He gives a little nod upstairs, where Hunter is sleeping. ‘Is it because of him?’
She shrugs.
‘I think,’ he says then, ‘that we should just do it … Our lives, everything, it’s all going to change, but … I mean, the whole world has children, so why can’t we?’ And, a little later: ‘What’ll we have, a boy or a girl?’
Refilling his glass, he thinks about the effect of alcohol on the quality of his sperm — about that, and the dwindling desire for sex that he’s experienced lately, which he blames on drinking.
• • •
They marry in the spring of 2005, in Saint-Valery-sur-Somme. A gentle rain had fallen earlier that morning, but the clouds above the ocean have now been driven away. The chapel is in the fields above the village, and a small group of guests has assembled in the wooden pews. Of the important people, only Friso and Hunter are missing. Ruth had called her brother a few times the night before, but he hadn’t answered.
‘Maybe he’ll just show up later on,’ she says. ‘Hey, hello, here I am …’
Edward lays a hand on her cheek and caresses away the sad turn of her mouth.
The priest is an icy ascetic. He stands atop the tomb of a mediaeval hermit called Walaric, who is honoured here as Saint Valery. A holy man, miracles happen at his grave. Ceremoniously and resolutely, the priest pronounces his blessing over the marriage.
The sun is at its zenith. Grains of rice gleam in the light. ‘I didn’t understand a word of it, but it was lovely,’ Edward’s father-in-law says. They drink champagne, and walk down to the source de la fidélité that flows from the bottom of the hill beneath the church — a dark spring, closed off with iron grillwork. The priest has the key, but he has already climbed into his Peugeot and driven off down the narrow dirt road. Edward and Ruth pose beneath the word FIDES chiselled in the stone above the gateway, toss coins through the grillwork into the black water behind, and kiss again. Everyone cheers and claps.
Tipsy and happy, they walk through the fields back to the village. The estuary at the bottom of the hill is drained; the mud flats glisten in the sunlight.
In the mirror of the men’s room in the restaurant on the quay, he glances at himself. With his beard streaked with grey and the two top buttons of his snowy-white shirt unbuttoned, he looks like a Greek singer.
On the tables are silver platters full of shellfish on ice, an image of plenty. Edward looks over at his wife, how she cracks open a crab leg and picks out the meat. Just this once, she says, because she doesn’t know how to say ‘sustainably caught’ in French. He wishes his mother could have shared in his happiness. Almost across from him is his father, his hair white and frothy, his new girlfriend at his side. Will he ever again be as happy as he was with his mother, Edward wonders. Is a human truly, fully equipped to love only once, as he once read somewhere, or does one get another chance? Is life that generous? He admits the sweet pain of the thought of a life without her, and can’t imagine that his cup would ever run so full again.
He drinks cool, light-green wine, Ruth whispers in his ear that she loves him, and that later, when they’re alone —
There we leave them, in the midst of their happiness, at the mouth of the river that rises forth two hundred and fifty kilometres inland.
• • •
When Ruth just didn’t get pregnant, they went in for a fertility test. Edward jerked off in a hospital room equipped with well-thumbed smut and a silent movie from the prehistory of pornography bouncing across the screen. He closed his eyes and thought about Marjolein van Unen and her breasts, her skin glistening with youth, as she popped the snaps on her lab coat, one by one. She leant back on her stool, her back against the fume cupboard, and let him go in …
The receptionist jotted down his particulars on a label, which she then stuck to the pot, so that his seed would not be taken for that of the North African who sat beside him, expressionless as a piece of fruit. A little later they passed each other again, driving at a snail’s pace across the parking lot: the North African in a weathered Fiat, he in his Volkswagen Touareg. His sperm may have been as worthless as an immigrant’s, but his car was a cut above.
Only 35 per cent of his cells were viable, the gynaecologist told him a few weeks later, ‘more or less the percentage you’d expect from a truck driver’. The bulletin board behind the doctor’s back was hung with birth announcements. Joy, joy. He told Edward about his research, which focused on exceptionally fertile men. ‘If you want to find out what makes Porsches so good,’ he said, ‘then you need to study Porsches, not Trabants.’ They left the office only after the gynaecologist had told them about the future they could expect: a route that would lead them in ascending degrees of despair past the wonders of modern assisted-reproductive technology. There was intrauterine insemination, in-vitro fertilisation, and if even that didn’t work there was always ICSI — intracytoplasmic sperm injection — in which the liveliest sperm cells were fished out from among all the dead material and injected into the plasma of the egg cell. Two fertilised egg cells were then put back into the uterus, which accounted for the preponderance of twins born after this treatment. In the parking garage, she ran her index finger over his crotch and said: ‘A Trabant, honey-pie?’
Dutifulness crept into their sex life. They made love with awkward bodies, Ruth keeping track of when they had to. Abstaining from alcohol on weekdays made him so grumpy that she would shout: ‘Well then, open a bottle of wine, for Christ’s sake!’
In the evening, as they stood together before the bathroom mirror, he saw a young woman and an old man. At fifty, every man has the face he deserves, Orwell had said, but Edward was convinced that that moment had already arrived on the cusp of his forty-eighth birthday. There were days when it looked as though he had never wiped the sleep from his eyes.
He and Ruth, he noted, had slid gradually into a tragic vortex of age. She had adapted to fit his years, rather than his personality. Yes, that’s how it had gone: she became older because of him, and he got even older than he was because of her. When naked in front of her, he was careful not to bend down from the waist, for then his belly and breasts seemed to separate from his frame and dangle in shapeless pleats; he would squat instead to pick up the cap of the toothpaste tube. He tried not to groan aloud when he did so.
Perhaps this, he thought, was his pain, the pain the Buddha had called the principal source of suffering: the acute awareness of disintegration. With a wife his own age it would have been different, he suspected; they would have grown old together in dignity, and closed their eyes discreetly to each other’s decline.
Ruth and he would not grow old together. He already had grown old and, if the general demographic precepts held true, he would not become old enough to see her do so. What he would have given to be able to return to the very beginning, before things like this began to torment him so. The triumph he’d felt at that evening’s conquest! But now, six years later, he knew it was a victory that could never be secured. What had started as a triumph was now an unequal battle.
Each morning he took a handful of pills, the benefits of which had been proven only barely or not at all. He was vaguely ashamed of his unreasoned belief that seaweed, ginseng, and royal jelly could provide him with youth and strength, but placed this in perspective by recalling how Herman Wigboldus had asked him to wipe his feet on the patch of lawn before his house.
Otherwise he was as unlike his old mentor as he was unlike Jaap Gerson; forceful personages both, who felt that happiness was their just desert. They dropped on life like paratroopers and took it by force. God, such nonchalant power, Edward thought — power he knew he could imitate, but did not actually possess. He could seduce a woman with its intimation, but not convince her in the long run.
Ruth had been in the shower for a long time, a sign that she was getting ready to have sex with him. He wondered whether he was capable of summoning up the requi
site lust. Maybe if he licked her first.
She rubbed a peephole in the steamy shower door and pressed her nose against it. He planted a kiss on it. ‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ she said from beneath the hissing spray. He lay in bed, toying with his organ in the hope of instilling a little life into it beforehand.
He remembered well what it was like to get a hard-on just by pointing at it, as opposed to the result of focused efforts that Ruth had once described as ‘hardish’.
‘The only head start I have on you,’ he once told his students, ‘is that I know what it’s like to be you, while you haven’t the faintest idea what it’s like to be me. That’s our only advantage, otherwise the world is furnished to accommodate you people. We may hold the buying power, but you possess the far more valuable capital of the future, whatever that may turn out to be.’
When Ruth slid in beside him a little later and whispered ‘Sorry, love, you’re on duty again’, he cursed the fact, and not for the first time, that one could grow accustomed to a beauty even as exceptional as hers. Everything became humdrum, and what was habituation if not death’s gate? Her beauty didn’t lead inevitably to randiness; on the contrary, someone like Marjolein van Unen excited him with undeniably more urgency than his own wife, who was a thousand times prettier. And with that girl in mind — the finger he slid up her butthole — he was able to live up to his obligations.
• • •
Socio-psychological research at the University of Nijmegen showed that the chance of a male being unfaithful during his wife’s pregnancy was twenty-seven times greater than at any other point in a marriage. A man contained himself as well as he could during his wife’s periods of illness and recovery — and, more generally, during the slow but certain process of the loss of beauty and vitality — but during her pregnancy he went all-out. The periodic sexual obsession of his bloated wife frightened him, her protruding labia and excessively slimy cunt made him a bit nauseous. In addition, he experienced the clear and generally quite correct premonition that after the child was born his life would be more or less over — all the reason one needed to commit adultery.
After a departmental sightseeing tour by boat of Amsterdam’s canals and the River IJ, followed by drinks at Hoppe’s on the Spui, Edward decided not to take the night train back to Utrecht, but to go by taxi. Beside him in the back seat was Marjolein van Unen. As they kissed, she opened his zipper and jerked him off until he almost came. He had enough self-control to push her hand away in time. They had the cabby drop them at the central station and found a public toilet. Fishing a one-euro coin from his pocket, he thought: a euro to take a piss is fairly steep, but a euro for a fuck is a real bargain. He locked the door behind them and pulled off her trousers and panties. She sat down on the toilet bowl and leaned back, her hands resting on the lid; he unbuckled his trousers and knelt between her legs. That was how he fucked Marjolein van Unen for the first time, beneath the glow of purplish fluorescent tubes and amid the odour of stale piss. He came as though it was the very first time, and in a sense it was. She leaned against the back wall with a saintly smile. So this was it, he thought, this is what it was all about, this border-crossing from which there was no return — the cunt of Marjolein van Unen, the centre of the universe.
Ruth’s pregnancy went serenely, dreamily; she was bothered almost not at all by the discomforts her girlfriends talked about, the chronic nausea and inexplicable pains. She felt a bit distracted, but in a way that pleased her, as though she was barely in contact with the physical world. She converted her study into a nursery, and went in there every day for a while to rearrange the little rompers, socks, and caps, her movements charged with a glow of expectation for which she had no words. She told no one that it was going to be a boy, and that his name would be Morris. Even before the child was born, Edward already knew what it was to be part of the little conspiracy against the outside world that a family is. Not only Ruth was pregnant, but the whole house was — it radiated out into the park and far beyond. Their principal conversations were reduced to friendly chitchat about who their son would be and which traits they hoped to recognise in him and which not. Life compacted to a cocoon with room only for them. In the morning she remained behind in it, and he left for the institute, where there awaited the encounter with Marjolein van Unen. She proved a discreet mistress, but still he had the daily sensation of being transported light years away from the padded little world he had just left. He had locked himself out, and struggled against the thought that this was irreversible.
She was twenty-eight, the age Ruth had been when he’d met her. She had a two-room flat in the Kanaaleiland district; he asked her to put away the scented candles, for Ruth’s pregnancy had whetted her sense of smell.
‘The things I do for you,’ she said.
‘I’m your boss.’
‘Come on then, boss.’
She was small and slim and limber, and possessed the hunger of thin women. She knew how to move her pelvis independently of the rest of her body, and was what the Emperor Tiberius had termed a ‘sphincter artist’ in the sense that, straddling him and seemingly immobile, she could make him come by means of powerful internal contractions. She did her best — she had taken courses in Tantra, and applied the techniques she’d learned with a barely perceptible smile. He didn’t know exactly what she wanted from him. ‘What does your boyfriend think of all this?’ he asked once. She raised a finger to her lips. ‘Sssh. Everything you say out loud comes back to you.’
Her cunt was well proportioned and hairless, and she knew no shame. Sometimes, on her hands and knees in front of him, she would shake her hair out of her eyes, and it took a while before he understood what he was seeing. She acts as though there’s a camera running … the vain endowment of pornography.
‘Have you got anything to drink?’ he asked, and a few moments later she came into the room with a bottle of Metaxa she’d brought home from Greece. They lay back on the pillows; he held the glass in one hand and put the other between her legs, where it was open and wet. ‘I already knew everything,’ he said. ‘The way you taste, how you feel, smell, I knew it all already.’
‘How boring then,’ she said.
‘On the contrary.’
‘Did you get a hard-on when you thought about me?’
‘A thousand times over,’ he said.
She was from Veghel; her father had died when she was seven. A month later, there was a new man in the house. ‘My mother couldn’t stand being alone. She still can’t.’
When she was twelve, the man had assaulted her; she kept silent, but left home when she was only fifteen. She said those were ‘difficult times’, but meanwhile she had finished high school on her own and was admitted to the lab technicians’ school in Leeuwarden, as far as possible from her parental home.
‘What year were you born in?’ she asked.
‘Fifty-eight,’ he said.
Without a hint of surprise, she said: ‘Just like my mother. Which month?’
‘May.’
‘That’s funny. Then you’re older than she is … A Taurus, I bet.’
The hard light of a late afternoon at the end of summer. The merciless hour. Moroccan boys raced up and down the street on mopeds. With a tender gesture, she smoothed back a few of the long hairs protruding from his eyebrows.
He saw framed photographs of her with a well-built young man. In one of them, he was wearing a wetsuit; in the other, which showed them embracing in some departure hall, a Dutch Marine Corps uniform. ‘He’s stationed in Afghanistan,’ she said. ‘We Skype almost every day.’
‘When he comes back,’ Edward said, ‘he’ll be a veteran. Thirty-something, and already —’
‘He’s thirty-two.’
His name was Michel; he had taken care of her when she was in a bad way. ‘Without him, I wouldn’t be here. Not like this.’
Hanging across from the toilet
was a poster with the text: ‘If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies.’ When she massaged his feet, he began to weep. No one had ever touched his neglected feet like this.
‘A lot of meridians come together in your feet,’ she said. And: ‘If you ask me, you’re a lot more sensitive than you think.’
When he came home, he didn’t know whether he was Zhuangzi dreaming that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuangzi. But at night in Wilhelmina Park across the way there crept a man with an automatic rifle, and camouflage stripes on his face, who forced his way into the house and opened fire on the double bed and the crib beside it.
• • •
He dreams about it for the first time during her pregnancy: how she leaves him and takes their child with her. He won’t get them back. He can go on living in Utrecht or move to Amsterdam, and there is also a variation in which he returns to his childhood village. It makes no difference; he has been cut loose from everything. He can turn left or right, there is nothing to keep him from going in any direction whatsoever — only the way back, that has been cut off. Somewhere in the whitened world, he stands, frozen, catatonic. He tries to pick up his life the way it was before he met her, but he has truly become too old for that. He will remain alone and, disappointed and filled with loathing, occasionally meet someone through a dating site, and sometimes he will burst into tears at his memories. This is what he’s made of his life, a barrens stretching out on all sides. Of all the feelings he’s ever had, only fear and confusion remain. Register this man as childless, a man who has known no happiness all his days …
The dream contained elements that were outspokenly practical, he felt, and did not seem to belong in the dead, empty space in which he moved. Whatever the case, he awoke each time in the bed he shared with Ruth with such an overwhelming sense of relief that he swore right then and there to better his ways. With a shiver of loneliness he crept up against her pregnant, sleeping body. He had made a mess of it, but things could still be set aright, it wasn’t too late. She never needed to know about it and, if he only stopped doing all the things that were dragging him down, if he tied the loose ends together, he would forget about it, too, in time. It would have never happened, or it would become like the memory of a book you’d read as a child, where you could still summon up the general mood, but where the events themselves had dissolved into thin air.
A Beautiful Young Wife Page 5
