THE HAPPY ENDING

It was the summer when nothing noteworthy happened except that it was hot for the second year in a row. There was a succession of heatwaves and heat records that weren’t fun for anyone. That winter, I had dreamt that I would leave the apartment complex next to the weather institute. In spring, I decided to put my money where my mouth was and, on Liberation Day, I crammed my things into a station wagon, handed the key to my apartment to a subtenant, and made my getaway from my angry neighbour/ex. I headed for a large building that housed a community living group diagonally opposite the city’s concert hall and right next to a tram stop, where I was degraded to the status of subtenant myself, and put my stuff in the smallest room, directly beneath the roof. That very evening, the evening of Liberation Day, you knocked on my door and presented me with a little pancake plant. We had met only one week previously, in the canteen of the film institute, where I discovered that you also lived in a community living group right beneath its roof, but two streets away from me. Of course, it wasn’t a good idea to start something new with a neighbour again – though this time you lived two streets away, not two doors down. Yet the idea of lying in bed on my own didn’t appeal to me either, so I did what the Einstein postcard on my new communal fridge advised me not to do: solve problems with the same thinking that had caused the problems in the first place.
I told myself you were my happy ending, and when you came inside me that night, I thought that was why I cried – because it had all ended well. I had never cried during sex before, though I’d seen it often enough in films. Now, I watched us as if we were in a movie scene: you, feet dangling over the edge of a too-short bed; me, curled up with my nose pressed against your shoulder. Poor but happy. The camera zoomed out, we saw the city rooftops, and the credits started. But this was a different kind of scene – the opening of a story where I mistook you for the solution when you were really just another problem. I don’t believe in horoscopes, but we were clearly two rams – fiery in the loins, sharp in the mind, but hollow where it matters, where the heart softens when you truly like someone. In retrospect, I suspect that’s why I cried. There had been various clues – your Groningen accent, the fact that you liked looking after plants and always babysat your nephew – that made me think you were sweet. But when you lay in my bed that night, I didn’t feel it, although the fucking itself was quite gentle: your penis wasn’t that big, so it slid in easily and didn’t reach far enough to hit that one special spot. On the other hand, there was no risk that it would penetrate any deeper, touching me where it hurts. When the crying had stopped, you told me that you had read somewhere that male and female genitals are actually quite similar. I had erectile tissue inside of me, just like yours, and you had an extra-sensitive spot on the tip of your erectile tissue, just like me. From then on, whenever we made love, I imagined you massaging my inner penis with your external clitoris.
It was kind of attractive, just like your certainty when you said a few days later that men also have a biological clock, that they want to be fathers before the age of forty. In fact, you didn’t want anything other than that for years now. That is when the naked truth came out. ‘Please don’t be shocked,’ you said, ‘but there is another woman.’ You had met her through a platform for people wanting to be parents. She was in a relationship with a man who didn’t want children but didn’t have a problem with her becoming a mother, which is why they devised this scheme with you. You were not in love but, after trying for two years, you had a history with her: you had lost two unborn children, the first one halfway through the pregnancy. Those losses have had a great impact, but you remained hopeful.
My mind was flexible enough to believe that I wasn’t jealous but, when spring had turned to summer, the heat weighed heavily on us – either in your bed or in mine but always right beneath the roof. I found it harder to accept that, once a month, you biked to her flat in the suburbs, watched porn on your laptop, and came into a plastic jar – sperm I had come to think of as mine –
while she injected it in another room. And because my heart didn’t work the way it should, I didn’t realise how important this baby was to you. I began to pressure you: I was your girlfriend and it bothered me. You could have explained this to her, couldn’t you? But of course, you couldn’t leave her for me, a woman who didn’t care for you but still looked for a happy ending with you. Looking back, I know it was better for me too that you kicked me out one sticky night – leaving me alone with the emptiness, the heat, and the absence of the apartment complex. If I saw you again today, I’d still want you to touch me the way you did. I’d turn up the heat, close my eyes and picture your face – gentle, just like in the photo you sent me fourteen months later, holding your newborn.