“Do you really have to go back tonight?” Kate asks. “You could come out after with Willem really quickly and then we could give the squeaky bed at the Major Booger another go.”
“Just one?” David asks.
They kiss again. The audience is still applauding.
• • •
Allyson notices the kissing couple. It’s hard not to, because people are starting to meander out of the theater and they are still kissing. And because, much as she’s looking forward to getting to know Willem’s friends, what she really wants to do is what that couple is doing.
And then the couple breaks apart, and Allyson gasps. The woman! She’s the woman from last night. The one she’d seen Willem with. The one she’d thought he was in love with. As of this afternoon, she no longer thought that. And now she really doesn’t think that.
“Who is that?” Allyson asks Broodje, pointing to the woman.
“No idea,” Broodje says. Then he points to the stage door. “Look, here comes Willy.”
Allyson feels paralyzed all of a sudden. Last night, she’d stood at that very stage door and Willem had breezed right by her, into the arms of that other woman. The one who is now in the arms of that other man.
This is not last night. This is tonight. And Willem is walking right toward her. And he is smiling. Wren thrusts the bouquet Wolfgang prepared (an enormous bouquet; it almost capsized the bike on the ride to the park) into her arms.
The bouquet is smashed in about five seconds. Because Willem doesn’t seem to give a shit about the flowers or the crowd of people waiting for him. He seems to be heeding Orlando’s words tonight.
“I would kiss before I spoke.”
And for the second time in a day, he does.
And, oh, what a kiss. It makes the one this morning seem chaste. It makes the flowers smashed between them bloom all at once. Allyson could live in that kiss.
Except she hears laughter behind them. And a voice, an unfamiliar one, though Allyson knows at once that it belongs to the redhead.
“I take it you found her then,” the voice says.
• • •
It takes ages for them all to troop out of the park. There are so many of them: Willem, Allyson, Broodje, Henk, W, Lien, Max, Kate, David. Wolfgang and Winston, the guy from the hotel whom Wren has been spending time with, are joining them later. The logistics are complicated. This one left a bike back there. This one is meeting them over here.
But it’s the introductions that take longer.
Kate is a theater director. Whom Willem met in Mexico, while he was looking for Allyson.
David is her fiancé, whom Willem has never met, who is going on about how good Willem was tonight, the vulnerability he brought to Orlando, what a brave way to play it.
Wren is the friend Allyson met in Paris and bumped into again in Amsterdam. “I wouldn’t have found you if it weren’t for her,” Allyson tells Willem. “I was about to give up but she made me go to the hospital you were at.”
Willem thanks Wren.
Wren curtsies.
W listens to all the introductions and still doesn’t understand.
Neither does Max. “This is too bloody confusing. Can someone draw a chart?”
“That’s not a bad idea,” W says.
“I was kidding,” Max says. “What I really need is a drink.”
• • •