Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“Please. Go.”

In order to restrain myself a second time, not to go, to flee from this hellhole, I tried to picture him on his black Batavus. Remember who this is. I saw him sitting on that big bike with its double crossbar, his sheepskin coat open, a silk shirt underneath that could just as well have been a ladies’ blouse, this nonchalant grasshopper on a bike, oversized boots half sliding off the pedals, leisurely cycling off to buy this very bed with me. With that Aaron in mind, I laid my hand as gently as possible on his sweat-drenched thigh, and called him “sweetheart.” It was with that Aaron in mind that I’d come to Enschede, with that Aaron in mind I’d decided to keep it.

For weeks, Boudewijn was the only one who knew I was pregnant. I was avoiding all contact with Enschede (and Enschede with me), and at McKinsey I kept mum about it as long as I wasn’t showing. From Day One of my internship in Silicon Valley, Boudewijn and I e-mailed each other daily, a routine with which he rounded off his afternoons in Amsterdam and I began my mornings in California. At first they were mostly jokey, corny e-mails, sometimes unexpectedly candid, with an unambiguous undertone on his part that I rather enjoyed. “You’re the only person I trust,” I wrote one day in October. “Of course, of course,” was his almost gilded answer, so I told him I was pregnant and confessed right up front that I was considering an abortion. “Considering” was my euphemism for the appointment I had already made at the Stanford University Family Planning Service. That sure cured him of his corniness; he turned into a sponge that wanted to soak up everything with exacting precision, so I told him everything with exacting precision — but how precise was it all without the sliding glass door and the website?

His reaction caught me off guard: he explicitly forbade me to go to that Stanford clinic. “Put off your decision for as long as possible,” he wrote, “ask for a cooling-off period.” “I’ve got one already.” “Then ask for another one,” and he reminded me I had responsibilities , not only with regard to the “life” but to the father as well. Excuse me? Really, he was dead serious, he considered having an abortion behind Aaron’s back, “how can I put it mildly,” he said, a crime . “But I don’t want anything to do with the guy,” I protested. “That’s beside the point,” he wrote, “who says you have to have anything to do with him? Who says he wants a child?”

What Aaron wanted was a tranquilizer dart. His fear itself was terrifying, and still I persevered: little by little I made progress, unhurriedly caressing his thickly clothed arms, his shoulders, until his dread seemed to gradually subside. Both bedside tables, the open drawers, the floor — everywhere, actually — were littered with pill strips and liquor bottles, all of them empty. After rummaging frantically through one of the bedside tables I came up with two sleeping tablets. “Here,” I said, “take these.” But he spat them out, and again I wriggled the soggy capsules into his mouth. I found a bottle of jenever with a swig or two left, put it to his lips and he swallowed. He let me nestle up against him and I continued stroking his arms, his face, his chest, until his breathing relaxed. And only then, when I had calmed down some myself, did the reality of the situation hit me: he didn’t notice . Even if I were to take off my heavy winter coat, even if I took off all my clothes and climbed onto his lap with my six-month belly, even then Aaron wouldn’t notice I was pregnant, let alone comprehend it.

It was a job and a half getting him down those stairs. He thrashed about and wedged himself between the wall and the railing. His body odor made me gag. In front of the house he fell to his knees in the snow, and while I hastily swept the snow off the Alfa he lay there curled up in a fetal position, wailing and ranting; I smiled at passersby while coaxing him, patiently but firmly, into the car.

We arrived at the Twentse Tulip before dusk; I had never been there before, it was surrounded by woods and had a huge Christmas tree in the granite foyer. After a good deal of pleading and explaining on my part they agreed to keep Aaron overnight for observation. I watched as he, meek as a lamb, gulped down two bright purple antipsychotics with a large glass of water; it was as though I was quenching a week-long thirst myself. Only when they asked me for his particulars — parents? employer? — did I realize how extraordinary it was that he’d managed to get to this stage. I’ll bet no one had been at his house in months. His parents lived down in Limburg, and they phoned, as far as I knew, infrequently. And what about his work? Was this the fate of a freelancer? I found Cees and Irma Bever’s number in my cell phone and gave it to the staff nurse.

I wanted to get out of there. Move on. While Aaron was being examined by one of the psychiatrists, I slipped out of the building. I looked up at the snow-covered oak trees and sycamores, the endless depth of the stone-cold sky above, and thought: this is as good a place as any for insanity to evaporate.

Driving south through salty slush, coat buttoned up, window open, dazed, I thought: did I really just go through all that? I only braked in Liège, soon after midnight, and checked into the most expensive room I could find. Should I have seen this coming? My suite had those little pillows a pregnant woman can prop under her belly while lying on her side, but sleep evaded me nonetheless.

I think it was already September by the time I realized it. I lived in a sort of student pueblo with undergrads, foreign post-docs, and beginning consultants, situated in the woods between the Stanford campus and the office park where McKinsey had its local division. I shared a top-floor apartment with two somewhat disagreeable French girls who had allotted me a square bedroom looking out on three sides at the tall, pointy pines. For the first few weeks I was lonely and depressed, I missed Enschede, I missed Aaron, I missed my father. Now that I was alone, guilt got a foot in the door. Hadn’t everything gone haywire essentially because of me? Wasn’t it my greedy exhibitionism that had driven us, a three-way bond with the strength of a water molecule, apart? I saw Siem crash through that glass door more often than I wanted to, I realized all too well what exactly had been smashed to smithereens — but at the same time I was liberated; the newness of being on the other side of the world banished the darkest thoughts of Enschede, distracted me from the irrevocability and hopelessness of the situation. On weekdays I worked long hours; at the weekends colleagues took me with them to San Francisco, where we spent days on the beach and nights in the clubs. This is good, it is good you are in California — and as soon as I started thinking this, sometimes even saying it out loud, I discovered I was pregnant.

“Prosaic” is too nice a word for how it all went. The youngest intern there, I was sitting in on a conference call with a McKinsey team for a page-by-page review of a final report for an Asian client; I was nauseous and the itch on my breasts was driving me insane. Don’t scratch, don’t scratch; if somebody had asked me anything I’d have answered, “don’t scratch,” but no one asked anything, giving me plenty of time to put two and two together: the itch, my late period, and all that the Enschede palaver had truly made me forget — that back on Corsica Aaron and I had had unprotected sex.

I got up, white as a sheet; the associate principal who chaired that witches’ coven asked if I was “OK” and whether they should call a doctor. Yeah, an abortion doctor, I thought, but left the conference room with my hand over my mouth, took the glass elevator downstairs, nodded weakly at the receptionist, and walked straight to the drugstore on Palo Alto Square where I bought two different pregnancy test kits and peed on them both, one after the other, back in the pueblo. Fat pink stripes. I sat there on the toilet until my legs fell asleep. Damn it to hell, I was pregnant by Aaron Bever.