Chapter 24 The Passage of Time #2
For the writing of The Dickens Man, James Winslow had a real listener.
Like his hero, Charles Dickens, Alma Vásquez taught Jimmy that the reader mattered.
And Alma was a fictional girlfriend in another important way.
“When you have sex with a young woman—and you will, Jimmy—you don’t have to hide her from me.
I won’t kill you for cheating on me. I’ll be happy to advise you about the precautions you can take not to knock her up.
There are some useful precautions, you know, Jimmy,” Alma told him.
“I know,” Jimmy said, as he’d been used to saying in Vienna.
That summer of ’64 was a productive one for James Winslow. “Don’t stop!” Alma would cry out from his bedroom when he stopped reading.
“Louder,” Jimmy got used to whispering, and Alma upped the volume on her Don’t stop!
act. Jimmy enjoyed writing to Jolanda and Mieke about his older girlfriend.
Those two would meet Alma that August, when Claude and Chantal were married in Pennacook, and Claude’s French family stayed in the Front Street house—though there might have been more room for them with the Beaudettes.
Many of the Beaudette children were grown up now, with children (and houses) of their own.
With Claude’s family in the Front Street house, Prudence and Honor shared a room, and Jimmy slept in the same bed with Mieke and Jolanda.
He was very happy. “No fooling around, you two,” Jolanda told them.
It was just like Jolanda to sleep in the middle, to keep Jimmy and Mieke separated.
There was a lot of looking at (and touching of) Mieke’s baby bump.
Mieke wished it was bigger. Because Jimmy had a hard-on, he was glad he wasn’t sleeping in the middle; he lay awake worrying that Jolanda would notice his erection.
One morning, when they were awake but lying in bed together, Jimmy confided to Mieke and Jolanda; he said having sex with them was certain to be the pinnacle of his sexual experience.
Jolanda snorted like a horse and Mieke cried, prompting Jolanda to say pregnant women had surging hormones.
Claude’s mother was a major disappointment to Jolanda; she wasn’t as bad as Claude had made her out to be.
The Winslow sisters had prepared themselves for being with a snooty Frenchwoman by putting on airs to one another, which Jimmy found annoying.
Chantal had urged the Beaudettes to be on their best behavior.
Meaning what, exactly? Were the Beaudettes not supposed to display their overbreeding tendencies publicly?
(The Beaudettes’ withholding of their overbreeding tendencies must have disappointed Claude’s French family.)
Jolanda saved the ruckus she’d promised to make at Claude’s wedding for the reception.
In her toast, Jolanda said nonstop sex with Chantal was the only thing preventing Claude from panic attacks.
As Claude’s former roommate, Jolanda wanted everyone to know that living with Claude and Chantal having nonstop sex was better than living with panicky Claude on his own.
“You call that a ruckus—that was just the truth,” Claude whispered to Jolanda later, kissing her ear.
Jolanda and Jimmy were very happy for Claude; they’d never seen him so relaxed.
Chantal, on the other hand, was a wreck.
The sheer number of Beaudettes at the wedding, and at the party afterward, was overwhelming to her, but Chantal was the only one who noticed the Beaudettes outnumbered all the other guests.
The Winslow sisters were unanimous in their opinion: the Beaudettes were always well-behaved.
As Constance once said, “The reproductive habits of the Beaudettes are their own business—surely not the domain of the townspeople of Pennacook.” As for those two tall Dutch girls with their arms draped around Jimmy Winslow’s shoulders—or the very tall one and the pretty one, who were both taller than Jimmy—the ladies of the town weren’t mistaken to imagine the Dutch girls were a new kind of two-moms idea, a twosome of motherhood in the making.
And of course Arnaud Beaudette came home to see Chantal get married.
He was grateful to Jimmy for introducing his unmarriageable aunt to Claude.
Arnaud had pitied Chantal, seeing her as someone destined for spinsterhood.
Arnaud noticeably (if silently) disapproved of Jimmy’s draft deferment in gestation, not to mention his marriage to Mieke.
Jimmy was disappointed that his former best friend was such a straight arrow.
Perhaps, unbeknown to Jimmy, Arnaud had always had an uptight moral barometer.
The officer in training clearly looked down on Jimmy’s relationship with Jolanda and Mieke, what he saw as a marriage in name only.
Jolanda sensed Arnaud’s holier-than-thou opinion of her roommate’s sex life, and of Jimmy’s future family life.
That August wedding weekend, whenever Arnaud was around, she addressed Jimmy as “Sperm Man.” Jimmy was heartened by her solidarity.
Arnaud was no less uptight about Jimmy’s much older girlfriend, Alma Vásquez.
It was heartening to Jimmy that Chantal, who was only a little older than Claude, stood in solidarity with Alma.
When Chantal saw Jimmy and Alma together, she made a point of praising older girlfriends and younger boyfriends.
It turned out that Alma and Chantal already knew and liked each other.
As a nurse’s aide, Alma had lent a helping hand at the birth of more Beaudettes than she could count—likely not at Chantal’s birth, not that either of them would remember.
Jolanda tried not to feel left out when Mieke and Jimmy talked about their writing—even when they were in bed, with Jolanda lying between them. Both Mieke and Jimmy were aware they were writing nineteenth-century novels—Mieke’s was more like Tolstoy than Dickens.
“The passage of time is like a major character,” Jimmy ventured to say.
“The passage of time is a major character!” Mieke exclaimed.
“In real life, the two of you are totally oblivious of the passage of time,” Jolanda told them.
This was true. As the years passed, the beginnings, the middles, and the ends of Jimmy’s and Mieke’s novels marked where those writers stood in time.
The years when their novels were published would be Jimmy’s and Mieke’s milestones.
When their child was born, Jolanda observed, the age of the blessed child was the only indication of real time the two writers noticed.
Vienna Winslow was born in Amsterdam in March 1965.
Jolanda always said she would be a girl.
Jimmy and his mom were there, staying in the hotel on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal—the canal running through the red-light district.
Before the birth, Jolanda took Honor on a walk in de Wallen, showing her the prostitutes in their doors and windows.
At the hospital, Honor sat beside Bente, Mieke’s mother—the two of them holding hands.
Jolanda sat beside Jimmy, holding his hand.
When the nurse emerged from the delivery room, the Dutch word for girl (“meisje”) was unintelligible to Honor and Jimmy, but Jolanda yelled, “It’s a Vienna! ”
Jolanda’s parents—the pussy-whipped lawyer, Jeroen, and his wife, Els, the pussy-whipper—took Jimmy and Honor to dinner at their favorite restaurant in Dam Square.
Honor’s postpartum nursing talk was better received by Bente than the Lammers, whose dinners were disturbed by any mention of Mieke’s “bleeding” or “swelling”—also her “nipples.”
Jolanda took Honor to the Anne Frank House, where they both cried, and Honor told Jolanda something that she’d never said to Jimmy.
Not the part about “the driving force behind the creation of Israel.” (He’d heard this before, how “anti-Semitism could compel countries to persecute their Jewish population—anywhere, and at any period of time.”) But Honor also said, “Some Palestinians are raised on hatred of the Jews—they believe in martyrdom, in death as the path to glorious paradise.” This seemed harsh to Jimmy; it sounded more like Esther than his mother, he told Jolanda.
Jolanda just shrugged. She said there were Palestinian refugees in the Netherlands.
She’d heard them say there should be no Israel—there should be only Palestinians in Palestine.
With Mieke still recovering in the hospital, Jolanda was more interested in keeping Bente’s hand off Jimmy’s thigh, or at least making sure that Bente wasn’t touching Jimmy’s penis.
Mieke wasn’t with them at dinner; she wasn’t there to say the moeder word when Bente was groping Jimmy under the table.
But this time Bente didn’t bite Jimmy’s tongue when she kissed him, and Jimmy didn’t need to say the penis word to summon Jolanda to restrain Bente.
When Mieke and Vienna were home from the hospital, and Mieke was breastfeeding the baby, Jimmy and his mom flew back to Boston.
On the plane, as if to test her son’s propensity for speechlessness, Honor said: “I know Bente is attractive, and she’s younger than Alma—she’s still too old to get pregnant.
” Jimmy just waited. “Bente is the kind of woman you should sleep with, but you shouldn’t actually sleep with her—not with the mom of your birth child’s mother, Jimmy,” Honor said.
For fuck’s sake! as Jolanda would say, and Jimmy was thinking, but he didn’t say it.