He’d never been much good as a lover. The only period of his life when he could lay claim to that qualification was in the mid-1970s, after Tineke’s conquest. For a year or year and a half they were bewitched by sex, and had sex the way sex was probably supposed to be had. For him it was utterly confusing, a drizzly no-man’s-land where he, without knowing it at the time, was busy replacing his one sacred goal—to become the world’s greatest judoka—with something else, something more uncertain, something completely absurd, that private dream world of formulas and graph paper. Aimless, vexed, a failure—that is how he felt at the climax of his sexual career, hopelessly out of condition too, but at the same time wound-up, and tense, and charged. In fact, it was the only phase of his life when he felt like sex.
Before that, when alongside his jobs he trained three, sometimes four hours a day (judo, running, wrestling, jujitsu, weightlifting—a man with muscles like a gorilla but the protein levels of a hunger striker—the pockets of his duffel bag stuffed with raisins and bananas and dark chocolate, so that he didn’t keel over from exhaustion, and then fasting for days before weighing in, jogging in a rain suit, waking up in a pension next door to a tournament stadium with eyes glued in their sockets and a tongue of ox leather)—in those years his libido dangled on his consciousness like a sad, frayed shred, a strand of desire that tickled his loins maybe twice a month, nocturnal moments when he shook Margriet out of her drunken stupor and mounted her like a komodo dragon.
So he could pride himself on a sex life of a year and a half, slightly less than his military service, and then it was over; his physical interest in Tineke faded with alarming speed. Mathematics took hold of him, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, and poof, it was over. In retrospect he thinks—a thought that under no circumstances should be allowed to leave his mind—that his sexual surge was a form of de-training, the result of the pent-up physical energy accumulated on his camp bed in the little upstairs kitchen, the conversion of physical labor into mental gymnastics and wrestling. He used to lie on top of Kiknadze and Ruska and Snijders; later, he released himself onto Tineke?
It was humiliating how quickly he had reverted to his old obsessive, solitary self. Before he knew it they were in America, where everything went well for them, everything thrived and flourished in California: guavas, tangerines, lemons, his new daughters, his and Tineke’s love for each other—everything except their moyenne, a word that still makes him nervous if he comes across it in one of those adult-lifestyle magazines. In Berkeley and Boston he lived for numbers. Men of his ilk were now named Quillen and Wiles and Erdős, skeletal digi-poets made of translucent rice paper who had retreated into the furthest reaches of their own cranium. When visiting Berkeley, Paul Erdos occasionally stayed with them in their clapboard house on Bonita Avenue, and then he and the maestro explored barren wastelands, penned an article the minute they had cracked a hypothesis, put in eighteen-, sometimes twenty-hour days, and once, when they sat talking in the grass in the backyard after one of those tabletop marathons, Tineke said jokingly to Erdős—but, oh yes, in effect to him: “Mathematicians, Paul, are little more than machines that convert coffee into hypotheses, don’t you think? Always those hypotheses of yours, I can’t bear to hear the word anymore,” at which Erdős guffawed in agreement and clapped his trembling hands.
In those days, as they lay in the bed she had hammered together herself out of pure love, Tineke sometimes slid her hand under the elastic of his pajama bottoms—his signal to launch into a soliloquy on algebra, on the glass wall separating him from the proof he was after, and how he was going to smash through that wall, tomorrow, once he was at his desk at Evans Hall. And yes, he felt guilty and inadequate. But Tineke appeared to accept his escape route, she followed his achievements closely, she seemed to believe that the cultivation of genius entails certain sacrifices, maybe she was simply happy that between seven and nine in the evening he did his damnedest to be a good father to Joni and Janis. By the time they had moved to Boston and he honed in on his breakthrough, sometimes sleeping on an air mattress in his office at MIT, sex was something they talked about like it was an overgrown lawn that needed mowing. And for the past ten years or so they talked about nothing at all. The erotic scenario was put off and, eventually, called off. They respected each other’s privacy. They kissed on the cheek when leaving or returning home.
Returning home was something, incidentally, he never did unannounced or noiselessly or as a surprise anymore, not since that time he inadvertently saw Tineke in the possession of an apparatus made of gray East Bloc plastic, the color of an old-fashioned dial phone, out of which stuck an iron rod with a hard rubber knob on the end, and which, when you plugged it in, pounded violently up and down, a brutal, hammering rattle. A noisesome machine one might use to crack walnuts, but which his wife used after a hard day’s work in her studio, he discovered one afternoon when the sound drew him to the bedroom, to pleasure herself.
His memory tells him that he spent the month following Isabelle’s ultimatum in his study, half naked and at night. That was when he discovered the websites. His study is cube-shaped, but the slight curvature of the roof and the stacks of yellowed periodicals and dusty books in the corners and along the walls make it resemble the inside of a bird’s nest. It is the only room in the farmhouse to have evaded Tineke’s woodworker’s hand. It is his man cave. Daddy’s jerk-off den.
Isabelle had opened the faucet all the way, and rusty water, confined to the pipes for decades, gushed out. Their routine consisted of texting each other after Tineke fell asleep—Isabelle never went to bed before three, did she actually ever sleep?—and as soon as he received an answer, the jumbo shrimp slipped out of bed, swam up the stairs to his study and switched on his laptop. He excitedly sent her e-mails laying out the future he had been dreaming up for them. That it was mutual, he gathered from the visions she herself sent back: she wanted to take a long trip with him, she would like to live in a real house with him, she asked whether he was in fact sterilized, and more such talk that, coming from someone else’s mouth, sounded rather big.
Now that they were being so explicit, he sometimes succeeded in texting her away from her sorority house, luring her to her dorm room, where she disrobed and, like him, sat naked at her computer. “Tell me exactly what you are going to do to me, soon, when we’re on that trip.” How literally Isabelle took that “soon” was evident the following afternoon. “Baby,” she texted him, “how did T react?” How did T react? Hang on, she’d given him a month. “I’m waiting for the right moment,” he texted back.
The days and nights passed, and again something changed in Isabelle’s attitude. He had previously seen her switch from admiring and uninhibited to preachy and moralistic—and now she turned harsh. Her e-mails became shorter, more time elapsed between them. “When are you going to tell her?” she answered when he asked if she was turned on. Sometimes she would get him aroused, and then give him the silent treatment for a quarter of an hour, an hour, the whole night. And because it was, in the end, always a letdown, because she never really cooperated—but also because he never gave up, addicted as he was to those little digital envelopes—he began, out of desperation, scouring the Internet. Driven insane by deferred fulfilment, he found photos where he could actually see what Isabelle was withholding from him. He was shocked to discover how many girls, Asian or otherwise, he could conjure up on his screen with just a few simple search terms. But it worked—and how. By the time Isabelle went to bed—always suddenly and unannounced—his laptop nearly melted from the tabbed sex sites, downloaded pictures of floozies in all manner of positions, pop-ups and weird, virusy dial-up programs. Sometimes it took him a good fifteen minutes to clean his hard drive, after which he would do the same in the upstairs bathroom to the raw chipolata between his legs. The release was followed by a peaceful gloom that got him restfully through the remainder of the night.
• • •
“Who knows if I’ll even get to see the inside of
the house again,” says Aaron. He puts on the judo jacket, his hands and forearms shoot out of the sleeves like broomsticks, he overlaps the front flaps.
“Don’t be so pessimistic.”
They hear the soft thwap of flip-flops from down the hall. “Guys?” Joni. “Dad, Aaron, you guys ready to eat? The table’s set.”
Aaron squats down and picks the belt up off the floor from between his bare feet.
“Where are you?” Her footsteps echo as she walks through the gently ventilated bathroom into the dressing room. “Am I disturbing?” Her face does not express irony, but irritation.
“You never disturb, honey,” he mumbles, with exaggerated sweetness.
“Coming,” Aaron says.
She sniffs and walks off without a word. The last time Joni disturbed him was at the end of the month Isabelle had given him; after a sleepless night he sat in the administrative wing like a prepped corpse. Something that seldom happens, happened: his secretary announced Joni. What was she doing there? He still remembers how optimistic she looked: spring was still pondering its next move but Joni was already wearing a summer frock. Her appearance cheered him up, they kissed on both cheeks, sat down at the corner of the conference table. He looked tired, she said; I have a busy job, he answered.
She said: “When you’re in love, anything’s possible.”
He asked: “How do you mean?”
“Dad,” she said, “I don’t want to butt in. I’m just here to warn you.”
“Oh? And what about?”
She leaned over and pulled a folded-up newspaper page out of her bag. She opened it, flattened it out, and slid it toward him. He recognized the photo in the middle all too well: him naked on the riverbank. He’d never shake it.
“You know Aaron took this picture, right?” he asked, just to ask something.
“I took it off the toilet door at our house. Look a little closer.”
He’d seen it already. But to buy time to pull himself together he made a point of scrutinizing the handwritten comments her housemates had scribbled next to his naked body over the past few years. Someone had drawn an enormous balloon in felt-tip pen from his gaping mouth with the text: “Ladies, is Joni behaving herself?” And lower down, under his bare feet in the grass, in large block letters: ERECTOR MAGNIFICUS. “Good one,” he mumbled, “except I don’t get this one.” He tapped the red circle around his shivery penis. “Property of Isabelle Orthel,” read the caption.
“It’s all over campus, Dad. If they write something like this about my father in my house, in my WC, then you can assume everyone knows you’re doing it with a freshman.”
“And what if it’s true? What then?” It occurred to him that she was four years older than Isabelle.
“I don’t begrudge you anything, Dad. But—”
“But what? What’re you here for, Joni, to chew me out?”
“No. I’m here for Mom—”
“She’s not here.”
“I don’t want Mom reading about your escapades on my bathroom door.”
Aaron has tied the belt around his waist, a tidy, flat knot, and examines the inside of the jacket. “I’ve heard that here and there in the Vluchtestraat interior walls have caved in,” he says. “They want to inspect the houses one by one to assess the danger of collapse. It’ll take another week or two. That’s what they say at the information post.”
Sigerius swallows and tries to think of something that sounds friendly. Before he can come up with an obligatory assurance that Aaron is welcome for as long as necessary, they hear the ringtone of a cell phone.
6
“That’s me,” Sigerius said. He pulled out his Nokia from the pocket of his khakis and checked the number on the display. He frowned. “Sigerius,” he said, allowing his eyes to wander around the dressing room. “Hello, Thom. No, no bother. (…) Terrible, never seen anything like it. But Enschede is resilient. (…) Yes, yes, we’re OK, Thom, we’re all fine. And you? Yes. (…) Go ahead, I’m listening.”
But Aaron wasn’t, at first. He looked around the narrow space. On either side, meters of aluminum racks were stuffed with clothing: to the left, suits and sport jackets arranged by color; to the right, twice as long, Tineke’s dresses and caftans. He was used to this—it was nearly impossible to talk to Sigerius for more than ten minutes at a stretch. What did take some getting used to was what he called the everyday Sigerius: they’d never been at such close quarters before. He noticed that Sigerius preferred to keep to himself, more often than not retreating to the living room while the rest of them were out on the terrace. During meals he could be downright grumpy. Maybe the fireworks disaster brought on extra stress at Tubantia, maybe he sensed the tension between him and Joni, although Aaron could hardly imagine that something so banal would affect his mood. Just to have something to do, he sniffed at the sleeves of the judo suit, the white cotton smelled fresh, old-fashionedly fresh, as though it had come straight from the prehistoric ’60s. Ruska and maybe even Geesink had clutched it, or pulled the collar over Sigerius’s head during a sparring match.
“… sounds very interesting,” he heard Sigerius say. He stood a quarter of a turn from him, with his free hand he gently nudged the toes of a pair of running shoes in the rack. “You folks are really on the ball (…) Yes. (…) I understand, yes. (…) Of course I’ll consider it.” Sigerius wheeled around, his dark, hard gaze locking into Aaron’s eyes. He smiled sheepishly, but Sigerius did not see it. Aaron’s head was reeling. They had been staying at the farmhouse for a week now, and still he hadn’t got a decent night’s sleep. He and Joni were condemned to each other in a narrow guest bed that creaked as though it were slowly contracting; every night he lay there, a nervous wreck, until five in the morning, lest he make it creak or crack, it creaked every time he swallowed, and by dawn he himself was a stiff, groaning plank.
At first he thought it a nifty idea, a few weeks at his in-laws. He was curious about the day-to-day routine on the Langenkampweg—but now he realized how uncomfortable it was. Even more wearing, if possible, than his insomnia was this strife with Joni—it was terrible timing, now that they were living with her parents they were at each other’s throats, they had never bickered so easily before, about everything and nothing. She still seemed pissed off about that wedding. And he in turn was being driven crazy by all her speculating about Boudewijn Stol and his wonderful internships.
And then there was that Ennio. Like hundreds of other Enschede residents, the poor guy lay crumpled in the hospital, bruised, beaten, and burned, not a pretty sight, and he could well imagine that for Joni the accident had “hit close to home,” but what he couldn’t take—Jesus, there wasn’t much he could take, that endless sniveling and blubbering was the least of it—was that he felt excluded; wherever he went, whether into the living room or out onto the terrace for a smoke, there she was, usually in the company of her mother, red-eyed, weeping, in an apparent heart-to-heart that was cut short the minute he appeared. If he asked whether she was all right, the answer was invariably “yeah, fine.” Apparently he was not the one to come crying to about other men. Sigerius had told him yesterday, not to his displeasure, that Ennio had moved to the Kievitstraat after his wife had kicked him out of the house. Apparently on account of messing around with a young female employee.
“When do you want to know?” Sigerius asked. “Fine. (…) Strictly confidential. Understood. I’ll get back to you within two weeks. It’s a deal. Talk to you soon. Bye. Bye, Thom.” Sigerius held his telephone at eye level, stared briefly at the display, and then slowly dropped his hand. He looked at Aaron and said: “Well, just look at you.”
“Like it’s tailor-made,” he replied.
“Two weeks,” Sigerius said.
“Two weeks?”
“If he hasn’t fallen before then.” Sigerius eyed him thoughtfully. “Aaron, listen, can you keep a secret? Yes, of course you can. You’ve already heard half of it anyway.”
Without waiting for an answer Sigerius confided
in him (his deep, calm voice sounded charged) that it was D66 chief Thom de Graaf who called to say that Kruidenier, the current Minister of Education, was expected to be sacked within a month, or would resign, which in itself wasn’t earthshaking news: it had been the talk of the town in The Hague for the past few weeks. “And would I make myself available.” Normally his father-in-law spoke deliberately, placing a full stop after just about every word, but now the sentences gurgled forth like a brook, his small nostrils flared with triumph. “Could be as early as next week. Or six months from now.”
Sigerius looked at him expectantly. Aaron racked his brains for something appropriate to say, but drew a blank. He was overwhelmed by the news, more forcefully than Sigerius could have been, it had a physical effect on him, as though he’d been given a kick in the backside. Sigerius a Cabinet minister—somewhere in his exhausted body a sprinkler started spouting adrenaline. He had to say something about Kruidenier and his squabbling with parliament, he’d read about it, the guy had misinformed the MPs regarding alleged fraud in public colleges. But his mouth was too dry to get a word out. He stared at the shoe racks alongside Sigerius’s face, a dark blotch on which no doubt surprise or even disbelief was starting to take form. He focused on a pair of waltzed-out, matt-black pumps.
“If I say yes, that is,” he heard Sigerius say. “Anyway, the party’s fed up with Kruidenier. Maybe he’ll just pack his bags himself. That’s what they’re hoping.”
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