Willem doesn’t answer. In the distance, I can hear the pop of the handball slamming against the wall, the coquettish sound of women’s laughter. I think of Céline. The girls on the train. The models at the café. The slip of paper in his pocket. There’s probably no shortage of girls wanting to play nurse with him. I get a weird feeling in my stomach. I’ve made a wrong turn, like when I am skiing and I accidentally swerve onto a black-diamond run full of moguls.
“Sorry,” I say. “It’s probably just the doctor in me coming out. Or the Jewish mother.”
Willem gives me a peculiar look. Another wrong turn. I keep forgetting that in Europe, there are hardly any Jewish people, so jokes like that don’t make sense.
“I’m Jewish, and apparently that means when I get older, I’m doomed to fuss about everyone’s health,” I hastily explain. “That’s what ‘Jewish mother’ means.”
Willem lies on his back and holds my watch up to his face. “It’s strange you mention the double happiness story. Sometimes I do get sick and wind up puking into squat toilets, and it’s not so nice.”
I wince at the thought of it.
“But there was this one time, I was traveling from Morocco to Algeria by bus, and I got dysentery, a pretty bad case. So bad I had no choice but to get off the bus in the middle of nowhere. It was some town at the edge of the Sahara, not even mentioned in any book. I was dehydrated, hallucinating, I think, stumbling around for a place to stay when I saw a hotel and restaurant called Saba. Saba was what I used to call my grandfather. It seemed like a sign, like he was saying ‘go here.’ The restaurant was empty. I went straight to the toilets to throw up again. When I came out, there was a man with a short gray beard wearing a long djellaba. I asked for some tea and ginger, which is what my mother always uses for upset stomachs. He shook his head and told me I was in the desert now and had to use desert remedies. He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a grilled lemon, cut in half. He sprinkled it with salt and told me to squeeze the juice into my mouth. I thought I would lose it again, but in twenty minutes, my stomach was okay. He gave me some terrible tea that tasted like tree bark and sent me upstairs, where I slept maybe eighteen hours. Every day, I came downstairs, and he would ask how I was feeling and then prepare me a meal specifically based on my symptoms. After that we would talk, just as I had done with Saba as a child. I stayed there for a week, in this town on the edge of the map that I am not even sure exists. So it is a lot like your story from before.”
“Except he didn’t have a daughter,” I say. “Or you’d be married by now.”
We are on our sides, facing each other, so close I can feel the warmth radiating off him, so close it’s like we are breathing the same air.
“You be the daughter. Tell me that couplet again,” he says.
“Green trees against the sky in the spring rain while the sky set off the spring trees in the obscuration. Red flowers dot the land in the breeze’s chase while the land colored up in red after the kiss.”
The last word, kiss, hangs in the air.
“Next time I get sick, you can tell that to me. You can be my girl in the mountains.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll be your mountain girl and take care of you.”
He smiles, like it’s another joke, another volley in our flirtation, and I smile back, even though I’m not joking.
“And in return, I will relieve you of the burden of time.” He slips my watch onto his lanky wrist, where it doesn’t seem quite so much like a prison shackle. “For now, time doesn’t exist. It is, what did Jacques say . . . fluid?”
“Fluid,” I repeat, like an incantation. Because if time can be fluid, then maybe something that is just one day can go on indefinitely.
Ten
I fall asleep. And then I wake up, and everything feels different. The park is quiet now. The sound of laughter and echoes of handballs have disappeared into the long dusky twilight. Fat, gray rainclouds have overtaken the darkening sky.
But something else has shifted, something less quantifiable yet somehow elemental. I feel it as soon as I wake; the atoms and molecules have rearranged themselves, rendering the whole world irrevocably changed.
And that’s when I notice Willem’s hand.
Willem has also fallen asleep; his long body is curved in the space around mine like a question mark. We aren’t touching at all except for his one hand, which is tucked into the crease of my hip, casually, like a dropped scarf, like it blew there on the soft breeze of sleep. And yet now that it’s there, it feels like it belongs there. Like it’s always belonged there.
I hold myself perfectly still, listening to the wind rustle through the trees, to the soft in-out of Willem’s rhythmic breathing. I concentrate on his hand, which feels like it’s delivering a direct line of electricity from his fingertips into some core part of me I didn’t even know existed until just now.
Willem stirs in his sleep, and I wonder if he’s feeling this too. How can he not? The electricity is so real, so palpable, that if someone waved a meter around, it would spin off the dial.
He shifts again, and his fingertips dig in right there into that tender flesh in the hollow of my hip, sending a shock and a zing so deliciously intense that I buck, kicking his leg behind me.
I swear, somehow I can feel his eyelashes flutter open, followed by the heat of his breath against the back of my neck. “Goeiemorgen,” he says, his voice still pliant with sleep.
I roll over to face him, thankful that his hand remains slung over my hip. His ruddy cheeks bear little indentations from the grass, like tribal initiation scars. I want to touch them, to feel the grooves of his otherwise smooth skin. I want to touch every part of him. It’s like his body is a giant sun, emitting its own gravitational pull.
“I think that means good morning, though technically it’s still evening.” My words come out sounding gaspy. I’ve forgotten how to talk and breathe at the same time.
“You forget, time doesn’t exist anymore. You gave it to me.”
“I gave it you,” I repeat. There’s such delicious surrender in the words, and I feel myself slipping away to him. Some small part of me warns against this. This is just one day. I am just one girl. But the part that can resist, that would resist, I woke up finally liberated of her.
Willem blinks at me, his eyes dark, lazy, and sexy. I can feel us kissing already. I can feel his lips all over me. I can feel the jut of his sharp hipbones against me. The park is almost deserted. There are a couple of younger girls in jeans and head scarves talking to some guys. But they are off in a corner of their own. And I don’t care about propriety.