Victoria feels a chill go up her chest. “That would never work. I’d be at the police station in five minutes flat crying, ‘I killed my husband, waaaa!’ But I appreciate your concern.”
Dr. Fairley shrugs, as though he was not all that invested in the idea. “Well, if you ever change your mind,” he says. “You’re still a relatively young woman, and still very attractive. There’s no reason this should ruin your life.”
Victoria takes a cab back to the school and tells Rose in hushed tones about her conversation with the doctor. “Do you think I should do it?” she asks.
Rose glances at the picture of her husband that she keeps on her desk. He is an older man, born in Italy, attractive in a Mediterranean kind of way. Rose herself seems much, much younger. Victoria is not sure exactly how old she is, but assumes that she is a few years older than Sloane, that she must have been a child bride. She has never met the husband.
“No,” Rose says. “I guess I really don’t think so.”
The smell of a hospital in the 1960s—ammonia and urine, antiseptic filth. Victoria wanders through the hallways searching for his room. Each doorway holds a new horror: women with wide-spread legs and flaming red vaginas that smell as old as the hospital walls, gum-mouthed old men pissing into metal pans while eating fruitcake. She runs through the hallways until there is only one more door.
Inside, her father lolls, legless and emasculated, viscous and weak. He grabs her hand in the doorway, an impossibly long grasp, and his hand is full of onion sweat. He says, “Vicky, you were always my girl. I knew you’d marry a big shot. I knew you’d go far.” She tries to wrench her hand away, but his fingers form a vise grip, moving to her shoulders. He whispers, “One last kiss for your dear old dad.”
Victoria runs from the room and is instantly in her old house, her mother’s house in Hyde Park. She runs from room to room until she sees her mother naked on the claw-footed bed, her stepfather astride her. Her mother says, “I don’t really love him, Vicky, but you kids have got to eat.” The stepfather pumps away, his glasses still on. He chuckles as he thrusts and says, “Silly girl, you’ll learn to love me.”
Tamara and Violet in the other room are frantic now, crying at the sound of Victoria’s terrified scream. They rush into her room, jumping on her bed and throwing their arms around her as though she were the plush piece of wire the baby monkeys clung to in starvation in that barbaric experiment that spawned such animal rights activism. She puts her arms around them, stroking their damp hair, saying, “Don’t worry, pretties, Mommy just had a bad dream.” Violet nuzzles up against her, saying, “I miss Daddy,” her mouth a hungry bird open for some scrap of comfort, some piece of feed. Victoria withdraws her arms, but the girls cling on, monkeys dying on a barren, wire vine. She wonders where her milk has gone.
The phone call comes at 7:00 AM, eight months later. Victoria calls Rose at home to say that she will not be coming in to work, and Rose on the other end grows somber. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s a hard decision. We had to decide the same thing for my mother, though. She was Catholic, and it was hard to say what she’d have wanted. But in the end, we didn’t want her to suffer any more than she already had.”
Victoria stares at the magnets on her refrigerator, snapshots of her children in Halloween costumes, of herself and Sloane dressed in formal wear. She cannot quite make sense of what Rose is saying. It takes a long time to make peace with such a decision. Victoria thinks it strange, this sad tone, so like Dr. Fairley’s earlier—this strange conspiracy of behaving as though they have not all been waiting for this event like children await summer vacation. She suddenly thinks she remembers that Rose’s mother did die sometime about a year ago, or maybe it was two. She does not remember what she died of, but Rose missed two days of work. Victoria had to answer the phones herself and kept losing things on the computer. When Rose came back, she seemed her usual self. Victoria assumed that the woman was old, that it was her time. Perhaps even a relief.
She says, “I guess I’ll have to have the girls sent home from camp in time for the wake.”
Rose says, “Call when you know the funeral arrangements, and I’ll tell the rest of the staff. Don’t worry, everything will be under control until you’re ready to come back.”
Victoria hangs up, thinking of Rose’s family at a funeral. Don’t Italian widows throw themselves on the casket as it’s lowered into the ground? She cannot picture Rose doing this. Perhaps when the husband dies, she will have to show up at the cemetery just in case.
Victoria drives to the hospital alone. She leaves Ned watching TV and eating like he does all day every day. Beavis and Butt-Head, perhaps. She thinks of Ned laughing with his mouth full while she signs the forms Dr. Fairley hands her. “You’re doing the right thing,” Dr. Fairley says. “I knew Sloane. He wouldn’t want to be kept alive this way.” Victoria nods, crying. She thinks, Have I seen this man once in the last year and a half that I haven’t had tears streaming down my face? She thinks, I got that bloody insurance policy out just in time. She thinks, Christ, I am my mother.
Hospitals are barbaric. They give you options no one can truly want. Victoria looks away, says, “No thank you, I don’t want to be there.” As an afterthought, one that may make her seem less a calculating bitch and more a distraught soon-to-be widow, she adds, “I’d like to remember him the way he was.”
It is almost enough to make her laugh.
Attila the There
April
Camden was atoning. Sometimes, during the ten, twelve-hour stretches he spent wandering around Amsterdam without uttering a word to anyone, he felt like a monk on a vow of silence. Dutch sifted through his ears like background noise, easy not to notice at all. He played games with himself: passing his student ID to the ticket seller at the Anne Frank House or negotiating vegetable purchases at the Boerenmarkt, all without verbal exchange. Alone at home, he gratefully turned the TV to Dutch shows. Over de Rooien, a program where people had to do stupid things in public and find strangers to participate, was his favorite since you didn’t need to understand what anyone said to follow slapstick. His mother had enrolled him in a weekly Dutch course, and to his relief they were allowed to speak only Dutch in class. Most of the students—techies over on jobs from the States and England—formed clinging friendships; Camden watched them transform from a conglomeration of nerdy strangers into giggling cliques. A decade younger than the others, he remained on the outside. They didn’t even invite him, a legal child at home, for drinks after class. Camden didn’t mind. Part of his atonement for what he’d done to Aimee—his deliberate abstinence from girls altogether—entailed steering away from any pack mentality.
Camden’s mother, Ginny, had a fetish for handicapped women. Lisle, the Dutch poet with whom he and Ginny were now living, had been in a wheelchair for eight years due to a riding injury. Before Lisle, Ginny had dated: an epileptic, a deaf woman (or a “beautiful human being who happens to be deaf”), two bipolars—one of whom was suicidal—and another woman in a wheelchair, from spina bifida. Lisle was the first of the girlfriends to be obese. Her spine rested so straight against the back of the chair that her breasts shot out like life-threatening torpedoes; her thighs spread on the seat. She had a breathtaking face.
At one time, in New Zealand, where Lisle had lived for reasons Camden had yet to ascertain, Lisle had been an artist’s model to earn money. There were pictures of her nude, chatting with older men and other beautiful women, pasted in a big scrapbook she kept in the floor-to-ceiling bookcase by the fireplace. Camden could not quite believe it was her—maybe a sister or something?—but he avoided the scrapbook anyway, worried he’d do the unspeakable: get a hard-on over Lisle’s twenty-year-old, nubile self; that he’d progress to imagining her now, nude and twisting around on the bed with Ginny, even her orgasmic yelps political and abrasive. Since he had first witnessed a female orgasm four months prior, it was difficult to keep from transposing the image onto every female he encountered, but in
Lisle’s case, he managed with ease, as long as he avoided the scrapbook.
Ginny and Lisle liked parading it around for guests, though. Not because they were proud of how hot Lisle used to be, but as an illustration of her earlier, oppressed self—the duped woman who used her body as a form of economic exchange; the innocent girl who became an “objectified object” of the “male gaze.” Lisle orated on this subject frequently to her poetry group, which met at the apartment every other Wednesday. Camden’s mother, who was not a poet, scurried around serving coffee and cakes, and though the members of the group all spoke and wrote in English, they lapsed into Dutch when Ginny entered the room. Ginny didn’t seem to mind; she liked assisting people. She often quipped that she would make the ideal personal assistant to a movie star. Lisle had published little poetry, but Camden doubted even movie stars could compete with Lisle’s ego and sense of entitlement. While the handicapped girlfriends in the past had accepted Ginny’s ministering with gratitude, Lisle seemed to punish Ginny for her normalcy, rejecting her efforts to help, driving her toward a more marginalized existence—as though being gay weren’t enough. Camden once overheard his mother and Lisle arguing about a club Ginny didn’t want to go to, and when he looked the name up under “gay” in his guidebook, he discovered the bar was S&M oriented. For days, he studied Ginny for bruises, but she looked fine, healthy if thinner.
He did not ask his mother what the hell they were doing in Amsterdam when it seemed clear already that things weren’t working out. He had long since given up on finding logic in what women bore for what they believed was love.
In order to relocate to Amsterdam, Ginny had pulled Camden out of school in Illinois three months before the end of his junior year. He’d left over the protests of school counselors, teachers, his grandparents, and most of the girls at Oak Park/River Forest High School, who aspired to sleep with him either again or for the first time. Camden and Ginny settled into the trendy Jordaan district during a time of year when the weather in Amsterdam was nonstop rain. While his friends back home were breaking out spring shorts that hung low on their hips, Camden and Ginny trolled Amsterdam museums in wet wool coats, fighting nonstop sore throats. Before Camden even unpacked his clothes at the Jordaan apartment, three ex-girlfriends’ e-mails had arrived. It’s 65 degrees today, one wrote. Hugh threw a party while his parents were in Saint Martin, and got arrested having sex with some skeeze in the master bedroom because in the throes of passion, ha ha, they didn’t hear the cops burst in, wrote another. We’re watching the Cubs’ opening from Hugh’s brother’s roof in Wrigleyville, wrote a third. Each typed at the end, before her name, I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. Camden did not write back.
It would be five months before classes started in Holland, and Ginny couldn’t work here for three years, until she could apply for legal residency. Meanwhile Lisle paid all the bills, leaving Camden and Ginny stuck in the apartment together like siblings home from school with measles. Though Ginny brimmed with plans for places to go, things to see, she spent her actual days fussing around the apartment, perusing Lisle’s Andrea Dworkin library and watching CNN so she could complain about world events later when Lisle got home. Camden, under pressure, developed an unhealthy interest in the Torture Museum. He listened to the audio tour of the Van Gogh Museum until he could have written a paper on bipolar Vincent without even getting on the Internet. Every day for lunch, he ate apple pie stacked tall on a white plate. He learned not to feel rain.
The closest he came to picking up a girl was at an Irish pub, Mulligan’s, with Lisle and his mother looking on. An abysmal folk band played loudly. The girl was with her mother too, who knew the band’s singer. The girl’s name was Roos, “the spelling of Rose in Dutch,” she explained. Camden quipped, “A rose by any other letters is still as sweet,” expecting the reference to be lost on her, but she replied in the flawless English that never stopped unnerving him among the young A’dam set, “Every American guy I’ve ever met has said some variation of that line, and I haven’t gone to bed with any of them yet.”
Their mothers watched them talk but didn’t speak to each other. Roos’ mother, a painter, sat alone and silent, listening to the music and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Ginny and Lisle argued about the guitarist, who was Lisle’s ex. Roos was pretty if tomboyish, with full, heavy breasts that he and his buddy Hugh would have nudged each other about back home. Camden broke the conversation off abruptly, though he watched Roos for the remainder of the evening. She had a stillness, like her mother. She was as tall as he and wore leather pants with sneakers. Her hair was short and dark, which almost made her appear foreign—he had never seen so many blondes—but her cheeks bore the unmistakable pink glow of a Dutch girl, even without makeup. Although she was dateless too, he felt embarrassed about being at the bar with Ginny and Lisle, but he saw restraint as a victory, indicative of his new life.
Aimee had leaned over, trying to whisper to him, breasts swaying. “After, it’ll be the same, you and me? This’ll be the only time he’s with us, right?” Hugh’s torso, stretching to intercept her path of intended intimacy, blocked Camden’s access to her ear. Would he have warned her if he could reach her? It’ll never be the same between us either way—get up and leave right now. If you don’t, this is only the beginning. Then Hugh’s hand, reaching to scoop her tit like an udder; vulgar kneading. Aimee’s eyes, scared but aroused, rolling back. So easy—it was so easy every time.
Morality was paradoxical in Amsterdam: prostitution legal, soft drugs decriminalized. Locals didn’t seem interested in it either. Some of his mom’s friends back home had spouted that letting women do what they wanted with their bodies—to sell them if they chose—was liberated, even feminist, but Ginny told the Oak Park bipolar on the phone that it wasn’t like that, it didn’t look like what she imagined. Camden knew what she meant. He’d figured if there weren’t so much stigma on sex for girls, everybody would have as much of it as possible. Women would hire hot guys for the night too, sure. Why not? But mostly boys his age and younger went for rent here, and old men did the buying. The commercial hype focused on women: bare breasts sold everything from soap to beer. Boobs were plastered on billboards, starred in the commercials before films. A poster selling ice cream at the Albert Heijn portrayed a female mouth giving a chocolate-covered bar head.
Even if you kept out of the Red Light District, there were mini prostitution clusters all over the city. Innocuously walking down the street, you might encounter a woman in her underwear, sitting in a picture window staring at you. The District itself had a giant German, British, and American frat party vibe, as if all the brothers were on X. Eastern European and Indonesian women in fluorescent bikinis stood behind elevated glass like animals in the zoo. The hot ones were up front, so gorgeous it was easy to succumb to the gawking, to figure the prostitutes must get off on their power. But the farther you walked among the labyrinthine streets, the more you encountered the fat, broken-down chicks, the hunchbacked, dwarfy, older whores behind their glass windows like circus freak-shows instead of proud lionesses strutting. The tourists of the District—nearly all male after nightfall—had a violent, frenzied undertow about them: you had to watch your wallet. Junkie-skinny drifters would offer to sell you H even if you were walking with your mom. The greedy desperation of it was more creepy than sexy—Camden only had to survey the revved up, shoving guys crowding the streets to wonder which were really the zoo animals. Man’s neediness for a hole was embarrassing.
According to Lisle, Holland was light years behind North America when it came to women’s “economic independence.” Ginny dully recited the statistics into the phone, seemingly only vaguely aware that she remained unemployed. When Camden left the apartment in annoyance, cabs at taxi stands displayed Yab Yum cards on their dashboards, receiving kickbacks for referrals to that infamous brothel where educated, beautiful Dutch girls would fuck your brains out for a price no sixteen-year-old could afford. In Amsterdam, those too lazy to go out to buy dr
ugs could have Thai stick or skunk delivered to their homes. The Netherlands seemed full of contradictions: in busy restaurants, strangers cordially invited Camden to sit at their table—yet since he and his mother had been here, none of their Dutch acquaintances had yet invited them home for a visit.
“Friendship is not casual here,” Lisle explained. “It can take years, and then it is formal, like a declaration—I think of you as a friend. In the United States it’s more like, Oh I sat next to you on the airplane and told you my secrets and now you are my friend. Here, we may be repressed, but our friendship is true.”
It seemed an odd thing to say for a woman who, at a poetry workshop in London, met an American tourist at a lesbian bar and proceeded to utterly disrupt her life in the course of a few months. The ground here was constantly shifting, sticky. Lonely.
Mei
He remembered her name visually: Roos. When he saw her selling tickets at Bananenbar, he would have turned and run had he not been with three English girls and a German guy from the youth hostel, all four engaged in hyped-up double entendres, full of hope for an evening of debauchery and trying to ignore the Disney World atmosphere of the tourist sex clubs. And now, ladies and gentlemen, Minnie and Mickey will skate on ice naked. They may fall into each other’s genitalia while they’re at it, but don’t worry—they won’t enjoy it. Roos stood in the doorway, sporting the same leather pants from Mulligan’s, hair still shorn like a boy’s, no lipstick to brighten her white and pink face. The first night he met her, Camden had thought she might be gay, but now he knew Dutch girls often went au natural. She held her hand out, smirking, though he didn’t think she’d remember him. He wished the German guy behind him would take some initiative and deal with her instead.
Slut Lullabies Page 15