Bonita Avenue (29 page)

She did not answer. For several minutes he looked at her back. Until he could hear from her breathing that she was asleep.

In the days that followed, Sigerius avoided his elder daughter; for Aaron, at least, it was hardly a coincidence that they never once sat down to eat at the same time. Sigerius mostly ate out. Joni seemed to have forgotten their nighttime conversation and avoided
him
. Her behavior annoyed him; one minute she was like a toddler in happy anticipation of America, the next minute she sat there blubbering about Ennio.

For his part, he was busy at
Tubantia Weekly
. Thank God. The fireworks disaster had undeniably brought out the best in him, and despite his sleepless nights he had outdone himself these past few weeks. Blaauwbroek was impressed. His boss was the first person they had heard on Joni’s answering machine, far ahead of the platoon of concerned friends and family, and he sounded like an eleven-year-old watching the circus ride into town. “Bever, good afternoon to you, Henk Blaauwbroek here on the machine. I assume you’re alive. Did you also hear a blast? Hibernation’s over, kid. Have you got photos? We’re putting out an extra edition, you get the picture.”

He and his boss had a love-hate relationship. During staff outings and over drinks they were boisterously brotherly, but at the workplace it was a constant battle. Since Aaron had studied at the Art Academy and not at journalism school, Blaauwbroek accused him of having artistic aspirations, a card he never tired of playing. “It ain’t gonna hang in a museum, kid,” or “why not try a shorter shutter speed,” or “there’s our still-life fetishist”—how often had he put up with remarks like that. And he
was
a lousy news photographer, he was the first one to admit it. Too slow for the real work, too hesitant, not passionate about hard news, but that’s why, he’d reply snidely, he worked for Blaauwbroek and not for Reuters.

But now he strode through media-clogged Enschede as though dispatched by
Time
magazine itself. For once, he’d come up with ideas all on his own: at a Chinese wholesaler in Liège he took before-during-and-after photos of 1.1-class fireworks, the ammonium chloride kind stored in the Enschede storage bunkers. Together with two ex-residents and the local police chief he crisscrossed the disaster area in a space suit. He shot a series of portraits of now-homeless Roombeekers whom he talked into posing in the torn and blood-stained clothes they were wearing that Saturday,
May 13th (his photo of the man wearing one flip-flop and carrying barbecue tongs, who had wandered for hours half naked through the burning streets, made it into a Victim Assistance brochure). From atop the dilapidated roof of the Grolsch brewery he photographed the scorched neighborhood—a shocking war-zone photo a national newspaper bought from him.

The air on his calamity-planetoid was, to put it otherwise, rarefied, and it made him light-headed. He maintained that every Enschede resident who was alive and still had all his limbs had no business grousing, and to suit his actions to his words he returned, as the first and only “victim,” the 1,500 guilders cash the city council had distributed to all those affected by the accident. Joni thought his gesture pompous, even tactless. “It’s time you drop the stunts,” she said.

On their last day at the farmhouse he went to the university library to update their website on a public computer, a shit job that made him wonder why
he
was the one doing it; this whole website thing was Joni’s idea, but
he
took the Dreamweaver course;
she
talked about clean prostitution, but
he
sat here shitting himself every time a student walked into the room. These were the last photos from the series they had shot at the Golden Tulip, they had to hurry up and post something new.

When he left the library the atmosphere hung like a crystal ball over the campus. Satisfaction with what he had just accomplished temporarily blocked out the visions he’d had while dozing at the library table; he’d dreamt he saw himself lying on the mossy tiles of the central square. The first stars wove through the uppermost blue, elongated wisps of orange hung above the treetops to the west. While he unlocked his bike the Bastille spat out a women’s
debating club, garrulous girls who had just gobbled up their weekly cafeteria sausage with fries and limp-boiled vegetables and were now busily searching for their bicycles.

He decided to take the inside route. A leafy cycle path led him to the broad dirt jogging track. Three runners scuffed with a muted crunch over the gravel, two female students sat in the middle oval with a bottle of wine. The sun sank behind the ivy-covered wall that hid the outdoor pool from view. Warm air caressed his scalp. He shut his eyes for a swarm of bugs and was wondering if the pool contained enough water to extinguish that orange ball when, with a whack, his camera bag was knocked off his shoulder. It dangled on his forearm and rattled against the spokes of the front wheel. A girl on an upright bike passed him, muttering a barely audible “sorry.”

“Fucking bimbo!” he shouted, surprised at how readily his contentment turned into rage. Breathing hard, he coasted to a standstill and stood with his legs spread. Jealousy, the fear of losing her, was always the root of everything.

It was snowing when he arrived at the farmhouse. The poplars on the northern edge of the garden blossomed so furiously that the twilight sky was saturated with flakes and the grass was covered with a translucent layer of fluff. Cuddly clumps of white danced around Joni’s bare ankles as she sat on the mossy terrace alongside the former stalls, like a … yes, like a what? Like a melting snowman.

Tineke sat across from her at the scrapwood table, between them their emptied plates and a carafe of water. As he approached them he was overcome by revulsion. He could guess what was up. “Hello,” he said and sat down next to Tineke. Joni answered his greeting with a gurgling, drawn-out snort into a piece of paper towel. Her eyes were puffy. Her mother sighed and looked at him. “Hungry?” she asked.

“Hungry
and
thirsty,” he said. Instead of asking Joni why she
had been crying, he took her glass and filled it with water. He gulped it back and wiped his mouth. “Mmm,” he said.

After an awkward silence Tineke made a move to get up. “I’ll go,” Joni mumbled. She stood up, pulled the spaghetti strap over her shoulder and shuffled across the fluffy backyard. Once she was in the kitchen Tineke laid a hand on his wrist and said quietly: “She’s just back from visiting Ennio. Try to be nice to her.”

He nodded. “What actually happened?”

Tineke glanced toward the house, from the pantry they could hear the hum of the microwave. “It’s a terrible story,” she said. “Just awful.” Keeping her eye on the door, she said: “The guy was on fire. From what I understand he was napping on the sofa when the living room window imploded. His entire back and legs full of glass. Then the rug under the coffee table caught fire, and then the sofa too, everything completely synthetic, of course. He rolled outside through the broken window and only then realized his trousers were on fire.” She shook her head. “And while he’s trying to put out the fire—it’s too terrible for words—he’s hit full-on, right by the front gate, by the chimney of his own—”

She cut herself off when Joni opened the screen door. Nifty physics problem, he heard himself thinking as Joni approached. Givens: rolling velocity of the man and the height of the chimney. Assignment: calculate the depth of the yard. Joni looked like she was in pain, and she was: with a moan she slammed a steaming plate of tandoori chicken under his nose. She blew on her fingers as she rounded the table. She looked pretty bad.

“I’ve had a hell of a day …,” he said before she even sat down. “I photographed these three Evangelical students. In their emergency shelter. They lived in a dorm right across from the fireworks factory. Blown to kingdom come with biblical ferocity. Photos, term papers, a brand-new practice piano, two rented tuxedos: everything
up in smoke. And wouldn’t you know it, they still believe. Well-spoken lads who thank the Lord they weren’t home. Evangelists or not, these guys understood that humor is the best way to deal with adversity.”

“I’ve been to see Ennio,” Joni said.

“Within just two days,” he continued, “they had a whole repertoire of May 13th jokes. They’re stuck in that makeshift apartment all day long. ‘What did the firecracker say to the roman candle?’—that kind of thing, the whole time.” He smiled, popped a piece of tandoori in his mouth and looked at Joni while he chewed. “I heard,” he said with his mouth full. “But now he’s able to have visitors. So he’s on the mend.”

With a strange motion, a kind of spasm, she knocked the roll of paper towels from the table. “On the
mend
?” She inhaled like a sponge diver and disappeared under the table. “He’s in the ICU, Aaron,” came the voice from underwater. When she resurfaced with the paper towels she banged her shoulder against the edge of the table, hard enough to bring on new tears.

“It’s not easy, honey,” said Tineke. “Have a good cry.”

(Bawl, doctor.
Bawl
. No, that’s not how he said it; months later he would express himself more euphemistically: he felt that Joni, for his taste, overreacted to what she had seen in that ICU. As though she’d had her tear ducts surgically shortened. Those two little geysers, he observed, made her curiously ugly, in contrast to what tears had done with his earlier, less attractive girlfriends: crying made them prettier, their tears
softened
them. He compared Joni’s sob-gob with her usual Scandinavian freshness. The broad face with its smooth, taut skin; I really should get some fresh air, you thought when you looked at her. The upper half radiated well-being, at least under normal circumstances, strength, genetic gold. Joni’s shrewdness, the sexiness, her flammable femininity—these
were lower, they gathered around her mouth, now a pale, quivering stripe, but usually a deep-red anemone with an ever so slightly forward-jutting lower lip that always looked moist. The tiniest pout and all that wellness became overripe, decadent. Although she was aware of her external weapons, she sometimes pushed down the tip of her modest little nose with her index finger: she felt that it swung upward. It didn’t. Amazing how much snot could come out of it.)

And how was Ennio faring? He must have asked something of the sort, because in barely intelligible stages he learned that the guy had third-degree burns all over his body, five broken ribs, a perforated spleen, and countless open flesh wounds. The doctors had covered Ennio’s legs, chest, and a good bit of his back with donor skin—like a dish of lasagna, he imagined. Every morning the wounds had to be disinfected, smeared with salve, and dressed, a painful affair for which they gave him painkillers and tranquilizers. Meanwhile Ennio lost liters of fluids into the jungle of tubes and apparatus, and all sorts of organs refused to function, the reason why he was permanently hooked to an IV that made him swell up in unexpected places.

Joni paused to catch her breath, nestling her rounded chin on her arms, which lay crossed on the table.

“So he’s still alive,” he summarized, and made a feeble attempt at reaching across and laying a hand on her shoulder. As she felt him she sprang up, furious. “Yeah, he’s still alive,” she screamed. She kicked her chair back and got up.

“Joni …,” Tineke said.

“Alive, but they’ve given him pretty slim odds, you prick. He’s got blood poisoning and pneumonia. He’s at death’s door. And everybody’s distraught—everyone in that family is totally devastated. You always make out like things are just hunky-dory!”

“Aaron doesn’t think that,” Tineke said soothingly. She shook her head. “It’s just awful luck, so soon after his divorce. Kicked out of his house, and then this.” She looked worriedly across the yard, her chin dragging the fat of her neck with it, she stopped only when her gaze met his—questioningly, it seemed.

“Wasn’t Ennio screwing his salesgirls?” he said. A heavy silence. “That’s what they say, anyway.”

Joni blew her nose in a paper towel, threw the wad onto the table, and stared into the yard.

“There are people,” he added, “who, in a case like this, would say: God punishes mercilessly and without delay. But you won’t hear me say that.” His comment hit them like seagull shit, he realized as much, but at the same time he was pleased with it, his lack of sleep cleared his head; wonderful how sleep deprivation made you more alert. That Ennio was nothing but a dirty bugger. Each season new first-year chick between his chutneys.

“If you were my son,” said Tineke, “I’d slap your face right now.”

But I’m not your son, he thought. He scooped together the last bits of rice and sauce, shoveled it all in his mouth and said: “Gotta go. Judo.”

When he and Sigerius returned back home around midnight, dead beat, Joni was already lying in the guest bed. Her sleeping figure radiated anger.

He cautiously slid alongside her, fully prepared for another sleepless night. It was the first time since the dinner table incident that he had been alone with Sigerius, and was quick to notice that his father-in-law was harboring a whopper of a grudge. They were sitting on the edge of the mat, next to the large sketchbook, discussing
katas
, when Sigerius asked if Joni had said anything about
“the fuss.” You mean Ennio, he had answered quasi-nonchalantly, or California? No, no—Sigerius meant that to-do about Wilbert, you know, at the table, the commotion over my son. He replied that they’d spoken about it briefly, Joni told him bits and pieces about when they were young, but that they hadn’t spoken much the past few days. It was a father-daughter thing, Sigerius assured him, nothing to worry himself about, but still there was this nagging question: did Aaron know if Joni had been in contact with Wilbert? Phone calls? Did he pick up anything along those lines?

No, he didn’t know a thing.

OK, good—say no more, water under the bridge, let’s get to work, case closed, it seemed—but for Aaron it was case
open
, water over the bridge, certainly now he lay there, once again, wide awake alongside Joni. For now at least, no tormenting fantasies about her escapades with the chutney-hawker, for now no agonizing about Stol and McKinsey, but you could hardly call it a solace. What had happened? What was Sigerius so worried about? Why did she keep him in the dark? The night stretched itself out like a torture rack of time. Sigerius’s fear had become his own, now
he
suddenly had to know if she’d talked to that jailbird, and more to the point:
why
. What was going on here?