“I know what I know,” Lien says.
They all argue over this and I find myself wishing for the anonymity of the road, where you had no past and no future either, just that one moment in time. And if that moment happened to get sticky or uncomfortable, there was always a train departing to the next moment.
“Well, if he does have a broken heart or blue balls, the cure is the same,” Broodje says.
“And what’s that?” Lien asks.
“Getting laid,” Broodje and Henk crow together.
It’s too much. “I’ve gotta piss,” I say, standing up.
In the bathroom, I splash water on my face. I stare in the mirror. The scar is still red and angry, aggravated, as though I’ve been picking at it.
Outside, the corridor is crowded, another film having just let out, not the de Bont but one of those treacly British romantic comedies, the kind that promise an everlasting love in two hours.
“Willem de Ruiter, as I live and breathe.”
I turn around, and coming out of the cinema, her eyes misty with fabricated emotion, is Ana Lucia Aurelanio.
I stop, letting her catch up. We kiss hello. She gestures for her friends, people I recognize from University College, to go on ahead. “You never called me,” she says, adjusting her face into a little girl pout that somehow looks charming on her, though almost anything would.
“I didn’t have your number.” I say. I have no reason to be sheepish, but it’s like a reflex.
“But I gave it to you. In Paris.”
Paris. Lulu. The feelings from the movie start to come back, but I push back against them. Paris was make-believe. No different from the romantic movie Ana Lucia just saw.
Ana Lucia leans in. She smells good, like cinnamon and smoke and perfume.
“Why don’t you give me your number again,” I say, pulling out my phone. “So I can call you later.”
“Why bother?” she says.
I shrug. I’d heard rumors she wasn’t too happy when things ended last time. I put my phone away.
But then she grabs my hand in hers. Mine is cold. Hers is hot. “I mean why bother calling me later when I’m right here, right now?”
And she is. Here now. And so am I.
The cure is the same, I hear Broodje say.
Maybe it is.
Ten
NOVEMBER
Utrecht
Ana Lucia’s dorm is like a cocoon, thick feather quilts, radiators hissing full blast, endless cups of custard-like hot chocolate. For the first few days, I am content just to be here, with her.
“Did you ever think we’d get back together?” she coos, snuggling up to me like a warm little kitten.
“Hmm,” I say, because there’s no right way to answer that. I never thought we’d get back together because I never considered us together in the first place. Ana Lucia and I had a three, maybe four-week fling in that hazy spring after Bram died, when I was spectacularly floundering in school but also spectacularly succeeding with women. Though succeeding isn’t the right word, exactly. It implies a kind of effort, when really, it was the one thing in my life that was effortless.
“I did,” she says, nibbling my ear. “I thought about you so much these past few years. And then we bumped into each other in Paris, and it felt like it meant something, like fate.”