Part 12 (1/2)
”Actually, no,” he said. ”That suit isn't nearly this nice.”
The blue-and-white tram arrived, and Augustus handed our cards to the driver, who explained that we needed to wave them at this circular sensor. As we walked through the crowded tram, an old man stood up to give us seats together, and I tried to tell him to sit, but he gestured toward the seat insistently. We rode the tram for three stops, me leaning over Gus so we could look out the window together.
Augustus pointed up at the trees and asked, ”Do you see that?”
I did. There were elm trees everywhere along the ca.n.a.ls, and these seeds were blowing out of them. But they didn't look like seeds. They looked for all the world like miniaturized rose petals drained of their color. These pale petals were gathering in the wind like flocking birds-thousands of them, like a spring snowstorm.
The old man who'd given up his seat saw us noticing and said, in English, ”Amsterdam's spring snow. The iepen throw confetti to greet the spring.”
We switched trams, and after four more stops we arrived at a street split by a beautiful ca.n.a.l, the reflections of the ancient bridge and picturesque ca.n.a.l houses rippling in water.
Oranjee was just steps from the tram. The restaurant was on one side of the street; the outdoor seating on the other, on a concrete outcropping right at the edge of the ca.n.a.l. The hostess's eyes lit up as Augustus and I walked toward her. ”Mr. and Mrs. Waters?”
”I guess?” I said.
”Your table,” she said, gesturing across the street to a narrow table inches from the ca.n.a.l. ”The champagne is our gift.”
Gus and I glanced at each other, smiling. Once we'd crossed the street, he pulled out a seat for me and helped me scoot it back in. There were indeed two flutes of champagne at our white-tableclothed table. The slight chill in the air was balanced magnificently by the suns.h.i.+ne; on one side of us, cyclists pedaled past-well-dressed men and women on their way home from work, improbably attractive blond girls riding sidesaddle on the back of a friend's bike, tiny helmetless kids bouncing around in plastic seats behind their parents. And on our other side, the ca.n.a.l water was choked with millions of the confetti seeds. Little boats were moored at the brick banks, half full of rainwater, some of them near sinking. A bit farther down the ca.n.a.l, I could see houseboats floating on pontoons, and in the middle of the ca.n.a.l, an open-air, flat-bottomed boat decked out with lawn chairs and a portable stereo idled toward us. Augustus took his flute of champagne and raised it. I took mine, even though I'd never had a drink aside from sips of my dad's beer.
”Okay,” he said.
”Okay,” I said, and we clinked gla.s.ses. I took a sip. The tiny bubbles melted in my mouth and journeyed northward into my brain. Sweet. Crisp. Delicious. ”That is really good,” I said. ”I've never drunk champagne.”
A st.u.r.dy young waiter with wavy blond hair appeared. He was maybe even taller than Augustus. ”Do you know,” he asked in a delicious accent, ”what Dom Perignon said after inventing champagne?”
”No?” I said.
”He called out to his fellow monks, 'Come quickly: I am tasting the stars.' Welcome to Amsterdam. Would you like to see a menu, or will you have the chef's choice?”
I looked at Augustus and he at me. ”The chef's choice sounds lovely, but Hazel is a vegetarian.” I'd mentioned this to Augustus precisely once, on the first day we met.
”This is not a problem,” the waiter said.
”Awesome. And can we get more of this?” Gus asked, of the champagne.
”Of course,” said our waiter. ”We have bottled all the stars this evening, my young friends. Gah, the confetti!” he said, and lightly brushed a seed from my bare shoulder. ”It hasn't been so bad in many years. It's everywhere. Very annoying.”
The waiter disappeared. We watched the confetti fall from the sky, skip across the ground in the breeze, and tumble into the ca.n.a.l. ”Kind of hard to believe anyone could ever find that annoying,” Augustus said after a while.
”People always get used to beauty, though.”
”I haven't gotten used to you just yet,” he answered, smiling. I felt myself blus.h.i.+ng. ”Thank you for coming to Amsterdam,” he said.
”Thank you for letting me hijack your wish,” I said.
”Thank you for wearing that dress which is like whoa,” he said. I shook my head, trying not to smile at him. I didn't want to be a grenade. But then again, he knew what he was doing, didn't he? It was his choice, too. ”Hey, how's that poem end?” he asked.
”Huh?”
”The one you recited to me on the plane.”
”Oh, 'Prufrock'? It ends, 'We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown.'”
Augustus pulled out a cigarette and tapped the filter against the table. ”Stupid human voices always ruining everything.”
The waiter arrived with two more gla.s.ses of champagne and what he called ”Belgian white asparagus with a lavender infusion.”
”I've never had champagne either,” Gus said after he left. ”In case you were wondering or whatever. Also, I've never had white asparagus.”
I was chewing my first bite. ”It's amazing,” I promised.
He took a bite, swallowed. ”G.o.d. If asparagus tasted like that all the time, I'd be a vegetarian, too.” Some people in a lacquered wooden boat approached us on the ca.n.a.l below. One of them, a woman with curly blond hair, maybe thirty, drank from a beer then raised her gla.s.s toward us and shouted something.
”We don't speak Dutch,” Gus shouted back.
One of the others shouted a translation: ”The beautiful couple is beautiful.”
The food was so good that with each pa.s.sing course, our conversation devolved further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness: ”I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it.” ”Sweet-pea sorbet, you are so unexpectedly magnificent.” I wish I'd been hungrier.
After green garlic gnocchi with red mustard leaves, the waiter said, ”Dessert next. More stars first?” I shook my head. Two gla.s.ses was enough for me. Champagne was no exception to my high tolerance for depressants and pain relievers; I felt warm but not intoxicated. But I didn't want to get drunk. Nights like this one didn't come along often, and I wanted to remember it.
”Mmmm,” I said after the waiter left, and Augustus smiled crookedly as he stared down the ca.n.a.l while I stared up it. We had plenty to look at, so the silence didn't feel awkward really, but I wanted everything to be perfect. It was perfect, I guess, but it felt like someone had tried to stage the Amsterdam of my imagination, which made it hard to forget that this dinner, like the trip itself, was a cancer perk. I just wanted us to be talking and joking comfortably, like we were on the couch together back home, but some tension underlay everything.
”It's not my funeral suit,” he said after a while. ”When I first found out I was sick-I mean, they told me I had like an eighty-five percent chance of cure. I know those are great odds, but I kept thinking it was a game of Russian roulette. I mean, I was going to have to go through h.e.l.l for six months or a year and lose my leg and then at the end, it still might not work, you know?”
”I know,” I said, although I didn't, not really. I'd never been anything but terminal; all my treatment had been in pursuit of extending my life, not curing my cancer. Phalanxifor had introduced a measure of ambiguity to my cancer story, but I was different from Augustus: My final chapter was written upon diagnosis. Gus, like most cancer survivors, lived with uncertainty.
”Right,” he said. ”So I went through this whole thing about wanting to be ready. We bought a plot in Crown Hill, and I walked around with my dad one day and picked out a spot. And I had my whole funeral planned out and everything, and then right before the surgery, I asked my parents if I could buy a suit, like a really nice suit, just in case I bit it. Anyway, I've never had occasion to wear it. Until tonight.”
”So it's your death suit.”
”Correct. Don't you have a death outfit?”
”Yeah,” I said. ”It's a dress I bought for my fifteenth birthday party. But I don't wear it on dates.”
His eyes lit up. ”We're on a date?” he asked.
I looked down, feeling bashful. ”Don't push it.”
We were both really full, but dessert-a succulently rich cremeux surrounded by pa.s.sion fruit-was too good not to at least nibble, so we lingered for a while over dessert, trying to get hungry again. The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed: It was past eight thirty and still light.
Out of nowhere, Augustus asked, ”Do you believe in an afterlife?”
”I think forever is an incorrect concept,” I answered.
He smirked. ”You're an incorrect concept.”
”I know. That's why I'm being taken out of the rotation.”
”That's not funny,” he said, looking at the street. Two girls pa.s.sed on a bike, one riding sidesaddle over the back wheel.