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“A h, this old thing?” he said, smiling down at me.
“A ugustus,” my mom said behind me, “you look extremely handsome.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said. He offered me his arm. I took it, glancing back to Mom.
“See you by eleven,” she said.
Waiting for the number one tram on a wide street busy with traffic, I said to A ugustus, “The suit you wear to funerals, I assume?”
“A ctually, no,” he said. “That suit isn’t nearly this nice.”
The blue-and-white tram arrived, and A ugustus handed our cards to the driver, who explained that we needed to wave them at this
circular sensor. A s we walked through the crowded tram, an old man stood up to give us seats together, and I tried to tell him to sit, but he gestured toward the seat insistently. We rode the tram for three stops, me leaning over Gus so we could look out the window together.
A ugustus pointed up at the trees and asked, “Do you see that?”
I did. There were elm trees everywhere along the canals, and these seeds were blowing out of them. But they didn’t look like seeds. They
looked for all the world like miniaturized rose petals drained of their color. These pale petals were gathering in the wind like flocking birds—
thousands of them, like a spring snowstorm.
The old man who’d given up his seat saw us noticing and said, in English, “A msterdam’s spring snow. The iepen throw confetti to greet
the spring.”
We switched trams, and after four more stops we arrived at a street split by a beautiful canal, the reflections of the ancient bridge and
picturesque canal houses rippling in water.
Oranjee was just steps from the tram. The restaurant was on one side of the street; the outdoor seating on the other, on a concrete
outcropping right at the edge of the canal. The hostess’s eyes lit up as A ugustus and I walked toward her. “Mr. and Mrs. Waters?”
“I guess?” I said.
“Your table,” she said, gesturing across the street to a narrow table inches from the canal. “The champagne is our gift.”
Gus and I glanced at each other, smiling. Once we’d crossed the street, he pulled out a seat for me and helped me scoot it back in. There
were indeed two flutes of champagne at our white-tableclothed table. The slight chill in the air was balanced magnificently by the sunshine; on one side of us, cyclists pedaled past—well-dressed men and women on their way home from work, improbably attractive blond girls riding
sidesaddle on the back of a friend’s bike, tiny helmetless kids bouncing around in plastic seats behind their parents. A nd on our other side, the canal water was choked with millions of the confetti seeds. Little boats were moored at the brick banks, half full of rainwater, some of them near sinking. A bit farther down the canal, I could see houseboats floating on pontoons, and in the middle of the canal, an open-air, flat-bottomed boat decked out with lawn chairs and a portable stereo idled toward us. A ugustus took his flute of champagne and raised it. I took mine, even though I’d never had a drink aside from sips of my dad’s beer.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, and we clinked glasses. I took a sip. The tiny bubbles melted in my mouth and journeyed northward into my brain. Sweet.
Crisp. Delicious. “That is really good,” I said. “I’ve never drunk champagne.”
A sturdy young waiter with wavy blond hair appeared. He was maybe even taller than A ugustus. “Do you know,” he asked in a delicious
accent, “what Dom Pérignon said after inventing champagne?”
“No?” I said.
“He called out to his fellow monks, ‘Come quickly: I am tasting the stars.’ Welcome to A msterdam. Would you like to see a menu, or will
you have the chef’s choice?”
I looked at A ugustus and he at me. “The chef’s choice sounds lovely, but Hazel is a vegetarian.” I’d mentioned this to A ugustus precisely once, on the first day we met.
“This is not a problem,” the waiter said.
“A wesome. A nd can we get more of this?” Gus asked, of the champagne.
“Of course,” said our waiter. “We have bottled all the stars this evening, my young friends. Gah, the confetti!” he said, and lightly brushed a seed from my bare shoulder. “It hasn’t been so bad in many years. It’s everywhere. Very a
The waiter disappeared. We watched the confetti fall from the sky, skip across the ground in the breeze, and tumble into the canal. “Kind
of hard to believe anyone could ever find that a
“People always get used to beauty, though.”
“I haven’t gotten used to you just yet,” he answered, smiling. I felt myself blushing. “Thank you for coming to A msterdam,” he said.
“Thank you for letting me hijack your wish,” I said.
“Thank you for wearing that dress which is like whoa,” he said. I shook my head, trying not to smile at him. I didn’t want to be a
grenade. But then again, he knew what he was doing, didn’t he? It was his choice, too. “Hey, how’s that poem end?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“The one you recited to me on the plane.”
“Oh, ‘Prufrock’? It ends, ‘We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human
voices wake us, and we drown.’”
A ugustus pulled out a cigarette and tapped the filter against the table. “Stupid human voices always ruining everything.”
The waiter arrived with two more glasses of champagne and what he called “Belgian white asparagus with a lavender infusion.”
“I’ve never had champagne either,” Gus said after he left. “In case you were wondering or whatever. A lso, I’ve never had white
asparagus.”
I was chewing my first bite. “It’s amazing,” I promised.
He took a bite, swallowed. “God. If asparagus tasted like that all the time, I’d be a vegetarian, too.” Some people in a lacquered wooden
boat approached us on the canal below. One of them, a woman with curly blond hair, maybe thirty, drank from a beer then raised her glass
toward us and shouted something.
“We don’t speak Dutch,” Gus shouted back.
One of the others shouted a translation: “The beautiful couple is beautiful.”
The food was so good that with each passing course, our conversation devolved further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness: “I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it.” “Sweet-pea sorbet, you are so unexpectedly
magnificent.” I wish I’d been hungrier.
A fter green garlic gnocchi with red mustard leaves, the waiter said, “Dessert next. More stars first?” I shook my head. Two glasses was
enough for me. Champagne was no exception to my high tolerance for depressants and pain relievers; I felt warm but not intoxicated. But I
didn’t want to get drunk. Nights like this one didn’t come along often, and I wanted to remember it.
“Mmmm,” I said after the waiter left, and A ugustus smiled crookedly as he stared down the canal while I stared up it. We had plenty to
look at, so the silence didn’t feel awkward really, but I wanted everything to be perfect. It was perfect, I guess, but it felt like someone had tried to stage the A msterdam of my imagination, which made it hard to forget that this di
“It’s not my funeral suit,” he said after a while. “When I first found out I was sick—I mean, they told me I had like an eighty-five percent chance of cure. I know those are great odds, but I kept thinking it was a game of Russian roulette. I mean, I was going to have to go through hell for six months or a year and lose my leg and then at the end, it still might not work, you know?”