Slut Lullabies (20 page)

It would be five months before classes started in Holland, and Ginny couldn't work here for three years, until she could apply for legal residency. Meanwhile Lisle paid all the bills, leaving Camden and Ginny stuck in the apartment together like siblings home from school with measles. Though Ginny brimmed with plans for places to go, things to see, she spent her actual days fussing around the apartment, perusing Lisle's Andrea Dworkin library and watching CNN so she could complain about world events later when Lisle got home. Camden, under pressure, developed an unhealthy interest in the Torture Museum. He listened to the audio tour of the Van Gogh Museum until he could have written a paper on bipolar Vincent without even getting on the Internet. Every day for lunch, he ate apple pie stacked tall on a white plate. He learned not to feel rain.

The closest he came to picking up a girl was at an Irish pub, Mulligan's, with Lisle and his mother looking on. An abysmal folk band played loudly. The girl was with her mother too, who knew the band's singer. The girl's name was Roos, “the spelling of Rose in Dutch,” she explained. Camden quipped, “A rose by any other letters is still as sweet,” expecting the reference to be lost on her, but she replied in the flawless English that never stopped unnerving him among the young A'dam set, “Every American guy I've ever met has said some variation of that line, and I haven't gone to bed with any of them yet.”

Their mothers watched them talk but didn't speak to each other. Roos' mother, a painter, sat alone and silent, listening to the music and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Ginny and Lisle argued about the guitarist, who was Lisle's ex. Roos was pretty if tomboyish, with full, heavy breasts that he and his buddy Hugh would have nudged each other about back home. Camden broke the conversation off abruptly, though he watched Roos for the remainder of the evening. She had a stillness, like her mother. She was as tall as he and wore leather pants with sneakers. Her hair was short and dark, which almost made her appear foreign—he had never seen so many blondes—but her cheeks bore the unmistakable pink glow of a Dutch girl, even without makeup. Although she was dateless too, he felt embarrassed about being at the bar with Ginny and Lisle, but he saw restraint as a victory, indicative of his new life.

Aimee had leaned over, trying to whisper to him, breasts swaying. “After, it'll be the same, you and me? This'll be the only time he's with us, right?” Hugh's torso, stretching to intercept her path of intended intimacy, blocked Camden's access to her ear. Would he have warned her if he could reach her
? It'll never be the same between us either way—get up and leave right now. If you don't, this is only the beginning.
Then Hugh's hand, reaching to scoop her tit like an udder; vulgar kneading. Aimee's eyes, scared but aroused, rolling back. So easy—it was so easy every time.

Morality was paradoxical in Amsterdam: prostitution legal, soft drugs decriminalized. Locals didn't seem interested in it either. Some of his mom's friends back home had spouted that letting women do what they wanted with their bodies—to sell them if they chose—was liberated, even feminist, but Ginny told the Oak Park bipolar on the phone that it wasn't like that, it didn't look like what she imagined. Camden knew what she meant. He'd figured if there weren't so much stigma on sex for girls, everybody would have as much of it as possible. Women would hire hot guys for the night too, sure. Why not? But mostly boys his age and younger went for rent here, and old men did the buying. The commercial hype focused on women: bare breasts sold everything from soap to beer. Boobs were plastered on billboards, starred in the commercials before films. A poster selling ice cream at the Albert Heijn portrayed a female mouth giving a chocolate-covered bar head.

Even if you kept out of the Red Light District, there were mini prostitution clusters all over the city. Innocuously walking down the street, you might encounter a woman in her underwear, sitting in a picture window staring at you. The District itself had a giant German, British, and American frat party vibe, as if all the brothers were on X. Eastern European and Indonesian women in fluorescent bikinis stood behind elevated glass like animals in the zoo. The hot ones were up front, so gorgeous it was easy to succumb to the gawking, to figure the prostitutes must get off on their power. But the farther you walked among the labyrinthine streets, the more you encountered the fat, broken-down chicks, the hunchbacked, dwarfy, older whores behind their glass windows like circus freak-shows instead of proud lionesses strutting. The tourists of the District—nearly all male after nightfall—had a violent, frenzied undertow about them: you had to watch your wallet. Junkie-skinny drifters would offer to sell you H even if you were walking with your mom. The greedy desperation of it was more creepy than sexy—Camden only had to survey the revved up, shoving guys crowding the streets to wonder which were really the zoo animals. Man's neediness for a hole was embarrassing.

According to Lisle, Holland was light years behind North America when it came to women's “economic independence.” Ginny dully recited the statistics into the phone, seemingly only vaguely aware that she remained unemployed. When Camden left the apartment in annoyance, cabs at taxi stands displayed Yab Yum cards on their dashboards, receiving kickbacks for referrals to that infamous brothel where educated, beautiful Dutch girls would fuck your brains out for a price no sixteen-year-old could afford. In Amsterdam, those too lazy to go out to buy drugs could have Thai stick or skunk delivered to their homes. The Netherlands seemed full of contradictions: in busy restaurants, strangers cordially invited Camden to sit at their table—yet since he and his mother had been here, none of their Dutch acquaintances had yet invited them home for a visit.

“Friendship is not casual here,” Lisle explained. “It can take years, and then it is formal, like a declaration—
I think of you as a friend
. In the United States it's more like,
Oh I sat next to you on the airplane and told you my secrets and now you are my friend
. Here, we may be repressed, but our friendship is true.”

It seemed an odd thing to say for a woman who, at a poetry workshop in London, met an American tourist at a lesbian bar and proceeded to utterly disrupt her life in the course of a few months. The ground here was constantly shifting, sticky. Lonely.

Mei

He remembered her name visually: Roos. When he saw her selling tickets at Bananenbar, he would have turned and run had he not been with three English girls and a German guy from the youth hostel, all four engaged in hyped-up double entendres, full of hope for an evening of debauchery and trying to ignore the Disney World atmosphere of the tourist sex clubs.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, Minnie and Mickey will skate on ice naked. They may fall into each other's genitalia while they're at it, but don't worry—they won't enjoy it
. Roos stood in the doorway, sporting the same leather pants from Mulligan's, hair still shorn like a boy's, no lipstick to brighten her white and pink face. The first night he met her, Camden had thought she might be gay, but now he knew Dutch girls often went au natural. She held her hand out, smirking, though he didn't think she'd remember him. He wished the German guy behind him would take some initiative and deal with her instead.

Amsterdam had changed for him on Koninginnedag, April 30—not Queen Beatrix's actual birthday, but her mother's; a good time of the year to party in the streets for about thirty-six hours nonstop. Even preparations depressed Camden: the buzz of incoming travelers and never-closing bars and restaurants, of the city being transformed into a musical flea market of wandering musicians and market stalls. The thought of sticking close to the Isle of Lesbos while his mother waited on Lisle and her friends proved too much. He'd stalked off in the hope of finding a quiet corner in which to refrain from the bacchanal, but instead he saw students everywhere, his own age or a year or two older, descending on A'dam from all over Europe and the U.K.

They spoke to him as though he were one of them—they did not know he'd changed. He remembered how to form the words—the banter and bullshit:
What bands do you like
? and
Where have you traveled
? and
Wanna see my tattoo
? He woke the next morning in a hostel, full-bladdered and naked next to a girl on a tapestry blanket thrown over a straw mat.

All his vows—all his efforts—and how long had his atonement lasted? Just over a month. It was the same weakness; he couldn't trust himself. That evening at Lisle's, he had allowed himself to think consciously of Aimee for the first time since his arrival—
Stop Cam, I think I'm gonna pee
—of how suddenly her back had arched, torso flowing like a wave that lapped toward him and receded away, her shoulders limp in his arms after . . . he'd felt godlike and clueless, cocky and nervous as he held her. Remembering, he bawled into his pillow leaving wet circles of saliva, trying to hide the sounds from his mother and especially from Lisle.

But he'd gone back to the youth hostel. The crowd kept changing every few days or weeks, but usually there was some straggler remaining who could introduce Camden to the next pack of travelers, recent high school or college grads. They bore guidebooks, though they mostly got too stoned to do anything but sit at the Bulldog, nearly passed out at their tables. Until they met him. Camden knew things by now—knew to take fellow Americans to the “Boom Chicago” comedy routine at the Rembrantplein, knew girls loved the salad Niçoise at Café Luxembourg, knew that the shabby Dutch Flower coffeehouse around the corner was small enough that both employees and regulars greeted him by name, which carried high cachet for his new friends. (“The Bulldog and The Grasshopper are the Hard Rock Cafés of hash,” he told them. “They're industries that sell overpriced T-shirts, not real local flavor.”) At the Albert Cuypmarkt, he ordered in Dutch: olives, cheese, and other foods girls found romantic. Weather permitting, he rode his date on the back of his bike all the way to Vondelpark for a picnic and free classical concert. Most tourists, even the girls, thought of A'dam as a walk on the wild side—so he knew how to find Casa Rosso and navigate his “charges” inside before they could realize they were being taken to the Hard Rock Café of live sex shows, since anything off the tourist path would freak them out. He could tell which girls were hot enough to get into RoXY, and took them to the Bazaar Attitude flea market near his house to look for club gear in case ugly-American shorts and Nikes downplayed their lithe legs. He lied about his age: eighteen, a graduate taking a break before “university” to hang out where his mother's lover, “a poet,” had an apartment. He never mentioned that Lisle was wheelchair-bound. Once, after an exceptionally lousy blowjob, he admitted (through some kind of free association?) that the poetry Lisle wrote was bad.

Seeing Roos again shamed him, as Pavlovian as if he were face-to-face with Aimee. Stupid—the girl sold tickets to a sex club of all things! Still, she seemed a bitter reminder of his early days in A'dam when he'd believed himself capable of change.

Now she waved her fingers in front of his downcast eyes. “Hey, you aren't going to say hi? I'll tell your mother. They don't let anybody in at Mulligan's who doesn't have any good manners!” She grinned wide.

Camden blushed. He felt it all over his head like a rash, a scalp itch. At once, his face seemed all wrong—seemed to invite this tall, unkempt girl to find him obvious, to read between the lines of his life and agenda.
Pretty boy with three girls, showing off, looking to get laid. Trendy American tourist thinking he's decadent for going to see naked girls shoot bananas out of their snatches. GQ poster-boy poseur, little suburban twit
. Anything he did, with this face, would seem calculated, a contrived effort to be charming. If only he'd taken his new friends to Casa Rosso, even though he was so bored with that show he thought he'd kill himself if he watched Batman go soft one more time. At least then he would never have run into Roos.

Suddenly it dawned on him, how to turn things around. “I didn't figure you for the kind of girl who would work at a place like this.”

Roos sighed. “You Americans always say ‘this kind of girl' and ‘that kind of girl.' It's just like your politics—one party is for the rich white people, another for all the poor people and the immigrants, you say. You all believe it and run out and vote for this person, and you marry this certain type of girl, and I always wonder do you wake up one day and realize that any outsider can tell from watching your TV sitcoms or news shows that you are all exactly the same?”

“What a bitch,” a Brit girl muttered. The German guy snickered.

Camden felt hit by strange relief. “Go on in without me, guys,” he said. “I have to stay here and defend my country's honor to this totally misguided, but very pretty woman.”

“You can't just stand here and block the door,” Roos countered. “It's bad for business, for the male customers to see me talking to you.”

“Wat doen jij achter werk?” he whispered, unable to let her go but desperate for his chortling cohorts not to hear.

She let her eyes run down him, as though sizing him up for the first time. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen.” The four hostelers made noises of shock and irritation. Two swarthy men behind them made as if to push ahead. Camden said, “I'm going to go have a drink somewhere and wait for you. An hour? Two? Four? Where should I go?”

“Don't be so silly,” Roos said. “It's too rude to leave your friends.” Then, “So, you know, I do the same thing every Sunday. Meet me at the Engelbewaarder tomorrow afternoon, and maybe you'll like it, too.”

Juni

After four weeks, Sundays belonged to Roos. A phone call in the morning, then the routine began. He rode his bike to her mother's houseboat, also an art studio; he went inside for coffee. Roos would be reading the paper at the old, farmhouse-style kitchen table, which was full of dents, grooves, and smears of paint. Her cup would sit half full, lukewarm, no lipstick around the rim or oil from makeup floating on top of the coffee, so Camden would have a sip and wait while her mother poured him his own cup. Next came bread and jam, or sometimes cookies, but Roos and her mother took little interest in them. Sometimes people would drop by, to see Roos' mother's paintings or talk about an upcoming show, and they would come into the kitchen too, and her mother poured coffee. Camden would feel like an insider for already being perched on the wooden bench with his own lukewarm mug, his own section of the
Herald Tribune
. Roos' mother spoke little English, so all conversation took place in Dutch—Camden would only pretend to read, straining to understand. Whenever Roos spoke, she addressed him in English, as though they were a unit, conspirators. The thrill was inexplicable; he had to keep his face calm though he wanted to dash up and kiss her hard to show all the guests what was between them. Except that
wasn't
between them—not yet—and besides, he had garnered enough about Dutch reserve to know a display of messy, over-eager passion would only position him as an outsider again. So he sat, sipped, read, waited.