Not Your Ordinary Housewife: How the man I loved led me into a world I had never imagined (5 page)

Given my original reluctance, I was utterly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The climaxes were stronger than I’d ever experienced and it certainly added a new dimension to our lovemaking. I joked that, if he wasn’t careful, I could dispense with him altogether.

‘How about we buy you some lingerie?’ he said a few days after purchasing the vibrator.

‘But, I’m not really into that.’

‘Hey, this is Amsterdam. Sex capital of the world. Lingerie is cheap here.’

So I indulged his whim and let him take me shopping in the red-light district. We returned with armfuls of black lacy garments, fishnet stockings and assorted torsolettes and corselets. Paul was like a kid in a candy store.

Paul insisted that I give him a personal fashion parade. He cooed admiringly as my plumped-up breasts and cinched waist accentuated my feminine figure. But, although I loved the sensuality of the silk and satin garments—trimmed in black lace and red ribbons—and although the lingerie was extremely flattering, I was outside my comfort zone. I was feeling pressured to conform to his notion of what his fantasy woman would wear; I had begun to feel like a vehicle for his own pleasure.

I knew that Paul was turned on, and I wanted to please him, but I wasn’t comfortable with these accessories. I needed to be true to myself: my self-image was arty alternative, not sexy slut. The cost was becoming an issue too and the lingerie, plus all the leather gear, had blown my frugal budget.

In his new leather ensemble, Paul attracted amorous attention from the city’s large gay population. One night, we were dining at a crowded pizzeria when a group of openly gay men sat at a neighbouring table. Paul whispered to me, ‘I think they’re talking about me.’

I had already noticed that they kept staring at him. My Dutch had come a long way under Paul’s tutelage and I could make out the key words associated with sex and sucking: they were describing in graphic terms what they would like to do to him—and what they would like him to do to them.

Paul let them continue fantasising among themselves in lurid detail until we left. Then, in his most perfect ‘Queen’s Dutch’, he turned to them, and said, ‘Well, gentlemen, have a good evening.’ With that, he bowed formally and exited. There was total silence as the penny dropped that he had understood their entire conversation.

While it was not just men who found Paul attractive, there did seem to be a preponderance of homosexual attention. I asked him about it the day after the restaurant episode as we were getting ready to go out. He said he guessed it was just the way he dressed. He was certainly more pretty boy than bloke.

‘But do you think you look gay?’ I pressed him.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘if you think I’m gay, you’re wrong.’ He told me he’d tried it once, when he was fifteen—there had been a gay guy in their apartment block and he’d always see him in the lift. He knew this man was infatuated with him because he kept begging Paul to come to his apartment.

So one day Paul decided to go, and he let the man fuck him. He claimed he didn’t enjoy it: ‘It’s not my thing. He sucked my cock as well, and I suppose, if you were blindfolded, it would feel the same as a woman doing it—although, I have to say, he was quite an expert.’

I was startled by his revelation, but Paul was emphatic: he wasn’t turned on by this experience. ‘I know myself: I’m just not gay. I fancy women—well, you, to be precise.’ He claimed he didn’t even look at other women any more. ‘I just want you; I love you, and only you.’

Until now, I hadn’t known that he had had a gay experience, but he said it wasn’t uncommon, especially in the Netherlands. He’d read the statistics and a large percentage of men have a homosexual experience at some time or other: ‘I just happen to have had mine early—so I know for sure: I’m not gay.’

He asked me whether I’d ever had a homosexual encounter, but I said I’d never even thought about it—I’m just not attracted to women. He said he’d done a whole battery of tests at school and he was off the scale for heterosexuality.

I accused him of sounding defensive; it was his business if he was gay, bi or whatever. ‘But I’d just like to know, since I’m in a relationship with you . . . Not to mention the AIDS risk you might pose. That’s all.’

So we agreed to drop the subject, although he would often tell me of the gay attention he was receiving, as if to prove he wasn’t acting upon it. I knew he frequented a ‘leather boy’ bar in one of the gay streets, but he insisted he went there for the superior dope deals.

A few days after our confrontation, we spent a lazy Sunday morning in bed, making love and smoking dope at the squat house.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘why don’t we give the tourists something to look at?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why don’t we sit naked in the window and smoke a giant joint? Come on, it’ll be fun. We’ll pretend to make out.’

Despite my voluptuous figure and our experimentation, I tended to still be a bit coy about my own nudity. I was not an exhibitionist, but I knew he thought of this as a cheeky stunt.

‘Okay.’ I hesitated. ‘But I’m not comfortable with this.’

‘Don’t worry—you’ve got a fantastic body.’

‘No,’ I said tersely, ‘that’s not the point.’

I wanted to please Paul, and so I acquiesced. Possibly the marijuana clouded my judgement, but he always had a way of making me feel foolish if I contradicted him. In any case, we sat naked kissing and embracing on the window ledge, overlooking what was one of the busiest intersections in Amsterdam. As buses and trams stopped at the lights, one person would usually notice us and then a quasi Mexican wave would follow as all the faces turned up towards us.

‘I guess we’ll be in photo albums all over Japan,’ Paul joked.

I laughed. ‘I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.’

‘And do you know what the funniest thing about this is? The banner on the squat house promoting the lesbian radio station.’

‘I’d forgotten about that,’ I said. ‘Oh my God, what would Hendrika think?’

‘Don’t worry, she’ll never find out,’ Paul joshed.

And she didn’t. But soon after, we had to vacate the room. Paul insisted I should come and live with him in Amstelveen, rather than return to the ‘corridor’, as he called my old room. Meantime, we had our first fight when I tried to enlist his help cleaning the editor’s room in preparation for its occupant’s return. We needed to tidy the overflowing ashtrays and general debris that had resulted from weeks of neglect. I was determined to leave it even cleaner than when it was lent to me, but Paul prevaricated. It became obvious he had no intention of helping and he left the cleaning to me while he got stoned.

I worked late into the night to make it presentable and by morning I had forgiven Paul, because I knew that I loved him.

3

So I found myself back at Paul’s student dorm. I missed the women and the atmosphere at the squat complex, but the noise of the punk band, buses and tourists outside my room had left me sleep deprived.

Paul was approaching his final high school exams. I was worried I would be a distraction, but he seemed confident. The night before each exam, he smoked a worrying amount of marijuana.

‘I don’t mean to sound like your mother, but shouldn’t you be studying?’

‘Hey, I don’t need to study. I’m doing four languages and art. I speak better English than my English teacher, who’s Polish.’ He did a humorous imitation of ‘Miss Pissovotski’ and her ‘Ponglish’, as he called it. It was true—he had a supreme gift for languages and certainly his results didn’t belie his confidence.

We were still making frequent visits to downtown Amsterdam, where one day I noticed a T-shirt in a shop window. The comic script read how to roll a joint and it had cartoon drawings.

‘Hey, look at that—it’s kind of cute,’ I said, thinking I might buy it for Paul.

I was certainly not prepared for his reaction. ‘Jesus fucking Christ, that’s my drawing! The bastards have ripped me off. I drew that on a piece of paper as a joke and the owner liked it so much I traded it for a hash pipe.’

Inside the shop, the manager told us that the T-shirt was a hot-selling item. It had been reproduced in three different sizes and colours. Paul was livid, but there was nothing to be done.

He became agitated and I felt a melancholic pall descend on his normally cheerful disposition. ‘That’s the story of my life. Everyone wants something or tries to rip me off. Even my fucking parents: I’ve got a father who won’t acknowledge me and a mother who’s sold out—fucking whore. She married my stepfather for his money and now she’s miserable. Serves her right. I once had a bet with my friends that I’d be dead by thirty.’

I was shocked by this dramatic statement. ‘But why?’ I asked somewhat naively.

‘Because I’ll probably die of a heroin overdose. They’ll find me in a gutter somewhere.’

I couldn’t believe he’d think that. He had so much going for him. I told him not to say stuff like that—he was scaring me. I knew he smoked a lot of dope and we’d sampled some speed and acid together, but I’d never known any actual addicts.

Desperate to understand him, I asked Paul endlessly about his mother and stepfather. He described Vlad as looking exactly like Colonel Klink, the bumbling German commandant in the 1960s TV show
Hogan’s Heroes
.

He said that when Vlad had come over from Czechoslovakia, he’d opened a car wash, which turned out to be a great business in Holland, what with all their acid rain. He made an absolute fortune. He’d originally been part of the Bayer family—the poor cousins. His branch had once had a fifteenth-century castle, plus apartments on the Black Sea. They’d owned a whole block of the Wenceslas Square in central Prague, but when the communists came to power the family had lost it all.

Vlad’s mother had been left living in a tiny apartment, with the remnants of her art masterpieces crammed into a couple of rooms. She refused to follow him to Holland because she was convinced that the communists would confiscate her collection—apparently, she was a paranoid old crone who slept with a knife under her pillow.

Paul had never shared this with me before, and I was spellbound. He said that for years Vlad wouldn’t go back to Czechoslovakia, for fear of being arrested. So, after he married Saskia, he used to send Paul back to Prague to retrieve some of the art treasures. ‘Since I refused to carry his surname, there was no official connection with Vlad. Later, he was able to regain entry; but for years as a child, I’d go to Prague and smuggle stuff out. You have no idea what my mother and stepfather put me up to. From the age of about twelve, I’d make a trip roughly once a year. There was just so much loot and it was worth a fortune. Like the Renoir.’

‘Renoir—the impressionist painter?’

‘What other Renoir is there?’ he asked rhetorically.

I stared at him in disbelief.

‘Well, admittedly not one of his finest, but a Renoir nevertheless.’ Apparently, they pasted a hideous portrait of Vlad’s mother over the original and gave Paul a carton of Marlborough to take on the train. If the border guards got suspicious, he was to offer them the cigarettes as a bribe.

Sure enough, at the border, one of the guards started inspecting the painting at the edges. The frame was a bit of a giveaway—it was obviously expensive. So Paul put on his most innocent expression and, as he produced the carton of cigarettes from his bag, asked, ‘Are you allowed to take these across the border?’ The guard immediately snatched them out of his hand and waved him through.

I found all this very hard to believe. But Paul said he would show me the Renoir, plus a painting by a seventeenth-century original Dutch master, Joris van der Haagen, that was listed in the Prague National Gallery as being under repair but which Saskia and Vlad had hanging in their dining room.

Then there was all the other stuff: the stamp and postcard collections, the Bohemian crystal . . . and not forgetting the diamonds. One time Paul had been heading back to Amsterdam with some diamond jewellery stuffed in his shirt pockets. There was a passenger, probably KGB, who noticed his bulging pockets and he got really nervous, but Paul averted suspicion by looking so angelic.

Because I sounded so disbelieving, he decided to take me to dinner with Saskia and Vlad. He’d already told his mother about me and she’d said she wanted to meet me anyway. I was full of trepidation and didn’t know what to wear—I could hardly turn up in my leather gear and fishnets. So, I decided on the only dress I had—a 1950s polka-dot op-shop outfit—although I felt very self-conscious.

Saskia greeted me with consummate charm and polish. She was tall, and I could see the remnants of her former career as a model in her posture and poise. Her face had a fragile beauty—high cheekbones and a strong chin, like Paul. There was a hint of sadness in her eyes. She introduced me to Vlad, a large dapper man with impeccable English. He too was a paragon of politeness, and I had difficulty envisaging him as the dog-tormenter or child- and wife-basher that I had been told about. Paul’s younger half-brother, Rudi, was there too. Paul seemed happier to see his dog, Bobby, than his family and he lavished attention on the pedigree boxer.

As soon as I entered the dining room, I saw the van der Haagen: a gentle landscape of muted colours. It was the intricately carved massive gold frame, however, which lent an air of opulence to this masterpiece. I could see Paul watching my reaction. It certainly looked authentic to me and it provided an intriguing contrast with their modern art collection. The apartment was furnished in a minimalist style: quality leather and steel sofas, and cabinets of Bohemian crystal and trinkets. I even thought I recognised some classic Gallé glass. And so I sat in their dining room eating spaghetti with the Dutch master’s painting on the wall while contemplating the circumstances that had brought me here.

The conversation was stilted, and I could sense that Saskia disliked me. She was grilling Paul about his plans for the future. She thought he should study art in Montreal. It would be good for him to get away from Amsterdam, and he could stay with family there. She reminded him that he would be drafted into the Netherlands army soon if he didn’t continue studying. She and Vlad were prepared to pay for his ticket so he could start college in the autumn.