The prostitute leaned forward in the flattering light; in so doing, her breasts appeared ready to slip out of her demi-bra. While Ruth held tightly to the armrests of the blow-job chair, Rooie softly covered Ruth's hands with her own. "You want to think about what happens and come see me again?" the redhead asked.
"Yes," Ruth said. She hadn't meant to whisper, nor could she take her hands out of the prostitute's hands without falling backward in the awful chair.
"Just remember-- anything can happen," Rooie told her. "Anything you want."
"Yes," Ruth whispered again. She stared at the prostitute's exposed breasts; it seemed safer than staring into her clever eyes.
"Maybe if you watched me with someone--I mean you, alone-- you'd get some ideas," Rooie said in a whisper of her own.
Ruth shook her head, aware that the gesture conveyed far less conviction than if she'd said sharply, "No, I don't think so."
"Most of the women alone who watch me are young girls," Rooie announced in a louder, dismissive voice.
Ruth was so surprised at this that she looked into Rooie's face without meaning to. "Why young girls?" Ruth asked. "Do you mean they want to know what having sex is like? Are they virgins ?"
Rooie let go of Ruth's hands; she pushed herself back on her bed and laughed. "They're hardly virgins !" the redhead said. "They're young girls who are thinking about being prostitutes--they want to see what being a prostitute is like!"
Ruth had never been so shocked; not even the knowledge that Hannah had fucked her father had been this astonishing.
Rooie pointed to her wristwatch and stood up from her bed exactly at the same time Ruth stood up from the difficult chair. Ruth had to contort herself in order not to make contact with the prostitute.
Rooie opened the door to a midday sunlight of such sudden brightness that Ruth realized she'd underestimated the dimness of the lighting in the prostitute's red room. Turning away from the light, Rooie dramatically blocked Ruth's exit while she bestowed on Ruth's cheeks three kisses--first on Ruth's right cheek, then on her left, and then on her right again. "The Dutch way--three times," the prostitute said cheerfully, with an affection more suitable for old friends.
Of course Ruth had been kissed this way before--by Maarten and by Maarten's wife, Sylvia, whenever they'd said their hellos and goodbyes--but Rooie's kisses had lingered a little longer. And Rooie had also pressed her warm palm against Ruth's belly, causing Ruth to instinctively tighten her stomach muscles. "What a flat tummy you have," the prostitute told her. "Have you had any babies?"
"No, not yet," Ruth replied. The doorway was still blocked.
"I've had one," Rooie said. She hooked her thumbs inside the waistband of her bikini panties and lowered them in a flash. "The hard way," the prostitute added, in reference to the highly visible scar from a cesarean section; the scar was not nearly as surprising to Ruth, who'd already noted Rooie's stretch marks, as the fact that the prostitute had shaved off her pubic hair.
Rooie let go of the waistband of her panties, which made a snap. Ruth thought: If I'd rather be writing than what I'm doing, imagine how she feels. After all, she's a prostitute; she would probably rather be being a prostitute than flirting with me. But she also enjoys making me uncomfortable. Irritated with Rooie now, Ruth just wanted to go. She tried to edge around Rooie in the doorway.
"You'll be back," Rooie told her, but she let Ruth slip into the street without further physical contact. Then Rooie raised her voice, so that anyone passing in the Bergstraat, or a neighboring prostitute, could hear her. "You better zip up your purse in this town," the redhead said.
Ruth's purse was open, an old failing, but her wallet and passport were in place, and--at a glance--whatever else should be there. A tube of lipstick and a fatter tube of colorless lip gloss; a tube of sunscreen and a tube of moisturizer for her lips.
Ruth also carried a compact that had belonged to her mother. Face powder made Ruth sneeze; the powder puff had long ago been lost. Yet at times, when Ruth looked in the small mirror, she expected to see her mother there. Ruth zipped her purse closed while Rooie smiled ironically at her.
When Ruth struggled to return Rooie's smile, the sunlight made her squint. Rooie reached out and touched Ruth's face with her hand. She was staring at Ruth's right eye with a keen interest, but Ruth misunderstood the reason. After all, Ruth was more used to people spotting the hexagonal flaw in her right eye than she was used to being punched.
"I was born with it . . ." Ruth started to say.
But Rooie said, "Who hit you?" (And Ruth had thought her bruise had healed.) "About a week or two ago, it looks like . . ."
"A bad boyfriend," Ruth confessed.
"So there is a boyfriend," Rooie said.
"He's not here. I'm alone here," Ruth insisted.
"You're only alone until the next time you see me," the prostitute replied. Rooie had only two ways of smiling, ironically and seductively. Now she was smiling seductively.
All Ruth could think of saying was: "Your English is surprisingly good." But this barbed compliment, however true, had a much more profound effect on Rooie than Ruth had anticipated.
The prostitute lost every outward manifestation of her cockiness. She looked as if an old sorrow had returned to her with near-violent force.
Ruth almost said she was sorry, but before she could speak, the redhead responded bitterly: "I knew somebody English--for a while." Then Rooie Dolores went back inside her room and closed the door. Ruth waited, but the window curtains did not open.
One of the younger, prettier prostitutes was scowling resentfully at Ruth from across the street, as if she were personally disappointed that Ruth should spend her money on an older, less attractive whore.
There was only one other pedestrian on the tiny Bergstraat--an older man with his eyes cast down. He would not look at any of the prostitutes, but he raised his eyes sharply to Ruth as he passed by. She glared back at the man, whose eyes were fixed on the cobblestones as he walked on.
Then Ruth walked on, too. Her personal but not professional confidence was shaken. Whatever the possible story was--the most probable story, the best story--she had no doubt that she would think of it. She hadn't thought enough about her characters; that was all. No, the confidence she'd lost was something moral. It was at the center of herself as a woman, and whatever "it" was, Ruth marveled at the feeling of its absence.
She would go back to see Rooie again, but that was not what bothered her. She felt no desire to have any sexual experience with the prostitute, who had certainly stimulated her imagination but who had not aroused her. And Ruth still believed that there was no necessity for her, either as a writer or as a woman, to watch the prostitute perform with a customer.
What bothered Ruth was that she needed to be with Rooie again--just to see, as in a story, what would happen next. That meant that Rooie was in charge.
The novelist walked quickly back to her hotel, where--before her first interview--she wrote only this in her diary: "The conventional wisdom is that prostitution is a kind of rape for money; in truth, in prostitution--maybe only in prostitution--the woman seems in charge."
Ruth had a second interview over lunch, and a third and fourth after lunch. She should have tried to relax then, because she had an early-evening reading, followed by a book-signing and then a dinner. But instead, Ruth sat in her hotel room, where she wrote and wrote. She developed one possible story after another, until the credibility of each felt strained. If the woman writer watching the prostitute perform was going to feel humiliated by the experience, whatever came of the experience sexually had to happen to the woman writer; somehow, it had to be her sexual experience. Otherwise, why would she feel humiliated?
The more Ruth made an effort to involve herself in the story she was writing, the more she was delaying or avoiding the story she was living . For the first time, she knew what it felt like to be a character in a novel instead of the novelist (the one in charge)--for it was as a character that Ru
th saw herself returning to the Bergstraat, a character in a story she wasn't writing.
What she was experiencing was the excitement of a reader who needs to know what happens next. She knew she wouldn't be able to keep herself away from Rooie. Irresistibly, she wanted to know what would happen . What would Rooie suggest? What would Ruth allow Rooie to do?
When, if only for a moment, the novelist steps out of the creator's role, what roles are there for the novelist to step into? There are only creators of stories and characters in stories; there are no other roles. Ruth had never felt such anticipation before. She felt she had absolutely no will to take control of what happened next; in fact, she was exhilarated not to be in charge. She was happy not to be the novelist. She was not the writer of this story, yet the story thrilled her.
Ruth Changes Her Story
Ruth stayed after her reading to sign books. Then she had dinner with the sponsors of the signing. And the following evening in Utrecht, after her reading at the university there, she also signed books. Maarten and Sylvia helped Ruth with the spelling of the Dutch names.
The boys wanted their books inscribed, "To Wouter"--or to Hein, Hans, Henk, Gerard, or Jeroen. The girls' names were no less foreign to Ruth. "To Els"--or to Loes, Mies, Marijke, or Nel (with one l ). And then there were those readers who wanted their last names included in the inscription. (The Overbeeks, the Van der Meulens, and the Van Meurs; the Blokhuises and the Veldhuizens; the Dijkstras and the De Groots and the Smits.) These book-signings were such arduous exercises in spelling that Ruth left both readings with a headache.
But Utrecht and its old university were beautiful. Before her reading, Ruth had had an early dinner with Maarten and Sylvia and their grown sons. Ruth could remember when they'd been "little" boys; now they were taller than she was and one of them had grown a beard. To Ruth, still childless at thirty-six, one of the shocks of knowing couples with children was the disquieting phenomenon of how the children grew.
On the train back to Amsterdam, Ruth told Maarten and Sylvia of her lack of success with boys the age of their sons--that is, when she'd been their age. (The summer she'd come to Europe with Hannah, the more attractive boys had always preferred Hannah.)
"But now it's embarrassing. Now boys the age of your boys like me."
"You're very popular with young readers," Maarten said.
"That's not what Ruth meant, Maarten," Sylvia told him. Ruth admired Sylvia: she was smart and attractive; she had a good husband and a happy family.
"Oh," Maarten said. He was very proper--he actually blushed.
"I don't mean that your boys are attracted to me in that way," Ruth quickly told him. "I mean some boys their age ."
"I think our boys are probably attracted to you in that way, too!" Sylvia told Ruth. She was laughing at how shocked her husband had been; Maarten hadn't noticed the number of young men surrounding Ruth at both her book-signings.
There'd been many young women, too, but they were attracted to Ruth as a role model--not only as a successful writer, but also as an unmarried woman who'd had several boyfriends and yet still lived alone. (Why this seemed glamorous, Ruth didn't know. If only they'd realized how little she liked her so-called personal life!)
With the young men, there was always one boy--at least ten but sometimes fifteen years Ruth's junior--who made a clumsy effort to hit on her. ("With an awkwardness that approaches heartbreaking proportions," was the way Ruth put it to Maarten and Sylvia.) As a mother of boys that age, Sylvia knew exactly what Ruth meant. As a father, Maarten had paid closer attention to his sons than to the unknown young men who'd been falling all over themselves around Ruth.
This time there'd been one in particular. He'd stood in line to have his book autographed after her reading in Amsterdam and in Utrecht; she'd read the same passage on back-to-back nights, but this young man had not appeared to mind. He'd brought a well-worn copy of one of her paperbacks to the reading in Amsterdam, and in Utrecht he'd held out the hardcover of Not for Children for her signature--both were English editions.
"It's Wim with a W, " he told her the second time, because Wim was pronounced "Vim"--the first time she'd signed a book for him, Ruth had written his name with a V .
"Oh, it's you again!" she told the boy. He was too pretty, and too obviously smitten with her, for her to forget him. "If I'd known you were coming, I would have read a different passage." He lowered his eyes, as if it pained him to look at her when she looked back.
"I go to school in Utrecht, but my parents live in Amsterdam. I grew up there." (As if this explained everything about his attendance at both her readings!)
"Aren't I speaking in Amsterdam again tomorrow?" Ruth asked Sylvia.
"Yes, at the Vrije Universiteit," Sylvia told the young man.
"Yes, I know--I'll be there," the boy replied. "I'll bring a third book for you to sign."
While she signed more books, the captivated boy stood off to one side of the line and looked longingly at her. In the United States, where Ruth Cole almost always refused to sign books, the young man's worshipful gaze would have frightened her. But in Europe, where Ruth usually agreed to book-signings, she never felt threatened by the lovestruck gazes of her young-men admirers.
There was a questionable logic to how nervous Ruth felt at home and how comfortable abroad; Ruth doubtless romanticized the slavish devotion of her European boy readers. They existed in an irreproachable category, these smitten boys who spoke English with foreign accents, and who'd read every word she'd written--they'd also made her the older-woman fantasy in their tortured young minds. They'd now become her fantasy, too, which--on the train back to Amsterdam-- Ruth was able to joke with Maarten and Sylvia about.
It was too short a train trip for Ruth to tell them everything about the new novel that was on her mind, but in laughing together about the available young men, Ruth realized that she wanted to change her story. It should not be another writer whom the woman writer meets at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and then brings with her to Amsterdam. It should be one of her fans --a wannabe writer and a would-be young lover. The woman writer in the new novel should be considering that it is high time for her to be married; she should even, also like Ruth, be weighing the marriage proposal of an impressive older man whom she is deeply fond of.
The unbearable beauty of the boy named Wim made him hard to put out of her mind. If Ruth hadn't only recently suffered her miserable encounter with Scott Saunders, she would even have been tempted to enjoy (or embarrass) herself with Wim. After all, she was alone in Europe; she was probably going home to get married. A noregrets fling with a young man, with a much younger man . . . wasn't that the kind of thing that older women who were about to marry even older men did ?
What Ruth did tell Maarten and Sylvia was that she'd like a tour of the red-light district, recounting that part of the story, or as much as she knew: how a young man talks an older woman into paying a prostitute to watch her with a customer; how something happens; how the woman is so humiliated that she changes her life.
"The older woman gives in to him in part because she thinks she's in control--and because this young man is exactly the sort of beautiful boy who was unattainable to her when she was his age. What she doesn't know is that this boy is capable of causing her pain and anguish--at least I think that's what happens," Ruth added. "It all depends on what happens with the prostitute."
"When do you want to go to the red-light district?" Maarten asked.
Ruth spoke as if the idea were so new to her that she hadn't yet thought of the particulars. "When it's most convenient for you, I guess. . . ."
"When would the older woman and her young man go to the prostitute?" Maarten asked.
"Probably at night," Ruth answered. "It's likely that they're a little drunk. I think she would have to be, to have the nerve."
"We could go there now," Sylvia said. "It's a roundabout way back to your hotel, but it's only a five-or ten-minute walk from the station."
Ruth was surpr
ised that Sylvia would even consider accompanying them. It would be after eleven, close to midnight, when their train arrived in Amsterdam. "Isn't it dangerous this late at night?" Ruth asked.
"There are so many tourists," Sylvia said with distaste. "The pickpockets are the only danger."
"You can get your pocket picked in the daytime, too," Maarten said.
In de Walletjes --or de Wallen, as the Amsterdammers called it--it was much more crowded than Ruth anticipated. There were drug addicts and drunken young men, but the small streets were teeming with other people; there were many couples, most of them tourists (some of whom were visiting the livesex shows), and even a tour group or two. If it had been just a little earlier in the night, Ruth would have felt safe to be there alone. There was mostly a tireless seediness on display-- and the people who, like her, had come there to gawk at the seediness. As for the men who were involved in the usually prolonged act of choosing a prostitute, their furtive searching was conspicuous in the midst of the unembarrassed sex-tourism.
Ruth decided that her older woman writer and her young man would not find the time and place conducive to approaching a prostitute, although from the confines of Rooie's room it had been apparent that, once one was in a prostitute's chamber, the outside world quickly slipped away. Either Ruth's couple would come to the district in the predawn hours--when everyone except the serious drug addicts (and sex addicts) had gone to bed--or they would come in the early evening or daytime.
What had changed about the red-light district, since Ruth's previous visit to Amsterdam, was that so many of the prostitutes were not white. There was a street where almost all the women were Asian--probably Thais, because of the number of Thai massage parlors in the neighborhood. Indeed, they were Thais, Maarten told her. He also told her that some of them had formerly been men; they'd allegedly had their sex-change operations in Cambodia.
On the Molensteeg, and in the area of the old church on the Oudekerksplein, the girls were all brown-skinned. They were Dominicans and Colombians, Maarten told her. The ones from Suriname, who'd come to Amsterdam at the end of the sixties, were all gone now.