Love, If That's What It Is, page 6
Quietly she climbs the stairs, undresses and lies down beside him with her back to him. Both lie there wide awake. He smells her: he smells fresh outdoor air and he smells her body, he wants to slide her nightie up and feel her skin against his chest and stomach. He wants to wrap his arms around her, wants to hold her, her body that belongs to him, that belongs to their marriage, the body she’s supposed to share with him, the body that has changed over the course of twenty-five years, that was once plumper, skinnier, that once was young, that was pregnant, that’s been sick, that’s grown more and more streamlined in the past few years—something he doesn’t find particularly attractive, it may be beautiful, but her chubbiness felt nicer, the body she has now is largely a feat of willpower. Her body, which, even with those changes, was always a constant, a constant factor in his life, a constant presence. He feels tears welling up in his eyes again.
“David?”
“Yes?” It could also turn out all right, married couples do survive crushes, crises, periods of separation, doubts, skydiving.
“Do you mind not breathing so noisily?”
-
A lover
On the floor behind her a Lego battle is in full swing. Hendrik, sprawled on his stomach, is directing the troop movements. He employs different voices, sings wordless battle hymns, bellows and shouts on behalf of his soldiers on the ground. It’s raining a bit, the river is as gray as the sky above. Sev is looking at her phone, swiping through the men selected for her on the basis of her preferences. The degree to which she may be a good fit for a particular candidate is expressed in numbers. The highest score goes to an executive with three kids who believes in possibilities and hasn’t lived if he hasn’t laughed that day. What he can’t live without is coffee, and oxygen, and he’d like to meet Barack Obama in person. Sev thinks for Obama that might be a waste of time. And for her too. Why is the algorithm choosing men like that for her? What kind of lamebrained answers did she give herself? She has begun exchanging messages with two of the men. One is a lawyer, the other a manager. She doesn’t know what sort of man she’s looking for, if it matters what sort of thing the managers manage, what sort of thing the controllers control, what it means that they all seem to identify themselves by their job. The men on the site confess that they want to fall in love again, or that they’re looking for a companion, or they’ll baldly say you are the one they’re looking for: My day starts off great if … I wake up beside you; sometimes it’s, waked up next to you. Oh yeah? Sev thinks. She thinks about Ernst, Hendrik’s father, about his depression. She remembers her last year with him, when she thought she’d have to sleep next to him for the rest of her life. She thinks about the other relationships she’s had. She thinks about the love of her life, whom she possibly only calls the love of her life because it ended before it could fizzle out; it never had the chance to definitively fail. She has no idea how it’s supposed to work, this being together, sharing a life.
“My fist hungers for justice!” Hendrik calls in a muffled voice, as if his cry is coming from far away, through the fog of battle. On stocking feet she weaves her way through his toys. In the kitchen she makes herself a cup of coffee, and a cup of cocoa for him.
She’s lived with three men. The first was Felix, she was twenty-five and had only recently broken up with Jasja, the boy she shamelessly called the love of her life, even to Felix’s face. The relationship with Jasja had been an open one, they didn’t live together, there were other hookups, but then they would tell each other about them, which only made the intimacy between the two of them deeper than with anyone else. Jasja was intense, energetic, original, emotional. He was intelligent, but his intelligence was scattered. He changed his mind about what he wanted to study from year to year: philosophy, Dutch, Russian, history, the violin at the conservatory. They were together, or more or less together, from age eighteen to twenty-three. She was crazy about him, she felt understood and deeply connected, but also uneasy about that fickleness of his. Her girlfriends thought he took advantage of her; she didn’t have the words to contradict them. The fact that she was sometimes unhappy when Jasja was with someone else proved, they said, that when she said sexual fidelity wasn’t important to her, she was just fooling herself. She was very young, he too, she wishes she could do it all over again, but there isn’t a box to check off for that sort of thing on dating sites.
She sees the milk for the cocoa bubbling up in the pan and foaming over the brim. By the time she springs into action, the spill has quenched the gas flame, and the smell of scalded milk rises from the hob. Some of the things in her apartment were well maintained only during the four years she lived with Ernst. He used to polish the cooker hood with a special product, he scratched the candlewax off the candlesticks, watered the plants, sometimes he even starched the bed linens. She dabs at the brown gunk with a paper towel and burns her hand on the metal. She holds her hand under running water until all sensation is gone.
After Jasja left, she tried a more traditional model with Felix. She and Felix did things together. They bought a house, renovated that house. They learned to ski and play bridge, they invited friends for dinner, they were tennis partners. She accepted the fact that there was a whole river coursing between their living-together arrangement and her private thoughts and feelings, a river that was rarely bridged; she assumed it was the same for him. She was a grown-up, she felt grown up, she thought it would be easy for her to fill in the traditionally established contours of adulthood. They talked about having children. They decided to wait until they were in their thirties. She didn’t really want to have children, but as long as her thirties were some way off, she thought it was fine to keep that thought on her side of the river. After five years, just before her thirtieth birthday, Felix left her. He had found someone else. He told Sev that she didn’t need him at all. It was an accusation, and also an explanation. She was sad. She felt uprooted, anyway. Was it true she didn’t need anybody? Really? In what way should she have needed him? How did other people need other people? Was it something to aspire to? They sold the house; she rented a studio in the city center that never became a cozy or comfortable home. She worked, she earned money, had boyfriends, never for very long, sometimes two at a time. She spent a week with Jasja when he was in the Netherlands before moving to Canada for good, and at the end of that week, the emptiness felt infinitely worse than it had after Felix’s departure. She bought her current apartment.
She leaves the mug and a saucer with biscuits on the floor next to her son, fondles a head that is immediately twisted away, out of reach—no cuddling during military campaigns!—and sits down at the window again.
At the end of a talk she gave, she met Johan. He offered to buy her a drink and explained to her what was so great about her. As she was putting on her coat, he asked if he could come.
“Come?” she asked. “Where?”
“With you.”
“I’m going home.”
“Then take me home, home with you.” It slammed through her body like a wave.
“Come then, come with me,” she said, looking at him, “come home with me then.” And that’s how it started. He was thirteen years younger than her and had just started university. He looked up to her, not the way she would look up to someone if she were in his place; it would have paralyzed her on the outside and made her balk on the inside, and she’d have beaten an immediate retreat, but Johan loved seeing her as his better, he basked in her radiance, he asked her questions, admired her eagerly and extravagantly, and in bed he was wonderfully diligent. She paid the bills, took him along to dinners and performances. He looked up to her, but she did not look down on him, she admired his grace, his devotion, he was funny and smart. For the first time since Jasja, she didn’t feel the need to follow the generally accepted confines within which relationships were supposed to take place. And she also realized that refusing to do so didn’t mean a lack of commitment, as in the on-and-off relationships she’d had since Felix. Once she came home when Johan was having some fellow students over. She was shocked by how very young they were, how much younger than she was, something she no longer noticed about Johan himself.
She happened to bump into him on the street a few weeks ago; they hadn’t seen each other in at least five years. He lives with someone called Frederieke, they have a baby. Sev took him home with her, the way she’d taken him home back in the day: a tribute, a small homage to the memory, and they slept together, also in homage to the memory. How does that work, time, she wondered; he had lived here in this apartment with her once, now he was back again, the exact age she’d been then, they had both had a baby. He was exhausted from the sleepless nights, he told her. Nights spent in bed beside Frederieke, she thought to herself. She touched his curls, she stroked his soft young skin, he felt familiar to her fingers, and it was as if something opened up somewhere inside her, as if her body were waking up from a slumber she hadn’t realized she was in. Ah yes, that’s who you are, they kept telling each other, ah yes, that’s what you like, as she licked his neck like an animal. This, she thought to herself, this once a week, not a relationship, let him just stay with his Frederieke and their child, but once a week let him come and make love to me like this. The thought made her cry, but she hid her tears because she didn’t expect he’d want to start an affair with her if he thought she was emotionally unstable or lonely, and because she wouldn’t know how to convince him they were tears of joy. Afterward they took a shower together, she made a pot of tea, they showed each other pictures of their children on their phones, they stared out the window and then said goodbye.
As it turned out, he wasn’t interested in having an affair with her at all; as far as he was concerned it was just that one time, he texted her back. She signed up for the dating site that very day. What she wanted wasn’t a companion, or someone to wake up next to. Did she want to fall in love again? She didn’t know, what she wanted was skin, a warm body, someone else’s desire, her own desire. Not a relationship, relationships were too complicated, and sooner or later turned into a tangle of responsibilities and obligations. A lover was what she wanted, but a kind one, and preferably with a cultured mind.
After the year with Johan, she’d been alone for a spell; she would see Jasja every so often when he was in the Netherlands, and then he would stay at her place. She met Ernst at a party. He wasn’t ambitious, he was a dreamer, gentle, caring. They were both thirty-five. Perhaps she wanted to have a baby after all. This was her chance.
“Mom?”
“Hendrik.”
“Can I go see if Simon’s home?”
“Yes, you may.”
“And if he isn’t home, can I go see if Koen’s home?”
“Yes, and if he isn’t in either, you’re coming straight back home again, okay?”
He puts on his sneakers and goes out.
The photos from the time Ernst lived here depict a sense of calm and happiness that she can’t remember. The house looks cozier, with pictures on the wall and their belongings displayed in such a way that clutter isn’t clutter but a carefully curated still life. The whole thing radiates serenity and tenderness, it all speaks of warmth, caring and love. Snapshots of Hendrik on Ernst’s lap, or Hendrik on Sev’s lap, nursing, asleep, in the bath, in bed, on a blanket in a park. And it must have been the truth—in the moments recorded for posterity, anyway. When Ernst was too ill to get out of bed for days at a time, and she had put Hendrik on his chest and taken a picture, maybe in order to show it to him, maybe to push him to get up and do something, what you see in that little relic of just one moment is a baby’s soft little body lying on the father’s large warm body.
The manager has sent her a message. She’s asked what he’s a manager of, and his reply is: people, and what those people do or make doesn’t matter. “Computers, cancer patients, automobiles, as far as I’m concerned, it’s all the same.” He asks if she owns a lot of shoes, and how long she’s been divorced. She says she doesn’t have very many shoes and asks if his divorce has shaken his belief in romantic love. She doesn’t want anyone who believes in romantic love.
-
Not staying means leaving
His friend spoke to her. Or, rather, he was speaking to Tirza, but he was looking at her at the same time. And he also looked at her, Rafik; now she knows his name. His friend asked what they were doing, where they lived, which school they went to, if they were sisters. Tirza stuck her nose in the air. Moroccers, she scoffed as they walked back, as if that explained it. Anyway, Krista had tried to compensate for Tirza’s snootiness by trying to look friendly; maybe he was too. The fact the two of them hadn’t really joined in the conversation meant they were having a kind of conversation of their own, a silent conversation, a conversation without words. She doesn’t think she looked as good as she wished she’d looked. She can’t wait to get upstairs, to look at herself in the mirror and see what he saw, to gauge how bad it was. She can make her face do exactly what it was doing when she said hello, she needs to see what that looked like. Rafik, a name like a color, like a bird, Krista and Rafik. His eyes brown, but green too, the way his neck rises out of his shirt in the hollow of his coat, his skinny chest, Rafik, the name of a prince, a hero, a knight in shining armor. Fire.
In the front hall she hears them fighting. She can’t make out what they’re saying but she does hear her own name. Dad is doing most of the talking. They’ll shut up as soon as she walks in the room, they think they can hide it from her, they’ve been fighting for days, and her dad has slept on the couch two nights already. Her mother’s beige coat hanging from the coatrack drags up something hazy, a flashback from the past, how long has she had that coat? It reminds Krista of swimming lessons, of sitting in the front seat when she wasn’t really supposed to, her mother whispering something in her ear, a winter vacation in Rome, the Colosseum, crisp winter air, her mother with her dad’s arm around her holding Krista’s hand, Ally’s head on her lap, reading to them about the wild animals and the gladiators who met their end down there in the arena.
When she opens the door her father looks up. He’s standing by the table, balled fist about to slam down on it. Her mother sitting across from him, her head in her hands. His arm freezes in midair. Terri, startled at the sudden silence, looks slowly up at him, then at her.
“Hi, Kris.”
“Don’t mind me, pound the table if you want.”
Her father stares at his fist.
“Yes. We’re having a row.” Duh.
“I’ll be upstairs.”
“Kris.”
“Yeah?” They’d better not start giving her grief about her coat, telling her to hang it up, she needs to see herself in her coat, with her coat on, with her coat on exactly the way Rafik saw her.
“It happens.”
“Really.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll make up again.”
“Whatev.”
“What?”
“Makes no difference to me.”
“Sorry?”
“Go ahead, I don’t care!”
“Kris!” Her mother’s not going to leave it there. She’s already halfway up the stairs. “Come back here.”
“Why.”
“Your tone of voice. Your attitude. Your coat.”
She zips her mouth, stares at her mother. Her angry mother. She hasn’t the foggiest why she’s so angry at her dad. Terri wants them all to behave the way she does, or the way she expects them to. She wants Krista to study Russian or Italian later, just because she wishes she’d done it herself, and because she claims Kris has her knack for languages. That’s such a bogus idea, that you’re supposed to inherit your parents’ talents and traits, it’s just a way to keep children prisoner. They don’t know a thing about her.
If she apologizes, she’ll be able to escape.
“Sorry, Mom.”
“All right, Kris.”
Incredible, the way parents accept two-faced BS as good manners.
“Aren’t you going to hang up your coat?”
“No, Mommy. I still need it. I’ll hang it up later.”
“All right, Kris.”
What asinine crap. She pastes on her sweetest smile.
“Could you keep the shouting down a bit? I’d like to get my homework done.” Before Terri can respond, she turns and stalks on, slams her bedroom door shut as hard as she can, and locks it. Slowly she wheels around to face the closet door. Krista, as seen by Rafik. Rafik, entranced by her gaze. Music, violins or something, or maybe Arabic chants, street litter eddying across the ground in the wind, the sun breaking through the clouds at that very moment, setting their hair aflame. No Tirza, no Mohammed, the square transformed into a wide-open plain, the houses into mountains. Fingernails scratching at her door.
