Tours of the Black Clock

94

SHE FOUND HIM LIVING on a houseboat in Amsterdam one canal north of the Dam Rak. He was surprised to see her, as was the woman with the flurry of black hair who emerged from the boat’s cabin with him. Joaquin stood on deck silently buttoning his shirt as Dania waited on the edge of the canal; he was trying to decide if he was happy to see her this soon, or happy to see her at all. Perhaps what he loved was the act of calling her to him, rather than the act of her coming. He spoke in broken Dutch to the blackhaired girl who climbed off the boat and brushed past her new rival as though rivalry meant nothing to her. Joaquin didn’t explain the girl to Dania and Dania didn’t ask him to. They went and had dinner in a restaurant. All around them was nothing but talk of Germany and all the Germans who were trying to get out. It bored him. He was nothing like in his letter to her; she now felt young beside him. He explained he was going to start his own dance company: It’ll be, he offered, for those who want to dance as you do, willfully and enraged. What are we enraged at? she asked, and he looked at her dumbfounded and blank.

In the hungry light of the houseboat he could see the fiery ravishment of her legs and belly; he could smell the other man, and her devourment of him. They’d walked through the streets halfdrunk back to the boat but now the moment sobered him enough that when the boat weaved with the water he couldn’t quite weave with it, pliant. But I believed you’d never been had, he said in almost a cry; when you knew me, she replied coolly, I hadn’t. The boat rocked and he toppled into her; he regarded the proximity aghast. He flew back from her. Don’t tell me your other girlfriends have all been virgins, she said. He neither denied nor affirmed it; he wasn’t angry so much as wounded. Sex abandoned him. If she touched him it only seemed to make matters worse. They slept unconsummated and the next day she put her things together to go. Don’t go, he said; after a moment he said, No, go. He walked with her to the train station. Inside she felt dead, she wanted only to be on the train as soon as possible in a cabin that was all hers in the bright light of day, so that she could cry. Halfway to the station anger finally came to him; when he pushed her he was like a child, she even laughed, though nothing about it was funny. She just walked on and didn’t look back to see if he was standing there watching her go. She read her ticket in the station as though on it was written: None of these men is worth the impulse of a true heart. Beyond Joaquin Young and Dr. Reimes, she wasn’t sure whom she meant.

Two days later in Vienna her father, older by the minute, staggered into the flat with a loaf of bread to find, astonishingly, his daughter returned. She was tottering in the middle of the room with a bottle of vodka. What is it? he asked, rather than, When did you return? She answered drunkenly, I’m plain. I’ll never waste the time regretting it again, that I’m plain, I’m going to get it all out of my system tonight. I’m plain, I’m plain. Girl, he said, how many men already love you? None, she answered. That’s not true, her father said, I didn’t ask how many love you perfectly or well, or nobly or without selfishness. I asked how many love you at all; I know myself of at least two. All right then, she said. Two. She thought about it a moment. All right then, she said: three. She thought again. Four. She sat down hard with the vodka and her father came and took it from her. He set it on the dresser. He put the bread on the table, he bent over to look into her eyes and make them smile. But looking at her closely, his own eyes narrowed. With a finger he touched her lips. But girl, he asked with a frown, where did you get this scar? She sat in the vodka daze for a moment before making her fragile way to the bathroom where she gazed into the mirror; there, as her father had done, she raised her fingers to a small white scar at the corner of her mouth where there’d never been one before. It shone in the light of the bathroom like a diamond in her tooth. But I never bled, she thought to herself in confusion. It’s my heart, she called to her father, the words it doesn’t know catch in the cracks of my face, I wear the words I can’t spit free. Not until later, after she’d slept some hours, did she wake in bed with the question that the receding tide of vodka left beached on her brain. “Four?”