It was Joe who arrived with the news that P.J. was at her parents’ and that she was ‘not doing well’. Not doing well meant: beaten up by Lover Boy Writer. In a fit of psychotic rage he had damaged home and garden, as well as the temple of his beloved. She had been at her parents’ place for days without showing her face. I saw a disturbing correlation between the violence in my dreams and that of her slaphappy Lover Boy Writer.
Joe and I went to Acacia Florist’s on Breedstraat and had a red-and-white bouquet put together for delivery to the White House.
‘It’s actually more the season for autumnal tints,’ the noodle of a shopkeeper said.
We ignored him.
‘Would you like to add a text for the recipient?’
Joe looked at me.
‘You’re the writer around here.’
The shopkeeper handed me a folded card with a hole punched in it. I wrote:
We’re around.
Your friends
Joe and Frankie
‘What kind of a text is that?’ Joe said. ‘Don’t you have to write something like “best wishes” or something?’
I shook my head. I had full confidence in P.J.’s ability to decode the message; she would read that we were here if she needed us, and that we were thinking of her without imposing our presence. That’s the way it was.
The very next tournament, in a backstreet district of Vienna, was a fiasco. I won’t go into it in depth because it was a glitch, an isolated dip in another otherwise steadily rising curve. There’s no sense boring people with things like that, I think. It was a paradoxical defeat, because it came in a period when I was experiencing exponential muscle development. That produces greater strength in the long term, but deep depressions in muscle capacity in the short term. That, in short, is how we lost Vienna. One thing, though: my picture appeared in the paper for the first time. What you saw was mostly that arm with the veins bulging out along it, and the beautifully defined muscle groups. Above all that, a head that looks like it’s about to explode. Until that picture started making the rounds of friends and family in Lomark — Joe had bought a whole pile of the Wiener Zeitung — almost no one knew what we were really up to. Once they found out, though, they erupted in a sort of boundless curiosity about our doings. With his story Joe became the man himself in the canteen at Bethlehem. A match was organized on the spot between the operator and Graad Huisman. Huisman won and, before long, began weeping again over the tumour in his knee.
At coffee the next morning Ma said people were driving her mad with questions. Whether it was really true that I had beaten men twice my weight, and whether I had actually won a tournament in Antwerp. In the Sun Café, where the incident with the roofer remained unforgotten, the rumour went around that I could never have become so strong without the use of ‘pills’. I noticed that people were looking at me differently — that people were looking at me. It was very invigorating.
Around that time I started smelling different. I don’t know whether it was just perspiration or something else as well. I don’t know, for example, whether you can smell testosterone. In any case, both Joe and Ma started throwing open the window whenever they came in. Joe even bought me a stick of deodorant, Beiersdorf 8x4, which to this day stands unopened on the kitchen shelf as one of the countless memories of him.
I still rode past the Eilander residence each day, on the way back from my training route to Westerveld. I flew by so quickly, in fact, that I barely had to time to peek in. Sometimes, when Joe had told me that P.J. was at home, I didn’t peek at all. I hoped she would see me and come outside and call my name, and invite me into that mysterious house which I had never seen from the inside. I wanted her to feed me beer the way she had fed me rosé that summer day, I wanted her to say intelligent things and pass along to me exciting details about the world of writers she now knew from up close. When she would ask me how my own writing was going, I would inform her that I had stopped, which was true: I no longer wrote.
I had spent years constantly painting the view from my own head, and then it was over. I would announce this with the romantic decisiveness of the artist who doesn’t believe that his talent obliges him to anything, but who sees it as something he can leave behind like an old pair of gym shoes. As casually as possible I would then draw her attention to my wrestling arm, and she would realize that I had become a man of action. Times had changed, other things were required of me. And after all, wasn’t writing an extremely unmanly activity? One to which arm wrestling was vastly superior? She would understand that. She would admire my stance, and think about Lover Boy Writer, who I imagined as a deeply neurotic pen pusher with puny limbs. The comparison would work in my favour. And then we would — we would, we would. .
I can’t claim that the Strategy of Becoming Stone was always successful.
We heard nothing from P.J. about having been beaten up, it remained a wild supposition. Joe said he had seen contusions next to her ear and above her eye, bruises that were already getting better by then and had faded to a yellowing glimmer. She hadn’t said a word about it.
Before long, though, it became clear that it was no isolated incident: once again, she came home damaged. We heard that she had refused to go to the police. The manhandling of girls with pin-curls and lovely broad cheekbones is, of course, forbidden by law, but without a police report that’s not much help. The White House became her rehabilitation centre. This time Joe and I sent a funny get-well card showing a dog with its tail all bandaged up.
Now she responded — by knocking on my door one wet and muddled Saturday morning.
‘I’m not intruding, am I, Frankie? Regina said Joe might be here.’
But Joe was probably out working at Dirty Rinus’s. He had bought a marked-down bulldozer from his employers at Bethlehem Asphalt and was fixing it up. All I knew was that he was planning to enter some race with it. I gestured to P.J. to sit down across from me. Then I saw it: her bottom lip was split. Two stitches held the rip closed, and there was a disfiguring red lump on her chin. My eyes filled with tears of rage, but P.J. shook her head.
‘It looks worse than it is. It was such a sweet card you two sent me. But how are you doing, Frankie? I’ve been hearing lots about you, that you take part in contests? With your arm?’
Arm wrestling, I wrote. The pegs and the square of chalk were still on the table; I assumed the starting position and motioned to her to do the same. She planted her elbow across from mine in the fading box, our hands folded around each other.
‘And now?’
I pressed a little and she pressed back.
‘That’s it?’
I nodded and let go. That was it.
‘No, show me! I want to feel how strong you are.’
She laughed, then winced at the pain in her torn lip. I put my arm back in the box and pressed her with great composure against the tabletop, as though lowering her onto a bed.
‘I couldn’t do a thing,’ P.J. said in amazement. ‘No wonder.’
Tournament in Rostock next week, I wrote. Come along.
‘Rostock? Where’s Rostock?’
Mecklenburg-Vorpommeren, on the Baltic.
The stakes were high at Rostock, and rumour had it that Islam Mansur would be there.
‘That’s where you and Joe are going? Maybe I will come along. I don’t want to go back to Amsterdam, not for a while anyway.’
She laughed again, this time more carefully.
And so it came to pass that Joe and I stopped by the White House on Friday morning to pick up P.J. Her upper lip was a bit less swollen now, the stitches had been removed from the lower one. She was carrying a floppy brown shoulder bag. For a girl, she travelled light. Joe opened the tailgate for her, she climbed in and said good morning to me. Kathleen Eilander came out of the house in a duster shiny with wear, but even in that old rag she was still attractive, her breasts showed only a hint of sag.