think we were lucky to get tickets,” said Jack.
“I might have to sit down. You don’t feel it?”
The Souvenir Museum Page 18