Bonita Avenue (30 page)

While she lay in a deep slumber next to him, as far away as possible on her side of the bed it seemed, he worked his way through the worst possible scenarios. Wilbert had molested her. No, they had had an affair. Bonnie and Clyde. Year after year she visited Wilbert in his cell for a weekly hour of hanky-panky in a cube of tempered glass. There was a child of theirs out there somewhere, she’d given birth, or at the very least had an abortion—and his morbid fantasies whirled around in this vein, picked up speed, flung themselves about, ever faster, ever wilder, until the electric field was enough to rouse Joni: she woke with a start. She lay there
panting and smacking her lips to dreams whose content he could only guess. She flipped on the bedside lamp, groped for her watch. “Damn,” she said. Only then did she look beside her. He was sitting upright, his back against the textured wallpaper. The glance she shot him was … indescribable. What was in it? Ice. Disdain, disapproval. Contempt? Her anger had fermented, and what he tasted was … 
loathing
.

And yet he managed to produce a complete sentence. “Joni,” he choked, “has Wilbert phoned you?”

She sat up, wrestled with the bedsheet, looked at him mockingly. She let out a contemptuous little chuckle, for a moment he expected an answer, but she turned away, shaking her head, burrowed her blond hair deep into the pillow and said: “G’night, dickhead.”

He was allowed back in his house. “Goin’ home,” he chirped after their last breakfast at the farmhouse, and without another word to each other, but as though it was perfectly normal that Joni should join him, they loaded their bags into the Alfa and drove off, he at the wheel, Joni in the passenger seat with the guinea pig cage on her lap. The sky above the campus was bright blue. They drove in silence down the Langenkampweg and the Hengelosestraat; he was familiar with these arguments and knew exactly how long they would last.

They didn’t go for outright bickering, and both considered drawn-out arguments a royal pain in the ass. Of course they’d had plenty of rows, clashes that shook the doors off their hinges, but these were incidents that diminished in frequency the better they came to assess each other’s weaknesses and flashpoints. Joni hated arguments because she was too efficient, because she was focused on the shortest route to success, which for her was not the
same as being right or winning an argument (as it was for him) but about arriving at a situation that offered her an
advantage
. As far as she was concerned, arguing was, she once screamed at him during, ironically enough, a grueling, entirely out-of-hand dispute, “un-pro-duc-tive!”

As they approached his street their attention drifted along the wooden partitions, the eye-level piss-yellow fencework that ran the length of the Lasondersingel and turned the corner at the Blijdensteinlaan. “Just like Asterix and Obelix’s village,” he said to Joni, “only less invincible.” She did not laugh.

He himself was a coward. He avoided confrontations whenever possible; an argument with Joni was more than anything a risk. For the past four years he’d been telling his friends that Joni would be the mother of his children, and to avoid anything that might jeopardize that, he had, until recently, tiptoed around her.

They toddled uneasily up the path to the front door, the key he’d been given by the town council slipped effortlessly into the brand-new lock. “Leave the animals in the hall for now.”

Glass. He’d heard endless accounts of the shock wave, an invisible Hun that swept relentlessly through the streets of Roombeek without skipping a single address—and still he was awestruck. The entire ground floor, which felt small after two weeks
chez
Sigerius, was littered with splinters, shards, and rubble. On the table, on the armchair seat cushions, on every uncovered centimeter of his bookshelves, between the buttons on the remote control, on the windowsills of opposing windows, one of which had been blown out, in the kitchen sink, on the cabinets—there was glass
everywhere
. The city council had boarded up the shattered sliding doors with wood panels.

“Double glazing,” he said, “gotta get double glazing.”

They drifted about the sparkling living room for a quarter of an
hour at a loss for what to do; and still Joni was silent. He handed her the only pair of rubber gloves he could find under the sink, and put on his own winter gloves. The thaw would set in within an hour, he estimated. He vacuumed the windowsills with his Nilfisk. They scooped the broken glass into garbage bags, in silence. He picked up the two breakfast plates they had left standing on the coffee table the morning of the wedding, and on the way to the kitchen he held a half-eaten slice of bread now sprinkled with glass under her nose. “Wanna bite?” he asked.

“Cut it
out
!” she screamed. With a furious swipe she knocked his arm away, the plate arced through the air and broke noisily. He exploded, grabbed her by the chin, squeezed it hard, and hissed through his teeth: “
What
went on between
you
and that
fuck
ing Wilbert?”

“Let
go
of me,” she said.

He squeezed harder, spit trickled onto his hand. “Tell me,” he bellowed, but instead of answering him, she growled with rage. He pushed her away. “I’m
sick
of it!” he screamed. “
Sick and tired!
Always these half-truths. Just fucking tell me what’s going on!”

Her eyes grew to unnatural dimensions. She was taken aback by his outburst, he could tell, the conceit drained from her face. She slumped into the armchair nearest the demolished sliding door, realized the seat was strewn with shattered glass and jumped back up. She cursed.

“Turn around,” he said. To his surprise, she obeyed. He slapped off bits of glass from her buttocks with the flat of his hand, and had to squat down to pick the splinters out of her skirt. This operation released the tension, apparently for both of them, because before he was finished she said: “All right then. Listen.” She sighed deeply, but remained silent.

“I’m listening,” he said.

Again it was a few moments before she spoke. “This isn’t to get any farther than this room. What I’m about to say is … let’s just say I’m not proud of it.”

“OK,” he said, worried but eager. “
Talk
. You’d got to the court case.” As she was now glass-free, he placed his hands on her hips, his thumbs resting against the flanks of her buttocks. She allowed it.

“Siem insisted I testify,” she said, suddenly businesslike. “He wanted me to say I heard what had gone on in the bathroom. That I was in the hallway and overheard the whole shebang. The sounds. What was said. You follow me now?”

He did not respond, but pressed his thumbs softly into her buttocks.

“Siem demanded that I blow the whistle on his son, my stepbrother. The kid I’d gone horseback riding with the week before. That I … 
shaft
him. That I
lie
in court.”

The word “shaft” did not sit well with him. He gave her ass a shove, she took a step forward. “Excellent,” he said. “The gloves are off.”

“Asshole!” she cried. She gave the armchair a kick.

“Why? He had to go. Your father was completely in the right.”

To his surprise, she stayed calm. She grabbed the vacuum, turned it on and cleaned the seat of the armchair. When she had finished she mumbled: “The bag’s full.” She dropped the hose wand and looked at him. “Aaron, try to relate. Just this once. I perjured myself. Against my will. I was put under pressure to betray a kid I liked. In a court of law. To his face. I committed perjury in front of him. He heard it, and he
knew
it.”

“And then?”

“And then?” she barked. “And then? What do you think ‘and then’? They gave him ten months. Thanks to me lying. Thanks to Siem’s manipulation.
That’s
what ‘and then.’ ”

He nodded. “Did Wilbert phone you?”

She wanted to say something, again something irate, but just at that moment her cell phone rang. While fumbling to retrieve it from her skirt pocket she cooled off and said: “I called him. We met up.”

She answered the phone. After announcing her name she listened attentively, stuck out her hand to him like a traffic cop, and disappeared into the kitchen. She pulled the door shut behind her with a bang. Who did she have on the line? He hurried after her and saw through the window that she’d gone all the way to the end of the overgrown backyard. She was talking indistinctly. With that criminal?

It was strangely quiet in the street; it took him a while to realize he heard no birds. The fauna had abandoned Roombeek. He had fled his house in order to simmer down. He left a note on the table saying that he’d gone to buy more vacuum cleaner bags and get something for them both to eat.

He wanted to cycle up to the Roomweg, to a small housewares shop across from the French fry joint, but once he saw the wooden fence he realized the shop now only existed in his memory. So—she
did
go to see Wilbert. He rode past the museum and into the neighborhood beyond it. Should he be jealous, or worried? Past the primary school he turned left and arrived at the “flower monument,” a public garden on the Deurningerstraat that overflowed with cellophane-wrapped flowers in memory of the victims. Why was he unable to show any empathy?

With a vaguely uneasy feeling he rode through Blaauwbroek’s street, glanced in the living room window, but no one was home. He crossed the railroad tracks and biked into the city center,
following the Langestraat until he reached the Hema. Had his capacity for compassion completely evaporated? Was he overlooking a sort of fundamental jealousy, a blind spot that determined his view of even the most serious matters?

He paid for the vacuum cleaner bags, as well as a hunk of cheese and six muesli rolls, and walked his bike to the lingerie shop in the Havenstraat. Not entirely by coincidence, he passed Ennio’s delicatessen, on whose dark-red door hung a note saying “Closed until further notice”; he stood in front of the busily decorated shop window and examined a small tower of jars: Colman’s Original Mustard, miniature jars of Wilkin & Sons No Peel Orange Marmalade, tall jars of Mrs. Ball’s Peach Chutney, all stacked in the shape of a little man. On top, attached with barely visible nylon thread, was a bowler hat, and alongside it, on two threads, a diagonal walking stick. He imagined Ennio fussing with his wares behind that cramped window display, and concluded that Joni couldn’t possibly have had sex with the sort of person who thought up and constructed this kind of nonsense.

Was he too jealous? Should he back off? Could he be imagining things? Stol, Ennio, Wilbert, fuck, fucking, fucked—three guys who robbed him of a good night’s sleep; did their number say something about Joni, or about him?

He walked farther and went into the lingerie shop. One way or another, today or tomorrow, they had to shoot a new photo series. Maybe he could buy something usable here, something to demonstrate his goodwill. The older saleslady nodded at him. From an overfull rack he chose a brassiere made of black see-through tulle, with red stitching on the half-cups, and in a plastic bin he found some black net stockings that—said the saleslady—would suit madam perfectly. Back to work, call a truce. He cycled back to the crater, pondered his wording of the suggestion to go up to the
attic and get changed. For the first time in weeks he felt something that resembled sexual desire.

For the second time that day, again almost as if it was a perfectly normal thing to do, he entered his house, this time conciliatory. “Hello!” he called out as he went into the living room. No reply; maybe she was still on the phone. He walked through the empty room, looked through the kitchen window into the backyard, but she wasn’t there either. He went back into the hallway and knocked, against his better judgment, on the WC door.

He smiled: would she have had the same idea, the eternal peace-making elixir, and be up in the attic already? Who knows, maybe their telepathic signals had survived the storm. He bounded up the stairs and scanned the landing—the folding stairs had not been pulled down, he saw at once—but still looked, his mouth half open, up at the attic hatch. Shut tight. Of course. The copper-colored padlock glowered frostily at him. The house was empty. Through the bathroom window he could see that her bike, which had waited for her alongside the conifers since the wedding in Zaltbommel, was gone.

His arousal long dissipated, he crashed down the stairs. Since the vacuum cleaner bags lay on top, it took him a few minutes to find his note on the dining room table. Her handwriting under his own.

His reaction to what he read was atypical for him, for the situation, for his deeply rooted fear of losing her, but apparently not at all atypical in a pathological sense, because when he recalled his behavior to Haitink some months later, she nodded furiously, a pumpjack on the fields of his psyche. He described to her how his consciousness did not shrink into a small, hard ball of regret, as one might hope and assume, but expanded into a universe of rage and resentment. “
Fuck
!” he screamed, “Fucking hell! You
bitch
! You sick, snivelling little
bitch
!” He then spent several minutes
tearing the cardboard packaging of the vacuum cleaner bags to shreds, slammed the bags against the corner of his dining room table, and then tore each of the bags individually to shreds. With sweat dripping from his skull, he seized the note from among the scraps of paper, wadded it up, and took it to the toilet. He pissed on it. Before he flushed he fished it back out of his urine (“Aaron,” said Haitink, “try to ascertain for yourself just why you did that”) and reread what she had written.

Now that it’s finally a bit calmer on campus—the last exams of the academic year have been wrapped up, most of the staff have gone abroad, either in campers or airplanes; as he cycles to the administrative wing in the morning he finds Tubantia as in his nightmares: ready to be disbanded—Sigerius goes to The Hague to test the waters. He likes traveling first class. Seated at an out-of-the-way table in Café Dudok’s back garden, he lunches with Frederik Olde Kannegieter, who has been at the Finance Department for the better part of the morning. They have managed to squeeze in an hour to discuss which way the wind blows, in Kannegieter’s opinion, in the Cabinet deliberating Sigerius’s appointment. They’ve known each other since Boston, where he had arranged for Kannegieter to teach a course on decision science. Many an afternoon was spent in his MIT office working together on an article on the “traveling salesman problem,” a piece that, for reasons that now escape him, never came to fruition. Later, Kannegieter was rector in Groningen, board member at KPN, and was now in his fifth year as chairman of the Central Planning Office.