Bonita Avenue (57 page)

Jesus—your own flesh and blood. He even attempts to understand Wilbert’s unbridled rage, an enervating exercise in empathy, it is partly meant to anticipate future troubles, naturally—of course there’s an element of tactical thinking; they
both
got a life sentence, he realizes now—but also to take stock of himself: what mistakes did
he
make? He tries to imagine how it must have been for a seventeen-year-old kid like Wilbert to be plopped into their family, from that fucked-up food-stamp life in Wijn’s attic to their majestic farmhouse nestled in a poplar grove, inhabited by stable, well-fed, energetic achievers.

He spent that last week at the department with these kinds of thoughts on his mind, and when his chauffeur dropped him off at his flat on the Hooikade he knew what he had to do. He changed out of his suit into jeans and a fleece sweatshirt, and took the rickety ladies’ bike from the downstairs landing out to the street. Off to the beach after all. With nervous resignation he cycled out to Scheveningen, without the money, but with the steadfast resolve to wait at beach marker 101 for his son. Surely Wilbert would come dig up the loot that same evening. Eye to eye it should be possible to engage him, maybe talk some sense into him. He was prepared to chance it. He would try to assess the danger, see how aggressive the kid looked; before he left he had stood in his expat-kitchenette holding a tomato knife, but thought better of it. Naturally he wanted to convince Wilbert he didn’t have a leg to stand on, that this was not a blackmailing family—but without force, and intending to assure him that he belonged, that he was part of the family, no matter what, in spite of everything, in spite of the past. He conducted that odd tête-à-tête in his mind, a father-and-son conversation that would begin awkwardly and would probably end awkwardly too. And yet he wanted to extend his hand one more time.

So there he stood, on December 14, 2000, at eight in the evening, on the pitch-black Scheveningen beach, shivering from the cold, but in fact mostly from nerves. The wind at his back, he paced around marker 101, giving the briny wooden stake the occasional kick just to release tension, rehearsing what he was going to say, scanning the shadowy dunes until he had differentiated the various shades of black, and finally concluding from the total lack of movement in that teeming darkness that Wilbert was not going to show up. He waited until ten, eleven o’clock, the sea approached
him—the
sea
did, yes—and then he declared himself crazy. A sentimental, naïve dickhead.

That weekend he stayed in The Hague. Not much point in hanging around in Enschede on his own. He worked a bit on the table in a living room that wasn’t his, his sandy shoes on a newspaper, and to his surprise all was quiet: no text messages about not-buried bags of money, no sign of life, nada, and when the last days before the recess steamrolled over him, long workdays laced together with end-of-year cocktail parties and last-minute Cabinet decisions, a vague, almost existential doubt crept over him: maybe he was being paranoid, who’s to say he was dealing with Wilbert after all? Couldn’t he have fallen prey to some anonymous nutcase who one way or another had stumbled across Joni’s online mischief and decided to give him a run for his money? Welcome to the reality of The Hague. He felt strangely provincial on Tuesday when he went to return his untouched 100 grand to that same MeesPierson girl. Maybe he had been living for weeks now in a phantasmagoria of guilt, maybe he had let himself obsess about his insane progeny to the point of narcissistic personality disorder.

He and his chauffeur have worked out a way to play music in the back of the car but not in the front. He listens to
Everybody Digs Bill Evans
, his favorite trio album, virtuosic up-tempo numbers alternated with skillfully contrasting, Satie-like, um, what are they, nocturnes? Aaron—wonder how he’s doing. On the last stretch of freeway he renews his pledge to e-mail Joni, preferably before he leaves for France tomorrow. It has to be a combination of the serious, fatherly approach and that drunkard’s rant he flushed down the toilet last week, a message in which he’ll sort things out
in an intelligent, tactical way; he must make it clear that he’s kept her secret to himself, that he has got past being judgmental, that everybody commits youthful indiscretions.

His driver drops him off at the main entrance to the campus; he wants to walk the rest of the way. His laptop in one hand and his doctor’s bag full of documents in the other, he passes the administration building and looks dispassionately at the picture window of his old office; his successor keeps the blinds shut, a faint light burns inside. The campus is a frosted Christmas cake, the fields resign themselves to the blanket of snow, only the widest stretches of asphalt still resist. In front of one of the dorms, a group of boys are engaged in a rather premature snowball fight; you can see their breath, their raw yells are echoless. He passes the sports complex, through the patch of woods, and reaches his street, the Langenkampweg. Snow swishes around the high streetlamps, all he hears is the crunch of his soles and a muted silence that thanks to thousands of slamming snowflakes can hardly be called silence.

There it is, the farmhouse,
his
farmhouse, swathed in white, patient, immune to the vicissitudes of life. Pain shoots through his bad leg: the exhaustion of the past few days, the exhaustion of the past six
months
, it’s excruciating, he is broken, yearns for a glass of wine, for a scalding shower.

When they bought the house back in ’85 there was a glossy wooden plank on the front with the words
MON REFUGE
burned into it, and after closing the sale he promptly unscrewed that smug piece of kitsch from the wall and—how appropriate—stoked the fireplace with it the whole evening. At first the impressive spaces, the luxurious finishes, took some getting used to—who’d have guessed he could grow old here, in aristocratic style? He, whose father had dropped dead in that hovel on the Trompetsteeg.

Tineke would have asked him to go around to the back with
those snowy shoes, but he doesn’t have the energy. Sighing, he pushes open the heavy front door, one of the cats darts outside. He stomps the snow from his shoes but decides to take them off anyway. He feels the underfloor heating through his socks. His skis are propped up against the dresser under the stairs, Janis has brought them down from the attic for him. He scoops up a handful of Christmas cards from the doormat, walks into the living room, sets down his bag full of work papers between the magazine rack and a large floor lamp that gives off a warm, soft light: after Tineke’s workshop was broken into three years ago (the booty: an electric drill, some 200 hand-tools, and pretty much anything liftable and with an electrical cord) she insisted on installing a light-timer in the house, an apparatus he prefers not to fiddle with. In a sudden urge for domesticity, he switches on the Christmas tree lights.

He takes an opened bottle of red from the wine rack next to the liquor cabinet, pours himself a full glass, and flops down in the corner of the sofa, his feet on the coffee table. He is hardly ever alone here. Dog-tired, he looks around the wide, sparsely furnished room and feels bad about leaving Tineke to her own devices here during the week. A copy of
Nouveau
lies open at his feet. On the other hand, maybe she loves it.

He takes his laptop from the bag and turns it on. The letter. Do it now, have to get an early start tomorrow. This afternoon at the office he plotted his route, Metz-Nancy-Lyon-Grenoble, more or less the route to Sainte-Maxime. He is planning to allude to that boat of theirs, but doesn’t yet know how; perhaps in slightly shocked terms? In Val-d’Isère, anyway, he wants to be the bringer of good news; provided he can hit on the right tone, he’s planning to close his e-mail with Tineke’s idea of visiting Joni in Silicon Valley in the new year.

He nods off before he’s even opened Word, how long his catnap
lasted, he can’t say; snippets of dreams, they are like memories of memories, shoot through his head, he dreams of a boy with deep-set eyes dressed in a body warmer. When he wakes with a start he is thoroughly zonked, his face is sticky—heavy stubble, he really must shave—and his bad leg is asleep. He’s hungry again, there’s a vague cooking odor in the house, a greasy smell he didn’t notice before. It’s half-past nine, he shoves the laptop aside and decides to shower first. On his way from the living room he ponders how to formulate the rapprochement part, attempt to explain his naked presence, or however you’d put it, in Aaron’s house. Maybe he should be as honest as possible, just write it down the way it happened.

In the hallway he is reminded of a comment of Tineke’s two weeks ago that had taken him aback: “I’m so glad everything we need is on the ground floor,” she had said, “because my knees just about explode every time I climb those stairs.” Maybe they should have a talk about taking drastic measures, a stomach bypass or something, but he’s not sure how to package a suggestion like that.

Well, it is handy, he thinks as he undresses in their bedroom; it was one of the pleasant surprises of the house: the master bedroom, bathroom, and dressing room all connected. Yes, handy. He shivers from the cold. The curtains are still closed, their bed has been slept in on his side—the idea that his wife sleeps there when he’s gone is not so much moving as poignant, only a step away from pity. With a sigh of relief he undoes his trousers, that junk from McDonald’s has bloated his stomach, he looks at his body in the mirror next to the bathroom door and absently rubs his hand over the tattoo on his chest.

What if he made a detailed account of it? A few sheets, like a narrative? From the evening in his hotel room in Shanghai, when he first thought he recognized her, to his ransacking Aaron’s house … or maybe further back … He fills one of the washbasins
with lukewarm water and uncaps the shaving cream. A confession like this has something ludicrous about it. Since yesterday he’s been troubled by a painful reddish spot on his left nostril, the skin is taut and irritated. Back in high school, when his brother had taken to harassing him with the story of their mother’s deadly boil, he didn’t dare even touch the pimples on his face, let alone eliminate them. But he’s over that now. He places the tips of his middle fingers on his nostril, leans toward the mirror, and squeezes. What is the essence of the situation? The skin around his nostril tightens, changes from red to white, the pain is a pinpointable, promising pain. The point is to make Joni realize it’s not about
herself—

In the upper-right corner of the mirror he sees something move. Focusing close-up blurs his vision at first, he sees only a pink splotch.
Someone is standing behind him
. The arc of muscles that connects his cold toes, via his buttocks, to his hunched shoulders, freezes. He drags his gaze like a granite block to the upper corner of the mirror. Breathless, he stares into a contorted face.

“
Fucking dog
. Time to pay up.”

As these words explode in his ear canals, the air is filled with a swishing sound. His right side and rib cage are struck by something so hard that it feels white-hot. The object Wilbert wields causes him a stinging pain in his lower body, a pain that easily eclipses the twinge in his nostril. His hands slap downward, he grasps the edge of the washbasin, its seam crackles, the soap dish clatters to the tile floor. He has to hold on with all his might to keep from falling over.

“You’ve already got undressed.”

He answers, but has no idea what.

“Who’d you expect, wanker? Your stepwhore?”

The second time, the nunchuk hits him numbingly hard in his neck: pain shoots its way to his jaw. (Nunchuk: the overestimated,
vulgar weapon he is being assaulted with, two sturdy steel handles connected by a short chain, a double flail that owes its dwindling popularity to Bruce Lee films. Once favored by skinheads with testosterone overload who went to public festivals or football matches looking for a brawl.) As he gasps in pain he sees in the mirror that Wilbert wants to say something. The bastard thinks there’s time for that. He couldn’t be more mistaken.
If you only knew who you’re dealing with, asshole, then you wouldn’t stand so close
.

Funny how it works, but he makes all the necessary approximations in the first second. Right after the first slug: a chain of assessments. The distance between him and the doorpost. The relative strengths: his opponent is a fighter and is armed, he himself is relatively well trained, but old and tired—a brief jolt of uncertainty: can he put up a good fight against a violent ex-con in the prime of his life? His vulnerable nakedness might seem like a drawback but, humiliating as it is, it’s also an advantage: he is nearly impossible to grab. The moment: this scumbag
wants
to fight, he has chosen his exact timing, and that’s
now
. At the same time he suspects that he’s just woken Wilbert up, when he walked through the hall, that this pig had mussed up the covers of the master bed—a thought that
recharges
him.

“Been patient long enough, wanker, it’s payback ti—”

He pushes himself with a groan from the washbasin, his left leg takes a giant step toward the doorpost, he drags the other one with it, and with his left shoulder lunges like a battering ram against the thickset chest, a firm mass that only grudgingly gives in, but the push is unrelenting. They commence their fall and, programmed as he is, he claws at his adversary’s pant legs, his hands clutch at the loose-fitting cotton around the calves and the knee hollows, grab it
low
, and straightaway he yanks the bastard’s legs out from under him, lifts him up, it has to be explosive, this is a tried-and-true,
brutal technique. As one body they tumble into the dressing room, Wilbert has no time to grab hold of the doorframe, an indivisible moment later the back of his head smacks against the low shoe rack opposite the door, a loud, dry wallop, and again his shoulder drills into the fleshy chest, something cracks, squeaking vocal cords, the smell of alcohol fills his nose.

They lie there, dazed, both on their backs, he on top of his assailant.