Bonita Avenue

by Peter Buwalda

  But after that Thursday afternoon in Compton, Sotomayor suddenly started playing hard to get. Phone calls and e-mails went unanswered. Only after sending three faxes to his head office in Dallas did I get a roundabout reply from some secretary or other, what it boiled down to was that the Barracks was suddenly no longer for sale. Fuck you, Víctor. I assume he had got wind of our plans, he’ll have envisioned flack from the neighborhood, negative press, God knows what. So in my next fax I suggested executing the sale quietly. After that, the Compton shopkeepers and hoi polloi were our problem. “Everything’s for sale,” read the fax, “I don’t think I need to explain that to Víctor Sotomayor—and not everything has to get into the papers.” And even if it did get into the papers, there were advantages to that too. I reminded him that since Villaraigosa became mayor of L.A., it had escaped no one’s attention that he and Sotomayor were buddies. A few years earlier, the real estate baron grudgingly admitted to the Los Angeles Times that he—a fellow Latino—had contributed generously to Villaraigosa’s election campaign. Since then the allocation of public works contracts seemed to tip quite blatantly his way. “Víctor, my friend,” I wrote, “maybe this is your chance to do something the mayor is not keen on. Think about it. We’re offering you fifteen. I can be in Dallas next Monday at four o’clock.”

  No reply. Of course not. Sotomayor didn’t care for my upfront tone. He was a more-luck-than-talent Cuban with a sweaty boxer’s nose, not accustomed to negotiating with women. His corpulent, pear-shaped body was clad in shoddy pastel-colored suits on which he wiped his beringed fingers before giving me a tepid, flabby handshake.

  “So I take it that’s a yes,” I said to Rusty. Last Monday I boarded a flight to Texas, and at five to four in the afternoon I stepped out of the fingerprint-smudged mirrored elevator on the eleventh floor of Stone Tower in downtown Dallas and knocked, without an appointment, on the matt-glass door to Sotomayor’s office.

  I disappeared back up the stairs earlier than my celebrating colleagues, under the pretext of getting back to work, setting an example—but in actual fact, with an unexpected knot in my gut. That e-mail. With every step, the bustle downstairs ebbed and the mystery swelled. Was it wise to have deleted his e-mail unread? What was Aaron after? Back in my office—formerly a bridal suite—with the door closed, the only sound was the soft hum of the PC. What did he want? Reading it couldn’t hurt, I thought, whether or not to respond was the next choice, and that was more the point. I retrieved the message from the trash folder. The rush of success and the relaxing effect of three glasses of Armand de Brignac Ace of Spades apparently allowed me to overcome my reluctance. Without giving it any more thought, I opened Aaron’s e-mail.

  (No subject)

  From: Aaron Bever (a.bever@hetnet.be)

  Sent: Thursday, April 17th, 2008, 04:49

  To: Joni Sigerius (jonisigerius74@hotmail.com)

  i’ll bet you were surprised when your mother told you we spoke at brussels central what an amazing coincidence without realizing it we sat across from each other all the way from maastricht, we only recognized each other at the last minute, i hadn’t seen her in so long either. i’m doing fine, i hope she told you that too, boy did she look good, so thin, so cheerful, so feminine, i was pretty surprised to see her in brussels, but that was mutual, because how could she have known i live in linkebeek now, i’m not going to say exactly where, because i value my privacy. actually that’s why i’m writing to you, because you know better than anyone how badly that mess back in 2000 shook me up, you helped me an awful lot then, I heard that from dr. haitink, was i a little bit nice to you? when i saw your mother with your husband i could hardly believe you’d settled in brussels too, now there’s a coincidence for you, funny how these things go, i spotted you just a couple of days later at the playground of the klimOP, I HAPPENED TO BE TAKING CLASS PICTURES THAT DAY, ALTHOUGH WHAT’S COINCIDENCE, WHAT IS COINCIDENCE, JONI? AND I SAW YOU WALK ACROSS THE PLAYGROUND PUSHING A STROLLER, YOU WERE WITH YOUR HUSBAND, THE SAME GUY WHO CAME TO PICK YOur mother up at the station in his bmw, it was kind of comical, we looked at each other right away and knew we were rivals, i wish you two all the happiness in the world. it was easy to pick out your daughter on the photos, i spotted juliette in a jiffy, third grade, miss jeanne, front row second from the left, the spitting image of you as a kid, two little blond braids, and what an enviable last name, jalabert, juliette jalabert, it sure sounds a lot better than bever, maybe even better than sigerius, but what’s in a name? i’m sure that rich boyfriend of yours is awfully kind to juliette, but that’s not why i’m writing, the reason i’m writing is that i’ve had a bit of a setback the last few days, i just wanted to warn you, in fact it’s not going well at all, i’m sleeping so badly again, darling. tineke told me that terrible news about your father, siem has been dead for years, she said, i only half believed her, i believe it, i have to believe it. i had no idea, i didn’t know, really i didn’t, i swear, i’m so sorry, i could cry about it all over again. everything came flooding back, it’s washing over me from all sides, the past few nights it’s been gnawing at me constantly, i had to go through it again in my mind, everything that happened, whose fault it is, the fights we had, etc. etc., and it’s LOGICAL. DON’T YOU ALSO THink it all started with the fireworks disaster? that ruined everything. after that it all went so goddamn FAst, everything fucked up, fuck, fuck, fuck. what i want to ask you is if you’ll tell me whereabout you live and work, then i know where there’s a chance i might bump into you, because that one time at the klimop i nearly freaked, i followed you all the way through sint-jansmolenbeek, through scheutbospark, all the way to anderlecht, but then i lost you, until i saw you in a green bus heading for koekelberg. well it took me hours to get home, i was up to my waist in mud. that’s it. i hope everything is ok with you, you’ve got a nice husband and a pretty daughter, what a goddamn shame that her wonderful grandpa

  Her wonderful grandpa? A haze hung over the Valley, a blend of mist and smog. Below, on the broad sidewalk along Coldwater Canyon Avenue, an Asian kid in a Dodgers jersey gingerly opened the wrought-iron gate that separated our front yard from the street and climbed up the sandstone steps with a newspaper he’d taken out of a shoulder bag.

  Her wonderful grandpa. I went out into the corridor. Danny and Deke were hanging in the Recruiting doorway, glass in hand. I greeted them, silently went down two flights of carpeted stairs and in the kitchenette I found a tray of used champagne glasses. I took the cleanest of them and filled it to the brim from one of the open bottles on top of the fridge. Sipping, I walked back upstairs and sat down at the computer. I opened Microsoft Office and sent an official reply to Sotomayor in which I indicated I wasn’t prepared to fly to Dallas a second time. He could just organize a lawyer in L.A.

  I pulled the elastic band from my hair, shook it loose, and stared out over Coldwater. The paperboy opened a gate across the street. The cuffs of his formless jeans were squashed under the soles of his sneakers.

  So Aaron was still off his rocker. I opened the letter again and as I reread his garbled missive an unpleasant mix of pity, relief, and disgust settled over me. For the time being I was relieved; it seemed to me to be a completely harmless e-mail from someone with no plan or ulterior motive. The guy had just sat down and let himself go, apparently in one confused spurt. I’d forgotten he had this e-mail address, I had opened the account during my McKinsey internship. The last time I saw Aaron was at the end of December 2000, when he went off the deep end. It seemed like half a lifetime ago, an oldtime newsreel, it genuinely hurt me to think that he still …

  Or again, of course. As I read his little epistle for the third time I realized that the line between fact and fiction wasn’t so easy to trace, if there was even anything factual about it at all. Much of it was grotesquely nonsensical: to start with, I was single, mother of a little boy, and hadn’t been in Brussels in thirty years. My heart skipped a beat when he started in on that child. Juliette—where the hell did he get that from?
What did it say about the rest? Had he really spoken to my mother? Of course not. Tineke thin? That seemed to me confirmation that he was imagining things, for some reason confusing a perfect stranger with my mother, just like he thought he saw me at a school playground. I did not know much about psychiatry, but this seemed to me completely delusional.

  On the other hand, he was using a Belgian provider, but what did that prove except that maybe he did live in Brussels, he was quite detailed about that, although it was beyond me what he’d be doing there. A malicious image welled up in me, I envisaged a busload of crazies from Enschede on a day trip to Brussels, and Aaron wandering the streets for a few hours while the orderlies searched for him.

  I brought the empty champagne glass to my lips and looked past its slender outline at the moisture stains on the ceiling. What I didn’t get is why he would make contact now, after eight years of silence. There must be a reason. Could he really not have known about Siem? Was that possible? Could he have missed it? Maybe he just read it now somewhere, or saw it on television, and the news had set him off. It was bizarre, utterly ironic, that Aaron of all people—chairman of the Siem fan club himself—wouldn’t know. I reread the part where he mentioned my father. I let his question about whether it all started with the fireworks disaster sink in. Not so crazy after all. If you thought about what had happened to the three of us after May 13, 2000, then the answer could well be: yes.

  All three of us were out of town the day SE Fireworks exploded. Siem, if I’m not mistaken, was in Shanghai on university business, Aaron and I were at a wedding in Zaltbommel. We were safe. None of us was left homeless (although in Aaron’s case it was a close call, a matter of just fifteen meters), nobody lost an arm or a leg. Still, I too was inclined to believe that the merciless blast had a disruptive effect on us all. Maybe it’s a law of nature that a blowup of those proportions sets unforeseen mechanisms in action, produces shock waves that in turn bring about bizarre developments, create misunderstandings, compel decisions. It seems like disasters of this scale act as miniature Big Bangs that expand into spaces buzzing with consequences, intrigues, possibilities, and impossibilities. A physical disaster like a fireworks accident is a maternity ward where new disasters are born.

  Not that we had any inkling that day—on the contrary. On the day itself, no clue. That Saturday, May 13, 2000, Aaron and I were safe and sound, digging into the marzipan wedding cake of a certain Etienne, the only high school friend Aaron still saw, and down there in Zaltbommel we found it difficult to really take in what had happened in our city, 150 kilometers away. Being among the all-day guests, we decided to spend an hour back in our hotel room while the bridal couple prepared for the photo session. On the steps of the town hall, Aaron gave Etienne Vaessen a squeeze round his creamy waist and said we were nipping out for a quick break.

  Not long before good manners pressed us to drive out to the estate where the dinner was held, I switched on the television. It was about five o’clock, I had just showered, Aaron was still in the bathroom fussing with his cuff links. Channel-surfing from the bed, I noticed that three stations were broadcasting the same images of a city, the view of a city you see when you approach it in a Boeing, and from that city rose an immense black column of smoke, that I saw, and the city was called Enschede, I registered that too. When Aaron came and sat down next to me, we watched footage from the ground, burning cars under a pitch-black sky, policemen shoving bewildered people in short pants out of a rubble-strewn street. If he’d looked a bit closer he would have seen that the street was the Lasondersingel, 150 meters from his house. “We’ve got to get back,” he said, “and ransack the Grolsch brewery,” a little joke I had to laugh at, simply because I just could not for the life of me imagine that the well-worn stoops that led to that little joke, the cobbled streets along which on other Saturdays we would stroll up to the Roomweg to buy fried rice at the tiny Chinese take-out, or a little farther on, order RAS French fries with herb salt at De Roombeker cafeteria, let’s just call it the road map of Aaron’s daily life—because it was utterly inconceivable to me that that inert, inviolable, unalterable reality had ceased to exist.

  I hadn’t recharged my cell phone, and Aaron didn’t own one back then. There was a pseudo-classical bakelite telephone in the hotel room, a matt-black stagecoach with a dial and coiled cord. I tried to reach my parents, but soon concluded that the network around Enschede was overloaded. Aaron didn’t think it was necessary to phone Venlo. Afterward we found out how many friends, family, and acquaintances had a very different opinion on the matter. His parents had been phoned by an uncle, a friend of his mother, his grandfather, his brother Sebastian, a classmate, his ex-judo instructor, the mother of an ex-girlfriend, an editor from Tubantia Weekly: understandably and genuinely concerned people who all asked, in a variety of ways, the same question: was Aaron still alive? His mother reached us the next day at my student house in a terrible state—she had spent the entire night in the living room, poring over teletext updates and sitting through reruns of Nova and the evening news, hoping for a sign of life. His dad, Aaron told me almost derisively, had exhibited less patience. “I’m going there,” he said at nine-thirty—and I could just imagine how Aaron’s tawny, bearded father grabbed his car keys and a pack of shag from the dining room table, and without further commentary drove off in the froggy-green Toyota Corolla he used to fetch us with when we took the train down to Venlo. To no avail, of course. His father, a pastry baker whose forearms carried the scars of 100,000 red-hot baking sheets, spent an hour wandering up and down police barriers and caution tape, accosting firemen and emergency personnel until they finally shooed him away.

  “Your father is livid,” his mother said.

  “Who takes off to Enschede on a gamble in the middle of the night?”

  “You watch your mouth. That you didn’t think to phone us is bad enough. You could’ve been dead.”

  From the booze, anyway. While the father was scouring the burning streets of Enschede, the missing son was whooping it up in Zaltbommel, partying like there’s no tomorrow, swigging glasses of pink champagne that don’t make you pee but do make you dance. While ambulances rode in and out of his neighborhood, Aaron joked to anyone who would listen that Roombeek was just like meat fried in Croma margarine—“it doesn’t spatter on its way to the platter.” When he lay down among the balloons and plastic beer glasses to do an imitation of Chinese firecrackers, I dragged him off the dance floor by his collar.

  The next morning in the car, the radio stations were full of the news of the war zone we were heading toward, and once we got to Enschede we felt strangely apprehensive as we approached the edge of Roombeek. Like his father twelve hours earlier, we parked alongside the fence in the median of the Lasondersingel, there was no getting any closer. We smelled the sulfury odor of spent fireworks and gawked at the shingleless roofs and wrecked chimneys on houses that had only just survived the shock wave and blocked our view of the real crater. A twisted metal shipping container had bored into the grassy median; the only way it could have got there was in an arc over the houses. Across from the damaged Rijksmuseum, a man sat staring through the fencing from a folding fisherman’s stool. He told us that the fire had spared the Vluchtestraat. On the ground next to him was a thermos of coffee, but he wasn’t a rubbernecker: his own house, on the H.B. Blijdensteinlaan, was on the verge of collapse, according to the experts. We drove in silence to my student house in the city center. In the kitchen we listened to my housemates’ reports; one of them was driving our shared minivan through the Deurningerstraat at the time of the explosion and watched a block of cement crash through the roof of the car in front of her.

  “Pity we weren’t home,” Aaron said with genuine regret in his voice. “This was not to be missed.”

  They had flown Ennio by trauma helicopter to the Groningen Academic Hospital with severe burns and lacerations. It was my mother who mentioned it to me in passing a week after the fireworks disaster. We were standing in m
y parents’ laundry room, Aaron and I had already been staying there for a few days. She jammed the drum full of bedding, but in fact she was spin-drying me. The news sent me whirling, the blood draining from my veins.

  Ennio Aaltink, a full-blooded Italian from the town of Forlì, ran, curiously enough, a British bodega in the Havenstraat passage, a long, narrow shop where as a first-year student I tended the cash register on Wednesday afternoons. The two of us helped German day trippers and the closest thing to Twents landed gentry negotiate the pots of Colman’s English Mustard and Haywards Pickled Onions, packs of Shredded Wheat, Honey Nut Cheerios, tins of baked beans and sausage, mushy peas, black peas, parched peas, and chutneys in a whole range of baby-poop colors. But most of the time my boss and I were alone.

  From age sixteen to thirty Ennio had sailed around the world, his last stint as a ship’s cook, and he wholesaled in exotic stories. Intentionally or not, the things he told me always posed a dilemma, touched on issues about how a person could live. About what it’s like to be stuck on a tanker off the coast of Sakhalin when you’re depressed. What it’s like to very nearly marry an Angolese. Or if your captain orders you to smuggle thirty Filipino women. “Tell me, Joni, what would you have done?” He was forty-something, dark and handsome, with a nose as long as your finger and shining brown eyes that in fact were fingers too, with which he spent those Wednesdays poking at my unsullied little soul.