•
As I climbed down on to the platform at Central Station, something else occurred to me, and I was surprised I had not thought of it before. I stood on the platform, under the high curved roof, with people streaming past me. How accurately could I remember the bodies of the women in the room, I asked myself, now that almost five years had passed? I had been clinging to a few details, the way a shipwrecked man clings to pieces of wreckage, but what else, if anything, did I actually remember? There is something that I believe to be true, and it is this: it’s almost impossible to remember the bodies of people you have slept with in the past, no matter how long you were together. As soon as you are separated from each other, their bodies start to shed detail. They become incomplete. They assume an abstract, almost ghostly look. Yes, you still retain a generalised idea of how that person looked, but can you picture them in their entirety? I don’t think so. So there’s one form of decay, which takes place in the memory. And then there’s another, more obvious form of decay, of course, which is physical, and which takes place in real life, real time. In five years the body alters. Maude might have put on weight, for instance. Astrid’s skin might have lost some of its resilience, its gloss. The question was, in the face of all this change, could I be confident that I would be able to identify the women if I saw them? If they were standing in a police line-up, with hoods over their heads and no clothes on, would I be able to pick them out? Or would I hesitate in that tense darkness behind the two-way mirror?
I began to walk along the platform, which was now deserted, pigeons squabbling in the iron rafters overhead. A sudden bitter smell of urine burned the lining of my nostrils. There was a third form of decay, now I thought about it. The bodies of the women I had seen in the white room five years ago were beginning to merge with the bodies of women I had been with since. They were being super-imposed, one on top of the other. Their outlines were becoming blurred. It was as if I had taken a slide of each woman I had been with, put them in a pile, in chronological order, and then, by shining a light down through the pile, tried to see the three women who were lying at the bottom.
Impossible.
Halfway along the murky tiled tunnel that leads to the station concourse, I came to another standstill. I realised I was involved in a process that was completely self-defeating. Every time I saw a woman’s body naked, it acted as a kind of acid, corroding the bodies of the women I was looking for. Far from exposing them, as I had thought it might, the process was actually protecting them from exposure. To put it more bluntly, my initiative had the seeds of its own certain failure implanted within it. I thought once again of what Isabel had said. She knew nothing of my true situation, and yet, in telling me to move on, she had given me advice that now seemed peculiarly relevant. I was about to reach a saturation point, a point beyond which it was useless, absurd, perhaps even hazardous, to go.
•
I use the word “hazardous” advisedly. That winter I had contracted NSU. I had never had a sexually transmitted disease before, and my reaction was probably a typical one: I felt dirty, ashamed.
I was treated at a clinic in the city centre, not far from the Musiektheater. The doctor who saw me was a woman in her late forties. She wore a white coat, which she left unbuttoned, and a pair of glasses with narrow, oblong lenses. She asked me a series of personal questions, one of the last of which concerned the number of sexual partners that I had had during the past six months. I hesitated for a moment, not knowing what to say, then I told her that I wasn’t sure.
“You’re not sure?” She peered at me over her glasses, the expression in her eyes opaque, unreadable.
“A lot,” I said.
“More than ten?”
I nodded. “Yes. More than that.”
“Do you use protection?”
I looked at her, but didn’t answer.
“In that case, you’re very lucky,” she said. “If that’s all you’ve got, I mean.”
Though it might seem hard to believe, the possibility of serious infection had never occurred to me, not until that moment. I could only assume it was because I had been so single-minded, so blinkered, as I went about my task of trying to uncover the three women.
“You know,” the doctor said quietly, “you really ought to take more care.”
To be told to take care of myself, after all I had been through—well, it amused me, and I suppose I must have smiled.
The doctor leaned forwards. “It’s not you I’m thinking of,” she went on in the same quiet voice. “It’s the people who might come into contact with you. . . .”
I swallowed quickly, then looked away.
She wrote me a prescription for some antibiotics. In less than two weeks all evidence of the disease had gone. It did not recur. Her words stayed with me, though, and from that point on I acted in a more responsible manner.
•
Apart from anything else, there was Juliette to think about. I had come to believe that Juliette—or rather, the idea of Juliette—had a direct bearing on my predicament, on my whole frame of mind, in fact. Three days after we met on the train, I called her at home. She told me it was good that I had got in touch with her. She was a drama student, she said, and she was about to go away on a course. She hadn’t wanted me to think that she had given me her number and then just disappeared. She laughed quickly into the phone. We arranged to meet the following day, in the Café Luxembourg. We had both remembered that it was often fairly empty in the middle of the afternoon.
She was already there when I arrived, sitting at a table towards the rear of the café. She was leaning back in her chair, reading a book, her legs stretched out in front of her, and crossed at the ankles. She smiled up at me as I walked over. “So,” she said lightly, “are you still talking to yourself?”
“I wouldn’t know, would I? Not unless you were there to tell me.”
“Me,” she said, “or someone else.”
I smiled. “There isn’t anyone else.”
I don’t remember much of what we said that afternoon. I just know that, for the first time in what seemed like years, I felt entirely relaxed. Here I was, out with a girl, and there was no agenda. I didn’t need to see her naked body; the colour of her face was enough. The one moment that stood out—and I found it touching, confirming, as it did, an innocence that had already been established—was when I noticed the scar on her left hand, a burn, presumably, because the skin looked as if it had melted and then set. I chose not to ask her about it. I didn’t want to disrupt the atmosphere, which was so easy, so calm, so utterly new to me.
One month later, when she returned from the Côte d’Azur, I took her out to dinner in a small Italian restaurant I knew in the Jordaan. It was a cold night, and she was wearing a black ribbed sweater, which, together with her short ponytail, gave her an appropriately French look. Her lipstick was a lush bruised purple. On the third finger of her scarred hand she wore six thin silver rings. She looked even more beautiful than I remembered, and yet she did not appear to be aware of her beauty—or, if she was, then she treated it with a tolerant amusement, the way you treat children when they ask too many questions. This seemed unusual to me, given how young she was. I didn’t think she could be more than twenty-five; in fact, she was probably nearer twenty.
She told me that her course had taken place in a converted farmhouse in the hills above Nice. Some evenings they drove into the town in an old American station wagon that belonged to one of the drama teachers. They had cocktails at the Negresco. They danced at a club in Cap d’Antibes. On her last night a man asked her to sail to the Greek islands with him in his yacht. She turned him down. He was too pretty, she said. He had no character. He was like a dummy in a shop window.
“A rich dummy, though,” I said.
She shrugged, but said nothing, and, once again, I was struck by her air of self-possession. She seemed to stand on her own, without illusions or dependencies. She saw everything with such clarity.
We talke
d about the South of France, which I also knew, of course, from the years I had spent with Brigitte. Once, while she was filling our wine-glasses, she noticed I was looking at her hand.
“Do you find it ugly?” she said.
“No, not at all. I was just curious.”
“People always want to know about it, but they almost never ask.”
She studied it dispassionately, tilting it one way, then the other, as if it was not her hand she was looking at, but the rings on her fingers.
“How did it happen?” I asked.
“My older sister did it.”
“It was an accident, I suppose—”
“No. She did it on purpose. She was jealous.” Juliette lifted her eyes to mine. “My father was a Dutch businessman and my mother was from Surinam. I don’t think I was,” and she paused, “intended.” She gave me a wry smile. “In any case, I was given up for adoption when I was still a baby. The people who adopted me already had one child, a girl called Taiana. I think she became jealous of the attention I was getting. One day, when I was five or six, she put my hand in a pot of boiling water and held it there—”
“She held it there?”
“Well, only for a second or two. I screamed so loud that she got frightened.” Juliette smiled again and drank from her glass of sparkling water. “We get on quite well now. She has no memory of doing anything to my hand. Sometimes I see her looking at it, slightly puzzled, as if she’s wondering what happened. . . .”
Though Juliette was no longer upset by the incident, she still carried a trace element of sadness in her, and, in telling the story, her voice had buckled slightly, despite itself. I put my hand over hers. I could feel the smooth, shiny skin against the inside of my fingers.
“You see photos of me as a little girl,” she said, looking out into the restaurant, “and I’m always standing there with one hand in my pocket. Or else it’s summer and I’m wearing gloves.” She laughed quietly and shook her head.
After dinner I took her to a bar where she ordered an Amaretto. We sat by the window and stared out into the streets, which were cold and colourless, the cracks between the paving-stones inlaid with frost. Sometime during the last few days the temperature had dropped below zero, and all the canals in Amsterdam had frozen over. Later, as I walked her to her tram-stop, we passed a flight of steps that would normally be used by people who owned small boats. We climbed down to where the dark bricks disappeared into the ice. I reached into my pocket and took out a coin.
“Listen to this,” I said.
I sent the coin skimming across the frozen surface of the canal. I had always loved the chattering sound it made, half musical, half metallic, a little like the electric whiplash of tram-rods sliding along their power-lines.
“Did you hear it?” I said.
Juliette smiled. Then she stepped past me, on to the ice.
“Careful,” I said. “It may be thin in some places.”
“I had an idea,” she said.
I watched her as she stood there in her long black coat.
“I thought we could go and find your money,” she said. “I saw where it went.”
“You’re crazy,” I told her. “What if it breaks?”
“We’ll get cold and wet,” she said, with a kind of restrained delight, “and then we’ll have to go to a bar and have another drink to warm us up.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
But I was already stepping out on to the ice.
Juliette took my hand. “It’s this way. Come on.”
We began to walk, following the diagonal path that the coin had taken when it flew out of my hand. People had thrown all kinds of objects on to the newly frozen canal. We passed a milk crate and a metal dustbin lid. We passed a bicycle with no front wheel. The ice winced and creaked, but it held. Usually I wasn’t superstitious, but a thought kept repeating in my head. If we find the coin, I thought, then something will have been decided. If we find the coin. . . .
“Are you sure you saw where it went?” I didn’t really want to know. I just needed to be saying something, to be talking. It was nerves, I suppose.
Juliette seemed to understand because she just smiled at me and didn’t bother to reply.
And then, about two-thirds of the way across, she took two or three steps to her left and bent down quickly. She turned to face me, holding up one gloved hand. Something silver glittered between her finger and thumb. I took the coin from her and stared down at it.
“It’s the same one,” I said.
“Of course,” she said. And then she said, “You mustn’t spend it.”
“No, I’ll keep it. As proof.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Of something.”
There was an eerie brightness out there in the middle of the canal. The lights of the city rebounded between the low cloud cover and the ice that was all around us, achieving a kind of concentration, an intensity of effect. As I brought my eyes back down, I saw that Juliette was looking at me.
“Do you think I’m attractive?” she said.
I laughed. “Yes, of course.”
She remained serious. “As a woman?”
“As a woman,” I said.
“Would you like to kiss me?”
She watched me lean towards her, tilting her face upwards to meet mine. As I kissed her I could feel the ice through the soles of my shoes, which contrasted oddly with the heat of her mouth. I stepped back and looked at her.
“How was it?” she said. “Was it nice?”
I smiled, but did not answer. My heart was beating loudly. Almost loudly enough, I felt, to crack the ice beneath us. To be dangerous.
I saw a man cross the hump-backed bridge behind her on a bicycle. He was singing to himself, his voice a fine, deep baritone. Somehow, it made me realise how late it was. I took Juliette by the hand and turned towards the steps.
“We should go,” I said, “otherwise you’ll miss your tram.”
•
It was a time in my life when I seemed to be holding my breath. I was living within myself, waiting for the future to be revealed. Most days I talked to either Isabel or Juliette. I thought they were both, in their different ways, trying to show me the paths that were open to me, and, though I listened to them both, I still held back. The memory of the walk across the ice had stayed with me. I had to move carefully because there was always the possibility that something might give way, but, equally, I felt that confidence would be rewarded.
One night, after the bar closed, I had a beer with Gusta and a friend of hers called Renate who had just returned from India.
“You’ve travelled, haven’t you.” Renate turned to me greedily, wanting to establish common ground.
The three of us walked to Renate’s houseboat, which was filled with incense candles, gold Buddhas, and cushions that had miniature mirrors sewn on to their covers. We drank more beer. I asked what the strange smell was. Renate explained that it was perfume she had bought in Varanasi. She showed me several small glass phials, each one containing a different brightly coloured liquid. We smoked grass through Renate’s home-made bong, and all of a sudden I was alone with her. Apparently Gusta had left. I hadn’t noticed.
“Yeah,” and Renate chuckled huskily, “this is good pot.”
She was sprawling on a couch, watching me through half-closed eyes.
“You can fuck me if you like,” she said.
“I don’t know. . . .”
“You fuck everybody else,” she said. “What’s wrong with me?”
I shook my head. “I’m too stoned. . . .”
“Oh well. Just thought I’d ask.”
And there was a time when it would probably have happened. Because, now I thought about it, she did remind me a little of Maude. She had the same sturdy ankles, the same coarse hair. . . . But I had reached the end of something. I was exhausted. As soon as it was possible to imagine walking home—a distance of no more than a few hundred yards—I rose to my feet
and said good-night. Still lying on the cushions, Renate gave me a mocking, dismissive smile.
About three days later I met Juliette for lunch. This was unusual because Juliette’s acting classes lasted all day, while I worked in the bar most nights and then slept until one or two in the afternoon. Also, since that kiss on the ice, I had been trying to discourage her—or if not discourage her, then at least move slowly, give myself more time to think. It might have been the weight of everything I was carrying, the thought of having to explain it all to her (she knew almost nothing about me; she didn’t even know I used to be a dancer). Or perhaps sex had been a means to an end for so many years that I could no longer equate it with closeness or with love. I don’t know. In any case, though it was only a twenty-five-minute tram-ride from my house to hers, I behaved as if she lived in a different country. We talked on the phone, for hours. We had the heightened intimacy of people living thousands of miles apart. The distance I put between us intrigued her, though. She thought I was mysterious. Once, she even told me I was cruel. She didn’t have to explain that. I understood. I realised that my strategy, if you could call it that, was only binding her more tightly to me. By resisting her, I was making myself irresistible. There was a sense in which I was only delaying something that was bound to happen.
That lunchtime I was in the middle of telling Juliette about Isabel’s recovery when I sensed somebody standing to one side of me. I glanced round. It was a girl of about twenty-five, with short blonde hair. I knew from the look of contempt on her face that she must be someone I had slept with, though I had no memory of her.
“So this is what you’ve been doing,” the girl said. “So it’s black girls you go for now.”
“This is Juliette,” I said. “We’re just friends.”
“Juliette.” The girl spat the word out as if it was something rotten she had eaten by mistake. “No wonder you haven’t called me for so long. No wonder you just dropped me like a stone. . . .” She brought one hand up to her face. Suddenly she looked as if she might be about to cry. “Don’t you have any feelings?”
The Book of Revelation Page 19