The Letterman

My father throws his Mini into fourth, simultaneously knocking the gearshift against my left knee. "Sorry," I say, even though he hit me, then I curse myself for falling into the old ways. At least I don't move my leg, which would be impossible to do anyway in this stupid bumper car. "Everything's tiny in Europe," my roommate warned me before I left, "even the pussy." Maynard is crass, but I like him. He's real Texas. When his dad comes to visit, they put on big hats and go out two-stepping at the Broken Spoke. I can't imagine going to a place like that with my own father and asking women to dance. I'd feel obliged to warn anyone who said yes to him.

We drive away from the airport. It's a damp January night and I try to make sense of the earthly constellations that are street lamps, neon, brightly lit windows. Planes occasionally descend across the highway in-front of us, flaunting their immense right of way. "Is this Amsterdam?" I ask.

My father shakes his head and says, "No. A suburb."

I nod, recognizing the town's name from my guidebook. In Utrecht, the red-light district is on a canal, in boats. There's one in The Hague, too, in a mall, of all places. The one I'm interested in is at the center of Amsterdam, the Walletjes. It means "little walls," and when I told Maynard this, he said, "See my point?" I've been helping him out at his garage lately--sweeping up, pumping gas--trying to save up for a hooker. I'm hoping to find something transcendent in paid legal sex. I want the money to make us even-steven, me and this woman, whoever she turns out to be. No one will feel hurt or degraded, or guilty over having degraded someone else. It'll be as if I'd gone to the store for a carton of eggs.

My father approaches an intersection and down-shifts. He's too big for this car. His gut grazes the steering wheel while his legs squeeze in tightly along either side of it. The light turns green and he accelerates again. Old lead foot, I think, as he races the engine unnecessarily. It's one of my mother's sayings. She and my father share a flair for acidity. They got divorced when (continued on page 140) Letterman (continued from page 92) they set their sights on each other.

I have an older sister, Mimi. She won't come to Amsterdam, or anywhere else my father happens to be living. She wants to know why I keep visiting him, and I tell her it's because he pays my tuition, which he does. She says I've made a deal with the devil, that it can't end well, that I should consider the student loans that have worked just fine for her. I tell her I like milking him for all he's worth, which, embarrassingly, is the only act of defiance I've been able to muster to this point.

We reach Amsterdam proper and my father turns on his windshield wipers. It's been sprinkling since we emerged from the covered parking at Schiphol, and at last he must deal with the accumulation of water. We drive alongside a tiny tram powered by parallel electric wires running above its roof--transportation for dolls. The apartment buildings are brick blocks with plain, square windows, and everyone seems to have agreed upon a uniform of white chiffon curtains. "Where are the hookers?" I find myself asking my father, with whom I've never once discussed a sex-related matter.

He looks at me and I freeze, thinking he's going to hit me. Then he turns back to the road without saying a word. The reality is, he's never laid a hand on me. It was Mimi he went after, while I stood by and watched. Often, I was the one who alerted him to the fact that she was in need of a smack. Perhaps she had bullied me, or taken something I wanted--some toy, or scrap of food. Like me, my father had an infantile conviction that Mimi should never interfere with my happiness. I thought this was because he loved me, and not, as I would later learn, because something in his character had made him ultrasusceptible to the worst aspects of the Arab culture in which he was raised.

He beat my sister elaborately, calling her into his room, spreading his legs as he sat on the edge of the bed, demanding that she come and stand between them. She'd start flinching right away, her head twisted in anticipation of being boxed. "Why are you flinching?" he'd ask her. He'd tell her to stand still, but she couldn't. Her arms jerked up in front of her face, and he pulled them back down. She cried and he asked why she was crying. He gave her a tissue. He waited until it had all subsided--the tears, the self-protection--before he started in on her, dealing his blows, then grabbing her wrists and pulling her back into him when she recoiled. She wore corduroy outfits with matching berets sent by my mother, who had not fought for custody. She was so little. It was like watching someone kill their pet.

One winter he put Mimi out of the house and I waved to her from the kitchen window as she sat on the cold concrete without a jacket. She didn't wave back, just kept her palms flat on the icy driveway. Later, my father had to defrost her hands in a bowl of cool water. He watched as her freezer-burned skin slowly came back to life, warning her that the numbness would soon give way to pain. But as the time passed, her face registered nothing; at the ripe old age of 11, it seemed she had acquired a death wish.

I can't believe I waved. It's my deepest shame, deeper than tattling on her, or not once raising a cry in her defense. I waved because I was safe inside the house, because immunity from my father had led me to believe I was special, and that any suffering that took place on my behalf was in everyone's best interest. I've wanted to apologize a million times but am afraid of reminding my sister that I'm despicable.

"You're thinking about the red light district," my father says finally. "They're not going to let those piggy women run wild all over the city. They've contained them."

"Yeah, well, I'm going to get a hooker," I say, wishing my voice wouldn't quake so much. This is the real reason I'm here, the reason I can't explain to my sister: to cure my unfounded fears of a man who has never struck me.

"Take off your shoe," my father says as we step through the vestibule, his Middle Eastern accent still causing him to occasionally drop his plurals. I kick off my sneakers without bothering to untie them. He warns me, "This is not how to make shoes last."

"Where's the bathroom?" I ask, setting my duffel bag on the shiny tiled floor.

"Give me your coat," he answers.

I take off my jacket and hand it to him.

"Coats go in here," he says, opening a folding closet door and pulling out a wooden hanger. Before angling it into one of my armholes, he pauses to examine the Maynard patch on the left breast. "What kind of clothing is this?" he asks me.

"It's my roommate's," I say. "He's a mechanic."

"Why are you wearing it?"

I shrug. "It's cool."

"'Cool'?" He smirks. He likes to put me down for sounding American. He resents that I have a country, I think, that I'm not a foreigner, that I'm pale, like my Scandinavian mother. He's upset that even as I walk around carrying fully half of his Lebanese genes, I do not seem to find myself an Arab. I refuse to visit Beirut, harbor a passive-aggressive Israeli sympathy, can't speak a word of Arabic. Anyone who didn't know my background might mistake my self-loathing for racism.

About the jacket, I say, "Girls like it," which is the only real weapon I have against him. He's a loser with women. As soon as he decides he's interested in someone--and he only dates women under his command at the American Consulate, so that he has access to their files--he's on the phone with Ticketron. It's freakish. Without bothering to ascertain the tastes of his prospective beloved, he buys several weeks' worth of play, symphony and opera tickets, then proposes marriage to whoever's still awake after the last curtain falls. He's come close a couple of times--there was even one short-lived engagement--but in the end it never works out. I think he's looking for someone with a very good attention span. Someone to follow his movements acutely, just as Mimi did when she was little, feeling his meaty palms against her skin before they even touched her.

"You must be kidding me," he says now, running his fingers over the embroidered patch.

I shake my head. "Seriously. Women love it."

"Low-class women?"

"College women. Professors even." I can't seem to stop taunting him.

"I don't believe you," he says.

"Where's the bathroom?" I say.

My father points the way and I jerk off into the toilet, thinking about Professor Devine and how she liked to sit on my lap while I edited Gunsmoke episodes for her production class. Sometimes she marked my work too harshly, sometimes she was too soft. She never got it right--how to grade a student you're screwing--so to this day I have no idea whether or not I can actually edit. I never saw what was beneath her skirts, either--only felt that she'd been thinking about me, or someone she liked just as well, before knocking at my door. On those late afternoons, when most of the faculty had gone home and the students hadn't quite begun their nocturnal takeover of the Communications building, she asked nothing more of me than a puncture, a rivet. Sometimes she'd let me suck on one of her breasts, quickly taking it back as soon as she was finished. Her stinginess made me come. My Dutch hooker is going to be just like Professor Devine. I'm going to pay her to quit early, to desert, to leave me in my own stupid mess.

My father knocks and says, "Are you almost done?"

I clean myself up, wash my hands and open the door. "Let me show you the kitchen," he says, turning abruptly. I follow him past his room and glance inside. Beyond his elevated bed is a telescope whose lens peeks gingerly out of a closed curtain, like a finger between two buttons on a blouse. It's tilted slightly upward, though not high enough to see the sky.

At the entrance to the next doorway he flips on a fluorescent lamp, illuminating a long galley kitchen. On the back wall is a door, and, beside it, a window revealing the lighted apartments into which my father is presumably peeping. "This is special tea," he announces, indicating a small box on his putty-colored counter. "Each bag can be used three times."

I nod.

"When you finish with a tea bag, put it in this Tupperware." He waggles a plastic tub near the sink.

"All right," I say.

"Here are the glasses," he says, opening one cupboard door, then another and another as he moves on to expose plates, pots, linens.

I keep nodding until he's finished, then point to the back door and say, "What's out there?"

"A garden," he says.

"No," I say, "what are you looking at through your telescope?"

He puts on his consulate face then, which causes the wrinkles on his forehead to smooth out, and his eyes to scan some middle distance. Diplomacy, he's always said, is the art of accepting defeat in the same way you would victory--with humility, grace and mild amusement. This is the man I always wanted for a parent, but my father wasn't one to bring the office home. "OK," he says, smiling a little. He's still handsome, which he doesn't deserve to be. "You caught me. C'mon."

He flicks off the kitchen lamp and I follow him back to his bedroom, where he operates on light from the hallway alone. We traverse the path between the foot of his platform bed and an ornate, freestanding wardrobe--furniture he's shipped all over the world with him in the course of his career. It still looks new. My father's practice has always been to buy expensive things, then treat them well so as not to have to replace them. He used to stand behind Mimi at the kitchen sink as she washed plate after Wedgwood plate, making sure she never chipped them. She never did, which disappointed him, but he swatted her anyway, while I stood by, rubbernecking.

He removes the lens cap, then positions himself in front of the eyepiece, all without actually touching the telescope. He's quiet for a long moment, then says, "OK, you can look."

We trade places and I assume his position behind the lens. Somewhere across the courtyard, a few flights up, a blonde in her mid-30s watches television while her seemingly disembodied hands perform the task of knitting. I can't explain why, but the way she's doing it, without looking, without checking her work, gives me a hard-on. "Who is she?" I say.

"Joanna."

"Yo Anna?"

"The J is a Y in Dutch."

"Oh," I say. "Joanna."

"Well, do you see what she's doing?" he says.

"How do you know her name?"

"She's my new assistant. She's knitting me a sweater."

"Why?"

"Why?" he laughs. "Because I took her to the symphony and she asked me what my favorite color was. I said blue and that's a blue sweater. Everyone in the Netherlands knits."

Just then Joanna stops knitting. Something on TV has caught her eye, perhaps, and she tilts her head slightly. She raises one of the thick needles to her chest and starts tracing a spot on the outside of her own sweater that would seem to correspond to a nipple.

"What's she doing?" my father asks.

"Nothing," I say. "Knitting."

"I'm going to propose to her while you're here. I've been monitoring her, and I think she's going to say yes."

"Wow," I say. "Congratulations."

"Well," he says, "she hasn't said yes yet."

"Does she know that you watch her?"

"Don't be stupid. I hide the telescope under the bed when she comes over."

"Just wondering."

"Step aside," he says.

I do, and he takes my spot, squinting through the far-reaching peephole. He doesn't say anything for a few seconds, then he asks, "Was she knitting all that time I was talking to you?"

"What else would she have been doing?" I say.

"Nothing," he says.

"Isn't she knitting now?"

"Of course."

"It's kind of dull," I say, "watching that."

"Not to me," my father says. "Not if you're in love."

The next morning at breakfast, he gives me a mug of hot water, then, a few minutes later, squeezes out the tea bag from his own mug and drops it into mine. "It might take a few minutes to brew," he says. "Just be patient."

We're sitting at a rectangular table at the front end of his long living room, eating cereal. He's easy with himself, dropping toast crumbs all over the place mat, letting tea dribble down the side of his mug, slopping random Cheerios onto the snowy carpet beneath his feet. Any of these would've been punishable offenses in my childhood, at least for Mimi; it infuriates me now to see it was all a ruse.

"Remember how you used to hit my sister?" I say, my voice a little stronger than the night before.

He looks at me. "Mimi was a willful child and that got her a few beatings. You, on the other hand--I never had a problem with you."

Despite his cozying up to me, I force myself to push on. "I remember one time, just before you put her outside, you told her to go and get her shoes. When she turned to walk away from you, you kicked her in the rear and she went flying forward."

My father laughs. "That's quite a story."

"Actually," I say, thinking some more, "you told her to go and get her shoe. You meant the pair, but you said 'shoe.' Do you realize you do that? Drop your plurals? I guess it's your accent."

"I'm an old man," my father says. "I don't need this kind of talk."

"About beating my sister or about your accent?" I say.

He doesn't answer. I've never said these things to him before. I thought that it would feel good to say them now, but it's making me feel worse. A million times worse. Because nothing happens. He doesn't get mad or kick me out or anything.

"I'm getting a hooker," I say.

"No, you're not," he tells me. "You will not endanger my standing in the diplomatic corps."

"You can't stop me."

"You don't think so?"

I shake my head.

"Well, I think so," he says.

"I don't care if you quit paying my tuition. I can get student loans."

"It's nothing to do with money."

"I'm going to take a shower," I say, getting up from the table.

"I may not be here when you get out," he says. "I need to go to work."

"It's Saturday."

"I'm getting a little behind," he admits.

"All right, then," I say. "I'll see you tonight. After the hooker."

I jerk off again, this time in the shower, thinking about Joanna and her knitting needles. When I come out, my father is gone, just as he said he would be, and I feel myself relaxing a little for the first time since I got here. I wrap a towel around my waist and go into his room to look through the telescope. At first it seems like Joanna's not home, but then, after a few minutes, she appears in the living room, carrying a basket of laundry. She sets it down on the floor and begins folding its contents, laying the clothes in neat piles on the couch. At one point she pulls a red blouse from the basket, and, as she holds it up for examination, her face registers dismay. She then drapes it across the front of herself, tugging at different parts of it to try to make it fit. Finally she turns her back to the window, removes the T-shirt she's wearing, and puts on the shrunken blouse. She buttons it and turns around a little, and I can see that the fabric is pulling across her chest. She caves her shoulders, but even so, there's no making it work. This distracts her to the degree that she forgets to turn around fully before slowly undoing the buttons. Her bra is white and matronly and the effect of this is fairly profound on me, though I don't follow through.

Instead, I go back in the guest room and pull some clean clothes out of my suitcase. After getting dressed, I count my money for the hooker and make sure I smell good in every place that can also smell bad.

In the entryway, I open the closet and pull out my mechanic's coat, then head for the front door. Seconds before I tug at the handle, I notice a place for a key on the inside, and think, how European. When the door won't open no matter which way I turn the knob, I see my father has won.

He's left a number where I can reach him at work, so I call him from the wall phone in the kitchen. "Fakir," he says--the last name I resent having to share with him.

"Yeah, I'm locked in," I say.

"Who is this, please?"

"C'mon," I say. "You locked me in. You can't do that. How does this fucking door work?" I rarely swear in front of him, and it seems to have the same effect as that time, many years ago, when I made the conscious shift from Daddy to Dad.

"Is this Gregor?" he asks.

"Where's the fucking key?"

"I have the key."

"This is fucked up," I say.

"I'll be home at lunch," he says. "Joanna is coming for dinner tonight and I'm going to ask her to marry me. I need you to be there."

"I can't believe you did this."

"Gregor," he says, "could you defrost the chicken in the freezer? I forgot to take it out before I left."

Without thinking, I go to the freezer and pull out a plastic bag with Chicken written on it in black magic marker. "Got it," I say.

"Plug up the sink and set it in there with some cold water. It'll thaw faster."

"I remember," I say, "from my sister's hands."

He laughs. "What are you talking about now?"

"Listen," I say, "I'm going to get a hooker tomorrow."

"You're the son of a diplomat," he tells me. "You will not get a hooker."

"Sure I will," I say, and I hang up.

I fill the sink and watch the chicken bob a little in the water. The twice-used tea bag from breakfast sits inside its Tupperware, and I know that tomorrow morning my father will make me use it, taking a fresh one for himself.

I realize I'm not breathing and correct that. Then I drain the sink of water and pray that tonight at dinner, each piece of chicken will have a raw, frozen center that will give Joanna food poisoning before my father has a chance to propose.

By now, she's finished folding her laundry and is watching TV and knitting again. She's kept the tight red blouse on after all, and I'm hoping that she'll reach inside one of the gaping holes between the buttons and touch herself, but she doesn't. Boring. At one point she turns her head abruptly, then sets her knitting on the couch and gets up. She leaves the living room for a moment, then returns carrying a cordless phone. She's talking amiably with someone, then listening, then she walks over to the window and looks down at me from her fourth floor apartment. She listens some more to whoever's talking, then shakes her head as if to say no and walks away. She doesn't seem to see the tip of the telescope.

Eventually she hangs up the phone and returns to her knitting on the couch. She sits there for maybe five minutes, then gets up again and walks to the window, looking directly at me. She puts her hands on her hips. She's attractive. Very sturdy in the face, with a powerful jaw and eminent cheekbones. She walks away from the window and out of the living room again, and seconds later, my father's phone rings.

The phone sits on the nightstand, along with a clock and a biography of Henry Kissinger. I perch on the edge of the bed and wonder about answering. The ringing stops eventually, then starts up again, which I take to be a sign.

"Gregor?" an American voice says. For a second I think it's my sister.

"Yes?" I say.

"This is Joanna. A friend of your dad's?" She pronounces her name with a hard J.

"Joanna?" I say, pronouncing it the Dutch way.

I hear a smile in her voice. "That's what Arshad likes to call me. I don't mind either way."

"I thought you were Dutch," I say. "You look Dutch."

"I look Dutch? How do you know that?"

I don't answer her.

"Hello?" she says.

"I'm here."

"I guess your father told you I was blonde."

I take a deep breath and say, "No. He watches you through a telescope in his bedroom."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm sorry," I say, "but you should know."

She doesn't respond. I feel worried about her, so I step back behind the telescope and look through it. She's standing in front of her window, looking down at me.

"You probably can't see the tip of the lens from up there," I say.

"You're looking at me now?" she says, her voice turning a little breathy.

"Sorry," I say, moving away from the eyepiece. "I'm not anymore. I promise. I just wanted to make sure you were OK."

"I'm not OK," she says. "Of course I'm not OK."

"Can I just suggest that you don't see my father anymore? He's not a very nice person."

She doesn't say anything.

"Would you like me to hang up now? So you can be alone?"

"No," she answers. "Please don't hang up."

"All right," I say.

She lets out a long breath. "I don't know what to say right now."

"That's OK," I tell her.

"Your father just called to tell me that he accidentally locked you in. He wanted me to call and tell you that you could go out in the garden if you wanted, for fresh air."

"I'm fine inside," I say.

"What have you been doing?" she asks tentatively.

Sitting on my father's bed and feeling ashamed, I want to tell her. So I do. "I watched you a little bit this morning." I begin slowly, "and last night, too, with my father. You were knitting, and then you touched yourself with one of the needles. This morning, you tried on a blouse that was too small for you and it made you upset. I'm very sorry for my part in all of this. I really am. I hope that telling you about my father's telescope makes up for it in some small way. Please understand, I'm nothing like him. I want to be better."

"Jesus," Joanna says.

I can't help it. I head for the telescope. "I'm looking at you again," I say. "I'm sorry. I don't know why I keep doing it. Maybe you should shut your curtains."

She sighs. "It's OK. I give you permission to look at me. Here," she says, and she waves.

"Hi," I say, then I go and open my father's curtains. "Can you see me now?"

"Not really," she says.

"Wait," I say, and I set the phone down and run into the kitchen, unlocking the door that leads out to the garden. My father's got his bike there, covered in plastic and propped up against a wooden fence, along with some gardening tools and a pair of dirty sneakers. I stand on a small brick patio, waving my arms wildly, while Joanna, who is much smaller and harder to see without the telescope, seems to wave back. I quickly return to my father's bedroom and pick up the phone again. "Hi," I say, panting a little.

"Do you want to get out of there?" she asks.

"What?"

"Do you want me to get you out of there?"

"Oh man," I say, "yeah."

"You'll have to jump the fence at the back of your father's garden. I'll call the woman who lives behind him and tell her to let you in."

The first thing I notice when Joanna opens her door is that she still hasn't changed out of the tight blouse, whose thin material allows the color of her skin to seep through in places. Also, her face seems less airbrushed in person, with wrinkles extending out from the corners of her eyes, and laugh lines forming parentheses from her nostrils to her mouth. Somewhere, somehow, she is a woman who enjoys life. "Gregor?" she says.

"Hello, Joanna," I say, holding out my hand. She doesn't so much take it as slip her own hand inside of it, as if I were a sheath.

"Come in," she says, stepping aside so I can pass.

Her place appears to be laid out identically to my father's, though she's painted her walls actual colors, as opposed to the noncommittal whites he prefers. The entryway is maroon, which makes me think of chimneys, while the rich yellow living room seems to promise an endless summer.

"Can I offer you anything?" Joanna asks. "A drink, or maybe some lunch?"

"I wouldn't mind a glass of water," I say.

She nods and heads for the kitchen. I don't want to crowd her so I stay in the front hall, like a handyman with muddy boots. Joanna pulls two highball glasses from one of her cupboards, then, instead of turning on the water faucet, pours us each some vodka. She brings the drinks out and we gulp them down, after which she returns the empty glasses to the kitchen. "Have a seat in the living room," she calls.

"Should I take off my shoes?"

"Yes," she says, "please."

I kick them off, then set them neatly beside an umbrella stand. "What about my jacket?" I ask when she returns.

She reaches out and touches the patch that says Maynard. It's not true that you can't detect vodka on someone's breath, or that its fragrance has to be damning. "Whose coat is this?" she wants to know. "Why don't you wear your own clothes?"

"I don't like my clothes," I say, trying not to feel aroused by her close scrutiny, or the way her voice has dropped.

She looks down at her blouse and says, "I don't like my clothes, either. They don't fit."

"Didn't you follow the washing instructions?" I ask.

"No," she says, tugging at the clingy fabric. "I put it in the drier, to make sure it would be ready for tonight."

"Oh," I say.

"I'm trying to stretch it back now," she tells me.

I nod, confining my gaze to her right shoulder.

"Can I try on your jacket?" she asks.

"Sure," I say, taking it off and handing it to her.

She slips it on and immediately slides her hands into the pockets. From the right one she withdraws the roll of guldens I've bound with a rubber band. There were too many bills to fit inside my wallet. "What's this?" she asks.

"My savings."

"What are you going to buy?"

I clear my throat. "A hooker."

"What?" she says.

"I should probably go," I say.

"I thought you said you wanted to be better," she says, closing my coat around her and crossing her arms to keep it shut.

"I do," I say. "I won't peep at you anymore, I swear."

"So you're just going to go find some other poor woman to peep at? You're going to stand in front of all those windows on Bloedstraat and decide who's got the best . . . whatever it is you're looking for?"

"This is something I've been planning for a long time," I say. "I wouldn't expect you to understand."

"So I was just the warm-up act? You got yourself all hot and bothered looking at me, and now you're off for the main event?"

"I would never have looked at you if my father hadn't shown me his telescope. I already told you."

"You didn't get all hot and bothered?" she asks in a way that makes it hard to tell what the right answer is, so I stick with the truth, which in the last couple of hours has kept me in the most trouble of my life.

"Yes," I say. "I suppose I did."

She looks at the wad of money in her hand. "Then this is mine," she says. "I earned it. You're going to have to forget about the hooker."

Joanna doesn't give back my jacket. She leaves it on, replaces my money in the pocket, then walks into the living room. I stand there in the entryway by myself for a couple of minutes, trying to figure out what to do. The money isn't as important to me as the coat, but there's something about her wearing the coat that also feels pretty important. I like the way she looks in it, like a high school girl in an oversize letterman's jacket. I want it back, but only with her in it.

"Joanna?" I say.

"In here," she calls, which of course I already knew.

I pad sock-footed into the living room to find her ensconced in the familiar, overstuffed couch, legs up on the coffee table and crossed at the ankles. She sits beside her perpetually open curtains, blue yarn in hand, needles clicking together with that same skin-tingling proficiency.

"Have a seat," she says, without looking up.

I survey my choices, which include a couple of minimalist chairs across from Joanna and the plush ocher carpet. In the end, I decide to join her on the opposite side of the couch, beneath the haze of an amber lamp.

"It's too bad we have to meet under these circumstances," she offers.

"Uh-huh."

"Your father always speaks so highly of you."

"Oh yeah? What does he say?"

She does this thing where she stops knitting for a second and coaxes a bunch of stitches down the length of one needle; I look away, worried about an involuntary reaction.

"He says you're smart and responsible and that you don't hold a grudge."

"I do hold a grudge," I tell her.

She shrugs and says, "Don't get mad--get even."

"Is that what you're going to do?"

"I'm going to file a complaint with the Consulate. This is sexual harassment. He'll have to face some kind of disciplinary action."

"Won't they just say that you were asking for it since you were dating him?"

"I didn't ask to be peeped at."

"What about your curtains? Won't they say you should've had them closed?"

"Your ideas aren't very advanced," she says.

I don't have an answer. She's probably right. "Can I have some more vodka?" I ask.

She nods. "It's in the freezer."

I get up from the couch. "Would you like some?"

"Sure."

In the kitchen, I note the torn ticket stubs from the Concertgebouw affixed to the freezer door with magnets. After filling the glasses Joanna and I used earlier, I quickly drain mine and refill it before heading back into the living room. "Just set it on the coffee table," she says about her drink, still not looking at me. I nod and use Dutch Vogue as a coaster.

Instead of returning to my corner of the couch, I choose the middle cushion this time, the vodka making me think I have nothing to lose. I turn toward her and say, "You know, my father was going to propose to you."

At last she stops knitting and looks at me. "What?"

"He was going to ask you to marry him tonight."

"But we've only been dating a few weeks."

"He always does this," I say. "Jumps the gun."

"Jesus," Joanna murmurs, reaching for her drink. "I wonder if I would've said yes."

"No," I say, "you wouldn't have. I wouldn't have let you."

"Gregor," she says, "I liked your father. I liked working with him, I liked going to the symphony with him, I liked sleeping with him. I might've said yes."

"You slept with him?"

"That's who I was thinking about when I touched myself last night," she says quietly. "Arshad."

I get up and walk over to the window, needing to shake all this off. "Wow," I say. "Those are just about the worst things you could've told me."

"Why?"

I look down at my father's apartment and see his bedroom curtains open, just as I left them. The telescope isn't so easy to spot in the daylight, but I'm pretty sure I can make it out. "Because," I say, "now I can't think about you and your knitting needles anymore."

"When did you think about them before?" she asks.

"This morning, in the shower."

"Never mind," she says. "I'm sorry I asked."

"Hey, I paid you for that, fair and square."

"Can we please not talk about this?"

"I was overcharged," I tell her, unable to stop myself.

She goes quiet for a moment, then says, "It wasn't nice?"

"Of course it was nice," I say. "It's just that it was only, you know, the one time."

She doesn't answer me.

I turn away from the window to look at her. "Can I have some of my money back?"

"Are you going to use it to get a hooker?"

"No," I say. "I want to change my plane ticket and leave early. I hate it here."

She sets her empty glass back down on the coffee table. "That's too bad."

I watch then as she picks up her knitting and gets back to work. Neither of us is particularly jarred when the phone rings, nor when my father's voice comes over the answering machine: "Joanna?" he says, with the Y. "Are you there? I'm worried about Gregor. I keep calling my apartment, but he doesn't answer. I'm afraid he's harmed himself. Joanna? Maybe you could go over and ring my doorbell or something. I wonder where you are. Oh boy. Neither of you is home. That makes me worry. I guess I'll call it a day here. I hope he defrosted that chicken."

My father hangs up and I say, "He thinks that sweater is for him."

"It was," Joanna says.

I look down at her lap. The piece of wool that was meant for his midsection lies draped across her like a baby's blanket. "Why are you still knitting it?" I ask her.

"Come back and sit down," she says.

"No," I say, turning back to the window. "I'm waiting for him."

"What's going to happen to us?" she wants to know.

"What do you mean?"

"When he comes home."

"Nothing," I say. "We live here and he lives over there."

"You know what he said to me last week?"

"What?"

"He said, Joanna, I wish you would shut the drapes in your living room. The Dutch are famous for peeping."'

"He isn't Dutch," I remind her.

"I think he'd like to be," she says. "I think he'd like to be anything other than who he is."

"Who is he?"

She sighs. "A very sad man. That was another thing I liked about him."

We don't say anything for a long while, until suddenly I notice my father in his bedroom window, looking irritatingly small and alone. I guess we probably see each other, though neither of us acknowledges this. After a moment, he closes his white chiffon curtains.

"Let's close the curtains," I say to Joanna.

"Why?" she says.

"Because," I say, tugging the pulley at the side of the window frame, "we're not a display case. What we do is not for public consumption."

"What do we do?" she says.

I sit back down on the couch with her, even closer this time, my left thigh pushing up against her right one. I ache for her blue blanket to cover us both.

"Are you cold?" she asks. "Would you like your jacket back?"

"No," I say.

She stops knitting momentarily and fingers the embroidered patch on her chest. "Who's Maynard?" she asks.

"My roommate. He's a mechanic."

"I had no idea that boys shared clothes."

"We don't, really. I just took it."

"Maybe you could get one with your name on it."

"That wouldn't be cool."

"Why not?"

"Because," I say, "it's better to be Maynard."

"Is he a good mechanic?" she asks.

"He's a good two-stepper," I tell her. "Have you ever two-stepped?"

"No."

"Me neither. I just watch Maynard do it."

"Isn't that the dance where you go around in a circle?"

"Yeah. Except the girl is always moving backward, so she can't see where she's going. It's the man's job to make sure she doesn't run into anyone and hurt herself."

The phone rings then, and we wait for my father's voice to come over the answering machine. Instead, we get only his shallow breathing--the same animal sound that used to escape him each time he pummeled my sister. The tape cuts out before he can hang up, and it occurs to me that he'll never have any last words.

I catch Joanna's eye then and feel myself wanting to press up against her, to find out if she would have me free of charge. Because she's the one I want, this woman who's been undone by my father, whose eyes rain down onto the knitting in her lap, returning the smell of wet sheep.

"Joanna," I say, "can I have my money back?"

"Are you leaving now?" she says, wiping her eyes a little. "Please don't leave."

"I'm not leaving," I assure her, and she lets me reach inside Maynard's pocket to retrieve the roll of bills.

"Do you want your jacket back, too?" she asks nervously.

"I just want to take it off you," I say, and she lets me set the knitting aside and ease her out of the sleeves.

"I might stop you," she warns. "If I say stop, you have to stop."

I nod and finger the buttons on her tight blouse, popping them open with just my touch. She leans forward a little so I can unhook her bra, then raises her hips minimally to assist me in lowering her jeans. As I roll her underwear down her thighs, the leg holes twist themselves into satin rings, blatantly exposing the cotton crotch and all its signs of welcome.

She curls herself into the corner of the couch then, crossing her arms in front of her as I stand and take off my own clothes. From my wallet I produce a rubber, which I offer to her as an inducement to help me out a little. She doesn't accept. "Should I stop?" I ask her.

She shakes her head. "No. Just, you do all the work."

I nod and roll the Durex on myself, then sit down beside her on the couch. I tug at her wrists and she allows this, her arms falling gently to reveal high, pointed breasts. I pull her onto my lap and feel her helping ever so slightly to get her legs straddled, to raise her hips, to lower herself at such an angle as to soak me up on the way down. I prefer it this way. With Professor Devine it was as if I was paralyzed, the way she'd tug at my zipper, pull me out, then tuck me back in again when it was over. Even her breast was an allotment, lifted by her own hand and placed in my mouth.

But here, with Joanna, I take my time, alternating between a pair of opalescent nipples. I scoop my hands beneath her thighs, separating the two halves of her so that I'm in as deep as she'll allow. Later, when I pull her face toward my own, when her sweet yellow hair comes into my mouth along with her shimmering tongue, not even the banging on the front door can make me let go.

a visit to dad in amsterdam is all about buying a hooker--until he meets dad's mistress