Happy Baby (6 page)

“C’mon now, Angel,” Ambellina says, unfastening the gag, sliding her fingers inside my cheeks to pull the puck from my mouth. “I’m taking you home.”

I’M DREAMING OF my wife. I’m remembering her when she was pregnant, and then when she wasn’t pregnant anymore. She was long and thin again after her pregnancy and I could fall asleep with her on top of me. She was so light I could barely feel her.

I scratch at my shoulder blades as I wake up and hear water boiling over a pot and spilling into a fire. The cotton sheet rides to my knees. I remember that I’m in Amsterdam and I haven’t seen my wife Zahava in years. There’s a woman in front of me at an ironing board wearing socks that don’t reach her ankles, her legs naked until her shirt begins at her thighs. She’s looking down on me. Her white T-shirt is so bright it appears out of focus. I wonder if she is going to hit me with the iron.

“I don’t know you,” I say.

“You will,” she says. She stands the iron on its heels. Her calves stretching, she jerks the plug from the wall.

Her name is Jessie and she’s a friend of my roommate Toine, who has left for work already. Toine and I share a small flat in the Jordan: two rooms with no doors, the shower hanging over the toilet, the kitchen the length and width of a plank.

There’s a packet of croissants between Jessie and me with the plastic ripped open. We lean against the counters and eat from plates we hold with one hand. She’s taller than me but not as tall as Toine. She’s beautiful, I think, though I didn’t notice it right away. She’s big-boned, like the Dutch, but with black hair, and her skin is the color of sand.

“Toine and I met in college,” Jessie says. “I don’t suppose he ever mentioned me?”

“We’ve only lived together for a couple of months,” I say. She watches me eating and I cover my mouth. “He’s moving soon. He never mentioned you.”

“Of course not. Why would he? You’re just roommates, right?” She lays her plate on the counter, next to the wood block and the knives. “But we were very close. He wanted to marry me, except that we were political. Can you imagine Toine at a protest?”

“No.” I place my plate in the sink and brush my hands together. “I have to go to work.” I squeeze between Jessie and the fridge to grip the tap, run a stream of water over my plate and pull the pan she cooked eggs in from the stove, wipe it twice with a rag and hang it on the wall. Jessie hasn’t moved; she’s waiting for something and I frown and smile at the same time to show her I’m in a hurry.

“You don’t have to look at me like that. I have work to do as well. I’m not some crazy person, you know. I’m not a stalker.”

“I never said you were a stalker.”

“I’ve just returned from Africa,” she tells me. “Ever been? I was doing very important work there. There’s a report I have to write. Tell Toine I’ll still be here when he gets home.”

***

It’s a damp Dutch day and the bricks in the street are wet. The tourists haven’t woken yet but the laundries are open and some of the hookers have turned on the lights in their windows. Toine is across from the fountain before the theater Casa Rosso, standing in front of the kiosk. He wears his dark blue suit and tie, his toes pointed toward the short rail that borders the canal. He seems to be considering what to do about the water.

“Up early,” I say, shoving my hands in my pockets and spitting at the canal.

“Up Simba,” he says and flips his cigarette into the canal. He looks the way he always looks, happy, disgusted, bored. “I was restless. I thought I’d leave you Jessie.”

“What’s wrong with her?” I say. “There’s something wrong with her.”

“She doesn’t know when she isn’t wanted. You would make a nice couple.”

“She’s beautiful,” I say.

“I’ll tell you something about beauty. She left Holland years ago to save the world. She thought she would spread a curtain and wrap the hungry children in it and they wouldn’t be hungry anymore. Now she comes back because I have a career. She arrived last night with her bags while you were sleeping. Can you imagine?” He shakes his head. He takes a flat pad of tickets from inside the empty ticket booth and hands them to me, then reaches into his pocket for some coins. “Have you had coffee?”

“No.”

“Here’s three gulden. Get two cups from Harry.”

Where I work it looks like a theater, a smaller version of where Toine stands, but it isn’t. There are pictures from the actual show cased in glass along the outside: Hank and Melinda fucking on a trapeze, Miriam sticking a banana in her pussy, Lucy smoking a cigar with her vagina, the lesbians. The stairs are carpeted and lead to a small landing with a podium where I write my tickets in front of a wall full of mirrors and what looks like a door with a golden handle. But it’s all an illusion. The door opens to a storage closet where costumes are kept. There’s no show here. This is just a rented storefront. The show is down the street, where the windows cost more, where it’s so crowded on the weekends your shoulders get stuck. But some people come in this way.

“Live sex show,” I call out. “See Mickey’s mouse.” I sell a couple of tickets before noon. I write out a card on the podium and initial my name at the bottom of it next to the price they paid. I make eight percent on each ticket plus the first sixty gulden. I can charge between fifteen and fifty gulden. The customers wait in front of the golden handle to the storage closet for me to open the door for them. “It’s not there,” I say, tucking the ticket pad into my pocket. “Follow me.”

“Where are you going?” an American in a rugby shirt asks, reaching for my collar. “Give me my money back.”

I avoid his hand. “I’m taking you to the theater.”

“I thought this was the theater.”

“You’ll be happy when you see it.” I try to walk quickly to stay ahead of them, but not so quick they panic. “You see,” I say, arriving at the Casa Rosso, pointing toward the facade. “It’s not a fake.”

“You’re a fake,” the man says. “You’re a fucking clown.”

“You can go in now,” Toine says. He takes their tickets and folds the slips into his pile, then opens the door for them. “You’re having a day,” he says to me. “Good for you.”

“OK. Two hundred gulden. How about you?”

“Sometimes more, sometimes less.” He takes his cigarette from his mouth and turns his hands over so the cigarette disappears. He turns his hands back and the cigarette is still gone, but his hands are both smoking. He smiles at me and the cigarette slides from between his lips, the smoke channeling along his cheeks. Then I walk back to my spot and try again.

After leaving Chicago, I traveled for almost two years before I wound up here. My wife had been staying with her lover in his condominium. I offered to move in with them and stay in the other room and she looked at me like I was some kind of monster, but I was the one looking for a solution. “I mean it,” I said. “You won’t even know I’m there.”

She walked away. It was too much for me, the apartment without her. I didn’t mean to end up in Amsterdam. But this is where I ran out of money and found a job.

I don’t work often at night, which is when the Banana Bar opens and the barkers make most of their money. It’s after seven now and I’m drinking and watching Adel, the Nigerian prostitute. She rents the most expensive window in the red light district, just around the corner from the main theater. It’s getting dark and the streetlamps are coming on along with the fluorescent bars along the top of the windows. The streets are pink.

Toine works the evening shift and I hear him calling tourists. Through the mist I can make out the edge of the neon sign pointing north. I watch Adel from a safe distance near the New Bridge. Toine sleeps with her sometimes and tells me she doesn’t charge him.

This is where I spend my evenings. A student is playing guitar on the bridge. The student’s friend dances on his heels, like something out of a children’s book, and waves a fedora around for change. The pickpockets are looking for customers. The Nigerian pushes herself up on her toes. I lean against the pylon as the streets swell. The owner of the bar on the far end of the district comes floating past with his dog at the wheel of his short barge.

I should go but I stay here where it’s light and noisy, the air filled with reefer, urine, and perfume. Hypodermics and trash float against the canal walls. Toine’s friend Jessie is home alone, probably setting our apartment on fire. Behind us, a man painted green is stripped to the waist and juggling bowling balls as if they were balloons. Toine’s baritone hovers over all of it like an umbrella. “Step right up, young lovers. You’re not here for the architecture. Ladies and gentlemen, step right up.”

Late, when the last show has already begun, I return to the theater. Yuen holds the door open for me, parting his gold teeth, holding his suitcase with his other hand. I climb the red carpets into the balcony where the bar is. Jessie stands with Toine. She’s changed into a flowered shirt and white slacks that hug her waist and she looks transformed from this morning and innocent among the salesmen here, all of whom wear dark suits. “I hope you got a discount,” I tell her and she laughs. She touches my shoulder.

“Someone’s been drinking already,” Jessie says.

Taco is bartending. A necklace of coconut halves is strung over the entrance to the dressing room. Miriam in her grass skirt is saying something quiet and urgent to Rynant the bouncer.

“Where did you go?” Toine asks. “I thought you would keep Jessie company after you got off, but you never went home.”

“He doesn’t like me,” Jessie says. “He’s afraid of girls.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “I tied one on.”

“Allow yourself to be teased,” Jessie says. “You’ll enjoy life more.”

“Don’t lecture people,” Toine tells her. “They don’t like it.”

Jessie makes a pouty face and pinches Toine’s elbow.

“She’s dangerous,” he jokes, leaning forward so the bar lights crawl under his chin. “Imagine, coming back to me after so many years. What could be more corrupt?”

“Beer, Theo?” Taco asks.

“Yes. And one for my friends.”

Miriam emerges on the stage below us, wearing a cape, dancing to Surinamese drum rhythms, and Hank scrambles out behind the curtain in the gorilla outfit. She’s painted WAR in bright green letters across her stomach. She steps from her skirt and jumps into the crowd, her long red cape flashing behind her, her bare feet smacking the armrests. She climbs along the customers on the first floor. She wraps her cape around a woman’s head. When Miriam pulls the cape back, her underwear is gone, her pubic hair inches from the woman’s nose. She scoots closer, bringing the woman’s face between her legs. Hank looks puzzled, scratches his head, then begins to play with himself, spraying the crowd with water from the plastic gorilla penis. When it’s over Miriam pulls Hank from the stage by a chain.

The lesbian show is starting. Victoria ambles forward in her police outfit with her thumbs tucked in her pockets and her hat cocked. Alexis waits for her in a shimmering metal dress, clutching the stage pole in her hands. Victoria told me one night that there are too many foreigners here. “No offense,” she said. “I mean the Arabs.” And the Arabs are in the front now for her show. Sheiks with magnificent turbans of all colors bundled over their heads. Yuen and Toine will always approach the Arabs and ask if they need women because the rich Arabs are too discreet to visit the girls who stand in the windows. Once a Pakistani general came dressed in full uniform and Toine sat with him and they talked about driving tanks through the Khyber Pass. Another time Toine sat in front with a small, hairless, pink man who wore only one long bolt of fabric like a toga. Toine later told me the man was the leader of a religion a million strong and there was a price on his head large enough to retire on. I thought he was encouraging me to kill the man and I got sick.

“I’ve never seen a sex show,” Jessie says, placing her elbows behind her on the bar. Victoria has cuffed Alexis’s wrists together and is inserting her baton into Alexis’s vagina. “Do you think they enjoy it?”

“What’s not to enjoy?” Toine asks.

Victoria rubs a teaspoonful of grease into Alexis’s anus and slips her thumb inside. An artificial moan comes through the speakers. “We’ve had his presidents in here,” Toine says, pointing at me. He finishes his beer and places the empty glass back on the bar near the spigots. “I’m so bored with this I could die.”

Toine’s room is in the front, where four windows overlook a quiet Dutch street. Not far from here is the Anne Frank Huis, but it doesn’t look different from any of the others except for the sign.

“Tell me about America,” Jessie says.

“America is a prison,” I say.

Jessie balances a box of photographs on her knee as if it were a child. She runs a finger along her gumline. “You know, since last I saw you, I’ve been working in a refugee camp in the Congo. I worked there for three years.”

“I know what you’ve been doing,” Toine says, without looking up, tossing waves of cocaine with his blade.

“Mmmm. The Hutus used the camp as a base for killing missions into Rwanda until Médicins Sans Frontieres protested. The whole world ignored it,” she says, stretching her arms high over her head. The box nearly falls, and she catches it. “So how did you come to live together?”

“This one? He’s an orphan. I took him in.”

“Is that true, Theo? Are you an orphan from an American prison?”

“I’m too old to be an orphan. I’m old enough to be a father.”

“She cares about everybody,” Toine says. It sounds as if he’s apologizing for her.

“You sound bitter,” Jessie says, smiling. “Anyway, I left Holland to go to Oxford and then took a job with the relief agency.”

“You won’t get what you came here for,” Toine tells her, wagging a finger in her direction and then returning to his task. “You might as well go back to your refugee camps.”

Jessie’s leg is shaking. “You wouldn’t believe the things you see. Have you heard of blue baby syndrome? In Gaza the water’s poison and babies are born unable to breathe. The UN sets up another tank of water every time the Israelis bulldoze a building.”