“You’ll be back,” Rooie told her, but she let Ruth slip into the street without further physical contact. Then Rooie raised her voice, so that anyone passing in the Bergstraat, or a neighboring prostitute, could hear her. “You better zip up your purse in this town,” the redhead said.
Ruth’s purse was open, an old failing, but her wallet and passport were in place, and—at a glance—whatever else should be there. A tube of lipstick and a fatter tube of colorless lip gloss; a tube of sunscreen and a tube of moisturizer for her lips.
Ruth also carried a compact that had belonged to her mother. Face powder made Ruth sneeze; the powder puff had long ago been lost. Yet at times, when Ruth looked in the small mirror, she expected to see her mother there. Ruth zipped her purse closed while Rooie smiled ironically at her.
When Ruth struggled to return Rooie’s smile, the sunlight made her squint. Rooie reached out and touched Ruth’s face with her hand. She was staring at Ruth’s right eye with a keen interest, but Ruth misunderstood the reason. After all, Ruth was more used to people spotting the hexagonal flaw in her right eye than she was used to being punched.
“I was born with it . . .” Ruth started to say.
But Rooie said, “Who hit you?” (And Ruth had thought her bruise had healed.) “About a week or two ago, it looks like . . .”
“A bad boyfriend,” Ruth confessed.
“So there is a boyfriend,” Rooie said.
“He’s not here. I’m alone here,” Ruth insisted.
“You’re only alone until the next time you see me,” the prostitute replied. Rooie had only two ways of smiling, ironically and seductively. Now she was smiling seductively.
All Ruth could think of saying was: “Your English is surprisingly good.” But this barbed compliment, however true, had a much more profound effect on Rooie than Ruth had anticipated.
The prostitute lost every outward manifestation of her cockiness. She looked as if an old sorrow had returned to her with near-violent force.
Ruth almost said she was sorry, but before she could speak, the redhead responded bitterly: “I knew somebody English—for a while.” Then Rooie Dolores went back inside her room and closed the door. Ruth waited, but the window curtains did not open.
One of the younger, prettier prostitutes was scowling resentfully at Ruth from across the street, as if she were personally disappointed that Ruth should spend her money on an older, less attractive whore.
There was only one other pedestrian on the tiny Bergstraat—an older man with his eyes cast down. He would not look at any of the prostitutes, but he raised his eyes sharply to Ruth as he passed by. She glared back at the man, whose eyes were fixed on the cobblestones as he walked on.
Then Ruth walked on, too. Her personal but not professional confidence was shaken. Whatever the possible story was—the most probable story, the best story—she had no doubt that she would think of it. She hadn’t thought enough about her characters; that was all. No, the confidence she’d lost was something moral. It was at the center of herself as a woman, and whatever “it” was, Ruth marveled at the feeling of its absence.
She would go back to see Rooie again, but that was not what bothered her. She felt no desire to have any sexual experience with the prostitute, who had certainly stimulated her imagination but who had not aroused her. And Ruth still believed that there was no necessity for her, either as a writer or as a woman, to watch the prostitute perform with a customer.
What bothered Ruth was that she needed to be with Rooie again—just to see, as in a story, what would happen next. That meant that Rooie was in charge.
The novelist walked quickly back to her hotel, where—before her first interview—she wrote only this in her diary: “The conventional wisdom is that prostitution is a kind of rape for money; in truth, in prostitution—maybe only in prostitution—the woman seems in charge.”
Ruth had a second interview over lunch, and a third and fourth after lunch. She should have tried to relax then, because she had an early-evening reading, followed by a book-signing and then a dinner. But instead, Ruth sat in her hotel room, where she wrote and wrote. She developed one possible story after another, until the credibility of each felt strained. If the woman writer watching the prostitute perform was going to feel humiliated by the experience, whatever came of the experience sexually had to happen to the woman writer; somehow, it had to be her sexual experience. Otherwise, why would she feel humiliated?
The more Ruth made an effort to involve herself in the story she was writing, the more she was delaying or avoiding the story she was living . For the first time, she knew what it felt like to be a character in a novel instead of the novelist (the one in charge)—for it
was as a character that Ruth saw herself returning to the Bergstraat, a character in a story she wasn’t writing.
What she was experiencing was the excitement of a reader who needs to know what happens next. She knew she wouldn’t be able to keep herself away from Rooie. Irresistibly, she wanted to know what would happen . What would Rooie suggest? What would Ruth allow Rooie to do?
When, if only for a moment, the novelist steps out of the creator’s role, what roles are there for the novelist to step into? There are only creators of stories and characters in stories; there are no other roles. Ruth had never felt such anticipation before. She felt she had absolutely no will to take control of what happened next; in fact, she was exhilarated not to be in charge. She was happy not to be the novelist. She was not the writer of this story, yet the story thrilled her.
Ruth Changes Her Story
Ruth stayed after her reading to sign books. Then she had dinner with the sponsors of the signing. And the following evening in Utrecht, after her reading at the university there, she also signed books. Maarten and Sylvia helped Ruth with the spelling of the Dutch names.
The boys wanted their books inscribed, “To Wouter”—or to Hein, Hans, Henk, Gerard, or Jeroen. The girls’ names were no less foreign to Ruth. “To Els”—or to Loes, Mies, Marijke, or Nel (with one l ). And then there were those readers who wanted their last names included in the inscription. (The Overbeeks, the Van der Meulens, and the Van Meurs; the Blokhuises and the Veldhuizens; the Dijkstras and the De Groots and the Smits.) These book-signings were such arduous exercises in spelling that Ruth left both readings with a headache.
But Utrecht and its old university were beautiful. Before her reading, Ruth had had an early dinner with Maarten and Sylvia and their grown sons. Ruth could remember when they’d been “little” boys; now they were taller than she was and one of them had grown a beard. To Ruth, still childless at thirty-six, one of the shocks of knowing couples with children was the disquieting phenomenon of how the children grew.
On the train back to Amsterdam, Ruth told Maarten and Sylvia of her lack of success with boys the age of their sons—that is, when she’d been their age. (The summer she’d come to Europe with Hannah, the more attractive boys had always preferred Hannah.)
“But now it’s embarrassing. Now boys the age of your boys like me.”