On a Tuesday in May

She had bought the dress a week earlier. Not out of curiosity, she told herself, but because some private part of her had already known she would need it. Dark blue, narrower than she was used to, with a back that fell further than a back is usually permitted to fall. For three evenings it had hung in her hallway cupboard, behind her raincoat, the way one hides a secret in a place no one looks.

On the Tuesday, mid-May, the rain had stopped. The city smelled of wet asphalt and lilac in bloom. She put the dress on without spending long at the mirror, because longer would invite doubt, and she had decided that this evening would not be granted doubt.

The Overtoom on a Tuesday evening is a strange mixture of quiet and urban indifference. Students on bicycles. A tram complaining around a bend. A dog uncertain whether to go left or right. She walked past all of it as if moving through a film she had not written but in which she was nonetheless the lead. Her heels tapped the pavement more softly than she had expected.

At number 294 she stopped.

The building is less visible than most people imagine. No windows, no signage, no suggestion of what happens inside. Only the discreet door, the small brass plate, and the fact that the licensed brothel here has been operating since 1986. She had looked it up. She had looked all of it up. The exploitation licence. The 2000 law. Which private houses in Amsterdam can be taken seriously and which to avoid. She was, in this thought at least, not a romantic.

She pressed the bell.

The voice that answered was calm. Not cheerful, not businesslike, only calm. He asked whether she had called before. She said yes, yesterday morning, once, at half past ten. The voice said he had thought so, and that the door was opening.

Inside it was different from how she had imagined, and therefore exactly as it should be. Black and gold, not much light, not much noise. A host in a dark suit who spoke her name without ceremony. He asked what she would like to drink before asking what she expected of the evening, a small thing that struck her.

She took a seat on a velvet bench, at a low table where a candle burned more slowly than candles ordinarily burn. She crossed her legs. The fabric of the dress slid back to its place in its own time. Someone watched from across the room, not boldly, not shyly, only attentively. She answered the gaze by not answering it. That is one of the oldest languages there is.

The host returned with a glass that fit her mouth as if someone had ordered it for her a long time ago. She said something friendly. He said something that was not a question but was an opening. She replied with something she also did not call a question. People who meet each other this way, she thought, have already greeted each other before they greet each other.

Later, at a moment that did not register on a clock, she stood up to walk with someone to a smaller room than the first. Her hand on the banister of a staircase that felt softer than staircases usually feel. The back of her dress found a hand, and the hand was warm, and there she let it stay.

What happened afterwards cannot be described without making it smaller. The moment the door closed behind her, she forgot the Overtoom, the tram, the dog, the raincoat, and the hallway cupboard. What remained was skin, slow music, and the certainty that a woman who does such a thing does not go back to who she was before. She descended a staircase, entered an evening, crossed a city, and when she came home she did not hang the dress behind the raincoat any more.

No one had decided anything more about her than she had decided about herself. That, in retrospect, had been the difference.