“Of course.”
“Haven’t we always been good friends? Even when I moved away we stayed close. Even when you were gone and you didn’t ever contact me, I thought we were good friends, and now you’re back, what if we’re not really friends at all?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Where have you been, Willy?”
“Where have I been? With Ana Lucia. Jesus, you were the one who said I needed to get laid to get over it.”
His eyes flash. “Get over what, Willy?”
I sit down on the bed. Get over what? That’s the question, right there.
“Is it your pa?” Broodje asks. “It’s okay if it still is. It’s only been three years. It took me that long to get over Varken, and he was a dog.”
Bram’s death gutted me. It did. But that was then and I’ve been okay so I’m not sure why it feels so raw again now. Maybe because I’m back in Holland. Maybe it was a mistake to stay.
“I don’t know what it is,” I tell Broodje. It’s a relief to admit this much.
“But it is something,” he says.
I can’t really explain it, because it makes no sense. One girl. One day.
“It is something,” I tell Broodje.
He doesn’t say anything, but the silence is like an invitation, and I’m not sure why I’m keeping this a secret. So I tell him: About meeting Lulu in Stratford-upon-Avon. About seeing her again on the train. About our flirtation on the train about hagelslag of all things. About calling her Lulu, a name that seemed to fit her so well that I forgot she wasn’t actually called that.
I tell him some of the highlights of a day that seems so perfect in retrospect, I sometimes think I invented it: Lulu marching up and down the Bassin de la Villette with a hundred-dollar bill, bribing Jacques to take us down the canal. The two of us almost getting arrested by that gendarme for illegally riding two people on a single Vélib’ bike, but then when the gendarme asked me why I’d done something so stupid, I’d quoted that Shakespeare line about beauty being a witch, and he recognized it, and let us off with a warning. Lulu blindly picking a Métro stop to go to and us winding up in Barbès Rochechouart, and Lulu, who claimed to be uncomfortable with traveling, seeming to love the randomness of it all. I tell him about the skinheads, too. About how I didn’t really think about it when I intervened and tried to stop them from hassling those two Arab girls about their headscarves. I didn’t really think about what they might do to me, and just as it was starting to dawn on me that I might have really screwed myself, there was Lulu, hurling a book at one of them.
Even as I explain it, I realize I’m not doing it justice. Not the day. Not Lulu. I’m not telling the whole story, either, because there are things I just don’t know how to explain. Like how when Lulu bribed Jacques to give us that ride on the canal, it wasn’t her generosity that got to me. I never told her I’d grown up on a boat, or that I was one day away from signing it all away. But she seemed to know. How did she know? How do I explain that?
When I’m done with my story, I’m unsure if I’ve made any sense. But I feel better somehow. “So,” I say to Broodje. “Now what?”
Broodje sniffs the air. The smell of the sauce has infiltrated the entire house. “Sauce is ready. Now we eat.”
Twelve
“I’ve been thinking,” Ana Lucia says. It’s sleeting outside but it’s toasty in her dorm, with our little feast of Thai food on her bed.
“Always dangerous words,” I joke.
She throws a sachet of duck sauce at me. “I’ve been thinking about Christmas. I know you don’t really celebrate it, but maybe you should come with me to Switzerland next month. So you’re among family.”
“I didn’t realize I had relatives in Switzerland,” I tease, popping a spring roll in my mouth.
“I meant my family.” She looks at me, her eyes uncomfortably intense. “They want to meet you.”
Ana Lucia belongs to a sprawling Spanish clan, the heirs to a shipping company that was sold to the Chinese before the recession crippled their economy. She has endless relatives, siblings and cousins, living all over Europe and the U.S., Mexico, and Argentina, and she speaks to them in a kind of round-robin on the phone each night. “You never know what might happen. One day, you might think of them as your family, too.”
I want to say I already have a family, but it hardly seems true anymore. Who’s left? Yael and me. And Uncle Daniel, but he barely counted in the first place. The roll sticks in my throat. I wash it down with a gulp of beer.
“It’s beautiful there,” she adds.
Bram took Yael and me skiing once in Italy. We both stayed huddled in the lodge, freezing. He learned his lesson. The next year we went to Tenerife. “Switzerland’s too cold,” I say.
“And it’s so nice here?” she asks.
Ana Lucia and I have been together for three weeks. Christmas is in six weeks. You don’t need to be W to figure out the math on that one.
When I don’t answer, Ana Lucia says, “Or maybe you want me to go, so you can have someone else keep you warm?” Just like that, her tone changes, and the suspicion that I now realize has been lurking outside all along comes rushing in.
• • •
The next afternoon, when I head back to Bloemstraat, I find the boys at the table, papers sprawled out all over the place. Broodje looks up wearing the expression of a guilty dog who stole the dinner.
“I’m sorry,” he says straightaway.
“About what?” I ask.
“I may have told them a little bit about our conversation,” he stammers. “About what you said.”
“It wasn’t much of a surprise,” W says. “It was obvious something has been wrong since you came back. And I knew that scar wasn’t from a bicycle accident. It doesn’t look like something you’d get from a fall.”
“My story was I got hit by a tree branch.”
“But you got beaten up by skinheads,” Henk tells me. “The same ones the girl threw the book at the day before.”
“I think he knows what happened to him,” Broodje says.
“Crazy that you saw the same guys,” Henk says.
“More like bad luck,” Broodje says.
I don’t say anything
“We think you have that post-traumatic thing,” Henk says. “That’s why you’ve been so depressed.”
“So you’ve scrapped the celibacy theory?”
“Well, yeah,” Henk says. “Because you’re getting laid now and you’re still depressed.”
“You think it’s because of this,” I say, tapping the scar. “Not because of the girl?” I look at W. “You don’t think maybe Lien was right?”
The three of them try not to laugh. “What’s so funny?” I ask, feeling irritated and defensive all of a sudden.
“This girl didn’t break your heart,” W says. “She just broke your streak.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.
“Willy, come on,” Broodje says, waving his arms to calm us all down. “I know you. I know how you are with girls. You fall in love and then it disappears like snow in the sun. If you’d had another few weeks with this girl you’d get tired of her, just like you do all the others. But you didn’t. It was almost like she dumped you. So you’re pining.”
You’re comparing love to a stain? Lulu had asked. She’d been skeptical at first.
Something that never comes off, no matter how much you might want it to. Yes, stain had seemed about right.
“Okay,” W says, clicking his pen. “Let’s start at the beginning, with as much detail as you can muster.”