Bonita Avenue

by Peter Buwalda

  “I was getting tutored in French at the time,” she said. “And those tutorials were given by a woman—an adult, or so I thought at the time, but in fact she was still a girl, about as old as I am now—who had just graduated cum laude from Utrecht specializing in, um … whatshername, Sartre’s battleaxe.”

  “De Beauvoir.”

  “Yeah. Her. But shit, what was that girl’s name again …” She was concentrating hard, it was something with an F, she said.

  “Does her name matter?”

  “She was a prig, but a pretty prig. Well groomed, chic, uppity, like one of those governesses in a film. Lily-white, beauty spots.”

  “You were being tutored,” he pressed. Stick to the subject—but she launched into an exposé of the educational regime in their home. The minute she or Janis were faced with a C-minus, her parents would rustle up a private tutor. “Achievement is the secret code word in this family, although they’ll never admit it. Just graduate? Come on. I didn’t have to be valedictorian, but it would be nice. In Berkeley they didn’t send me to just any private school. Berkwood Hedge: small classes, emphasis on culture, tuition in the thousands. Later, in Boston, Kids Are People Middle School—American Montessori education, a Shakespeare play a year. A ‘C’ was way below par for a Sigerius.”

  “And meanwhile a juvenile delinquent sat in the garden revving his motorbike,” he said.

  “… Vivianne! Vivianne Hiddink. My parents doted on her. She had lived in Strasbourg, studied for a year at the Sorbonne, had started organizing programs for Studium Generale here in Twente. We’d hardly started the lessons and already my father had to invite her round. In America they used to have Richard Feynman over, if the name means anything to you, but anyway Mademoiselle Hiddink was interesting too, so why not.”

  “Sure, why not?” He felt himself getting angry, all that elitist hot air, in that respect Joni was a bit soft in the head too. But he held back, for fear of stalling her.

  “This boyfriend of hers, Maurice was his name, had a doctorate in theoretical physics. Early thirties, squeaky-clean black hair, British tweed jacket, Van Bommel dress shoes. Spent the whole evening squinting drily through his little Schubert specs, one witticism after the other. Never met anybody since then who was so completely different from Wilbert. It hurt your eyes to see those two at the same table. But you couldn’t very well send Wilbert to the kitchen to eat his steak, although that would have suited Dad fine. I remember that Wilbert, who had otherwise kept unusually quiet, asked Maurice what he actually did all day at that ‘research institute’ of his. ‘I’ve got a room there,’ he answered, polishing his Schubert specs with a soft cloth, ‘with just a sofa, that’s it, and I lie on it all day, thinking.’ That must have sounded familiar to Wilbert: your own room with nothing but a bed to lie on and think.”

  She chuckled softly, probably pleased with herself. She was a good talker and she knew it.

  “So Vivianne always came to the house on Saturday mornings, from half-past nine to half-past eleven, for me it was torture, and on top of it I had to get dressed in a big hurry. We used this room, sat there at Grandpa Sigerius’s desk, which she so smartly called a bureau ministre, and from then on so did we.”

  “And me too, now.”

  “Except Wilbert,” said Joni. “He had another kind of French on his mind. We all noticed how he hung around downstairs early Saturday morning, way too early for him, and stole every glimpse of Vivianne he could. If he got the chance he’d take her coat, hang it neatly on the hallway coatrack—we teased him for being such a show-off, gently of course. What the heck, I thought it was sweet and understandable. Vivianne was quite a … sight in her ensembles. The house smelled like Chanel until dinner time.”

  He pressed his nose into Joni’s neck.

  “And then one Sunday afternoon Maurice was on the line for Dad. A nonplussed conversation, not the least bit witty or clever, from the sound of it—within two minutes he went to take it upstairs, asked if I would hang up the receiver below. Fifteen minutes later he came into the living room. He said: ‘Vivianne won’t be coming anymore.’ And that was it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Later that afternoon, when Wilbert was off to who knows where on his motorbike, Dad said she was considering filing a police report.” She cleared her throat and swallowed. “It all started with her scarf, which should have been tucked in the sleeve of her coat but wasn’t. Maybe she’d left it somewhere, lost it. These things happen. The next week, this Maurice guy tells my father, on her way home Vivianne reaches into her coat pocket for a handkerchief, Irish linen, one of those perfumed ladies’ hankies. I’d seen those accessoires of hers. Well, that hankie had been transformed into a clammy wad. It no longer smelled of Chanel, but of lukewarm sperm. Although it was ‘horrid,’ she said, ‘horrid,’ she kept her mouth shut about it, even to Maurice. Of course she could guess whose glue douche that was.”

  Joni paused for a moment, turned her shoulders. The bed creaked.

  “Let’s be adults about this, Vivianne resolved, the kid’s a teenager, a bit of a lout, she had already caught on to that. And besides, she really liked coming to our place, it clicked. Maybe she was even flattered, who knows. A wad of spunk is a compliment in a way, isn’t it?”

  “A pleasantry, at least.”

  “Two weeks after that hankie incident, which no one except she and Wilbert knew about, Vivianne and I were sitting up here and as usual, sometime during the second hour, after my mother had brought us coffee and krentenwegge, she went off to use the toilet, here in the upstairs bathroom. So she’s sitting there, door locked, and soon enough she hears something behind the shower curtain, she hears a noise. She hears someone breathing—that’s how she put it in court—”

  “In court?”

  “In court, yeah. She hears breathing, and freezes. For a moment she thinks she’s just heard herself, her own panting. Then she braces herself and yanks open the curtain. There he is: stark naked, his jogging pants around his ankles, holding that Scottish scarf she’s been missing for the past three weeks. He’s standing there jerking off, sniffing that fucking scarf, just a few feet from Vivianne—”

  “Fucking hell.”

  “But what does she do? She doesn’t scream. She spares him, not deliberately, mind you, no motivation behind it whatsoever, she says later—she saves his ass by not screaming. ‘What do think you’re doing?’ she whispers, and he comes. She just sits there. He takes a step toward her, so he’s almost hanging over her, and sheds …”

  “Spurts.”

  “OK, spurts cum all over her wrist and thigh. ‘You’re out of your mind,’ she hisses, and still manages to contain herself, maybe paralyzed by the shock, at least that’s her take on it. She tugs the curtain closed again, wipes the muck from her legs with some toilet paper, pulls up her pantyhose and skirt, forgets to flush, does think to wash her wrist and walks back to my room.”

  “What a scumbag,” said Aaron.

  “Yeh …,” she said with a shrug. She went quiet for a moment. “But,” she continued, “that Vivianne was a strange one too. She walks back into my room, goes over to the mirror, smoothes out that Laura Ashley blouse of hers, and sits down. ‘Bon,’ she says, ‘where were we. Future du passé, always a tricky one …’ Nothing! Not a word about Wilbert. I swear, until that phone call I didn’t even know anything had happened. That woman just finished off our French lesson, I walked her downstairs as usual, we even stood chatting with my mother in the hall, and then she gets into her little Renault and drives off to Maurice.”

  Outside, beyond the campus, probably from the tracks leading to Drienerlo Station, an intercity train blew its horn. The drawn-out sound penetrated the guest room and brought him to himself. He couldn’t gauge the atmosphere. What kind of mood was she in? She seemed to be criticizing the woman. Or not? For days he’d been misreading everything and everyone.

  “Sounds like Vivianne wanted to think things over first,” he said. “She wasn’t stupid, of course
. She didn’t scream blue murder straightaway, you could call that self-control.”

  “True,” said Joni. “But at the same time it’s weird. It’s weird not to utter a peep about something like that. As if nothing happened in that bathroom, that’s how she acted. And who says anything did happen?”

  Rather than letting the suggestion sink in and pretend to at least consider the possibility, he barked: “You can’t be serious! Nobody makes up something like that. Of course it happened.”

  “Hang on a minute,” she said, “he never admitted it …”

  “Yeah, right. Why would he?”

  “You say nobody makes up something like that, but you could also say: nobody does something like that. You’d sooner make it up than actually do it.”

  He felt himself getting angry. “Beating a guy to a pulp with a sledgehammer, Joni, that’s something I’ve also considered on occasion. And I still didn’t do it. That Wilbert of yours, he does whatever pops into his head. That’s where it all goes wrong. I take it the judge agreed with me?”

  She turned away from him, thumped her backside into his pelvis like a boxing glove. “It was his word against hers,” she said. “There was no proof. No one saw or heard anything.”

  He sprang upright and looked at the dark outline of her shoulder blades against the sheets. Was she serious? Did she really doubt what had happened in that bathroom? “Joni,” he said, “don’t be so incredibly naïve. And what about that jizz-hankie? Made up too? Come on, be reasonable.”

  “Look who’s talking,” she snarled. “You’re going to tell me what’s reasonable and what’s not?”

  “I’m just expressing an opinion, and yes, I think you’re being highly unreasonable. What was the upshot of the case?”

  “Highly unreasonable …” She sighed theatrically. “Goddammit, Aaron,” she exploded, “I can’t really take this right now. You’ve been acting like an imbecile all week, just now too, at the table, with your tales of heroism, and you’re calling me unreasonable? Go take another sleeping pill. Good night.” She jerked the sheet farther to her side and buried her head in her pillow. He was glad the light was out, because he could feel himself blushing. “Tales of heroism?” he said as calmly as possible. “What are you talking about?”

  She did not answer.

  “Well?”

  “Aaron. You don’t really think I bought that crap about Manus, do you?”

  “Then don’t buy it.”

  “I don’t believe a stinking word of it.”

  Silence. Five minutes. Ten minutes? He gazed at the gently billowing curtains. He started to believe she was sleeping, and that infuriated him. She knew he couldn’t sleep after an argument. You don’t sleep without an argument either, she’d say tomorrow. In the silence he suddenly sensed that she was keeping something from him. She fobbed him off with a sanitized, Aaron-friendly version of the story. She knew better than to be honest about anyone with a pecker. In the four years of their relationship, jealousy had become such a powerful mechanism that it was impossible to guess what she actually thought of the guy. Even if she’d had twins with that Wilbert she wouldn’t tell him.

  “Another one of your crushes, I’ll bet,” he snapped.

  “Whatever,” she snapped back.

  He swallowed his anger. “And you still haven’t answered my question. Why the tantrum? Why smash a dish of potato croquettes to smithereens?”

  She did not answer. For several minutes he looked at her back. Until he could hear from her breathing that she was asleep.

  In the days that followed, Sigerius avoided his elder daughter; for Aaron, at least, it was hardly a coincidence that they never once sat down to eat at the same time. Sigerius mostly ate out. Joni seemed to have forgotten their nighttime conversation and avoided him. Her behavior annoyed him; one minute she was like a toddler in happy anticipation of America, the next minute she sat there blubbering about Ennio.

  For his part, he was busy at Tubantia Weekly. Thank God. The fireworks disaster had undeniably brought out the best in him, and despite his sleepless nights he had outdone himself these past few weeks. Blaauwbroek was impressed. His boss was the first person they had heard on Joni’s answering machine, far ahead of the platoon of concerned friends and family, and he sounded like an eleven-year-old watching the circus ride into town. “Bever, good afternoon to you, Henk Blaauwbroek here on the machine. I assume you’re alive. Did you also hear a blast? Hibernation’s over, kid. Have you got photos? We’re putting out an extra edition, you get the picture.”

  He and his boss had a love-hate relationship. During staff outings and over drinks they were boisterously brotherly, but at the workplace it was a constant battle. Since Aaron had studied at the Art Academy and not at journalism school, Blaauwbroek accused him of having artistic aspirations, a card he never tired of playing. “It ain’t gonna hang in a museum, kid,” or “why not try a shorter shutter speed,” or “there’s our still-life fetishist”—how often had he put up with remarks like that. And he was a lousy news photographer, he was the first one to admit it. Too slow for the real work, too hesitant, not passionate about hard news, but that’s why, he’d reply snidely, he worked for Blaauwbroek and not for Reuters.

  But now he strode through media-clogged Enschede as though dispatched by Time magazine itself. For once, he’d come up with ideas all on his own: at a Chinese wholesaler in Liège he took before-during-and-after photos of 1.1-class fireworks, the ammonium chloride kind stored in the Enschede storage bunkers. Together with two ex-residents and the local police chief he crisscrossed the disaster area in a space suit. He shot a series of portraits of now-homeless Roombeekers whom he talked into posing in the torn and blood-stained clothes they were wearing that Saturday, May 13th (his photo of the man wearing one flip-flop and carrying barbecue tongs, who had wandered for hours half naked through the burning streets, made it into a Victim Assistance brochure). From atop the dilapidated roof of the Grolsch brewery he photographed the scorched neighborhood—a shocking war-zone photo a national newspaper bought from him.

  The air on his calamity-planetoid was, to put it otherwise, rarefied, and it made him light-headed. He maintained that every Enschede resident who was alive and still had all his limbs had no business grousing, and to suit his actions to his words he returned, as the first and only “victim,” the 1,500 guilders cash the city council had distributed to all those affected by the accident. Joni thought his gesture pompous, even tactless. “It’s time you drop the stunts,” she said.

  On their last day at the farmhouse he went to the university library to update their website on a public computer, a shit job that made him wonder why he was the one doing it; this whole website thing was Joni’s idea, but he took the Dreamweaver course; she talked about clean prostitution, but he sat here shitting himself every time a student walked into the room. These were the last photos from the series they had shot at the Golden Tulip, they had to hurry up and post something new.

  When he left the library the atmosphere hung like a crystal ball over the campus. Satisfaction with what he had just accomplished temporarily blocked out the visions he’d had while dozing at the library table; he’d dreamt he saw himself lying on the mossy tiles of the central square. The first stars wove through the uppermost blue, elongated wisps of orange hung above the treetops to the west. While he unlocked his bike the Bastille spat out a women’s debating club, garrulous girls who had just gobbled up their weekly cafeteria sausage with fries and limp-boiled vegetables and were now busily searching for their bicycles.

  He decided to take the inside route. A leafy cycle path led him to the broad dirt jogging track. Three runners scuffed with a muted crunch over the gravel, two female students sat in the middle oval with a bottle of wine. The sun sank behind the ivy-covered wall that hid the outdoor pool from view. Warm air caressed his scalp. He shut his eyes for a swarm of bugs and was wondering if the pool contained enough water to extinguish that orange ball when, with a whack, his camera bag was
knocked off his shoulder. It dangled on his forearm and rattled against the spokes of the front wheel. A girl on an upright bike passed him, muttering a barely audible “sorry.”

  “Fucking bimbo!” he shouted, surprised at how readily his contentment turned into rage. Breathing hard, he coasted to a standstill and stood with his legs spread. Jealousy, the fear of losing her, was always the root of everything.

  It was snowing when he arrived at the farmhouse. The poplars on the northern edge of the garden blossomed so furiously that the twilight sky was saturated with flakes and the grass was covered with a translucent layer of fluff. Cuddly clumps of white danced around Joni’s bare ankles as she sat on the mossy terrace alongside the former stalls, like a … yes, like a what? Like a melting snowman.

  Tineke sat across from her at the scrapwood table, between them their emptied plates and a carafe of water. As he approached them he was overcome by revulsion. He could guess what was up. “Hello,” he said and sat down next to Tineke. Joni answered his greeting with a gurgling, drawn-out snort into a piece of paper towel. Her eyes were puffy. Her mother sighed and looked at him. “Hungry?” she asked.

  “Hungry and thirsty,” he said. Instead of asking Joni why she had been crying, he took her glass and filled it with water. He gulped it back and wiped his mouth. “Mmm,” he said.

  After an awkward silence Tineke made a move to get up. “I’ll go,” Joni mumbled. She stood up, pulled the spaghetti strap over her shoulder and shuffled across the fluffy backyard. Once she was in the kitchen Tineke laid a hand on his wrist and said quietly: “She’s just back from visiting Ennio. Try to be nice to her.”

  He nodded. “What actually happened?”

  Tineke glanced toward the house, from the pantry they could hear the hum of the microwave. “It’s a terrible story,” she said. “Just awful.” Keeping her eye on the door, she said: “The guy was on fire. From what I understand he was napping on the sofa when the living room window imploded. His entire back and legs full of glass. Then the rug under the coffee table caught fire, and then the sofa too, everything completely synthetic, of course. He rolled outside through the broken window and only then realized his trousers were on fire.” She shook her head. “And while he’s trying to put out the fire—it’s too terrible for words—he’s hit full-on, right by the front gate, by the chimney of his own—”