He shrugged. He shook his head.
“I want to remember being here with you,” he said. “And I want to remember Cygnet and the smell of the coffee and manure, and the horse smell. I want to think of my grandfather being here, his pleasure and relief at seeing the horses. I don’t know. I guess it’s a little goofy.”
“I don’t think it’s goofy, Jack.”
I looked at him. This was a different side of him, and I liked it.
After petting the horses, we climbed up on a stack of hay in the center of the courtyard. A light rain began to fall, and the hay was piled under a pole barn. We climbed to the top of the bales and found a place to sit. The hay smelled magnificent, like open fields, and, mixed with the scent of the rain and the gentle movements of the horses, it couldn’t have been more lovely. We ate the baguettes and the éclair and everything else. I couldn’t believe how perfect the food tasted, how it felt to be with Jack in the horse academy. He seemed to read my mind.
“Pretty good first date,” he said.
“Kind of up there on the list. Are you calling this a date?”
“What are you calling it?”
“Amy would say it’s a hookup.”
“I think it’s a date, sort of.”
“Okay.”
“How long are you staying in Europe?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Another two or three weeks. I have to be back to work in the fall. I’m starting a new job.”
“Where?”
“At Bank of America.”
He looked at me.
“We can fix that,” he said.
“It doesn’t need to be fixed.”
“Are you sure? I don’t see you as a corporate suit.”
“Judge much?”
“Things are what they are.”
Our wires crossed a little. I wasn’t sure why, or what it meant, but for an instant I felt a flicker of both of us reappraising things. I remembered what he had said about his editor calling him a pot-stirrer.
He gave me a look, then pushed one of the hay bales back and arranged two more on either side until we had a tiny couch. He lay back and then pulled me close. He put his arms around me. I rested my head on his shoulder and wondered what he would do next, if now came the big seduction moment, but he was smarter than that, better than that. He turned my face up to his and kissed me, kissed me with everything, then pulled me even closer if that was possible.
“Stay close,” he whispered.
“You want to sleep here?”
“Well, we could sleep in bed, something we’ve both done a thousand times. Or we could sleep here next to the horses in Amsterdam in each other’s arms and remember it the rest of our lives. Is it really a choice?”
“This is your code?”
“Something like that.”
“Rough treasures?”
“Experience everything, I suppose. Drink it in. Is that a horrible cliché?”
I was still stung by his comments about Bank of America, but I understood him a little better.
“I’m still deciding,” I managed.
A little while later, our breathing matched, and the scent of hay covered everything.
13
I woke to the smell of cigarette smoke. For a moment I had no idea where I was. Jack still slept beside me. The rain had grown heavier. Bit by bit, the pieces of the previous night came parading back. I sat up, slightly panicked. I had no notion of the hour, no notion of anything except that we had petted the horses last night. With the rain obscuring the sun, it might have been any time. The question of the cigarette smoke puzzled me until I realized someone smoked below us, under the cover of the pole barn, probably on break from doing something with the horses. Then I heard a voice speaking to someone. Jack slowly sat up beside me, his finger again to his lips, a smile spreading on his face.
“We’re trapped,” he whispered and almost started laughing.
“What time is it?”
He shrugged.
Ten or a million thoughts surged through my brain. For one thing, I had to pee. I mean, really pee. And I imagined the hay had made me look pretty much like a crazy woman. I put a hand to my hair and felt it going out in every direction. My lips and throat felt coated with chocolate, and my fingers felt greasy and dirty and horsey.
Then I thought about Amy and Constance. I glanced at my phone, but neither one of them had texted.
It was six forty-eight in the morning. That was the other thing the cell phone said. Brian had left a message, but I didn’t have the stomach to listen to that at the moment.
“How are we going to get out of here?” I asked Jack.
“We’ll just climb down. We haven’t done anything wrong.”
“How about breaking and entering?”
“We’ll act like we just got done having sex,” he said, grinning and balling up the paper bag and policing the area. “Everyone loves a lover. Besides, what can they do?”
“They can call the police.”
“For two people having sex in a haystack?”
“We didn’t have sex.”
“But you wanted to.”
I nudged his shoulder. He laughed. We heard a shoe scuff below us, and someone called up, his voice coated with nervousness.
“Who is there?” he called.
At least I think that’s what he said. He called in Dutch.
“We fell asleep,” Jack called down. Then he said the German word for sleep.
Then another voice joined the first voice, and I knew we had to climb down and face the music. Maybe they thought we were bums. Maybe they thought we were thieves. Jack went first. He turned back to me and helped me down. Two men—one young, one old—had backed away from the hay bales, their faces turned up to watch us.
“We came in to pet the horses and fell asleep,” Jack said.
The old man shook his head. He obviously wasn’t happy with us. But the young guy—who had the cigarette and probably had broken a rule by smoking next to the hay bales—spoke to us in passable English.
“This is not good what you have done,” the young man said.
He had a thin face and a bunch of hair that went up a few inches from his scalp, then fell over into a hair hedge. He lips came together in a pucker.
“Sorry,” Jack said. “We were out late. We didn’t hurt anything.”
The old man spoke rapidly to the younger one. The younger one answered. Then the older man hurried off.
“He’s going to call the police. You’d better hurry. There’s a station nearby here, so they won’t be long.”
Only he reversed the word order so that it came out, long won’t be. He sounded like Yoda from Star Wars.
Jack grabbed my hand, and we ran for the door.
*
Halfway home—after stopping in a restaurant and going to the bathroom and getting more coffee—Jack made me stop to watch a swan paddle beneath a cobblestone bridge.
“My grandfather wrote about swans in his journal. I think it surprised him to find them here. He seemed to relish seeing any signs of nature, because that signified they had survived … that things would go on.”
“Can you find a passage about swans?”