Dear Mr. M (16 page)

Three days later, on Friday morning, they met up at Central Station. The first leg of the trip would take them to Flushing, then they'd go by ferry to Breskens, and after that take the bus—which ran only once every two hours—to Terhofstede.

As was to be expected, the thin boy showed up wearing his rubber boots. David introduced him to the others. The boy shook hands all around, starting with Stella.

“Hi, I'm Stella,” she said. From her cheery tone and the way the others were acting, it was clear that they had all been filled in on the boy's painful situation at home.

“Herman,” he said.

When he got to Laura, he smiled. “Hello,” he said. “We've met before, haven't we?” She thought he was only pretending not to remember her. He reached out to shake her hand, and his left hand joined the right. He laid it atop hers and gave it a little squeeze. “I just want to say that I'm so happy you invited me to join you,” he said. “I mean, the only person I really know here is David. Thank you, Laura.”

She looked into his eyes, which were more gray than blue, but with something glistening behind that gray, something much lighter, a winter sun appearing for a moment from behind gray cloud cover—it wasn't easy to hold his gaze for long.

“Of course,” she said, releasing her breath for the first time since he'd taken her hand.
So he's not a complete asshole,
she thought.
A complete asshole doesn't say things like that.

They found an empty compartment and, with a little shifting and squeezing, they all fit in. None of them had much in the way of luggage; no suitcases at least, suitcases were for old people. Michael was the only one who hadn't yet tossed his duffle bag up onto the rack. He unzipped it and pulled out a squarish bottle of Dutch gin.

“Anyone up for a shot?” he asked.

The bottle went around. David was the first to raise it to his lips, then Ron and Michael. Lodewijk, Laura, and Stella shook their heads. “It's only ten o'clock!” Lodewijk said. “Please!”

As last, the bottle arrived at the thin boy—at Herman. He took a slug; Michael was already holding out his hand for the bottle when Herman tilted his head all the way back, without removing the bottle from his lips. They watched breathlessly as little bubbles rose through the liquid, bubbles roiling to the surface like in an aquarium. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down a few times, the train rattled and lurched as it crossed a switch, and the mouth of the bottle came loose from Herman's lips, spilling gin down his chin and neck. He rested the bottle on his thigh and screwed the cap back on.

“So, now my parents are dead and gone,” he said.

For a few seconds it was very quiet in the compartment—only the sound of the iron wheels on the tracks. Herman wiped his mouth and handed the bottle back to Michael.

“Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you guys,” he said, looking at them one by one. “My parents are still alive. Unfortunately. All I did was erase them, I needed to do that.”

He laughed loudly, David was the only one who laughed along with him, but not from the bottom of his heart, Laura noticed.

“Do you…want to talk about it?” Stella asked.

Stella's father was a psychologist, but more than that: her father too had traded in his wife six months ago for one of his female patients, twenty years his junior.

“If I started talking about my parents, I'd bore all of you all the way to Flushing,” Herman said. “That's part of it. The other thing is that they don't deserve it. They're basically a couple of losers who should never have had children.”

Another silence.

“But don't worry,” Herman laughed. “I'm not a total downer. I'm really happy to be here. Really.” He waggled his head a few times, then closed his eyes. “Well, almost,” he said.

“If you ask me, you're just really pissed off at your parents,” Stella said.

Herman opened his eyes again and looked at her. “Not pissed off, no. Just disappointed.”

On the boat from Flushing to Breskens they bought gravy-roll sandwiches. David, Ron, Michael, and Herman had a can of beer along with theirs, Lodewijk had coffee, Stella a glass of mineral water. Laura drank tea.

As they lounged along the railing on the rear deck, David and Herman held up their half-eaten rolls to the diving gulls. Laura squinted at the water foaming around the hull, and then at the coastline fading into the distance. She thought about her own parents, with whom no one could find fault. On the contrary, all her friends, both boys and girls, agreed that she had the greatest parents in the world. “I wish my father was like yours,” Stella had said to her once. “What do you mean?” Laura asked. “I don't know,” Stella said. “Your father just has a way of looking at people that's so…so
normal.
Yeah, that's it! Your father looks at me the way he would look at an adult. And he talks to me that way too. My own father always has this pitying look in his eyes, and he always talks in that kind of undertone. ‘Maybe you'll understand it someday, Stella.' That's what he said to me recently. I don't know what it was about, just something stupid, about what time I had to be home or something. ‘I'm not one of your patients, Daddy!' I shouted at him. But he didn't even get mad. He just stood there with that pitying smile on his face.”

The boys were especially charmed by Laura's mother. She translated British and American literature into Dutch; the last few years she had also started writing poems that were published from time to time in literary journals. Her first collection was going to appear that fall. But when Laura brought friends home, her mother always stopped working and made the loveliest sandwiches for them. Poppyseed and sesame-seed buns with pickled meat roll, ham, minced beef, herring, and mackerel.

“You have really nice friends,” she had told her daughter once they'd all gone home. “Well, then?” she went on, after a pause, in a quieter tone. “Any of the boys you like more than the others?”

“No,” Laura said.

“That David—his name
is
David, isn't it?—he's very handsome.”

Upon which Laura said she was going to her room, she had homework to do.

Laura's father used to work as an editor for a national newspaper, but for the last eighteen months he had been presenting a popular current-events program on TV. The best part about him, as Stella said, was that he stayed so normal. He had every reason to get a swelled head. People on the street nudged each other when Laura's father walked by, sometimes they asked him for an autograph, which he always gave without complaint. Even during vacations on faraway foreign beaches, people would come up to him. “We don't want to bother you,” they would say, “but we saw you in the distance and my wife said to me: ‘Is that who I think it is?' Look, she's sitting up there in front of that café, could you just wave to her? Are these your children?” Laura's father never lost his patience with these kind of encounters, he waved to the woman in front of the café, he squatted down between the children for a photo, he handed out autographs on the backs of beer coasters, napkins, and placemats, sometimes with a big Magic Marker on a T-shirt, and one time even on the inside of someone's thigh, at a beach resort in southern Spain—the Dutchman in question was covered in tattoos and wore only a pair of swimming trunks, so he had rolled up one of the legs of those trunks, right up to his crotch. “Here, if you would,” he'd said. “I'll tattoo it on myself, later.” Laughing, Laura's father complied.

Not long ago she had gone out to lunch with him at a restaurant that had just opened. When they came through the revolving doors, all the customers looked up. Dozens of pairs of eyes followed as the waitress led them to their table—the best spot in the house, Laura saw, with a view of the canal. During lunch, too, people kept looking at them. Laura saw them lean over to each other and whisper, smile, then look again. But her father bore these gazes too with calm and patience.

“You know what's funny?” he said. “You're seventeen now.”

She stared at him blankly.

“You know these people are looking at us and asking each other: ‘Is he there with his daughter, or with some girlfriend thirty years younger than him?' Two years ago, they wouldn't have wondered at all. That's something new. Fantastic!”

Laura couldn't help but blush, but her father had risen halfway out of his chair and kissed her on the cheek. “So,” he said. “Now they have even more to whisper about.”

Ever since her father's face became a regular feature on TV, her parents' marriage had been accompanied by a never-ending flow of rumors about extramarital affairs. Photographs sometimes appeared in the gossip magazines, showing him leaving a nightclub or disco with a girl barely older than his own daughter. And there was that time, in one of those magazines, that a fashion model had claimed she'd been having a secret affair with him for almost a year. But her father dismissed it all with a laugh; he even brought the gossip rags home and tossed them on the kitchen table. “Look what they're writing about me now,” he said. “It's obviously a slow season for news.”

And Laura's mother laughed along with him. In the evening her parents still lay across from each other on the couch with their books, the way they always had, and filled each other's wineglasses. At school, though, it sometimes made things tough for Laura. Her friends tended not to read those magazines, but some of the teachers did. It was hard to put a finger on it: something pitying about the way Mr. Karstens, their physics teacher, looked when he asked about homework she hadn't finished; Miss Posthuma, in English, who never looked at her directly and always started shuffling papers around on her desk when Laura came up to ask about some British or American novel on their required list. You couldn't really know for certain, there might have been other reasons too. Mr. Karstens was short, and short men often don't like pretty girls. Miss Posthuma, as David once put it, was “clearly a reject, as a specimen of the female sex.” They had all laughed at that. “A specimen that should never have made it out of the factory.” Her homeroom teacher had called her aside one morning and asked if there was anything she wanted to talk about. “Your grades are generally quite good,” he said, “but sometimes you seem a little absentminded in class. Are you doing okay, or is there something you'd like to talk to me about?”

Her homeroom teacher was also their history teacher. His name was Jan Landzaat, and he had a friendly, not-unhandsome face, but his teeth were a bit too long. He was one of the more easygoing teachers, he would talk to you off the record, as though the two of you were on an equal footing. He was also one of the few teachers who came to class in jeans and a sweater; most of the others preferred sport jackets and ugly gray or light-brown slacks made of some barely definable synthetic material, with a sharp crease down the front of them. Those teachers probably thought this colorless outfit lent them a kind of natural authority in the classroom, but for the students it only undermined their credibility. How could someone who dressed like that, someone obviously so oblivious to the devastatingly ugly, actually have anything interesting to say about distant countries, exotic species, or writers at home or abroad? In class you always tried to look at a spot beside them or above their head, and generally maintained the greatest possible physical distance between yourself and the teacher in question. Whenever that distance was reduced, for example, when you had to come up to the front of the class, you couldn't help but notice that they emitted a peculiar odor, like wet clothing kept in a bag too long. Some of them had horrible breath too, that smelled like dead flowers in a vase, or, as in the case of Mr. Van Ruth, the math teacher, as though he had mashed a whole cheeseboard between his teeth the night before.

Laura looked at the fresh, boyish face of her homeroom and history teacher, tanned above the collar of his burgundy fisherman's sweater, and wondered whether it could really be, whether there was a real possibility that she could trust this man; that she could tell him that her absentmindedness had to do partly with the sport coats, the slacks, and the stench of rotten water in a vase.