by Dola de Jong
“Who could that be?” someone shouted, and then, “More guests!”
“Now the party can start!” shouted one of the blowhards hopefully.
Erica went to open the door and came back, sober and pale, with her boss. I’d never met him, I’d only ever heard about him in the vaguest terms, but I knew it was him the second he walked in the door. The mood changed instantly. Some of the guests immediately tried to make a good impression, while others retreated back into their shells. Ultimately, everyone ended up in my bedroom, where the boss had taken a seat on the couch. The bolder ones among them gathered around him in chairs and on the ground, while the shyer ones hovered around the balcony and the open door to the hallway. I went to the kitchen to make more sandwiches and poured the last bit of punch into a glass. When I returned to my room and offered the boss some refreshments, I noticed that Erica was gone. I found her in her room frantically cleaning. She emptied the ashtrays out the window facing the canal, fluffed the pillows and straightened the chairs. She didn’t see me, and I tiptoed back out of the room. By then, there was an animated conversation going on in my room, and I tried to find a place in the circle. The boss was clearly enjoying all the attention. He reminded me of a father who was just checking in to see what the kids were up to, as if the teenagers had been allowed to have a little party in the living room while the parents tried to make themselves as comfortable as possible upstairs, mother stretched out on the bed with a book and a cup of tea on the nightstand and father hunched over his paperwork at the vanity. After a few outbursts of laughter downstairs and a few knowing glances at each other, they decided that dad would just go down—amiably and in a spirit of camaraderie, of course—and have a look. I have to admit the boss irritated me. He was just so interested in what everyone had to say. He led the conversation with such artificial tact and so many nods of understanding that I was tempted to make a belittling comment or two just to cut him down to size.
The conversation was about politics: the state, the individual versus the state and the masses. It was a fairly common topic in those days given the situations in Spain and Germany. The boss’s ideas and conclusions didn’t sit well with me. I waited in vain for someone to stand up for the individual, but nobody in the room seemed to feel the urge to protest. After a half-hour, I went to check on Erica—she’d never come out to join the group. Her door was open, the room had been cleaned (in a very Erica-like fashion), but she wasn’t there. I checked the shower, the bathroom, the kitchen (I even opened the door to the balcony), but she was nowhere to be found, and I realized with shock that she’d just left. I sat on her bed waiting for her to come home. Maybe she’d just gone out for some fresh air or to buy cigarettes at the neighborhood bar that was open all night. Every now and then I’d get up, go to my room, empty a few ashtrays, collect the plates and glasses carelessly cast aside and take them into the kitchen. Then I’d go back to Erica’s room and lean out the window over the canal, hoping that one of the late-night partygoers in the distance would be her. But she didn’t come home, and when her party guests were finally getting ready to leave, I closed the door to her bedroom and told them in a hushed tone that Erica had gone to bed with a splitting headache. I saw everyone out and prayed that they wouldn’t run into Erica on the street. But she never turned up. I boiled some water and did the dishes, tidied up the house, swept the living room, tended to the stove, and when I finally crawled into bed completely exhausted as the sun was coming up, there wasn’t a trace of the party left in the house. Even the cigarette smoke had been whisked out the window and into the clear, cold night.
I lay shivering under the covers. It was suddenly so cold in the apartment. Why had Erica left? Vague suspicions and theories ran through my mind, and I kept coming back to that pale look on her face when she walked in the room with her boss, and how she’d behaved a few months earlier on the way to Wies’s house when she dragged me across the street. Then my thoughts turned to Wies. Why hadn’t Erica invited her? Was she maybe spending the night at her house? But then why would she, I wondered resentfully. I sprang out of bed and went to the kitchen to warm up some milk. As I lay against the pillows sipping my bedtime drink, I heard Erica’s keys in the door. I quickly switched off the light, crawled back under the covers and listened to her sneak up the stairs.
3
I PROMISED MYSELF that I wouldn’t say anything to Erica about her strange behavior, and to be honest, I didn’t even have a chance because Ma showed up first thing in the morning to wish us a happy new year and talked nonstop. The General had invited some friends over to ring in the new year, and Ma needed a full hour to express her outrage over the way they had treated her.
“They completely ignored me,” she lamented. “I was only there to make dinner! Nothing but a maid!”
As soon as she left, Erica retreated into her room and didn’t come out again. That afternoon, I went to visit my family and had dinner in the city. The New Year’s Eve party wasn’t mentioned again. A few days later, Erica presented me with a savings account book in her name and asked me to keep watch over her inheritance, that is, the five hundred guilders that was left of it.
“Why don’t you do it yourself?” I asked, not entirely thrilled with the role of treasurer being tossed in my lap.
She ignored my question. “More money’s coming,” she said nonchalantly. “There are a few people who owe me.”
Less than a week later, she came to ask for fifty guilders.
“You mean you want your bankbook back?” I asked, opening the desk drawer I’d stashed it in. “Listen, Erica. I don’t feel comfortable with this arrangement. It’s ridiculous for me to be keeping tabs on your money, for you to have to ask me every time you need some. You need to manage the bankbook yourself.”
She stubbornly refused. Her face turned bright red, but she didn’t explain her reasoning. That same day, I found the book back on my desk. We went back to living the simple life we’d had before Erica became rich and her balance remained untouched. The fact that we suddenly had to watch every cent felt strange. Erica seemed to find the whole thing funny; she made jokes about us having seven meager years ahead of us. And in truth, in contrast to the sober existence our incomes actually afforded, that brief period of opulence felt much longer than the few weeks it had lasted. We didn’t have much, but we lived fairly well. Erica was still stuck paying off her debt to Ma. Her full salary would have afforded her a slightly more comfortable lifestyle, but just like before, she could only deposit a limited amount in our household fund. And since she refused to let me put any extra money into our pot in the kitchen cupboard, I spent less than my own income allowed. I concluded that she hadn’t used her inheritance to pay back her debt to Ma for her time volunteering at the local newspaper. I didn’t understand why, but I suspected it had something to do with the other bizarre aspects of her history. Erica’s strange behavior the day she’d received the money and the fact that her garrulous mother never said a word about it again on any of her later visits were proof that the whole thing was an epilogue to a family drama I knew nothing about.
It was a cozy winter, and we enjoyed ourselves. Gradually, I started renewing old ties. I invited friends over for dinner and went out more often. My attempts to bring Erica into the circle were only partially successful. She kept her distance, and after a while, when she started expressing her criticism and aversion, I stopped trying. To keep the balance, I even insisted on inviting Wies, but Erica wasn’t interested. Wies never came to our house, and I could only wonder whether Erica saw her regularly. Still, Erica and I spent a lot of time together, and she seemed to enjoy it. Many evenings were spent reading together in my room. We also had occasional bursts of activity, when we’d suddenly take up leatherwork or something and spend weeks fiddling around with awls and knives, making all kinds of things—some more useful than others. Then we’d decide to study graphology or sign up for fencing lessons. None of it lasted very long. Erica would come up with the idea, but after a sh
ort bout of enthusiasm, she’d had enough. And since I’d let myself be swept up in her excitement and my own dedication was based solely on her ambition, my interest would quickly wane as well. The bursts of activity were signs of Erica’s restlessness, excuses to avoid her own inner turmoil, activities she imposed on herself so that she would never get around to the things she actually wanted to do. I sensed it already back then, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. These thoughts were nothing more than vague ideas spinning around in my head that I couldn’t pin down.
“What shall we do, Erica?” I’d ask.
“What do you mean?” she’d say. “Nothing. We don’t have to do anything, do we? Why are you always nagging me about what to do?”
At the same time, however, she had absolutely no idea what to do with herself. She’d pick up a book, flip through it, pick up another, offer to make tea but then not do it, eat an apple, lie on the couch, write, stand in front of the window for half an hour, go in the kitchen, tear up whatever it was she’d written, and then ask: “Want to go to the movies?”
I didn’t understand why her work didn’t already keep her busy enough. Journalism was an interesting profession, after all, and I always thought that journalists and reporters spent their entire evenings out on assignments or gathering news.
When I asked Erica about this, her response was sarcastic. Oh sure, it was a romantic profession, she just hadn’t gotten to the romantic part yet. In the foreign news department, the most prized skills were cutting and pasting, and she was so handy with scissors and glue that they just couldn’t spare her.
“Not to mention your knowledge of foreign languages,” I said encouragingly.
She shrugged.
“What good is that?” she said. “It’s just an office job, Bea. One day, I hope to write about art. That’s my goal—the Art and Literature department, but …” She finished the sentence with a disheartened gesture. “I’m not a careerist,” she added. “Besides, I’m only twenty-one.”
She was disappointed with her job, her profession, and I was annoyed by the short-sightedness of her employers, who underestimated her potential.
But none of those things were the source of her restlessness, that I knew. It was something deeper inside her, something to do with her actual being, though she could have certainly found sublimation in her work for what was troubling her emotionally.
Once, following a hunch, I asked her if she was in love. She looked at me in shock: “What makes you think that? Me? In love?” The bitter lines on the sides of her mouth deepened into dark trenches. Then, as if struck by sudden inspiration, she said, “Maybe I am in love, God knows.”
I could tell the topic intrigued her, so I pressed a bit further: “Your boss, perhaps?”
She laughed out loud. “What? You think I’m in love with him?”
I realized then how childish and naïve the question was and started to laugh in spite of myself. “I guess you’re the only one who can answer that question,” I said.
“Yeah, one would assume so!”
She burst out laughing again, and I, sensing her sarcasm, crawled back into my shell.
“What did you think of him?” she asked in an attempt at seriousness, which was undoubtedly intended to put me at ease so I’d feel forced to confide in her. His name hadn’t come up since the New Year’s Eve party, and the question was painful. She must’ve sensed my hesitation or seen it in my face, because she cut me off by saying that he was a very special person.
“That could be,” I replied vaguely.
“He’s very well informed,” she said almost apologetically. “I have lunch with him sometimes,” she added, and suddenly, as if the confession had been one step too far, she scowled at me, said I asked the strangest questions, and left the room. It was up to me to draw my own conclusion, but I didn’t know what to make of the whole thing. I thought about it a lot, recalling Erica’s teenage behavior during our walk that fall, but I didn’t get much further than that. For some inexplicable reason, I just couldn’t see Erica with her boss, and since I wouldn’t allow myself to meddle in Erica’s personal affairs—not even in my mind—I brushed the whole thing off. The subject of men didn’t come up again until a few weeks before Easter, when I met Bas. He was the manager of our Rotterdam branch and visited our office regularly to meet with my boss, who was on doctor’s orders to take it easy and limit his work to Amsterdam.
It was with Bas that I had my first real relationship. I’d had two other boyfriends before him, and although I don’t really count them anymore, I still remember my total surrender—and my misery after our separation. They were short, intense affairs, both of which ended in depression, followed by temporary isolation to rediscover my sense of self-worth. Here in America, I’ve had my share of adventures, but nothing has ever become of them. In my life, men have always been like shadows waiting in the wings. There was never room for them on stage because Erica held the spotlight.
Women my age are often asked in moments of confidence why they never married, and they usually answer that they never wanted to or that they just never found the right guy. I give both answers. Though secretly I wonder whether my relationship with Bas had met all the conditions for a happy marriage. But such contemplations are unproductive at best.
I already knew from Bas’s correspondence with my boss that he was a kind, level-headed man. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they write business letters. In addition to the qualities I found attractive in him, he also matched the physical image I’d constructed. Okay, he was a bit shorter than I’d imagined, but still stocky enough to instill trust. He’d gone gray quite young, but he still had a youthful face and the healthy complexion of a man without major conflicts in his life. I liked his broad, well-formed hands and fantastic smile. Maybe I dissected his physical attributes one by one so I could size them up against my own. I’ve never seen any reason to boast about my own appearance. Even back then, I was what men called drab. I’d always been pale and skinny, my coarse hair a dull shade of blond, and I had no interest in or talent for fashion. But I had good hands and—as Erica had once pointed out—pretty teeth.
Bas reminded me of my father, and I immediately felt so safe with him when he took me out for lunch that I invited him home with me that same evening.
He ended up staying the night. It amazes me how easily I used to let myself be seduced into extreme intimacies. I shared my bed with men whose bodies were as strange to me as their physiognomy. The second time I’d recognize their facial expressions and feel incredibly embarrassed about the memory of the first time. After all, our first night together couldn’t have been much different? So, what was the point of those first few nights? But maybe I was afraid that after having been friends, I wouldn’t be able to enter into a physical relationship. Perhaps I found it easier after a few drinks. After an evening of wandering hands, I’d be half-numb with exhaustion and end up giving in blindly. The pattern was always the same.
Still, it wasn’t until the morning, after listening carefully for any sound behind the sliding doors, that I gave him—passively and because I felt more or less obliged to—the satisfaction he’d been waiting for all night. But Bas was patient, and he stayed patient all the nights we shared my bed.
As I look back on the whole episode, it’s clearer to me how vague feelings of guilt had already contaminated much of the happiness I would have otherwise drawn from the new relationship. But it’s precisely because of the ambivalence of my emotions, which manifested themselves in the form of unmotivated apologies, concessions, and a constant feeling of guilt, that I’ll never forget what happened on Easter Monday. Bas had been there since Good Friday, and I insisted that Erica join us for Easter weekend. Even when Bas surprised me with two tickets to the theater, which he had purchased on his way over from the station, my first question was, “What about Erica?” I ignored the look of surprise on his face, his objections, and asked if he wouldn’t mind picking up a third ticket on Saturday morning. Si
nce I absolutely insisted that we all sit together, he had to trade in our tickets for three seats that weren’t nearly as good. Of course, the whole thing bothered me. I told myself I was stuck in the middle because I wasn’t able to see how unreasonable I was being. Erica belonged with us. I wasn’t going to just leave her to her own devices for the entire holiday weekend. The fact that Bas refused to accept this, even after my clear arguments, seemed unfair to me. At the same time, Erica’s attitude about it all surprised me. When I announced that the three of us were going to the theater together, she smiled and said “good” or “nice” or something, I don’t remember exactly. I had expected her to protest, to reluctantly give in out of politeness, at which I was prepared to reassure her that she belonged with us.