“You’re very popular with young readers,” Maarten said.
“That’s not what Ruth meant, Maarten,” Sylvia told him. Ruth admired Sylvia: she was smart and attractive; she had a good husband and a happy family.
“Oh,” Maarten said. He was very proper—he actually blushed.
“I don’t mean that your boys are attracted to me in that way,” Ruth quickly told him. “I mean some boys their age .”
“I think our boys are probably attracted to you in that way, too!” Sylvia told Ruth. She was laughing at how shocked her husband had been; Maarten hadn’t noticed the number of young men surrounding Ruth at both her book-signings.
There’d been many young women, too, but they were attracted to Ruth as a role model—not only as a successful writer, but also as an unmarried woman who’d had several boyfriends and yet still lived alone. (Why this seemed glamorous, Ruth didn’t know. If only they’d realized how little she liked her so-called personal life!)
With the young men, there was always one boy—at least ten but sometimes fifteen years Ruth’s junior—who made a clumsy effort to hit on her. (“With an awkwardness that approaches heartbreaking proportions,” was the way Ruth put it to Maarten and Sylvia.) As a mother of boys that age, Sylvia knew exactly what Ruth meant. As a father, Maarten had paid closer attention to his sons than to the unknown young men who’d been falling all over themselves around Ruth.
This time there’d been one in particular. He’d stood in line to have his book autographed after her reading in Amsterdam and in Utrecht; she’d read the same passage on back-to-back nights, but this young man had not appeared to mind. He’d brought a well-worn copy of one of her paperbacks to the reading in Amsterdam, and in Utrecht he’d held out the hardcover of Not for Children for her signature—both were English editions.
“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.