Bonita Avenue

by Peter Buwalda

  10

  Your child is your most precious possession. And a focused, expert touch can ensure memorable class photos. Aaron Bever School Photography has been successfully serving the Brussels area since 2002.

  A well-organized approach is the key to making “picture day” a happy experience for your child. Aaron Bever identifies with the world of children and creates a child-friendly atmosphere, capturing them at their most natural and relaxed. He always finds a suitable location for group photos.

  Today’s school pictures are tomorrow’s cherished memories!

  The site sagged under children seated at classroom desks, children clasping toys, children in steel pedal cars that brought back memories of my own primary school days. The kiddies’ pal himself was nowhere to be seen. On a separate page he offered his services as a restorer of antique black-and-white pictures. (“Aaron Bever employs the most up-to-date apparatus and techniques in photographic restoration. The difference is in the details!”) In the sample photograph I recognized the half-disintegrated wedding portrait of his grandparents, a time-worn, warped, and water-pocked piece of paper that he kept propped on his bookshelf and with the slightest puff of breeze fluttered to the floor like an autumn leaf. Alongside it the spruced-up, spotless version. I looked at his grandmother’s awkwardly fitting wartime dress. The hairline of the young man who had been his grandfather was already receding, but even in his Venlo nursing home he wasn’t as bald as his grandson.

  My own head was still heavy from yesterday. After work about thirty of us boarded three Chrysler vans that took us from Coldwater to the Gold Digger, Rusty’s favorite hotel bar in downtown L.A. He treated, said we had to celebrate the Barracks deal. Earlier that day Rusty, Debra from Personnel, and I had already been to see a renowned interior architect on South Hope Street, offices on every continent. This was just the ticket, Rusty said, these guys (who turned out to be two women and one man) had done Amazon.com, Deutsche Bank, a complete make-over of the Sheraton, they’re the tops, he guaranteed they’ll be purring once they saw the Barracks. If we’re gonna go bankrupt, Joy, then let’s do it in style. But he’d rather end up in Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For, did I get his drift? That list was an obsession from his Goldman Sachs days, and although I cautiously prepared him for a letdown—I couldn’t imagine a firm like this wanting to take us on—they actually warmed to our proposal, and after that Rusty was unstoppable. That evening, in the Japanese restaurant where we all sat around one of those teppanyaki tables, he launched into a slightly boozy State of the Union address, a discourse on corporate identity, the revolutionary “open plan” office interiors, the “cool” titanium scooters we would glide up and down the long hallways on. He managed to get all of us into the Digger before midnight, where we stood on the hip rooftop bar until the wee hours catching cold. It was already light when the van dropped me off on Sunset Boulevard.

  I washed down two Tylenol with a gulp of coffee and reflected on Aaron. What kind of life did he lead in that Belgian hick town? The thought of him at those primary schools pained me in a complicated way. I wondered if I had any right to feel like that. Looking at the goofy website, I realized that someone who didn’t know better would think he had found his niche. But this wasn’t the Aaron I knew; if I had predicted this future to the old Aaron—putzing around primary schools, Belgian primary schools, in a minivan—then he wouldn’t have even scoffed at me, he’d have begged me to put him out of his misery then and there.

  I straightened my shoulders. This meticulously maintained website aroused latent feelings of guilt in me, even more than those creepy e-mails of his. The suspicion that I had tricked him into starting that sex site (like the accusations against Colin Powell and Tony Blair) reared its head again. The same old reflex: it was all my fault. I inhaled hard through my nose. I had sealed our fate just at the moment I wanted to be rid of him—that kind of agonizing. For a brief moment I was back on the Vluchtestraat, sitting across the breakfast table from him, that morning long ago when I put his head on the chopping block. We had been taking pictures for months, just for the fun of it—so I said, and so he believed—and it was then that I laid my plan on him. We’d had a degrading night; in the middle of it I woke with a shock to a terrible scream, a curse, and saw Aaron cowering on the chair in the corner where I had draped my clothes a few hours earlier. He was crying. On the floor all around him: a notebook, ripped to shreds, that I immediately recognized as a school notebook we’d already argued about interminably. Since I was thirteen I had kept a kiss list on the two glossy inside covers, a chronological inventory of all the boys I had at least made out with, date, age, first name, location, eye color, hair color, hair length, God knows what else. In all there were more than 100 names, a number Aaron called “astronomical,” and he accused me of being an “astronomical slut,” he kept going on about that stupid list, and why were there two girls’ names on it? (“Why do you think?”)

  I had long since stopped being amused by his jealous whining, and actually I had decided to dump him weeks earlier—just beat it, go jump in the lake—but when I saw him sitting there surrounded by shreds and wads of paper, I was struck by the powerful emotions I had released in him. I knew I had a certain sexual clout, I was aware of my effect on men, but this? He was in my power. This guy would not only never leave me, but he would also do anything necessary to keep me. That’s why I didn’t break up with him that morning, but instead, between two bites of toast, said there was something I had to tell him. “I’m going to start a sex site,” I said. “You know, on the Internet.” I still remember his jaw dropping open, I could see the glop of half-chewed bread and aged cheese on his tongue. “Preferably with you, of course,” I said to reassure him.

  There were voices in the hallway; Rusty was showing his guests out, I heard them talking as they clattered down the stairs. Once it was totally quiet again I clicked on a button called “Backgrounds,” half expecting to read about how Aaron had ended up in the exciting and fulfilling world of school photography, but I was wrong, it was a page of background patterns for behind the portraits: solid light blue, soft pink roses, speckled pastel tints, “or why not try something completely different: linen! For that special effect, Aaron Bever will print your son’s or daughter’s portrait on a genuine linen canvas, so your school picture will resemble a freshly made oil painting.”

  • • •

  The children … A thought so painful that I clapped my hand over my mouth, it slid into my consciousness, filled it—of course he hadn’t just randomly chosen this profession, these kids were the whole point. Going through his e-mails in my head, I knew for sure he was childless. For a man in his late thirties this was not earthshaking, but I knew that Aaron had a deep-seated and lifelong yearning for children. With his illness, the schizophrenia from which he surely suffered, it seemed unlikely to me that he’d ever find a woman who would dare get pregnant by him. It wasn’t rheumatism or allergies—as far as I could tell he was halfway to hell. I knew something of the progressive misery that plagued him. (Rusty, of all people, had told me the story of a schizophrenic man in the apartment below his, back in his start-up days in Redondo Beach. Rusty called him “The Voice,” and he wasn’t referring to Frank Sinatra either, although the downstairs neighbor was famous for his timing and phrasing: for two years the guy opened his throat, at random times [but always at night], bellowing surreal texts at the top of his lungs; sometimes it was a song, “Black Betty” by Ram Jam, or an AC/DC number, but mostly he yelled the same mantra over and over at stadium-filling volume, something Rusty would perform with a grin, relieved that this period of his life was over: “BIIIIIIILLLL!!! You hear me, BILLLLL?! You owe me one point two FUCKIN!!! BILLION!!! DOLLARS!!!, BIIIILLLLL!!!!” For hours on end, half the night, without a break, without Clinton ever coughing up the dough. Rusty called 911 a few times and pointed the receiver at the floor, to which the dispatcher asked why he had invited the man—a regular at the Redondo Beach mental health services
—into his apartment. It was not a disease to snag girls with. Nor to start a family with.)

  “I want children.” It was one of the first things Aaron confided in me. If I’m not mistaken it was the first time we met, a curious conversation we had in the snow in front of the Technical Management Studies building; a camera hung around his neck, a flat woolen cap on his head—I knew about his ambitions to have a large family before I even knew he was bald. Still, I only grasped how serious he was when I dumped him four years later. “Do you know what Aaron told me?” my father asked just before we left on that last vacation. “That he wants you to be the mother of his children.”

  That was sneaky of him—I still remember thinking that. Sly old fox. We had hardly spoken to each other for two weeks, and there he was, Siem the couples counselor, armed with an excuse to break the silence. Brooding over life without Aaron, I walked into our big student-house kitchen, and two pancake-frying housemates pointed upstairs: “Your dad’s up in your room.” And what do you know, there sat Mr. University President in his shirtsleeves, his silk tie draped over the back of my desk chair, drinking green tea from a plastic milk cup. “I thought I’d just wait here for you, hope you don’t mind?”

  He started by being nice about Ennio, was I able to sleep, he’d heard from Mom how upset I was, he was proud of me, so much empathy. Pause. Here comes Wilbert, I thought. Go on, lemme have it. I resolved to say absolutely nothing about the nerve-racking telephone conversation I’d had with Wilbert. (He came across as completely uninterested, his mutinous voice lower than usual, but no less malicious, and still as hard as nails. “If I ask if you guys are still alive,” he said, “it doesn’t mean actually I hope so.” “You living somewhere now?” I asked, tongue-tied. “How about you?” he shot back, “you living somewhere? Why don’t you come around, you can see where I live.” In between sentences he made strange slurping noises. By the time I hung up I was exhausted, done in, drenched in sweat.)

  But my father didn’t start in about Wilbert. “Joni,” he said, “do you want to tell me what’s going on with you and Aaron?” He had heard the “awful news” from my mother as well, and he wasn’t really surprised, he’d seen us together close-up, and he was the last one to underestimate the effects of a disaster like the fireworks accident, everything was intertwined, but, he said in closing: you couldn’t, under these circumstances, make decisions about a relationship. He wanted us to take a vacation together. “I’ll pay.”

  “Get lost, Dad,” I said. “Butt out, will you. Leave me alone. You don’t know what you’re saying. I’m finished with that guy.”

  He got up, shook his head, picked up his tie. “Come with me,” he said. “Let’s go grab a bite at De Beijaard.”

  We got up early because of the heat, and left our rented Corsica villa at eight in the morning. Crossing the maquis via narrow, jagged paths we hiked inland, picking lemons and kiwis along the way. As the coast retreated we started getting sunburned, the heat was merciless on that island, and although we trudged mostly in silence, sometimes we suddenly had a serious talk, as often happens on vacation. My father’s intervention seemed to work. We talked a lot about him, and we realized full well that without him we wouldn’t be on Corsica right now, without Siem we’d probably have called it quits. We agreed that he deserved credit for putting out the fire.

  But then, in those Corsican woods, we smelled real fire. Aaron had read somewhere that in the summer the libeccio, a sultry southwesterly wind, was at its most persistent, more treacherous than the mistral. Among the tall pine trees and cork oaks we heard the brief thunder of galloping swine, the weightless rustle of mountain goats—animals you otherwise never saw—and before long we could see the fire, an orange fury that sucked away our oxygen, and we heard the sizzling and crackling. Making a dash back to the coast, laughing and looking over our shoulders, at times skidding to the ground, abandoning the bag with lemons and kiwis on the way—a waste, I thought as we clambered up the hill alongside the villa. So there I stood in my bikini, peering into the distance at the black ring of smoke surrounding the wooded hills, hand in hand with the guy who, on the way here, I had hated with a passion.

  He had picked me up on Saturday morning, after more than a week of no contact. God, how I hated him then. Aaron being “dry” as usual, our first stop was the Central Pharmacy on the Beltstraat. He ran inside with one of the refill prescriptions a doctor friend of his had artfully photocopied; meanwhile, I scooted over to the driver’s side of the double-parked Alfa. When he slid into the passenger seat, a satisfied grin on his face, I snarled at him that he was a junkie, always upping his intake of sleeping pills, and then always bigger pills, a pill like a Christmas tree with a drip-tube next to Aaron’s bed, and after that a pill like a church steeple that stuck out above Aaron’s street. I charged out of Enschede toward Maastricht, intentionally reckless and belligerent, hanging over the wheel like a jaw surgeon, I braked late and aggressively, tailgated every car I could. If Aaron turned the air conditioning up a notch, I turned it back down a notch. We hobbled over the potholed Belgian roads in silence, my rancor filling the car like mustard gas. Outside, industrial parks coughed noxious rubber clouds into the June skies, the asphalt cracked under our wheels. We loathed each other. Just to punish him I avoided the toll roads, lurched at 90 kph over the parched provincial asphalt—the result being that we ended up in some shitty little pitch-black town and slept in separate shitty hotel beds in a shitty fleabag hotel. The next day we drove the rest of the way to Sainte-Maxime in one surly sigh; the Barbara Ann lay in the gleaming marina, wagging its tail like a dog that knows full well something is up with its owners. We navigated out of the harbor, followed the coastline along Cannes, Antibes, Monaco, and brusquely cast anchor at San Remo, where we ate pizza with long faces and refueled.

  Once we reached the open sea things relaxed a bit. Aaron realized it was up to him to start. I eyed him through my sunglasses from the foredeck’s Jacuzzi, he stood holding the cherrywood rudder that was actually meant for a sailboat, but that I had instructed the Palmer Johnson builders to put in anyway. “How was Ennio’s funeral?” he shouted; I pretended not to hear. Five minutes later I got out of the tub, balanced my way around the helm and through the sloping salon, changed into another bikini in the bedroom and climbed back up on deck. “It sucked, of course,” I shouted in his ear.

  When he offered his condolences an hour later, I let rip. I raged about how much he pissed me off, his jealousy, his oafishness, his inane behavior—yeah, yeah, he understood that. And just to test whether he really meant it I told him I could start at McKinsey in Silicon Valley in August. “Did that Stol call you?” Aaron asked. I answered that just before we left I’d gone horseback riding with Boudewijn, and Brigitte of course, I quickly added, and because he reacted to that piece of news more maturely than I had expected, I went to the salon and brought out a bottle of white wine.

  “So how’d it go with good old Bo?”

  “That rhymes.”

  “Yup.”

  To spare him the details I made a point of the strange atmosphere in the dunes. It was weird. I’d caught an early train and taken a taxi to Black Beauty stables. After a mozzarella and tomato bread roll at the bar, the three of us rode to the coast. Boudewijn proved to be a far worse rider than Brigitte and myself: we lost him during a vigorous, spontaneous gallop along Scheveningen beach, and after ten minutes’ wait, still no Boudewijn. “He’ll be OK,” Brigitte said. When we got back to the stable in the early evening, we heard that he’d returned his mare hours earlier. The man who hosed down our horses said that “Mister Boudewijn” was thrown off his horse while scaling the dunes and had twisted his ankle, if not worse.

  Aaron laughed for the first time all week. “But instead of jumping straight into her Aston Martin,” I said, “or at least calling home, Brigitte offered me a complete tour of the stables.” More than an hour later, in the car, she suddenly gave me a worried look. “I wonder how he got home?” The couple live
d in a gray cement villa that was like a jukebox museum on the inside. “Haven’t you started dinner yet?” Brigitte asked when we entered the sparse, low-ceilinged living room and found Boudewijn with an ice pack on his ankle. He was watching the Tour de France on a flat-screen TV, a crate of 45-rpm singles next to him. “What do you think?” he barked. Out of politeness I disappeared to the bathroom, where I pretended to pee by spitting tap water into the toilet, and took my time putting on lipstick. When I got back, Brigitte was in the kitchen stir-frying spring onions and Boudewijn was setting the long glass-topped table. A tense hospitality hung over the dinner table. Boudewijn followed a sulky account of a recent renovation project on the house with a few obligatory tips for if I were to get that internship in Silicon Valley.

  “So it’s not sure yet?”

  “It is now.”

  “Did they say anything about me?”

  “About you? Yeah of course, Aaron, you’re all we talked about.”

  I chose not to say that Brigitte did in fact ask after Aaron, and rather eagerly agreed with me that I had some thinking to do about “that, um … boy,” and that we all couldn’t help thinking back on Etienne Vaessen’s wedding dinner. For my part at least, I recalled Aaron’s return from the bathroom, where he’d been hiding out for an idiotically long time, ten minutes, twenty, a half hour, in fact I’d already written him off. We gaped at him, the three of us, he looked terrible, as gray as papier-mâché, with a white tuft on the crown of his head—toilet paper, he told me later, to stop the bleeding—which made him look like a burst hard-boiled egg.