Bonita Avenue

by Peter Buwalda

  “I’m on my way home from work,” Aaron said. “I’m kind of under the weather.”

  “About-face, Bever,” Björn said. “There’s a party. It’ll perk you up. We’re going to celebrate your bachelorhood.”

  “Who says I’m a bachelor?”

  “I do,” said Björn. He wiped his hand over his muscled ferret-snout.

  “Everyone does,” said Murk.

  “Your lady told me herself,” Björn said. “Your ex-lady.”

  Actually, I do hate you guys, he thought. Maybe this kind of jerk was the reason he’d fled Utrecht, not a thought he’d ever admitted to Joni, who surely wouldn’t have understood. Since you always saw Björn and Murk together, Joni gave them the amusing nickname “Björk.” “I was at De Kater yesterday, and guess who was there? Björk.” The complete ease with which she had these braggadocios in her pocket.

  In fact, Joni knew little about the Utrecht debacle that had been on his mind these last few weeks. He kept all references to it vague. After high school his mother had packed a student cookbook and teddy bear for him, and off he went to study Dutch in Utrecht. It was a catastrophe. He flunked two-thirds of his exams, and due to unfinished hazing business at a fraternity he missed the department introduction, so that he didn’t know anyone who could pilot him through the winter semester. He pined away in the room he rented from his great-aunt in Overvecht, a suburb with asbestos flats and its own station with two sets of rails to lie down on. Utrecht’s nightlife was out of reach; from the sixth floor he stared out over a dark-green ocean of grass, his great-aunt’s granite balcony was the edge of the edge. His insomnia thrived, he often woke at four, four-thirty in the morning, unlocked the door and sat freezing to death on a plastic garden chair for hours on end, until it was time to go to class. He would then grapple his way into town on his great-aunt’s undersized ladies’ bike, performing depressing slaloms through drafty Utrecht-North, which now reminded him of his cycling expeditions through post-explosion Enschede. He noticed from the pillowcases (also borrowed from his great-aunt) that his hair was starting to fall out, just like the bristles of her silky toothbrush that he used on the sly because he kept forgetting to buy his own.

  “I talked to her a while ago,” Björn lisped.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Who do you think? Your lady, of course. She was in the Hole, a send-off from her debating team.” The Hole: a dank underground drinking cave that literally bored into the Oude Markt. News about Joni in the Hole was always bad news. “One thimble of Bacardi,” drawled Björn, “and she’s pushing her tits up against you. She’ll tell you anything you want to know. And also what you don’t want to know. And forever pressing those party-knockers against you. Pity she’s buggered off to America.”

  His big eyes were slanted, the whites were yellow. One way or the other, this ferret never failed to mention Joni’s breasts. Knaak couldn’t not talk about them. Yes, he hated Björn, even more than he hated Murk.

  “ ‘I’ll bet you’re a free agent now,’ I say to her. ‘How’d you know that?’ she says. You know how ladies say that at 4 a.m. in the Hole.” Björn put on a girlie voice. “ ‘How’d you know that?’ ‘Well, I can feel it on two things,’ I say. ‘Two pointy pieces of hard evidence.’ ”

  Murk chortled softly. Björn, who only laughed either out of strategic considerations or schadenfreude, put on a serious face. Aaron felt, to his surprise, no jealousy, did not taste the battery acid he used to taste, nor the explosive, childish rage over a pair of nipples poking into the wrong male body—only loathing. What he’d have liked most of all was to tell these two he was a millionaire, and which tits had made him just that. To check himself, he held the wide point of Björn’s necktie between his fingers. The blue and orange tie was knotted in a full Windsor, which according to Ian Fleming was the mark of a cad.

  “Paws off the tie, geek,” said Van der Doelen, and wound up as if to slug him. Aaron decided to play along and let go. These ties were a symbol for the outside world that Knaak and Van der Doelen were officers of the Student Union, the crowning glory of their Tubantia years. Murk especially had a knack for looking back on his student years like an honorary minister, a twenty-three-year-old assessing his past over a good cigar. Of course it was Sigerius, as always, who had put the crown on his head. Three years ago there was a sudden and urgent need for an organization that would “steer all student activism.” A student union, after the Anglo-American model. He had seen how Sigerius had screwed another administrative layer onto Enschede’s student life, just like you sealed the lid onto a jar of canned peas. His hidden agenda was to counteract the exodus from campus. Students who were initially drawn to the compact, friendly, over-organized campus, usually thanks to enthusiastic parents, were now taking rooms in downtown Enschede, in a real student house near the bars and fraternities on the Grote Markt. It was 2000: you couldn’t lock up Dutch college students in the sticks anymore. But now that once-provincial area was packed with hundreds of millions worth of real estate: student flats, faculty housing, a cafeteria and restaurant, a supermarket, an infirmary, a dentist, barber shop, swimming pool, library, pubs, theatres, basement party rooms, athletic fields, works of art—Tubantia was the campus. The Student Union was to be the engine behind it. Sigerius budgeted a heap of money for it, and recruited Björk to mind the shop.

  “Let’s go, pussypants,” Murk said. “Your daddy-in-law will be there too.”

  Aaron shook his head.

  Björn laughed at something, but the sound was drowned out by the rustling of so many leaves surrounding them. “What,” he said. “Sigerius is your pal, isn’t he? Or are you chicken?”

  Aaron suddenly went red-hot, the air that closed in on him felt like a furnace, it could ignite at any moment. He was ashamed, he was overcome by an explosive shame. But what for? From Knaak’s and Van der Doelen’s mugs you could see he had a strange look about him. His embarrassment had nothing to do with Joni’s breasts in the Hole, nor with the fact that he had wholeheartedly distributed them throughout the world, boobs that would bob like driftwood around the Web for years to come—no, he was ashamed because the guys were right: he was chicken.

  “What’s with that Student Union?” he asked off the cuff. “It sounds so namby-pamby. In Utrecht it wouldn’t ever get off the ground, in a real varsity town the frats wouldn’t let themselves be bossed around by some student union. I thought that student associations didn’t give a damn about the university.”

  As usual, he was only parroting Etienne Vaessen. To his friend, who had been something of a big shot on the Utrecht frat scene, he defended the campus tooth and nail, but as soon as he stood at the bar with guys like this he became a mini-Etienne and did his Utrecht veteran act. Sometimes he couldn’t resist lying outright that he was a fratter, and if they pressed him he would bluff his way forward, delving into repertoire borrowed from Etienne. “A real frat lampoons the university admin,” he said.

  “Your point being?” asked Björn. As opposed to Murk, who was at a total loss for words, and whose body hung like a cheap sausage over his handlebars, Björn sprang to attention, his legs spread like a commando, the crossbar of his sticker-covered bike in his low crotch. He wore neatly polished, snug-fitting brogues straight out of the student handbook. His weird, glowing snake-eyes glared belligerently.

  “Real fratters don’t give a shit about how their university’s run,” Aaron said nervously. “They just do whatever they goddamn please.”

  Before Björn responded, he slid his pronounced lips up and down over that big set of teeth of his. “You hear that, Van der Doelen? Bever here is in the know. Now that Sigerius has dropped him like a piece of dog shit he’s going to tell us just how things should go.” He shook his disgruntled ferret-head. “The school newspaper photographer feels that we should do whatever we goddamn please.” He looked straight at Aaron, mockingly. “For years he’s got his head up Sigerius’s ass and now he thinks were ass-lickers. You hear that?”

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nbsp; “I hear it,” Murk said earnestly. “Big talker in the bar, Siem this, Siem that.”

  His nausea returned. He might be five years older than these guys, but the world started spinning as though he were on a carnival ride, the rustling treetops became a green morass that whispered to him like a theatre prompter. Go on, tell them.

  “Sigerius is leaving,” he said. It sounded raspy; he cleared his throat. “He’s through with your campus. He’s going to be the new Minister of Education. I’ve known for months.”

  “Bullshit, Bever,” said Björn. “Where were you at Sigerius’s barbecue, anyway? Your bosom buddy doesn’t even invite you around anymore.”

  “He’s going to be a Cabinet minister. Still a secret, FYI.”

  Björn sniffed and spat into the bushes. “Now that his lady’s off fucking Jim in America—” he said to Murk.

  “Jeff,” said Murk.

  “Now that his lady’s off fucking Jim and Jeff in America,” Björn conceded, “and Daddy can’t bear the sight of butt-kisser anymore, butt-kisser’s gonna spread some secrets.”

  Aaron wanted to respond, but his stomach beat him to it. It clenched like a fist, so that the remaining gall made its way up his esophagus. Yellow bile oozed out of his mouth and dribbled over his handlebars. Björn yanked his bike backward.

  “You’ve been boozing, Bever,” Murk said. “Should’ve said so earlier.” He laughed uneasily. “Go curl up in your basket, punk.”

  Björn, meanwhile, was back on his bike, and before he rode off he gave Aaron’s baggage carrier a firm kick.

  13

  Brilliant June sunlight carved the linoleum floor of the former classroom into slices. We both sat looking at the grainy, glossy wooden crucifix on the white stucco wall, so colossal and three-dimensional that it persistently caught your eye. Jesus as hand-hewn athlete in the romantic Tyrol shepherd-with-flock style I recalled from ski vacations in Val Gardena. Every drop of sap would ooze out like blood.

  “You hang him up?” I asked to break the silence. Wilbert seemed better at silences than I was. We sat opposite each other, me on an uncomfortable wooden chair, him sprawled on a formless thrift-store armchair covered in light-brown patchwork leather.

  “Nah, the Romans did,” he answered.

  I didn’t even realize he’d made a joke, that’s how nervous I was. I can barely remember what we talked about for the first half hour, or should I say: what I talked about, agitated, high-speed, haphazard, like a wound-up toy mouse. Wilbert, cracking his knuckles, asking the occasional question. The whole time I saw myself through his eyes. I regretted my coquettish miniskirt, I detested my droning account of my internship in California, I cursed the Quote I’d bought at the train station newsstand and that had slipped out of the bag.

  I focused on that crucifix, perhaps out of embarrassment, but also not to have to look at that other scene of suffering: Wilbert’s face. What had happened? It was as though it belonged to two different people; the right half of his face, the undamaged side, showed a grim, ill-shaved man who was beginning to resemble his father: the same broad fleshiness as Siem, the same small nose whose right nostril moved when he talked. The eye was still black as crude oil, but duller and smaller than it used to be, accentuated by the gray bags underneath. I had trouble telling whether the healthy half radiated bitterness, or maybe even cruelty, because the gruesome left side demanded all the attention. It was twisted, almost melted. His left cheek and corner of his mouth drooped and puckered as though there were no skull underneath, the pale skin hung like an empty rubber bag. His lower eyelid sagged under its own weight, showing the reddish-white insides. When he blinked only the good side closed, the left side stayed open while the eyeball rotated to all white. Every couple of minutes a globule of drool threatened to escape from the corner of his sagging mouth, and he would slurp it back up. It was the sound I’d heard over the telephone.

  “Do you have to be religious to live here?”

  “Preferably not.”

  “Preferably not. OK.”

  As always, he was sizing me up, in so far that was possible with that one watery eye. “Sometimes I wonder,” he said, “what exactly they do want. Why they take in megamorons like us. Nobody getting rich off us, see. They keep pourin’ money in.” He seemed to be mulling it over; I was relieved for him to be the one talking for now. “I guess their thing is to save souls. For them, every convert counts. And as long as they’re at it, may as well be hardcore sinners. You have to be rotten to the core, otherwise you ain’t gettin’ in.”

  Although his Dutch had clearly deteriorated, his theory had something to it. And he knew himself well enough to use the term megamoron, a pretty accurate description, albeit an indirect one.

  “Do you want to stay?”

  “Sure. As long as I can stand it. You can’t do nothing here. No smoking, no drinking. No drugs.”

  “Of course, they’re helping you reintegrate, that’s good.” Genesis: your bridge to society—I had looked it up on the Internet before getting in the train to Amsterdam—Catholic, locations in ten cities. Applications accepted from prison; ex-convicts were only admitted if they were “motivated” to give their life “new meaning.” Sounded all right to me.

  “That’s not the point,” Wilbert barked. “I can fill in my own fucking forms. I can live where I want. I don’t need them, see, I’m just using them, their, what do they call it … their compassion.”

  He yawned, stretched his arms above his head, and pushed his compact chest forward; the overwashed cotton of his T-shirt was yellowed in the armpits. He wore camouflage army pants and generic sneakers. His body was bloatedly muscular, a hard, round belly—a gift from his father—swelled between his thick thighs. On the dusty rattan coffee table in between us lay a copy of Nieuwe Revu, some dried-up tangerine peels, and a weird object: two short sticks, handles actually, connected to each other by a two-inch chain. “What’s that?” I asked, nodding at it.

  I spent the whole trip from Enschede to Amsterdam wondering what I was going to say to Wilbert. What to talk about with someone you perjured in court? Ten years had passed, I’d had ten years to think it over, and I couldn’t come up with anything better than this?

  “Karate sticks. Point is, they’re different here. These religious people are selfless. Take Jacob, he’s completely selfless.”

  “Jacob?”

  “My mentor. The guy gets up at six every morning.” He looked at me. What was I supposed to do, whistle with admiration?

  “Then he bikes out here from Watergraafsmeer and sits in the kitchen waiting for the deliveries from the bakery and the grocery store. Every morning, see? He puts out the bread, the milk, the apples, and the bananas, drinks coffee. Only then does he have his breakfast. Half a loaf of peperkoek with butter.”

  I nodded.

  “Spends the rest of the day fixing shit. Other people’s shit. This morning two Yugoslavs showed up, they’d come to have a chat with one of our guys. He must’ve smelled them or something, ’cause he climbed out his window and shimmied up the drainpipe to the roof. Lay there flat against the roof tiles.”

  Strangely enough, I pictured him lying there, Wilbert, clinging to the steep, tea-cozy-shaped roof of the pretentious urban villa where we were sitting, a building that until the 1930s had housed the Free School. High-ceilinged classrooms with ornate woodwork, anthroposophical slogans etched into the tiled walls, once intended for children from the intellectual class. Today the villa was home to a very different sort of resident.

  “And so Jacob has to get rid of these chumps. And then get a ladder and haul that dude off the roof. And that’s how it goes, see, six days a week, for twenty years. If you ask him why he does it, he says: because Jesus loves me, and he loves you too. A selfless man. Doesn’t even get paid, y’know.”

  That last part was hard to believe, that Jacob didn’t get paid, in fact it all sounded pretty soppy to me, but, I thought, maybe he really was touched. I looked at the crucifix. Did he still believe?
Once we all went to Drenthe, he and the four of us, a short vacation early on in his year with us in the farmhouse, we’d rented a National Parks bungalow, I think to get used to one another. So there we were in this forest ranger’s cabin, sitting around a table that wobbled so much my mother flipped it upside down and took a bread knife to one of the legs—to Wilbert’s amazement, because of course the only thing he ever saw his mother take a bread knife to was a cardboard carton of supermarket wine. And since it did nothing but rain the whole time, we played Risk and Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, which pissed Wilbert off because even Janis knew more than him. His religious outlook, or what passed for it, revealed itself during those gaming hours: there was a question about Hinduism or Buddhism and Wilbert earnestly declared that there had to be something between heaven and earth, he did believe in a God, his mother’s soul had to have gone somewhere. At which point Siem made an attempt to gently instruct him—but in fact he jumped down his throat; our live-in atheist was determined to convince Wilbert of the impossibility of an afterlife, tossing around studies done by scientists he “knew personally.” It was a red flag to Wilbert. “Know-it-all,” he said, hard as nails, and nothing else. I seem to remember hiking through the woods the next afternoon, could have been later, to a dolmen. Alongside that enormous pile Wilbert stumbled upon a rock with a cavity that had filled up with rainwater, and in that little pool we saw tadpoles swimming around. He asked if I saw the “fathead,” that was Siem, he said, and the pool he was swimming around in was the universe he supposedly knew everything about. And those two other tadpoles, those were me and him, to whom Siem sat there hollering that nothing existed except our little pool.