“Goodbody, every afternoon,” Arno began his usual spiel. After two years of it, Lisa didn’t even notice the joke anymore. Wim, their captain, steered the boat — long enough to hold eighty passengers, low enough to sail beneath the city’s innumerable bridges — past the train station. Back in the kitchen, Lisa pulled soft drinks from the fridge and arranged them on her cart.
“The Central Station is built on an artificial island,” Arno said, first in English, then in Dutch and French and German. “It was designed by the same architect who designed the Rijksmuseum, which is where you can find our most important Rembrandt paintings.”
Pulling the cork from a bottle of Chianti, Lisa glanced outside. The sky was gray, and there were wisps of mist along the embankment. When Arno paused for breath, she heard raindrops patter on the boat’s glass roof.
She thought back to that morning, that lovely morning with Timo. They hadn’t gotten out of bed until ten thirty. She’d cracked open a can of Jus-Rol croissants and slid them into the oven. They’d only been together for three months, but Lisa was already spending so much time at Timo’s place she had practically moved in. Her toiletries were in his bathroom, half her clothing hung in his wardrobe, she felt so comfortable she knew their relationship was the real thing.
“On your right is NEMO, the science museum, and underneath it is the highway to Amsterdam-North.”
The passengers gaped at the vast green building that rose up from the water like the prow of an enormous oil tanker.
When she was with Timo, she lost all sense of time. After breakfast, they’d put on Netflix and continued watching Stranger Things, the series they’d begun last night. When you were in love, all you wanted to do was snuggle up together, all day long. And so they did, until the middle of the afternoon, when Timo had pointed to his wristwatch and she realized it was past time for her to leave for work.
They continued along the river, “the majestic five-star Amstel Hotel on your left, the Rolling Stones’ favorite place to stay when they’re in town.” The passengers were always on the lookout for celebrities. In fact, was that Robbie Williams working up a sweat on the treadmill in the glass-walled fitness center? No, too tall. Probably just some businessman.
After they passed the hotel, the captain turned them around and set a course for the Herengracht. When she could make out the distant bridge that marked the entrance to the world-famous Grachtengordel — the Canal District — Lisa felt a rush of pleasure well up from deep inside her. Not because of the bridge or the canal, but because she knew it wouldn’t be long now before—
First, of course, would come the Willet-Holthuysen Museum with its imposing latticed windows to the right, and then “the relatively new Waldorf Astoria hotel” on the left, but after that it would be barely half a minute before Wim throttled back the Princess Beatrix almost to a standstill to give the passengers time to point their cameras off to the left for one of the cruise’s highlights: beneath the graceful stone bow of the bridge over the Reguliersgracht, six more bridges could be seen, each of them illuminated, stretching all the way south to the Lijnbaansgracht, seemingly stacked up one atop the other. Yes, the Seven Bridges did indeed make for a lovely picture.
Her own personal highlight came almost at the same moment as the photo op: some thirty yards before it, there was something to be seen that seven hundred bridges couldn’t compete with — as soon as the boat slowed down and the passengers turned their attention to the left, she could blow unseen kisses to the handsome young man on the old houseboat not six feet to their right. For those ten or fifteen seconds, it would be as if she was home, with Timo, done with work for the evening, and the love that would wash over her would be so intense, so delicious, it would carry her through the second half of the cruise.
They were almost there: the first passengers were getting to their feet, their phones at the ready, and Lisa turned to face the scene where, just a few hours earlier, she and Timo had relished their warm, sweet croissants. The skipper slowed the boat. Another fifteen yards, ten. She ran a hand through her hair. Five more yards, and she would be able to see into the living room. Three...
Lisa’s shoulders slumped. Timo wasn’t standing at the window, waiting for her. He was on the couch, asleep. The TV was still on. She sighed, but her disappointment quickly melted into tenderness. He’s even cute when he’s sleeping, she thought.
It was natural that her boyfriend would need to catch up on his sleep over the weekend. He rose at six every morning and put in at least fifty hours a week at work, sometimes sixty. His own ad agency — he’d wanted that since high school. There were times that he and his team slaved over a pitch until two in the morning.
Behind her, the cameras began to click. She turned around, and almost got a selfie stick in her face.
The Princess Beatrix returned to Pier F at five thirty. That gave Lisa half an hour to prepare the boat for the six o’clock cruise. She’d have to hurry. The moment the last of the four o’clock passengers were gone, she gathered up the empty bottles, dumped the trash in a large plastic bag, replaced the dirty place mats with fresh ones, checked the tables and the restroom. Arno helped her restock the drinks, and she wound up with a couple of minutes to sneak a cigarette on the back deck before the next load of passengers boarded.
With her imperturbable smile, Lisa took orders, refilled the nut dishes, snapped pictures for everyone who asked. Meanwhile, her thoughts were filled with Timo.
He was so different from Stefan. Timo was the complete opposite of that bastard she’d somehow stayed with for two and a half years. In him, she found everything her previous boyfriend had been unable or unwilling to give her: attention, tenderness, great sex. And the things she’d resented in Stefan were absent from Timo: egotism, self-righteousness, emotional distance. Opening a container of chocolate milk, she asked herself for the umpteenth time why she had let herself suffer through a relationship that, if she was honest, she had never for one moment truly believed in. The only answer she could come up with was simple cowardice.
Walking down the aisle with two bottles of Heineken in her hands, she heard someone say the words “Waldorf Astoria.” She delivered the beers and returned quickly to the back of the boat. Once they passed the Waldorf, everyone would be looking ahead for the Seven Bridges. Lisa took up her usual position by the window, but then changed her mind. She opened the door to the back deck and was greeted by a chilly gust of wind in her face. There were puddles of water on the wooden benches. Rain dripped from the Dutch tricolor that hung out over the black surface of the Herengracht, as if the flag had just been fished out of the canal.
They approached Timo’s houseboat. Inside the Princess Beatrix, passengers were getting to their feet, angling for a better view. Ten yards to go. She wished she had a cigarette but was afraid the captain might smell it.
Two more yards.
One.
“Can you give me a hand, please?”
Lisa whirled at the sound of the voice. A man stood in the doorway. He was having trouble staying erect, thanks to the thin elderly woman clutching his arm.
“My mother needs to use the lavatory,” the man said apologetically. “She’s ninety-four.”