by Gayle Forman
“I wouldn’t say no to a coffee.”
I follow him into the kitchen, which is the old kitchen, all chipped cupboards, cracked tiles, ancient tiny gas range, cold-water-only sink.
“Kitchen’s next. And the bedrooms. Maybe halfway was a bit optimistic. I’d better get on it. You should come live with me. Help me out,” he says with a loud clap of his hands. “Your pa always said you were handy.”
I’m not sure if I’m handy, but Bram was always drafting me for help with some home-improvement project or another.
He puts the coffee on the stove. “I gotta get into gear. I’ve got two months now, so tick-tock, tick-tock.”
“Two months until what?”
“Oh, shit. I didn’t tell you. I only just told your ma.” His face breaks out into a smile that looks so much like Bram’s it hurts.
“Told her what?”
“Well, Willem, I’m going to be a father.”
• • •
As we drink coffee, Daniel fills me on the big news. At the age of forty-seven, the perennial bachelor has at last found love. But, because apparently the de Ruiter men can never do things the simple way, the mother of Daniel’s child is Brazilian. Her name is Fabiola. They met in Bali. She lives in Bahia. He shows me a picture of a doe-eyed woman with a lit-from-within smile. Then he shows me an accordion folder, several centimeters thick, his correspondence with the various government agencies to prove the legitimacy of their relationship so she can get a visa and they can be married. In July, he is going to Brazil in preparation for the birth in September, and, he hopes, the wedding soon after. All going well, they’ll be in Amsterdam in the fall, and return to Brazil for the winter. “Winters there, summers here, and when he is old enough for school, we’ll reverse it.”
“He?” I ask.
Daniel smiles. “It’s a boy. We know. We already have a name for him. Abraão.”
“Abraão,” I say, rolling it over my tongue.
Daniel nods. “It’s Portuguese for Abraham,”
We both are silent for a moment. Abraham, Bram’s full name.
“You’ll move in, help, won’t you?” He points to the blueprints, the one bedroom that will be made into two, the flat that once housed the two brothers, and for a spell housed all three of them before it was just Daniel all on his own. And then, not even him.
But now we are two here. And soon there will be more. After so much contracting, somehow, inexplicably, my family is growing again.
Thirty-four
* * *
JUNE
Amsterdam
* * *
Daniel and I are on the way to the plumbing supply shop to pick up a shower body when his bike gets a flat tire.
We stop to inspect. There’s a nail lodged deep into the tube. It’s four-thirty. The plumbing store closes at five. And then it’s closed for the weekend. Daniel frowns and throws his arms in the air like a frustrated child.
“Goddammit!” he curses. “The plumber’s coming tomorrow.”
We did the bedrooms first, a mess of studs and drywall and plaster, neither of us knowing exactly what we were doing, but between books and some old friends of Bram’s, we managed to make a tiny “master” bedroom, with a loft bed, and a tinier nursery, which is where I’m now living.
But the learning curve was high and it took longer than we’d expected, and then the bathroom, which Daniel thought would be simple—swapping out seventy-year-old fixtures for modern ones—turned out to be anything but. All the pipes had to be replaced. Coordinating the arrival of the tub and the sink and the plumber—another of Bram’s friends, who is doing the job on the cheap but also on his off hours, nights and weekends—has challenged Daniel’s already limited logistical skills, but he soldiers on. He keeps saying that if Bram built a boat for his family, dammit, he’s going to build a flat for his. And it’s such a strange thing to hear, because I’d always thought Bram built the boat for Yael.
The plumber came last night, we thought, to finish the bath and shower installations, only to tell us he couldn’t install the new tub that had finally arrived until we had a shower body. And we can’t finish tiling the bathroom and move on to the kitchen—which the plumber said will probably also need all new pipes—until we have a shower.
For the most part, Daniel has approached the renovation with the sheer enthusiasm of a child building a sand castle at the beach. Every other night, when he and Fabiola Skype, he lugs his battered laptop around the flat, showing off all the latest modifications, discussing furniture placement (she’s big into feng shui) and colors (pale blue for their room; butter yellow for the baby’s).
But during those semi-nightly calls, you can see the bump is growing. After the plumber left, Daniel admitted he could almost hear the baby inside, ticking like one of those old alarm clocks. “Ready or not, here he comes,” he’d said, shaking his head. “Forty-seven years, you’d think I’d be ready.”
“Maybe you’re never ready until it’s upon you,” I’d said.
“Very wise, little man,” he’d said. “But goddamn it, if I’m not ready, I’m going to have the flat ready.”
“Go on ahead, take mine,” I tell Daniel now, swinging off my bike. It’s the same beat-up old workhorse I bought off a junkie when I first came back to Amsterdam last year. It stayed locked up outside Bloemstraat all those months I was in India, no worse for wear. When I started working on the flat, I brought it back to Amsterdam, along with the rest of my things, all of which fit on the bottom two shelves of the bookshelf in the baby’s room. I don’t have much: Some clothes. A few books. The Ganesha statue Nawal gave me. And Lulu’s watch. It still ticks. I hear it in the night sometimes.
Problem solved, Daniel is bright sunshine again. With a gappy grin, he hops onto my bike, and takes off pedaling, waving behind him, almost slamming into an oncoming moto. I wheel his bike off the narrow alley and turn onto the wide canal of the Kloveniersburgwal. I’m in an area sandwiched between the shrinking Red Light District and the university. I head in the direction of the university, more likely to find bike repair shops there. I pass an English-language bookstore I’ve ridden by a few times before, always somewhat curious. On the stoop is a box of one-euro books. I poke through—it’s mostly American paperbacks, the kind of thing I read in a day and traded when I was traveling. But at the bottom of the box, like a displaced refugee, is a copy of Twelfth Night.
I know I probably won’t read it. But I have a bookshelf now for the first time since college, even if it’s only temporary.
I go inside to pay. “Do you know of a bike repair place nearby?” I ask the man behind the counter.
“Two blocks down, on Boerensteeg,” he says, without looking up from his book.
“Thanks.” I slide over the Shakespeare.
He glances at the cover, then looks up. “You’re buying this?” He sounds skeptical.
“Yeah,” I say, and then by way of an explanation I don’t need to give, I tell him I was in the play last year. “I played Sebastian.”
“You did it in English?” he asks, in English, with that strange hybrid accent of someone who’s lived abroad a long time.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Oh.” He goes back to his book. I hand him a euro.
I’m almost out the door when he calls out: “If you do Shakespeare, you should check out the theater down the way. They put on some decent Shakespeare plays in English in Vondelpark in the summer. I saw that they’re holding auditions this year.”
He says it casually, dropping the suggestion like a piece of litter. I ponder it there, on the ground. Maybe it’s worthless, maybe not. I won’t know unless I pick it up.
Thirty-five
* * *
“Name.”
“Willem. De Ruiter.” It comes out a whisper.
“Come again.”
I clear my throat. Try again
. “Willem de Ruiter.”
Silence. I can feel my heartbeat, in my chest, my temple, my throat. I can’t remember ever being nervous like this before and I don’t quite understand it. I’ve never had stage fright. Not even that first time with the acrobats, not even going on with Guerrilla Will, in French. Not even the first time Faruk shouted action and the cameras rolled and I had to speak Lars Von Gelder’s lines, in Hindi.
But now, I can barely say my name out loud. It’s as if, unbeknownst to me, there is a volume switch on me and someone has turned it all the way down. I squint my eyes and try to peer into the audience, but the bright lights are rendering whoever is out there invisible.
I wonder what they’re doing. Are they looking at the ridiculous headshot I scrambled to put together? Daniel took it of me in the Sarphatipark. And then we’d printed my Guerrilla Will stats on the back. It doesn’t look half bad from a distance. I have several plays to my credit, all of them Shakespearian. It’s only if you inspect it closely you see that the picture is shitty quality, pixelated to the extreme, taken on a phone and printed at home. And my acting credentials, well, Guerrilla Will isn’t exactly repertory theatre. I’d seen some of the headshots of the other actors. They came from all over Europe—the Czech Republic, Germany, France and the UK, as well as here—and had real plays under their belts. Better photos, too.
I take a deep breath. At least I have a head shot. Thanks to Kate Roebling. I called her at the last minute for advice because I’ve never auditioned before. With Guerrilla Will, Tor decided what role you’d play. There was some sniping about this, but I didn’t care. The money was split equally, no matter how many lines you had.
“Ahh, yes, Willem,” a disembodied voice says. It sounds bored before I’ve even begun. “What will you be reading for us today?”
The play being produced this summer is As You Like It, one I’ve never seen or heard much about. When I stopped in the theater last week, they told me I could prepare any Shakespearian monologue. In English. Obviously. Kate had told me to take a look at As You Like It. That I might find something really meaty in it.
“Sebastian, from Twelfth Night,” I say. I decided to put together three shorter Sebastian speeches. Easiest to do that. It was the last part I played. And I still remembered most of the lines.
“Whenever you’re ready.”
I try to remember Kate’s words, but they swirl in my head like a foreign language I barely know. Choose something you feel? Be who you are, not who they want you to be? Go big or go home? And there was something else, something she told me before she rang off. It was important. But I can’t remember it now. At this point, it’ll be enough to remember my lines.
A throat clears. “Whenever you’re ready.” It’s a woman’s voice this time, in a tone that says: Get on with it.
Breathe. Kate said to breathe. That much I remember. So I breathe. And then I begin:
“By your patience, no. My stars shine darkly over me: the malignancy of my fate might perhaps distemper yours.”
The first lines come out. Not too bad. I continue.
“Therefore I shall crave of you your leave that I may bear my evils alone.”
The words start to flow out of me. Not as they did last summer in that endless array of parks and squares and plazas. Not haltingly, as they did in Daniel’s bathroom, where I practiced them all weekend, to the mirror, to the tiles, and on occasion, to Daniel himself.
“If the heavens had been pleased, would we had so ended!”
The words come differently now. Understood in a fresh way. Sebastian is not just some aimless drifter, going where the wind blows him. He’s someone recovering, rubbed raw and unsure by his spate of bad fortune, by the malignancy of his fate.
“She bore a mind that envy could not but call fair,” I say and it’s Lulu I see, on that hot English night, the last time I spoke these words in front of an audience. The faint smile on her lips.
“She is drowned already sir, with salt water, though I seem to drown her remembrance again with more.”
And then it’s over. There’s no applause, only a loud silence. I can hear my breathing, my heartbeat, still hammering. Aren’t the nerves supposed to go away once you are on stage? Once you’ve finished?
“Thank you,” the woman says. Her words are clipped, generic, no actual gratitude in them. For a second, I think perhaps I should thank them.
But I don’t. I leave the stage in a bit of a daze wondering what just happened. As I walk up the aisle, I see the director and producer and stage manager (Kate told me whom to expect) already conferring about someone else’s headshot. Then I’m squinting in the bright light of the lobby. I rub my eyes. I’m unsure of what to do next.
“Glad that’s over?” a skinny guy asks me in English.
“Yeah,” I say reflexively. Only it’s not true. Already, I’m starting to feel this melancholy set in, like the first cold fall day after a hot summer.
“What brought about the change of mind?” Kate had asked me on the phone. We hadn’t been in any kind of contact since Mexico, and when I told her my plans, she sounded surprised.
“Oh, I don’t know.” I’d explained to her about finding Twelfth Night and then being told about the auditions, about being in the right place at the right time.
“So how’d it go?” the skinny guy asks me now. He has a copy of As You Like It in his hand, and his knee is thumping, up-down-up-down.
I shrug. I have no idea. Truly. I don’t.
“I’m going for Jaques. What about you?”
I look at the play, which I haven’t even read. I just figured I’d get what they gave me, as it always was with Tor. With a sinking feeling, I begin to suspect that wasn’t the right way to go.
And it’s then I remember what Kate said on the phone, after I explained the roundabout way I’d come to audition.
“Commit, Willem. You have to commit. To something.”
Like so many of the important things these days, the memory comes too late.
Thirty-six
* * *
A week goes by, I hear nothing. The skinny guy I’d spoken to, Vincent, had said there’d be a series of callbacks before final casting. I don’t get called. I put it behind me and get back to work on Daniel’s flat, channeling so much energy into my tiling that Daniel and I finish the bathroom a couple of days ahead of schedule and get started on the kitchen. We take the metro out to IKEA to pick cabinets. We’re in a showcase kitchen with cabinets the color of red nail varnish when my phone rings.
“Willem, this is Linus Felder from the Allerzielentheater.”
My heart thuds like I’m on stage all over again.
“I need you to learn Orlando’s opening speech and come in tomorrow morning at nine. Can you manage that?” he asks.
Of course I can manage it. I want to tell him that I’ll more than manage it. “Sure,” I say. And before I have a chance to ask any particulars, Linus hangs up.
“Who was that?” Daniel asks.
“The stage manager from that play I auditioned for. He wants me to come back in. To read for Orlando. The lead.”
Daniel jumps up and down like an excited child, knocking over the prop mixer in the show kitchen. “Oh, shit.” He pulls us away, whistling innocently.
I leave Daniel in IKEA and spend the rest of the day in the drizzle at the Sarphatipark, memorizing the speech. When it’s a decent hour in New York, I call Kate for more advice but I wake her up because it turns out she’s in California now. Ruckus is about to start a six-week tour of Cymbeline on the West Coast before coming to the UK in August for various festivals. When I hear this, I’m almost embarrassed to ask her for help. But, generous as always, she takes a few minutes to tell me what to expect on a callback. I might read a bunch of scenes and a bunch of parts, opposite several actors, and even though they’ve asked me to read Orlando, I shouldn’t assume that’s
the role I’m up for. “But it’s promising they’ve asked you to read him,” she says. “It’s quite a role for you.”
“How do you mean?”
She sighs, noisily. “You still haven’t read the play?”
I’m embarrassed all over again. “I will, I promise. Later today.”
We talk a little more. She says she’s planning on spending nonfestival weekends traveling out of the UK, so maybe she’ll come to Amsterdam. I tell her she’s welcome any time. And then she reminds me again to read the play.
• • •
Late that night, after I’ve read the opening monologue so many times I could recite it in my sleep, I start on the rest of the play. I’m falling asleep at this point and it’s a little difficult to get into. I try to see what Kate means about Orlando. I suppose it’s that he meets a girl and falls in love with her and then meets her again but she’s disguised. Except Orlando gets a happy ending.
• • •
When I arrive at the theater the next morning, it’s almost empty, and dark except for a single lamp burning on the stage. I sit down in the last seat, and a short while later, the house lights flicker on. Linus strolls in, clipboard in hand, and behind him, Petra, the diminutive director.
There are no pleasantries. “Whenever you’re ready,” Linus says.
This time, I am ready. I’m determined to be.
Except I’m not. I get the lines right, but as I say one, then the next, I can hear myself say them and then I wonder how they sounded, did I hit the right beat? And the more I do that, the stranger the words start to sound, in the way that a perfectly normal word can start to sound like gibberish. I try to focus, but the harder I try, the harder it becomes, and then I hear a cricket chirping somewhere backstage and it sounds like the lobby of the Bombay Royale, and then I’m thinking about Chaudhary and his cot and Yael and Prateek and I’m everywhere in the world except in this theater.
