The Book of Jonah (37 page)

She looked at him kindly. “I'm glad. You have a really nice aura.”

“No, no,” he clarified quickly, “we really only just met, we're not—anything.”

But she had turned to look over to where Judy—or whatever she ought to be called—was studying one of the Polaroids. “She never got over what happened to her parents. That's why her hair is all fucked up.” She looked back at Jonah. “Don't tell her I said that, okay?” He nodded. He wanted her to think he knew what she was talking about so that she wouldn't tell him what she was talking about. “The one thing I learned in rehab is that it's the people who have their shit together who take that stuff the hardest. Have you noticed that?”

“Yup,” he said, again hoping agreement would preempt any elaboration.

“I know you guys can't stay long. I'm going to go say goodbye. But I'm going to tell her what a good aura you have.” Then she smiled again, and walked over to her cousin.

He watched them exchange a few words; Margaretha gave Judy an eager, full-bodied hug, which was returned stiffly. If there was a family resemblance, it was difficult to see, even assuming the noses had been a closer match pre-rhinoplasty: They seemed so starkly different in disposition, in mannerism. Margaretha, for instance, would have fit in well with the expat crew—while Judy—who the fuck knew where she would fit in? He began coughing his smoker's cough. How had he ended up in this art gallery? He headed to the door to save everyone this disruption of the show's atmosphere.

“Is it nothing to you, all who pass by?” the disembodied voice said over the speakers as he went out.

There remained a general dampness to things outside. Water dripped from the front of the colonnade, tiny rivulets flowed into puddles at the edge of the street. Jonah's coughing petered out. Then he lit a cigarette, because—because he fucking wanted to. He leaned against one of the colonnade's pillars as he smoked. He felt tired in a nonspecific way—tired of all of everything.

A few minutes later he heard the door open behind him, and Judy appeared. One of her hands was balled in a fist at her hip, and, makeup or not, her face had taken on a perceptible pallor. “Are you okay?” he asked.

She turned and looked at him as though she'd forgotten he might be there and, reminded, wished he wasn't. “You didn't have to wait,” she said coldly.

And Jonah found he was ready to return this coldness. “Yeah, well,” he said, and held up the cigarette.

The silence that followed was awkward—and it was too bad their encounter would have to end this way, he thought. Something sterile and amicable would have been preferable—what they would have had if they'd parted at the alley, after all.

She stared down one end of the street, turned her head to look to the opposite end. Then she said to him, “You asked before what I did?” He nodded. “I work for a shell company that's secretly buying property in downtown Las Vegas for one of the biggest casino developers in the country.”

“So you buy out, like, bankrupt condo developments?” he asked after a moment.

“Right now I'm buying out a church,” she said simply.

Jonah frowned at this. “Why'd you tell me that?”

“Because I wanted you to know what I was really like.”

He studied her carefully composed face—and then he did understand something new about her, though he doubted it was what she'd assumed, or intended. Characteristics that had seemed so strangely incongruous in her—the aggressively styled hair, the luxury accessories, the remarkably unremarkable nose—suddenly fell into place. She was wearing a costume: She was dressed up as a Las Vegas real estate investor.

It was getting later in the afternoon—the air was becoming colder, the mist thickening. He saw that she'd started to shiver a little in her trench coat. “You're sure we've never met before?” he asked.

“No, Jonah,” she said. “We don't know each other.” She continued, “I have to go back to my hotel for my things. I'm leaving for the airport soon.”

He supposed she'd be able to find her own way to her hotel. But then, why should he feel so reluctant to ask? Either way, she would be out of his life forever in twenty minutes. As she'd just said: She had a plane to catch. “You know which way to go?”

She worked the fingers of the fist at her side. “My hotel is near the train station.”

“If you want, I can show you.”

And, after a pause, she said, “Okay.” (In later months, back in Las Vegas, she would wonder why she had agreed to this offer—which he had obviously been so reluctant to make, and she had been so disinclined to accept. She supposed, in the end, there had been some refusal with regard to each other that they had not yet been prepared to make—though that refusal would come soon enough.)

Jonah led her to Prinsengracht, the outermost canal of the Canal Ring, and then they started back northward. It was not the most direct path to the train station—but he figured if he was walking her, he might as well take a route he liked. Trees, their foliage still green, lined both sides of the canal; brightly colored rowboats and tarp-covered speedboats were tied in long rows at the edge. They didn't speak as they retraced their path back up the clock face of the city, though the silence was more comfortable now. He sensed they were both able to enjoy this stroll up a charming Dutch street on the most straightforward terms, and were capable of enjoying it this way because they both knew it would soon be over.

They crossed Westermarkt, the western continuation of Radhuisstraat, and as they resumed their course northeast, Jonah's nose started to hurt. It didn't often anymore, except when the weather was like this: cold, and wet. He might have asked her if hers did, even after having had the surgery, but he didn't think it was worth breaking their mutually sustained silence to find out. She walked, as before, with her face down, arms now folded across her chest—the one fist clenched tightly in the crook of the other arm.

They went up a bridge arching over Bloemgracht, a canal that branched off to the west. Then, at the top of this bridge, Judy stopped; looking across to the opposite side of the water, she asked him, “What's that?”

He looked over. “The Anne Frank House.”

It was a nondescript building—handsome, but in the same way as every other building on the street: three stories of dark brick, large black-and-white casement windows. It would have been difficult to pick out if not for the long line of tourists waiting outside—carrying guidebooks, umbrellas, a cluster near the front in matching rain slickers. Jonah had never been inside the house: hadn't gone during his college trip, had seen absolutely no advantage to going now. It wasn't far from the houseboat, though, and he passed it fairly frequently, usually without giving it much attention. He regarded it mostly as another place Max went to meet women. But Judy seemed to have taken an interest in it—moved up to the bridge's metal railing to study it. He watched as her head followed the line of tourists stretching down the block, around the corner. “What do you think it is they're looking for?” she said.

He was inclined at first not to answer—but, finally, he knew what she meant. “You know how it is, half of tourism is just saying you've been there,” he said. “You go, you take a couple pictures, you cross the name off the list. I remember after 9/11, seeing tourists posing for photos in front of the rubble at Ground Zero before it had even stopped smoking. Smiling, even.”

“You were in New York then?” she asked, still looking across the water.

“Yeah, but, y'know, fifty blocks away,” he said. “Still, it was shitty. Where were you?”

“College,” she answered.

She was young, then—or not even young, only younger than him. He'd been just out of college himself, dating Zoey for the first time—by September, breaking up with Zoey for the first time. She'd lived on Christopher Street then, and that far south you could smell it in the air: electrical burning and God knew what else. Outside her subway stop, one of the vendors who had appeared in the city as if by spontaneous generation to sell bullshit gewgaws and commemorative bumper stickers would set out his wares every night. “Remember! Remember! One dollar! Remember!” the vendor would repeat, sing-song, as Jonah came up the subway steps. And then he and Zoey would spend the next five hours fighting and crying, while on television they showed as if on a loop the towers burning, the towers falling—or else people jumping, some holding on to sheets, like they hoped they could just sail away. Here was another set of thoughts he didn't like to revisit—not now, and even less when he'd been sitting at his desk on the twenty-ninth floor of 813 Lexington. Yes, he thought: shitty.

He began to study the line of tourists himself: the rowdy college students, possibly or probably high; the Chinese tour group ranged behind a woman holding up a purple umbrella. Maybe the point of visiting these places was so that you didn't have to remember—or rather, it made the memory manageable—finite. You paid your visit, you spent your thirty minutes, and then you were allowed to head to the next site—you lived your life as though these things didn't happen anymore: belonged to some other time, some other place.

He spotted him!—in the back of the line!—grinning—tapping his nose—

But it was just a man in Hasidic garb—a normal Hasid, as it were—shuffling forward to fill a gap in the line ahead of him. Jonah saw that he had grabbed onto the railing—as if he might leap over the side, or he feared a wave was coming to sweep him off. He'd dropped the cigarette he was smoking, too—fumbled in his pockets for another, dropped the box, and the cigarettes spilled out into the canal, floated away.

He could sense Judy's eyes on him. But he felt so distressed and ashamed by what had just occurred he couldn't look back. He waited for what she would say. All she said, though, was, “Why don't we keep going?” Then she headed off the bridge. After a moment he followed her—the line of tourists still shuffling one by one into the Anne Frank House.

Regular gusts of wind had started up—blowing water from the trees, shaking the boats in the canal against the side. She was shivering again. “It isn't too much farther,” he told her. “We cross over at Herenstraat, and then the train station's right up the street.” She nodded. “Look, about what happened on the bridge,” he began, suddenly identifying something—unwanted, in their silences. “It's just, I have bad dreams sometimes.”

“What about?” she asked.

He heard her teeth chattering behind her lips. “There's someone chasing me.”

“Freud said we're everyone in our dreams.”

Jonah thought about this. “I think Freud and I had very different experiences of puberty.” And she laughed, fully, for the first time since he'd met her: clear, surprisingly light, mezzo-soprano, like her voice.

They passed a bench at the edge of the canal, before which no boats were tied. “Can we sit for a bit?” she asked.

“You don't need to get to the airport?”

“I have a few minutes.”

They sat down, the wind driving ripples up the canal before them. He could still hear the faint clicking of her teeth. He unbuttoned his coat and put it around her shoulders. She hesitated, then pulled the lapels closed around her, pinching one with the thumb and forefinger of her closed fist. “Thank you,” she said. But then she seemed to feel the need to compose herself—sat up a little on the bench, pulled the coat straighter over her chest. “You're probably disappointed we won't have time to fuck,” she said tersely.

He stared at her, startled—offended, even. “You think that's what I wanted? Is that what you wanted?”

“What more could this have been?” she replied.

He thought of what her cousin had said about her, about never getting over it; he thought of it like a warning. But he asked her anyway, “How did you end up in Las Vegas?”

“Everyone ends up somewhere, don't they?” she answered after a moment. “How did you end up in Amsterdam?”

And Jonah wanted to tell her the whole story—not the despairing, truncated version he'd told Max: He wanted her to know all of it, fully. But then it seemed too much to begin, he wasn't sure there'd be enough time—he worried she wouldn't believe him. His nose was aching by now, his hands nearly numb. He shoved them into the pockets of his jeans. He could see Judy, even in his coat, still shivering—as if even between the two of them there wasn't warmth enough for either one. He leaned forward, and she slid from out of the corner of his eye. What was he waiting for? he asked himself. What was he hiding from?

He turned around to look at her and was struck by how small she appeared: her blond head poking above the coat, bulging in empty folds around her torso. A faint blueness had entered her lips. Behind the bench up the street, he saw a bakery, not unlike the one on Lindengracht he visited. “How about I go get us some coffee?” he offered. “Help warm us up a little bit for the rest of the walk?” She nodded, and Jonah hurried across the street.

*   *   *

When he had gone, Judith tucked her elbows closer against her sides, crossed her legs at the ankles, pulled them underneath her on the bench. It seemed to her like some strange indictment that she'd traveled so far from where she now lived and only here met someone so easily recognizable. He was intelligent, he had gone to a good liberal arts college, he was a Jew who had been raised in the Northeast. He was familiar. More than that: She liked him. But then, who was she kidding? she thought. He had been nice to her—and these days, that was all it took.

She took her fist out of the coat—she unfolded the balled-up Polaroid that she'd pulled from the wall of Margaretha's exhibit, smoothed its creases as best she could over her thigh. Margaretha probably assumed she'd taken the picture and stormed out because she was offended that the photograph had been included as part of the show. But it hadn't been that. The shock of it had been that when she first saw this image of a young girl in a white dress, standing on a grassy lawn—to which Margaretha had seen fit to add a crucifix in the background, a crown of thorns around the girl's head—she hadn't recognized that the girl in the picture was her.