“At least let me come over and explain,” he asked.
She let the silence build for a while, then said, “I guess I can spare a few minutes tonight.”
He arrived bearing wine and red roses and a shopping bag that smelled of lemongrass. She stood in her living room, arms folded,
face set like a stone.
“Before you say anything, let me talk, okay?” Charlie laid the roses at her feet. “I’m sorry. I apologize. I just got carried
away. But if I offended you, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.” He pulled her into his arms, fluttered his lips against her neck.
Her knees softened, and she leaned against him. Maybe she’d been too quick to judge. Maybe he hadn’t meant anything, after
all. “I just got carried away,” he said. “When a man’s around you he just naturally gets certain thoughts.”
The words pierced her heart like a scalpel.
A man just naturally gets certain thoughts.
He felt the change in her body and looked into her face. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
She felt sick. A knot seemed to have formed in her stomach. He was looking at her all wide-eyed and innocence, which only
made it worse. She pulled away from him, walked to the other side of the room. “Let me ask you something, Charlie. You ever
try to tie up one of your white girlfriends?”
“What?”
“It’s a simple question. Did you ever ask a white woman to do what you asked me to do?”
He stared at her as if she were speaking a language he could not understand. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about why you’re with me, white boy. I know what you think: black women, dirty sex.”
“I do not!”
Faith crossed her arms and smiled, though the tears were pushing up behind her eyes. “Sure, you do. I bet you couldn’t wait
to tell all your friends you fucked a black girl once and it was so good. Like eating chocolate, right? You could brag about
how she tied you up, how she whipped you and beat you, and then how you did the same, how you played Mr. Charlie and the slave
girl all night long!”
Charlie’s face blanched and then reddened. Clear evidence, she thought, of his guilt. White people were always changing colors
on you.
He whispered, “I can’t believe you think that.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” She glared at him for long minutes, until he dropped his hands and walked to her couch and collapsed here,
shoulders drooping and face down. They were silent then, listening to the salsa music drifting under her door.
When Charlie spoke his voice trembled. “I like you. I like you a lot. Maybe, if I examined my reasons closely enough, it might
have something to do with…” He let the thought trail off, then continued. “I don’t know. Okay, is that what you want to hear?
I don’t know. But I do know that I like you.
I like you.
Isn’t that enough?”
He’d brought carrots and lettuce drenched in sweet vinegar from a favorite Vietnamese restaurant and tangy barbecued ribs
from the rib joint down the street and noodles and spring rolls from the Thai place they first visited together, and, most
surprising, a whole fish, wrapped in aluminum foil, baked with thyme and lemongrass, from where she did not know. After he
left, Faith laid it all out on the dining room table, a cultural feast for two. She opened the wine and took a sip. California
red. It was good vintage but tasted bitter in her mouth. She spit it out, looked at the food without appetite. The fish stared
back with its cold and colorless eye.
_________________
by Janet McDonald
The square outside Centraal Station is jammed with bodies. Leaning against wood, sitting on concrete, and lying on grass,
eating, smoking, staring. Strangers at a picnic. Their guidebooks tout museums and tulips but they have been carried here
by the same current that has brought generations to Amsterdam—drugs and sex. Jesse ambles along with the crowd crossing the
canal bridge, past marijuana-breathing coffee shops, brightly lit currency exchange offices, souvenir stands, and eateries
that exhale falafel and pizza. In the distance beyond the canal, a red glow. The red-light district of shopping window sex
workers.
Just ahead, the “World’s Only Sex Museum.” She hurries by, tempted and revolted, the edge of the one feeling sharpening the
tension of the other. She glances at the sort of people gathered at the entrance. Tourists. Young. Couples. Innocents, she
tells herself, not perverts. A museum, after all, not a sex den. She turns back toward the elaborate porn parlor made safe
for dishonest tourists by the word
museum.
The tight space houses a chaos of paintings and sculptures, postcards and drawings. The body’s pleasured agonies displayed
in explicit splendor. Men bent naked over cows, women’s mouths on horses, stiletto heels pressed hard against flesh, nipples
and foreskin pierced by silver rings, buxom women with skirts raised above their penises, the fluids of humans and animals
running together, flowing, forming little pools.
Alien, unwelcome arousal. She shuts herself into a booth. A cushioned bench and an overhead beam. A guilder falls into the
coin slot and for three minutes a head moves up and down in a lap. Her hand slips inside her jeans. Another guilder drops.
And another. And another. A muffled groan and it’s done. She arranges her clothes, sets her face, and steps out into a group
of waiting teenagers. “Weird,” she says, adopting what she hopes is a believable look of disapproval. The day had darkened;
Jesse steps outside into the dusk and immediately swerves to face a nearby postcard stand. She stares absently at the cards,
then steps quickly away from the museum. The canals of Amsterdam tremble with reflected houses, streetlamps, buses, people.
An overloaded tram rumbles to a stop.
“Leidseplein?” she asks.
The driver answers with a stream of Dutch words. His smile tells her he’ll let her know when to get off.
“Leidseplein!” he announces.
Another packed square. People are playing wooden flutes, dancing with arms waving in the air, weaving on bicycles with raised
handlebars through tourists. A young woman with long, matted brown hair stops in front of Jesse and picks up a flattened cigarette
butt. She stares at it for a long moment, then stashes it in the back pocket of her grimy jeans. As she shuffles away, it
drops out of a hole and falls back to the ground. Above the Bulldog Cafe scowls a huge papier-mâché bulldog, a fat joint in
its mouth. Inside, stacks of Bulldog coffee mugs, Bulldog caps, and Bulldog T-shirts.
“Excuse me, uh, where can you buy… uh, I was told you could buy…”
Undoings in Amsterdam
“At the bar,” the cashier says without looking up from her magazine, “follow the corridor and turn right.” Jesse looks behind
her even though what she’s doing is legal where she’s doing it. Autographed photos of Chuck Norris, Run DMC, and other celebrities
hang from the walls. She finds her way into an obscure haze of heavy smoke. At the bar, figures sprinkle hashish and crumble
marijuana onto thin strips of paper. Others study floating tea balls. Music smothers conversation. The bartender is handsome,
a mane of tangled dreadlocks, green eyes, and a muscled, unpampered body. A dark tank top,
GLEASON’S GYM—BROOKLYN, NEW YORK,
boastfully tight.
“Hi!” exclaims Jesse, squeezing between two customers onto a bar stool. “I’ll have a beer.” The bartender sits a thick glass
on the counter, foam running onto her fingers. “Thanks. Hey listen, I’m from Brooklyn, too! We are everywhere, aren’t we?
I can’t believe it, my first time in Amsterdam and I meet another Brooklynite. How’d you end up here?” Jesse is relieved to
find familiarity in this stranger. Brooklyn bonding.
The bartender’s grin becomes outright laughter, her dimples deepening.
“Birth,” she says, her obvious accent sending a warm flush into Jesse’s face. “I am Dutch. Sint Maarten, Dutch West Indies.
Only the shirt’s American. A gift. So now it is my turn? How did you end up here? Holiday?”
A teenager straddles the stool next to Jesse, examining a silver ball bobbing in a teacup. He looks up at the bartender, then
at Jesse, then at the bartender’s shirt, and again at Jesse. Laughter is shaking his body, his head, the cup of marijuana
tea, but there is no sound from his mouth. The sight of the boy along with the Bulldogged air and her own embarrassment unleashes
Jesse’s laughter. Her hands cover her face, her stomach burning as if from sit-ups. At last she composes herself enough to
wipe her eyes and clear her throat. The bartender is still chuckling, dabbing up spilled tea near the boy’s saucer. He watches
the dishrag absorb the precious, pungent liquid and sighs, “Wow. Bummer.”
Jesse feels the woman’s eyes on her, and heat floods her face and neck. “Whew, sorry, well… anyway… where were we, oh yes,
what I’m doing in Amsterdam, yeah, I’m on vacation, I mean, holiday. Spring break. I’ve never been to Europe before. All my
friends said Amsterdam is heaven, so liberated, that it’s legal to buy…”
“Of course. See that bearded guy in the corner with the long, purple ponytail?”
“Don’t think I could miss him.”
“He is Mars. See our price list on the wall behind him? Go there. But come back, Brooklyn.”
“Jesse. And you’re…?”
“Come back, Jesse.” She waves her hand in front of the boy’s eyes. “Another tea ball, Loek?”
AFGHAN HASHISH—20 GUILDERS.
About fifteen dollars.
MOROCCAN HASHISH—25 GUILDERS.
Twenty bucks. Jesse reads down to the marijuana, hash brownie, and tea ball prices. The variety of choices is paralyzing.
She is not an experienced drug shopper and feels self-conscious under the fixed stare of Mars, looking either at or through
her. The easiest choice is alphabetical. Afghan.
The bartender sees Jesse using a spoon to chip off a piece of the rock-hard hashish. “You haven’t been smoking before now?”
“Not really. I tried them, I mean some, in high school but didn’t really like it, you know… felt kinda… I don’t know, guess
I’m a lightweight. But since I’m here…”
The bartender demonstrates with a match. “You hold it over the flame like this… see how it softens? Now it breaks up more
easily for rolling.” Her biceps move like fists as she turns her wrists back and forth, singeing the hash. The sleek joint
she rolls is as perfect as a cigarette. She puts it whole in her mouth, then pulls it out slowly, wettened. She brings it
again to her mouth, holds the match close, and lights it. Then she places it between Jesse’s lips. Jesse inhales. They observe
each other. Jesse inhales. And again. Her eyes close.
The stool squeaks. She twists. It squeaks. She giggles. Her eyes find Mars. He doesn’t bother to look away. She smiles. He
watches, expressionless. Someone hums at her back. She twists around, squeaking the stool. No one. She laughs a long time.
Swallows hard. Calls out, “Excuse me!”
“Yes, Jess, the very best,” answers the bartender, approaching. Her hair writhing rope and her breasts rising and falling
in a slowed motion that Jesse feels in her own body. She instructs herself to look elsewhere but is defied. The bar-tender’s
face warms to red as she watches Jesse’s eyes.
“Was that a poem? Are you a poet? A nameless, beer-pulling, Dutch Rasta poet? Behind the waist-high fortress. I’m so thirsty.”
The Dutch woman traces Jesse’s jawline with her finger. “You want a tea, little Jess at sea?” She walks off humming, two brimming
mugs in each hand, her thick forearms straining.
The tea-drinking boy is passed out on a nearby table of half a dozen slow-blinking smokers handling a water-filled glass pipe.
They don’t seem to notice him, but Jesse does. She tells the bartender she’ll go with ginger ale. “Not feeling too normal,
you know what I mean, Poet? Between the ponytailed red planet over there and you vibing me, well, what world am I in? What
world is in me?” She takes the soda the bartender offers and gulps it down. It chills her lips. “Being by myself and everything,
I don’t want to get too carried away.”
“I can carry you away,” whispers the bartender. Jesse visibly flinches. A second glass of ice and ginger ale is placed in
front of her. “On the house.”
Jesse inhales more warm, sweet smoke. She is soft focus, intense lightness, effortless concentration. She doesn’t see, but
feels, this woman exploring her visually, pausing here, lingering there. She redirects her awareness away from the quake in
her stomach. A. Afghan. Afghanistan. Where is that? Asia? Africa? Europe? Her thoughts race from continent to continent, in
search of Afghanistan. The enveloping sounds slow her to its rhythm. Lyrics in a foreign language. Doesn’t matter, she still
likes it. She recognizes a song. It’s in English. They all are. She has the CD. Is she smoking or breathing? She can no longer
tell the difference.
Pressure on her breast. A hand. Men squeeze. Women caress. This is a woman. Jesse opens her eyes onto the bar-tender’s. “I
want to touch the sexy Jesse.”
Hands warm on her face, lips soft on her mouth, tongues, breath. “I carry you away.” Whispered.
Time stalls in the moment, stuck where a woman reaches across a continent for a young stranger, brings her to a pool of heat.
Jesse’s eyes seek the door. “Maybe I should…” She is on the other side of the bar, much too close to the bartender. “Not here,
Poet…” The wall, soft wood behind her, holds her steady. Held yet falling. “I really shouldn’t…”
“Oh, but you should. This world you’re in, it is the old world. We love freely. Let it carry you away.”
Loosening buttons, belt, zipper; losing thought, words; lost in hands searching in thin cloth, in tangled curls, inside… finding.
The sudden, stunned gasp. Jesse shudders into the curve of the bartender’s neck, her legs no longer holding her. Aloft, she
is the smoke curling from mouths, the shadow in their lovers’ corner, the music blanketing sound. The blank eyes of Mars on
them.
Lights flickering white, red, green, blue, the tourist-bright colors of theater marquees and ice cream parlors. Outside noises
resonate inside Jesse’s head, a din of wheels, words, wind. The blinding streetlamp hums. She is in one place, then another,
not going to but suddenly being there, and there, and there, in one place, then the next. Movement without moving. She takes
in the thin, night air. Muscle lifts bone and flesh, heart drums blood, lungs pull air. Such relentless effort, constant,
unnoticed until moments like this.