"No, he is not young enough," I told her, "but he's in pretty good shape for a man his age."
"I suppose you beat him, then," the student said.
"Yes, I beat him," I answered.
But after the reading, the same young woman handed me a note. I don't believe you. Someone hit you, the note said.
This I also like about the Germans: they come to their own conclusions.
Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label--to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.
And I can just hear Allan on the subject of my writing two novels in a row about women writers; yet I've heard him say that editorial advice should not include recommendations or caveats about what to write or not write about. Doubtless I shall have to remind him of that.
But more important to this new novel: what does the bad boyfriend do, as a result of observing a prostitute with her customer, that is so degrading to the woman novelist? What happens to make her feel so ashamed that it's enough to make her change her life?
After watching the prostitute with her customer, the boyfriend could be so aroused that the way he makes love to the woman writer makes her feel that he is thinking about someone else. But that's just another version of bad sex. It must be something more awful, more humiliating than that.
In a way, I like this phase of a novel better than the actual writing of it. In the beginning, there are so many possibilities. With each detail you choose, with every word you commit yourself to, your options close down.
The matter of searching for my mother, or not; the hope that, one day, she will come looking for me. What are the remaining major events in my life? I mean the events that might make my mother come to me. My father's death; my wedding, if I have one; the birth of my child, if I have one. (If I ever get up the nerve to have children, I would want only one.) Maybe I should announce my forthcoming marriage to Eddie O'Hare. That might get my mother's attention. I wonder if Eddie would go along with it--after all, he wants to see her, too!
[In a postcard to Eddie O'Hare, which was of the great Cologne cathedral, the splendid Dom--the largest Gothic cathedral in Germany.]
BEING WITH YOU, TALKING WITH YOU . . . IT WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT EVENING IN MY LIFE, SO FAR. I HOPE I SEE YOU AGAIN SOON.
SINCERELY,
RUTH COLE
[In a postcard to Allan, which was of a magnificent castle on the Rhein.]
BE AN EDITOR. CHOOSE BETWEEN THESE TWO TITLES: HER LAST BAD BOYFRIEND OR MY LAST BAD BOYFRIEND . IN EITHER CASE, I LIKE THE IDEA.
LOVE,
RUTH
P.S. BUY ME THIS HOUSE AND I'LL MARRY YOU. I THINK I MIGHT MARRY YOU, ANYWAY!
"I'm a novelist," I will doubtless say at some point. "I'm just a storyteller."
Looking over the list of my fellow panelists--other authors, all promoting their books at the book fair--there is an atrocious American male of the Unbearable Intellectual species. And there is another American writer, female, less well known but no less atrocious; she is of the Pornography Violates My Civil Rights school. (If she hasn't already reviewed Not for Children, she will--and not kindly.)
There is also a young German novelist whose work has been banned in Canada. There was some charge of obscenity--in all probability, not unmerited. It's hard to forget the specific obscenity charge. A character in the young German's novel is having sex with chickens; he is caught in a posh hotel with a chicken. A terrible squawking leads the hotel staff to make the discovery--that, and the hotel maid had complained of feathers.
But the German novelist is interesting in comparison to the other panelists.
"I'm a comic novelist," I will doubtless say at some point; I always do. Half the audience (and more than half of my fellow panelists) will take this to mean that I am not a serious novelist. But comedy is ingrained. A writer doesn't choose to be comic. You can choose a plot, or not to have one. You can choose your characters. But comedy is not a choice; it just comes out that way.
Another panelist is an Englishwoman who's written a book about socalled recovered memory--in her case, hers . She woke up one morning and "remembered" that her father had raped her, and her brothers had raped her--and all her uncles. Her grandfather, too! Every morning she wakes up and "remembers" someone else who raped her. She must be exhausted!
Regardless of how heated the debate on the panel is, the young German novelist will have a faraway expression on his face--as if something serenely romantic has just crossed his mind. Probably a chicken.
"I'm just a storyteller," I will say again (and again). "I'm not good at generalizations."
Only the chicken-lover will understand me. He will give me a kindly look, maybe mildly desirous. His eyes will tell me: You might look a lot better with some reddish-brown feathers.
In Frankfurt, in my small room at the Hessischer Hof, drinking a beer that isn't very cold. At midnight it becomes October 3--Germany is reunited. On the TV, I watch the celebrations in Bonn and Berlin. A moment of history, alone in a hotel room. What can one say about German reunification? It's already happened .
Coughed all night. Called the publisher this morning, then the publicist. It's such a shame to cancel my appearance on the panel, but I must save my voice for my readings. The publisher sent me more flowers. The publicist brought me a package of cough drops--"with organically grown Swiss alpine herbs." Now I can cough through my interviews with my breath smelling of lemon balm and wild thyme. I've never been happier to have a cough.
On the elevator, there was the tragicomic Englishwoman; from the look of her, she'd doubtless awakened with the recovered memory of yet another rape.
At lunch in the Hessischer Hof, there was (at another table) the German novelist who does it with chickens; he was being interviewed by a woman who interviewed me earlier this morning. My interviewer at lunch was a man with a bigger cough than mine. And when I was alone, just sipping coffee at my table, the young German novelist looked at me whenever I coughed--as if I had a feather caught in my throat.
I truly love my cough. I can take a long bath and think about my new novel.
In the elevator, like a small man inflated to grotesque size--with helium--there is the atrocious American male, the Unbearable Intellectual. He seems offended when I step into the elevator with him.
"You missed the panel. They said you were sick," he tells me.
"Yes."
"Everyone gets sick here--it's a terrible place."
"Yes."
"I hope I don't catch something from you," he says.
"I hope not."
"I'm probably already sick--I've been here long enough," he adds. Like his writing, it's unclear what he means. Does he mean he's been in Frankfurt long enough to catch something, or does he mean he's been in the elevator long enough to have been exposed to what I've got?
"Are you still not married?" he asks me. It's not a pass; it's a signature non sequitur of the kind the Unbearable Intellectual is renowned for.
"Still not married, but maybe about to be," I answer.
"Ah--good for you!" he tells me. I'm surprised by his genuine fondness for my answer. "Here's my floor," he says. "Sorry you weren't on the panel."
"Yes." Ah, the little-heralded chance encounter between world-famous authors--is there anything that compares with it?
The woman writer should meet the strawberry-blond boyfriend at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The bad boyfriend is a fellow fiction writer--very minimalist. He's published only two books of short stories--fragile tales, so spare that most of the story is left out. His sales are small, but he has been compensated by the kind of unqualified critical adoration that often accompanies obscurity.
The woman novelist should be a writer of "big" novels. They are a parody of the proverbial wisdom that opposites attract. In this case, they can't stand each other's writing; their att
raction is strictly sexual.
He should be younger than she is.
They begin an affair in Frankfurt and he comes with her to Holland, where she is going after the book fair to promote a Dutch translation. He doesn't have a Dutch publisher--and he has been far less in the limelight in Frankfurt than she has been. Although she hasn't noticed this, he has. He hasn't been in Amsterdam since he was a student--a summer abroad. He remembers the prostitutes; he wants to take her to see the prostitutes. Maybe a live-sex show, too.
"I don't think I want to see a live-sex show," the woman novelist says.
It could be his idea to pay a prostitute to let them watch. "We could have our own live-sex show," the short-story writer says. He seems almost indifferent to the idea. He implies that she might be more interested in it than he is. "As a writer, " he says. "For research ."
And when they're in Amsterdam, and he's escorting her through the redlight district, he keeps up a casual, lighthearted banter. "I wouldn't want to see her do it--she looks inclined to bondage." (That kind of thing.) The minimalist makes her think that watching a prostitute will be merely a naughty bit of hilarity. He gives her the impression that the most difficult part of it will be trying to contain their laughter-- because, of course, they can't reveal their concealed presence to the customer.
But I wonder how the prostitute would hide them so that they could see without being seen?
That will be my research. I can ask my Dutch publisher to walk with me through the redlight district--after all, it's a thing tourists do. He probably is asked by all his women authors; we all want to be escorted through the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant. (The last time I was in Amsterdam, a journalist walked with me through the redlight district; it was his idea.)
So I will get a look at the women. I remember that they don't like it when women look at them. But I'm sure I'll find one or two who don't absolutely terrify me--someone I can go back to, alone. It will have to be someone who speaks English, or at least a little German.
One prostitute might be enough, as long as she is comfortable about talking to me. I can imagine the act without seeing it, surely. Besides: it is what happens to the woman in hiding, the woman writer, that most concerns me. Let's presume the bad boyfriend is aroused, even that he masturbates while they're hiding together. And she can't protest, or even make the slightest move to get away from him--without the prostitute's customer knowing that he's being watched. (Then how can he masturbate? That's a problem.)
Maybe the irony is that the prostitute has at least been paid for how she's used, but the woman writer is used, too; she has spent her money to be used. Well. Writers must have thick skins. No irony there.
Allan called. I coughed for him. Now that there is no immediate possibility for us to have sex--given the ocean between us--naturally I felt like having sex with him. Women are perverse!
I didn't tell him about the new book, not a word. It would have spoiled the postcards.
[In another postcard to Allan, which was an aerial view of the Frankfurt Book Fair, boasting some 5,500 publishers from some 100 countries.]
NEVER AGAIN WITHOUT YOU.
LOVE,
RUTH
It's the right look for someone who's about to approach a prostitute. I appear to have an old disease to share.
My guidebook for Amsterdam informs me that the redlight district, known as de Walletjes ("the little walls"), was officially sanctioned in the fourteenth century. There are tittering references to the district's "scantily clad girls in their shop windows."
Why is it that most writing about the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is always so unconvincingly superior in tone? ( Amusement is as strong an expression of superiority as indifference is.) I think that any expression of amusement or indifference toward the unseemly is usually false. People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
"Everyone has a sexual hang-up, at least one," Hannah once said to me. (But if Hannah has one, she never told me what it is.)
There are the usual obligations ahead of me in Amsterdam, but I have enough free time for what I need to do. Amsterdam isn't Frankfurt; nothing is as bad as Frankfurt. And, to be honest, I can't wait to meet my prostitute! There is the thrill of something like shame about this "research." But of course I am the customer. I'm prepared-- indeed, I'm fully expecting--to pay her.
[In another postcard to Allan, which she mailed from Schiphol Airport and which--not unlike the earlier postcard she mailed to her father, of the German prostitutes in their windows on the Herbertstrasse--was of de Walletjes, the redlight district of Amsterdam: the neon from the bars and sex shops reflecting in the canal; the passersby, all men in raincoats; the window in the foreground of the photograph, framed in lights of a purplish red, with the woman in her underwear in the window . . . looking like a misplaced mannequin, like something on loan from a lingerie shop, like someone rented for a private party.]
FORGET EARLIER QUESTION. THE TITLE IS MY LAST BAD BOYFRIEND --MY FIRST FIRST-PERSON NARRATOR. YES, SHE'S ANOTHER WOMAN WRITER. BUT TRUST ME!
LOVE,
RUTH
The First Meeting
The publication of Niet voor kinderen, the Dutch translation of Not for Children, was the principal reason for Ruth Cole's third visit to Amsterdam, but Ruth now thought of the research for her prostitute story as the all-consuming justification for her being there. She'd not yet found the moment to speak of her new excitement to her Dutch publisher, Maarten Schouten, whom she affectionately referred to as "Maarten with two a 's and an e. "
For the translation of The Same Orphanage --in Dutch, Hetzelfde weeshuis, which Ruth had struggled in vain to pronounce--she had stayed in a charming but run-down hotel on the Prinsengracht, where she'd discovered a sizable stash of marijuana in the small bedside drawer she'd selected for her underwear. The pot probably belonged to a previous guest, but such was Ruth's nervousness on her first European book tour that she was certain the marijuana had been planted in her room by some mischievous journalist intent on embarrassing her.
The aforementioned Maarten with two a 's and an e had assured her that possession of marijuana in Amsterdam was barely a noticeable offense, much less an embarrassment. And Ruth had loved the city from the beginning: the canals, the bridges, all the bicycles, the cafes, and the restaurants.
On her second visit, for the Dutch translation of Before the Fall of Saigon --she was pleased that she could at least say Voor de val van Saigon --Ruth stayed in another part of town, on the Dam Square, where her hotel's proximity to the red-light district had led an interviewer to take it upon himself to show Ruth the prostitutes in their windows. She'd not forgotten the blatancy of the women in their bras and panties at midday, or the "SM Specials" in the window of a sex shop.
Ruth had spotted a rubber vagina suspended from the ceiling of the shop by a red garter belt. The vagina resembled a dangling omelet, except for the tuft of fake pubic hair. And there were the whips; the cowbell, attached by a leather strap to a dildo; the enema bulbs, in a variety of sizes; the rubber fist.
But that was five years ago. Ruth had not yet had the opportunity to see whether the district had changed. She was now staying in her third hotel, on the Kattengat; it was not very stylish, and it suffered from a number of graceless efforts to be orderly. For example, there was a breakfast room that was strictly for the guests on Ruth's floor. The coffee was cold, the orange juice was warm, and the croissants lay in a litter of crumbs--suitable only for taking to the nearest canal and feeding to the ducks.
On its ground floor and in the basement, the hotel had spawned a health club. The music favored for the aerobics classes could be detected in the bathroom pipes for several floors above the exercise facility; the plumbing throbbed to the ceaseless percussion. In Ruth's estimation, the Dutch--at least while exercising--preferred an unrelenting and unvaryi
ng kind of rock music, which she would have categorized as an unrhymed form of rap. A tuneless beat repeated itself while a European male, for whom English was very much a foreign language, reiterated a single sentence. In one such song, the sentence was: "I vant to have sex vit you." In another: "I vant to fook you."
Her firsthand inspection of the gym had quickly dashed any tentative interest she might have had in it. A singles' bar in the guise of an exercise facility was not for her. She also disliked the self-consciousness of the exercise. The stationary bikes, the treadmills, the stair-climbing devices--they were all in a row, facing the floor for the aerobics classes. No matter where you were, you could not escape seeing the leaping and the gyrations of the aerobic dancers in the plethora of surrounding mirrors. The best you could hope for would be to witness a sprained ankle or a heart attack.
Ruth decided to take a walk. The area around her hotel was new to her; she was actually closer to the red-light district than she realized, but she began walking in the opposite direction. She crossed the first canal she came to and turned onto a small, attractive side street--the Korsjespoortsteeg--where, to her surprise, she encountered several prostitutes.
In what seemed to be a well-kept residential area were a halfdozen windows with working women in their lingerie. They were white women, prosperous-looking if not in every case pretty. Most of them were younger than Ruth; possibly two of them were her age. Ruth was so shocked that she actually stumbled. One of the prostitutes had to laugh.
It was late morning, and Ruth was the only woman walking on the short street. Three men, each of them alone, were silently windowshopping. Ruth had not imagined that she could find a prostitute who might talk to her in a place that was less seedy and less conspicuous than the red-light district was; her discovery encouraged her.
When she found herself on the Bergstraat, once again she was unprepared--there were more prostitutes. It was a quiet, tidy street. The first four girls, who were young and beautiful, paid no attention to her. Ruth was aware of a slowly passing car, the driver intently looking over the prostitutes. But this time Ruth wasn't the only woman on the street. Ahead of her was a woman dressed much as Ruth was--black jeans, black suede shoes with a stacked, medium-high heel. The woman, also like Ruth, wore a short, mannish leather jacket, but in dark brown and with a silk paisley scarf.