Bonita Avenue

by Peter Buwalda

  “Prosaic” is too nice a word for how it all went. The youngest intern there, I was sitting in on a conference call with a McKinsey team for a page-by-page review of a final report for an Asian client; I was nauseous and the itch on my breasts was driving me insane. Don’t scratch, don’t scratch; if somebody had asked me anything I’d have answered, “don’t scratch,” but no one asked anything, giving me plenty of time to put two and two together: the itch, my late period, and all that the Enschede palaver had truly made me forget—that back on Corsica Aaron and I had had unprotected sex.

  I got up, white as a sheet; the associate principal who chaired that witches’ coven asked if I was “OK” and whether they should call a doctor. Yeah, an abortion doctor, I thought, but left the conference room with my hand over my mouth, took the glass elevator downstairs, nodded weakly at the receptionist, and walked straight to the drugstore on Palo Alto Square where I bought two different pregnancy test kits and peed on them both, one after the other, back in the pueblo. Fat pink stripes. I sat there on the toilet until my legs fell asleep. Damn it to hell, I was pregnant by Aaron Bever.

  I lay in bed for the rest of the week. Too sick to work. At night I puffed my sniveling self up into a zeppelin of self-reproach, and when I jolted awake in the morning from muddy dreams, that ink-black airship hung above the pine trees, casting a shadow and on the verge of combustion. I only got up toward afternoon, ate a little something, and marched through the woods, furious, overwrought, stamping pine cones to splinters. My atheism teetered: it was difficult not to see the punitive hand of some god or other behind this new ordeal, that damn God of Wilbert’s. I cursed the hunk of wood on Wilbert’s wall and at the same time prayed for a miscarriage: Dear Lord, please let me be rid of this, I don’t want it. Internet pregnancy forums list all kinds of things mothers-to-be should expressly not do, and so I worked overtime, slept too little, drank as much alcohol as possible, at home, up in that little room, wine, whiskey, vodka. Weekends I ate with those two pocket-sized French girls, who chatted with each other in incomprehensible Parisian, perhaps about my cooking (they invariably sliced open the meat I had cooked for them, scrunched up their tiny noses and brought it back to the kitchen to finish the job), perhaps about my constant nausea. I called the Stanford University Family Planning Service. I e-mailed Boudewijn.

  He phoned while I was sitting in the empty breakfast room in Liège eating Nutella on French bread.

  “Where are you?”

  “Liège.”

  “And. How did he react? They gave Arend a downer—and then? What’d he say? Tell.”

  “And then nothing, Bo. There’s nothing much to tell. My ex-boyfriend’s got a psychosis, a whopper of a psychosis. He thinks the sun is made of yellow jam he can smear on his toast. It’s really awful.”

  “So he’s not going to miss the little one for the time being.”

  Only months later, when I was less self-absorbed, when I wasn’t afraid Boudewijn would find out I’d been trying to unload a $1.5 million boat, when I no longer dreaded seeing my parents, when we were already safely ensconced on our hill in San Francisco—only then did I figure out what he had been up to. In retrospect I understood his loyalty, his empathy, the earnestness of his e-mails, how he managed to get me to cancel the appointment at that Stanford Family thing and think “for at least five minutes per day” about “the joys of motherhood,” a phrase that leapt with surprising ease to the lips of this fifty-year-old childless man. In retrospect I understood his satisfaction when I passed the twelve-week mark and announced my pregnancy at McKinsey. The story behind his smile at Schiphol Airport, where he whisked me into a business-class lounge I called “louche” and why he, in the middle of that joint and with a mouth full of crab salad, had laughed so hard. “I’ve got really sad news,” he said, “Brigitte and I are splitting up. I’ve filed for divorce. We’re driving each other bonkers.” Then he put me on the train to Enschede and as a farewell laid his ringed hand briefly on my belly. (And still I hadn’t caught on, no idea that he’d already started finagling his transfer to San Francisco, no idea that he was already planning to cradle my head during delivery. A few years ago I dug up some old e-mails from that time, and sure enough, there it was in black-and-white: in October 2000 Boudewijn wrote that Brigitte was making a big deal—rightfully so, he felt—of his infertility.)

  Now he said: “And soon, your parents. Be sure to greet your father for me.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  That boat. The fucking Barbara Ann. We really had to get rid of it, preferably in one shot, one viewing, because I was not about to travel back here from the States a second time. She was moored in the marina where we’d left her the previous summer. I was to meet the potential buyer the day after tomorrow in Sainte-Maxime, a wealthy American ICT guy I had met through McKinsey who spent his winters in Monaco and had recently been on the lookout for a Palmer Johnson like ours.

  I crossed into France well before noon and decided to push on until Lyons, so as to arrive in Sainte-Maxime early the next day and take my time readying the boat. The route de soleil was, on my own in the Alfa, a different experience altogether: a bleak, monotonous streak through restlessly leafy hills, the sleepy aire restaurants and parking lots, no sunflowers, no traffic jams, no expectations. I had to do my best not to constantly think back on the Vluchtestraat and what I’d seen there. Why did things always go differently than you expected? Hours of dark toll roads later I found myself in Christmassy downtown Lyons, booked into a hotel with a sagging bed where I didn’t get a wink of sleep.

  At the end of November my mother called me at McKinsey. She caught me so by surprise I didn’t even have time to die of shock. Suddenly I was sitting in a full office courtyard with my mother on the line—I had no idea what to expect, and in fact I’ve never figured out whether she was just pretending everything was hunky-dory, or if everything really was hunky-dory. She was as sweet as pie, gave no indication that she knew anything about the glass door incident. She asked if I would come to Val-d’Isère for Christmas. The half-second delay allowed me to invent an excuse: sorry, Mom, tons of work to do over Christmas. A few days later I really was sorry, because since deciding to keep the baby, something else was growing in me as well, an idea, a plan, a notion that I had started to cherish as though I were carrying twins. I took folic acid to strengthen them both at once.

  The next morning, completely wiped out, I drove through Provence. Despite the mild weather I was still cold; a profound melancholy began to seep into my bones. At Chambéry, the exit I would use tomorrow to head back up to Val-d’Isère, I saw a bright speck of light. A minuscule hole in my perception, as though an extra-intense white heat pricked through the day’s movie screen. I glanced at the dashboard, at my hands on the sporty three-spoke steering wheel, and then back to the road.

  “Fuck.”

  Here we go again. I’d been asking for this for weeks, I was well aware of that. The last one was before the fireworks disaster, so I’d had, believe it or not, six migraine-free months behind me, I had warded them off with abracadabras and incantations. But the day of reckoning had arrived. Within minutes the illuminated speck spread into a fist-sized, swirling diamond of light—more eager than usual, it seemed, as though someone wanted to fast-forward the misery. The aura phase, the doctors call it. I had been familiar with the routine since high school: fifteen minutes from now all I’d see would be fireworks, everything would become a dancing, burning, full-screen light show. After a while the diamond would disappear, followed by a half-hour respite. Then the migraine would hammer a nail into my temple.

  Too nauseous and blinded to drive, I maneuvered the Alfa into the first possible lay-by, turned off the engine, and rested my head on the steering wheel. All I had in my purse was paracetamol, no Imigran, which is what I needed now. The box was already empty before I left for California. There might be some ibuprofen 600 on the boat. I put on my sunglasses, but the frenzied flickering was on the inside: thoughtburn. I s
wallowed three paracetamols and concentrated as best I could on Christmas in Val-d’Isère.

  The baby would fix everything. I didn’t tell Boudewijn, simply because he didn’t have a damn thing to do with it—but this idea did, in the end, keep me from having the abortion. Night after night I lay on the communal sofa of the pueblo, tossing pine cones into the fireplace (the strange hardness of the scales, their crackle and hiss as soon as the flames flared up and made short work of them), brooding, reasoning, feeling; and the more my waist vanished and my belly swelled, the more I realized what a trump card I had in my hand. For the first time since the sliding glass door I allowed thoughts of Corsica in, tried to recall the emotions of the vacation. We knew full well what we were doing when we made love. On the boat, on the way back in Nancy. We wanted this child. It wasn’t conceived by mistake. I knew Aaron would acknowledge paternity at once, he would put everything aside to raise the child. And damn it, it was on its way—irrevocable. And wouldn’t this irrevocability cancel out that other irrevocability? A child, Aaron’s and mine … Did I realize what I was doing? I lay there on a sofa in Silicon Valley making Siem a grandfather. And after fully realizing that, I knew without a doubt: this thing in my belly would be stronger than what drove us apart. We’d become father and mother and grandpa. I would birth us back together.

  The fires of purgatory subsided. I drove 160 kph all the way to Hyères, where the freeway ended and the headache began. The coastal road that looked so enticingly short on the map turned out to be a small intestine: endless hairpin turns and rocky cliffs, I had to constantly alternate between gas and brake. Rather than its azure sparkle, the Mediterranean showed its true colors: an indifferent black drink. I lowered a window, the ice-cold sea air screwed itself into my throbbing temples. Saint-Tropez exit, now that’s more like it. As soon as I reached Sainte-Maxime I’d coast straight to the marina, park the Alfa as close as possible to the Barbara Ann. In my thoughts I dived into the water and swam like a dolphin toward the medicine chest.

  I wove around a cliff and suddenly, way down to the right, saw the slender little white boats alongside what looked like endless tables set for dinner. I drove too fast across a bridge and descended to where the tortuous route nationale turned into the beachfront boulevard. By now I was howling from the pain, a monotonous yammer.

  Winter was very much in charge here; chairs were stacked and parasols tightly wound shut on the café terraces opposite the moorings. I had my choice of parking spots. I killed the engine—silence at last—and rolled my head and shoulders. For a few seconds I knew for sure I was going to throw up. Breathe calmly. Hair loose, now. Catch your breath, swallow, just swallow it back. I took a swig of mineral water and got out.

  The sea wind blew straight through my coat and what little I had on underneath. Where was that sloop? The glazed kitsch that the marina exuded at the height of summer had gone into hibernation. The rows of winterized yachts displayed themselves at their hardest, the pleated white plastic, the polished wood, the tinted windows that were meant to express speed and exclusivity—floating insults, that’s what they were, we’d given the middle finger to soberness and self-restraint.

  Aaron threw a wrench into everything. What kind of father would he make? Who would let that kind of guy become a father? It had all seemed so logical, the two of us showing up in Val-d’Isère unannounced, you couldn’t really call it a surprise anymore, it would … I walked along the stone paving to the marina office, a low white building with a roof deck. The door was locked: in offseason it was open only between three and five. So much the better, no stammering in French to an unintelligible harbor master. I had pictured us making our surprise entrance at Hans and Ria’s, waltzing into that gingerbread house of theirs, serious but excited. I glanced at myself in the reflection of the office window: spikes of tousled hair framed a face like sweaty old cheese that begged for sympathy. The same girl that cycled from home to the campus in a free fall to Mommy. I’d inherited the migraines from her, but she gave me no sympathy. “I get headaches too sometimes, Joni. You really can talk normally.”

  If he saw me like this, his elder daughter with a pregnant body, everything between us would simply evaporate, I was sure of it. We needn’t say a word about last summer, or maybe in fact we should, those million-year-old mountains might be just the place to get it out in the open. We could do whatever we wanted. We would do what was best. And after New Year’s, Aaron and I would get into the car and drive to the farmhouse. And just like after the fireworks disaster, we’d stay. And I would give birth in my parents’ farmhouse.

  My temples throbbing, I fished the keys to the cabin out of my purse and walked up the third pier; if I remembered correctly we were moored at the very end. And yes, around a forty-five-degree bend in the walkway, among the rest of the big boys, I spotted the undulating of a familiar tush. Barbara Ann’s high-class ass. I picked up speed as I walked along the black water, gritting my teeth against the screech of a million seagulls. The painkillers were up on the deck, in one of the compartments in the wheelhouse, or else in the bathroom of the big cabin in the nose of the boat. “Hi Babs,” Aaron would always say as he climbed onto the stern, and I caught myself parroting him. The steps up to the sun deck were covered in gull shit; brownish water had collected in the gutters and corners. If only I could pull the tarp off the purple sunbeds and lie down. Instead, I opened the doors of the pilothouse. Not without regret: I recalled how the Palmer Johnson instructor had taught Aaron and me how to maneuver these twenty meters of luxury safely in and out of harbors in just a week.

  I sat down on one of the leather captain’s chairs and opened a cupboard next to the rudder. The first-aid kit. Band-aids, gauze, scissors, Aaron’s temazepam—ibuprofen. I ripped open the sachet and washed it down with a few gulps of mineral water. And now, flat out. The guy would be showing up in just over four hours. So what if it’s messy. I pictured myself on the large round bed, felt the luxuriant lift of the mattress, shades drawn, telephone off.

  I went down the stairs, too fast maybe, because as I passed the U-shaped sofa in the salon I had to grab the edge of the table. Vomit filled my mouth. I staggered into the kitchen and puked into the sink. The fancy faucet ran as though it was last used yesterday; I rinsed my mouth, hoping I hadn’t puked up the magic powder. In fact it really was a hell of a mess down here, you could see we took off back home in a hurry: two crumpled-up swimsuits of Aaron’s; dishes, washed but not put away; tools I had no idea we’d ever used. On the dining table, an open bottle of uncorked rosé.

  How sick was Aaron? How unwelcome was this surprise now? What was I supposed to tell them about the father of my child?

  Beyond the salon was a guest cabin you had to pass through to get to the master suite, a roomy sluice with two sofa beds, never used, ditto the smallish shower cubicle. I squeezed through it and opened the door at the other end. Only now did I smell my own puke-breath: a heavy, sweet-rotten smell. A few steps later I reached the bed; on it was a pair of high heels and, unfortunately, just a thin sheet. I dropped the water bottle, sank onto my left side and buried my head into one of the pillows. I lay there for only thirty seconds, until I nearly suffocated.

  So would it be “all’s well that ends well” after all? Would a grandpa and a mother alone be enough to make this work?

  Don’t think, just relax. I took my head out from under the pillow. God, what a smell. The sound of the seagulls, the rustle of the waves in the bay farther up, the traffic on the quay had all but vanished, and I sank away as though gravity doubled over on itself; I was driving in a car along dark, narrow roads, familiar surroundings, it looked like the campus, I plowed the Alfa through arid farmland, it was rough going, the wheels got stuck, strangely enough I became incredibly tired. In the distance I saw someone whom I recognized as Aaron, his bald head gleaming in the moonlight, shining over the sand beds like a second moon. He looked happy, his sheepskin coat was wide open. “Where have you been?” he called out.

  It
felt like I’d slept for hours, but was probably more like a few comatose minutes. The headache spread to my shoulders and neck, I turned my head the other way.

  Maybe it was that unreal smell that drew my eyes along the glossy wood of the wardrobes toward the floor, the hesitant start of an exploratory glance. A piece of clothing caught my eye, it lay like a red river of fabric on the cream-colored carpeting. Intriguing, that hundredth of a second, the fraction during which unsuspecting becomes suspecting. Your brain sends SOS messages at neuron-speed to all parts of your body, to your muscles, your sweat glands, your heart, your lungs—I had to catch my breath. My eyes followed that river upstream: the coat—it was a heavy red coat—was lodged in the matt-glass bathroom door, forcing it ajar. It did not belong there. I kept staring at it, paralyzed. I lay there for six months, maybe even a year, my eyes glued to that coat—and then I slowly got up.

  My headache was gone, that’s how fast the blood drained from my brain. There was someone in the bathroom. A junkie with Christmas plans. A serial killer with Christmas plans. With two soft steps I stood at the door and pulled it farther open. The same terrible stench hit me like a ton of bricks. The bathroom was disproportionately huge, design overkill that played on the nouveau-riche thirst for luxury: suspended toilet, his-and-her washbasins, bathtub, water-tight shower whose sliding glass door, I noticed at once, was open.