“Here you go,” he said.
I pressed my back into one of the pillows and pulled the blanket up to my waist. Adjustments complete, Dirk sat back onto the pillow beside me and, under the covers, wriggled out of his underwear and into the pyjama bottoms.
“Ready?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “One last thing.”
He got up, went to the door, and turned off the overhead lights. In the dark he shuffled to the corner, where I could hear him fiddling with a knob. Another click, and this time a thin beam shot up the blue-green wall, giving the room an underwater glow. “Mood,” Dirk said.
He knelt by the side of the bed, pulled the cassette from the case, and slipped it into the video player. The screen went blue. We waited. An impatient Dirk leaned forward, smacked the side of the TV and stabbed the buttons. “Damn, fucking,” he said, laughing. A nervous laughter. Unusual for Dirk.
Finally some combination of buttons worked, and the video began to play. After a moment of hesitation, Dirk lay back on the bunk. His heels bounced up and down on the carpet. His fingers drummed the blanket. A grin started to show on his face and he let out a small, beer-scented burp. The nurses appeared on screen. There were three, and except for their white gloves they were dressed as on the cover. A male patient entered the scene. One nurse looked at the other, then addressed the patient. “Please remove your undergarments, sir,” she said, in a dubbed voice.
I tried to focus on the scene but out of the corner of my eye I saw Dirk’s hand under the duvet, shadows rippling across the surface.
After a second of hesitation, I slipped my hand under the covers and started to masturbate alongside Dirk.
“See the way he’s doing it?” Dirk said, pointing with his free hand at the screen.
I looked briefly at the flickering picture but couldn’t tell what he was pointing at. My attention was split. Part of me was watching Dirk, trying to see how fast he was going. How hard he was concentrating.
After a few more scenes he shuffled forward and pressed Pause, then sighed theatrically as he lay back into the pillows and stretched his arms to the side, as if he were swinging on a hammock. He flashed a smile.
“Perfect.”
I looked at the clock on the stereo. It was midnight. Dirk got up from the bunk and went to his records.
“Did you finish?” he said, laughing. He didn’t wait for an answer. “And now, for some music.”
He had something new, he said, pulling out an album I didn’t recognize. After slipping out the record, he handed me the cover. All it said was the name of the band, no album title. The Velvet Underground, which didn’t make sense, if “velvet” and “underground” meant what I thought they did. On the back was a picture of a man smoking a cigarette. His collar was sticking out of his sweater. The new fashion.
Dirk set the needle on the record and slipped back into bed. I watched as the needle rolled slowly over the undulating vinyl, like a tiny boat riding long waves. At first there was nothing but the hum of the speakers. Then came a guitar, strumming out of time and out of tune. And a person singing, between whisper and falsetto.
Dirk lay back and cradled his head in his hands.
“Brilliant, eh?”
As I listened to the guitar, slowly falling into rhythm, my eyelids grew heavy. I drifted in and out of sleep, like the needle that rode the undulations of the record.
“De Vries … are you awake?”
I rubbed my eyes and face. The feeling of drunkenness was gone from my head. I could think clearly enough. The music had stopped but the hum of the speakers was still brushing my ears. I squinted at the green numbers on the stereo. One fifteen.
Next to me, Dirk propped himself up on an elbow and shifted onto his side. I did the same, facing him. Dirk moved closer to me, and after a second or two, I moved closer to him. I was so close I could feel the warmth rising from his chest. We didn’t speak, and I don’t think I even breathed. When I felt his hand on my back, I put my hand on his. Then he sank into the pillow and closed his eyes, and I sank down and closed mine.
After a while I realized I was breathing again, that we were breathing in the same rhythm. We stayed facing each other, eyes closed, chests rising and falling in unison, until we fell asleep.
Dirk had taken it for granted that I’d be coming to his house for Christmas dinner, so he never bothered to actually invite me. When he finally got around to informing me of my expected time of arrival, I told him my parents probably expected me to go with them, to the neighbours’.
“So tell them you’ve got a better invitation,” he said. “Who are your neighbours, anyway? I’ve never heard you mention them.”
“The Zoetmulders.”
“Oh, wait a second. The Zoetmulders?” he said, raising his arms in front of him, as though shielding himself from a radioactive blast. “My goodness, de Vries, why didn’t you say right away it was the Zoetmulders? No right-thinking person would miss a chance to go to the Zoetmulders’.”
I was about to launch a comeback when he cut me off.
“Too late for the Zoetmulders, Old Man. I’ve already told my parents you’re coming, so you’re coming. Fait accompli.”
A week later, my mother was driving me to Dirk’s. And though his house already felt like home to me, and I’d met his parents, this night was different. I was being inducted into the family. I had dressed in a crisp white shirt, navy sweater, wool pants, dress socks, and vigorously shined brogues. My most adult self.
When the car pulled up at the dead end in front of Dirk’s I checked myself briefly in the reflection of the windshield. My mother handed me a wrapped a box of chocolates. “For Dirk’s parents,” she said, “not Dirk.”
She probably added something else, but I wasn’t paying attention. I’d caught sight of the kitchen, so brightly lit through the bay window, and was looking at the action inside. Though I hadn’t met most of the people there, I felt I knew who they were from Dirk’s descriptions. There was Dirk’s parents, Wim and Cornelia, his older brother, his grandmother, who drank everyone’s wine when they weren’t looking. And another couple his parents’ age, who must have been their regular Christmas guests, the Polhemuses. All crowded around the island, drinking, prepping food, talking, gesturing. Casual, belonging.
I kissed my mother goodbye, crossed the street, and skipped up the red brick steps to the glass vestibule in front of the house. The smell of sugar and brandy thickened the air. I rang the doorbell and listened. There was a pause in the noise from the kitchen, the shuffling of feet on tile, the scrape of the lock, and the turn of the brass doorknob. The door opened, letting out more brandy and sugar and the buttery smell of pie crust. I saw an oversized Christmas tree, which had taken over the living room. I heard jazz playing loudly. A voice like and unlike Dirk’s, which must have been his brother’s, was explaining something about Athenian history. And before me, in the doorway, was Dirk’s mother, Cornelia. “Master Jan has graced us with his presence,” she said. “The little pianist has arrived!”
This was the cue for footsteps to come galloping down the stairs and socks to slide across the living room’s waxed hardwood floor. Dirk, on the edge of control, came crashing into me, grabbing on to me not to fall. Then he stood up, put his arm around my shoulder, and without missing a beat said, “I believe you mean Masturbator Jan, the little penis.”
His mother threw her head back and laughed silently, a hand hanging in mid-air. Dirk imitated her, hanging his hand in mid-air.
After introductions and aperitifs, everyone moved to the dining room, where throughout dinner Dirk put on a bravura performance of Dirkness, and the entire family showed their unlimited adoration of everything he did. His father beamed. Granny stroked the back of his hand. The Polhemuses’ niece, who arrived late and sat next to Dirk’s brother, giggled at every one of Dirk’s dirty punchlines. All of this was played around a table packed with food, so much, and so rich, and under a giant painting of a
dog sleeping on a lush bed of purple grass—an “early Scholte,” I had been told.
Time was only called when Wim, at the head of the table, unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his fly, hung his head, and closed his eyes. By that point Granny had been led to a guest room at the back of the house, the Polhemuses had left, and Dirk’s brother and the Polhemuses’ niece had gone off somewhere.
“You two boys go to the tree,” Cornelia said in a wobbly voice. “I’ll manage the plates.”
I stumbled to the living room couch. Dirk, riding another of his second winds, threw his father’s old newspapers into the low-burning fire and grabbed hold of the poker. I rested my eyes for a moment only to be hit in the head by a flying object.
“Vorsicht, de Vries,” Dirk said, unwrapping the gift that landed next to me on the couch—the gift I’d brought. “And what could this be?”
“It’s for your parents,” I said.
“That’s just going to make them taste better, Old Man.”
Dirk rubbed his hands and opened the box, which contained dozens of individually wrapped chocolates set in a grid. He pulled out chocolates at random, unwrapped them, took small bites from each, then rewrapped the uneaten portions and placed them back in the box. “Funny,” he said. “They all taste the same.”
He snapped the box shut and threw it aside, knocking other presents and tinsel dangerously close to the fire. “Feel like ducking upstairs,” he said, “and watching an interesting mature video?”
I looked into the kitchen. “Your mother’s right there,” I hissed. “She can probably hear us!”
“Good point, de Vries. It’d be rude not to extend the invitation.”
Dirk cackled at his joke, drew a breath, and bolted up the stairs two at a time. I sprang to my feet and raced after him.
“I’m going to beat you up, de Vries,” Dirk called back at me, not caring who heard.
If Dirk and I were inseparable before, then that first Christmas, the first of four I spent at his house, showed we were bonded in a new way. We had become best friends. A circle of two, into which no one else was admitted.
During the years at Sint Ansfried, I must have had my own classes, spent time alone practising, spent lunches by myself, and I remember leaving Dirk’s house on Saturday afternoons, which means I must have spent the rest of the weekends away from him. But I cannot pick out a memory from those years that does not find Dirk by my side. We spent what felt like years at the movie theatre, sitting through many bad and terrible movies. We listened to experimental music in record shops and in his room and went to watch bands play in bars and small clubs. We walked every street in Den Bosch, where he lived, and Vught, where we cut classes, something we did with increasing frequency, ducking out of math and languages and going to sit in a café to talk, argue, laugh.
There’s a stack of photographs, letters, and postcards I collected from those years that I’ve crammed into a shoebox, and I can call up almost all of them by heart.
There is the picture I took of Dirk in art class, wearing a paint-smeared smock and wielding a paintbrush like a fencing foil. Another that Dirk took of me after six months of growing out my hair in grade eleven, transforming myself into a kind of Shirley Temple with a dirty upper lip.
There’s a picture of Dirk and me standing at the edge of the sea on a class trip to Zeeland. Both of us with pants rolled above the knee, wading into the water. Dirk is wearing a tricorne hat bought at a thrift shop in Middelburg, windblown wavy hair sticking out the back. He bought me a hat too, a type of a beanie, and made me wear it. The entire trip, even on the train ride back, he insisted on being called Louis Napoleon Matador.
“Louis Napoleon the Third, mind.”
There’s a picture taken from the bay window of Dirk and me playing soccer in the park. Dirk’s hair corralled by a terrycloth headband, a plastic ball at his feet, a look of intensity on his face as he is about to dribble past me. There is a particularly memorable photo of Dirk and me dressed up for the Graduation Ball, all pomp and pomposity. I’m in a rented tuxedo and Dirk’s in a velour smoking jacket bought from the charity shop in downtown Den Bosch. My hair is combed forward to hide a nasty job I’d made of trying to get rid of a pimple, and Dirk’s square-framed sunglasses are hanging off the tip of his nose. I’m smiling with closed lips; Dirk’s leering at the camera and, on close inspection, showing a hint of the chipped tooth.
As for the letters and postcards, I know these by heart too.
The note Dirk mailed from Den Bosch on a Tuesday afternoon that got to me in Vlijmen on Wednesday morning. “I am bored. What are you up to tonight?” The letter from France, where he spent part of a summer. “Dear Mister de Vries, We, at the ministry of completely irrelevant things, would like to remind you that the Bengal Tiger is not native to Paris. Furthermore the Bengal Tiger will not be found in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.” There is a crumpled bill taped to the bottom left-hand corner of the postcard. An arrow leads to a tightly scrawled explanation. “Ten francs folded five times equals two francs, it seems.”
There is a scribbled message from the other side of a class. “Hello young sir, Hello and welcome to this letter. I am theoretically in class right now, though if I were to be strictly accurate, I would say that is a vast overstatement.” That one is signed, “I hate you, I love you,” each struck through, followed by “You are okay.”
There is the drawing he made for Sint Ansfried’s improvisational theatre show, Thespus. Dirk drew brilliantly, often making sketches of imaginary and imaginatively hairy animals with surplus legs, clublike tails, and claws that gripped smaller, flailing versions of themselves. He could turn out masses of those animals, great populations of them. For the show’s poster, he drew two shaggy-haired creatures interlocked in mortal embrace, with one of the animals calling to the other, “Cry mercy!” Which was what Dirk always said when he had me in a headlock or was twisting an arm behind my back.
“Cry mercy, de Vries! Cry mercy, Old Man!” His forearm cutting farther into the neck. My shoulder being pulled nearly out of its socket. “Say it, Jan! Mer-cy!”
People at school treated those posters like collector’s items, tearing them from the walls as soon as they appeared. When the show was over, Dirk gave me the original, in blue ink. “I made it for us,” he said.
That was Dirk and me in public: what others knew, and could see. But there were also things we didn’t talk about, not even to each other. The things we couldn’t explain, but just did.
Like the times we argued or joked or horsed around, this also followed a routine. It started Friday afternoons, when Dirk and I would cut the last class, ride to central Den Bosch, hang out in record stores and go to the movies. The first couple of years we’d cap the outing with a slice of pizza or hot dogs and fries, complemented with beers from his father’s cellar at home, but as we got older we’d stop for a drink in a pub or head out to a house party when someone’s parents were out of town. If it was a big night, Dirk and I’d get drunk and smoke a joint that Dirk would buy, usually off Pirm. If our adventure took us far, we’d leave our bikes behind, locked to a fence, and Dirk would call a cab to take us back, happy to pay, because while I had a two-guilder-a-week allowance, Dirk got thirty and didn’t care about money. He loved letting coins spill out of his pockets, leaving them where they fell on the pavement.
When we got home at two or three, we’d stumble into the kitchen. The sink would sometimes be full of dishes, but the little table in the bay window was always clear enough that I could rest my head on it as I slumped into a chair. Even though Dirk had likely drunk twice as much as I had, he’d shuffle to the shelves near the sink, find two glasses, and run the tap till the water was cold.
“It’ll take the edge off, Old Man.”
We’d drink glasses and glasses of water, till I’d start feeling my stomach pressing against my belt. Then we’d make our way to the stairs where, ever since I had taken a fall on one of our first nights together, Dirk would dutifully follow
me up, ready to catch me in case I did an encore.
The lights in his room would already be dimmed, and I’d amble between piles of clothes and books to the mattress, focusing most of my thoughts on not hitting my head against the top bunk. As I lay sideways among the scattered pillows, the world would spin anew, but as soon as Dirk joined me, it slowed, then grew still.
As we lay side by side, Dirk would say something about a girl at a party or the girl he was going out with at the time, about how he had gone down on her. He would add advice. Pay attention to her breathing to know if she’s liking it. Keep the same rhythm once you’ve found the sweet spot. Do not change technique if you think you’re getting close.
At some point, I would notice music playing in the background. Dirk always had something set up on his turntable, but I only noticed the sounds when he and I stopped talking. It was the old songs we used to listen to, only quieter. A slow bass. A lonely voice singing about love. A guitar edging in and floating out.
As I tried to pick the strands apart, Dirk would begin unbuttoning his shirt, but more often than not he’d grow impatient and lift it, half-unbuttoned, over his head. I’d get under the covers and wiggle out of my underwear. A shirtless Dirk would stand up, walk to the door, and turn off the lights. In the darkness I would hear him come back to the bed and feel him pull at the covers. As my eyes adjusted to the street light that seeped under the drawn curtains I could make out the shape of his head, neck, and shoulders, and see that he was facing me. Listening to the shallow sounds that emanated from the speakers, moving in and out of earshot, I tensed for the moment when he would shift in the bed. That would be the signal. He’d prop himself up, inch closer, and I’d do the same. I’d feel a hand on my side, above the hips. I’d put my hand in the same place above Dirk’s hips. He’d move his hand down, between my legs. I’d do the same.
School of Velocity Page 4