Second Cast on Love

I turned fifty-two in March and I celebrated by buying myself a new coffee maker and sleeping in. The party consisted of nothing else. Well, my neighbor Phyllis brought over a slice of cake from the bakery, but she knocked at eight in the morning so it hardly counted as a party. It counted as breakfast with a witness.

I've been on my own for eleven years now. Not lonely, just alone. There's a difference and I will defend that difference at parties I don't attend. My routine is simple. I get up around seven, I drink my coffee while it's still dark outside, and I look at the canal from my kitchen window. Then I go sell houses. I'm good at it. I've been a realtor for twenty-three years and I know every creaky floorboard in the older neighborhoods of this city. I know which canals flood in a wet spring and which landlords lie about the heating. People trust me because I tell them boring truths with a straight face.

That's my life. It's a good life. I want that understood before anything else happens in this story, because what comes later will make it sound like I was miserable. I wasn't. I was comfortable. There is a difference there too.

* * *

The trouble with comfort is that it makes you agreeable when you're tired. That's the only explanation I have for what happened on the last Thursday of September.

I'd shown four houses that day to a couple from Rotterdam who kept asking if the basements flooded, and by six o'clock I was done with human speech. I stopped at the frituur on the corner of my street because cooking felt like an impossible task, and that's where I ran into Femke.

Femke is thirty-eight, which she reminds me of whenever I try to give her advice, and she works at the same agency as me. She was in line ahead of me with two paper cones of fries and the look of a woman with a plan.

"Kiki. Perfect. I was going to call you tonight."

"Don't call me tonight. I'm putting the phone in a drawer tonight."

"You'll want to hear this." She paid and stepped aside so I could order. "Bex is doing one of her events again."

"Who is Bex?"

"The event planner. Remember, the scavenger hunt in the spring, the one Henk's team won and then nobody talked to them for a month." She handed me one of the cones, which I hadn't asked for, and that's how Femke operates. "She does speed dating now."

"Speed dating." I said it flat, the way you'd say tax audit.

"In the old bait shop. On the canal, by the lock. They converted it, it's got the rod racks still on the walls, it's very charming apparently. Thursday next week. There's a wine option."

"Femke."

"There's a wine option, Kiki."

I paid for my fries and we walked toward my building. "I'm fifty-two," I said. "Speed dating is for people who are thirty and panicking."

"It's for people who are single and willing to spend one evening in a funny room. Bex says half the sign-ups this time are over forty-five. The Utrecht crowd is older than you'd think. Everyone's divorced and owns a bicycle."

I laughed at that, which she took, correctly, as an opening.

"Ten euros," she said. "It includes the wine. And I'll be there, so if it's awful we can leave after the second round and get fries, which we're doing anyway, so really you're risking nothing."

"You bought me fries right now so I'd owe you."

"Obviously. That's how friendship works." She stopped at my door. "Thursday. Eight o'clock. I already signed you up. I paid your ten euros."

"You what?"

"So you can't cancel. That's a different kind of friendship. The kind that works."

She went off down the street with her remaining cone, and I stood there in my hallway eating fries I hadn't wanted, thinking that I'd raised three children and run a business and I could still be managed by a woman fourteen years younger holding mayonnaise.

I wish to clarify why I did not simply stay away, for I had the option. I could have eaten the ten euros. But there's a thing that happens when you've been alone long enough. You get so good at your own company that you stop noticing you've stopped trying. My last date was four years ago. A dentist. He talked about enamel for two hours and then asked to split the bill to the cent. I went home and thought, well, that's the effort for this decade, and I put dating away in a drawer like the phone.

My sister Loes is the only one who calls me on it. She lives in Den Bosch and she calls on Sundays.

"You're doing what now?" she said when I told her.

"Speed dating. In a bait shop. Don't make it a thing."

"I'm not making it a thing. I'm just picturing it. Are there actual worms."

"I assume the worms are gone, Loes. It's an event space now."

"Are you nervous?"

"I'm annoyed. That's different from nervous."

"You always say that right before you're nervous." She has known me for fifty-odd years, so there's no point arguing. "What are you going to wear?"

"Clothes. Work clothes. It's on a Thursday, I'll come from showings."

"Kiki. It's a date event. Wear the green blouse."

"The green blouse has a coffee stain."

"Wash it first, you are not an animal." She paused. "You know what this is really about, right?"

"It's about Femke owing me for the Hendriks commission and paying me back in bad ideas."

"Mm. Sure." She let that sit, the way she does. "Have a good time. Actually have a good time, I mean. Not the polite kind where you tell me later it was fine."

"I always have a fine time."

"That's what I'm saying."

* * *

Thursday came around faster than I'd have liked, mostly because I'd spent the weekend telling myself I could still back out, and knowing I wouldn't. I wore the green blouse. I washed it first.

The bait shop sits right on the water, and at night with the lamps on inside it glows this warm yellow through the old windows. Femke was waiting outside, stamping her feet against the cold. She had clearly dressed up. I had clearly dressed work-casual, which I claimed was intentional.

"There she is," she said. "You look nice. Come on, they open the doors at eight."

Inside it was actually lovely, I'll admit that. The wooden counters were still there, pushed against the walls, and above them the rod racks held candles instead of fishing poles. A woman about my age, maybe a bit younger, short and quick-moving, was arranging little paper name tags on a table near the door. She had a clipboard and the particular energy of someone whose money depends on the evening going well.

"That's Bex," Femke said, and waved.

Bex came over with two name tags already peeled. "Femke, hi, and you must be Kiki, Femke's guest. You're both in the over-forty-five table, which is doing great numbers tonight, I'm very pleased." She said it all in one breath. "Wine is at the bar, the little counter by the window. First round starts in ten minutes."

"Younger than us," Femke said, watching Bex speed off.

"Everyone's younger than us." I took a tag that said KIKI and stuck it on my blouse, crooked, and Femke reached over and fixed it without asking, which is also friendship.

We got wine from the counter by the window. The canal outside was doing that thing it does on clear nights, holding the moon in the middle of itself like a coin. I remember thinking, with my glass in my hand and my back against a rack built for carp rods, that the evening would be forgettable at worst and funny at best. Femke owed me ten euros either way.

The chairs were set in two long rows facing each other. The men stayed put and the women moved, which Femke said was backwards and I said was irrelevant since I'd decided in the taxi not to take anyone home no matter what. First bell rang. Bex clapped her hands and called out that we had five minutes each, be kind, be curious, and God help us all, begin.

The first man was a watchmaker. He was nice. He described watches.

The second was the dentist all over again, different face, same splitting of the air into categories I didn't care about. I answered his questions about my work with real answers, because I'm a professional even at a bait shop, and he nodded along and looked past my shoulder at the canal.

The third chair was empty for a minute. The bell had rung, the men had rotated, and the seat across from me stayed open. I was about to enjoy five free minutes when someone came around the end of the row, hurrying, apologizing to Bex about a parking problem with her bicycle.

She sat down across from me and I stopped hearing the room.

"Sorry," she said, tucking her bag under the chair. "Sorry, I'm late, I had to move my bike twice. Hi. I'm Sheryl."

I knew her. This was the obstacle I could not overcome. I knew that face from ten years ago and a hotel conference in Amsterdam and a night that ended badly, badly meaning it ended with me in a cab at two in the morning pretending to be someone who does that.

"Kiki," I said.

And then, because apparently my mouth had made its own decisions, I said, "You probably don't remember me."

She went still. She looked at the tag on my blouse, then up. I watched it land on her, the recognition, one decade arriving all at once.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, wow. Kiki. From the, the conference. The Velthoven thing."

"Yes," I said. "That one."

"Ten years." She said it like she was doing the math against her will. "You just vanished. I mean, you were gone when I woke up, and then you were gone gone."

"I had an early train."

"At two in the morning."

"The trains were running," I said. "Some of them. Probably."

She laughed, and I remembered the laugh too, which was worse. The bell rang for the rotation and a man started to lower himself into the empty chair, and Bex appeared out of nowhere and steered him elsewhere, saying something about a seating error, which I'm fairly sure she invented on the spot. She was paid to keep the evening moving, but she gave us a little nod as she went, like she was doing us a favor she'd add to the invoice later.

"So the clock isn't running," Sheryl said. "Apparently."

"Apparently."

"Good. Because I have questions."

"Three minutes' worth?"

"Ten years' worth. It'll have to be fast." She leaned her elbows on the table between us. The table was an old counter, varnished, with a candle in a jar that had once probably held maggots. Romance is where you find it. "Why did you leave?"

And there it was, first question, no warm-up. I looked at the candle. "I panicked," I said. "It had been a good night. A very good night. And I woke up and thought, well, now it has to become something, and I didn't know if I could do that, so I did the thing I do, which is leave first."

"Ten years ago I thought you hated me."

"I didn't hate you."

"Well, obviously. You kissed me."

"Shh," I said, and she laughed again, and the man two seats down looked over, and I didn't care. "Keep your voice down, this is a respectable bait shop."

"You kissed me," she repeated, quieter, mostly to herself, "and then you left a note that said it was lovely, take care."

"I stand by the word lovely."

"You could have said anything else. You could have said see you around. You could have said I'll call you and then not called, like a normal person." She turned her glass a quarter turn on the counter. "I looked you up, you know. After. Couldn't find you. No trace. It was like you'd been invented for that one weekend and then discontinued."

"I moved apartments that autumn."

"See? Discontinued."

The bell rang. We both ignored it. Bex, at the far end of the row, was doing the thing where she claps twice and points, but at our table she just slowed down and kept walking, which I noted for later gratitude.

"Your turn," Sheryl said. "Fair's fair. One question."

"Are you happy? Now, I mean. Generally."

She thought about it, actually thought, which caught me off guard. "Mostly. I own a board game cafe. In the Oostplein quarter, you'd know it. It does fine. I'm fifty-one, I have a cat, I work too much." She shrugged. "What about you?"

"I'm a realtor. Twenty-three years. I live by a canal, I turned fifty-two in March, I have a new coffee maker I like very much."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the inventory answer. It's what I show clients."

"You're still doing that," she said. "Selling the house instead of showing the rooms."

"That's a horrible thing to say."

"Thank you," she said.

The bell rang again, longer this time, and Bex called something down the row about five-minute rounds meaning five minutes, people, please. Sheryl stood, and so did I, because the women moved, and for a second we stood there like two people who'd agreed to nothing and no idea what to do with their hands.

"Later," she said. "There's a break at nine. Come find me."

"Where will you be?"

"Wherever the wine is," she said. "Obviously."

The next man was a retired ferry captain, which sounds promising and wasn't. He talked about currents. Then an accountant, then a man who sold insurance