Thirty-four
JUNE
Amsterdam
Daniel and I are on the way to the plumbing supply shop to pick up a shower body when his bike gets a flat tire.
We stop to inspect. There’s a nail lodged deep into the tube. It’s four-thirty. The plumbing store closes at five. And then it’s closed for the weekend. Daniel frowns and throws his arms in the air like a frustrated child.
“Goddammit!” he curses. “The plumber’s coming tomorrow.”
We did the bedrooms first, a mess of studs and drywall and plaster, neither of us knowing exactly what we were doing, but between books and some old friends of Bram’s, we managed to make a tiny “master” bedroom, with a loft bed, and a tinier nursery, which is where I’m now living.
But the learning curve was high and it took longer than we’d expected, and then the bathroom, which Daniel thought would be simple—swapping out seventy-year-old fixtures for modern ones—turned out to be anything but. All the pipes had to be replaced. Coordinating the arrival of the tub and the sink and the plumber—another of Bram’s friends, who is doing the job on the cheap but also on his off hours, nights and weekends—has challenged Daniel’s already limited logistical skills, but he soldiers on. He keeps saying that if Bram built a boat for his family, dammit, he’s going to build a flat for his. And it’s such a strange thing to hear, because I’d always thought Bram built the boat for Yael.
The plumber came last night, we thought, to finish the bath and shower installations, only to tell us he couldn’t install the new tub that had finally arrived until we had a shower body. And we can’t finish tiling the bathroom and move on to the kitchen—which the plumber said will probably also need all new pipes—until we have a shower.
For the most part, Daniel has approached the renovation with the sheer enthusiasm of a child building a sand castle at the beach. Every other night, when he and Fabiola Skype, he lugs his battered laptop around the flat, showing off all the latest modifications, discussing furniture placement (she’s big into feng shui) and colors (pale blue for their room; butter yellow for the baby’s).
But during those semi-nightly calls, you can see the bump is growing. After the plumber left, Daniel admitted he could almost hear the baby inside, ticking like one of those old alarm clocks. “Ready or not, here he comes,” he’d said, shaking his head. “Forty-seven years, you’d think I’d be ready.”
“Maybe you’re never ready until it’s upon you,” I’d said.
“Very wise, little man,” he’d said. “But goddamn it, if I’m not ready, I’m going to have the flat ready.”
“Go on ahead, take mine,” I tell Daniel now, swinging off my bike. It’s the same beat-up old workhorse I bought off a junkie when I first came back to Amsterdam last year. It stayed locked up outside Bloemstraat all those months I was in India, no worse for wear. When I started working on the flat, I brought it back to Amsterdam, along with the rest of my things, all of which fit on the bottom two shelves of the bookshelf in the baby’s room. I don’t have much: Some clothes. A few books. The Ganesha statue Nawal gave me. And Lulu’s watch. It still ticks. I hear it in the night sometimes.
Problem solved, Daniel is bright sunshine again. With a gappy grin, he hops onto my bike, and takes off pedaling, waving behind him, almost slamming into an oncoming moto. I wheel his bike off the narrow alley and turn onto the wide canal of the Kloveniersburgwal. I’m in an area sandwiched between the shrinking Red Light District and the university. I head in the direction of the university, more likely to find bike repair shops there. I pass an English-language bookstore I’ve ridden by a few times before, always somewhat curious. On the stoop is a box of one-euro books. I poke through—it’s mostly American paperbacks, the kind of thing I read in a day and traded when I was traveling. But at the bottom of the box, like a displaced refugee, is a copy of Twelfth Night.
I know I probably won’t read it. But I have a bookshelf now for the first time since college, even if it’s only temporary.
I go inside to pay. “Do you know of a bike repair place nearby?” I ask the man behind the counter.
“Two blocks down, on Boerensteeg,” he says, without looking up from his book.
“Thanks.” I slide over the Shakespeare.
He glances at the cover, then looks up. “You’re buying this?” He sounds skeptical.
“Yeah,” I say, and then by way of an explanation I don’t need to give, I tell him I was in the play last year. “I played Sebastian.”
“You did it in English?” he asks, in English, with that strange hybrid accent of someone who’s lived abroad a long time.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Oh.” He goes back to his book. I hand him a euro.
I’m almost out the door when he calls out: “If you do Shakespeare, you should check out the theater down the way. They put on some decent Shakespeare plays in English in Vondelpark in the summer. I saw that they’re holding auditions this year.”
He says it casually, dropping the suggestion like a piece of litter. I ponder it there, on the ground. Maybe it’s worthless, maybe not. I won’t know unless I pick it up.