Bonita Avenue (14 page)

At the time he thought nothing of it, they appeared to be no more than a protocolar psycho quiz. She wanted to know how he perceived Sigerius, she wanted to know what they did together, she wanted to know precisely how often they judoed, and what went on in a training session, she wanted to know what Joni thought of
their friendship, whether he and Sigerius discussed his relationship with her, whether he ever made comparisons with his own father, not consciously but maybe unconsciously? If they ever had words, if he had friends his own age, if he considered their friendship a balanced one, and so on and so forth. Haitink never tired of his fascination for the man, no detail bored her, and he in turn never tired of answering her questions. Only now did he appreciate how consummately she pinpointed her target. From day one Haitink had suspected that under the polished enamel of his Sigerius adoration lay a soft core of dry rot. Something was not right. Whenever her questions got difficult, he used his hero-worship for Sigerius to divert her attention.

“Tell me, Aaron,” she said one morning not long before the breakthrough, “where does it come from, your boundless ability to look up to people? You talk about Sigerius as though he’s the Dalai Lama. Do you look up to me?” You? he thought, offended—
you
I find hot, but he did not respond. “Who were you actually in love with?” she continued—a taunting, even hurtful question that he eventually, after an abashed silence, answered with a command: go buy
Who’s Who in the Netherlands
at Broekhuis bookstore and read for yourself about your Dalai Lama.

That
Who’s Who
was a
Volkskrant
pamphlet that had been on sale for a year now. Haitink nodded, she knew the title, it was a booklet listing the achievements of the 100 most influential Dutch figures of the twentieth century. Sure enough, the next week she had it with her, still in its brown Broekhuis wrapping paper, and he watched as she pored over the pages that extolled Siem Sigerius and his mathematics, an entry bookended by laudations to the somewhat older Ruud Lubbers and the somewhat younger Freek de Jonge. The article was written in layman’s language; the book’s science editor portrayed Sigerius as a colorful late bloomer with a curious
start as a world-class judoka, and thereafter zoomed in on his brilliant scientific career. It mentioned the often spectacular proofs the “mature student” Sigerius produced for various decades-old theories in all corners of mathematics, and how he managed to transform his initial reputation as a Houdini-like “problem solver” into one of a major mathematical theorist. Of course, the article cited, albeit superficially, the “knot theory” breakthrough that had earned Sigerius his Fields Medal.

While Haitink perched on the tiny seat of her severe stainless-steel chair to read the pamphlet, Aaron kept a close eye on the minute movements of her mouth, how it pursed and then relaxed, little grains of lipstick stuck in the wrinkles of her lips. She sat upright and rotated her ankle, and with it a sleek Parisian pump. This’ll teach her, he thought. In the atypical quiet of the therapy room he let his mind wander back to when he asked Sigerius to explain the deal with those knots.

“What do you want to know?” Sigerius had asked.

“Y’know—everything.”

“But it doesn’t interest you.”

“Sure it does,” he insisted.

“It’s either bafflingly complicated or childishly simple.”

“Give me simple.”

“OK. For years I’ve locked myself up with circles randomly scattered in a three-dimensional space. Still interested?”

“Now more than ever.”

“All right. Imagine tying a knot in a shoelace and stitching the ends together so you’ve got a closed circle. Only then do you have a mathematical knot. Got it? Two apparently different knots are identical if you can change the one into the other without having to cut the shoelace. The number of unique knots might be limitless, we don’t know. On the other hand, half the time, outwardly
different knots are secretly identical. How do you tell one from the other? For sixty years, research kept hitting a brick wall. And then someone came up with a polynomial, an algebraic formula you can use to give each knot its own identity. That someone was me. Can’t make it any simpler than that.” And then, as though the knowledge had been successfully transferred, he scribbled the formula in the margin of a newspaper, as fluently as a medium, a braid of digits, letters, brackets, and Masonic symbols.

As things tend to go with revolutionary mathematics, the Sigerius Polynomial (as the strand was officially called) turned out not only to be indispensable right down to the hair follicles of mathematics, but also for unraveling the structure of plastic polymers, for DNA research, for the string theory, in other words: the theory of the universe.

“So you’re a kind of Einstein,” he said.

“Yeah, if Liberace is a kind of Beethoven.”

When Haitink was finished reading, she clapped
Who’s Who in the Netherlands
shut and ran her hand pensively over the cover. “I
hate
math,” she said. Sigerius used to blow his top when someone with a good set of brains uttered this kind of nonsense, and was proud of it to boot. “What they meant to say is that they’re
warm-blooded
,” he’d growl, fidgeting furiously with his ears, “artistic, spi-ri-tu-al, more a ‘people person’ than a ‘number cruncher.’ Meanwhile, Aaron, they fall for all sorts of pseudo-scientific, semireligious bullshit because they can’t make heads or tails of simple numerical relationships. They are stupid, Aaron.
Stupid
. They
want
to be stupid. They hate math but looooove Uri Geller. I’ll show you how you can beat the pants off that Uri Geller with a simple probability calculation.”

He looked at Haitink. “And Sigerius hates me,” he said.

She eyed him, frowning. “I know you think so. But why?”

• • •

Why did he confide in her? Because she spoke the language of the civilized world, the language of the campus that had chucked him out? Because in that godawful Tulip there wasn’t another normal woman to be found? (The women in his section had forearms as gouged as the cutting board his grandfather used to slice salami, they claimed to be Saddam Hussein’s mistress, but then on CIA directives, of course, and with orders to abscond with the regime’s laser-powered weapons, so don’t get worked up—but still.) Or did he realize that it was simply her professional confidentiality, that in fact he sat here talking to
no one
, to a kind of ball-shooter, to a mercenary who would ignore him entirely if they ran into each other later in the supermarket?

No, he trusted her because she laughed at his jokes; when he said something witty a smile would pass across her bony, wrinkled face, not out of indulgence, or worse, out of pity, but because her clinical poker face was simply not wisecrack-proof. If on a good day he’d refound something of his old frivolity, he could crack her up, which made her sixteen instead of sixty-one. And for him, a complete and utter wreck whose self-respect lay like a deflated soccer ball on the clinic lawn, her giggly abandon had a greater healing power than her entire arsenal of psychotherapeutic gimmicks. Although only his nostrils quivered when she asked him that question—why do you think Sigerius hates you?—internally he sprinted as fast as he could to the edge of the long-kept secret, pushed off from the dusty sand and leapt, limbs flailing, over the cliff of profound silence he had managed to maintain for four long years.

“Because I am his daughter’s pimp,” he said. “That’s why.”

Haitink, as he recalled, did not bat an eye. She never batted an eye, she was trained not to bat an eye. With her thumb and index
finger she pinched a piece of fluff from her woolen leggings. “Tell me about it,” she said.

He told her, very concisely, about how he and Joni had run an amateur sex site from the end of 1996 until their unmasking in 2000, a paid website for which he had taken the photos, week in week out, photos exposing every square centimeter of Joni’s body, in the most titillating settings possible: to put it bluntly, porn. And sometimes a little bit of himself. “A little bit of yourself?” asked Haitink, pulling a quasi-alarmed face.

Yeah, well, whatever. He made his confession without going into the gory details, after a four-year vow of silence it was all he could do to force out the basic facts. She had questions, and as always she played the certified question mark, she wanted to know exactly what they were talking about; he saw she forgot to take notes.

“Was it your idea?” she asked.

“Yes. No, both of us,” he answered, not even stopping to realize that it had been
her
idea.

“Did this, um …”

“Joni.”

“Did Joni use her real name on the website?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then what?”

“She was supposed to be a girl from the American Midwest. That was the website’s look.”

“Just pictures?”

“The Internet is too slow for videos.”

“And how racy were these pictures?”

“You do know what porn is?”

“Eh … I’ve an idea.”

“Well, that. They used to call them erotic images.”

“And you had to be a member to view these … erotic images?”

“If you wanted to see all of them, yeah, of course.”

“OK. And what was the site called?”

“Lindaloveslace.”

“And this Linda, that was Joni?”

“No, me.”

“Just asking.”

“This is the first time I’ve told anyone.”

“That’s very brave of you, Aaron. But? Did it work out?”

“Are you kidding? We hit the jackpot. It was an unbelievable success. We couldn’t believe it.”

“So Joni is that pretty, is she?”

“She’s breathtaking.”

“According to you.”

“According to thousands of men.”

He told Haitink that one day they woke up and realized “it” had become bigger, bigger than their relationship. “We went to bed as a couple and woke up as business partners. We realized that we were a pair of managers, managers with a secret. Managers
of
a secret.”

“And all that time you were scared witless that her big-shot father would find out.”

“Uh-huh. Pretty much, yeah.” He attempted to explain to her how incredibly complicated it was to keep it quiet, to create a vacuum around something that was so all-consuming and so successful, and at the same time so totally inappropriate; it was not just a sleight of hand, it required constant vigilance. “We led double lives. And at the same time I was getting chummier with Sigerius. On a first-name basis with her caring, loving
father
. An impossible juggling act. To be honest, it was awful.”

“What were you so afraid of?”

He could not suppress a groan. Did she really not get it? The question annoyed him as much as her hardhanded debunking of
his admiration for Sigerius. Did she learn this 100 years ago in psych class? It occurred to him that he shouldn’t have made her read
Who’s Who in the Netherlands
, but an entirely different book altogether, a handbook for the novice judoka that Sigerius had written for the youngsters in his dojo and had printed and bound at Tubantia’s print center. Since the late 1980s Sigerius gave free hour-long judo lessons on Thursday evenings for children from Twekkelerveld, a grim housing project across from the campus’s main entrance. His handbook explained, in terms the kids would understand and accompanied by clumsy illustrations he drew himself, the technical fundamentals of judo as well as the philosophy behind it, but what Aaron mostly remembered was the three-page code of conduct for the “sportsmanlike judoka.” Sigerius had probably drawn up this edifying list because he saw it as his duty to inform the often immigrant youngsters, boys he rightly categorized as underprivileged, of a set of values different from the ones they picked up around their piss-stinking apartment blocks. “If I have my judo partner in a hold, I will not cause him unnecessary pain.” “I promise to engage in fair play.” “If I win a match I will not boast about it.” “I will not lie on the mat, but will sit up straight while listening to the sensei’s instructions.” “I will remember to brush my teeth before going to the judo lesson.”

Haitink was still looking at him. Her expression was mildly mocking, the look of someone who, because of her ’60s upbringing, was obliged to play the enlightened woman of the world. Fine. Instead of lecturing her on the degree of betrayal they were talking about here, on the devious measures you had to take before you had a secret, well-organized sex site up and running, he asked her if she had children herself.

“A son,” she said.

“That’s a pity,” he said. “Married?”

“Ingmar has a boyfriend.”

“Terrific. Even better. I’ll just assume Ingmar and his friend are nice, decent guys, sociable, good at their work. I’ll bet he’s good-looking.”

She frowned at him. “Ye-e-s-s …,” she said.

“OK. So one day you get a tip. Go to this or that Internet site, and you do, and you discover a meticulously designed website, a site your son updates every week with new pictures of himself. Crisp photos of Ingmar and his hard cock. I’m just putting it in clear English for you. And if you type in your credit card number you can have access to thousands of photos showing the vast assortment of meat and plastic that gets rammed up Ingmar’s spit-lubed anus—as long as it takes for that handsome face of his to contort into a grimace and his smooth-shaven dick to ejaculate. The following Sunday you see them again, your son and his boyfriend, but this time in the flesh. They’re coming over for dinner.”

For a split second she sat there frozen, maybe because of the imagery, maybe because of his rough language, and he intensely enjoyed seeing her brick-red mouth hang open, a filament of saliva stretching between her smallish, aged teeth. Her wise, pistachio-green eyes stared straight ahead, aghast—but then she regained her composure. “I wouldn’t exactly break out the champagne, no,” she said. “But—”

“Sigerius would go apeshit,” he interrupted, more rudely than he had intended. “He’d blow a fuse. Siem Sigerius discovers that the apple of his eye is an Internet whore?” He bit his upper lip and cringed. “I’d be first,” he said. “First he’d slit my throat, and then his own. You know, if I wasn’t safely locked up here I’d be lying at the bottom of Rutbeek Lake right now. And Siem next to me.”