Just One Night

by Gayle Forman

  All too quickly, they part again. Willem will go ahead to his call at the theater. Wren is meeting Allyson and Broodje at the flat. Everyone will meet at the park, and after the play, they will all celebrate.

  Saying good-bye is less fraught this time. They have done it now once, like normal people: leave, come back. It builds confidence.

  This time Willem kisses her good-bye. It is quick, a peck on the lips. It is not nearly enough. He wants all of her. From her lips to her feet.

  “I’ll see you after the play,” Allyson says.

  “Yes,” Willem says.

  But they both know they will see each other sooner than that. That they will find each other during the play, once more, in the words of Shakespeare.

  Wren arrives not long after Willem has left. She squeals and hugs Allyson, squeals and hugs Broodje. She kisses the saints on her bracelet. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Anthony, patron saint of lost things. She kisses all the saints. They all came through.

  “I knew it,” Wren says in that fluty voice of hers. “But I thought you were going to find him on the train, like you did the last time.”

  “I sort of found him at the train station,” Allyson says. And then she explains how she’d been about to catch the train to the airport when she’d opened the packed breakfast Winston, the guy from their hotel, had made for her. And it was the hagelslag that did it. The bread with chocolate sprinkles, the very first thing she and Willem had talked about. It had been the sign, the accident, the nudge to go to Willem.

  “How did you know where to find him?” Wren asks

  “Because you told me the address, and that the name of the street was a belt.”

  Wren turns to Broodje. “You told me that.”

  “Foreigners can never remember Ceintuurbaan otherwise,” he says.

  “As opposed to the many other pronounceable street names here?” Allyson asks.

  They all laugh.

  They clean up the mess from the snacks and prepare to make their way to Vondelpark. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Allyson knows she has a flight home out of London tomorrow, at 4:00. She will have to figure out how to get there. She has a few hundred dollars left. If she has to blow it on the fast Eurostar train, so be it. It was a last-minute impromptu decision to go to Paris from London that had gotten this entire ball rolling. It took two hours to get from one world to another. She is fairly confident she’ll be able to get back in time.

  When Broodje goes to have a quick shower, Wren pats the sofa next to her. “Did you find out who the woman was, the one with the flowers from last night?” she asks.

  Allyson hasn’t. Last night, seeing Willem with the woman had been a deal breaker. It had seemed to confirm everything she suspected about him, the way that Ana Lucia’s fury had. But now Allyson doesn’t really care who that woman is. She has seen Willem. She has spent an afternoon with him. She knows that what happened to her last year, in a way, has happened to him.

  “I didn’t,” she tells Wren.

  “You could ask Broodje.”

  She could, but she doesn’t want to. It no longer matters.

  She can almost hear Melanie’s scoff from across the Atlantic. Melanie had been with Allyson last summer when she’d met Willem, had been suspicious of him from the start, had not been able to understand why Allyson wouldn’t let go of that one guy, that one day.

  Whatever. She isn’t listening to Melanie. Or her mom. Or Dee. Or Céline. Or Ana Lucia. She is listening to herself. And she knows that everything is okay.

  “You know what we should do?” Wren says, that manic mischievous smile of hers spreading across her face. “We should get him flowers.”

  For a second Allyson thinks this is some sort of duel, to win against the red-haired woman from last night. But then she understands what Wren means. They should get him flowers. At the flower market. Where Wolfgang works.

  They ride on Wren’s bicycle, Allyson sidesaddle on the rack behind. (She thinks this might be her favorite thing about Amsterdam. She wants to import the tandem sidesaddle riding back home.) It is early evening when they arrive at the flower market, but a Saturday night, and bustling. Wolfgang is there, wrapping up a big bouquet of lilies.

  When he looks up and sees them, he doesn’t seem the slightest bit surprised, even though Allyson is supposed to be in Croatia. He just winks. Allyson waits for the crowd to disperse and when there’s a break, she hugs him. The smell of him, tobacco and flowers, feels so good and familiar that it doesn’t make sense that she only met Wolfgang three days ago (except that it does).

  “She found him!” Wren announces. “She found her Orlando.”

  “I was under the impression she found what she was looking for already last night,” he says in that rumbly heavily accented voice.

  Wolfgang looks at Allyson, a silent understanding passing between them. He is right. Last night, even when she’d thought Willem was a ghost she’d been chasing, she still felt like she’d found what she’d been looking for. Something harder to lose. Because it was connected to her. Because it was her.

  “It turns out, I found us both,” Allyson tells Wolfgang.

  “Double good news then,” he says.

  “Double happiness,” Allyson says.

  “That too,” Wolfgang says.

  “We are going to see him perform Orlando again. Can you come?” Wren asks.

  Wolfgang says that one night of Shakespeare is enough for him. And he has to shut down the stall tonight. But he’ll be free after ten.

  “Then meet us after,” Allyson says. “A bunch of us are going for dinner. You should be there.”

  She thinks of what Broodje said, the dinner like a banquet for the investor’s circle. Wolfgang should be there. So should Dee. And Professor Glenny. And Babs. And Kali and Jenn, her roommates last year. Maybe she’ll hold another investor’s dinner when she goes home.

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” Wolfgang says. “Now, would you like some flowers?”

  At the amphitheater at Vondelpark, Allyson spots Broodje. He has saved several seats, up front this time. He is with a group of people, a guy even taller than Willem, a short-haired girl, another guy. He has brought a basket of food and several bottles of beer.

  He kisses Allyson and Wren three times, cheek-cheek-cheek. And then he turns to the group. “Everyone. This is her. Lulu. Only she’s really Allyson. And this is her friend Wren.”

  They all sort of stare at each other. The girl speaks first, sticking out her hand. “I’m Lien.”

  “Allyson.”

  “Wren.”

  Lien stares at her. “You really do look like Louise Brooks.”

  “Huh?” Wren says.

  “The silent film actress,” Allyson explains. “My hair was like hers then. That’s why Willem called me Lulu.”

  Lien looks at her, remembering that Louise Brooks movie Willem dragged them all to. She’d known then something was up with Willem. No one had believed her when she’d said he had fallen in love.

  They believe her now.

  W is having a hard time understanding.

  After all the methodical work they put into it, calling all the American tour companies, finding the barge captain in Deauville, the charts of all the connections, this didn’t make sense. Willem going off to Mexico to look for her hadn’t made sense either. It would’ve been one thing had the girl visited a small town during a quiet time of year, but a resort area at Christmas? The odds were ridiculous. But at least that adhered to a logic. The Principle of Connectivity, albeit stretched very thin.

  But he doesn’t understand this. All the looking they had done, and from what Broodje had said, the girl had done her own looking. But then she’d just happened upon him at the play last night? The play Willem was not even meant to be performing in? He’d been the understudy until last night.

  It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

  Backstage, Willem is thinking about accidents again. And things that seemingly don’
t make sense, except they do. Like right out there in the fifth row. All of them, together. That makes sense.

  He doesn’t see Kate yet, but she has texted that she and David will be there but must leave right after the play. David is catching a late flight back to London, and she’s seeing him to the airport.

  Willem’s cast mates slap him on the back, offer congratulations from last night, and condolences for next week. He accepts them both.

  Max is by his side, as always. She is the other understudy, for Rosalind, and Willem’s best friend in the cast. “You win some, you lose some. And sometimes you win and lose at the same time. Life’s a bloody cockup,” Max says.

  “Is that Shakespeare?” Willem asks.

  “Nah. Just me.”

  “Sounds like the Universal Law of Equilibrium,” Willem says.

  “The what?”

  When Willem doesn’t answer right away, she says, “Sounds like a bunch of shite.”

  “You’re probably right,” Willem agrees. And then he asks her if she’ll come out after the show.

  “I’m still hungover from last night,” Max complains. “How many parties does one man need?”

  “This is different,” Willem says.

  “How is it different?” Max asks.

  Max has become one of his closest friends these past months, and yet he hasn’t told her a thing. There is nothing to do now but to tell her everything.

  “Because I’m in love.”

  Kate and David arrive just before curtain. She’d meant to come straight from the airport, but when she’d seen David, she had been overcome. It was a bit silly, really. It had only been a few days since she’d seen him, and they’d been together for five years. But she’d been feeling roiled since last night. A good Shakespearean performance was known to have aphrodisiacal effects. So when David arrived, she’d hustled him back to her Major Booger hotel and had her way with him. Then they’d fallen asleep and gotten themselves massively lost on the way to the park (someone should mention to city planners that Amsterdam was laid out like a rat’s maze, albeit a very pretty rat’s maze) and now here they are.

  I hope I haven’t oversold it, Kate thinks as the lights go down. She has essentially promised Willem an apprenticeship based on last night’s performance, but David has to agree. She is sure David will agree. Willem had been that good. But she is nervous now. They’ve offered apprenticeships to foreigners before, but sparingly, because the visa paperwork and union issues are such a headache.

  Willem enters the stage. “As I remember . . .” he begins as Orlando.

  Kate breathes a sigh of relief. She hasn’t oversold it.

  It is better than last night. Because there are no walls. No illusions. This time, they know exactly who they are speaking to.

  “The little strength that I have, I would it were with you”.

  She is his Mountain Girl.

  “What would you say to me now, an I were your very very Rosalind?”

  No more pretending. Because he knows. She knows.

  “Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love.”

  She believes. They both do.

  “I would kiss before I spoke.”

  The line is a kiss. Their kiss.

  “For ever and a day.”

  For ever and a day.

  “Holy shit,” David says to Kate when it is over.

  Kate thinks I told you so, but doesn’t say anything.

  “And this is the hitchhiker you gave a ride to in Mexico?”

  “I keep telling you, he wasn’t a hitchhiker.” David has been giving her grief about giving a ride to a stranger for months now. Kate keeps reminding him that all people are strangers, initially. “Even you were a stranger to me once,” she’d said.

  “I don’t care if he was three-legged ape,” David says now. “He’s unbelievable.”

  Kate smiles. She loves lots of things, but she especially loves to be right.

  “And he wants to apprentice with us?”

  “Yep,” Kate says.

  “We can’t keep him off a stage for long.”

  “I know. He’s green. The training will do him good. And then we can sort out union issues and get him up there.”

  “He’s really Dutch?” David asks. “He has no accent.” He stops for a second. “Listen to that. They’re still applauding.”

  “Are you jealous?” Kate teases.

  “Should I be?” David teases back.

  “That boy is hopelessly in love with some American girl he found and lost in Paris. As for me, I’m hopelessly in love with some stranger I met five years ago.”

  David kisses her.

  “Do you really have to go back tonight?” Kate asks. “You could come out after with Willem really quickly and then we could give the squeaky bed at the Major Booger another go.”

  “Just one?” David asks.

  They kiss again. The audience is still applauding.

  Allyson notices the kissing couple. It’s hard not to, because people are starting to meander out of the theater and they are still kissing. And because, much as she’s looking forward to getting to know Willem’s friends, what she really wants to do is what that couple is doing.

  And then the couple breaks apart, and Allyson gasps. The woman! She’s the woman from last night. The one she’d seen Willem with. The one she’d thought he was in love with. As of this afternoon, she no longer thought that. And now she really doesn’t think that.

  “Who is that?” Allyson asks Broodje, pointing to the woman.

  “No idea,” Broodje says. Then he points to the stage door. “Look, here comes Willy.”

  Allyson feels paralyzed all of a sudden. Last night, she’d stood at that very stage door and Willem had breezed right by her, into the arms of that other woman. The one who is now in the arms of that other man.

  This is not last night. This is tonight. And Willem is walking right toward her. And he is smiling. Wren thrusts the bouquet Wolfgang prepared (an enormous bouquet; it almost capsized the bike on the ride to the park) into her arms.

  The bouquet is smashed in about five seconds. Because Willem doesn’t seem to give a shit about the flowers or the crowd of people waiting for him. He seems to be heeding Orlando’s words tonight.

  “I would kiss before I spoke.”

  And for the second time in a day, he does.

  And, oh, what a kiss. It makes the one this morning seem chaste. It makes the flowers smashed between them bloom all at once. Allyson could live in that kiss.

  Except she hears laughter behind them. And a voice, an unfamiliar one, though Allyson knows at once that it belongs to the redhead.

  “I take it you found her then,” the voice says.

  It takes ages for them all to troop out of the park. There are so many of them: Willem, Allyson, Broodje, Henk, W, Lien, Max, Kate, David. Wolfgang and Winston, the guy from the hotel whom Wren has been spending time with, are joining them later. The logistics are complicated. This one left a bike back there. This one is meeting them over here.

  But it’s the introductions that take longer.

  Kate is a theater director. Whom Willem met in Mexico, while he was looking for Allyson.

  David is her fiancé, whom Willem has never met, who is going on about how good Willem was tonight, the vulnerability he brought to Orlando, what a brave way to play it.

  Wren is the friend Allyson met in Paris and bumped into again in Amsterdam. “I wouldn’t have found you if it weren’t for her,” Allyson tells Willem. “I was about to give up but she made me go to the hospital you were at.”

  Willem thanks Wren.

  Wren curtsies.

  W listens to all the introductions and still doesn’t understand.

  Neither does Max. “This is too bloody confusing. Can someone draw a chart?”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” W says.

  “I was kidding,” Max says. “What I really need is a drink.”

  Wolfgang has arranged for a table at a caf
é run by a friend of his in a neighborhood off the shrinking red light district. It is on the Kloveniersburgwal, not far from the bookstore where Willem found the copy of Twelfth Night, and where the bookseller inside told him about the auditions for As You Like It that were happening at the theater around the way.

  It takes about an hour for them to get there, because they all walk together, instead of splitting up into taxis and trams and onto bikes. No one wants to be separated. Something about the night feels magical, as if a bit of Shakespeare’s fairy dust has settled over them.

  Wolfgang is waiting at the table, along with Winston, a pitcher of beer between them.

  Everyone sits down. Allyson snaps a picture and texts it to Dee. Wish you were here.

  She is about to put her phone away but then she texts the photo to her mother. I am having the best day of my life, she writes. She hesitates before hitting send. She is not entirely sure how welcome this message will be, from a bar, no less. But she thinks (hopes) her mother will be happy that she is so happy. And with that in mind, she presses send.

  Wolfgang has ordered a bunch of food, pizza and pasta and salads. It starts to arrive, along with lots more booze.

  Willem has hardly eaten all day and is famished. But Allyson is sitting next to him, and with everyone jammed at the table, she is right up close. And then she slips off her sandals under the table and sort of nuzzles her foot against his.

  He loses his appetite, for food anyway.

  The conversation is disjointed. Everyone wants to tell their part of the tale, and they tell it out of order and, as the booze flows, with increased drunkenness.

  Allyson and Willem sit back and listen to this story.

  “I didn’t even know her, but I knew I was supposed to go with her to the hospitals,” Wren is saying.

  “I knew something was up as soon as Willem came back,” Lien says.

  “Hey, I did, too,” Broodje says.

  “No you didn’t,” Henk says.

  “I did. I just didn’t believe it was a girl.”

  “I knew something was up because he didn’t want to shag Marina,” Max says. She looks at Allyson. “Sorry, but have you seen Marina? Rosalind?” She shakes her head. “Maybe I’m biased because I’d like to shag her.”