Slut Lullabies (21 page)

Though Roos (of course) had a bike too, they usually walked to the Engelbewaarder. Across the street, kitty-corner, was a coffeehouse displaying the Jamaican flag, but the only time they had ever entered was for Roos to purchase a bottle of water, which she promptly brought back onto the street. The Engelbewaarder was up a narrow flight of stairs, dark and brown and tentatively seedy in its bohemianism. The crowd was largely middle-aged Dutch and arty ex-pats; there were chessboards. Smoke was thick. He had seen a group of grungy Gen Xers smoking skunk once out in the open, but never dared light up himself. Roos did not smoke, cigarettes or anything else. She drank infrequently, but at Engelbewaarder ordered one whiskey straight up and sipped it while Camden drank Duvels like Lisle so as not to be mistaken for a Bud Light–gulping tourist.

They were there for the jazz. A wild scene that rarely started on time but got going around 3:00 PM or so, as musicians slowly filtered in, dragging their instruments behind them. They sat up in front, under the gray glow of the window, and then, for no cover charge to patrons, began an hours-long improvisational jam session featuring a rotating group of some twenty musicians. Sometimes a dozen played at once, sometimes only a few, as they sat out sets and joined in, leaving Camden dazed and aroused in a way music never before had. In the large, open area in back, full of tables, bar life went on as usual with the jazz serving as a backdrop, but up front, where Roos and Camden crammed in at the bar or snagged one of the two tables directly in front of the stage, conversation halted; the music reigned.

Most of the players were men over thirty, scruffy with unwashed clothing in muted shades of black, buttons missing. One saxophonist, a woman scarcely older than Roos, showed up twice to play, her toned biceps flexing as she manipulated her horn. Her hair was long and blond, her face the clean, simple prettiness of Holland; she wore, each time, a black tank top and tight black pants over her tall swaying body. Watching her blow into her sax, face growing pink with effort, hipbones shifting positions as she grooved, her entourage of men accompanying her in a cacophony of sound, Camden felt stirred in a way he never had at Casa Rosso. She was like an Amazon goddess, and in those moments he felt he would have given anything to feel her body moving against his, to have her wet mouth to himself. But in the next instant, she would jump offstage, and there would be Roos, flushed with pleasure and her tiny whiskey, beaming at him, and the saxophonist would seem like a beautiful sunset they had witnessed together, shimmering and magical, and he would feel glad to see Roos in the dim light of the bar, real and tangible, neither of them mourning that the splendor of what they'd seen was gone.

After Engelbewaarder, even the usual haze of early evening in Amsterdam felt too bright. They walked shielding their eyes, blinking. They needed to “come down,” Roos said, so they headed all the way to Centraal Station, to a surreal spa as modern and New Age as Engelbewaarder was a dingy 1960s throwback. Roos' best friend from school worked here, at Oibibio, as a massage therapist, and Roos had a standing Sunday appointment just before closing. Inside, the place felt like a strange cross between a giant dance studio and a shopping mall—after his fourth visit, Camden still felt incapable of navigating between the shop, the café, and the spa on his own. Roos, on their first “date” following Engelbewaarder, had taken the liberty of booking Camden a massage, too—not that he minded. When she'd gone right along with him to the coed dressing room and stripped, his anticipation overrode his embarrassment and he'd chucked off his own clothes, lingering with the smell of Duvel and smoke. But when Roos turned, still naked and holding her towel to her side like a handbag, and pranced into the lobby, sat down, and started reading a magazine, Camden freaked. His own towel wrapped around his waist (he'd done it before he could even notice that she hadn't), he surveyed the lobby in a panic: all around him, business types of both genders sat in the buff reading, talking on cell phones, sipping water and tea. A few had towels wrapped around their waists (thank God!), but most appeared oblivious to their nudity, including the fully dressed, hot young receptionists and the walk-in customers off the street inquiring about the availability of appointments without batting an eye at the hoards of dangling penises and perky—or sagging—breasts.

Roos' own breasts, only eighteen years old, nonetheless suffered from gravity, given their size. Her pubic hair was sparse and black; she didn't shave her lean thighs and the hair was likewise thin but dark like a pubescent boy's. Camden's heart rate returned to normal when his massage therapist fetched him, but she ushered him to a private room exposed through a wide, glass door so that all—especially the hot receptionist with her bird's eye view—could watch his ass being kneaded. He thought he might pass out. Just last year, visiting Hugh in the Hamptons, Camden and the crowd they'd run with that summer had formed their own nudist colony down a stretch of mostly deserted beach—they only invited the prettiest, potentially promiscuous girls to join them. Occasionally an adult would hap upon them and stare, disapproving or maybe envious, but the sense of themselves as spectacle had only heightened Camden's enjoyment, his feeling of power. He could tell that some of the kids they'd met, even ones with nice bodies, wanted to join in but just couldn't overcome their shyness, and he'd felt disdainful of their conventionality, superior. But now it was the sheer lack of spectacle—of sex—that so unnerved him. He seemed to be the only person in the building conscious of all the nakedness.

And that was Roos. A normal girl living with her mother, dabbling at painting, going to school part-time, abstaining from cigarettes and drugs—but in boutiques, if she saw a shirt she liked, she'd take her top off right there and try it on without going into a changing room. He had seen other Dutch girls do this too and, not knowing them, had assumed they were wild—partying, rave-hopping, X-taking, slutty chicks the Oak Park Camden would have made it his business to know. Instead, Roos lived something like her forty-year-old mother; neither of them dated much, from what Camden could tell. They cooked dinners in, talked about art. After Oibibio, Roos would take him to Shizen, her favorite macrobiotic Japanese restaurant, and Camden, exhausted, would sit beside her sipping green tea, having traversed the entire city by foot on little sustenance beyond beer, wolfing down his raw-fishless maki while Roos expertly maneuvered chopsticks to place tender sashimi slices into her naturally bright red mouth. She never seemed tired; her feet never hurt. Shizen was between their homes, so she would bid him good night upon leaving, kiss him swiftly three times on the cheek—left, right, left—their lips never meeting, and promise to call him tomorrow. She was reliable, did not play games, did not seem to keep track of who had phoned whom last. When she referenced former lovers, which she did rarely but always with good nature, it was impossible to ascertain whether she meant to give him hints or was merely confiding in him as one would a friend. At least she had yet to announce
I think of you as a friend
—some small relief. She seemed to have no idea of how to flirt.

And so, over a series of four Sundays and sporadic other-day-of-the-week “dates” (were they dates? They went, as the saying went, Dutch), Camden's confusion grew. He did not know how to approach her as a lover—despite thinking of her constantly, was not even quite sure he wanted to. She made him nervous at the same time as making him feel more at ease, more himself than he could recall having felt with a girl—with anyone. His handsomeness, a currency in which he was accustomed to dealing, seemed not to register with her, though she was always polite and gracious, interested enough in him on some level to spend extensive time with him. For a woman who got naked at every opportunity, she seemed almost asexual, or at least defined less by her sexuality than seemed normal. Didn't she have desires? Did she fantasize about him? Was she seeing someone else? Like throwing himself upon her in a tacky American display of passion in front of her mother's art-patron guests, the prospect of blatantly hitting on her seemed clearly inappropriate, contrary to the intimacy he hoped was building between them. He feared—like a girl—that if they fucked, it wouldn't mean anything to her. They would, he decided, every Sunday night alone in his bed, listening to the sound of his mother and Lisle's arguments or worse, his mother's shuddery sobbing alone, simply be friends.

Ginny was in front of the TV when Camden entered the apartment after his fourth Sunday with Roos. The silence made it immediately apparent that Lisle was not at home. Since coming to Amsterdam, his mother had taken up cigarettes again after ten years, and now she turned to look at him, her frail, lovely face lit by the TV, her body like a brittle stick aflame at one end. Camden was about to walk past her and go to bed, but she said, accusation somehow always in her voice, “I was waiting for you.”

He didn't say anything. That was the one thing about having a mother, about having his particular mother—you did not have to say anything. She would just keep talking at you, and eventually, if you listened hard enough, she would tell you how she wanted you to behave, and if you felt like it, you could fake it, and then you could leave.

“I'm thinking—well, I'm . . . you got your wish, after all. I guess we're going home.”

The words should not have felt like a jolt. But they felt like sliding down the long, spiraling plastic slide of the playground Ginny used to take him to as a kid in Chicago, his body wild with static electricity so when she lunged forward to catch him at the bottom despite his protests that he did not need her, she always gave him a shock.
Aversion therapy
, he'd quipped to Aimee once, trying to make light of the calls he hadn't returned.
My mother totally smothered me, but she didn't even know how to do it right, to make me dependent like she wanted. It's not you. She accidentally taught me to like my space
. He stood now in front of Lisle's sofa, in her
gezzelig
little living room, his skin bristling with an electric pain. “Who says I want to leave?”

His mother snorted. “Isn't it apparent? You can't stand to be in this house for more than five minutes. Not that—”

“Maybe that's because I'm trying to take advantage of living in another country, so I'm out doing stuff. Maybe I've been trying to make the best of it.”

Ginny sighed. “I was going to say, not that I blame you. Lisle and I can't be pleasant to be around. You have been making the best of it. You haven't given me any trouble, Cam. You never do. It's not you—I said it all wrong. It's me.”

“Well who says you have to be with Lisle for me to stay here? Maybe I'm tired of being dragged around because of who you're sleeping with. Maybe I'll just stay.”

There was nothing, then. Only his mother, too demure to point out that at sixteen, he had no money, no legal right to be in Holland, no high school diploma even. He was tied to her, dependent, and this he knew was the one comfort of her life, even though living with him was like living with a ghost. Even though he couldn't wait to leave.

“I didn't realize you'd become happy here,” Ginny ventured. “Are you seeing someone? A girl?”

“Of course it's a girl,” Camden snapped. “What would it be, a guy?”

“I didn't mean that, honey.”

“Whatever.” On the tip of his tongue:
Excuse me for liking girls—if I promise never to impose my disgusting male libido on one again, can we stay
? But Ginny would receive the words like a cruel, irrational blow; there was nothing, truly nothing she had ever said to him to give him the idea that his heterosexuality—his sexuality at all—was unacceptable or repugnant to her. Always she had given him freedom, with the obvious exception of these sporadically predictable relocations-for-love. Yet he had never brought a girlfriend home, it occurred to him abruptly. He'd never had a girlfriend he treated well enough to bear his mother's scrutiny. Her fault, or his? How could he explain to her now that after four weeks some Dutch girl had transformed him, made him into something better? His mother of all people, who was transformed and uprooted and reinvented every few months, every few years, but never got anywhere beyond her own skin. Hadn't he learned from the master how foolish it was in the end, when there was only one person you ever could be?

“I'm glad you met someone,” Ginny placated, with a stupid therapist's voice. “You may find it harder to leave now, but it comforts me, knowing you gained something positive from this experience. It makes me feel less guilty for uprooting you, again.”

“Yeah, well, it shouldn't.” He stared at her hard. How utterly ironic that a woman so fragile would build a life around wanting people to need her. Maybe the Oak Park bipolar missed her, wanted her back after she'd increased her cachet by running off to live with an Andrea Dworkin-spouting radical Dutch poet. Maybe she had gotten wind that an American Sign Language convention was going to be held in Illinois and she couldn't resist. Maybe he should let himself collapse into her arms and cry and give her what she wanted, and then if she had him she wouldn't need everyone else. But he didn't know how to do that, didn't want to, and couldn't remember anymore if he had turned into an asshole to escape her, or if he had just been born that way. What did he have, anyway, to offer Roos? A dick already used up before adulthood, that had squirmed up every hole he could get into, even when it ruined lives? His pretty face? Some “cool” status meant to make up for the fact that his mother was a lesbian with embarrassing lovers—for the fact that something in him was dead and cold?

But how could he go back?

Under fluorescent basement lights—whose party was it?—keg beer in transparent plastic cups: a too-bright yellow. Sudsy Easter egg dye. Hugh's brows drawn back from his eyes, lips curled, a snarling dog
. . . all over us, man . . . couldn't get enough . . . didn't have to talk her into anything . . . comes like a fucking eel . . . tell them, Cam . . . why not ménage à cinq?
Words like the buzz of someone else's radio; his own footsteps an echo in his ears, ascending the stairs
. Awww . . . Mr. Fucking Sensitive . . . like she's his girlfriend or something . . . dude . . . not even fucking midnight . . . come back . . .