Just One Night (4 page)

“Then meet us after,” Allyson says. “A bunch of us are going for dinner. You should be there.”

She thinks of what Broodje said, the dinner like a banquet for the investor’s circle. Wolfgang should be there. So should Dee. And Professor Glenny. And Babs. And Kali and Jenn, her roommates last year. Maybe she’ll hold another investor’s dinner when she goes home.

“I wouldn’t miss it,” Wolfgang says. “Now, would you like some flowers?”

At the amphitheater at Vondelpark, Allyson spots Broodje. He has saved several seats, up front this time. He is with a group of people, a guy even taller than Willem, a short-haired girl, another guy. He has brought a basket of food and several bottles of beer.

He kisses Allyson and Wren three times, cheek-cheek-cheek. And then he turns to the group. “Everyone. This is her. Lulu. Only she’s really Allyson. And this is her friend Wren.”

They all sort of stare at each other. The girl speaks first, sticking out her hand. “I’m Lien.”

“Allyson.”

“Wren.”

Lien stares at her. “You really do look like Louise Brooks.”

“Huh?” Wren says.

“The silent film actress,” Allyson explains. “My hair was like hers then. That’s why Willem called me Lulu.”

Lien looks at her, remembering that Louise Brooks movie Willem dragged them all to. She’d known then something was up with Willem. No one had believed her when she’d said he had fallen in love.

They believe her now.

W is having a hard time understanding.

After all the methodical work they put into it, calling all the American tour companies, finding the barge captain in Deauville, the charts of all the connections, this didn’t make sense. Willem going off to Mexico to look for her hadn’t made sense either. It would’ve been one thing had the girl visited a small town during a quiet time of year, but a resort area at Christmas? The odds were ridiculous. But at least that adhered to a logic. The Principle of Connectivity, albeit stretched very thin.

But he doesn’t understand this. All the looking they had done, and from what Broodje had said, the girl had done her own looking. But then she’d just happened upon him at the play last night? The play Willem was not even meant to be performing in? He’d been the understudy until last night.

It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

Backstage, Willem is thinking about accidents again. And things that seemingly don’t make sense, except they do. Like right out there in the fifth row. All of them, together. That makes sense.

He doesn’t see Kate yet, but she has texted that she and David will be there but must leave right after the play. David is catching a late flight back to London, and she’s seeing him to the airport.

Willem’s cast mates slap him on the back, offer congratulations from last night, and condolences for next week. He accepts them both.

Max is by his side, as always. She is the other understudy, for Rosalind, and Willem’s best friend in the cast. “You win some, you lose some. And sometimes you win and lose at the same time. Life’s a bloody cockup,” Max says.

“Is that Shakespeare?” Willem asks.

“Nah. Just me.”

“Sounds like the Universal Law of Equilibrium,” Willem says.

“The what?”

When Willem doesn’t answer right away, she says, “Sounds like a bunch of shite.”

“You’re probably right,” Willem agrees. And then he asks her if she’ll come out after the show.

“I’m still hungover from last night,” Max complains. “How many parties does one man need?”

“This is different,” Willem says.

“How is it different?” Max asks.

Max has become one of his closest friends these past months, and yet he hasn’t told her a thing. There is nothing to do now but to tell her
everything
.

“Because I’m in love.”

Kate and David arrive just before curtain. She’d meant to come straight from the airport, but when she’d seen David, she had been overcome. It was a bit silly, really. It had only been a few days since she’d seen him, and they’d been together for five years. But she’d been feeling roiled since last night. A good Shakespearean performance was known to have aphrodisiacal effects. So when David arrived, she’d hustled him back to her Major Booger hotel and had her way with him. Then they’d fallen asleep and gotten themselves massively lost on the way to the park (someone should mention to city planners that Amsterdam was laid out like a rat’s maze, albeit a very pretty rat’s maze) and now here they are.

I hope I haven’t oversold it
, Kate thinks as the lights go down. She has essentially promised Willem an apprenticeship based on last night’s performance, but David has to agree. She is sure David will agree. Willem had been that good. But she is nervous now. They’ve offered apprenticeships to foreigners before, but sparingly, because the visa paperwork and union issues are such a headache.

Willem enters the stage. “As I remember . . .” he begins as Orlando.

Kate breathes a sigh of relief. She hasn’t oversold it.

It is better than last night. Because there are no walls. No illusions. This time, they know exactly who they are speaking to.

“The little strength that I have, I would it were with you”.

She is his Mountain Girl.

“What would you say to me now, an I were your very very Rosalind?”

No more pretending. Because he knows. She knows.

“Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love.”

She believes. They both do.

“I would kiss before I spoke.”

The line is a kiss. Their kiss.

“For ever and a day.”

For ever and a day.

“Holy shit,” David says to Kate when it is over.

Kate thinks
I told you so
, but doesn’t say anything.

“And this is the hitchhiker you gave a ride to in Mexico?”

“I keep telling you, he wasn’t a hitchhiker.” David has been giving her grief about giving a ride to a stranger for months now. Kate keeps reminding him that all people are strangers, initially. “Even
you
were a stranger to me once,” she’d said.

“I don’t care if he was three-legged ape,” David says now. “He’s unbelievable.”

Kate smiles. She loves lots of things, but she especially loves to be right.

“And he wants to apprentice with us?”

“Yep,” Kate says.

“We can’t keep him off a stage for long.”

“I know. He’s green. The training will do him good. And then we can sort out union issues and get him up there.”

“He’s really Dutch?” David asks. “He has no accent.” He stops for a second. “Listen to that. They’re still applauding.”

“Are you jealous?” Kate teases.

“Should I be?” David teases back.

“That boy is hopelessly in love with some American girl he found and lost in Paris. As for me, I’m hopelessly in love with some stranger I met five years ago.”

David kisses her.

“Do you really have to go back tonight?” Kate asks. “You could come out after with Willem really quickly and then we could give the squeaky bed at the Major Booger another go.”

“Just one?” David asks.

They kiss again. The audience is still applauding.

Allyson notices the kissing couple. It’s hard not to, because people are starting to meander out of the theater and they are still kissing. And because, much as she’s looking forward to getting to know Willem’s friends, what she really wants to do is what that couple is doing.

And then the couple breaks apart, and Allyson gasps. The woman! She’s the woman from last night. The one she’d seen Willem with. The one she’d thought he was in love with. As of this afternoon, she no longer thought that. And now she
really
doesn’t think that.

“Who is that?” Allyson asks Broodje, pointing to the woman.

“No idea,” Broodje says. Then he points to the stage door. “Look, here comes Willy.”

Allyson feels paralyzed all of a sudden. Last night, she’d stood at that very stage door and Willem had breezed right by her, into the arms of that other woman. The one who is now in the arms of that other man.

This is not last night. This is tonight. And Willem is walking right toward her. And he is smiling. Wren thrusts the bouquet Wolfgang prepared (an enormous bouquet; it almost capsized the bike on the ride to the park) into her arms.

The bouquet is smashed in about five seconds. Because Willem doesn’t seem to give a shit about the flowers or the crowd of people waiting for him. He seems to be heeding Orlando’s words tonight.

“I would kiss before I spoke.”

And for the second time in a day, he does.

And, oh, what a kiss. It makes the one this morning seem chaste. It makes the flowers smashed between them bloom all at once. Allyson could live in that kiss.

Except she hears laughter behind them. And a voice, an unfamiliar one, though Allyson knows at once that it belongs to the redhead.

“I take it you found her then,” the voice says.

It takes ages for them all to troop out of the park. There are so many of them: Willem, Allyson, Broodje, Henk, W, Lien, Max, Kate, David. Wolfgang and Winston, the guy from the hotel whom Wren has been spending time with, are joining them later. The logistics are complicated. This one left a bike back there. This one is meeting them over here.

But it’s the introductions that take longer.

Kate is a theater director. Whom Willem met in Mexico, while he was looking for Allyson.

David is her fiancé, whom Willem has never met, who is going on about how good Willem was tonight, the vulnerability he brought to Orlando, what a brave way to play it.

Wren is the friend Allyson met in Paris and bumped into again in Amsterdam. “I wouldn’t have found you if it weren’t for her,” Allyson tells Willem. “I was about to give up but she made me go to the hospital you were at.”

Willem thanks Wren.

Wren curtsies.

W listens to all the introductions and still doesn’t understand.

Neither does Max. “This is too bloody confusing. Can someone draw a chart?”

“That’s not a bad idea,” W says.

“I was kidding,” Max says. “What I really need is a drink.”

Wolfgang has arranged for a table at a café run by a friend of his in a neighborhood off the shrinking red light district. It is on the Kloveniersburgwal, not far from the bookstore where Willem found the copy of
Twelfth Night
, and where the bookseller inside told him about the auditions for
As You Like It
that were happening at the theater around the way.

It takes about an hour for them to get there, because they all walk together, instead of splitting up into taxis and trams and onto bikes. No one wants to be separated. Something about the night feels magical, as if a bit of Shakespeare’s fairy dust has settled over them.

Wolfgang is waiting at the table, along with Winston, a pitcher of beer between them.

Everyone sits down. Allyson snaps a picture and texts it to Dee.
Wish you were here.

She is about to put her phone away but then she texts the photo to her mother.
I am having the best day of my life
, she writes. She hesitates before hitting send. She is not entirely sure how welcome this message will be, from a bar, no less. But she thinks (hopes) her mother will be happy that she is so happy. And with that in mind, she presses send.

Wolfgang has ordered a bunch of food, pizza and pasta and salads. It starts to arrive, along with lots more booze.

Willem has hardly eaten all day and is famished. But Allyson is sitting next to him, and with everyone jammed at the table, she is right up close. And then she slips off her sandals under the table and sort of nuzzles her foot against his.

He loses his appetite, for food anyway.

The conversation is disjointed. Everyone wants to tell their part of the tale, and they tell it out of order and, as the booze flows, with increased drunkenness.

Allyson and Willem sit back and listen to this story.

“I didn’t even know her, but I knew I was supposed to go with her to the hospitals,” Wren is saying.

“I knew something was up as soon as Willem came back,” Lien says.

“Hey, I did, too,” Broodje says.

“No you didn’t,” Henk says.

“I did. I just didn’t believe it was a girl.”

“I knew something was up because he didn’t want to shag Marina,” Max says. She looks at Allyson. “Sorry, but have you seen Marina? Rosalind?” She shakes her head. “Maybe I’m biased because I’d like to shag her.”

The table laughs.

“You have nothing to worry about,” Kate tells Allyson. “He was a miserable mess in Mexico after he didn’t find you.”

“He was even worse after the food poisoning,” Broodje says.

“You got food poisoning?” Kate asks. Willem nods. “The mystery meat? I knew it!”

“I got really sick right after you dropped me off,” Willem says.

“You should’ve called me,” Kate says.

“I ended up calling my ma, in India, and that’s why I went over, so it was a good thing, the food poisoning.” Sickness leading to healing. The truth and its opposite again.

“At least it paid off in the end, because at the time, that Mexico trip seemed like a disaster,” Broodje says. “At that New Year’s party, you were a mess, Willy.”

“I wasn’t a mess.”

“You were. You had girls coming at you and you didn’t want any of them. And then you lost your shoes.” Broodje looks at the gathering. “There were these giant piles of shoes.”

The hair on the back of Allyson’s neck goes up. “Wait, what?”

“We went to this party on the beach, in Mexico. New Year’s Eve.”

“With the piles of shoes?”

“Yeah,” Broodje says.

“And the Spanish reggae band. Tabula rasa?” Allyson asks.

It’s noisy in the bar but it goes quiet for a second as Allyson and Willem look at each other and once again understand something that they somehow, somewhere already knew.

“
You were there
,” she says.

“
You were there
,” he says.

“You were both at the same party,” W says. He shakes his head. “I cannot even begin to calculate those odds.”

She’d been thinking of him. But it had felt like ridiculous wishful thinking. Delusional wishful thinking.