The wine arrived before I had decided whether to read or to listen. The pub had six tables crammed into a room built for four, and my elbow was nearly touching the elbow of a woman at the next table over, and I had brought a book the way I always bring a book, and the book was open in front of me, and within ten minutes I knew I was not going to read a word of it.
I had come in to be alone. The people in the pub had other plans.
It was my last night in Amsterdam. The kind of evening I usually like, where I do not have to translate anything or decide anything or be anyone in particular. Just a body in a chair with a pie on the way and a glass of red I had not yet touched.
The conversation at the table to my left turned political about the time my food arrived. A woman in her sixties, halfway through what I suspected was not her first glass of wine, was naming things about my country with a precision I could not argue with, even if she had been talking to me, which she was not.
The man across from her, quieter, said one sentence about a person he used to know and put his fork down. Grief, the kind that does not need volume.
Behind me, a younger pair were jubilant about something the woman in her sixties was furious about. Their voices were bright and a little loud in the way voices get when you are sure you are right and you are also sure the room agrees.
To my right, a couple in their thirties were arguing about whether to be furious or to stop reading the news for a week, which is its own kind of grief.
And me. In the middle. With a book I had stopped reading and a wine I had started drinking and a body that was registering all of it at once, the way a microphone registers everything in a room without choosing.
---
Then They Noticed Me
The thing about being the only American in a room full of strangers talking about America is that eventually someone notices.
The woman in her sixties was the first. She glanced over at one point, mid-sentence, and then leaned slightly toward my table and asked, with the kind of warmth that is also a small invitation to fight, what I made of it. As an American. Surely.
I smiled. I said I had not really thought about that. Which was a small lie, the social kind, the kind we use to keep our dignity and theirs at the same time. I had thought about it. I just was not going to give it to her.
She accepted the lie graciously. Went back to her conversation.
The jubilant pair behind me tried next, about twenty minutes later. Their version was friendlier. They wanted me to share their happiness about the thing they were happy about. Wanted confirmation, I think, that they were not crazy to feel what they were feeling. I told them I could see why they felt that way. Which was true. I could. I just was not going to feel it with them.
The man with the grief did not try to recruit me. He was somewhere I recognized. He needed nothing from anyone.
The exhausted couple to my right asked me, around the time the pie arrived, whether I read the news. I said I did. They asked how I lived with it. I said I was still figuring that out. Which was the most honest thing I said all night, and also the thing that ended the conversation, because nobody at a pub on a Thursday wants to hear that you are still figuring it out. They want you to have an answer. So they can argue with it, or agree with it, or feel less alone in their own.
I did not have one.
