School of Velocity Read online

  “I was watching you the other day,” he said, wiggling his fingers in the air. “Not bad.”

  When he smiled I saw one of his front teeth was chipped.

  “So, I have the Budapest Radio Orchestra paying a visit to my living room after school today,” he said, “and apparently they’re short a piano soloist. Interested?”

  That’s how he invited me to his house. And it wasn’t just me he invited. It was Lise too. And another girl, Beate, who was in the circle of lunchtime card players that Dirk sometimes nudged himself into. She was thin and tall with a crown of ginger curls.

  At the last bell we met at the bicycle rack and left in pairs. Beate rode with Lise, I rode with Dirk, all of us heading towards the Sint Jan steeple, which marked the centre of Den Bosch. Dirk didn’t introduce Beate as his girlfriend, he didn’t introduce her at all, but when he and I put some distance between us and the girls, he leaned over, looked at me, and said he had seen Beate naked when the two of them had gone skinny-dipping in a neighbour’s swimming pool. Before I could think of anything to say, or ask, Dirk’s eyes were back on the road.

  That afternoon was my first time in Den Bosch without my parents. Vlijmen, where we lived, was a postwar village, and Den Bosch was the nearest big city, where we sometimes visited on weekends. The roads near Dirk’s house were cobblestone. The houses were tall, narrow, and close to the street. Where main-floor curtains were open you could see into living rooms. Chandeliers, oil paintings, old and ornate furniture, porcelain plates on display, and vases filled with flower arrangements. One after another, all alike.

  At the end of a dead-end street Dirk pointed to an alley behind his house where Lise and I could lock our bikes, while he and Beate leaned theirs against a tree in the middle of a small fenced-in garden.

  I expected Dirk’s house to be like the ones I’d spied into on the way over, but it wasn’t. The entranceway was tile, not hardwood. There was hardwood in the living room, but the furniture in it was simple and looked comfortable. The kitchen had a rectangular island at the centre and a small circular table by the bay window. I’d never been in a house that looked as inviting, or felt so immediately welcoming.

  Dirk impatiently waved us upstairs. “I’ll be there in a sec,” he said. “Beate’ll lead the way.”

  We walked through the living room and up the staircase. At the top was a narrow carpeted hall and the first door on the left was Dirk’s room. It was about the same size as mine but completely crammed. A bunk bed, with the bottom bunk covered in baggy pillows and duvets. Rickety bookshelves overflowing with books, magazines, stacks of photographs, records, and, as a centrepiece, a hi-fi stereo system with silver turntable and shoebox-sized speakers. His desk was buried under papers, and his cupboard overstuffed with shirts and sweaters and jeans, none of which was part of the school uniform. The walls were painted a deep blue-green and plastered with posters of bands I knew, like the Beatles and Ike and Tina Turner, and movies I’d never heard of, like Dr. Strangelove and Amarcord.

  Dirk appeared, balancing a box of biscuits, bottle of milk, and four glasses. “Huzzah,” he said. “Make yourselves at home. I mean, at my home.”

  Beate curled up on the bottom bunk, among the pillows. I settled against the bedpost. Lise asked for the bathroom. Dirk directed her next door and plonked himself in the middle of the bottom bunk, scattering some of the biscuits.

  As soon as the bathroom door closed, Dirk leaned towards me.

  “So, Old Man de Vries,” he said, “what’s she like?”

  “Lise?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Yes, de Vries. Lise.”

  I didn’t know what to say, or what he wanted to hear.

  Beate giggled.

  Dirk cupped his hands in front of his chest and squeezed. “Have you … ?”

  I shook my head.

  He pursed his lips and nodded in a kind of sympathy. “Suction?” He opened his mouth and pointed to the tip of his wiggling tongue.

  I was about to make up a lie when Lise appeared at the door.

  “What did I miss?” she asked.

  “We were just talking about eating soap,” Dirk said, leaning back against the wall and yawning. “Your parents ever make you eat soap, de Vries? No? My parents sometimes do. Usually the translucent kind, which I prefer anyway.”

  Beate broke out into a full-blown laugh. Dirk shifted closer to me to make room for Lise, and in the same movement dangled his hand off my shoulder.

  “So, de Vries, you just moved here, right?”

  I nodded, conscious of his arm hanging there, wondering what it might be up to.

  “Where were you before?” he asked.

  “Haarlem,” I said.

  “School?”

  “I went to an all-boys school,” I said.

  “I did too!” Dirk said. “Grades six and seven. Good times.”

  He told the story of the time he helped organize an overnight raid of a nearby girls’ dormitory. He told the story of how every day before first bell a card circulated his homeroom that had a picture of a naked woman on it, and that everyone called her Bushwoman. He shared the rumour that the regular photography teacher at Sint Ansfried hadn’t come back this year because he had been sleeping with a grade twelve student and that apparently someone had found proof in the school’s darkroom.

  When Dirk spoke seriously he bobbed his head and sometimes closed his eyes. When he got close to a punch-line his sides began to shake in anticipation. All through the afternoon he left his arm hanging over my shoulder.

  Was any one of Dirk’s stories true? Did it matter? Lise and Beate were fixed to every word he said. And so was I.

  When he was done, Dirk led us to the front door, leaving Beate in his room upstairs. He said he had to do homework, winking as he said the word, then observing almost philosophically that if he actually did his homework he wouldn’t be failing half his classes.

  While I went to the alley to unlock the bicycles, Dirk stayed in the glass vestibule outside the front door with Lise. When I came back, his hand was on the back of her neck, and he was smiling while whispering in her ear. When he saw me he let go of Lise and, with the same hand, pointed to me.

  “Janos Miklos sends his regrets about the Budapest Radio Orchestra and says we’ll do it next time, okay?”

  Lise and I rode our bikes through the narrow streets and between the tall houses of Den Bosch and for the first time I cycled slightly ahead of Lise, pushing the pace. By the time we arrived in low-lying Cromvoirt, with its asphalt roads and bungalows, the sun was approaching the horizon and there was only a thin line of orange behind the silhouettes of far-off trees. Night coming, but still time. I was thinking of the gold chain hanging in front of Lise’s breasts, and of Dirk cupping his hands in front of his chest. But as I was about to let my bike drop on the lawn in front of her house, Lise waved at me to stop.

  “I have a scene to memorize for tomorrow,” she said. “So not today.”

  The next Monday, I was sitting by the bike racks at the side entrance to Sint Ansfried. The last bell of the day had rung fifteen minutes before. Lise still hadn’t come out.

  Wind was rustling the branches. The sky was a light blue and criss-crossed by the double-lined vapour trails of passing airplanes. I replayed parts of the Chopin in my head to keep myself busy while I watched other students pour out the side door. First large groups, then stragglers. When I saw there were fewer than a couple dozen bikes left in the rack I started to look for Lise’s. It was my third time circling the rack, looking for the cream-coloured Batavus, when it dawned on me she was already gone.

  I cycled as quickly as I could to Cromvoirt. Skidded left at the post office and right at the stop sign. I slid to a halt in the middle of the street in front of her house. Lise’s Batavus lay on the lawn. Beside it was a bike I recognized.

  I lay my bike on the curb, handles on the grass, and walked up to the back gate, where I peeked over the wooden slats. Still and barely breathing, I fixed my eyes on
the little shed in the corner of the yard.

  Of course I couldn’t see any of it, but it was easy to imagine. Lise would have lain on the couch first, making room for Dirk beside her. After a moment he’d take her in his arms, kiss her with his tongue, and she’d kiss him with hers. Then Dirk would slide a hand to her waist and, when he sensed she was ready, slip it beneath her shirt, touch her bra. He had shown me exactly what he would do, and more or less told me he was going to do it, on the day he had invited me to his house.

  It’s strange to say that’s how it started for Dirk and me because that should have been how it ended.

  I watched for two weeks as Dirk draped his hand over Lise’s shoulder, fingertips fidgeting, thumb playing with ring. As he held her by the waist when they walked down the hall. As he laughed while she whispered into his ear. As he’d nod at her, or fix her hair.

  Then it all changed. Lise started arriving at classes with Stefa, not Dirk. Walking the halls with eyes cast down and notebooks pressed to her chest. Hurrying away after the last bell without saying goodbye to anyone.

  Dirk acted as if nothing had changed. He went on loping through the halls, loudly failing to blow bubble-gum bubbles, kicking the push-bars on the doors before proceeding through them. He returned to his group of friends, Pym, Pirm, and Beate, who was back in the picture, and dozens of others who naturally gravitated towards him.

  Coincidentally, or so it seemed at the time, I began to see even more of Dirk. At the start of the school day while locking up my bike. Between classes while walking through the halls. During lunch hour in the cafeteria at the next table over. Señor Todas-Partes with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, laughing louder than anyone else after jokes, low-fiving friends and strangers, air-pistolling imaginary targets. All long strides and billowing shirts. Once or twice, while passing his group as they ate lunch and played poker, I thought I heard him call out my name, De! Vries!, as if he wanted me to join them, but I didn’t think he was serious so I pretended I didn’t hear him, until one day after school the hallway around our lockers emptied and it was just Dirk and me packing to go home. As I knelt to zip my knapsack, I looked over at him. Though most of his face was obscured I saw the corner of his mouth curling in a smile.

  “She said you taught her everything she knows,” he said.

  “Who?” I said.

  Dirk turned to me. “Who? Man, I should give you more credit.”

  He let out a loud laugh and I smiled, almost against my will.

  “See ya, de Vries. I mean, Vries de.” He banged on his locker door twice and walked away. Back hunched, feet splayed, snapping fingers like he was keeping beat with a drum solo.

  I rode home feeling shaken and excited, my bicycle wheels barely touching the ground. In my head I was hearing the Gnossiennes, but at a slightly sped-up pace, and as I looked around I could almost see notes vibrating from tree branches and rippling across the surface of canals. A grace note broke like a twig under my tire. Triads radiated across the tall stalks in the fields and into the shadows in the forest. Every so often I’d get the sense Dirk was riding next to me, and I’d swing my head, right and left, to catch a glimpse. In my imagination he was watching the path of the music with me, already cracking jokes about it. Lovely twigs, de Vries. Clever run of bark.

  Soon Dirk was shouting my name like a fanfare down the halls, giving me shots in the arm, cupping the back of my head as if I’d scored an important goal. He made space for me in his lunchtime circle and introduced me as “Ludwig von van der Vries” to Pym and Pirm and to girls, too, like Rika and Grietje, and others from his drama class and the years above. Like we had been friends for ages and I’d just reappeared.

  At first I thought it might be a way for him to confound his friends, hanging out with the guy whose girlfriend he’d stolen. But then he started inviting me to his house after school. Initially with Beate and Pirm. Then with Pirm. Then just me, alone, almost every day. Hanging out together became our thing. Soon it was the only thing. I’d spend the day waiting for last bell, when Dirk and I’d meet at the bike racks and ride off together.

  Dirk’s mission during the rides home was to see if he could destroy his bicycle. Without warning he would fly ahead then jam the brakes, leaving long black streaks on the pavement. He called them “crapstains.” The darker the better. When riding along a canal’s edge, he swivelled his handlebars as if losing control. He was spectacularly bad at popping wheelies but that didn’t stop him from trying. Each time he’d fall off the back of his saddle as the bike shot skywards.

  “Piece of shit,” he’d say, examining a snapped fender or derailed chain, “I can’t help it’s a piece of shit.”

  For Dirk, the more histrionic the wipeout the better. And because I tucked my hems into my socks and slowed down through puddles and tried not to ride off the side of dykes into canals, Dirk called me “Old Man,” “Sobriety de Vries,” and sometimes just “Arthritis.”

  “All right, de Vries,” he said to me one day. “If you won’t do any good tricks, you can at least ride eyes closed.”

  I thought to myself, I knew you were wild, but not crazy.

  “No chance,” I told him.

  “Come on. I do it all the time.”

  “So I’ll lay flowers at your grave.”

  He tsk-tsked. “You’re soft, de Vries. First thing, you look ahead and calculate the distance to the next turn or bridge or whatever obstacle. Then you steady your speed, so you know how much time you have. Finally, you close your eyes and start to count. One, two, three. No rushing through the numbers! My record’s twelve.”

  He squinted into the distance and moved his lips to show he was calculating. Then he said, “Okay,” closed his eyes, and adjusted his grip on the handlebars. Not sure what to do, I biked next to him and kept count. One, two, three. He bobbed his head. He bit into his lower lip. Four, five, six. I held my breath.

  I kept thinking he was going to ride into a fence or signpost or tree, but he had a knack for landing on grass, or at least the softer gravel, after which he’d get back on his bike and laugh.

  “One day, de Vries, I’m going to break every single bone in my face, and it’s going to be great. Now, your turn.”

  Somehow he persuaded me. The first few times, I kept my eyes closed for barely five seconds. I’d imagine my tires sliding along the gravel shoulder, or being caught short by a sewer grate. I’d start screaming and begging Dirk to warn me if I was heading towards a pole or off a bridge.

  “No,” he said, “but just to the right are shards of glass and barbed wire! And radioactive alligators! And a nuclear submarine!”

  I’d snap my eyes open, convinced I would find myself face to face with the ground or hurtling over a dyke. Dirk would be miles ahead by then, looking back, his lower lip curled down. The look of pity.

  “Your heart is too soft, de Vries!” he’d yell. “Yet we understand and are forgiving!”

  When we got to Dirk’s house, we’d lean the bikes against the magnolia in the centre of his garden. Then, as he opened the French doors that led to the kitchen, we’d begin to argue. Starting with our usual.

  “You know I stole her from you,” he’d say.

  “Did not.”

  “So what are you saying, de Vries? That I took out your trash?”

  Occasionally he would throw in a kind of twist. Frown. Turn his head to the side.

  “She did say you were a primo kisser.”

  I’d narrow my eyes. “Well, I have had a bit of practise in my time,” I’d say.

  A poker face from Dirk. “I’m being serious.”

  For a moment it seemed possible.

  “And also that you had giant balls. Like, elephantiasis of the testicles.”

  Dirk would laugh, duck out of the way, and throw things at me from cover. Fruit. A cookbook. A spatula.

  “Come on, de Vries. Don’t like what I said? Embarrassed by your boulder-like genitalia? Why is your eyelid twitching? Fancy having a go?”

  H
e’d launch himself at me and get me in a headlock.

  “I’m offering clemency under the Geneva Conventions, but you have to plead guilty to all charges.”

  Just as quickly as he’d pounce on me, he would let go, and begin to search for boxes of biscuits or mini waffles. Dirk’s parents were almost always away, either on business in the city or on one of many trips out of town for his father’s conferences. While Dirk slammed cupboard doors I’d collect my knapsack and remind him we needed to start on some homework.

  “I know, I know,” he said, shooting an imaginary gun at his temple.

  “If you fail, they’ll hold you back.”

  “Yes, I think I know how failing works.”

  “We’d be in separate grades.”

  “Well, then, you better get to work.”

  I’d transcribe answers into Dirk’s workbooks while he, lounging on the bottom bunk stuffing biscuits down his throat, would start a new debate. Politics, usually. His parents called themselves left-wing, read Het Parool and got the New Statesman from England, and my father was always echoing the editorials in NRC and De Telegraaf. Getting into some kind of fight mostly meant parroting the opinions of our elders but with more gusto and insults, with Dirk threatening to put me in another headlock if he felt control slipping away. When the politics argument died without resolution, Dirk would choose one of the albums stacked above the stereo.

  Dirk categorized his music by function. There was music for hanging out, music for going out, music for celebrating, usually funk, music for heartbreak, which was acoustic guitar with one singer. Most important was music for when you’re with a girl. Percy Sledge, from America, was a leader in this category. “It Tears Me Up,” “Warm and Tender Love.” As the singer wailed, Dirk would sprawl across the bottom bunk and I’d sit next to him. He’d do the talking. I’d listen.