Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

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.