“It’s all way too soon to take seriously,” Constance said, trying to shield me. “It’s just fun right now.”
“You girls are getting your frisk on,” Amy said. “You’re both so super slutty.”
It was sweet and funny, but just underneath it, just along the seams, I knew Amy was trying too hard. She knew it, too, but she had to keep going. The rest of it—the phone calls with her mom and dad, the trips to the consulate for a passport, the ignominy of returning home before the trip was over—all lay in front of her. She knew it, and so did we, but we had to fake it and pretend and be brave.
We had the coffee and the croissants and the bright red jam. At one point, Constance slipped off the bed and opened the curtains and windows, and we gained a constant breeze flowing through the window. The breeze lifted the sheer white curtains, and I supposed we all thought the same thing: that this was Europe, that curtains lifting in a midday breeze against a French door was something worth seeing and remembering.
Then the phone rang again from far away, but we knew it was Amy’s mom, or the consulate, or some day-to-day matter that demanded her attention. The magic left us, and we lifted the tray from the bed and swept off the crumbs, and Constance took a single spoonful of jam and put it in her mouth as if she wanted to remember, needed to remember, and the white curtain flapped softly and the day started.
*
“It’s about the light, isn’t it?” Jack asked.
We hadn’t left Amsterdam. We couldn’t leave until Amy’s affairs were in order, or she had made the final decision to return home. Besides, we didn’t want to leave Jack and Raef. Now we stood in front of Johannes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid. It was odd, I thought, to see finally a painting that one had studied in art books for all one’s school days. Here it was at last, the humble portrait of a kitchen maid emptying a pitcher into a bowl. Light—soft, morning light, I thought—streamed in through the window on the pail’s right and coated everything with calmness. I knew from the small handout they gave at the Rijksmuseum’s admissions desk that most art critics believed Vermeer employed a camera obscura to capture the image of the maid and reflect pinpoints of light onto the furniture of the painting. You could see the blots of light on the maid’s apron and on the rim of the pitcher. But Vermeer had transcended the camera obscura and everything else to provide a moment of quiet domestic solitude. It was about the light, just as Jack said, and I stood transfixed by the painting. Out of every piece of art I had seen in Europe, it was my favorite painting by far.
“When I saw the Mona Lisa in Paris,” I said, “I couldn’t seem to care. But this?”
My throat caught.
“Yes,” Jack said.
“She could be alive in the next room. And the light is still there, still waiting for any of us to discover it.”
“I agree. That’s how I see it, too.”
“It’s real, but it’s more than real. It feels like it’s the essence of everything. Sorry, I know that sounds inflated and pompous or just stupid, but it’s not just about common light, it’s about the whole world, isn’t it?”
Jack took my hand. I was not sure why I felt so moved. It was a mixed-up day, with Amy calling and quarreling with her parents, with my own sense that soon, very soon, I would have to be on a plane back to New York for a career that felt—next to the beautiful simplicity of Vermeer’s work—loud and difficult. Nothing felt settled; nothing seemed to combine in the way I had expected. The painting—in fact the entire afternoon in the Rijksmuseum, with Jack’s hand finding mine, then releasing it, then finding it again—almost wounded with its beauty. It was not Hemingway’s Paris, but it was the same thing, the same pursuit of the simple and sublime, and it hurt my heart a little to let it inside me.
“I know what we need to do,” Jack said. “It’s the perfect antidote for a day in a museum.”
“I’m not sure I’m in a very adventurous mood.”
“You will be. I promise. Come on. We need to get away from the past and move toward the future.”
“If it were only that easy.”
“What is it, Heather?”
“Weltschmerz,” I said, feeling the heaviness of the word as it passed my lips. “German for world weariness and pain. It’s the idea that physical reality can never meet the demands of the mind. I researched it for a paper my sophomore year. I remembered it because it kind of describes these moods I sometimes get.”
“Welt…?” he asked.
“Weltschmerz. Unnamed dread and fatigue of the world. That’s the definition.”
“Ugh,” he said. “Do art museums always have this effect on you? If so, we’ll have to avoid them.”
“Sorry. I don’t like to be this way.”
“Don’t be sorry. Come on. It’s close by here. I found it the last time I came through Amsterdam.”
I was in no shape to resist. Jack kept my hand in his and led me out. Five minutes later, we stood in a fencing studio at the edge of the Rijksmuseum Gardens. The idea of a fencing studio, the concept that you could simply trade everyday life in for a fencing foil, or an épée, or whatever the hell it was called, seemed so preposterous that I felt my heart lift a little. Jack spoke to the attendant and nodded at whatever he was being told. The attendant was a young man with a triangular goatee. He looked like Zorro only not as outrageously cute as Zorro was supposed to look.
“We’re going to fence,” Jack said, pushing his credit card toward Zorro and looking at me. “We’re going to fight to the death. When you’re feeling existential dread, you need to push the limits. You need to confront death.”
“Jack,” I began, then I realized I had no idea what I wanted to say. I didn’t have a stance against fencing. No one in the world had a stance against fencing. I still felt jumbled up and jittery.
“You’ll feel better, I promise. It’s the best way to get out of … what did you call it?”
“Weltschmerz.”
“Okay, Weltschmerz, then,” Jack said, pulling his credit card back from Zorro. “Trust me on this. It’s impossible to feel world weary if you are fencing in defense of your life.”
“I don’t know the first thing about fencing, Jack. I’ve never even thought about it.”
“Perfect,” he said, accepting a roll of equipment from Zorro. Two white uniforms came ingeniously wrapped around a pair of fencing foils. Jack pushed one at me. Zorro shoved a beekeeper’s hat toward me. It was a helmet with the front covered in mesh. Apparently, we could also plug ourselves into a sensing device to record hits. Zorro spent quite a few minutes explaining the hookup to Jack.
“You can figure this out, right?” Jack asked me when Zorro finished. “It’s just a set of overalls, really.”
“We’re going to fence? Right now? That’s what you’re saying?”
“You won’t think about a thing except combat. Trust me. It will get your blood cruising in the best way.”
“This is crazy.”