by Gayle Forman
We turn to leave and Max pokes me in the side. “Now’s the real show,” she says. I turn around and see who she’s talking about: a woman has her legs wrapped around one of the jugglers’ hips, her arms tangled in his hair. “Get a room,” Max jokes.
I watch them a moment longer than I ought to. And then the girl drops down and turns around. She spots me and I spot her, and we do a double take.
“Wills?” she calls
“Bex?” I call.
“Wills?” Max repeats.
Dragging the juggler behind her, Bex comes up to me and gives me a big theatrical hug and kiss. It’s quite a change since the last time I saw her when she would barely shake my hand. She introduces me to Matthias. I introduce her to Max. “Your girlfriend?” Bex asks, sending Max into a theatrical howl of protestation.
After a bit of chit-chat, we run out of things to say, because we never really did have that much to say even when we were sleeping together. “We should go. Matthias needs lots of rest before so he can perform.” Bex gives an obvious wink in case anyone wasn’t clear about what kind of resting and what kind of performing she was referring to.
“Okay then.” We kiss, kiss, kiss good-bye.
We’re walking away when Bex calls out. “Hey, did Tor ever find you?”
I stop. “Tor was looking for me?”
“She was trying to track you down. Apparently some letter came for you at Headingley.”
It’s like a switch is thrown, the way my body surges. “At Headingley?”
“Tor’s place in Leeds,” Bex says.
I know where Headingley is. But I rarely gave anyone a mailing address at all, and I don’t remember ever giving anyone Tor’s home address, which was the occasional Guerrilla Will headquarters, where we’d go to rehearse or recuperate. There’s no reason on earth to think she’d send me a letter there, that she’d know to send me a letter there. But still, I walk back toward Bex. “A letter? From whom?”
“Dunno. But Tor was quite keen to get it to you. She said she tried emailing you but you were unresponsive. Imagine that?”
I ignore the dig. “When?”
She scratches her brow, trying to dislodge the memory. “I can’t remember. It was a bit ago. Wait, when were we in Belfast?” she asks Matthias.
He shrugs. “Around Easter, wasn’t it?”
“No. I think it was earlier. Around Shrove Tuesday,” Bex says. She throws up her hands. “Some time around February. I remember pancakes. Or March. Or maybe it was April. Tor said she tried emailing you and got no reply so she wanted to know if I knew how to reach you.” She widens her eyes, to show the absurdity of such a notion.
March. April. When I was in India, traveling, and my email account got infected with that virus. I switched to a new address after that. I haven’t checked the old account in months. Maybe it’s right there. Maybe it’s been there all along.
“Don’t suppose you know who the letter was from?”
Bex looks peeved, bringing back a bunch of memories. When it didn’t last between us, and Bex had been nasty the rest of the season, Skev had made fun of me: “Didn’t you ever hear? Don’t shit where you eat, man.”
“No idea,” Bex tells me in a bored tone that seems practiced, so I’m unsure whether she doesn’t know or does but won’t say. “If you’re so interested, you can just ask Tor.” She laughs then. It’s not friendly. “Though good luck getting her before fall.”
Part of Tor’s “method” was to try to live as close to Shakespearian times as possible while she was on the road. She refused to use a computer or a phone, though she would sometimes borrow someone else’s to send an email or make a call if it was important. She didn’t watch TV or listen to an iPod. And though she obsessively checked the weather reports, which seemed a rather modern innovation, she checked them in the newspapers, which somehow made it fair game because newspapers were around in seventeenth-century England, so she said.
“Don’t suppose you have any idea what she did with it?” My heart has sped up, as if I’ve been running, and I feel breathless, but I force myself to sound as bored as Bex, for fear that if I make the letter sound important, she won’t tell me anything.
“She might’ve sent it to the boat.”
“The boat?”
“The one you used to live on.”
“How’d she even know about the boat?”
“Good Christ, Wills, how should I know? Presumably you told someone about it. You did live with everyone for a year, more or less.”
I told one person about the boat. Skev. He was going to Amsterdam and asked if I could hook him up with any free places to stay. I mentioned a few squats and also said if the key was still in its hiding place, and no one else was there, he could camp on the boat.
“Yeah, but I haven’t lived on that boat for years.”
“Well it’s obviously not that important,” Bex says. “Otherwise whoever wrote it would have known where to find you.”
Bex is wrong but she’s also right. Because Lulu should’ve known where to find me. And then I stop myself. Lulu. After all this time? The letter’s more likely from a tax collector.
“What was all that about?” Max asks after Bex and Matthias have gone.
I shake my head. “I’m not sure.” I look across the square. “Do you mind? I need to duck into an Internet café for a second.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll grab a coffee.”
I log onto my old email account. There’s not much there but junk. I go back to the spring, when it got infected with that virus, and there’s a pocket of nothing. Four weeks of messages that have just vanished. I try the bulk bin. Nothing there. Out of habit before I sign off, I scroll back for the emails from Bram and Saba, relieved to find them still there. Tomorrow, I’m going to print them out and also forward them to my new account. In the meantime, I change the settings on my old account to forward all new mail to my current address.
I check my current email account, even though Tor wouldn’t have known about it because I only told a handful of people the new address. I search the inbox, the junk mail. There’s nothing.
I send Skev a quick note, asking him to ring me. Then I send a note to Tor as well, asking about the letter, what it said, where she sent it. Knowing Tor, I won’t get a response until the fall. By that point, it’ll have been more than a year since I met Lulu. Any sane person would say it’s too late. It already felt too late that first day, when I woke up in the hospital. But even so, I’ve kept looking.
I’m still looking.
Forty
* * *
The tech rehearsal is a monster. Aside from lines, plenty of which get forgotten in the new environment, everything has to be relearned and reblocked on the amphitheater stage. All day long, I stand behind Jeroen, Max behind Marina, as they fumble through their various scenes. Once again we’re like their shadows. Except none of us has a shadow because there’s no sun today, just a steady drizzle that has put everyone in a sour mood. Jeroen hasn’t even made a joke about his malady of the day.
“It makes you wonder whose brilliant idea this was,” Max says. “Outdoor bloody Shakespeare. In Holland, where English isn’t even the language and it rains all the time.”
“You forget, the Dutch are the eternal optimists,” I tell her.
“Is that true?” she asks me. “I thought they were the eternal pragmatists.”
I don’t know. Maybe I’m the optimist. I checked my email when I got back from the Paradiso last night and again before I left this morning for rehearsal. There was an email from Yael, and a forwarded joke from Henk, and a bunch of the usual junk, but nothing from Skev or Tor. What exactly did I expect?
I’m not even sure what there is to be optimistic about. If the letter is from her, what’s to say it’s not a long-distance piss off? She’d have every right.
We break for l
unch and I check my phone. Broodje’s texted to say he’s heading off on some wooden sailing boat and he’ll be incommunicado for a few days, but he’ll be back in Amsterdam next week. Daniel’s also texted to let me know he’s arrived safely in Brazil, and forwarded a photo of Fabiola’s belly. Tomorrow, I vow, I’m getting a phone that accepts pictures.
Petra forbids mobile phones in rehearsal. But when she’s talking to Jeroen, I put my ringer to vibrate and slip my phone into my pocket anyway. Optimist indeed.
Around five o’clock, the drizzle lets up and Linus resumes the rehearsal. We’re having trouble with the light cues, which we can’t see. Because the show starts at dusk and goes into the night, the lights come up halfway through, so tomorrow’s rehearsal will be from two in the afternoon to midnight, so we can make sure the second half, the in-darkness part, is properly lit.
At six, my phone vibrates. I pull it out of my pocket. Max widens her eyes at me. “Cover me,” I whisper, and scuttle off to the wings.
It’s Skev.
“Hey, thanks for getting back to me,” I whisper.
“Where are you?” he asks, his voice dropped to a whisper, too.
“Amsterdam? You?”
“Back in Brighton. Why are we whispering?”
“I’m in a rehearsal.”
“For what?”
“Shakespeare.”
“In Amsterdam. Fuck, that’s cool. I gave that shit up. I’m working at a Starbucks now.”
“Oh, shit, sorry.”
“Nah, it’s all good, man.”
“Listen, Skev, I can’t talk long but I ran into Bex.”
“Bex.” He whistles. “How is that sweet thing?”
“Same as always, hooked up with a juggler. She mentioned a letter Tor was trying to get to me. Earlier in the year.”
There’s a pause. “Victoria. Man. She is something else.”
“I know.”
“I asked if I could come back and she said no. Just that one time. Off season. Don’t shit where you eat.”
“I know. I know. About that letter . . .”
“Yeah, man, I don’t know anything about it.”
“Oh.”
“Victoria wouldn’t tell me. Said it was personal. You know how she gets.” He sighs. “So I just told her to send it you. I gave her the address on the boat. I didn’t know if you could get mail on the boat.”
“You could. We could. We did.”
“So you got the letter?”
“No, Skev. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Well, it must be at the boat, man.”
“But we don’t live there anymore. Haven’t done for a while.”
“Oh, shit. Forgot it was empty. Sorry about that.”
“No worries, man.”
“Break a leg with your Shakespeare and shit.”
“Yeah, you too—with your cappuccinos and all.”
He laughs. Then we say good-bye.
I go back to the rehearsal. Max is looking crazed. “I told them you had to puke. The Flunky is mad you didn’t ask first. I wonder if he calls Petra for permission before he makes love to his wife.”
It’s an image I do my best not to conjure. “I owe you. I’ll tell Linus it was a false alarm.”
“You gonna tell me what this is about?”
I think of Lulu, all the wild-goose chases this year that have led nowhere. Why would this be anything else?
“Probably just what you said: a false alarm,” I tell Max.
• • •
Except that probably becomes a pebble in my shoe, aggravating me for the rest of the day, making it hard to keep from thinking about the letter, where it is, what it says, who it’s from. By the time rehearsal ends, I feel this sort of urgency to know; so even though the rain has returned, and even though I’m bone tired, I decide to try Marjolein. She doesn’t answer her phone and I don’t want to wait until tomorrow. She lives close by, on the ground floor of a wide house in a posh neighborhood at the south end of the park. She’s always told me to drop by any time.
“Willem,” she says, opening the door. She has a glass of wine in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and she doesn’t seem so happy that I’ve dropped by. I’m dripping wet, and she doesn’t invite me in. “What brings you here?”
“Sorry to bother you but I’m trying to find a letter.”
“A letter?”
“That was sent to the boat, some time in the spring.”
“Why are you still getting mail at the boat?”
“I’m not. Someone just sent it there.”
She shakes her head. “If it went to the boat, it would’ve been forwarded to the office and then on to the address you provided us.”
“In Utrecht?”
She sighs. “Probably. Can you call me in the morning?”
“It’s important.”
She sighs. “Try Sara. She handles the mail.”
“Do you have Sara’s number?”
“I’d have thought you’d have Sara’s number,” she says.
“Not for a long time now.”
She sighs. Then reaches for her mobile. “Don’t start anything up with her.”
“I won’t,” I promise.
“Right. You’re a changed man.” I can’t quite get whether she’s being sarcastic or not.
Inside, the music changes, from mellow jazz to something wilder with screaming trumpets. Marjolein looks longingly inside. I realize that she’s not alone.
“I’ll let you go,” I say.
She leans forward to kiss good-bye. “Your mother will be pleased I saw you.”
She starts to close the door. “Can I ask you something? About Yael?”
“Sure,” she says absently, her attention already back in the warm house and on whomever’s waiting in there.
“Did she, I don’t know, do things, to help me, that I didn’t know about?”
Her face is half hidden in shadows, but her toothy smile shines in the reflected light. “What did she say?”
“She didn’t say anything.”
Marjolein shakes her head. “Then neither can I.” She starts to close the door. Then she stops. “But did you consider in all those months you were gone, why your bank account never ever went to zero?”
I hadn’t considered it, not really. I rarely used my bank card but when I did, it always worked.
“Someone was always watching,” Marjolein says. When she shuts the door, she’s still smiling.
Forty-one
* * *
Utrecht
* * *
Everything takes too long. The train is late. The bike share line is too long. So I catch a bus instead and it stops to pick up every old lady in town. I shouldn’t have left so late, but it was already late when I got hold of Sara this morning. Then it took a bit of cajoling before she finally remembered there was a letter. No, she didn’t read it. No, she didn’t remember where it came from. But she thinks she forwarded to the address on file. The one in Utrecht. Not that long ago.
By the time I get to Bloemstraat, it’s almost noon. The second tech rehearsal is at 2:00 back in Amsterdam. I have nothing but time in my life, but never enough of it when I need it.
I ring the eyeball bell. There’s no answer. I have no idea who lives here anymore. I texted Broodje on the train over but he didn’t answer. Then I remembered that he’s in the middle of the Aegean somewhere. With Candace. Whose name he knows, whose telephone number and email address he got before he left Mexico.
The front door is locked but I still have my key and it still works. The first good sign.
“Hello,” I call, my voice echoing through the empty house. It no longer looks like the place I lived in. No more lumpy sofa. No more boy smell. Even the Picasso flowers are gone.
There’s a dining room
table, with the post scattered all over it. I rifle through the stacks as quickly as possible, but I see nothing, so I make myself slow down and methodically go through each piece of mail, dividing it into neat piles: for Broodje, for Henk, for W, even some for Ivo, who’s still getting letters here, for a couple of unfamiliar girls who must be living here now. There is some mail for me, mostly dead letters from the university and a travel catalog from the agency I used to book our Mexico tickets.
I look up the stairs. Perhaps the letter is up there. Or in the attic in my old room. Or in one of the cabinets. Or maybe it isn’t the one Sara forwarded. Maybe it’s still back on the Nieuwe Prinsengracht. Or somewhere in Marjolein’s office.
Or maybe there is no letter from her. Maybe it’s just another false hope I’ve conjured for myself.
I hear ticking. On the mantel, where the Picasso used to hang, there’s an old-fashioned wooden clock, like the kind Saba once had in his Jerusalem apartment. It was one of the few pieces Yael kept after he died. I wonder where it is now.
It’s half past twelve. If I want to get the train back in time for the tech rehearsal, I have to leave now. Otherwise, I’ll be late. And being late for tech? The only thing worse in Petra’s book would be not showing for a performance. I think of the original understudy, replaced because he had to miss three rehearsals. It’s too late for her to replace me, but that’s not to say she can’t fire me. I’m nothing but a shadow, anyhow.
Being fired won’t make any material difference in my life right now. Except I don’t want to be fired. And more than that, I don’t want to hand over that decision to Petra. If I’m late, that’s exactly what will happen.
The house seems huge all of a sudden, like it would take years to search all the rooms. The moment seems even bigger.
I’ve given up on Lulu before. In Utrecht. In Mexico. But that felt like surrendering. Like it was me I was really giving up on. This feels different, somehow. Like maybe Lulu brought me to this place, and for the first time in a long time, I’m on the cusp of something real. Maybe this is the point of it all. Maybe this is where the road is meant to end.
