A Widow for One Year

  And on the Bloedstraat there were girls who looked like men, tall girls with big hands and Adam's apples. Maarten told Ruth that most of them were men--Ecuadoran transvestites who had a reputation for beating up their customers.

  There were, of course, some white women, not all of them Dutch, in the Sint Annenstraat and the Dollebegijnensteeg, and also in the street where Ruth wished that Maarten and Sylvia had not taken her. The Trompetterssteeg was not only too narrow for an alley; it was too narrow for an upstairs hall. The air was trapped in there, and a war of odors raged unceasingly: urine and perfume, so richly commingled that the result resembled bad meat. There was also a dry, scorched smell--from the whores' hair dryers--and this stink of something burnt seemed incongruous because the alley, even on a rainless night, was wet. The air never moved enough to dry the puddles on the stained pavement.

  The walls, dirty and damp, marked the backs and chests and shoulders of the men's clothes--for the men had to press themselves against the walls in order to pass one another. The prostitutes in their windows, or in their open doorways, were near enough to smell and touch, and there was nowhere to look--except into the face of the next one, and the one after that. Or into the faces of the browsing men, which were the worst faces of all--alert, as they were, to the prostitutes' hands flitting into the alley, making contact, and making contact again. The Trompetterssteeg was a buyer's market; the contact was too face-to-face for mere window-shopping.

  Ruth realized that, in de Wallen, one needn't pay a prostitute to see someone having sex--the motivation for that had to come from the particular young man himself, and/or from the character of the older woman writer. There would need to be something, or something missing, in their relationship. After all, in the Erotic Show Centre, one could rent video cabins. SIMPLY THE BEST, the advertisement read. Or at the Live Porno Show, the promised sex was REAL FUCKING LIVE. And in another spot: REAL FUCKING ONSTAGE. One did not have to make any great or special effort to be a voyeur here.

  A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed, a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.

  There was at least some consolation to Ruth in seeing that the "SM Specials" in the sex-shop window had not changed. The rubber vagina that resembled an omelet was once again suspended from the ceiling of the shop, although the garter from which it hung was now black, not red. And no one had bought the comic dildo with the cowbell attached by a leather strap. The whips were still on display, and the enema bulbs were presented in the same (or a similar) selection of sizes. Even the rubber fist had endured the passage of time untouched--as defiant and unwanted as ever, Ruth thought . . . that is, she hoped .

  It was half past midnight when Maarten and Sylvia returned Ruth to her hotel. Ruth had paid careful attention to the route they'd taken. In the lobby of her hotel, she kissed them both good night. The Dutch way--three times--but more quickly, more matter-of-factly, than Rooie had kissed her. Then Ruth went to her room and changed her clothes. She put on an older, faded pair of blue jeans and a navy-blue sweatshirt that was too big for her; it was not flattering to her figure, but it almost hid her breasts. She also put on the most comfortable shoes she'd brought with her, black suede loafers.

  She waited in her room for fifteen minutes before leaving the hotel. It was a quarter to one in the morning, but she was not even a fiveminute walk from the nearest of the prosperous streets for prostitutes. Ruth wasn't thinking of visiting Rooie again at this hour. But she did want a glimpse of Rooie Dolores in her window. Maybe I could watch her lure a customer inside, Ruth thought. She'd go back for a real visit the next day, or the following one.

  Thus far Ruth Cole's experience with prostitutes should have been a lesson to her: Ruth's capacity to anticipate what might happen next in the world of prostitution was clearly not as developed as her skills as a novelist; one might wish that Ruth had developed at least a degree of wariness regarding her unpreparedness among women of this walk of life--for there on the Bergstraat, in what should have been Rooie's window, sat a much coarser, much younger woman than Rooie. Ruth recognized the leather halter top that had hung in Rooie's shallow wardrobe closet. It was black, the decolletage fastened by silver snaps, but the girl was too bosomy for the halter to be entirely closed. Beneath her deep cleavage, under the halter top, the girl's flabby stomach overhung her black half-slip, which was torn. The waistband was ripped; the white elastic contrasted with the black of the slip and the roll of sallow flesh from the fat girl's ample belly. She might have been pregnant, but the gray hollows under the young prostitute's eyes revealed a degree of inner damage that suggested her capacity for conception was minimal.

  "Where's Rooie?" Ruth asked. The fat girl got off her stool and opened the door a crack.

  "With her daughter," the tired girl said.

  Ruth was walking away when she heard a dull thump against the window glass. It was not the familiar tapping of a fingernail, or a key or a coin, which Ruth had heard from the windows of several other prostitutes. The fat girl was hitting the window with the big pink dildo that Ruth had earlier seen in the hospital tray on the table by Rooie's bed. Once the young prostitute had got Ruth's attention, she stuck the end of the dildo in her mouth and gave it an unfriendly tug with her teeth. Then she nodded indifferently to Ruth, and at last she shrugged, as if her remaining energy allowed her only this limited promise: that she would try to make Ruth as happy as Rooie could make her.

  Ruth shook her head no, but she gave the young prostitute a kindly smile. In return, the pathetic creature repeatedly slapped the dildo against the palm of her hand, as if marking time to music only she could hear.

  That night Ruth had a frightfully arousing dream about the beautiful Dutch boy named Wim. She awoke embarrassed, and with the conviction that the bad boyfriend in her novel-in-progress should not be a strawberry blond; she even doubted that he should be entirely "bad." If the older woman writer was going to suffer a humiliation that would cause her to change her life, it should be she who is bad; one doesn't change one's life because someone else has been bad.

  Ruth was not easily persuaded by the belief that women were victims; or, she was convinced that women were as often victims of themselves as they were of men. On the evidence of the women she knew best--herself and Hannah--this was certainly true. (Of course Ruth didn't know her mother, but she suspected that Marion probably was a victim--one of her father's many victims.)

  Furthermore, Ruth had had her revenge on Scott Saunders; why drag him, or a look-alike strawberry blond, into a novel? In Not for Children, the widow novelist, Jane Dash, had made the correct decision, which was not to write about her antagonist Eleanor Holt. Ruth had already written about that! ("As a novelist, Mrs. Dash despised writing about real people; she found it a failure of the imagination--for any novelist worthy of the name ought to be able to invent a more interesting character than any real person. To turn Eleanor Holt into fiction, even for the purpose of derision, would be a kind of flattery.")

  I should practice what I preach, Ruth told herself.

  Given the unsatisfactory pickings in the breakfast room, and the fact that her only interview of the day was also a lunch, Ruth swallowed half a cup of lukewarm coffee and an orange juice of a similarly unappealing temperature; then she went forth to the red-light district. At nine in the morning, it was advisable not to walk through the district with a full stomach.

  She crossed the Warmoesstraat within sight of the police station, which she didn't notice. What first caught her eye was a young, drugaddicted street prostitute who was squatting at the corner of the Enge Kerksteeg. The young addict was having difficulty maintaining her balance; she could keep herself from falling only by resting the palms of both hands on the curb as she urinated in the street. "For fifty guilders, I can do anything a man can do for you," the girl said to Ruth, who ignored her.

  At nine o'clock, only one window prostitute was working on the Oudekerksplein beside the old church. A
t first appearance, the prostitute could have been one of the Dominican or Colombian women Ruth had seen the night before, but this woman was much darkerskinned; she was very black, and very fat, and she stood with hearty confidence in her open doorway, as if the streets of de Wallen were surging with men. In fact, the streets were virtually empty--except for the street cleaners, who were picking up the previous day's litter.

  In the unoccupied cubicles for the prostitutes, many cleaning women were busily at work, their vacuum cleaners presiding over their occasional small talk. Even in the narrow Trompetterssteeg, where Ruth wouldn't venture, a cleaning woman's cart, containing her pail and mop and bottles of cleaning solvent, protruded from a room into the alley. There was also a laundry bag of soiled towels, and a bulging plastic bag of the kind that fits in a wastebasket--no doubt filled with condoms, paper towels, and tissues. Only new-fallen snow could make the district look truly clean in the penetrating morning light--maybe on a Christmas morning, Ruth thought, when not even one prostitute would be working there. Or would there be?

  On the Stoofsteeg, where the Thai prostitutes had been dominant, only two women were soliciting from their open doorways; they were, like the woman by the old church, very black and very fat. They were chatting to each other in a language like no other Ruth had ever heard--and because they interrupted their conversation to give Ruth a neighborly and courteous nod, she dared to stop and ask them where they were from.

  "Ghana," one of the women said.

  "Where you from?" the other one asked Ruth.

  "The United States," Ruth replied. The African women murmured appreciatively; rubbing their fingers together, they made the universal request for money.

  "You want anything we can give you?" one of them asked Ruth.

  "You want to come inside?" the other asked.

  Then they laughed uproariously. They suffered from no illusion that Ruth was truly interested in having sex with them. It was simply that the well-known wealth of the United States made it impossible for them not to try to entice Ruth with their abundant wiles.

  "No, thank you," Ruth said to them. Still smiling politely, she walked away.

  There were only cleaning women in evidence where the Ecuadoran men had strutted their stuff. And on the Molensteeg, where last night there had been more Dominicans and Colombians, there was another African-looking prostitute in a window--this one was very lean--and yet another cleaning woman in another of the cubicles.

  The desertion of the district gave it more of the atmosphere that Ruth had always had in mind; the look of abandonment, which was the look of unwanted sex, was better than the nonstop sex-tourism of the district at night.

  In her all-consuming curiosity, Ruth wandered into a sex shop. As in a traditional video store, each category was afforded its own aisle. There was the spanking aisle, and the aisles for oral and anal sex; Ruth did not explore the excrement aisle, and the red light over the door to a closed "video cabin" prompted her to leave the shop before the customer exited the private viewing box. Ruth was willing merely to imagine his expression.

  For awhile she thought she was being followed. A compact, powerful-looking man in blue jeans and dirty running shoes was always behind or across the street from her--even after she'd circled the same block twice. He had a tough face with the stubble of two or three days' growth of beard, and a haggard, irritable expression. He wore a loosefitting windbreaker cut like a baseball warm-up jacket. He didn't look as if he could afford a prostitute; yet he followed her as if he thought she was one. At last he disappeared and she stopped worrying about him.

  She walked in the district for two hours. By eleven o'clock, some of the Thais had returned to the Stoofsteeg; the Africans were gone. And around the Oudekerksplein, the one fat black woman, possibly also from Ghana, had been replaced by a dozen or more brown-skinned women--the Colombians and the Dominicans again.

  By mistake, Ruth turned into a dead-end alley off the Oudezijds Voorburgwal. The Slapersteeg quickly narrowed and ended at three or four prostitutes' windows, the access to which was a single door. In the open doorway, a big brown prostitute with what sounded like a Jamaican accent grabbed Ruth by her arm. A cleaning woman was still at work inside the rooms, and two other prostitutes were readying themselves in front of a long makeup mirror.

  "Who are you looking for?" the big brown woman asked.

  "No one," Ruth said. "I'm lost."

  The cleaning woman kept sullenly to her task, but the prostitutes at the makeup mirror--and the big one who held fast to Ruth's arm-- laughed.

  " I'll say you're lost," the big prostitute said, leading Ruth out of the alley by her arm. The prostitute firmly squeezed and squeezed Ruth's arm; it was in the manner of an unasked-for massage, or like the affectionate, sensual kneading of dough.

  "Thank you," Ruth said, as if she'd truly been lost--as if she'd truly been rescued.

  "No problem, sugar."

  This time, when Ruth again crossed the Warmoesstraat, she noticed the police station. Two uniformed policemen were in conversation with the compact, powerful-looking man in the windbreaker who'd been following her. Oh, good--they've arrested him! Ruth thought. Then she guessed that the thuggish man was a plainclothes cop; he appeared to be giving orders to the two cops in uniform. Ruth was ashamed and hurried on--as if she were a criminal! De Wallen was a small district; in one morning, she'd stood out--she'd looked suspicious.

  And as much as Ruth preferred de Wallen in the morning to what the district became at night, she doubted that it was the right place or time of day for her characters to approach a prostitute and pay her to allow them to watch her with a customer. They might wait all morning for the first customer!

  But now there was barely time to continue past the area of her hotel to the Bergstraat, where Ruth expected to find Rooie in her window; it was just before midday. This time, the prostitute had undergone a milder transformation. Her red hair had a less orange, coppery tone; it was darker, more auburn--almost maroon--and her demi-bra and bikini panties were an off-white, like ivory, which accentuated the whiteness of Rooie's skin.

  By leaning over, Rooie could open her door without getting off her barstool; thus she was able to sit in her window seat while Ruth poked her head inside. (Ruth made a point of not crossing the threshold.) "I haven't time to stop and see you now," Ruth said, "but I want to come back."

  "Fine," Rooie said, shrugging. Her indifference surprised Ruth.

  "I looked for you last night, but someone else was in your window," Ruth went on. "She said you were spending the night with your daughter."

  "I spend every night with my daughter--every weekend, too," Rooie replied. "The only time I'm here is when she's in school."

  In an effort to be friendly, Ruth asked: "How old is your daughter?"

  "Look," the prostitute sighed, "I'm not getting rich talking to you."

  "I'm sorry." Ruth stepped back from the doorway as if she'd been pushed.

  Before Rooie leaned over and closed her door, she said: "Come see me, when you have the time."

  Feeling like a fool, Ruth chastised herself for having had such high expectations of a prostitute. Of course money was the main thing on Rooie's mind--if not the sole thing. Here Ruth was trying to treat the woman as a friend, when all that had really happened was that Ruth had paid her for their first conversation!

  After so much walking without any breakfast, Ruth was ravenous at lunch. She was sure that she gave a disorganized interview. She couldn't answer a single question regarding Not for Children, or her two earlier novels, without changing the subject to some element of her novel-in-progress: the excitement of starting her first novel in the first-person voice; the compelling idea of a woman who, in an instant of bad judgment, humiliates herself to a degree that she embarks on a whole new life. But as Ruth talked about this, she caught herself thinking: Who am I kidding? This is all about me! Haven't I made some bad decisions? (At least one, just recently . . .) Aren't I about to embark on a whole new l
ife? Or is Allan merely the "safe" alternative to a life I'm afraid to pursue?

  At her late-afternoon lecture at the Vrije Universiteit--it was her only lecture, really; she kept revising it, but in essence it stayed the same-- her speech sounded disingenuous to her. Here she was, espousing the purity of imagination as opposed to memory, extolling the superiority of the invented detail as opposed to the merely autobiographical. Here she was, singing the virtues of creating wholly imagined characters as opposed to populating a novel with personal friends and family members--"ex-lovers, and those other limited, disappointing people from our actual lives"--and yet the lecture had worked well again. Audiences loved it. What had begun as an argument between Ruth and Hannah had served Ruth, the novelist, very well; the lecture had become her credo.

  She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one--for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story--not necessarily what did happen or what had happened.

  Ruth Cole's credo amounted to a war against the roman ++ clef, a putdown of the autobiographical novel, which now made her feel ashamed because she knew she was getting ready to write her most autobiographical novel to date. If Hannah had always accused her of writing about a Ruth character and a Hannah character, what was Ruth writing about now? Strictly a Ruth character who makes a bad, Hannah-like decision!

  And so it was painful for Ruth to sit in a restaurant and listen to the compliments of her sponsors from the Vrije Universiteit; they were well-meaning but mostly academic types, who favored theories, and theoretical discussions, to the more concrete nuts and bolts of storytelling. Ruth hated herself for providing them with a theory of fiction about which she now had sizable doubts.