“You had an erection ?” Ruth asked Wim, when they were safely on the street again.
“Yes,” the boy confessed.
What wouldn’t give the boy a hard-on? Ruth wondered. And the little goat had squirted twice the night before! Were there men who ever had enough? But it occurred to Ruth that her mother must have liked Eddie O’Hare’s amorous attention. The concept of sixty times had new meaning.
It was one of the South American prostitutes on the Gordijnensteeg who said to Wim: “Half-price for you with your mother.” At least her English was good. And because it was better than her Dutch, Ruth did the talking.
“I’m not his mother, and we just want to talk with you—just talk,” Ruth said.
“It costs the same, whatever you do,” the prostitute said. She was wearing a sarong with a matching demi-bra—a floral pattern meant to represent tropical vegetation. She was tall and slender, her skin a kind of coffee-with-cream color, and although her high forehead and pronounced cheekbones gave her face an exotic aspect, there was something too prominent about the bones in her face.
She led Wim and Ruth upstairs to a corner room; the curtains were sheer, and the light from outside gave the sparsely furnished room a rural atmosphere. Even the bed, which had a pine headboard and a quilted bedspread, had the look of something one would find in the spare bedroom of a farmhouse. Yet dead-center in the queen-size bed was the expected towel. No bidet, no sink—no place to hide, either.
To one side of the bed were two straight-backed wooden chairs— the only place to put one’s clothes. The exotic prostitute removed her bra, which she put on the seat of one chair, and she unwrapped her sarong; she was wearing nothing but a pair of black panties when she sat on the towel. She patted the bed on either side of her, inviting Wim and Ruth to join her.
“You don’t have to undress,” Ruth told her. “We’re just talking with you.”
“Whatever you want,” the exotic woman replied.
Ruth sat on the edge of the bed beside her. Wim, who was less cautious, plopped himself down a little closer to the prostitute than Ruth liked. He probably already has a hard-on! Ruth was thinking. That instant it became clear to her what should happen in her story.
What if the older woman writer felt that the younger man was insufficiently attracted to her? What if he seemed almost indifferent to having sex with her? Of course he did it. And it was clear to her that he could do it all day and all night; yet he always left her with the feeling that he never got very excited. What if he made her feel so self-conscious about her sexual attractiveness that she never entirely dared to show her excitement (lest she make a fool of herself )? This would be a boy quite different from Wim in that regard—an utterly superior sort of boy. Not as much of a slave to sex as the older woman writer would have liked . . .
But when they watch the prostitute together, the young man very slowly, very deliberately, lets the older woman know that he’s really aroused. And he gets her so aroused that she can scarcely keep still in the wardrobe closet; she can’t wait for the prostitute’s customer to be gone. And when the customer leaves, the older woman has to have the young man right there, on the prostitute’s bed, with the prostitute watching her with a kind of bored contempt. The prostitute might touch the woman writer’s face, or her feet—or even her
breasts. And the woman writer is so consumed by the passion of the moment that she can do nothing but let everything happen.
“I’ve got it,” Ruth said aloud. Neither Wim nor the prostitute knew what she was talking about.
“Got what? What’s it going to be?” the prostitute asked. The shameless woman had her hand in Wim’s lap. “Touch my breasts. Go on, touch them,” the prostitute told the boy. Wim looked uncertainly at Ruth, like a child seeking his mother’s permission. Then he put a tentative hand on one of the prostitute’s small, firm breasts. He withdrew his hand the instant he touched her, as if her skin were unnaturally cold or unnaturally hot. The prostitute laughed. It was like a man’s laugh, harsh and deep.
“What’s wrong with you?” Ruth asked Wim.
“ You touch them!” the boy said. The prostitute turned invitingly to Ruth.
“No, thank you,” Ruth told her. “Breasts are not miracles to me.”
“ These are,” the prostitute told her. “Go on—touch them.”
The novelist may have known her story, but her curiosity—if nothing else—was aroused. She put a careful hand on the woman’s nearest breast. It was as hard as a flexed biceps muscle, or a fist. It was as if the woman had a baseball under her skin. (Her breasts were no bigger than baseballs.)
The prostitute patted the V of her panties. “You want to see what I’ve got?” The disconcerted boy looked beseechingly at Ruth, but this time it was not her permission to touch the prostitute that he wanted.
“Can we go now?” Wim asked Ruth.
As they were groping their way down the dark stairs, Ruth asked the prostitute where she or he was from.
“Ecuador,” the prostitute informed them.
They turned onto the Bloedstraat, where there were more of the Ecuadoran men in the windows and in the doorways, but these prostitutes were bigger and more obviously male than the pretty one had been.
“How’s your hard-on?” Ruth asked Wim.
“Still there,” the young man told her.
Ruth felt she didn’t need him anymore. Now that she knew what she wanted to happen, she was bored with his company; for the story she had in mind, he was the wrong boy, anyway. Yet the question remained of where the older woman writer and her young man would feel most at ease about approaching a prostitute. Maybe not in the redlight district . . .
Ruth herself had been more comfortable in the more prosperous part of town. It wouldn’t hurt to walk with Wim on the Korsjespoortsteeg and on the Bergstraat. (The idea of letting Rooie have a look at the beautiful boy struck Ruth as a kind of perverse provocation.)