She asked what I was writing about? Fact; but I wanted to write fiction. Did I have any contacts? No. I'm trying to add some drama. She said she had to make money. On one side of her sink, a shiny black plastic water heater sprayed vapor into a cloak of steam. She poured some into a cup with a tea bag in it. As I walked past, I gave her the other hundred. "Don't you need this?" she asked, smiling oddly, like a powdered pin cushion.
"No. I budgeted it for the week," I said and stepped down into the street between lines of men toward the corner and right across one end of Old Church Square. A water heater; and I had mentioned the water heater, once white, now smudged, in my room when she had asked about coffee.
In 1982, Alaine, in Florida while I waited in Woodstock, New York, had pulled out all my nerves and twisted them blind in the air above the Atlantic. Suzie in 1976 when I was stuck in an apartment in New York partied with cocaine in pick ups on country roads and tried to choose between three men,.I wanted to claw through the walls. Not to be able to leave the booth was foltern, haltering, torture. If I affected Ulrika enough to fight me off, I could get her out, even if sixty two."I have to make money."
The next night, a deepness slowed the air, both left by the same bed mate and alone in the aprtment after I loved in 1963 and Ulrika from,... 1995? My sweater holes: I needed an apartment. A thrown out prison experiment could pay half her rent.
"I love you," I said to her red back. Sensation welled up through my heart. On one elbow, I kissed her back. "I love you," and she was off. What was I doing for Halloween? Nothing, staying here. Had I spoken to my mother? She phoned me once a month. Have a pleasant evening. I weaved between the streams of men on the lamp lit pavement.
After breakfast, I typewrote about 1991 but remembered "I love you." If she let me move in, I didn't want her to think it was to do that act. "I told the truth, but I have no right to love you. It is only a play, a carnival. I can not claim to love you inr eality, or expect anything to happen because of it."
I took the note out with me. At eight, her curtain was closed. I'd seen her sit with the blond across the hallway. I'd gone to her in August; she'd been smoking a big hand rolled cigaret; I never went back. I should not show her the note, but why care? It wasn't blackmail, but the blond was closed too. If I left it in front of her door, Ulrika would knock it onto the street. I left it by her stone step corner; the rectangles matched. From my room, near 2, I felt a far off burst of glee.
The next day by six, I thought I should check up on her, but I'd seem like the man in the suit, clenched before her door. At 8:05 she was closed, at 11:30 she was open. She let me open the door myself. "Thank you." She asked if anything had happened. "Did you get my note?"
"No." Her command said she had not found it, and I may not believe what I wrote because love was real in a church or in a circus.
I said the government might stop bothering me after Clinton got out. The apartment agent says there's nothing under twelve hundred. Ulrika enlarged her eyes.
I crawled over.I write about her in my diary. I put my hand on her back and leaned against her waist. They get stolen. Yes. I lowered my face, my mouth on her hip. I told her I thought of her when I wrote, what a foreigner would understand. "You write in German?" I moved my lips to her ribs and back to her waist. "No, I write in English. You forget everything unless you write it down. But I can't write about this," I said into her thigh. "Why not?" Some people get upset. Her cell phone rang. Slightly bent over, I retreated to the bed. When she looked at me, I raised my eyelids. She smiled, told the caller she hoped he was all right and would see him later. From her doorway she said, "Enjoy your evening."
A self contradictory No with triumphant eyes. I didn't think of her German, but her English.
*
If the cash machine next to Los Latinos didn't work, I had to walk five blocks North to Central Station and stand in long lines of backpackers and suburbanites. I bought a rose. The lady sealed it in a plastic cone and I zipped it inside my jacket. Droplets sprayed in the cold dark.
Two hours later, Ulrika looked unimpressed, cheeks lax under thick make up. What did I want to do? "I got you something." I handed her the rose. A fiery grape color lit her eyes. She unwrapped the blue paper, cut the plastic with scissors and leaned the rose in the sink. I said a word that meant play apart. Standing on the bed she tripped onto the floor but landed on one leg.
"Be careful."
"I don't be careful."
I held her foot, touched her side and slid my hand onto her stomach. Faced the other way,l knelt above me, she rubbed an object between her legs so I could see it. After a while, she turned to look backwards with a discovering grin. I kissed her ankle. She cut some leaves off the rose, put it in a bottle and set it on the sink.
"I can't remember how I budgeted this."
"Don't get emotional," she said. "Come tomorrow. See you tomorrow."
On my bed in my hotel room, I remembered her ass. "Don't get emotional," or you will want to prove whether love is true or false; argue, complain and break up. If love was joining, then be satisfied.
"See you tomorrow." I could go at eight but to be there first, shut out the others. She might have a date, regular customers, bound, whipped, swollen in a black rubber suit; a minister, a TV personality, a phone call or want to perfect her make up. Her curtains
stayed closed. At one twenty, I was back at the hotel. "I have a computer," she said in August, a keyboard and a screen, success to hide a weakness to insult, dark shot big eyes stilled as if threatened, easy to upset. A petty criminal type might try to rule her. Maybe her last boyfriend beat her.
I wore a blue cap because of the rain. I put a hundred guilder note on the sink. Ulrika said, "FBI." I knew it would take the whole visit. In Woodstock N.Y. in 1981 a taxi driver friend murdered his girl friend.There was gossip. IN 1988,a big rape case happened. The teen age girl's name was just like a name in a book I had written twenty years before. After two years, I phoned her lawyer and left the message,.Then, I was followed. I had to answer questions for four years.It was all about this woman who worked for President Reagan. She was in another book I wrote, also not published about a massage parlor in Canada in 1974. They tried to change my personality through conditioning treatments, mild electric shock when I looked at a picture. Then they got Tibetans into it. No one believes me. My sister thinks I'm crazy, and my mother. I thought they wouldn't follow me to Europe past the three mile limit, but they did.
Ulrika was looking aside. I said her eyes looked blue. She said it was the light. "I'm glad we couild talk. I need people to distract me from the government. When I was in New York, I asked for my CIA and FBI file. They said there was nothing."
What did she think now? Murder, rape, Tibetans, a massage parlor; a section of my true mind like a pebble thrown into the night whatever she thought or fantasized. Two nights later, I bypassed her street, then refused to bar myself. The blond from across the hallway was in her room. Ulrika opened her outer door. I was just saying hello. She said, you forgot this, and went to her armoire, and handed me my blue cap. Thanks.
With key noises, hotel guests went into the next room and closed the door a hundred times. They yelled at each other and laughed loud. One made a phone call in broad American tones. Ulrika stood blue lit behind glass.
