He starts to say something. Then stops. “Nothing,” he says. “So, Ana Lucia? Again.”
“Yeah. Ana Lucia. Again.” I can think of nothing else to add so I revert to small talk. “She sends her greetings.”
“I’m sure she does,” Broodje says, not buying it for a minute.
“You want to eat?”
“I do,” he says. “But the sauce isn’t ready.”
Broodje goes up to his room. I’m perplexed. It’s unlike him to turn down food, no matter how cooked it is. I’ve seen him eat raw hamburger meat. I let the sauce simmer. The aroma fills up the house and he still doesn’t come down. So I go up and tap on his door. “Hungry yet?” I ask.
“I’m always hungry.”
“Do you want to come down? I can make some pasta.”
He shakes his head.
“Are you on a hunger strike?” I joke. “Like Sarsak.”
He shrugs. “Maybe I will go on a hunger strike.”
“What will you strike for?” I ask. “It would have to be very important for you to go without food.”
“You are very important.”
“Me?”
Broodje swivels in his desk chair. “Didn’t we used to tell each other things, Willy?”
“Of course.”
“Haven’t we always been good friends? Even when I moved away we stayed close. Even when you were gone and you didn’t ever contact me, I thought we were good friends, and now you’re back, what if we’re not really friends at all?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Where have you been, Willy?”
“Where have I been? With Ana Lucia. Jesus, you were the one who said I needed to get laid to get over it.”
His eyes flash. “Get over what, Willy?”
I sit down on the bed. Get over what? That’s the question, right there.
“Is it your pa?” Broodje asks. “It’s okay if it still is. It’s only been three years. It took me that long to get over Varken, and he was a dog.”
Bram’s death gutted me. It did. But that was then and I’ve been okay so I’m not sure why it feels so raw again now. Maybe because I’m back in Holland. Maybe it was a mistake to stay.
“I don’t know what it is,” I tell Broodje. It’s a relief to admit this much.
“But it is something,” he says.
I can’t really explain it, because it makes no sense. One girl. One day.
“It is something,” I tell Broodje.
He doesn’t say anything, but the silence is like an invitation, and I’m not sure why I’m keeping this a secret. So I tell him: About meeting Lulu in Stratford-upon-Avon. About seeing her again on the train. About our flirtation on the train about hagelslag of all things. About calling her Lulu, a name that seemed to fit her so well that I forgot she wasn’t actually called that.
I tell him some of the highlights of a day that seems so perfect in retrospect, I sometimes think I invented it: Lulu marching up and down the Bassin de la Villette with a hundred-dollar bill, bribing Jacques to take us down the canal. The two of us almost getting arrested by that gendarme for illegally riding two people on a single Vélib’ bike, but then when the gendarme asked me why I’d done something so stupid, I’d quoted that Shakespeare line about beauty being a witch, and he recognized it, and let us off with a warning. Lulu blindly picking a Métro stop to go to and us winding up in Barbès Rochechouart, and Lulu, who claimed to be uncomfortable with traveling, seeming to love the randomness of it all. I tell him about the skinheads, too. About how I didn’t really think about it when I intervened and tried to stop them from hassling those two Arab girls about their headscarves. I didn’t really think about what they might do to me, and just as it was starting to dawn on me that I might have really screwed myself, there was Lulu, hurling a book at one of them.