“No. I’m dead serious. Sigerius—it’s his leg I was pulling.”
“But that’s … I mean …”
“It was insane and incredible and awesome, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Even keeping it a secret was fantastic … Addictive. Nobody knew, but meanwhile 11,000 guys did know, they knew everything … It was unbelievably exhilarating. A source of continuous conspiratorial … um …”
She looked at him musingly. “Sexual arousal?”
“Horniness, yeah. That’s the word I was looking for.”
He phoned the Thai take-out on the edge of town, ordered a green curry with rice, and showered in the half hour before the delivery scooter drove up the hill to his house.
It made you inhumanly horny. Naturally. Every week they almost floated out of his attic room, or wherever they did the shoot, in five-star hotels, on the Barbara Ann, at bed-and-breakfasts in Zeeland or East Groningen with museum flyers next to the electric kettle. It was always good. For years, their week was a cycle of horniness that started with provocative preparations, scouting out locations, buying new lingerie for Joni in chic or downmarket shops, with the ecstatic event taking place on Tuesday or Wednesday evening. They spent hours making the 100 to 150 photos they owed their clients, and the days that followed were consumed by an exhausted, satisfied after-session that consisted of examining what was being simultaneously examined on 11,000 other computers—by 1998 standards, a mind-blowing concept—and once they’d had enough of themselves they checked their bank balance, withdrew 1,000 guilders and drove to Paris, or to Berlin, or to Ameland for a new session. Their arousal seemed insatiable and its source inexhaustible. Sometimes it was like living in a dream, he imagined himself the rector of his own paradisiacal campus—until the high wore off. When the thrill passed, the real campus reappeared, a grassy campus with a damned real farmhouse, and in that farmhouse lived a real-life rector, Joni’s father, whom he stood next to in the university sport center’s showers twice a week.
He turned off the water. There was, he considered, also a reckless aspect to it, something masochistic. Constantly pushing his luck by gravitating ever closer to Sigerius. As though he were deliberately trying to get caught.
He paid for his food and ate it in his workroom. When the plate was empty he went back to the iMac and reread Joni’s e-mail. He noticed that he kept getting stuck at a remark that had, of course, stung him right from the start, but that he hadn’t yet found the time to get worked up about.
“I did live in San Francisco with Boudewijn Stol for a while,” she wrote, “maybe you still remember him.”
Boudewijn Stol—so she’d been with that goon after all. Behind the shock of Sigerius’s suicide, something else started to itch. Maybe it was just an old reflex, but he could not let go of the idea that Joni was taunting him with that “maybe you still remember him.” Of course he remembered him. So those two had shacked up. The minute he tried to imagine it, Joni under the same roof as that arrogant greaseball, he just about burst a blood vessel. The poison associated with that time! He was surprised how easily he fell back into his old love spasm, an echo, certainly, but still: neuralgia he hadn’t felt in years. His and Joni’s story was also a story of four years of pathological jealousy. One-sided jealousy, mind you: his. The constant fear she would leave him. The fear of being dumped. Of being supplanted. At her parents’ house. Behind his camera. (He: “You know, I also kept it up because I knew I was expendable.” Haitink: “You mean you were afraid she’d carry on with someone else if you called it quits?” He: “Yes.” Haitink: “Was that realistic, do you think?” He: “It seemed to me a foregone conclusion.”)
The memories of Etienne Vaessen’s wedding came crashing over him, that intense exhaustion once again poured into his legs, his obnoxious recklessness, the humiliation—it all came rushing back. How he was wrung through the mangle of jealousy during the dinner that had kept them away from Roombeek on May 13, 2000.
They had been sitting glued to the hotel-room television for too long, and suddenly they had to rush. So while the horsemen of the apocalypse were galloping through their neighborhood in Enschede, they careered at 140 kph toward the Groeneweide estate. Joni fussed with his crookedly knotted bow tie; he mused sourly on the garish bash that awaited them. Arriving late, they parked the Alfa next to an enormous pond stocked with swans. “Don’t panic,” he exhorted her as they trotted up the broad marble stairs. They were courteously greeted by young men in livery, one of whom hurried ahead through the cool foyer decorated with gilded friezes and life-size oil paintings. Rooms off to each side were being prepared for the festivities later on in the evening, and somewhere in the depths of the estate a klezmerish ensemble could be heard rehearsing. They stopped before a pair of velvet-clad doors, which the lackey carefully opened, revealing a banquet hall so vast that from a distance the company resembled a kindergarten class at their cookie break. The decor was even more over-the-top than he had expected. Amphoras with long-stemmed sunflowers; here, too, oil portraits and hunting tableaux; an ornamental plaster ceiling, blue and gold regimental-striped wallpaper, the parquet floor a geometric mosaic of various kinds of wood over which waiters skated back and forth.
Their Louis Seize chairs must have been empty, disturbingly empty, for a good twenty minutes, and as though she wanted to make up for lost time, Joni strode ahead of him, ticking across the slick floor, and sat down, smiling, at one of the empty places. His soles slipping out from under him, he creaked around the grid of lavishly set tables, his gaze focused above the alternately black and bare backs of the guests, his destination being the bridegroom’s reddened ear, into which he whispered their alibi, concise, euphemistic: there was some problem in Enschede, nothing to be alarmed about, carry on eating. When he walked via the other side of the dining room to his seat, he saw to his satisfaction that the news of the fireworks factory caused no more of a ripple than a pebble tossed into the surf. Vaessen was already laughing again.
Meanwhile Joni had struck up a conversation with an older man in a white dinner jacket. Something he was saying made her laugh, “… and when I got home that evening,” he caught, “she’d bought another thing with an electrical cord.” Next to the man sat a much younger woman with gathered-up brown hair who said something back that he didn’t catch. “Long story short, something had to be done,” the man said, exclusively to Joni. “Eventually she was bathing the garden gnome twice a day.” Aaron cleared his throat and pulled in his chair. It took the man a fraction too long to notice him; he cut himself short as though Aaron was meddling in some way.
“Boudewijn Stol,” he said, and a tanned hand shot across the table. Aaron shook it, a sturdy, dry grip. He noticed Stol’s improbably tight curls, which were combed back with something greasy, Brylcreem maybe; after a few inches the graying coif turned wavy, distinguished, classic, exposing his high forehead. The man sat straight up in his white dinner jacket with his stumpy Carthaginian chin thrust forward: at once, all the black tuxedos in the banquet hall fell flat. Even before Aaron realized who this Boudewijn Stol was, he already hated him.
“I’m a colleague of Etienne’s,” Stol said to Joni, apparently in response to a just-asked question. “His boss, actually. At McKinsey Netherlands.”
Aaron nearly choked when he heard those words, Joni shifted in her chair, her heels scraped across the parquet floor. He glanced around and noticed that everything in this fairy-tale gala hall zoomed into sharper focus: the fifty-plus place settings, the clatter of countless knives and forks, the glistening platters, the shimmering dresses and glittering jewelry, the chatter emitting from dozens of mouths, the swirl of moving eyebrows, cheekbones, corsages—all at once. “His team leader?” he heard Joni ask. Quit showing off, he thought, and stared at his plate. Next to him sat a man with a mustacheless beard, whose sultry B.O. prickled his nose and whose whiskers scraped over the collar of his shirt like a dish-scrubber.
“Aha,” said Stol, “so the young lady is in the know. No,
I’m not his team leader. I’m the managing partner in Amsterdam. Or franchise holder, whatever you want to call it.”
“How about ‘head honcho,’ ” Joni suggested. “Head Honcho of McKinsey Netherlands.”
“Don’t spread it around,” said Stol.
An hour ago when they sat watching Enschede burn, nothing had happened to him. Now suddenly everything was happening to him: bad things. Liters of blood were pumped with elephantine force into his head; his back, his hands, buttocks, face, and feet spontaneously ignited like matches. Heat radiated off him, even the lace-collared pursed and powdered mugs of the oil portraits in their gilded frames began to perspire. Head Honcho McKinsey, he thought, Jesus H. Christ, and as though someone were now unfocusing the lens, the whole damn Sissi palace faded into a blotchy blur. He focused on Stol’s powerful neck, where a muscle twitched; the guy had a neck like an oak, a centuries-old trunk whose roots burrowed into virile, rounded shoulders under the white fabric of his dinner jacket. There was undoubtedly a fitness room in the head-office basement where he pumped his daily iron; this was the kind of guy who lifted sixty kilos but left the bench press at 120, just to knock the next monkey’s morale down a notch. Aaron rubbed his eyes with both hands. “My contacts,” he mumbled. A ropy bite of veal that had absorbed all his saliva had lodged itself under his tongue. He removed a contact lens from his eye and studied the plastic disc as though seeing it for the first time.
“So how many consultants do you manage, Mr. Stol?” he heard Joni ask.
“Mr. Stol doesn’t manage anything,” he said. “Boudewijn manages an office of about 150.”
Her laugh was full of excited admiration.
“But,” continued the smug voice, “as I’m sure you know, consultants are independent-minded. We feel quite confident, for instance, sending our little friend Vaessen here out to play. Once a week I read him the riot act, that’s more than enough.”
And again that crystalline laugh Joni reserved for special occasions, a laugh that began deep in her chest and lacked gracefulness. What he heard was unconditional surrender. Not that this guy was in any way a comic genius, his jokes were lazy, simplistic—it was power that exerted, via an unmarked detour, an influence on Joni’s humor. The full-fat power on which he gorged himself stretched the button of the white dinner jacket Stol had pulled out of his walk-in closet this morning. He had chosen this white jacket to quash any misunderstandings, just like a dominant chimpanzee wastes no time in pushing his ass into your face. An alpha male, Aaron had read in the career brochures that he summarily chucked in the wastebasket, the type who makes his subordinates sniff his feet because he thinks they smell like raspberry pie. He placed the lens back in his eye. If Joni saw that he was already starting to lose it, this dinner would be his Waterloo. She was not to find out that he was scared to death of this guy.
Well, if this wasn’t poetic justice. He and his spiteful swagger about this kind of man. Consultants are charlatans, stupid and greedy, he would sermonize whenever Joni mentioned a possible future in consultancy—a future, by the way, she was being trained for as a Technical Management student, a future she had in fact already opted for and which she would undoubtedly take by storm. Instead of supporting her, as soon as she said anything positive about a company like McKinsey he scrunched his forehead into horns, perfidious drivel dripping from his cloven hooves. The “consultancy sector” was a decadent indulgence, he would say, “bullshit” in plain English, a perverse luxury that would evaporate the minute the stock markets crashed. His idle contempt was always ready. And whenever Joni let him goad her into contradicting his clichés, he would snort something snide about the untalented boys and girls these days who turned up their noses at a proper professional training and instead ate away at their college education like aphids. Unhindered by any decent form of ambition, they coasted into law or economics or communication or some other Styrofoam discipline, after which, at age twenty-two, off they went to peddle spurious advice.
To illustrate this constructive criticism he would drag his own friends through the mud. Etienne was a classic example of this breed: the former biology student who egoistically jettisoned that old radio-show slogan “Keen for Green” once he realized that it did not apply to his biologist’s salary. And now? Now Etienne wrote reports full of corporate gobbledegook acknowledging the inevitability of layoffs, or mergers, or this or that sort of white-collar crime, summarized on a single corrupt PowerPoint page, which some hoity-toity board chairman could wave as he sashayed into the workplace, announcing: I regret, dear employees, to have to fire you, it’s all here, read it for yourselves. She wanted to waste her talent on that? A master’s in Lame Excuses? “Aaron,” she would sigh (implicitly forgiving him, because his argument was no more than subversive claptrap, and they both knew it), “I’m going to be an engineer.”
He swigged back his glass of Corton-Pougets and stared at the plaster grapevines on the ceiling. What now? One way or another, the conversation had to be steered away from McKinsey. In answer to another of Joni’s questions he had missed, Stol replied that his consultants were today’s mineworkers: every company had value, if you dug deep enough. The conversation turned to the quickest, most efficient methods of digging. For the first time, Aaron got a good look at the woman next to Stol. She was a damn sight younger than her husband, translucently pale, slightly over-muscular and slightly over-perfumed: he realized that the smell coming from across the table, penetrating his veal cheeks with sautéed escargot, must be her scent.
“So what does your daughter do?” he heard himself ask with a pinched voice.
Now all three of them were looking at the woman. She was weighed down by rather a lot of gold: rectangular earrings, four chunky rings, a necklace kept at body temperature by her decidedly trashy cleavage; the upper part of her dark-blue dress consisted of a loosely draped flap of velvet that covered her large breasts like a black bar across a criminal’s eyes. Her intelligent, subtly made-up face was at odds with this rampant eroticism. Her long, pale hands were covered in freckles.
“Brigitte is my wife,” said Stol. “I was just saying to your charming sister here that a few years ago I bought a stable for Brigitte. It was on the verge of bankruptcy, and dilapidated, you’d hardly recognize it now, she has—”
“—her own mouth,” Brigitte interrupted. She looked at Aaron with warm, dark-brown eyes; he couldn’t distinguish the iris from the pupil. “But he’s right, it was a dream come true. I’m mad keen on horses.” She had a thick Hague accent.
Stol said: “You mean you love horses.”
“When we bought it, the stable had just one star, now we’ve got three. Like I said, I’m mad keen.” Or was it a Leiden twang? As common as dirt, anyway. The point was, though, he had struck a chord with her, the equine chord, because she shifted her chair, as though to reposition herself for her moment of glory. She was hot to trot. “How many horses do you have?” he asked, interested, “or, no, sorry, what I meant to ask was, where’s the stable?” Joni shot him a surprised, questioning glance.
“Between Scheveningen and Wassenaar,” she answered, “right on the beach. You couldn’t ask for a better location, smack in the middle of the dunes. Black Beauty Manège, do you remember that TV series? We thought it was a neat name. It was his idea.” She gestured at Stol; her index finger sported a golden ring with a ludicrous little watch on it.
“I always watched Black Beauty as a kid,” said Joni. “I’m crazy about horses.”
“What’s also interesting,” said Brigitte, steeped in her own story, “is that when Máxima and Alexander go riding along the beach they always stop in for a cup of coffee, once a week at least”—she paused for a moment to gauge the effect of her hobnobbing with the royal couple. “Then I’m like, we’re not doing so bad after all. Hey, hon?” She snuggled her shoulder against Stol’s.
“Not bad indeed,” he said. “But Willem-Alexander has to drink coffee somewhere, doesn’t he, babycakes?” He stared listlessl
y at a distant point beyond Aaron’s shoulder. The mist of boredom between these two was too thick and clammy to ever burn off; Joni thought so too, he saw from the brazen twinkle with which she caught his eye. “I rode until I was sixteen,” she said. “Do you ride too?”—that’s right, Aaron thought, shift the attention to the person who does interest you. In fact, he and babycakes were completely irrelevant, they were just along for the ride. “A little,” replied Stol, “but I’m sure you ride better. I can definitely picture you astride a galloping horse.”
Aaron’s molars crackled. “Naked and bareback, I suppose?” he quipped. It was meant as a joke, but it came out sounding like he had a throbbing pain somewhere. Stol and Brigitte exchanged glances. Joni laid down her silverware, wiped her mouth, and gave him a look of feigned fondness. “We’ve been together for four years now,” she said, “but Aaron’s fantasy is as vivid as always.”
Stol chuckled quietly. “Say,” he asked in a theatrical attempt to rescue the conversation, “what does the young lady actually study, to know so much about McKinsey?”
Aaron butted in before Joni could answer. “She has a computer,” he said, again with that strange pinched voice, “and what d’you know, it’s got Internet on it. And on that Internet she surfed all on her own to the McKinsey website. That’s how.”
A new silence, a few shades deeper than the previous one. Regret filled Aaron’s sinuses. What he had just done, what he had just done twice, was the verbal equivalent of punching someone in the face; he was trigger happy tonight, suffering from a serious loss of self-control. With the least provocation he lashed out like a brute. Stol looked at him with a devious, slightly amused expression. Hard-blue eyes that scorched the peeling paint of his inner self. Aaron knew exactly what Stol saw: if anyone could tell how morbidly jealous he was, then he could. He was a calamity. How would Stol react if he told him about the night before Joni’s interview for an internship at Bain & Co., maybe a year ago, how after a few hours of agitated tossing and turning, he snuck out of bed, took the stack of clothes Joni had laid out into the bathroom and subtly spattered tangerine juice over her blue skirt and white blouse, tore tiny runs in strategic places in her stockings? He couldn’t stop himself. He was convinced that Joni would dump her freelance photoboy the minute she set foot in one of those mirrored-glass office towers. Somewhere in the world was a skyscraper that would steal her from him. London, New York, Tokyo: he was going to lose her to consultancy.
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