A Widow for One Year

“You want to come inside?” the other asked.

Then they laughed uproariously. They suffered from no illusion that Ruth was truly interested in having sex with them. It was simply that the well-known wealth of the United States made it impossible for them not to try to entice Ruth with their abundant wiles.

“No, thank you,” Ruth said to them. Still smiling politely, she walked away.

There were only cleaning women in evidence where the Ecuadoran men had strutted their stuff. And on the Molensteeg, where last night there had been more Dominicans and Colombians, there was another African-looking prostitute in a window—this one was very lean—and yet another cleaning woman in another of the cubicles.

The desertion of the district gave it more of the atmosphere that Ruth had always had in mind; the look of abandonment, which was the look of unwanted sex, was better than the nonstop sex-tourism of the district at night.

In her all-consuming curiosity, Ruth wandered into a sex shop. As in a traditional video store, each category was afforded its own aisle. There was the spanking aisle, and the aisles for oral and anal sex; Ruth did not explore the excrement aisle, and the red light over the door to a closed “video cabin” prompted her to leave the shop before the customer exited the private viewing box. Ruth was willing merely to imagine his expression.

For awhile she thought she was being followed. A compact, powerful-looking man in blue jeans and dirty running shoes was always behind or across the street from her—even after she’d circled the same block twice. He had a tough face with the stubble of two or three days’ growth of beard, and a haggard, irritable expression. He wore a loosefitting windbreaker cut like a baseball warm-up jacket. He didn’t look as if he could afford a prostitute; yet he followed her as if he thought she was one. At last he disappeared and she stopped worrying about him.

She walked in the district for two hours. By eleven o’clock, some of the Thais had returned to the Stoofsteeg; the Africans were gone. And around the Oudekerksplein, the one fat black woman, possibly also from Ghana, had been replaced by a dozen or more brown-skinned women—the Colombians and the Dominicans again.

By mistake, Ruth turned into a dead-end alley off the Oudezijds Voorburgwal. The Slapersteeg quickly narrowed and ended at three or four prostitutes’ windows, the access to which was a single door. In the open doorway, a big brown prostitute with what sounded like a Jamaican accent grabbed Ruth by her arm. A cleaning woman was still at work inside the rooms, and two other prostitutes were readying themselves in front of a long makeup mirror.

“Who are you looking for?” the big brown woman asked.

“No one,” Ruth said. “I’m lost.”

The cleaning woman kept sullenly to her task, but the prostitutes at the makeup mirror—and the big one who held fast to Ruth’s arm— laughed.

“ I’ll say you’re lost,” the big prostitute said, leading Ruth out of the alley by her arm. The prostitute firmly squeezed and squeezed Ruth’s arm; it was in the manner of an unasked-for massage, or like the affectionate, sensual kneading of dough.

“Thank you,” Ruth said, as if she’d truly been lost—as if she’d truly been rescued.

“No problem, sugar.”

This time, when Ruth again crossed the Warmoesstraat, she noticed the police station. Two uniformed policemen were in conversation with the compact, powerful-looking man in the windbreaker who’d been following her. Oh, good—they’ve arrested him! Ruth thought. Then she guessed that the thuggish man was a plainclothes cop; he appeared to be giving orders to the two cops in uniform. Ruth was ashamed and hurried on—as if she were a criminal! De Wallen was a small district; in one morning, she’d stood out—she’d looked suspicious.

And as much as Ruth preferred de Wallen in the morning to what the district became at night, she doubted that it was the right place or time of day for her characters to approach a prostitute and pay her to allow them to watch her with a customer. They might wait all morning for the first customer!

But now there was barely time to continue past the area of her hotel to the Bergstraat, where Ruth expected to find Rooie in her window; it was just before midday. This time, the prostitute had undergone a milder transformation. Her red hair had a less orange, coppery tone; it was darker, more auburn—almost maroon—and her demi-bra and bikini panties were an off-white, like ivory, which accentuated the whiteness of Rooie’s skin.

By leaning over, Rooie could open her door without getting off her barstool; thus she was able to sit in her window seat while Ruth poked her head inside. (Ruth made a point of not crossing the threshold.) “I haven’t time to stop and see you now,” Ruth said, “but I want to come back.”

“Fine,” Rooie said, shrugging. Her indifference surprised Ruth.

“I looked for you last night, but someone else was in your window,” Ruth went on. “She said you were spending the night with your daughter.”

“I spend every night with my daughter—every weekend, too,” Rooie replied. “The only time I’m here is when she’s in school.”

In an effort to be friendly, Ruth asked: “How old is your daughter?”

“Look,” the prostitute sighed, “I’m not getting rich talking to you.”

“I’m sorry.” Ruth stepped back from the doorway as if she’d been pushed.

Before Rooie leaned over and closed her door, she said: “Come see me, when you have the time.”

Feeling like a fool, Ruth chastised herself for having had such high expectations of a prostitute. Of course money was the main thing on Rooie’s mind—if not the sole thing. Here Ruth was trying to treat the woman as a friend, when all that had really happened was that Ruth had paid her for their first conversation!

After so much walking without any breakfast, Ruth was ravenous at lunch. She was sure that she gave a disorganized interview. She couldn’t answer a single question regarding Not for Children, or her two earlier novels, without changing the subject to some element of her novel-in-progress: the excitement of starting her first novel in the first-person voice; the compelling idea of a woman who, in an instant of bad judgment, humiliates herself to a degree that she embarks on a whole new life. But as Ruth talked about this, she caught herself thinking: Who am I kidding? This is all about me! Haven’t I made some bad decisions? (At least one, just recently . . .) Aren’t I about to embark on a whole new life? Or is Allan merely the “safe” alternative to a life I’m afraid to pursue?

At her late-afternoon lecture at the Vrije Universiteit—it was her only lecture, really; she kept revising it, but in essence it stayed the same— her speech sounded disingenuous to her. Here she was, espousing the purity of imagination as opposed to memory, extolling the superiority of the invented detail as opposed to the merely autobiographical. Here she was, singing the virtues of creating wholly imagined characters as opposed to populating a novel with personal friends and family members—“ex-lovers, and those other limited, disappointing people from our actual lives”—and yet the lecture had worked well again. Audiences loved it. What had begun as an argument between Ruth and Hannah had served Ruth, the novelist, very well; the lecture had become her credo.

She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one—for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story—not necessarily what did happen or what had happened.