FOR KENNETH, THERE has been no consolation, no prize. Across town, in the doorway of a fourth-floor walk-up, he stands with his lover’s wrist grasped too tightly in his fist as she berates him.
“Sukkel!” Agnes shouts, trying to jerk her arm back. “Watje!”
“Fine,” Kenneth says. “I’m a pussy—I’m a whatever the fuck you just said. Come back inside.” He knows he’s holding her too tight and loosens his grip to take her sleeve instead, but like most of her clothes, Agnes’s sleeve is purposely frayed, and the strips slide through his fingers loosely, a few breaking off as she yanks back—he can hear the cheap fabric ripping. She stands a foot away from him in the hallway, hip jutting out like a chicken bone, a taunting look on her face.
Then, all at once her mouth grows serious. She shrugs, looks at him pleadingly. “Baby,” she begs. “Kom met mij.”
“Fuck off,” Kenneth says, turning his back to the doorway. “Uitgewoonde heroinehoer.”
“It know one to take one!” Agnes retorts, and Kenneth gives up, heads through the kitchen into the rest of the apartment, where he can no longer see her. It know one to take one. Yeah, that about sums up their whole fucking relationship, doesn’t it? Nothing more to say.
From the window, he watches her emerge onto the street: a bony figure clad in black, skin so pale she’s almost indistinguishable from the washed-out white gray of the buildings across the street. Later, when she gets home, she’ll be high, but it’s impossible to say whether that’ll make things better or worse. He can hardly tell the difference anymore; her brain is going, so that she always seems twitchy and dangerous and a little stupid in a way he used to find sexy but now finds increasingly frustrating.
Ruined beauty, that’s his specialty. He is forty-five years old and exhausted by ruin.
He’s been clean for seven months.
Pussy, she called him. Wimp. He’s not a man to her, clean. His needles were the phalluses she craved. His cock’s in way better shape clean, but that doesn’t even factor. She’d rather run off with her girlfriends to some club and shoot up in the toilet, zoning out like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead. Then, once she’s run back to the toilet to puke, she’ll come out looking horny and fine, dancing wild, and making all the men who see her crazy with desire, because Agnes has something raw and lit in her when she’s just the perfect degree of high—has it even now that her looks are going to seed. Used to be that coke was her thing at clubs, but now she’s all about the H; she can’t get enough.
She has him to thank for that.
He should have run out on her before he kicked it himself. Then she wouldn’t be his responsibility; you can’t blame one junkie for walking out on another. Now he’s stuck. He came out of the blissful cocoon of his own addiction to find her living in his apartment, spending his money, smoking his cigarettes, crashing in his bed, and refusing to put out. Fuck it. Agnes doesn’t need him. She got herself all the way from some backwater Czech town to A’dam on her own, survived picking up tricks illegally on the street before getting taken in by a bordello; then all on her own she left that life behind and got a real job waiting tables, even dancing at RoXY’s dyke-themed night, “Pussy Lounge,” for extra cash, a gig any hot girl would covet. She was something then, beating out all those trendy wannabes. Lately, though, RoXY won’t have her with her protruding ribs and bruises. Kenneth’s not sure even a bordello would take her, or whether she’d end up back on the street should he walk. He’ll give this to Amsterdam: when you put the governmental stamp of approval on whoredom, you get a better class of dames. In some cities, a desperate bitch like Agnes might be the best you could get, but here you can have your cock sucked by a gorgeous, multilingual, twenty-one-year-old Dutch college girl and sip champagne while you’re at it, all aboveboard. Agnes’s non-English-speaking junkie ass need not apply.
And now he’s all she has. He shouldn’t have let her leave, should have kept her here with him even if it meant he had to knock her down. He should have, but he wanted a break from her. He permits himself to fantasize: Maybe she’ll meet some kid at the club, run off with him. Maybe she’ll become Someone Else’s Problem and he’ll be free.
He’s not tending bar tonight, so what to do with himself until Agnes gets back (because fuck it, he knows she’ll come home). This is what he misses most about H: when the needle was his mistress, he never had to wonder how to kill time. Now, days and nights stretch out before him in want of some kind of productive activity. He’s been in Holland now for more than five years, since the last time he kicked H and found himself with a Dutch wife as a means of killing all this extra, no-drug-taking time—thank Christ she never had kids, at least. He knows better than to believe he’ll never touch a needle again. Once a junkie, always a junkie. But he’s on hiatus, at least, and this time—though he’s afraid to dwell on this too much—he just doesn’t crave it like he used to, no matter how long he went clean before.
This time, he seemed to just wake up one day, Agnes naked next to him with a busted lip he didn’t remember (did she fall—were they in some kind of accident?—or did he do it himself?), and he felt done. The H seemed like a burden, the way going to work for his father had been a burden in the years after Will died and he was promoted into Will’s position. He felt like getting high was what he was supposed to be doing, but he just wanted, more than anything else, to play hooky: to not heat up the spoon, not tie off his arm. He wanted more sleep. He stayed in bed all day, and even after he started feeling sick, sweating and shaking, and knew the H was there in the apartment, he couldn’t work up a taste for it. The sickness felt good somehow. He started drinking to help with the withdrawal, as Agnes sat on the corner of the bed, her long legs drawn to her chest like a sylph’s, lecturing him on how bad the booze was for him. He threw the bottle of Famous Grouse at her and ordered her to take his stash and get it out of the house, give it the fuck away, for all he cared.
He should have told her to leave with it.
The night stretches out before him. He’s avoiding friends who use, which has him tending bar at a touristy Irish pub. Another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody. I got no money ’cause I just got laid. He remembers Will singing that, parodying the new Cat Stevens version, probably two, three months before Will put a bullet in his brain. Kenneth switches on the TV. On CNN they’re still yammering about Clinton’s being cited for contempt of court—they’ll never finish persecuting that poor bastard even now that he’s been acquitted. That damn blue dress with his jism on it will probably hang in a museum someday with a white laundry pen circling the spot where he shot his wad. Jesus. Kenneth rolls another cigarette, sprinkles a little hash in it even though he’s been telling himself he won’t, lights up, and listens to the English of the newscasters until the words blend together and sound foreign to him, until nothing makes any sense.
WHEN THEY FINALLY do make it to Café de Engelbewaarder, on Sunday afternoon, Mary, Leo, and Sandor find it in full swing on their arrival. Immediately Mary is frightened for her lungs. The place is a cloud of smoke; she can even smell hash, the odor drifting in from the back of the bar. Yank is nowhere to be seen, certainly not on the stage playing the sax. However, the place is so packed that he could be here, somewhere in the back maybe or in the throng by the bar. She, Leo, and Sandor enter the smoky haven, Mary tucking her face a bit into her brother’s arm as if to breathe air filtered through his skin. She will be able to stay here only so long before she starts hacking, so she’d better make it good while it lasts.
It’s the kind of bar she hasn’t experienced since she was last in Europe, with Joshua. Packed with a predominantly male crowd, full of aging hippies dressed in faded tones of black and gray, everybody smoking, drinking Duvel and small glasses of whiskey. Most of the men have long hair; the women wear fringy scarves wrapped around their necks. These kinds of people annoy Geoff. He thinks they’re putting on a show with their shabbiness—trying to indict others as bourgeois pigs if they deign to take a shower
and comb their hair. Mary doesn’t agree, but that doesn’t mean she fits in. Her engagement ring alone set Geoff back 10K, plus she’s carrying a Kate Spade tote. She looks like a freaking yuppie or, worse, a doctor’s wife: exactly what she is.
But the music! Well, Geoff would approve of the music. Cacophonous and wild, a jam session of roving musicians is in full swing at the front of the room. She, Leo, and Sandor stand where they can watch the rotating musicians; maybe Yank will materialize out of the crowd. Maybe any moment, the front door will burst open, letting in shards of light that make everyone wince, and there he will be.
Sandor goes to order drinks. Mary asks for bourbon as though for luck. She and Geoff always drink wine. However, she feels for the second time in her life as though she is going by an alias—as though she has slipped into someone else’s skin. In the course of twenty-four hours she has transformed from a bored New England schoolteacher to a kind of madcap Euro detective accompanied by two faithful sidekicks, roaming Amsterdam looking for the Man Formerly Known as Yank. On the day of her bleed, he told her his real name; she remembers the moment but not the actual words, which she never used or heard again. She imagines Sandor asking the bartender in Dutch if he knows of a man called Yank and the bartender laughing in his face.
Which is exactly what happens two hours later, after the musicians have gone home or are clustered in the back and Mary is starting to cough but doesn’t want to leave. The bartender (a) snickers and (b) indicates that he doesn’t know anyone by that moniker, not in any language.
Mary does not wish to take no for an answer, so they take seats at the bar and Sandor continues to speak to the bartender in Dutch, describing the time when he saw the mystery man in question playing the saxophone. This doesn’t ring a bell with the bartender, who adds that, as they’ve just witnessed, De Engelbewaarder sometimes gets more than twenty musicians jamming together on Sunday afternoons, and clearly he cannot know them all, but that the girl they saw is the usual saxophonist and not—the bartender winks—easy to forget. Mary would like to leave right then, go take gulps of fresh air outside, but Leo and Sandor have ordered more drinks, so she has to sit and sip her third bourbon and pretend not to be impatient. Sandor and Leo converse with the bartender in rapid Dutch, after a while forgetting to translate what is being said. Leo’s mastery of the language is impressive. Mary pushes her glass away, but instead of leaving, Leo enthusiastically begins drinking it himself.
All at once, the bartender slams his hand on the bar so loudly they all jump, and Leo gives a squeal of alarm. The bartender, though, is smiling. He says something else in Dutch, and Mary catches only the word “jam.” Then, not waiting to be translated, the bartender mimes wildly for Mary the actions of tending bar.
“He says,” Sandor explains, “that he just realized we are talking about the old bartender. He’s not a musician. Just sometimes he would play for fun, on Sundays, with the others in the jam session, when the girl was busy.” Sandor says “jam session” as though it is in ironic quotes.
“The thing is,” Sandor continues, pantomiming a discouraged look as if to forewarn Mary that the news is not good—Mary thinks, suddenly, that he will tell her the “old bartender” is dead—“he says this man now works at an Irish pub. And I know for a fact that Irish pubs here in Amsterdam, they always hire people from Ireland, with the Irish accent. Maybe they hire some Brit and think the Dutch people don’t know the difference. But they don’t hire the tall cowboy with the Yankee accent, that much I promise you. So I’m thinking this is not our man.”
“He doesn’t have a Yankee accent,” Mary explains. “He has a southern accent. In America, a Yank is a northerner. The nickname never even made any sense.”
Sandor looks at Leo and shrugs as if to say, They all look alike. She is not sure who “they” would constitute. She is also not sure why her body has clenched up, tight and alert and suddenly ready for action, at this new clue.
“ALL I CAN say,” Leo announces the next day as they peruse a phone book looking for names of Irish pubs, “is that either this asshole better owe you money, or you had better desperately want to fuck him, because otherwise why are we working so hard to find him?”
Mary blushes. It is abundantly clear that committing adultery would not exactly shock either Sandor or Leo; still, she feels exposed and foolish.
“We never slept together,” she explains to her brother. “We were just friends. But he did me a favor once . . .” She pauses.
What did Yank do, really? Wouldn’t anyone—barring the part about leaving her in the flat alone so he could run out and score—have done the same for a sick girl far from home? Yet the connection forged between them that night felt important, intense. Still, what possible bond could offer a rationale for a married woman’s tracking down an aging, homophobic junkie? Wanting to “fuck” him surely does not quite cover it. What would Geoff say if he could see her jotting pub names and addresses in her Nix notebook, directly beneath the messily scrawled sentence, What does it mean to heal? This is crazy. Memory stirs, and Mary wonders for a moment what the elusive Hasnain, Nix’s boyfriend, is doing now—if he is still in London after all these years, and if he is the one she should be trying to find. But no: she was chasing someone else’s memories back then—the memories of the dead. Her search for Yank may be futile, it may be immoral even, but it is her own.
Inexplicable things are happening around her. Friday, when she arrived, Leo was in love with a younger man named Pascal and hated Sandor for trying to steal the boy’s affections. But if Mary is not mistaken, Leo and Sandor slept together last night, after they returned from an elaborate rijsttafel at a hole-in-the-wall Indonesian joint, and Leo and Sandor sat up gossiping about their mutual art friends until Mary gave in to her exhaustion and trudged to Leo’s bedroom to do a PT. Her Vest is at home, so she had to use her Flutter device, and halfway through she lost all energy and tossed the thing across the room into her open suitcase, passing out in Leo’s bed, believing she would wake with him beside her. They have been sleeping side by side since her arrival, like children on a sleepover, making up for lost sibling time, and the intimacy of it has been delicious and touching, her favorite part of the trip. Yet when she rose this morning, Leo had unfurled the sofa bed and he and Sandor were still asleep. She couldn’t swear to what was hidden by the bedding, but both men were naked from the waist up, and Sandor had a tattooed arm slung over Leo’s darker, frailer torso. She scurried back to Leo’s bed in titillated alarm, rising only when she smelled coffee, to find Sandor sitting on the (now folded) couch in his outfit from last night, Leo impeccably dressed in fresh jeans and a button-down blue linen shirt, feet bare and hair still wild.
All day now, she has been watching her brother and Sandor, looking for clues. If anything, Sandor seems more intent than ever on annoying Leo, suggesting they should call Pascal and see if he’s in the mood for Irish whiskey, since their plans clearly include a pub crawl. He even continues to call Mary “Nicole,” though Leo has asked him three times to cut it out. Sandor’s tormenting of her brother has a crackling sexual energy to it, intimate enough to make Mary feel like an intruder.
There are about half a dozen Irish pubs in Amsterdam. Leo is not familiar with any of them. Mary has already gathered that her brother has an almost unfathomably poor sense of direction and faulty visual memory, which seem to her odd traits in a visual artist. Sandor, however, knows of several and says that Mulligan’s is the only “tolerable” one of the lot, so, hoping for the best, they head there first. They have been drinking all day again at Leo’s, and Leo and Sandor have been smoking cigarettes and hash. Mary’s lungs feel as though they’ve been scraped along a gravelly parking lot and hung up in the sun to burn. She did her (only third of the trip) PT in Leo’s bedroom while he and Sandor continued their banter and smokefest in the living room, but it helped even less than last night’s.
The wet air outside enters her throat like a cold knife with each inhale, then turns heavy and
warm the moment Sandor throws back the door of Mulligan’s. A man and a woman are, inconceivably, playing spoons for a boisterous, approving crowd. Sandor and Leo immediately start elbowing each another and affecting brogues. Mary’s eyes, though, dart straight for the bar.
It cannot be this easy. It cannot be, but it is. The world is small. When Geoff’s parents, now divorced far longer than they were ever married, were in Venice on their honeymoon, they ran into four separate people they knew from home. These encounters were so strange to them that Venice became forever infused with a kind of magic in their memories, as though everything that happened there was larger than life; they even returned to Venice for a “second honeymoon” when trying to revive their marriage, although this time they saw no acquaintances and succeeded only in realizing that they, too, had become strangers.
As for Mary, her “Venice” was the Cincinnati hospital room, five years ago, into which Geoff walked, sealing their romance with a sense of fate. Now, however, small-world coincidences seem to be occurring in such rapid succession that she’s unsure what meaning to take away. Just Friday night at the Jordaan gallery, there was Sandor, whom she had never expected to see again, and now the same thing is happening again, albeit this time at her orchestration. Was this all predestined, the way it felt with Geoff, or is life mere chaos, bodies thrown together, flung apart, then colliding again at random? To say that the world no longer feels real, feels smaller than life in the largest possible way, would not be an overstatement.
A Life in Men: A Novel Page 28
