“Two fifty,” I repeated.
“I’ll be back at the hostel long before that, so don’t worry. We’ll see how things go with the Flying Dutchman. We can figure out everything tomorrow. Are you going to stay here and listen to more music?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m getting tired.”
“Carpe Jack-um. He’s way into you. And he’s off-the-charts gorgeous.”
“What about Constance?”
We both looked over at Constance. She sat with Raef and Johnn P, listening to a jazz conversation, apparently. She looked alert and happy and even had her hand on the small of Raef’s back. We both looked at one another, then Amy shook her head.
“She’s going sheepherder on us,” she said. “I’ve never seen her so smitten.”
“He’s cute.”
“He’s really cute. I love his accent.”
“Okay, then we’re set,” I said, trying to summarize, and because I always summarized. It was my singular talent. “I’ll meet you back at the hostel. Call if anything changes. Don’t get sawn in half.”
I wanted to concentrate and make sure I understood everything correctly, but I was blurry and drunk and tired. I knew we had a reason to leave Amsterdam pretty quickly, but I couldn’t remember why. It had something to do with a train connection, and also something to do with meeting a cousin of Amy’s in Munich or Budapest, but I couldn’t remember which. Besides, the scenario reminded me of Three Coins in the Fountain, a corny old black-and-white movie about three girls visiting Rome. They each throw a coin in the fountain and the music swells, then a song asks, “Which coin will the fountain bless?” The Mom-a-saurus made me watch it on Netflix with her before I left. It was one of her all-time favorite movies.
Too much had happened too quickly, and I didn’t trust our drunkenness. I also didn’t trust Alfred, the Flying Dutchman with the typewriter fingers; I had decided he was long and gangly, like an overgrown asparagus plant, and I didn’t like him. But Amy did like him, or at least wanted to go with him, and I tried not to judge when it came to her hookups, so I nodded and kissed her cheek and told her to be careful. She said she would be, then she grabbed Alfred and headed out.
That left me with Jack.
“Want to go?” he asked when Amy slipped up the stairs to the street and into the night. “I know a place you should see.”
“I’m tired, Jack.”
“Of me, or just tired?”
“Not of you.”
“Then the place I have to show you … Raef helped me locate it on a map. We have to find it together.”
Everything had softened. It was going to be morning soon, and the street would come awake with coffee and baked goods, and it was Amsterdam, the first time in my life, but I could hardly keep my eyes open. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, although I knew I wanted to be with Jack.
“It’s going to be light soon,” I said, stalling.
“That makes it better.”
“I’ll tell Constance we’re leaving,” I said, and I stood.
I had made up my mind without knowing I was making up my mind. Jack called the waiter over and settled the bill with the money we had all contributed as I told Constance the plan.
11
“After World War II, my grandfather made his way back home, but it took him a while. It took him about three months, maybe a little longer. Part of that was probably the devastation in Europe and the lack of dependable transportation, but he went on walkabout. That’s what Raef called it when I told him about it. My grandfather never talked about it much. He seemed guilty about it somehow, or secretive. But he kept a journal, and now I’m following it. You asked what I’m doing, and that’s it,” Jack said, his body turned toward me. “That probably doesn’t sound like much, but it is something I need to do. It’s something I promised myself I would do, and now I’m doing it.”
We had walked for a good half hour, and the streets did smell of coffee and baked goods. The sky hadn’t become light yet, but the darkness had retreated and lost its grip. The windows and the canals had begun to glow with pink, but you could not see things distinctly. Once we saw a cat sitting in the window of an apartment, just under an illuminated lamp, and it stared at us for a moment before suddenly flinching and bending its head down to lick its shoulder.
“What were you doing before you started following his journal?”
“Journalism, mostly. Changing the world for good. Isn’t that what they say? I graduated from the University of Vermont with a communications degree. I don’t even know if journalism exists anymore in the age of the Internet, but that’s what I was doing. When I got out of college, I took a reporting job in Wyoming at a small paper near the Wind River Range. I know, I know, little off the front line of journalism, but I thought I might be able to influence a community that size, whereas in a big city I would be a cub reporter with no clout. I’ve kind of come to think that small-town papers are the front line of journalism, but that’s another story. It turned out to be an excellent paper, and I wrote everything, which was great training. I had a boss named Walter Goodnow, who was one of these old-time journalists you don’t find much anymore. He gave me plenty to do, but he also let me write features, and he worked with me. Close editing. I wrote a lot of editorials, too, and I found out I had a tendency to be shrill when it came to topics that I believe in. Walter called me a pot-stirrer, but that wasn’t all bad. I stayed there for about three years.”
“Why did you leave?”
“Oh, I guess it was time to go. Walter said as much. After that, some things happened, not great things, and I decided to take a break. To interrupt my march to journalistic world dominance.”
“And you also hatched the plan to follow the journal?”
“I was a little at loose ends. I needed a guide. I needed someone to help me start my life over again. My grandfather had to do it after the war.”
“But you’ll go back to journalism?”
“That’s the plan. Walter called it the Clark Kent fantasy. You’re a journalist, but you’re also Superman. Once a news junkie, always a news junkie. You can’t help it.”
“I like that you’re following your grandfather’s journal.”
“I’m actually hitting the most important spots in no special order, but I don’t think that matters. And here I am going on and on and you want to eat, don’t you?”
“You’re not going on and on, but I do want coffee and bread. It has been a long night.”