‘You like her?’
‘Well enough.’ I did too, although we were not friends as such. There was something heroic in her efforts to be light, to keep her bulk afloat on such a thin stream of sound. Her fingertips touched the keys with exquisite delicacy, defying gravity, skipping like a flurry of raindrops across the surface of a pond, producing ever more intricate Venn diagrams of interlocking ripples.
Spilkin and I sat up straighter than usual, while she paddled through ‘Swanee River’.
‘Her name,’ Spilkin whispered, ‘is Suzanna, but I promised not to tell. She enjoys being Mevrouwed. Bit of a snob, never mind the country-girl stuff.’
Total snob, in reverse, to a degree (6). National serviceman in a boa (6). New edition of Bosman (6).
When she rolled without missing a beat into ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, we gave her a round of applause, which found a few polite echoes at the other tables — or it may have been draughtsmen clacking over their foes. She showed us her grateful yellowed ivories.
‘Just this once’ was no more than a manner of speaking. Mevrouw Bonsma acquired a permanent place at our table. She would join us between shifts at the piano, to moisten her throat with the mug of tea or rock shandy to which her contract entitled her. She laughed voraciously at Spilkin’s jokes, as if she were crushing rusks between her molars, and left fading echoes of her laughing mouth on the rim of her teacup and the ends of her satin-tipped cigarettes.
Once had been a tolerable novelty; but being in her company constantly aggravated me. The sheer bulk of her was an imposition. When she sat down at the table, I felt myself rise momentarily in my own chair, as if the room had subsided in her vicinity. She loomed over us like a dam wall, which had seemed sturdy enough when observed from a safe distance, but appeared to be crumbling away now that we squatted, like a pair of truant schoolboys, in the damp shade at its foot. I felt as if I was on the shores of Mevrouw Bonsma. The phrase rang in my head, trying to fit itself to the tune of ‘Loch Lomond’ or ‘On Top of Old Smokey’, without success. Always, it was Rotterdam I saw. Such a watery fecundity! What if she burst? I would be washed away like a stick of balsa on a flood of evergreens. Even when she went back to the piano, the threat remained. She had elbowed her way out of the background to which she belonged, and could no longer be ignored. When she played, we had to listen. Her personal favourites bubbled along perkily, flats tumbling like little propellers, sharps concealed like lures in soft lumps of melody. The special requests, hauled up from the abysmal deeps, could be positively sodden. More than once I felt as if I was drowning.
It was impossible to discuss my fears with Spilkin. I could not be sure what he thought of Mevrouw Bonsma. He seemed to like her a great deal. But then he also treated her as if she were a fool. He thought nothing of speaking about her in the third person, while she sat nodding pleasantly, fingering the ugly beauty spot stuck like a pastille of salted licorice to the corner of her mouth.
As an act of self-preservation, to save myself from being swept away, I began to tell her about my System of Records. ‘Over my head,’ she protested, ‘Greek to me. I’m no good with words.’ But she was impressed with me, I could tell, she thought I was frightfully clever, and so I kept pressing my clippings on her and reading her extracts from the notebooks. At other times, it was lexical gymnastics, flashy routines full of pikes and rolls and tearles with a twist, moves I could execute in my sleep. ‘Medley, Mevrouw,’ I would say. ‘Heterogeneous mixture. See meddle. Meddle, busy oneself unduly. And mêlée. Same root in “mix” — from the Latin misceo.’ Then again: ‘Do you see, Mevrouw,’ I would say. ‘Wormwood. From the OE wormod, wermod, after worm, wood: cf vermouth. And vermouth. From the G. Wermut, wormwood. That’s what we call a backflip. Let me show you how it works here in the dictionary.’ And sometimes, when both of us were exhausted, I would fall back on frenzied bouts of lexical fartlek. ‘Here we are: absinth. A shrubby plant, Artemisia absinthium, or its essence. Also called “wormwood”. Hence a liqueur flavoured with wormwood. Are you still with me? Artemisia. Any of various plants, including sagebrush and wormwood, f. ME, f. L., f. G. plant sacred to Artemis. Artemis. G. Myth. The virgin goddess of the hunt and the moon. Sagebrush perhaps? f. L. salvia, the healing plant, from salvus, healthy, safe. Salvation!’ And so on. She would bite her bottom lip with her ragged incisors and gaze at me anxiously. I had the distinct impression that she admired me, an impression I had not gained from a member of the fairer sex (to stretch a point) for quite some time, and it flattered my vanity, I suppose, or what few shreds of it remained. I couldn’t help myself: I began to take pleasure in making her clap one of her big red hands to her mouth in astonishment and delight.
My behaviour was uncharacteristic; obviously, it lacked the decorum people associate with me. And it appeared to infect Spilkin too. Lapsing out of character, just as I had done, he began to tell jokes. Have you heard the one about? he was always asking. Mevrouw Bonsma, who did not have a funny bone in her body, declared that he was the wittiest man alive. Under this onslaught, shoals of old punchlines came adrift in my head and slewed about, looking for jokes to attach themselves to. Knock knock. Who’s there? Ja. Ja who? Boo. Boo who? To get to the other side. And one to hold the light bulb. Because it feels so good when I stop. What was that Indian’s name again? Said the Texan. Said the Irishman. Said the Jew. Clutter and disorder. I found myself plucking index cards out of box-files like some door-to-door salesman in a cartoon, an ugly little man with Dagwood Bumstead shoes and a daft hairstyle. Spilkin told another joke, something off-colour, lime-green, puce.
What was this attack of nerves all about? To speak for myself, I found the lack of discrimination in Mevrouw Bonsma’s dim interior alarming. A great jumble of music had been poured into her, like leftovers into an olla podrida, and it bubbled out in an indiscriminate broth. I am a repository too; but in me, everything has its place. In me, things are filed, whereas she was merely filled.
I imagined that Spilkin, with his fine sense of discrimination, felt the same. When Mevrouw Bonsma sat at our table, we burbled away desperately, as if trying to mend a crack in her foundation. When she returned to her piano, we sat in depleted silence, with our backs stiff and our fists clenched on our knees, while our newspapers lay unread on the table before us. When I went home exhausted, Spilkin was still clamped to the table under the sconce, like a floodlit statue.
Later it occurred to me that if Spilkin had felt the same anxieties as I did, he would have responded with a recitation of the eye chart or some favourite prescriptions, a mortar of solid sense, rather than this sludge of inane jokes. In the light of his subsequent behaviour, I came to believe, strange as it may seem, that he was competing with me for her favours. In which case he had infected me!