Intimacies(10)

Once the waiter had taken our order Adriaan looked across the table at me again. How is Jana? Adriaan had not yet met Jana—they would meet for the first time that weekend, Jana had asked us to dinner precisely for this purpose. I had hesitated to introduce him to Jana, despite the fact that we had met through her, at least indirectly, at an opening at the Kunstmuseum not long after my arrival in The Hague. Jana had invited me to the event, and after introducing me to a group of people had subsequently been swept away, for obvious reasons she knew a great many more people there than I did.

I remember standing in that cluster of strangers, holding my drink and unable to follow the conversation, which began in English but then slipped into Dutch. At the time, I knew too little still of that language. I noticed Adriaan, because he seemed at ease and because he also said nothing as the conversation accelerated around us. I was silent for so long that I began to wonder if I could slip away, it was strange to remain at the edge of the group saying nothing. At that moment, Adriaan asked if I wanted another drink. I said yes, and then as he took the empty glass from my hand he paused and asked if I wished to join him.

I was relieved to leave that company. We walked through the gallery full of Mondrians and he said that he was very fond of the museum and its collection, it was one of his favorite places in the city. The openings were always strange to him, though, the galleries full of people talking to one another and ignoring the art altogether. Of course, he was doing the same thing right now, he didn’t have a leg to stand on. I laughed and then he introduced himself. As we continued walking through the gallery I said that I was new to the city and did not yet know the museum. He said that in that case I was lucky, there were many wonderful things to discover.

The encounter was not very much more than that, but after we had parted ways he returned and asked for my phone number. I remember that he made the request in a manner that was entirely natural and I also remember the jolt of pleasure I felt as I saw him coming back through the crowd. I gave him my number and later that evening he sent a message. He asked if we could meet again and I sent a single word reply: Yes. Such a response was not in character for me, not in its brevity and not in its unequivocal nature, it was as if I had been influenced by the directness of his own correspondence. That was, I thought, the prospect offered by a new relationship, the opportunity to be someone other than yourself.

When I told Jana about Adriaan she seemed almost perplexed, or perhaps it was some other feeling that crept upon her—in her expression I saw her image of me shift. She had not thought of me as the kind of woman who paired off with a man so quickly. It was only for a brief moment and then she was her usual self, she asked his name and then said she didn’t know him but looked forward to meeting him. I thought her voice was overly bright, I told her that I didn’t know that it would come to that. But it did come to that, over the course of the following weeks and then months and when Jana had suggested dinner it had been impossible to refuse.

Now, as I looked at Adriaan and he asked how Jana was, I was struck by how little thought or anxiety it seemed to cause him, the idea of meeting her. That again illustrated the differences in our character, such things were never so simple to me. My mind moved in circles, I had been apprehensive about bringing them together, but in his ease I was now reassured. She is fine, I said. I was there last night for dinner. It was odd, something happened in the street, there were police.

Was anybody hurt?

I don’t know.

At that moment the waiter arrived with the wine, and then with bottled water and a plate of amuse-bouches. Adriaan waited with his face fixed in a patient grimace, he no longer experienced these small attentions as anything other than a ritual to be endured. When at last the waiter had gone, Adriaan leaned forward and placed his hand on mine, as if to reassert our solitude. The gesture was reassuring rather than erotic, the touch of a friend or even a father, although it could turn on a dime, its intention mutable.

In any case, he said. Please don’t move to Jana’s neighborhood.

His voice was simultaneously concerned and a little playful, as if the words were a form of flirtation or invitation. I thought of his own home, the furnishings that had been chosen by his wife, the closed doors of the children’s bedrooms. The house had once belonged to his parents, and despite the fact that it had been extensively renovated, converted into two apartments because the place was too big for a single family, it remained the house he had spent the long years of his childhood in. That comfort was alien to me, we had moved so frequently when I was young that there was no one place I would think of as my childhood home, we were mostly arriving and then leaving, those years were all motion.

It was not the case with Adriaan, and I thought it was for this reason that he seemed so little troubled by the material remains of his marriage, all those things I would have removed at the moment of my desertion, out of pain and pique—the chair purchased by Gaby, the books on the shelves and the art they had selected together. He did not feel the complexity of those objects and their history, no matter where he was he never looked anything other than a man at home. I smiled and squeezed his hand in return. That tranquility was what had drawn me to him, but at the same time I understood a little better the determination with which Gaby had decorated the place and filled it with her belongings, the degree to which she was trying to occupy a foreign territory, in that action I was able to see beyond the failed marriage, and further into Adriaan’s past.