Two visitors come and go
On Tuesday morning, an hour before sunrise, the boat moored up silently along the Promenade. By mid morning the visitors had been seen drinking coffee on the hotel patio. Rumours traveled quickly, as they do when famous people appear in unexpected places.
It was a 20 meter canal boat painted matte black, with windows covered in burgundy curtains running the length of it. On deck were a variety of unusual potted plants, a 2 meter tall potted fig, and two matching orange omafiets. From the mast, a long emerald pennant trailed in the breeze. In its playful austerity, the boat made for an eccentric presence — even in reliably eccentric Fern River. On the transom, in emerald Art Nouveau lettering, Ecstasy, and below it Utrecht.
By Wednesday, word had spread that the boat belonged to Maaike & Peter, the former movie stars turned performance art duo known simply (and not a little iconically) by their first names. They had earned a reputation for popping up unexpectedly in cities around the world to orchestrate seemingly spontaneous — and distinctly provocative — works of performance art. In the years since the crash, their work had grown increasingly bold. In the evening, the couple was spotted walking down the public steps on the north side of Citron Hill.
The Fria café was abuzz with speculation among the students, who were gathered at the bar and around tables, talking energetically across the room.
“Can someone tell me what they even do?”
“My art history professor says their first piece after Hollywood was a series of photographs of them having actual sex in the middle of the day at famous spots all over the world. There’s that one of them in Piazza San Marco.”
“That’s the one with the old ladies walking past while Maaike looks like she’s having an orgasm.”
“That’s it. And their recent work has gotten wild, with like thousands of people participating.”
“No… what.”
“Seriously. They call them Come-Ins. In Cape Town a few years ago they had like a thousand people get off at the same exact time in a public park.”
“Do you think they’re planning one here?”
A girl in her early 20s came in and set her shoulder bag down on an empty section of the long table in the middle of the café. “Check it out, I found their book at the library.”
The other students gathered around, looking down at a hefty emerald tome titled Ecstasy. She opened and leafed past a few pages of text to a glossy double spread showing the couple, fully naked, having sex in the middle of a crowded bridge in Amsterdam. Peter stood behind Maaike with his hands grasping her hips. She leaned forward with one hand on the metal railing and the other on the saddle of an orange omafiets. Her eyes were closed and her mouth open. Both their faces expressed precisely the book’s title. The next page showed the Piazza San Marco photograph, with a group of ladies craning to look back at Maaike as she rode Peter cowgirl. Her breasts were captured spectacularly mid bounce as she leaned back on his knees. The students leaning on the table craned with equal curiosity.
The girl who had retrieved the book read the caption. “It seeks to overwhelm, in a gushing flood, the boundary between private and public.” She raised her eyebrows and turned the page.
“Yeah, so this was their first really big one, I think, in Brazil.” It showed a few hundred people, all nude, spread out on Ipanema Beach in various states of lovemaking and masturbation. There were couplings of two and three, hands reaching over to a neighbor, a kiss across the sand, someone going solo while watching. A circle of five women each going down on the next was surrounded by a concentric circle of seven men doing the same. There were lovers in every conceivable position — a tangled but orderly orgy on a public beach, hundreds of naked bodies joined in pleasure. On the wet sand at the water’s edge, Peter could be seen on top of Maaike, who had her legs wrapped around him.
The group studied the scene intently. “It’s like Where’s Waldo but everybody is fucking.”
“A gushing flood indeed.”
“Honestly what they’re doing is amazing. If they do one here, I’m going.”
“I’ll go with you.”
On Thursday morning, Maaike & Peter were seen walking up the museum steps to greet the curator. Maaike wore tight black jeans and a loose sweater cropped above her navel, Peter in a trim, rumpled lavender linen suit. The curator led them in between the glittering dolomite columns. Rumours spread among the town’s denizens.
“What are they, late 30s now?”
“They look good.”
That evening, just after sunset, a group of women walking along the Promenade back to the Celandine saw two naked figures dive off the bow of the canal boat Ecstasy and swim out into the current. The women stopped at the railing, pretending to marvel at the bands of delicate color streaking the western sky, and watched the figures climb a ladder at the stern back onto deck. Maaike giggled and shook the water from her limbs as she watched Peter climb aboard, his strong back and tight bottom glistening in the low light. She took his hand and led him down into the open cabin glowing with warm lamplight.
“My, what a beautiful couple. What do you suppose they’re planning?”
The next morning, the boat was gone.