Amsterdam had changed for him on Koninginnedag, April 30—not Queen Beatrix’s actual birthday, but her mother’s; a good time of the year to party in the streets for about thirty-six hours nonstop. Even preparations depressed Camden: the buzz of incoming travelers and never-closing bars and restaurants, of the city being transformed into a musical flea market of wandering musicians and market stalls. The thought of sticking close to the Isle of Lesbos while his mother waited on Lisle and her friends proved too much. He’d stalked off in the hope of finding a quiet corner in which to refrain from the bacchanal, but instead he saw students everywhere, his own age or a year or two older, descending on A’dam from all over Europe and the U.K.
They spoke to him as though he were one of them—they did not know he’d changed. He remembered how to form the words—the banter and bullshit: What bands do you like? and Where have you traveled? and Wanna see my tattoo? He woke the next morning in a hostel, full-bladdered and naked next to a girl on a tapestry blanket thrown over a straw mat.
All his vows—all his efforts—and how long had his atonement lasted? Just over a month. It was the same weakness; he couldn’t trust himself. That evening at Lisle’s, he had allowed himself to think consciously of Aimee for the first time since his arrival—Stop Cam, I think I’m gonna pee—of how suddenly her back had arched, torso flowing like a wave that lapped toward him and receded away, her shoulders limp in his arms after . . . he’d felt godlike and clueless, cocky and nervous as he held her. Remembering, he bawled into his pillow leaving wet circles of saliva, trying to hide the sounds from his mother and especially from Lisle.
But he’d gone back to the youth hostel. The crowd kept changing every few days or weeks, but usually there was some straggler remaining who could introduce Camden to the next pack of travelers, recent high school or college grads. They bore guidebooks, though they mostly got too stoned to do anything but sit at the Bulldog, nearly passed out at their tables. Until they met him. Camden knew things by now—knew to take fellow Americans to the “Boom Chicago” comedy routine at the Rembrantplein, knew girls loved the salad Niçoise at Café Luxembourg, knew that the shabby Dutch Flower coffeehouse around the corner was small enough that both employees and regulars greeted him by name, which carried high cachet for his new friends. (“The Bulldog and The Grasshopper are the Hard Rock Cafés of hash,” he told them. “They’re industries that sell overpriced T-shirts, not real local flavor.”) At the Albert Cuypmarkt, he ordered in Dutch: olives, cheese, and other foods girls found romantic. Weather permitting, he rode his date on the back of his bike all the way to Vondelpark for a picnic and free classical concert. Most tourists, even the girls, thought of A’dam as a walk on the wild side—so he knew how to find Casa Rosso and navigate his “charges” inside before they could realize they were being taken to the Hard Rock Café of live sex shows, since anything off the tourist path would freak them out. He could tell which girls were hot enough to get into RoXY, and took them to the Bazaar Attitude flea market near his house to look for club gear in case ugly-American shorts and Nikes downplayed their lithe legs. He lied about his age: eighteen, a graduate taking a break before “university” to hang out where his mother’s lover, “a poet,” had an apartment. He never mentioned that Lisle was wheelchair-bound. Once, after an exceptionally lousy blowjob, he admitted (through some kind of free association?) that the poetry Lisle wrote was bad.
Seeing Roos again shamed him, as Pavlovian as if he were face-to-face with Aimee. Stupid—the girl sold tickets to a sex club of all things! Still, she seemed a bitter reminder of his early days in A’dam when he’d believed himself capable of change.
Now she waved her fingers in front of his downcast eyes. “Hey, you aren’t going to say hi? I’ll tell your mother. They don’t let anybody in at Mulligan’s who doesn’t have any good manners!” She grinned wide.
Camden blushed. He felt it all over his head like a rash, a scalp itch. At once, his face seemed all wrong—seemed to invite this tall, unkempt girl to find him obvious, to read between the lines of his life and agenda. Pretty boy with three girls, showing off, looking to get laid. Trendy American tourist thinking he’s decadent for going to see naked girls shoot bananas out of their snatches. GQ poster-boy poseur, little suburban twit. Anything he did, with this face, would seem calculated, a contrived effort to be charming. If only he’d taken his new friends to Casa Rosso, even though he was so bored with that show he thought he’d kill himself if he watched Batman go soft one more time. At least then he would never have run into Roos.
Suddenly it dawned on him, how to turn things around. “I didn’t figure you for the kind of girl who would work at a place like this.”
Roos sighed. “You Americans always say ‘this kind of girl’ and ‘that kind of girl.’ It’s just like your politics—one party is for the rich white people, another for all the poor people and the immigrants, you say. You all believe it and run out and vote for this person, and you marry this certain type of girl, and I always wonder do you wake up one day and realize that any outsider can tell from watching your TV sitcoms or news shows that you are all exactly the same?”
“What a bitch,” a Brit girl muttered. The German guy snickered.
Camden felt hit by strange relief. “Go on in without me, guys,” he said. “I have to stay here and defend my country’s honor to this totally misguided, but very pretty woman.”
“You can’t just stand here and block the door,” Roos countered. “It’s bad for business, for the male customers to see me talking to you.”
“Wat doen jij achter werk?” he whispered, unable to let her go but desperate for his chortling cohorts not to hear.
She let her eyes run down him, as though sizing him up for the first time. “How old are you?”
“Sixteen.” The four hostelers made noises of shock and irritation. Two swarthy men behind them made as if to push ahead. Camden said, “I’m going to go have a drink somewhere and wait for you. An hour? Two? Four? Where should I go?”
“Don’t be so silly,” Roos said. “It’s too rude to leave your friends.” Then, “So, you know, I do the same thing every Sunday. Meet me at the Engelbewaarder tomorrow afternoon, and maybe you’ll like it, too.”
Juni
After four weeks, Sundays belonged to Roos. A phone call in the morning, then the routine began. He rode his bike to her mother’s houseboat, also an art studio; he went inside for coffee. Roos would be reading the paper at the old, farmhouse-style kitchen table, which was full of dents, grooves, and smears of paint. Her cup would sit half full, lukewarm, no lipstick around the rim or oil from makeup floating on top of the coffee, so Camden would have a sip and wait while her mother poured him his own cup. Next came bread and jam, or sometimes cookies, but Roos and her mother took little interest in them. Sometimes people would drop by, to see Roos’ mother’s paintings or talk about an upcoming show, and they would come into the kitchen too, and her mother poured coffee. Camden would feel like an insider for already being perched on the wooden bench with his own lukewarm mug, his own section of the Herald Tribune. Roos’ mother spoke little English, so all conversation took place in Dutch—Camden would only pretend to read, straining to understand. Whenever Roos spoke, she addressed him in English, as though they were a unit, conspirators. The thrill was inexplicable; he had to keep his face calm though he wanted to dash up and kiss her hard to show all the guests what was between them. Except that wasn’t between them—not yet—and besides, he had garnered enough about Dutch reserve to know a display of messy, over-eager passion would only position him as an outsider again. So he sat, sipped, read, waited.
Though Roos (of course) had a bike too, they usually walked to the Engelbewaarder. Across the street, kitty-corner, was a coffeehouse displaying the Jamaican flag, but the only time they had ever entered was for Roos to purchase a bottle of water, which she promptly brought back onto the street. The Engelbewaarder was up a narrow flight of stairs, dark and brown and tentatively seedy i
n its bohemianism. The crowd was largely middle-aged Dutch and arty ex-pats; there were chessboards. Smoke was thick. He had seen a group of grungy Gen Xers smoking skunk once out in the open, but never dared light up himself. Roos did not smoke, cigarettes or anything else. She drank infrequently, but at Engelbewaarder ordered one whiskey straight up and sipped it while Camden drank Duvels like Lisle so as not to be mistaken for a Bud Light–gulping tourist.
They were there for the jazz. A wild scene that rarely started on time but got going around 3:00 PM or so, as musicians slowly filtered in, dragging their instruments behind them. They sat up in front, under the gray glow of the window, and then, for no cover charge to patrons, began an hours-long improvisational jam session featuring a rotating group of some twenty musicians. Sometimes a dozen played at once, sometimes only a few, as they sat out sets and joined in, leaving Camden dazed and aroused in a way music never before had. In the large, open area in back, full of tables, bar life went on as usual with the jazz serving as a backdrop, but up front, where Roos and Camden crammed in at the bar or snagged one of the two tables directly in front of the stage, conversation halted; the music reigned.
Most of the players were men over thirty, scruffy with unwashed clothing in muted shades of black, buttons missing. One saxophonist, a woman scarcely older than Roos, showed up twice to play, her toned biceps flexing as she manipulated her horn. Her hair was long and blond, her face the clean, simple prettiness of Holland; she wore, each time, a black tank top and tight black pants over her tall swaying body. Watching her blow into her sax, face growing pink with effort, hipbones shifting positions as she grooved, her entourage of men accompanying her in a cacophony of sound, Camden felt stirred in a way he never had at Casa Rosso. She was like an Amazon goddess, and in those moments he felt he would have given anything to feel her body moving against his, to have her wet mouth to himself. But in the next instant, she would jump offstage, and there would be Roos, flushed with pleasure and her tiny whiskey, beaming at him, and the saxophonist would seem like a beautiful sunset they had witnessed together, shimmering and magical, and he would feel glad to see Roos in the dim light of the bar, real and tangible, neither of them mourning that the splendor of what they’d seen was gone.
After Engelbewaarder, even the usual haze of early evening in Amsterdam felt too bright. They walked shielding their eyes, blinking. They needed to “come down,” Roos said, so they headed all the way to Centraal Station, to a surreal spa as modern and New Age as Engelbewaarder was a dingy 1960s throwback. Roos’ best friend from school worked here, at Oibibio, as a massage therapist, and Roos had a standing Sunday appointment just before closing. Inside, the place felt like a strange cross between a giant dance studio and a shopping mall—after his fourth visit, Camden still felt incapable of navigating between the shop, the café, and the spa on his own. Roos, on their first “date” following Engelbewaarder, had taken the liberty of booking Camden a massage, too—not that he minded. When she’d gone right along with him to the coed dressing room and stripped, his anticipation overrode his embarrassment and he’d chucked off his own clothes, lingering with the smell of Duvel and smoke. But when Roos turned, still naked and holding her towel to her side like a handbag, and pranced into the lobby, sat down, and started reading a magazine, Camden freaked. His own towel wrapped around his waist (he’d done it before he could even notice that she hadn’t), he surveyed the lobby in a panic: all around him, business types of both genders sat in the buff reading, talking on cell phones, sipping water and tea. A few had towels wrapped around their waists (thank God!), but most appeared oblivious to their nudity, including the fully dressed, hot young receptionists and the walk-in customers off the street inquiring about the availability of appointments without batting an eye at the hoards of dangling penises and perky—or sagging—breasts.
Roos’ own breasts, only eighteen years old, nonetheless suffered from gravity, given their size. Her pubic hair was sparse and black; she didn’t shave her lean thighs and the hair was likewise thin but dark like a pubescent boy’s. Camden’s heart rate returned to normal when his massage therapist fetched him, but she ushered him to a private room exposed through a wide, glass door so that all—especially the hot receptionist with her bird’s eye view—could watch his ass being kneaded. He thought he might pass out. Just last year, visiting Hugh in the Hamptons, Camden and the crowd they’d run with that summer had formed their own nudist colony down a stretch of mostly deserted beach—they only invited the prettiest, potentially promiscuous girls to join them. Occasionally an adult would hap upon them and stare, disapproving or maybe envious, but the sense of themselves as spectacle had only heightened Camden’s enjoyment, his feeling of power. He could tell that some of the kids they’d met, even ones with nice bodies, wanted to join in but just couldn’t overcome their shyness, and he’d felt disdainful of their conventionality, superior. But now it was the sheer lack of spectacle—of sex—that so unnerved him. He seemed to be the only person in the building conscious of all the nakedness.
And that was Roos. A normal girl living with her mother, dabbling at painting, going to school part-time, abstaining from cigarettes and drugs—but in boutiques, if she saw a shirt she liked, she’d take her top off right there and try it on without going into a changing room. He had seen other Dutch girls do this too and, not knowing them, had assumed they were wild—partying, rave-hopping, X-taking, slutty chicks the Oak Park Camden would have made it his business to know. Instead, Roos lived something like her forty-year-old mother; neither of them dated much, from what Camden could tell. They cooked dinners in, talked about art. After Oibibio, Roos would take him to Shizen, her favorite macrobiotic Japanese restaurant, and Camden, exhausted, would sit beside her sipping green tea, having traversed the entire city by foot on little sustenance beyond beer, wolfing down his raw-fishless maki while Roos expertly maneuvered chopsticks to place tender sashimi slices into her naturally bright red mouth. She never seemed tired; her feet never hurt. Shizen was between their homes, so she would bid him good night upon leaving, kiss him swiftly three times on the cheek—left, right, left—their lips never meeting, and promise to call him tomorrow. She was reliable, did not play games, did not seem to keep track of who had phoned whom last. When she referenced former lovers, which she did rarely but always with good nature, it was impossible to ascertain whether she meant to give him hints or was merely confiding in him as one would a friend. At least she had yet to announce I think of you as a friend—some small relief. She seemed to have no idea of how to flirt.
And so, over a series of four Sundays and sporadic other-day-of-the-week “dates” (were they dates? They went, as the saying went, Dutch), Camden’s confusion grew. He did not know how to approach her as a lover—despite thinking of her constantly, was not even quite sure he wanted to. She made him nervous at the same time as making him feel more at ease, more himself than he could recall having felt with a girl—with anyone. His handsomeness, a currency in which he was accustomed to dealing, seemed not to register with her, though she was always polite and gracious, interested enough in him on some level to spend extensive time with him. For a woman who got naked at every opportunity, she seemed almost asexual, or at least defined less by her sexuality than seemed normal. Didn’t she have desires? Did she fantasize about him? Was she seeing someone else? Like throwing himself upon her in a tacky American display of passion in front of her mother’s art-patron guests, the prospect of blatantly hitting on her seemed clearly inappropriate, contrary to the intimacy he hoped was building between them. He feared—like a girl—that if they fucked, it wouldn’t mean anything to her. They would, he decided, every Sunday night alone in his bed, listening to the sound of his mother and Lisle’s arguments or worse, his mother’s shuddery sobbing alone, simply be friends.
Ginny was in front of the TV when Camden entered the apartment after his fourth Sunday with Roos. The silence made it immediately apparent that Lisle was not at home. Since coming to Amsterdam,
his mother had taken up cigarettes again after ten years, and now she turned to look at him, her frail, lovely face lit by the TV, her body like a brittle stick aflame at one end. Camden was about to walk past her and go to bed, but she said, accusation somehow always in her voice, “I was waiting for you.”
He didn’t say anything. That was the one thing about having a mother, about having his particular mother—you did not have to say anything. She would just keep talking at you, and eventually, if you listened hard enough, she would tell you how she wanted you to behave, and if you felt like it, you could fake it, and then you could leave.
“I’m thinking—well, I’m . . . you got your wish, after all. I guess we’re going home.”
The words should not have felt like a jolt. But they felt like sliding down the long, spiraling plastic slide of the playground Ginny used to take him to as a kid in Chicago, his body wild with static electricity so when she lunged forward to catch him at the bottom despite his protests that he did not need her, she always gave him a shock. Aversion therapy, he’d quipped to Aimee once, trying to make light of the calls he hadn’t returned. My mother totally smothered me, but she didn’t even know how to do it right, to make me dependent like she wanted. It’s not you. She accidentally taught me to like my space. He stood now in front of Lisle’s sofa, in her gezzelig little living room, his skin bristling with an electric pain. “Who says I want to leave?”
His mother snorted. “Isn’t it apparent? You can’t stand to be in this house for more than five minutes. Not that—”
“Maybe that’s because I’m trying to take advantage of living in another country, so I’m out doing stuff. Maybe I’ve been trying to make the best of it.”
Slut Lullabies Page 16