Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstances. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments for her former credo.
It wasn't until (in lieu of dessert) she asked for another glass of red wine that Ruth knew she'd had too much to drink. At that instant she also remembered not seeing the beautiful Dutch boy Wim in line for her autograph after her successful but mortifying speech. He'd said he would be there.
Ruth had to admit that she'd been looking forward to seeing young Wim again--and perhaps drawing him out a little. Truly she hadn't been planning to flirt with him, at least not in earnest, and she had already decided not to sleep with him. She'd wanted only to arrange a time to be alone with him--possibly a coffee in the morning--to discover what his interest in her was; to imagine him as her admirer, and maybe as her lover; to absorb more of the details of which the beautiful Dutch boy was composed. And then he hadn't shown up.
I guess he finally got tired of me, Ruth thought. She could sympathize with him if he had; she had never felt so tired of herself.
Ruth refused to allow Maarten and Sylvia to accompany her to her hotel. She'd kept them up late the night before; everyone was in need of an early night. They put her in a cab and instructed the driver. Across the street from her hotel, at the taxi stand on the Kattengat, she saw Wim standing under a streetlight--like a lost boy who'd been separated from his mother in a crowd, which had since dispersed.
Mercy! Ruth thought, as she crossed the street to claim him.
Not a Mother, Not Her Son
At least she didn't sleep with him--not exactly. They did spend the night together in the same bed, but she did not have sex with him--not really. Oh, they had kissed and cuddled; she did permit him to touch her breasts, but she made him stop when he got too excited. And she'd slept the whole night in her panties and a T-shirt; she'd not been naked with him. It wasn't her fault that he'd taken all his clothes off. She'd gone into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and to change into the panties and the T-shirt, and when she'd come back into the bedroom, he'd already undressed and crawled into bed.
They'd talked and talked. His name was Wim Jongbloed; he'd read every word she'd written, over and over again. He wanted to be a writer like her, but he'd not approached her after her lecture at the Vrije Universiteit; he'd been devastated by what she'd had to say. He wrote nonstop autobiographical logorrhea--he'd never "imagined" a story or a character in his life. All he did was record his miserable longings, his wretchedly ordinary experience. He'd left her lecture wanting to kill himself, but instead he'd gone home and destroyed all his writing. He'd thrown his diaries--for that's all he'd written--into a canal. Then he'd called every first-class hotel in Amsterdam until he found out where she was staying.
They'd sat talking in the hotel bar until it was obvious that the bar was closing; then she'd taken him to her room.
"I'm no better than a journalist," Wim said, brokenhearted.
Ruth winced to hear her own phrase recited to her; it was a line right out of her lecture. What she'd said was: "If you can't make something up, you're no better than a journalist."
"I don't know how to make up a story!" Wim Jongbloed complained.
He probably couldn't write a decent sentence to save his soul, either, but Ruth felt totally responsible for him. And he was so pretty. He had thick, dark-brown hair and dark-brown eyes with the longest eyelashes. He had the smoothest skin, a fine nose, a strong chin, a heart-shaped mouth. And although his body was too slight for Ruth's taste, he had broad shoulders and a wide chest--he was still in the process of growing into his body.
She began by telling him about her novel-in-progress; how it kept changing, how that was what you did to make up a story. Storytelling was nothing more than a kind of heightened common sense. (Ruth wondered where she'd read that; she was sure she hadn't thought it up.)
Ruth even confessed that she'd "imagined" Wim as the young man in her novel. That didn't mean she would have sex with him; in fact, she wanted him to understand that she would not have sex with him. It was enough for her to have fantasized about it.
He told her that he had fantasized about it, too--for years! He'd once masturbated to her book-jacket photograph. Upon hearing this, Ruth went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth, and changed into a pair of clean panties and a T-shirt. And when she came out of the bathroom, there he was--naked in her bed.
She'd not once touched his penis, although she felt it poking against her when they hugged; it felt good to hug the boy. And he'd been awfully polite about masturbating, at least the first time. "I just have to do it," he'd told her. "May I?"
"All right," she said, turning her back to him.
"No, looking at you," he begged her. "Please . . ."
She turned over in bed to face him. Once she kissed his eyes, and the tip of his nose, but not his lips. He stared at her so intently that Ruth could almost believe she was his age again. And it was easy for her to imagine that this was how it had been with her mother and Eddie O'Hare. Eddie hadn't told her this part, but Ruth had read all of Eddie's novels. She knew perfectly well that Eddie hadn't invented the masturbation scenes; poor Eddie could invent next to nothing.
When Wim Jongbloed came, his eyelids fluttered; Ruth kissed him on the lips then, but it was not a lingering kiss--the embarrassed boy ran to the bathroom to wash his hand. When he trotted back to bed, he fell asleep so quickly, his head on her breasts, that she thought: I might have liked to have tried my hand at that, too!
Then she decided she was glad she hadn't masturbated. If she had, it would have been more like having sex with him. Ruth found it ironic that she needed to make her own rules and her own definitions. She wondered if her mother had needed to similarly restrain or measure herself with Eddie. If Ruth had had a mother, would she have found herself in such a situation as this?
She only once pulled back the sheets and looked at the sleeping boy. She could have gone on looking at him all night, but she even restrained or measured how long she looked. It was a good-bye look-- and chaste enough, under the circumstances. She resolved that she wouldn't let Wim in her bed again, and in the early morning Wim made her more determined to keep her resolution. When he thought she was still asleep, he masturbated beside her again, this time sneaking his hand under her T-shirt and holding fast to one of her bare breasts. She pretended to continue sleeping while he ran to the bathroom to wash his hand. The little goat!
She took him out to a cafe for breakfast, and then they went to what he called a "literary" cafe on the Kloveniersburgwal--for more coffee. De Engelbewaarder was a dark place with a farting dog sleeping under one table, and--at the only tables that got any window light--a halfdozen English soccer fans were drinking beer. Their shiny blue soccer shirts lauded a brand of English lager, and when another two or three of their mates would wander in and join them, they would, in salutation, break into a fragment of a rousing song. But not even these desultory outbursts of singing could rouse the dog from its sleep, or keep it from farting. (If de Engelbewaarder was Wim's idea of a " literary" cafe, Ruth would have hated to see what he called a lowlife bar.)
Wim seemed less depressed about his writing in the morning. Ruth believed she'd made him happy enough for her to expect some further research assistance from him.
"What kind of 'research assistance'?" the young man asked the older woman writer.
"Well."
Ruth remembered her shock upon reading that Graham Greene, as a student at Oxford, had experimented with Russian roulette--that suicidal game with a revolver. The information had jarred her image of Greene as a writer who had the greatest control of himself. At the time of his dangerous game, Greene was in love with his younger sister's governess;
the nanny was twelve years older than young Graham and already engaged to be married.
While Ruth Cole could imagine a young idolater like Wim Jongbloed playing Russian roulette over her, what did she think she was doing when she went with Wim to the redlight district, and almost at random approached first this and then that prostitute with the proposition that she allow them to watch her with a customer? While Ruth had explained to Wim that she was posing this question hypothetically -- that she did not truly want to see a prostitute perform the act (or acts)--the prostitutes whom Ruth and Wim talked to either misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted the proposition.
The Dominican and Colombian women who dominated the windows and doorways in the area of the Oudekerksplein did not appeal to Ruth because she suspected they had a poor understanding of English, which was the case; Wim confirmed that they had a worse grasp of Dutch. There was a tall, stunning blonde in an open doorway off the Oudekennissteeg, but she spoke neither English nor Dutch. Wim said that she was Russian.
Finally they found a Thai prostitute in a basement room on the Barndesteeg. She was a heavyset young woman with flabby breasts and a potbelly, but she had an amazing moon-shaped face, a lush mouth, and wide, beautiful eyes. At first her English seemed passable, as she led them through a warren of underground rooms where a virtual village of Thai women regarded them with the utmost curiosity.
"We're just here to talk to her," Wim said unconvincingly.
The solid prostitute led them to a dimly lit room with nothing in it but a double bed that was covered by an orange and black bedspread of a roaring tiger. The center of the bedspread, which was the tiger's open mouth, was partially covered by a green towel that was bleach-stained in spots, and slightly wrinkled--as if the heavyset prostitute had only moments ago been lying on it.
All the rooms off the underground hall were partitioned by walls that didn't reach the ceiling; the light from other, more brightly lit rooms crept over these thin partitions. The surrounding walls trembled when the prostitute lowered a bamboo curtain that covered the doorway; under the curtain, Ruth could see the bare feet of the other prostitutes padding past in the hall.
"Which one of you will watch?" the Thai woman asked.
"No, that's not what we want," Ruth told her. "We want to ask you about what experiences you've had with couples paying you to watch you with a customer." There was nowhere in the room where anyone could be hidden, so Ruth asked: "And how would you do it? Where would you put someone who wanted to watch?"
The thickset Thai undressed. She wore a sleeveless orange sheath of some thin, slinky material. It had a zipper down the back, which she undid very quickly; she slipped her shoulders out of the straps and wriggled the dress down over her hips to the floor. She was naked before Ruth could say another word. "You can sit on this side of the bed," the prostitute told Ruth, "and I lie down with him on the other side."
"No . . ." Ruth began again.
"Or you could stand, anywhere you want," the Thai told her.
"What if we both want to watch?" Wim asked, but this only further confused the prostitute.
"You both want to watch?" the solid woman asked.
"Not exactly," Ruth said. " If we both wanted to watch, how would you arrange that?"
The naked woman sighed. She lay down on the towel on her back; she took up the whole towel. "Which one wants to watch first?" the prostitute asked. "It should cost a little more, I think . . ." Ruth had already paid her fifty guilders.
The big Thai opened her arms to them, beseechingly. "You want both to do and watch?" she asked them.
"No, no!" Ruth scolded her. "I just want to know if anyone has ever watched you before, and how they watched you."
The perplexed prostitute pointed toward the top of the wall. " Somebody watching us now --is that how you want to do it?" Ruth and Wim looked at the partition that served as a partial wall on the near side of the double bed. Near the ceiling, the face of a smaller, older Thai woman grinned down at them.
"My God!" Wim said.
"This isn't working," Ruth announced. "It's a language problem." She told the prostitute that she could keep the money; they'd seen all they wanted.
"No watching, no doing?" the prostitute asked. "What is wrong?"
Ruth and Wim were navigating the narrow hall with the naked woman following them--she was asking them if she was too fat, if that was what was wrong--when the smaller, older Thai prostitute, the woman who'd been grinning down at them, blocked their exit from the hall.
"You want something different ?" she asked Wim; she touched his lips with her fingers, and the boy drew back from her. The little, older woman winked at Ruth. " You know what this boy likes, I bet," she said, fondling Wim's crotch. "Oooh!" the small Thai cried. "He got a beeeg one--he wants something, all right!" Wim, in a panic to protect himself, covered his crotch with one hand and his mouth with the other.
"We're leaving now," Ruth said firmly. "I've already paid." The little prostitute's clawlike hand was reaching for Ruth's breast when the big, naked Thai who was following behind them pushed her way between Ruth and the aggressive older whore.
"She is our very best sadist," the heavyset prostitute explained to Ruth. " That's not what you want, is it?"
"No," Ruth said; she felt Wim at her side, like a clinging child.
The bigger prostitute said something in Thai to the smaller one, who backed into an unlit room. Ruth and Wim could still see her; she was sticking her tongue out at them as they hurried along the hall toward the welcome daylight.
"You had an erection ?" Ruth asked Wim, when they were safely on the street again.
"Yes," the boy confessed.
What wouldn't give the boy a hard-on? Ruth wondered. And the little goat had squirted twice the night before! Were there men who ever had enough? But it occurred to Ruth that her mother must have liked Eddie O'Hare's amorous attention. The concept of sixty times had new meaning.
It was one of the South American prostitutes on the Gordijnensteeg who said to Wim: "Half-price for you with your mother." At least her English was good. And because it was better than her Dutch, Ruth did the talking.
"I'm not his mother, and we just want to talk with you--just talk," Ruth said.
"It costs the same, whatever you do," the prostitute said. She was wearing a sarong with a matching demi-bra--a floral pattern meant to represent tropical vegetation. She was tall and slender, her skin a kind of coffee-with-cream color, and although her high forehead and pronounced cheekbones gave her face an exotic aspect, there was something too prominent about the bones in her face.
She led Wim and Ruth upstairs to a corner room; the curtains were sheer, and the light from outside gave the sparsely furnished room a rural atmosphere. Even the bed, which had a pine headboard and a quilted bedspread, had the look of something one would find in the spare bedroom of a farmhouse. Yet dead-center in the queen-size bed was the expected towel. No bidet, no sink--no place to hide, either.
To one side of the bed were two straight-backed wooden chairs-- the only place to put one's clothes. The exotic prostitute removed her bra, which she put on the seat of one chair, and she unwrapped her sarong; she was wearing nothing but a pair of black panties when she sat on the towel. She patted the bed on either side of her, inviting Wim and Ruth to join her.
"You don't have to undress," Ruth told her. "We're just talking with you."
"Whatever you want," the exotic woman replied.
Ruth sat on the edge of the bed beside her. Wim, who was less cautious, plopped himself down a little closer to the prostitute than Ruth liked. He probably already has a hard-on! Ruth was thinking. That instant it became clear to her what should happen in her story.
What if the older woman writer felt that the younger man was insufficiently attracted to her? What if he seemed almost indifferent to having sex with her? Of course he did it. And it was clear to her that he could do it all day and all night; yet he always left her with the feeling that he never got
very excited. What if he made her feel so self-conscious about her sexual attractiveness that she never entirely dared to show her excitement (lest she make a fool of herself )? This would be a boy quite different from Wim in that regard--an utterly superior sort of boy. Not as much of a slave to sex as the older woman writer would have liked . . .
But when they watch the prostitute together, the young man very slowly, very deliberately, lets the older woman know that he's really aroused. And he gets her so aroused that she can scarcely keep still in the wardrobe closet; she can't wait for the prostitute's customer to be gone. And when the customer leaves, the older woman has to have the young man right there, on the prostitute's bed, with the prostitute watching her with a kind of bored contempt. The prostitute might touch the woman writer's face, or her feet--or even her breasts. And the woman writer is so consumed by the passion of the moment that she can do nothing but let everything happen.
"I've got it," Ruth said aloud. Neither Wim nor the prostitute knew what she was talking about.
"Got what? What's it going to be?" the prostitute asked. The shameless woman had her hand in Wim's lap. "Touch my breasts. Go on, touch them," the prostitute told the boy. Wim looked uncertainly at Ruth, like a child seeking his mother's permission. Then he put a tentative hand on one of the prostitute's small, firm breasts. He withdrew his hand the instant he touched her, as if her skin were unnaturally cold or unnaturally hot. The prostitute laughed. It was like a man's laugh, harsh and deep.
"What's wrong with you?" Ruth asked Wim.
" You touch them!" the boy said. The prostitute turned invitingly to Ruth.
"No, thank you," Ruth told her. "Breasts are not miracles to me."
" These are," the prostitute told her. "Go on--touch them."
The novelist may have known her story, but her curiosity--if nothing else--was aroused. She put a careful hand on the woman's nearest breast. It was as hard as a flexed biceps muscle, or a fist. It was as if the woman had a baseball under her skin. (Her breasts were no bigger than baseballs.)
The prostitute patted the V of her panties. "You want to see what I've got?" The disconcerted boy looked beseechingly at Ruth, but this time it was not her permission to touch the prostitute that he wanted.