A Widow for One Year (57 page)

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. At 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 life? 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.

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.