“It’s Wim with a
W,
” he told her the second time, because Wim was pronounced “Vim”—the first time she’d signed a book for him, Ruth had written his name with a
V
.
“Oh, it’s
you
again!” she told the boy. He was too pretty, and too obviously smitten with her, for her to forget him. “If I’d known you were coming, I would have read a different passage.” He lowered his eyes, as if it pained him to look at her when she looked back.
“I go to school in Utrecht, but my parents live in Amsterdam. I grew up there.” (As if this explained everything about his attendance at both her readings!)
“Aren’t I speaking in Amsterdam again tomorrow?” Ruth asked Sylvia.
“Yes, at the Vrije Universiteit,” Sylvia told the young man.
“Yes, I know—I’ll be there,” the boy replied. “I’ll bring a third book for you to sign.”
While she signed more books, the captivated boy stood off to one side of the line and looked longingly at her. In the United States, where Ruth Cole almost always refused to sign books, the young man’s worshipful gaze would have frightened her. But in Europe, where Ruth usually agreed to book-signings, she never felt threatened by the lovestruck gazes of her young-men admirers.
There was a questionable logic to how nervous Ruth felt at home and how comfortable abroad; Ruth doubtless romanticized the slavish devotion of her European
boy
readers. They existed in an irreproachable category, these smitten boys who spoke English with foreign accents, and who’d read every word she’d written—they’d also made her the older-woman fantasy in their tortured young minds. They’d now become
her
fantasy, too, which—on the train back to Amsterdam— Ruth was able to joke with Maarten and Sylvia about.
It was too short a train trip for Ruth to tell them everything about the new novel that was on her mind, but in laughing together about the available young men, Ruth realized that she wanted to change her story. It should
not
be another writer whom the woman writer meets at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and then brings with her to Amsterdam. It should be one of her
fans
—a wannabe writer and a would-be young lover. The woman writer in the new novel should be considering that it is high time for her to be married; she should even, also like Ruth, be weighing the marriage proposal of an impressive older man whom she is deeply fond of.
The unbearable beauty of the boy named Wim made him hard to put out of her mind. If Ruth hadn’t only recently suffered her miserable encounter with Scott Saunders, she would even have been tempted to enjoy (or embarrass) herself with Wim. After all, she was alone in Europe; she was probably going home to get married. A noregrets fling with a young man, with a
much
younger man . . . wasn’t that the kind of thing that older women who were about to marry even older men
did
?
What Ruth did tell Maarten and Sylvia was that she’d like a tour of the red-light district, recounting that part of the story, or as much as she knew: how a young man talks an older woman into paying a prostitute to watch her with a customer; how
something happens;
how the woman is so humiliated that she changes her life.
“The older woman gives in to him in part because she thinks
she’s
in control—and because this young man is exactly the sort of beautiful boy who was unattainable to her when she was his age. What she doesn’t know is that this boy is capable of causing her pain and anguish—at least I
think
that’s what happens,” Ruth added. “It all depends on what happens with the prostitute.”
“When do you want to go to the red-light district?” Maarten asked.
Ruth spoke as if the idea were so new to her that she hadn’t yet thought of the particulars. “When it’s most convenient for you, I guess. . . .”
“When would the older woman and her young man go to the prostitute?” Maarten asked.
“Probably at night,” Ruth answered. “It’s likely that they’re a little drunk. I think
she
would have to be, to have the nerve.”
“We could go there now,” Sylvia said. “It’s a roundabout way back to your hotel, but it’s only a five- or ten-minute walk from the station.”
Ruth was surprised that Sylvia would even consider accompanying them. It would be after eleven, close to midnight, when their train arrived in Amsterdam. “Isn’t it dangerous this late at night?” Ruth asked.
“There are so many tourists,” Sylvia said with distaste. “The pickpockets are the only danger.”
“You can get your pocket picked in the daytime, too,” Maarten said.
In
de Walletjes
—or
de Wallen,
as the Amsterdammers called it—it was much more crowded than Ruth anticipated. There were drug addicts and drunken young men, but the small streets were teeming with other people; there were many couples, most of them tourists (some of whom were visiting the live-sex shows), and even a tour group or two. If it had been just a little earlier in the night, Ruth would have felt safe to be there alone. There was mostly a tireless seediness on display— and the people who, like her, had come there to
gawk
at the seediness. As for the men who were involved in the usually prolonged act of choosing a prostitute, their furtive searching was conspicuous in the midst of the unembarrassed sex-tourism.
Ruth decided that her older woman writer and her young man would not find the time and place conducive to approaching a prostitute, although from the confines of Rooie’s room it had been apparent that, once one was in a prostitute’s chamber, the outside world quickly slipped away. Either Ruth’s couple would come to the district in the predawn hours—when everyone except the serious drug addicts (and sex addicts) had gone to bed—or they would come in the early evening or daytime.
What had changed about the red-light district, since Ruth’s previous visit to Amsterdam, was that so many of the prostitutes were not white. There was a street where almost all the women were Asian—probably Thais, because of the number of Thai massage parlors in the neighborhood. Indeed, they
were
Thais, Maarten told her. He also told her that some of them had formerly been men; they’d allegedly had their sex-change operations in Cambodia.
On the Molensteeg, and in the area of the old church on the Oudekerksplein, the girls were all brown-skinned. They were Dominicans and Colombians, Maarten told her. The ones from Suriname, who’d come to Amsterdam at the end of the sixties, were all gone now.
And on the Bloedstraat there were girls who looked like men, tall girls with big hands and Adam’s apples. Maarten told Ruth that most of them
were
men—Ecuadoran transvestites who had a reputation for beating up their customers.
There were, of course, some white women, not all of them Dutch, in the Sint Annenstraat and the Dollebegijnensteeg, and also in the street where Ruth wished that Maarten and Sylvia had
not
taken her. The Trompetterssteeg was not only too narrow for an alley; it was too narrow for an upstairs hall. The air was trapped in there, and a war of odors raged unceasingly: urine and perfume, so richly commingled that the result resembled bad meat. There was also a dry, scorched smell—from the whores’ hair dryers—and this stink of something burnt seemed incongruous because the alley, even on a rainless night, was wet. The air never moved enough to dry the puddles on the stained pavement.
The walls, dirty and damp, marked the backs and chests and shoulders of the men’s clothes—for the men had to press themselves against the walls in order to pass one another. The prostitutes in their windows, or in their open doorways, were near enough to smell and touch, and there was nowhere to look—except into the face of the next one, and the one after that. Or into the faces of the browsing men, which were the worst faces of all—alert, as they were, to the prostitutes’ hands flitting into the alley, making contact, and making contact again. The Trompetterssteeg was a buyer’s market; the contact was too face-to-face for mere window-shopping.
Ruth realized that, in
de Wallen,
one needn’t pay a prostitute to see someone having sex—the motivation for that had to come from the particular young man himself, and/or from the character of the older woman writer. There would need to be something, or something missing, in
their
relationship. After all, in the Erotic Show Centre, one could rent video cabins.
SIMPLY THE BEST,
the advertisement read. Or at the Live Porno Show, the promised sex was
REAL FUCKING LIVE.
And in another spot:
REAL FUCKING ONSTAGE.
One did not have to make any great or special effort to be a voyeur here.
A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed, a novel
should be
more complicated than it seems at the beginning.
There was at least some consolation to Ruth in seeing that the “SM Specials” in the sex-shop window had not changed. The rubber vagina that resembled an omelet was once again suspended from the ceiling of the shop, although the garter from which it hung was now black, not red. And no one had bought the comic dildo with the cowbell attached by a leather strap. The whips were still on display, and the enema bulbs were presented in the same (or a similar) selection of sizes. Even the rubber fist had endured the passage of time untouched—as defiant and unwanted as ever, Ruth thought . . . that is, she
hoped
.
It was half past midnight when Maarten and Sylvia returned Ruth to her hotel. Ruth had paid careful attention to the route they’d taken. In the lobby of her hotel, she kissed them both good night. The Dutch way—three times—but more quickly, more matter-of-factly, than Rooie had kissed her. Then Ruth went to her room and changed her clothes. She put on an older, faded pair of blue jeans and a navy-blue sweatshirt that was too big for her; it was not flattering to her figure, but it almost hid her breasts. She also put on the most comfortable shoes she’d brought with her, black suede loafers.
She waited in her room for fifteen minutes before leaving the hotel. It was a quarter to one in the morning, but she was not even a fiveminute walk from the nearest of the prosperous streets for prostitutes. Ruth wasn’t thinking of visiting Rooie again at this hour. But she did want a glimpse of Rooie Dolores in her window. Maybe I could watch her lure a customer inside, Ruth thought. She’d go back for a real visit the next day, or the following one.
Thus far Ruth Cole’s experience with prostitutes should have been a lesson to her: Ruth’s capacity to anticipate what might happen next in the world of prostitution was clearly not as developed as her skills as a novelist; one might wish that Ruth had developed at least a degree of wariness regarding her unpreparedness among women of this walk of life—for there on the Bergstraat, in what should have been Rooie’s window, sat a much coarser, much younger woman than Rooie. Ruth recognized the leather halter top that had hung in Rooie’s shallow wardrobe closet. It was black, the décolletage fastened by silver snaps, but the girl was too bosomy for the halter to be entirely closed. Beneath her deep cleavage, under the halter top, the girl’s flabby stomach overhung her black half-slip, which was torn. The waistband was ripped; the white elastic contrasted with the black of the slip and the roll of sallow flesh from the fat girl’s ample belly. She might have been pregnant, but the gray hollows under the young prostitute’s eyes revealed a degree of inner damage that suggested her capacity for conception was minimal.
“Where’s Rooie?” Ruth asked. The fat girl got off her stool and opened the door a crack.
“With her daughter,” the tired girl said.
Ruth was walking away when she heard a dull thump against the window glass. It was not the familiar tapping of a fingernail, or a key or a coin, which Ruth had heard from the windows of several other prostitutes. The fat girl was hitting the window with the big pink dildo that Ruth had earlier seen in the hospital tray on the table by Rooie’s bed. Once the young prostitute had got Ruth’s attention, she stuck the end of the dildo in her mouth and gave it an unfriendly tug with her teeth. Then she nodded indifferently to Ruth, and at last she shrugged, as if her remaining energy allowed her only this limited promise: that she would
try
to make Ruth as happy as Rooie could make her.
Ruth shook her head
no,
but she gave the young prostitute a kindly smile. In return, the pathetic creature repeatedly slapped the dildo against the palm of her hand, as if marking time to music only she could hear.
That night Ruth had a frightfully arousing dream about the beautiful Dutch boy named Wim. She awoke embarrassed, and with the conviction that the bad boyfriend in her novel-in-progress should
not
be a strawberry blond; she even doubted that he should be entirely “bad.” If the older woman writer was going to suffer a humiliation that would cause her to change her life, it should be
she
who is bad; one doesn’t change one’s life because
someone else
has been bad.
Ruth was not easily persuaded by the belief that women were victims; or, she was convinced that women were as often victims of themselves as they were of men. On the evidence of the women she knew best—herself and Hannah—this was certainly true. (Of course Ruth didn’t know her mother, but she suspected that Marion probably
was
a victim—one of her father’s
many
victims.)
Furthermore, Ruth had had her revenge on Scott Saunders; why drag him, or a look-alike strawberry blond, into a novel? In
Not for Children,
the widow novelist, Jane Dash, had made the correct decision, which was
not
to write about her antagonist Eleanor Holt. Ruth had already written about that! (“As a novelist, Mrs. Dash despised writing about real people; she found it a failure of the imagination—for any novelist worthy of the name ought to be able to invent a more interesting character than any real person. To turn Eleanor Holt into fiction, even for the purpose of derision, would be a kind of flattery.”)