Bonita Avenue

by Peter Buwalda

  He remains silent, his impudent tongue lies in state in his mouth. They do not hear her leave, the front door slams all the more deafeningly, a grenade. The door to 59B, her own front door, hers and her little boy’s, formerly also of Siem Sigerius: she bolts it shut.

  The farmhouse, finally. He takes the gravel path around the back, shuffles onto the grass of the backyard, too dark to see his hand in front of his face. Thanks to Janis’s habit of leaving her house keys in Deventer there is a spare key hidden in the bird house at the far end of the terrace. He finds it without much trouble and walks over to the garbage can next to the workshop. He bangs mercilessly into the tree stump for chopping hardwood, clenches his teeth against the pain, and removes the worn-out socks from his feet. The left one is drenched in blood. He wraps them in the dishcloth from his head and squashes the wad as deep as possible under the cardboard boxes and scrap wood in the plastic bin.

  Strangely enough he yearns not so much for the security of his house as for Tineke, he yearns to curl up against her sleeping body. But he’s not there yet, not by a long shot. In the kitchen he removes the dishcloth-tourniquet, impatient blood immediately fills the salmon-pink gash in his shoulder. He binds it with gauze and adhesive tape. His body is covered with clotted blood, his feet are as brown as goat’s hooves. He switches off the table lamp in the living room window and walks toward the bedroom, his feet now in his running shoes. He creeps into the room, whispers “hello, sweetheart” to make sure she’s asleep and in two steps is standing in the bathroom. He showers, avoiding his shoulder as much as possible; it takes him twenty minutes, his foot stings and throbs.

  Tomorrow he’ll have to lie about her daughter, it won’t be easy, an intense anticipatory regret elicits a deep affection for his wife. He turns off the tap. It’s her daughter we’re talking about.

  The summer dies down. The months following his descent into hell are uneventful. So uneventful that it makes him nervous, this uneventfulness is a relentless burden. Tineke was not aware of his degradation, he’s relieved for that, but her ignorance only augments his isolation. He never mentioned the wound on his foot, he bluffed about the gash in his shoulder, told her it was the result of an unlucky spill at a glass-strewn frat house, he really should have dropped by a first-aid station. Not a word from Joni. Aaron no longer comes to training sessions, good, correct, he canceled their dan exam by letter to the judo association.

  Joni plays it neatly by flying off to California while they’re vacationing on Crete. Tineke is flabbergasted, but he defends her sudden departure, McKinsey does not wait for Mommy and Daddy to come back from holiday, he says, meanwhile biting his nails: every day of their vacation he plans to spill the beans, tell his wife how he really got those strange wounds, to be totally honest, but he holds his tongue. In fact he never really comes close. They’re eating souvlaki when Joni phones Tineke’s cell, he forces a cramped smile as his food goes cold; even when it’s clear that mother and daughter are carrying on a neutral, normal conversation he can’t manage to swallow a single bite.

  Back in Enschede he is greeted by relatively good news, confirmation that he did the intelligent thing: just keep your mouth shut, wait and see what happens. And what happens: that website of theirs has frozen, no new photos for several weeks, and then it vanishes from the Web entirely. Apparently they were making the best of a bad situation. He relaxes somewhat. Or is it because Joni is in America?

  Meanwhile things are very quiet indeed. Not a peep from California. It is Tineke, of course, who is most surprised. She thinks she understands why Aaron is making himself scarce, although he hasn’t yet dared tell her the judo sessions have stopped. “Siem, honey, Joni’s keeping awfully quiet, don’t you think?” This opportunity to open up, he lets pass by too. What’s more, he does just the opposite. To his own amazement he is prepared to do anything to keep Joni from blowing the whistle on him. He undertakes something extremely gutless and futile. Not to mention risky. He creates a fake e-mail address for his daughter on Yahoo and from that cursed phony out-box he sends brief messages, sometimes longer ones, to his own e-mail address. “Dear Dad and Mom and Janis, it’s terrific here, been over the Golden Gate Bridge, no phone yet but fortunately there’s e-mail. McKinsey is great but intensive, love, Joni”—that sort of drivel, and because Tineke doesn’t use e-mail herself, he prints out these stinking lies of his for her. It fills him with disgust and self-loathing, but he does it all the same.

  As though he’s being punished: no word from The Hague. He peruses the newspapers and journals until his fingers are black, reads memoirs of illustrious statesmen at bedtime. Rumor has it he’s in The Hague’s waiting room, there’s been a leak somewhere. On a Radio East talk show someone—a college student, no less—says he’s going to become Minister of Education, and the next day he has to shake off four journalists.

  Annoyingly, this vacuum fills up with self-doubt, it just happens. Isn’t he being overly self-righteous? Sometimes he thinks it downright stupid to equate that Internet site with prostitution, it’s just not the same thing; these are the moments he considers himself a narrow-minded old fart, but a minute later the taboo takes his breath away again, he almost wants to scream with misery, and he treats himself and his wife to another phony e-mail. Then, again: am I being too uptight? Am I not the one who’s a moral and ethical stick-in-the mud? A frightened, sexless man?

  While he runs the university on auto-pilot he thinks about his children. He can get his head around Wilbert’s downfall, with a mother like that, with a father like that, a father who ditches his family. He’s asked for a son like Wilbert. But Joni is another story, he tells and retells Joni’s story, which is his own story: a girl destined by him for happiness and success, a daughter to whom he offered security, gave all the attention a self-fulfilled man like himself has to offer—partly to ease his guilty conscience about Wilbert, he readily admits, but in the end she did receive all his love, not to mention reaped it, far more than he got in his own youth.

  Wednesday, October 11th. As he and Tineke sit watching the evening news, dinner plates on their laps, De Graaf rings. In a two-hour conversation, Sigerius learns that D66 will officially withdraw support for Hildo Kruidenier after the weekend, maybe earlier; the inside story is that this public hazard is dragging the party down in the polls, it’s untenable, he has to go. Kruidenier will resign, there is no other option, and therefore De Graaf wants to present Sigerius the next day as the new minister. Is he ready? More than that, he answers, and yes, he’ll be able to get to the Prime Minister’s office tomorrow morning, Kok wants to see him. Does he mind if the Interior Ministry does a security check—of course he doesn’t mind, bye Thom, for sure, thank you, I’m very pleased too.

  The next day, on his way back to Enschede following a relaxed interview with the PM, De Graaf phones again. He hears, in euphemistic terms, that the National Security people came across Wilbert, and they want to conduct a limited security investigation to rule out the possibility of blackmail.

  Blackmail—the word triggers him. During a sleepless night he ponders which of them, Wilbert or Joni, is more of a liability; he asks himself the perverse question: which is worse, murder or porn? For the first time since his undoing he gets out of bed and looks at the young women on the websites. He thinks about them. About the mystery of their choices, about Joni’s choice, about the choice of all these girls; he looks them in the eye intending to read desperation, self-destruction, insanity perhaps, regret, deep-seated sluttishness, rotten teeth, traces of abuse and neglect, or else simple, honest-to-goodness stupidity—but the only thing he sees is beauty. They are all, pretty much without exception, beautiful. Not concert pianists or doctoral students, maybe, but above-average attractive women; you could also say: as looks go, successful young women, thoroughbreds in possession of eyes, hair, feet, legs, hands with which they could make it out in the civilized world, could snag themselves potent, healthy marriage partners, land themselves decent jobs. He is no sociologist, nor
a biologist, but couldn’t these girls have in fact been born into decent families? To good-looking parents with balanced, sturdy genes, with genetic material that produces daughters that every man wants to have, or touch—or barring that, at least look at? Behind every nude photo worth paying for are parents who conceived a desirable child. Behind every sex site is a man like him.

  A man like Theun Beers—who’d have known? The next day he does something off the wall, something he never thought of before all this mess began. He goes into a record shop, tries to remember the name of Joni’s begetter’s band, and when he does dredge up the name he goes through the bins of LPs in search of Mojo Mama, against his better judgment, but what do you know, he finds one. Stupid City Blues, it’s called, a battered copy from 1973; on the cover, a photo of the Utrecht Cathedral tower, with—undoubtedly a scissors-and-paste job—an equally tall electric guitar leaning up against it.

  With a fascination you’d sooner expect from Joni, but which she always denied—so with borrowed fascination—he studies the photo of the man whose appearance he’d nearly forgotten, but whom he immediately recognizes as her father, because good God, she does resemble Theun. The same healthy blondness, the same proud, self-confident expression, the broad face, the erect posture. The spitting image of that virile, dark blond fellow who on the back cover of Stupid City Blues is shown walking along a river, probably the Vecht, the guitar from the front cover slung over his shoulder like a Viking sword, a rock ’n’ roll guy who named his daughters after Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin. This is family. The DNA drips off it.

  Before listening to the LP on the turntables and headphones up front, before determining that Theun Beers has a flat, uninteresting voice, he stares mesmerized at that picture. According to the caption, the figures a few steps behind him are a drummer, bassist, and pianist: like Beers, twenty-somethings with sideburns and floppy hats or Sandokan turbans over their long hair, but guys who pale in comparison to their frontman in charisma and photogenics. Theun Beers wears leather pants, and between the lapels of his open suede jacket glows a brazen torso as leathery as his trousers.

  On Sunday he and Tineke stroll pseudo-relaxed through Het Rutbeek, they discuss the immediate future and how he will inevitably be sleeping in a pied-à-terre in The Hague on weekdays. Suddenly it’s all moving so fast: on Monday morning he hears from Kok himself that the Cabinet very much wants him, “we’ve got a green light”; the next day the eight o’clock news opens with Kruidenier’s dramatic exit. Current affairs programs spend the rest of the evening speculating on a successor, his name keeps coming up. He has already informed his university deans and the key members of his staff by telephone. He and his spokesman go through what he will have to do tomorrow afternoon, after the news from The Hague. A special meeting of the Board of Directors and the trustees has been convened to address the changeover, there is champagne, he makes a farewell circuit through the administrative wing, starts removing things from his office walls.

  At two o’clock that afternoon the hurricane starts swirling; the campus is swarming with news media, he gives the same brief reaction a few times and leaves the administrative wing via a side door. The next morning his new chauffeur picks him up, and to his surprise his department secretary is sitting on the backseat. Conversing calmly, they drive to Huis ten Bosch, where after his swearing-in he drinks two cups of tea with the queen; the world is spinning again, but now at double time.

  He recognizes the pattern. The first weeks are killingly hectic, he puts in fourteen-, fifteen-hour days, hurtles between Zoetermeer and The Hague, sees more civil servants, advisory panels, and union officials than is good for a person. He endures his first parliamentary debate, wades through stacks of dossiers—but his head is calming down. This is how he’s always done it: smother private problems in demanding work. He enjoys his new arena, the responsibility, the national interest that, like a horde of hooligans, storms the Cabinet where he is suddenly a member.

  Back in his apartment on the Hooikade, as he showers off the new reality, Aaron’s house on the Vluchtestraat seems farther away than ever, and he can hardly imagine he actually smashed through that sliding glass door. From his cozy Hague apartment, that balcony where he lay bleeding seems like a fantasy, a dream, a nightmare. For the past few days he’s been toying with the idea of calling McKinsey, asking for Joni’s e-mail address, the real one. Maybe he’ll muster up the courage to send her something, something sensible, something … fatherly?

  But then he himself is the recipient. The text message comes in on his private cell phone during parliamentary question time. The Christian Democrats’ education expert has summoned him to the sitting with a query about the competitive position of Dutch research institutes. He is early, it is only his second time in this situation, before it’s his turn the Defense Minister takes questions about the Joint Strike Fighter. The practically empty chamber seems immense, bigger than on television, questioners walk in and out, the minister’s response elicits another question. Kok comes in, walks behind the television cameras. The PM grunts something that sounds like “how’s it going,” sits down next to him and thumbs through a stack of paper. To kill time during the ensuing airplane discussion between his colleague and a defense specialist, he takes his phone out of his pocket. “Unknown sender,” just an 06 number. He opens the message.

  Wanker listen. I know you’re fucking your stepdaughter on the Internet. Want me to keep your jerk-off secret quiet?

  He glances at the PM. The electrical field surrounding the boss of the Netherlands: its force dissipates. Which throws Sigerius off balance. He has to grasp the veneer tabletop so as not to tumble over backward. But he forgets to first set down that instrument of calamity, he just lets go of it, the phone bangs against the edge of the table and clatters to the floor. He grimaces sheepishly at Kok, who glowers at him, he slides his chair back a bit and disappears under the table. His temples throbbing, he gasps for breath.

  Christ. Now the shit’s gonna hit the fan.

  He sees the gleaming phone, half of it anyway, the anthracite back panel has come loose, it’s lying on the floor between Kok’s feet. The Speaker of the House calls his name, it’s his turn, he looks up at the PM like a puppy dog, mumbles “sorry” and points under Kok’s desk, “I’ll just get that.” He grabs the bit of plastic from between the heavy black leather shoes, robust labor union footwear that would cost a Berlusconi in the polls, and struggles to his feet. He sets the dismantled cell phone on the desk top and hurries to the Speaker’s lectern. A capable body double answers the questions that are fired at him.

  As soon as he is liberated, he leaves the parliament building without so much as a glance in any direction, and has his Volvo deliver him to his department in Zoetermeer. Only once he has closed his office door behind him, high up and deep in his department, does he reassemble the phone. It comes to life, searches for a network, and immediately starts vibrating: two new messages. The first is from, of all people, Isabelle Orthel. Hey, just saw you on TV, long time no see. How’s things? The second is from the same unknown 06 number. Went all pale, didn’t you. Shit-scared, you fucking wanker. Make me an offer.

  He slams the cell phone onto his desk, stares at it for a bit, and picks it up again. He’s got a meeting with his department secretary and under-minister in five minutes; instead of preparing for it he fumbles a reply.

  Who are you?

  For the rest of the week he agonizes over that question. He dials the number about four times, each time gets put through to a female voice who reads out the numbers, followed by a beep. Once, he leaves a message, firm and clear: Identify yourself, friend, or drop the goddamn charade. Once, somebody answers but doesn’t say anything, he keeps asking who he’s dealing with, until, following a derisive chuckle—a gruff man-laugh—they hang up.

  His options are few. Aside from himself, only Joni knows of his “involvement,” maybe Aaron too—and he’d sooner bite off his tongue. He rules out either of them being behind the
se perverse texts. So one of them must have blabbed. Or is he underestimating Aaron? Could he have pissed Aaron off? What were you doing in my house? What kind of vacation did you treat us to? Something like that? No, it can’t be. The kid isn’t crazy. No, one of them talked. The person who is hounding him is well informed, knows that Joni is Linda and knows about him—in other words, knows everything, and that infuriates him, he’s mad at the asshole himself, but at Joni and Aaron too: why did they talk?

  Wait a sec … He scrutinizes the text messages again. Could they be from someone who recognized Joni, just like he recognized her—why not?—and is now taking a shot in the dark? A wild guess? Who would do something like this? Somebody at Tubantia? A student?

  In any case, it hits the mark. His old fear returns, a paralyzing combination of panicky self-preservation, that first and foremost, and an overwhelming fatherly concern. Not only is his ass on the line (a mutated ass, Siem Sigerius’s ass has expanded into a network of interests, contacts, expectations, responsibilities; a reputation like a crystal chandelier that under no circumstances may be allowed to come crashing down), but Joni’s too. The illusion that Joni would come out of this unscathed, that everything would eventually return to how it was, a cautious flicker of hope that has provided him with some relief these past months, has been destroyed.

  During his next obligatory question hour, exactly what he is afraid of happening, happens. Perhaps that is why the text message hits him right in the gut. I can see you, wanker. You’re looking pale. Been jerking off too much or just sleeping badly?

  When, later that afternoon, his chauffeur drives him through an autumn storm to Utrecht, where he has to address a meeting of the national Student Union, he asks him to stop at a roadside restaurant. Although he has resolved to ignore the stalker, he retreats to the men’s room and, trembling with rage and hardly in the mood for a friendly chat, calls his old secretary. Who has asked for his telephone number recently? Only journalists. No one else? No, not that she can recall, and anyway she never gives out telephone numbers, he knows that.