The Fault in Our Stars(37)

“I guess?” I said.

“Your table,” she said, gesturing across the street to a narrow table inches from the canal. “The champagne is our gift.”

Gus and I glanced at each other, smiling. Once we’d crossed the street, he pulled out a seat for me and helped me scoot it back in. There were indeed two flutes of champagne at our white-tableclothed table. The slight chill in the air was balanced magnificently by the sunshine; on one side of us, cyclists pedaled past—well-dressed men and women on their way home from work, improbably attractive blond girls riding sidesaddle on the back of a friend’s bike, tiny helmetless kids bouncing around in plastic seats behind their parents. And on our other side, the canal water was choked with millions of the confetti seeds. Little boats were moored at the brick banks, half full of rainwater, some of them near sinking. A bit farther down the canal, I could see houseboats floating on pontoons, and in the middle of the canal, an open-air, flat-bottomed boat decked out with lawn chairs and a portable stereo idled toward us. Augustus took his flute of champagne and raised it. I took mine, even though I’d never had a drink aside from sips of my dad’s beer.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, and we clinked glasses. I took a sip. The tiny bubbles melted in my mouth and journeyed northward into my brain. Sweet. Crisp. Delicious. “That is really good,” I said. “I’ve never drunk champagne.”

A sturdy young waiter with wavy blond hair appeared. He was maybe even taller than Augustus. “Do you know,” he asked in a delicious accent, “what Dom Pérignon said after inventing champagne?”

“No?” I said.

“He called out to his fellow monks, ‘Come quickly: I am tasting the stars.’ Welcome to Amsterdam. Would you like to see a menu, or will you have the chef’s choice?”

I looked at Augustus and he at me. “The chef’s choice sounds lovely, but Hazel is a vegetarian.” I’d mentioned this to Augustus precisely once, on the first day we met.

“This is not a problem,” the waiter said.

“Awesome. And can we get more of this?” Gus asked, of the champagne.

“Of course,” said our waiter. “We have bottled all the stars this evening, my young friends. Gah, the confetti!” he said, and lightly brushed a seed from my bare shoulder. “It hasn’t been so bad in many years. It’s everywhere. Very annoying.”

The waiter disappeared. We watched the confetti fall from the sky, skip across the ground in the breeze, and tumble into the canal. “Kind of hard to believe anyone could ever find that annoying,” Augustus said after a while.

“People always get used to beauty, though.”

“I haven’t gotten used to you just yet,” he answered, smiling. I felt myself blushing. “Thank you for coming to Amsterdam,” he said.

“Thank you for letting me hijack your wish,” I said.

“Thank you for wearing that dress which is like whoa,” he said. I shook my head, trying not to smile at him. I didn’t want to be a grenade. But then again, he knew what he was doing, didn’t he? It was his choice, too. “Hey, how’s that poem end?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“The one you recited to me on the plane.”

“Oh, ‘Prufrock’? It ends, ‘We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’”

Augustus pulled out a cigarette and tapped the filter against the table. “Stupid human voices always ruining everything.”

The waiter arrived with two more glasses of champagne and what he called “Belgian white asparagus with a lavender infusion.”

“I’ve never had champagne either,” Gus said after he left. “In case you were wondering or whatever. Also, I’ve never had white asparagus.”

I was chewing my first bite. “It’s amazing,” I promised.

He took a bite, swallowed. “God. If asparagus tasted like that all the time, I’d be a vegetarian, too.” Some people in a lacquered wooden boat approached us on the canal below. One of them, a woman with curly blond hair, maybe thirty, drank from a beer then raised her glass toward us and shouted something.

“We don’t speak Dutch,” Gus shouted back.

One of the others shouted a translation: “The beautiful couple is beautiful.”



The food was so good that with each passing course, our conversation devolved further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness: “I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it.” “Sweet-pea sorbet, you are so unexpectedly magnificent.” I wish I’d been hungrier.

After green garlic gnocchi with red mustard leaves, the waiter said, “Dessert next. More stars first?” I shook my head. Two glasses was enough for me. Champagne was no exception to my high tolerance for depressants and pain relievers; I felt warm but not intoxicated. But I didn’t want to get drunk. Nights like this one didn’t come along often, and I wanted to remember it.

“Mmmm,” I said after the waiter left, and Augustus smiled crookedly as he stared down the canal while I stared up it. We had plenty to look at, so the silence didn’t feel awkward really, but I wanted everything to be perfect. It was perfect, I guess, but it felt like someone had tried to stage the Amsterdam of my imagination, which made it hard to forget that this dinner, like the trip itself, was a cancer perk. I just wanted us to be talking and joking comfortably, like we were on the couch together back home, but some tension underlay everything.