Last night, wide awake at half-past two, he got up and fished his wallet out of his trouser pocket, with one ear tuned in to Tineke and the other to the restless city. He crept upstairs by the light of the summer night. Windows open throughout the house, the pregnant summer air pervading the rooms. He tiptoed past the guest room and along the hallway, opened the door to his study, closed the windows above his desk, shoved a stack of documents to a corner of the cool desktop and, in the light of his desk lamp, switched on his laptop. He hadn’t looked at the website in months. It took some courage. A seven-centimeter plastered wall, and behind it, that pair in the guest bed. The modem dial-up resounded like the pealing of a carillon. He knew this would accomplish nothing, and even if it did: what then? Crash through the wall and drag the two of them out of bed? Beat the living daylights out of them? Throw himself at them, weeping? He was appalled anew by the home page, a sensation incompatible with the complacent lust that he could recall from the two or three months in which he had been no more than a casual consumer, a satisfied, unscrupulous dirty old man. The sight of the stylized opening photo of the girl (resemblance, of course, is not a matter of eye or hair color, he understood that, but of form, the angles of the face, the unmistakable triangle between the corners of the mouth and the rounding of the chin, the way the broadish jaw catches the light, the thin arch of the eyebrows) plunged him into a panicky sorrow. He took out his credit card and began entering it on the billing page, precision work requiring the exact input of random characters that failed three times in a row, he’d punched in the wrong number or skipped a letter, and then the modem cut him off. His bare thighs stuck to the leather seat of his desk chair.
During his fourth attempt he heard, through the merciless screech of the modem, a door being opened. There was someone in the hallway. Joni or Aaron. His heart stopped beating, he posthumously switched off the desk lamp, clumsily attempted to close the browser, his clammy fingers fumbling with the mouse—in vain: the page froze—and as a last resort he slammed the laptop closed.
He pricked up his ears in the suddenly humless darkness. After a few terrified moments in which he had repeated visions of the door flying open he heard a distant squeak, the squeak of the bottom tread of the staircase. But why, they had their own bathroom here at the end of the hall? In his left hand he held a hole punch that he squeezed gently until he lost his grip and it fell to the carpeted floor with a thud. He bent down to pick it up, felt that its clear plastic bottom was still attached to the reservoir. He waited and waited, until he began to suspect he missed whoever it was returning to their room. He waited even longer, and then snuck like a thief back to his bedroom, where he was slightly alarmed to find an empty bed. He was already lying on his side, pretending to sleep, when Tineke returned and proceeded to brush her teeth in the darkened bathroom.
“Where were you?” she asked when she came back in. He did not answer. As she lowered the heavy freight of her body into the bed, puffing and panting, she said: “I know you’re awake.”
“Had to pee.”
“Not true,” she said.
“Is too—upstairs. Downstairs was occupied. And you? Have you been eating?”
• • •
He had returned from his Almelo adventure to a slumbering farmhouse. He undressed in the laundry room and put his clothes in the hamper, regretfully showered off Isabelle’s perfume, and climbed into bed next to Tineke. But the evening’s events were too exhilarating for him to fall asleep. What was now sizzling through his body was far more blissful than the pleasure that other, legal, ostensibly more important events had brought him—so that for the first time in his life he doubted the point of it all. What good was half a lifetime of cerebral discipline? All that solitary perseverance! He thought of Isabelle, at this very moment sleeping somewhere on campus, and felt like smacking himself on the head for all his dutiful sublimation. In a surge of guilt he laid a hand on the comatose mountain next to him. Compared to that delicate figure in the alley, Tineke’s back and hips were like the still-warm cadaver of a rhinoceros. He tossed and turned for hours, imagining Isabelle’s slender body against his own, and each time he rolled over he became even more aroused.
And that night, too, he got out of bed and went upstairs to his study, this time wearing a bathrobe and heavy woolen socks. Sitting at his ice-cold desk, he did something that went against his nature: he texted Isabelle in the middle of the night. He told her how wonderful it was, and that he wanted more. Texting a college freshman at 3:30 in the morning—had he lost his mind?
To his amazement, he received an answer almost immediately: she also thought the food was great. Wha—? “Wiseacre,” he texted back, grinning. “Did I wake you?” After twenty minutes that felt like a week at the North Pole she replied that she was “letting her hair down” at the beauty parlor. Letting her hair down at the beauty parlor? It took him a few seconds to solve the cryptogram: the Beauty Parlor was a disco in downtown Enschede. The jolt of jealousy that shot through his body was not generated by that nightclub, nor by the vivid image of Isabelle on a sweaty dance floor, but by the realization that his Asian lover had followed up their intimate candlelight dinner by hitting the town. He imagined how she touched up her make-up, changed into a slinky dress, and cycled into Enschede. Jesus.
He gathered his composure and texted back that she must be a pretty good dancer. He waited in vain for another half hour, but the cold drove him down to the living room for a glass of whiskey. Back in bed he switched his cell phone to silent mode and set it on the floor next to him. Every two minutes he checked to see whether she had come through. After a miserable hour and a half he fell asleep.
The next afternoon he received a formal rejection letter on his office computer. She had thought about it long and hard, but she “couldn’t handle it anymore.” Until now she had managed to block out all thoughts of his wife, but the fact remained that he was a “cheat,” a “rat,” an “adulterer,” an “unreliable man.” Now that they had become “more intimate,” she considered it an “insoluble problem.” She regretted it. “Don’t e-mail or text me anymore.”
He gave computers a wide berth for the next few days, like a lifelong smoker determined to kick the habit. Every fiber in his body, every one of his brain cells, screamed out for contact. In the evening at home he heard his cell phone chirp with phantom texts. Three days after receiving her Dear John letter, just before four in the afternoon, he typed out a message, his heart pounding: “consider this message unsent” and nothing else. Once he’d clicked “send” he despised himself for it, but at the same time hoped it would make her laugh and break her silence. He spent the last hours of his workday gazing at his in-box like a fisherman waiting for a nibble, refreshing the page every few seconds, until he was engulfed in darkness. The low-rise administrative wing, with his spacious office at the end of it, stuck like a foot out of the tower adjacent to the campus’s main entrance. He gazed out of the picture window across the empty parking lot. If I turn on the light, he thought, there’ll be a madman on display.
And for days on end, nothing. At night, he hardly closed his eyes; usually between three and four in the morning he took to his study with a glass of whiskey and a packet of tissues, and sat in his leather reading chair jerking off to her yearbook photo. Twice he wrote her lengthy, pathetic letters on his laptop and then deleted them, not out of common sense, but out of fear. Isabelle’s principled tone unnerved him. When, after the weekend, he returned to his office at 11 a.m. from a meeting and, against his better judgment, opened his private e-mail account, the name Isabelle Orthel appeared like a burning bush on his computer screen. He touched his left ear and opened the message.
“Is it such cold turkey for you too?”
He wonders how she’s doing. Is she still living on campus? Maybe she was in Roombeek at the time of the accident. He and Aaron walk deeper into the dressing room, an illogically L-shaped space. Around the corner, along the base of the L, his wife has built shallow, made-
to-measure shelves for their shoes; on the rear wall is a walnut cupboard with steel modular shelves, a hanging section on the left for his academic robes and dress tails. It smells of the dried lavender Tineke has placed in sachets among his clothes. He squats down, his joints make a snapping sound, and like a forklift he pulls two judo suits from the lowest shelf.
“The jacket to this one,” he says to Aaron, his chin on the top suit, “probably won’t fit you. The bottom one is my old competition suit. Take that jacket.”
Aaron takes the stack from him. “Try it on here?” he says.
“You sleeping all right?” He can see that Aaron does not like the question. “You look knackered.”
“Reasonably. It gets pretty warm at night.”
Sigerius turns, reaches up and pulls an old black belt from the uppermost shelf, a supple, time-worn thing; the spot where the button dug itself in, year after year, has been scuffed white. Aaron wriggles out of his shoes. Sigerius waits until his new jeans have dropped to his ankles and he wobbles on one leg while removing the other. “Here,” he says at precisely that moment, “my lucky belt,” and tosses it too hard—flings it—at his shoulder, it is a ridiculous gesture. But Aaron does not notice, or pretends not to.
“Thanks,” says Aaron, and bends down to pick up the belt. “Your competition belt?”
“That too. Just my old belt.”
He watches as Aaron pulls the bleached-white judo trousers up over his long, suntanned legs and bony hips, ties the string of the waistband in a bow. His torso is lanky and has the form of a question mark. Aaron wouldn’t do something like that. It is unkind of him to take out his paranoia on this kid. Isn’t it the same old tune? he suddenly wonders. Him and sex. Isn’t he always projecting his guilt onto others when it’s about sex? Did he conjure up his idiotic, paranoid ideas because the moralizer in him feels he should be punished for all that Internet cruising? Isabelle would say: Yes.
After they picked up where they had left off, she told him during one of their battery-guzzling telephone conversations that he owed it all to her mother. Owe all what to your mother? Well, she said excitedly, her mother watched her pine for the past four days and said: just e-mail the guy.
“Your mother?” he exclaimed, “does your mother know about this?”
“Of course she does,” she said, “what d’you think?”
“You’re kidding, this isn’t something you go and tell your mother. What we have going here is strictly confidential, Isabelle.”
She burst out laughing. “Get used to it, big guy, in our family we tell one another everything.”
He did not get used to it. Worse: now, eighteen months later, he still cringes at the thought of Marij Star Busman knowing about his escapade with her adopted daughter. When he sent her a tentative e-mail a few weeks after Isabelle had spilt the beans—“I just wanted to say, Marij, what a nice, spontaneous daughter you have”—her reply was not moralistic, but dead serious: “I have complete faith in your intentions, Siem, but I don’t like seeing my daughter hurt.”
Hurt? He had no idea what she was getting at. Her daughter did not make a hurt impression, at most she acted piqued, moody. Ever since what they continued to call “cold turkey,” their phone calls and e-mails increasingly focused on what she saw as his spineless gift for committing adultery. And when the conversation—all post-Almelo communication was carried out by phone or e-mail—came anywhere near sex she would text him: isn’t this difficult for you? Or: what would your daughters make of all this? Or: don’t you think of yourself as a bad person? Although it might have been better to explain to her that judging him was not exactly the job of a maîtresse, he wore himself out setting straight what she in turn would bend back out of shape for him. When he asked her if she thought Bill Clinton was a bad person, she answered that he mustn’t hide behind other people. When he tried to explain what it was like to wake up next to the same woman for twenty years (“that’s for as long as you’ve been alive, Isabelle”), she replied: “You’re not even halfway there, man.” She was Monica Lewinsky and Kenneth Starr wrapped into one.
So now Monica and Kenneth were hurt. Instead of wondering about his own failings, he left the administrative building in the middle of the day, his eyes bleary with concern, and called her up. Why didn’t she tell him she was hurt? And what from, honeybunch? She answered that she was not his honeybunch and that he apparently did not appreciate what she was going through. She was always alone, she slept alone, she went to her parents’ alone, to parties alone—and the whole time, all she could think of was Siem Sigerius.
“And what about me then?” he said. “All I think about is you, Isa. And what goes through my mind is that you’re free, you’re the one who’s constantly running off. You and that Beauty Parlor of yours, you hanging out in one of your bars until four in the morning, three times a week. You going on one blind date after the other.” (This was true: she kept him fully abreast of the fratboys who accompanied her to galas and house parties all across the Netherlands.)
“Siem,” she sighed, “they’re pimply little creeps.”
“Maybe, but you go to bed with them. The pimply creeps get to have sex with you.”
Be-e-e-ep.
He heaved a sigh, crossed the rain-soaked asphalt of the main road, and called her back. “I’m right, though, aren’t I?”
“Yeah, my turn, OK? You sleep every night with that wife of yours.”
“And I’m still happy. With us! Come on, Isa, just this once pretend to be an adult. When can we meet? De Appel is waiting.”
“You are such a coward.”
“Coward? I crave you. We can do whatever we want!” He stood with one arm outstretched, like a Shakespearean actor on the phone. It was cold, he blinked back the half-soft tears, trying to focus on the bare branches of the oaks and elms. “As long as you keep it quiet.”
She did not thaw, she exploded. She exploded just like SE Fireworks would explode a year later. This was precisely what pissed her off, every time, she shrieked. Did he really not get it? She was not someone for on the side. She was disgusted by his underhanded approach, she was disgusted by his asking her to keep it from her parents.
“Coward,” she snorted, “don’t you ever, and I mean ever, forbid me to be honest with the people who saved my life, you got that?”
“Isa sweetheart, just listen …”
“No, I will not listen, I’ve got our house bible in front of me, I know exactly what kind of manipulative little man you are, this book never lies. Listen is the last thing a person should do with cheats like you!”
Book? To his astonishment, a housemate of hers, a girl who sat on the corner of her bed drinking camomile tea during their conversation, had handed her a book entitled Never Satisfied: How & Why Men Cheat. The sorority’s “house bible” in which she’d spent an entire evening underlining passages with a ballpoint “because it was all just so familiar.”
“But Isa,” he moped, “at least tell me what I have to do.”
She went silent, a loaded pause like a piano being dropped from the tenth story, but instead of crashing to smithereens she answered with saccharine sweetness: “You’ve got a month to leave your wife.”
• • •
Put an end to it. A man in his position, a man who shoulders considerable ceremonial and administrative responsibilities, a man at the head of a family that would unanimously agree that they’d put up with enough already—a man like this, you would expect to put an end to it. But no. The only thing he can think of is Isabelle’s hand, that petite Asian hand that had so startled him that evening in Almelo; day and night he felt that phantom hand, tugging gently on his nervous system, driving him crazy, crazy with desire. There were moments when he was prepared to die for that hand. During that topsy-turvy month of March 1999 he tried to imagine himself inhabiting a future even more topsy-turvy, but because he was so turned around himself it hardly fazed him at all.
Often, at night, an hour or so after he had watche
d, from his half of the nuptial bed, Tineke remove her acres of textile and dig herself in, panting, next to him, he saw everything as clear as day: he would leave her, the woman who understood him so well, who for years had put herself second for his sake, the woman for whom he felt a massive, inert, deeply satisfied love—she had to go. Since Isabelle had issued her ultimatum he had difficulty falling asleep; tossing and turning, he abandoned himself to what began as practical, rational musings: he imagined short-term rentals in downtown Enschede he could move into until the divorce, he projected himself into Isabelle’s daily routine, saw himself sitting in her student kitchen on weekday mornings, his suit as crumpled as himself, drinking coffee from an oversized mug missing its handle. He pictured them driving off to Delft on misty Sunday mornings to visit his fifteen-year-younger mother-in-law-to-be, he pictured them at the procession into the Grote Kerk, arm in arm, for the opening of the academic year, Isabelle in a handmade hat intended for menopausal women—the idea of a middle-aged man with, nota bene, a Thai girl, would this go over well?—problematic scenarios he eventually allowed, unresolved, to swirl around in the eddy of increasingly carefree fantasies: city trips to Barcelona and Paris, romantic evening strolls through Europe’s finest parks, hotels, or B&Bs for which he would foot the bill; and only when he had worked through those visions, only after that endless, chaste foreplay, did he give in to her slender hand. Sweaty and curved like a jumbo shrimp, he lay on his half of their Auping mattress, as close to the edge as possible, a suit of armor around his erection. He barely touched himself, afraid that his mechanical shaking would waken Tineke, meditating on the passionate maneuvers Isabelle would perform on him, maneuvers that by now he was painfully aware he dreaded. How was he going to get through this? In some things in life, Siem Sigerius was extremely talented, a champion, even, he’d proved himself over and over—but he was downright lousy in bed.
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