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“Wait. Here? He went to college? Here?” I try to reconcile the Willem I met, the itinerant traveling actor, with an honors college student, and it hits me again how little I know this person.
“For one year. Before I got here. He studied economics, I think.”
“So what happened?” I meant with the college, but she starts telling me about Ana Lucia. About how she and Willem got back together last year but then how she found out that he’d been cheating on her with some French girl the whole time. She’s very casual about it, like none of it is all that surprising.
But my head is reeling. Willem went here. He studied economics. So it takes a minute to finally digest the last part. The cheating-on-Ana-Lucia-with-a-French-girl part.
“A French girl?” I repeat.
“Yes. Apparently, Willem was going to meet her for some secret tryst, in Spain, I think. Ana Lucia saw him shopping for flights on her computer, and thought he was planning to take her as a surprise because she has relatives there. So she canceled her vacation to Switzerland, and then told her family all about it, and they planned a big party, only to discover that the tickets were never for her. They were for the French girl. She freaked out, confronted him right in the middle of the campus—it was quite a scene. He hasn’t been around since, obviously. Are you sure you don’t need some ice for your head?”
I sink onto the stoop next to her. Céline? But she claimed she hadn’t seen him since last year. But then she’d said a lot of things. Including that we were both just ports that Willem visited. Maybe there were a bunch of us out there. A French girl. Or two or three. A Spaniard. An American. A whole United Nations of girls waving from their ports. I think of Céline’s parting words to me, and now they seem ominous.
I always knew that Willem was a player and that I was one of many. But now I also know that he didn’t ditch me that day. He wrote me a note. He tried, however halfheartedly, to find me.
I think of what my mom said. About being grateful for what you have instead of yearning for what you think you want. Standing here, on the campus where he once walked, I think I finally get what she was talking about. I think I finally understand what it truly means to quit while you’re ahead.
Thirty-six
Amsterdam
Forward momentum. That’s my new motto. No regrets. And no going back.
I cancel the Paris-London portion of my flight home so I can fly home straight from London. I don’t want to go back to Paris. I want to go somewhere else. I have five more days in Europe, and there are all these low-cost airlines. I could go to Ireland. Or Romania. I could take a train to Nice and hook up with the Oz crew. I could go anywhere.
But to get to any of those places, I have to go to Amsterdam. So that’s where I’m going first. On the pink bike.
When I went to deliver the bike to Saskia, along with a box of chocolates to say thank you, I told her that I didn’t need her to find me Robert-Jan’s contact information.
“You found what you needed?” she asked.
“Yes and no.”
She seemed to understand. She took the chocolates but told me to keep the bike. It didn’t belong to anyone, and I’d need it in Amsterdam, and I could take it with me on the train or pass it along to someone else.
“The pink White Bicycle,” I said.
She smiled. “You know about the White Bicycle?”
I nodded.
“I wish it still existed.”
I thought about my travels, about all the things that people had passed on to me: friendship, help, ideas, encouragement, macarons. “I think it still does,” I told her.
Anamiek has written me instructions on biking from Utrecht to Amsterdam. It’s only twenty-five miles, and there are bike paths the whole, flat way. Once I get to the eastern end of the city, I’ll hook up with the tram line nine, and I can just follow that all the way to Centraal Station, which is where most of the budget youth hostels are.
Once out of Utrecht, the landscape turns industrial and then to farms. Cows lolling in green fields, big stone windmills—I even catch a farmer in clogs. But it doesn’t take long for the bucolic to meld with office parks and then I’m on the outskirts of Amsterdam, going past a huge stadium that says Ajax and then the bike path dumps me onto the street and things get a little confusing. I hear the bring-bring of a tram, and it’s the number nine, just as Anamiek promised. I follow it up the long stretches past the Oosterpark and what I assume is the zoo—a flock of pink flamingos in the middle of the city—but then things get a little confusing at an intersection by a big flea market and I lose the tram. Behind me, motos are beeping, and the traffic of bicycles seems twice that of cars, and I keep trying to find the tram, but the canals all seem to go in circles, each one looking like the last, with tall stone banks and every kind of boat—from houseboat to rowboat to glass-domed tour boat—on its brackish waters. I pass by improbably skinny gabled row houses and cozy little cafés, doors flung open to reveal walls a hundred years’ worth of brown. I turn right and wind up at a flower market, the colorful blooms popping in the gray morning.
I pull out my map and turn it around. This whole city seems to turn in circles, and the names of the streets read like all the letters in the alphabet got into a car accident: Oudezijds Voorburgwal. Nieuwebrugsteeg. Completely lost, I pedal up next to a tall guy in a leather jacket who’s strapping a blond toddler into a bike seat. When I see his face, I do another double take because he’s another, albeit older, Willem clone.
I ask him for directions, and he has me follow him to Dam Square and from there points me around the dizzying traffic circle to the Warmoesstraat. I pedal up a street full of sex shops, brazen with their lurid window displays. At the end of the block is one of the city’s cheaper youth hostels.
The lobby is boisterous with activity: people are playing pool and Ping-Pong, and there’s a card game going, and everyone seems to have a beer in hand, even though it’s barely lunchtime. I ask for a dormitory room, and wordlessly, the dark-eyed girl at the desk takes my passport info and money. Upstairs in my room, in spite of the NO DRUG USE IN THE DORMS sign, the air is thick with hash smoke, and a bleary-eyed guy is smoking something through a tube on a piece of tinfoil, which I’m pretty sure is neither hash nor legal. I lock my backpack in the locker and head back downstairs and out onto the street to a crowded Internet café.
I pay for a half hour and check out the budget airline sites. It’s Thursday now. I fly home out of London on Monday. There’s a flight to Lisbon for forty-six euros. One to Milan, and one to somewhere in Croatia! I Google Croatia and look at pictures of rocky beaches and old lighthouses. There are even cheap hotels in the lighthouses. I could stay in a lighthouse. I could do anything!
