Scott sat on the edge of her bed, next to all the magazines she’d bought at the airport before leaving. Her used tissues littered the floor. He was trying to be patient. “Sue,” he said calmly, “has this ever happened to you before? Before you met me? I mean…have you ever been afraid to leave your room?”

She shook her head. He never dreamed he’d have to ask such a thing. It looked as though there was still a lot he didn’t know about her.

“Do you think you could at least go downstairs with me to get something to eat?”

She had no immediate response. If she were anyone else she would have looked pitiful, but her natural beauty was so thick that it didn’t crack, even in her worst moments.

“I’m still not feeling well,” she finally said, and got up. He watched her go into the bathroom. From behind the door he heard the sound of running water. She always turned on the tap when she was in the bathroom.

When she came out, he knew, the conversation would turn to her physical complaints. Had it been a specific ailment—appendicitis, say, or mercury poisoning—they could have picked the proper course of action and laid it to rest. But it was a vague mixture of symptoms—headaches, some nausea, fatigue—and, thus, open to endless discussion. Three, four times a day she offered it up for conversation, and they laid into it like two mad scientists.

The intricacies of her condition fascinated her far more than any mere city ever could. Amsterdam was nothing compared to the grand architecture of her unwellness.

He collected her tissues, stuffed them in his pocket. With Susan a constant presence, the maid couldn’t get in to clean, and their room was going to seed. Used towels lay in heaps; empty Coke cans stood on the bureau, on the windowsill. The wastebasket spilled over. Their beds—which, at the beginning of the week, had felt like cotton fortresses—had gone thin and slack in the sheets and begun to feel like old newspaper. Hotel beds, Scott was discovering, had no stamina.

He had begun to see their hotel room almost as a living thing—as a body that was trying to reject Susan like a virus or a transplanted organ. Failing this, the room was dying before his eyes. He glanced out the window at the costly view. It was still morning, but he sensed another day collapsing on him. The water continued behind the closed bathroom door. Waiting, he picked up one of her magazines. On the cover: Ten Secrets of Beauty: The Things You Never Knew.

She would not have sexual intercourse with him until a minister pronounced them married under the eyes of God and the State of Arizona. On this she was firm. Their discussions on the matter were brief and focused, as if bound by mathematical law. She called it that, “sexual intercourse.” The term always deflated him…suggesting something dry and complex. Something requiring the presence of an attorney, or an anesthesiologist. But Scott, who had his own word for it, didn’t want to continue much longer without it. So, knowing he was beaten, he married her.

She was, naturally, a beautiful bride. His own eyes registered this as a simple act. Then others began to tell him, “Susan is such a beautiful bride,” in whispered tones, as though they were trying to warn him of something. Even people he didn’t know, men and women, came up to him and said, “Lovely girl you’ve got there. You’re very lucky.”

Like many great beauties, she narrowly missed homeliness. Her eyes were almost too large, her nose almost too long. Almost. He could see the same features going unchecked in the rest of her family, in whom these traits raced to their natural conclusions. Susan’s father had eyes so large, you could imagine goldfish swimming in them.

She flirted with fatness but just managed to avoid it, and was instead ripe and full. She moved across the wedding hall, a great white float—a fistful of wedding dress in each hand. She threw her bouquet over her shoulder, and when she pulled up her skirt so he could remove her garter, the sight of her bare leg seemed to still the air. As he worked the garter down her leg, he could see the concentrated faces of the bachelors in the crowd. Then he flung the garter into the air. It lay on the floor for a full second before they collected themselves and made a rush for it. He couldn’t wait to get her out of there.

At home that evening she kept him waiting. She was a long time in the bathroom, then on the phone with her parents. Then with her sister. Another session in the bathroom. He listened to the tap running. It was very late when she finally got into bed. Her nightgown was thick and long-sleeved. She was cold, she said.

At first he touched her, softly and tentatively. Then very gradually, like a tide moving in, he began to envelope her. He could hear their wedding dinner trickle down through her insides, and wondered if she was as perfect inside as she was outside. Then he noticed that she began to lay very still, and there was a change of rhythm in her breathing. It became very slow and regular. He spoke her name in the dark, but there was no answer. She had fallen asleep.

Filled with disappointment, he finally got up and went into the living room. He tried to read, but the words didn’t register. Finally he picked up a book of baby names, fifteen thousand of them, many with origins and variations. He looked up her name and found that it was Anglican and meant “beaver field.” Quite ironic, he thought. Eventually he fell asleep in his chair. He woke up at dawn, with the lights still on, and the sound of his bride snoring in the bedroom.

A few hours later they were on the airplane. Her parents saw them off. He took the window seat because she got up a lot and wanted the aisle. He had to glance sideways to see her. On the cheek facing him was the red imprint of her mother’s kiss, the lips slightly parted, as if they were about to speak. The airplane cabin produced its loud non-sound, and Scott wondered if, on the return flight, he would be able to tell the plane was pointed in the opposite direction.

Hours passed. Susan fell asleep over Greenland. A pen fell from her hand; a notebook lay open on her lap. There was no writing, only an elaborate doodle at the top of the page: a circle of stars enclosed a smaller circle of alternating black and white balls, which in turn enclosed a slender rectangle whose sides waved like water and inside of which lay the scribbled-over writing out of which the whole drawing radiated and which, before being crossed out, had read: “Things To Do In Amsterdam.”

They flew with the spin of the earth and missed an entire night. It was morning when they arrived. Their room wasn’t yet ready, so they left their bags with the desk clerk and walked through the city. Though summer, it was cool; the sun was white in a gray sky, and objects cast pale, bloodless shadows. The streets were narrow, the blocks like broom closets, but through a slice of sky Susan spotted a church steeple, and they made for it.

They rounded a corner. “Christmas lights,” Susan said, delighted. Scott looked away from her and saw that a line of red lights was indeed strung up in a row of trees running along the canal. “Oh, there it is, Scott.” The church was built of the same gray stone that, carved up in blocks, was fitted into its walkways, so that the whole structure seemed to have grown straight out of the ground. Susan found a plaque near the entrance; she bent her head down and began reading out loud: “The cornerstone of the Oude Kerk was laid in…”

Scott’s gaze drifted upward and came to rest on a woman standing at a window. She noticed him watching, smiled, and stepped out of her robe. The first thought that entered his head, once he realized that the woman was naked, was if she were warm enough. All around him the air was cold. Then he realized that it was warm where she was, and at the thought of that warmth something tightened in his throat and he understood what he was looking at.

Susan read: “The Oude Kerk, literally Old Church, did what no other house of worship in Amsterdam would do: Welcome the ladies of the night into its congregation.” The letters were raised bronze; Susan’s fingers brushed across them as she read, but lifted at the second clause and drifted to her scarf. It had arrived like that moment in a Western, when the settlers realize they’ve been surrounded by Indians all along. They were being watched from dozens of windows, all framed by red neon tubing, deadened in the daylight. The glass was exceedingly clean. From behind it, women beckoned to Scott, some fervently, as if a long-distance phone call awaited him inside. And, though it brought him no pleasure, he could not take his eyes away.

Susan took his arm and moved on, drawing her coat closer. Her pace quickened, as if she felt a downpour coming. On every corner they began noticing sex shops, the windows displaying pictures so anatomically explicit they suggested something more surgical than sexual.

She said she wasn’t feeling well, so he guided her back to the hotel. Inside the lobby she needed aspirin and went off to the hotel’s gift shop. Scott took a seat in a leather chair facing two businessmen. One of the men glanced at Susan heading into the shop and nudged his partner, who also looked. His bottom lip swallowed the upper as he nodded. “Die vrouw heeft Ôn lekkere volle kont,” he commented.

The first man grinned. He turned to Scott: “Do you know what he just said about your girlfriend?” The other man frowned, turned to his newspaper. “He said she has a sweet fat ass.”

That afternoon, as they slept off their flight in parallel beds, he dreamt of his wedding, this time the guests taking him aside one by one and repeating the Dutchman’s words.

Scott dug the used tissues, damp, and stiff with snot, from his pocket and dropped them in the wastebasket just outside the dining room. For the third morning in a row, he ate alone.

He tried to work on his postcards, but it wasn’t easy. He wrote without pronouns, to cover Susan’s absence. “Went to the Rijksmuseum. Ate raw herring. Good!” He would mention how nice the room was. After awhile he started to think about how his postcards would be received back home; like the wrong color smoke coming out of the Vatican?

He couldn’t tell them that Susan stayed in all day, and at night retreated to her own bed. That she hid in her illness. That he lay in bed, monitoring her sleep, studying the rise and fall of her hips. He thought of pulling her blanket away, an inch at a time, but knew her eyes would snap open on him. Instead, he lay awake, and imagined her saying and doing things…

When he was done with his breakfast, he made a second tray of food to take upstairs. The first morning he’d done this, he had actually asked permission. “Can I take food out of the dining room? It’s for my wife,” he asked the first hotel employee he saw, who looked up from his coffee and told Scott in perfect English that he really didn’t care where he took it. The desk clerk noticed him on his way up. He looked soberly at the tray of provisions and told Scott he didn’t have to take it up himself, that the hotel paid people to do that sort of thing. Scott smiled, shook his head, and held up one hand; the international symbol for “Everything’s under control.”

When he reached his room, he could hear the television through the door: “By unhinging his jaw,” a voice said, “the snake can open his mouth wide enough to swallow the egg whole. A special bone in the back of the throat fractures the shell, which is then expelled in one swift motion.” When he opened the door he sensed a sudden humidity, which he took for shower steam, and observed two things he had never seen before: A snake swallowing an egg and, near the full-length mirror, Susan without any clothes.

Her finger grazed her throat; her eyes were fixed and calm. She was studying her reflection. When she saw him looking at her, she took a sweatshirt from the bed and held it up to her chest. Her bare hips were visible at the shirt’s edges; in the mirror he could see the reflection of her tensed shoulders and buttocks. The sweatshirt was from an old ski trip, and read GO FOR IT!

“I’ll be done in a minute,” she said, not taking her eyes off him. When she didn’t move, he knew what she meant. She wanted him to leave. He did, but not before letting her know that their marriage seemed to be disolving into some kind of bizarre piece of fiction.

He didn’t know how to return to her. He walked aimlessly around the city. By nightfall, he was sitting at an outdoor cafe, drinking beer brewed by Trappist monks. A candle burned at each table. He shared the space with other bodies, people who cleaned their plates, pushed them away, and, shifting their weight, rolled their own cigarettes, twirling them over the open mouths of the candle holders’ glass chimneys till they caught fire. They exhaled, and clouds of smoke passed through them. How could their lungs hold so much? He was getting used to such thoughts: his mind was filled with the properties of the body.

The sight of Susan without clothes, watching herself in the mirror, was still settling in him. He realized that, before that moment, he hadn’t fully comprehended that Susan could even be naked…in the same way that he couldn’t believe that we would all die one day. The crowds thinned. The waiters blew out candles, began moving tables inside. They stacked chairs and chained them together. Scott finally left when he noticed them standing at the bar with their arms crossed, staring at him.

The city had grown stark with moonlight and shadow. He saw two teenagers of undetermined gender necking in a phone booth. A car with German plates sped by, in reverse. Back home, his electric lawn sprinkler would be starting up right about now.

When he opened the door of his room, the moon was so bright he thought a light must be on. His eyes found no color, but outlines and surfaces stood out, and he saw quite clearly that the room had been cleaned. More than clean, it looked vacated. He wondered for a moment if the wedding had really happened. Then he heard her speak.

“Where were you all this time?” A shadow lay across her bed. He could just make out her form, sitting up.

He shrugged. “Just walking,” he said. Then he went into the bathroom and drew a glass of water. His path back was clear; nothing on the floor but the carpet that covered it. He set the glass of water down on the table next to his bed. No more used tissues on the floor, and the Coke cans were all gone. Susan was still sitting up, watching him.

His clothes still smelled of cigarette smoke; even his shoes smelled of smoke. His blood felt like sour milk in his veins, and when he shut his eyes the bed commenced a slow, dull spin. He could have passed out in his clothes, but he felt the bed tip with her weight. He opened his eyes and saw her sitting on the edge of the bed. She watched her own hands lying limp in her lap, and he watched them with her.

“You cleaned the room,” he said.

“The maid,” she said. “I asked her.”

“What’d you do all day?” I asked.

“I was on the phone. My mother.”

“What were you talking about?”

She stared at her hands for a moment, then looked up and said, “She just wanted to give me some advice.” Then she slowly raised her nightgown over her head.

Later, and for the rest of their trip, she would stay close to him and hold his hand whenever possible. And she also continued to share his twin bed, and hold him warmly at night.

He never learned what her mother had said on the phone that day. But whatever it was, it was by far the best wedding gift they’d got.