History of a Pleasure Seeker Page 9

  So was Didier’s. “D’you think she’d like two?” He smiled his crooked smile and watched Piet closely. When he saw his friend was not shocked, he told a story of his own. “My first year as a page at the Amstel, a guest asked me into his suite. His wife had noticed me. She was younger than him, Austrian, randy as hell. We spent the night gamuching her.” He grinned. “Of course we didn’t touch each other, him and me.” As he spoke, his foot was bobbing lightly against Piet’s thigh; he could feel the hair on Piet’s leg against his toes. “It happened a lot after that.”

  Like Piet Barol, Didier Loubat was not telling the strict truth. He had, indeed, been invited to guests’ rooms at the Amstel Hotel; it had happened on many occasions. But in each case the occupants of the rooms had been men—and their wives, if they had them, were not present. Now recklessness gripped him. He pulled the plug and let some water out of the bath, as though preparing to leave it; but when the level was sufficiently low to expose them both, he said, “We can’t go in this state. Blok’ll be up any minute. If he catches us …”

  Piet’s erection was almost painful. “Well, what then?”

  “I won’t look if you don’t.”

  Both their cocks were now standing clear of the water. Didier’s was long and thin, like his body. Piet’s was squatter and fatter, rising from a dense clump of black hair. The memory of Blok’s lascivious stares before dinner remained, and was highly unpleasant.

  “All right, then,” said Piet. “Eyes closed.”

  They leaned back and closed their eyes and began to rub themselves, making the water churn. At his end of the bath, Piet was loosening Jacobina’s stays, pushing her dress roughly to the floor as she ripped the buttons on his shirt. He was proud of his body and longed to show it to her. He imagined her admiring him, sliding his undershorts down, taking his prick in her mouth. His legs spasmed and a foot jerked against Didier’s buttock. In the instant he touched it, his friend’s smooth skin became Jacobina’s and this sent him hurtling towards the conclusion he sought.

  Didier was listening carefully. When he judged that Piet was past caring, he opened his eyes. Piet’s head was thrown back, his neck and shoulders magnificent. His right hand was thrashing in the water. For six hours Piet had been subject to the most demanding temptations, which first Jacobina, and later the obligations of dinner with her daughters, had prevented him from satisfying.

  Satisfaction, when it came, was bountiful.

  Didier found the sight awe inspiring, and the impossibility of matching such profusion made him self-conscious. He stood up and reached for a towel.

  “Sorry.” But Piet had no energy for embarrassment.

  Didier finished drying and put on his dressing gown. “Do ask your friend if she needs anyone else to lend a hand.”

  “Of course.” Piet closed his eyes again. He was no longer feeling loquacious and wanted Didier to leave.

  “Bonne nuit, then.”

  “Good night, my friend.”

  Didier went to his room, pulled the table across the door, hoarding the memory of what he had seen, opened the window and lay on the bed. He understood the merits of delay and did not touch himself for five long minutes while he thought over what had just happened and improved upon it—so that when he began his long, slow frig in the hush of a summer’s night, Piet Barol not only repeated his performance in the bath but put his strong arms around Didier’s shoulders and stroked the back of his neck with his fingers and looked deep into his eyes and kissed him.

  Meanwhile Piet refilled the bath—hot this time—and washed and went to bed, entertaining the tired protests of his conscience and resolving to be better, without at all intending to honor this promise.

  After this, Piet Barol began to omit his daily ritual of feigned regret. It seemed a pity to squander an instant of that glorious summer on self-recrimination, so he sedated his scruples and threw himself into sampling the many pleasures available to him while Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts was in America.

  He thought less and less of his life in Leiden and grew bolder in his explorations, sometimes leaving Egbert with a translation for two hours at a stretch while he sketched in the shuttered ballroom the superb Louis XV furniture, or the silver table ornaments reserved for Christmas and baptisms. Every piece Maarten had bought was the product of masterly labor. The delicate butterflies and dancing bears engraved on a glass goblet of the sixteenth century had the power to move Piet to tears. So did the fact that Maarten owned seventy-eight such glasses and kept them in a cabinet, redolent of intrigue and secret treaties, that had once belonged to a doge of Venice.

  Piet no longer felt embarrassed to be caught in contemplation of the family’s possessions. At last he was at ease with the girls and immune from the disapproval of the servants thanks to the protection of Jacobina. Nevertheless, because it made him happy to be well liked, he continued to dispense his good nature without regard to rank or influence; and so became rather a favorite with Mrs. de Leeuw, who was not used to university men taking the trouble to inquire after her mother’s health, still less to them remembering her ailments from week to week.

  Egbert’s docility in the matter of translation exercises was commendable. When Piet understood that his charge would not attempt to leave the schoolroom once he had reached it, he began to add other pursuits to his sketch making. It pleased him to volunteer his services to Jacobina in front of the other servants and to provoke the frown she always wore when setting the date and time of their next appointment. Though he imagined doing so often, he never undressed in front of her nor pretended to any further intimacy than that of a discreet and unusually obliging body servant. She, however, became a great deal more particular in her requirements, which she continued to articulate in the tone she used when she outlined a menu to Monsieur la Chaume or asked Hilde Wilken to clear the tea things. Permitted such quantities of supervised experimentation, Piet began to see that the way to sensual Nirvana is long, and that even an inch of the journey, properly savored, can give two people more pleasure than many enjoy in a lifetime.

  As satisfying to him was the social intimacy he had achieved with Constance and Louisa, who now included him in the tête-à-têtes that took place in the summerhouse at the end of the garden where Louisa kept her mannequins and toiles and gave commands to seamstresses and milliners. She did not make any effort to contribute practically to her creations, and Piet admired the way she took for granted that others should labor to give life to her imaginings. She knew her own mind well and was a severe critic. Twice, while her sister and Piet played trictrac, she reduced to tears a middle-aged embroiderer who had failed to catch a pattern of ivy, clambering over a ruin, that she had designed for a coat inspired by Arthurian legend.

  Like her father, Louisa had no patience with incompetents. The third time the embroiderer made a mistake, she never appeared again. Once or twice Piet wondered what had happened to her. Presumably she had a family to feed, but such quotidian pressures were so far from life as it was lived at Herengracht 605 that he never remembered to inquire.

  Didier remained hilarious on the subject of the girls’ extravagances and reported numerous instances of petulance. But they were only rude to servants. Now that Piet had graduated to the status of guest, he saw only their most charming sides. He and Didier did not share a bath again or refer in any way to the events of their first one together, but they continued to use each other’s water and exchange gossip from the vantage point of the radiator; and when Didier smiled into Piet’s eyes as he served him coffee, or ice-cold lemonade, Piet smiled back.

  On July 17th, Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts returned from New York in low spirits. It was the first time he had gone into partnership with Americans and he had not enjoyed the experience. He had never met such uncontainable enthusiasm—for yet another story, another elevator shaft, another eighty thousand dollars spent on frescoes and gilt. More than a thousand crystal chandeliers had already been installed, and apparently a further six hundred were required
. The project was likely to finish late and certain to cost much more than he had anticipated.

  Maarten had well-established lines of credit, but just at the moment his finances were rather tighter than usual. His hotel on the shores of Lake Como was not doing well. The resort had fallen abruptly out of fashion a few months after it was finished. His establishments in London and Frankfurt had required new lead roofs and been closed for six months, since he could not have patrons in a building filled with banging workmen.

  Unlike his wife and daughters, Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts had a keen sense of the value of money. Because he was honest he was prepared to charge his guests the sums he did only for an experience that was, in every way, perfect. He personally supervised the selection of the telephonists. He turned every tap, stayed in every Suite Impériale, tried the butter in every breakfast room to make sure it was soft but solid. He would rather close for a season than offer accommodations that were less than first rate. But to have closed his two most profitable hotels for the same season left him inconveniently short of funds, since the new one in New York, which his partner had decided to call the Plaza, was costing tens of thousands a week.

  For some time, Maarten had been wondering whether God was punishing him for the venture’s worldliness. He had sanctioned the architect’s fancies from the other side of the Atlantic and visited to see the demolition of the existing building and the sinking of the new foundation’s cornerstone. But the Americans had built very quickly and on his second visit he had been shocked by the grandiloquence he had financed. To have built a Renaissance French château thousands of miles from the Loire Valley was one thing. To have presumed to improve on the original by inserting nineteen floors beneath its turrets was another and seemed worryingly close to what others had done with the Tower of Babel. That enterprise had brought ruin and discord to its overreaching builders, and it seemed to Maarten that this one might do so, too.

  His partner, an American named Lionel Dermont, whom he had met in the first-class dining room of the French liner Provence, appeared to have much less money now than he had seemed to have then. Indeed, Maarten was no longer sure Dermont had ever had the sums he claimed. Over his six weeks in the United States he had developed an energetic dislike for the man, who dressed so elegantly and told everybody what to do and contributed little of tangible worth to anything.

  Lionel Dermont was a talker. Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts, except with his closest associates, was not. Mr. Dermont’s talk was generally the greatest rot and this did not make his monologues easier to endure. He had a thousand sincere ways of explaining the delay of a check, and though he had long ceased to contribute to the construction costs he was fiercely loyal to his vision of a hotel “fit for potentates” and determined to spend as much of Maarten’s money as was necessary to achieve it. In this he was gleefully abetted by the architect and the gentleman responsible for the interiors. Through his acquaintance with these three men Maarten derived the inaccurate but unshakable impression that all Americans are brash and acquisitive and painfully dull dining companions besides.

  Mr. Dermont’s stylish postponement of his latest installment of capital had inspired Maarten to investigate how best to cope with future emergencies alone. He lunched with his bankers at the Knickerbocker Trust Company and sounded them out on the possibility of a further loan. But the shiny confidence expected of men who attempt to borrow large sums of money in New York was impossible for Maarten to emulate, since it would have been so unacceptable in Amsterdam. As he left their monumental offices on Fifth Avenue, he was aware that he had not done well.

  This knowledge preoccupied him throughout his return voyage, during which he began to believe that God disapproved of his spending such sums and energies on a monument to human vanity. By the time his own door was opened to him he was feeling morose and apprehensive. Though he had not hesitated to spend $180 on an evening cloak for Louisa and only slightly less on gowns for Constance and Jacobina, he knew that he should not have bought them. It was a further challenge to the deity.

  Jacobina was unusually solicitous when she came to chat in his dressing room before dinner. As he embraced her, he felt a tug of violent desire that horrified him and made him step backwards to avoid giving his Creator further offense. He could see that this annoyed his wife and did his best to be bright and amusing at dinner; but in fact the only thing that lifted his spirits was the way in which Constance and Louisa appeared to have dropped their guard with Piet Barol. Maarten was glad of that. He had often been cruelly cut by ladies like his daughters when he was a young man. He was pleased for Piet that it was 1907, not 1877, and that the world had moved on.

  When dinner was over, Egbert was allowed to come down, having dined on sugared bread and milk in his room; and watched impassively by Didier Loubat the whole family unwrapped their gifts and exclaimed over them as the salon filled with tissue paper and ribbons.

  Observing this happy scene, Piet saw that his father’s presence disturbed Egbert and that he took care not to come into contact with any of the brightly colored paper; also that he shifted surreptitiously from foot to foot over the wreathed roses in the carpet, following a secret dance of his own.

  Maarten had brought the boy a bright red fire engine and knew at once that Egbert did not care for it. He had no idea that the Shadowers were deeply suspicious of primary colors and that merely holding such an object required tremendous courage. This meant he was unmoved when Egbert carried it the whole way across the room to give to Hilde Wilken to take upstairs. Maarten saw only a sullen, pampered child, too fussed over by women, and this depressed him and reignited his anger over Mr. Dermont.

  Jacobina knew her husband well and understood that Egbert was likely to be shouted at if his father’s mood did not improve. Maarten’s mounting impatience irked her and added insult to the injury he had done her in his dressing room. “Do sing us a duet, darling, with Mr. Barol,” she said. Maarten had a decent voice and was always happier after using it. “Why not something by Bizet?” she added slyly, to punish him for his failures as a lover and a father.

  Maarten, who had no appetite for conversation, was touched by his wife’s suggestion. “Capital idea. What say you, Mr. Barol? Do you think we might manage it? We have Carmen somewhere.”

  But Piet had a better idea. He took out the Pêcheurs de Perles and suggested that they sing the duet commonly called “Au fond du temple saint.” “Two old friends are reunited but fall in love with the same divine beauty. It nearly makes them enemies but in the end they swear eternal friendship.”

  “A splendid theme.” Maarten took his glasses from their case and peered over the music. He remembered it was devilish tricky to fit the words to the notes.

  Both men were baritones and the duet called for a tenor, so Piet took the higher part and sang it in falsetto. He had played the piano arrangement so often he had no need to look at his hands, and this left his eyes free to direct the meaning of the music as he wished. As he sang of the crowd falling to its knees, astonished at such loveliness, he stared fixedly over the piano lid and into the room beyond. Constance and Louisa were on the daybed, as usual. Egbert sat on a little stool at his mother’s feet. Jacobina’s chair was against the farthest wall, and her children could not see her face without turning round. This meant that when Piet sang “Look! There is the goddess!” no one saw that he did so straight into Jacobina’s eyes; nor did anyone observe that she met his gaze unflinchingly.

  Now Maarten joined him in rapt appreciation of the heavenly figure’s beauty. But when he sang “O vision! O dream!” he was looking at Piet’s hands to make sure his timing was accurate, and it struck Jacobina as significant that he should sing these words without even thinking of her. This made her bolder and she put down her embroidery. Now the male voices joined forces in rapturous major thirds, and though Maarten’s pitch wobbled occasionally they made a fine sound. Singing straight to Jacobina, Piet declared that love had taken their hearts by storm and was turning t
hem into enemies.

  At this, Jacobina smiled.

  But now the music was gaining control of them and Maarten was confident enough to look up from time to time, which meant that he was looking directly into Piet’s eyes when he sang, “No, nothing will separate us!”

  Piet Barol was genuinely moved. He had chosen the duet in order to communicate with Maarten’s wife, but the passion of the music, the platonic fidelity of the male lines, drew him increasingly towards the man he had cuckolded. As they swore lustily to be friends forever, to treat each other as brothers, and promised that the goddess would unite them one day, Piet began to feel a mounting filial devotion. He did love Maarten, and the soaring declarations they made to each other dimmed his consciousness of all else. They sang the last chorus triumphantly, in a perfect unison of pitch and pace that left them feeling tender and inseparable, enormously refreshed, as though Bizet’s rich harmonies had released the toxins from their souls.

  Ten hours after closing his eyes, Maarten woke with the conviction that Piet Barol could be a useful ally. He had built his fortune on recognizing exceptional talent and did not consider that a man of Piet’s gifts was best deployed teaching German verbs to a troubled little boy.

  Maarten was a fearless realist. He did not pretend to himself that he had gained the confidence of his American bankers in their gaudy offices. As he lay propped up on his pillows, contemplating the soft-boiled egg Hilde Wilken had brought him, he was annoyed by this failure—but it did not induce panic. He knew many wealthy men in Holland and was confident he could persuade them to lend him large sums. In his own country he had a greater renown and surer touch than would ever be the case in America.