“I did,” she says, nibbling my ear. “I thought about you so much these past few years. And then we bumped into each other in Paris, and it felt like it meant something, like fate.”
“Hmmm,” I repeat. I remember bumping into her in Paris and also feeling like it meant something, but not fate. More like the encroachment, a day too soon, of a world I’d left behind.
“But then you didn’t call me,” she says.
“Oh, you know. Something came up.”
“I’m sure something did.” Her hand drifts between my legs. “I saw you with that girl. In Paris. She was pretty.”
She says it offhandedly, dismissively even, but something skitters to life in my gut. A kind of warning. Ana Lucia’s hand is still between my legs and it’s having the intended effect, but now Lulu’s somewhere in the room, too. Just like that day in Paris, when I ran into Ana Lucia and her cousins while I was in the Latin Quarter with Lulu, I want nothing but distance between these two girls.
“She was pretty, but you’re beautiful.” I say it, trying to steer the conversation away. My words are true, but meaningless. Though Ana Lucia is probably technically prettier than Lulu, such contests are rarely won on technicalities.
Her grip tightens. “What was her name?” she asks.
I don’t want to say her name. But Ana Lucia has me firmly in hand and if I don’t say it, I’ll arouse suspicion. “Lulu,” I say into the pillow. It’s not even her real name, but it feels like a betrayal.
“Lulu,” Ana Lucia says. She lets go of me and sits up in the bed. “A French girl. Was she your girlfriend?”
Morning light is filtering through the window, pale and gray and tinting everything in here slightly greenish. Somehow, the gray dawn light had made Lulu glow in that white room.
“Of course not.”
“Just another one of your flings then?” Ana Lucia’s laughter answers her own question; the knowingness irks me.
That night in the art squat, after everything, Lulu had smudged her finger against her wrist, and I’d done the same. A kind of code for stain, for something that lasts, even if you might not want it to. It had meant something, in that moment at least. “You know me,” I say lightly.
Ana Lucia laughs again, the sound of it throaty and full, rich and indulgent. She climbs on top of me, straddling my hips. “I do know you,” she says, her eyes flashing. She runs a finger down my center line. “I know what you’ve been through now. I didn’t understand before. But I’ve grown up. You’ve grown up. I think we’re both different people, with different needs.”
“My needs haven’t changed,” I tell her. “They’re the same as they ever were. Very basic.” I yank her toward me. I’m still angry at her, but her invoking of Lulu’s name has riled me up. I finger the lace along the trim of her camisole. I dip a finger under the straps.
Her eyes flutter closed for a minute and I close mine, too. I feel the give of the bed and the trail of her waxy kisses on my neck. “Dime que me quieres,” she whispers. “Dime que me necesitas.” Tell me you want me. Tell me you need me.
I don’t tell her because she’s speaking Spanish, which she doesn’t realize I now understand. I keep my eyes closed, but even in darkness I hear a voice telling me she’ll be my mountain girl.
“I’ll take care of you,” Ana Lucia says, and I jump in the bed at hearing Lulu’s words come out of Ana Lucia’s mouth.
But as Ana Lucia’s head dips under the covers, I realize it’s a different kind of taking care she’s talking about. It’s not the kind I really need. But I don’t refuse it.
Eleven
After two weeks ensconced in Ana Lucia’s dorm, I make my way back to Bloemstraat. It’s quiet, a welcome change from the constant hubbub in and around the University College campus, everyone in everyone’s business.
In the kitchen, I open the cupboards. Ana Lucia has been bringing me back cafeteria food or ordering takeout, charging it away on her father’s credit cards. I crave something real.
There’s not much here, a couple of bags of pasta and some onions and garlic. There’s a can of tomatoes in the pantry. Enough for a sauce. I start to chop the onions and my eyes immediately tear. They always do this. Yael’s too. She never cooked much, but occasionally she’d get homesick for Israel, and she’d play bad Hebrew pop music and make shakshouka. I might be all the way upstairs in my room and I’d feel the burn. I’d gravitate down to the kitchen. Bram would find us sometimes, together and red-eyed, and he’d laugh and ruffle my hair and kiss Yael and joke that chopping onions was the only time you’d ever catch Yael Shiloh crying.
Around four, I hear the key click in the lock. I call out a hello.
“Willy, you’re back. And you’re cook—” Broodje says as he turns the corner into the kitchen. Then he stops midsentence. “What’s wrong?”
“Huh?” And then I realize he means my tears. “Just the onions,” I explain.
“Oh,” Broodje says. “Onions.” He picks up the wooden spoon and swirls it in the sauce, blows, then tastes. Then he reaches into the pantry for several dried herbs and rubs them between his fingers before sprinkling them in. He gives a few shakes of salt and several turns of the pepper mill. Then he turns the flame down low and puts on the lid. “Because if it’s not the onions . . .” he says.
“What else would it be?”
He shuffles his foot against the floor. “I’ve been worried about you since that night,” he says. “What happened after the movie.”
“What about it?” I say.
He starts to say something. Then stops. “Nothing,” he says. “So, Ana Lucia? Again.”
“Yeah. Ana Lucia. Again.” I can think of nothing else to add so I revert to small talk. “She sends her greetings.”
“I’m sure she does,” Broodje says, not buying it for a minute.
“You want to eat?”
“I do,” he says. “But the sauce isn’t ready.”
Broodje goes up to his room. I’m perplexed. It’s unlike him to turn down food, no matter how cooked it is. I’ve seen him eat raw hamburger meat. I let the sauce simmer. The aroma fills up the house and he still doesn’t come down. So I go up and tap on his door. “Hungry yet?” I ask.
“I’m always hungry.”
“Do you want to come down? I can make some pasta.”
He shakes his head.
“Are you on a hunger strike?” I joke. “Like Sarsak.”
He shrugs. “Maybe I will go on a hunger strike.”
“What will you strike for?” I ask. “It would have to be very important for you to go without food.”
“You are very important.”
“Me?”
Broodje swivels in his desk chair. “Didn’t we used to tell each other things, Willy?”
“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.