The right kind of attention

It was not loneliness. That word did not fit what he felt. Men of his age are not lonely. They simply miss a particular kind of attention and have forgotten which.

A few months earlier he had thought an ordinary woman would solve it. He had tried. Twice. Both times, after three weeks, he had felt the same fatigue, a fatigue that came from negotiating who would be what for whom. He did not want a negotiation. He simply did not know what he did want.

Then he tried what a friend had suggested. Just go out, a hotel bar in the city, a glass or two. The idea was more interesting than the execution. The first evening he spoke to no one. The second evening he spoke to someone who was so curious about his work that, after half an hour, she seemed to treat him as material for a conversation. The third evening he listened to a conversation he did not want to have and cycled home early.

For days afterwards the feeling stayed with him. What he was missing, it seemed, was not that someone would choose him. It was that he would not need to choose or be chosen. He wanted someone to spend an evening with him the way an evening with someone is spent. Full stop. Without the phase before and the phase after.

Once he had silently put it that way to himself, the rest followed. Not at once. First a few weeks of wondering whether this was a wish one was allowed to have. Then an evening on the couch when he typed the right words into a search bar and ended up at something that had a licence, in his own city, since 1986. An Amsterdam brothel. Not somewhere far away, not somewhere vague, not something he could keep denying to himself.

He did nothing that evening with what he had found. He only left the address in a browser tab.

For two months.

On a Tuesday, after a dinner where no one had remembered his answers, he walked up the Overtoom. At number 294 he rang the bell.

A neatly dressed host opened the door and said his name as if expecting him. He ordered his favourite drink. Black and gold. A leather bench. No hurry. No pressure. But no ambiguity either.

And then her. She sat down next to him the way someone sits down who actually means to stay next to you.

She asked how his day had been. Not out of politeness. She listened. He told her about his afternoon, about a colleague’s dog, about a conversation that had irritated him. She laughed at the right moments. She touched his wrist when he mentioned his father.

Only half an hour later did she ask quietly what he had hoped to encounter this evening. He finally knew how to say it.

What happened next cannot be described without making it smaller. But this much can be said: companionship, given correctly, is a service. A sex club in Amsterdam, licensed since 1986, on the Overtoom. He understood that sentence only now.

It was not the only evening.