Amsterdam Amsterdam

He moved into the apartment my windows faced, so close I could throw an egg. When his windows were open I heard him say he wanted to know everything about the world. He was bent over a globe. I didn’t know men had globes in their bedrooms, and I thought that was a curious thing to say. At the time, I was eating a grilled cheese sandwich with burnt crust.

Because he talked loudly to himself, I discovered his name was Amsterdam. I liked the way it ran when I doubled it, ‘Amsterdam Amsterdam,’ people rushing down stairs to the subway to catch a train.

My mother prepared me for men, describing rough and tumble, sweat and stink men. ‘A woman has to compromise,’ she said, ‘if she wants to get ahead.’

I didn’t tell her about Amsterdam, but if I had, she’d say, ‘A pink vase, with daisies? A purple handkerchief? He’s not right.’

Three thousand miles from mother, I imagined Amsterdam’s bed a ship. Bookshelves lined two walls; he steered a ladder to reach the top volumes.

When I first watched, I stayed low, turned off the lights and sat on the floor. Pebbles I’d brought in pressed into my legs. When the weather was hot, my skin stuck to the hardwood floors. Each night as I spied I ate one tiny square of dark chocolate. In ten squares I noticed a pattern.

His work was numbers. Ledgers and graphs and plotting down exact locations with his pen. He ate Italian food, seven kinds of pasta in seven days. Fusili penne rigatoni angel hair linguine spaghetti lasagna. On the eighth day he brought home Chinese in white and red boxes. He broke open two fortune cookies, read the fortunes, threw the cookies away. Then for two days I didn’t see him cook or eat, but he was home later than usual so I assumed he’d been out.

I felt brave and left my curtains open, never saw him glance out his window. I stood in front of the window in brocade underpants while he minced garlic, sliced mushrooms, slit and gutted a tomato. When he spilled diced bits onto the white tiled floor, he knelt with a towel, but he never saw me, in the window, how I was.

I had a map of Holland that came with a star by his name so I tacked it over my bed. I dreamt of tulips, elaborate irrigation systems, windmills, wooden shoes and Amsterdam. In the morning I touched my small breasts, took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and did what a man would want. I peeled the white coverlet down to a pool around my waist and offered my neck, ribs, waist, but he stayed pinned to the ceiling, Amsterdam bold, Amsterdam in red, Amsterdam starred.

I worked as a waitress in a restaurant where the most inexpensive dinner entrée was twenty dollars. Amsterdam walked past on his way to work so every day I went to the window at the same time. Amsterdam Amsterdam, why won't you see me? He stared straight ahead, or looked at the galvanized steel trash bin on the corner. Then he was gone, newspaper tucked under his arm. I went back to whisk a dropped napkin from the floor, bring a woman a plate with two eggs paprika-dashed, and ornamental slices of fruit. I put a squat china pitcher of cream and a white bowl with cubed sugar in front of a fat old lawyer so he could erase the taste of coffee from his coffee.

On my way home in the early evening, I passed Amsterdam’s doorstep and heard opera. I entered my apartment without turning on the lights. The setting sun bled through a red glass heart in the window, bleared the wall. He bowed over books, writing endless streams of numbers. I thought of Rapunzel, skeins long enough to climb.

At dinnertime I’d remind myself to eat, lean on the refrigerator door and move expired grapefruit juice and a carton of sour milk back and forth, but there was nothing behind. I opened a can of soup and went back to the window. When it was ready, I put it in the refrigerator, and drank a mug of tea on the couch by the window—with a book in my hand, in case he looked.

Amsterdam smoked, but looked guilty as he did. He stored cigarettes under his red lamp and lit them with an engraved lighter. He smoked while he read. He tapped his cigarette against the ashtray in a rhythm, maybe the rhythms of the words he read, but I don’t think he knew he did. Next to the burgundy sofa his skin was paler than the white tulips in my window box, though his shirt was the color of a stem.

Sometimes I watched in the dark, crouched on the floor, so only my eyes and the top of my head might show. He sat still at his table. I pressed my finger on cold glass where has hand was, my mouth against the wall.

He never had women, unless he had them someplace else. I couldn’t stand to think of it, so I thought of it often. I tried to imagine the sort he might like. Tall but not too tall, slender, high-waisted, long hair, serious mouth, bottom lip made for deep-red lipstick and pressing against wineglasses. His desire would terrify him—I couldn’t keep thinking about it, I gave myself a headache from biting my lip so hard.

I believed there was something tortured in him because once in a while he read D.H. Lawrence, but he pulled the curtains tightly shut just after he picked up the book. On those nights I couldn’t sleep.

Once I heard him say into the telephone, ‘But she doesn't eat scallops.’ So I bought scallops, which I hated, and pretended to eat them on my couch, across from his table where he sat with numbers and bruschetta.

One day I was at the stove, stirring, and I stopped looking at him for a moment. When I turned, Amsterdam stood in front of his window, one hand over his eye to shield off the sun, watching me. I dropped the spoon into risotto but he didn’t take his eyes from my face. I didn’t move. He seemed to be looking at my shoulders. His collar was unbuttoned. I saw his throat.

Then he waved wildly at me. I raised one hand, uncertain, and he pointed, so I turned to see smoke rising from the pan. Without thinking, I grabbed it and just as quickly dropped it, scalding my hands. I turned the oven fan on high and thought Amsterdam Amsterdam, he had seen me, he had seen me, how long had he been there at his window? Amsterdam Amsterdam, and there was a curved red welt, wrist-to-knuckle, on each of my palms.

The next day was rainy and cold, a brutal morning in spring, and my restaurant was nearly empty. I went to the window with a towel to polish tables. He was late, and when he walked by he walked slowly, eyes like continents on a relief map, black-outlined and ridged. I tapped the window. He gripped his briefcase tighter and smiled.

That night while I brushed my hair, I turned, and there he was, in his bedroom, face to the window. If he thought I couldn’t see him, he was an amateur; he had shut off his light, but left on the bathroom light, so he was backlit. I opened my window and motioned. He moved away and sat down; then turned back. He opened his window.

‘Hello,’ I said. I didn’t look at him. ‘I’ve been watching you,’ I said. ‘I wish you would—’ I couldn’t think of anything to say, ‘have tea with me.’

Stacks of his number-books lay behind him on his bed. Why had he taken them into his bedroom? I had never before seen them anywhere but his table. A pigeon landed on his window ledge.

‘Would you?’ I asked again. The pigeon flew away.

He nodded. ‘When?’ His voice was unexpectedly high.

I thought it would be proper to name a time two days away, like ‘Tuesday afternoon.’ This was Friday, that would give me time to prepare. I didn’t have a pitcher; tea on Tuesday would give me time to find one. I could buy roses, mop the floor. I could take down or not take down the map of Holland. I could buy a dress. I could be prepared.

‘Right now,’ I said. ‘I was just going to make some. Won’t you come over?’

A horrible second passed, then he said, ‘I’ll be there in a few minutes. What’s your address?’

Three gold raps on the doorknocker. I peered out the peephole to see him with one daisy. I realized I was wearing army surplus pants and a stained pink shirt and opened the door. Amsterdam was tall, but the doorway loomed around him. He handed me his daisy. I thanked him, and put it in a vase.

I poured tea, offered him soymilk and sugar, watched him spoon one and one half teaspoons of sugar into his tea and a thin stream of milk. I told him I broke a mirror as a child and cut my foot on the glass. I told him pigeons in Pittsburgh had redder feet.

I told him my doorknobs were cobalt and white ceramic but the one on the front door had been stolen. I told him I went to an architectural antique store and found paperweight doorknobs and replaced all of the knobs with them, except the front door, into which I bolted crystal. He looked at the map on the kitchen wall.

‘Do you like Holland?’

‘I’ve always wanted to go there,’ I told a theoretical truth. ‘Ever since I was little.’

‘I was born there, in Amsterdam.’

‘Yes I know,’ I said. ‘I mean, I thought so.’

A bee hit the window screen. It was spring, but I smelled wet leaves, cold. When I leaned my head closer, I smelled orange and clove and sandalwood.

I looked across to his lit rooms. On his dresser was a bottle of cologne that had not been there before and his globe was on his bed. I couldn’t tell which continent faced up.

I went to him, stood with my hipbone touching his shoulder blade. I cupped my hand over his shoulder; it was warm. He did not move, I did not move. We waited. I thought of us then, our feet on the earth, the earth spinning so fast.