Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“Did this, um …”

“Joni.”

“Did Joni use her real name on the website?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then what?”

“She was supposed to be a girl from the American Midwest. That was the website’s look.”

“Just pictures?”

“The Internet is too slow for videos.”

“And how racy were these pictures?”

“You do know what porn is?”

“Eh … I’ve an idea.”

“Well, that. They used to call them erotic images.”

“And you had to be a member to view these … erotic images?”

“If you wanted to see all of them, yeah, of course.”

“OK. And what was the site called?”

“Lindaloveslace.”

“And this Linda, that was Joni?”

“No, me.”

“Just asking.”

“This is the first time I’ve told anyone.”

“That’s very brave of you, Aaron. But? Did it work out?”

“Are you kidding? We hit the jackpot. It was an unbelievable success. We couldn’t believe it.”

“So Joni is that pretty, is she?”

“She’s breathtaking.”

“According to you.”

“According to thousands of men.”

He told Haitink that one day they woke up and realized “it” had become bigger, bigger than their relationship. “We went to bed as a couple and woke up as business partners. We realized that we were a pair of managers, managers with a secret. Managers of a secret.”

“And all that time you were scared witless that her big-shot father would find out.”

“Uh-huh. Pretty much, yeah.” He attempted to explain to her how incredibly complicated it was to keep it quiet, to create a vacuum around something that was so all-consuming and so successful, and at the same time so totally inappropriate; it was not just a sleight of hand, it required constant vigilance. “We led double lives. And at the same time I was getting chummier with Sigerius. On a first-name basis with her caring, loving father . An impossible juggling act. To be honest, it was awful.”

“What were you so afraid of?”

He could not suppress a groan. Did she really not get it? The question annoyed him as much as her hardhanded debunking of his admiration for Sigerius. Did she learn this 100 years ago in psych class? It occurred to him that he shouldn’t have made her read Who’s Who in the Netherlands , but an entirely different book altogether, a handbook for the novice judoka that Sigerius had written for the youngsters in his dojo and had printed and bound at Tubantia’s print center. Since the late 1980s Sigerius gave free hour-long judo lessons on Thursday evenings for children from Twekkelerveld, a grim housing project across from the campus’s main entrance. His handbook explained, in terms the kids would understand and accompanied by clumsy illustrations he drew himself, the technical fundamentals of judo as well as the philosophy behind it, but what Aaron mostly remembered was the three-page code of conduct for the “sportsmanlike judoka.” Sigerius had probably drawn up this edifying list because he saw it as his duty to inform the often immigrant youngsters, boys he rightly categorized as underprivileged, of a set of values different from the ones they picked up around their piss-stinking apartment blocks. “If I have my judo partner in a hold, I will not cause him unnecessary pain.” “I promise to engage in fair play.” “If I win a match I will not boast about it.” “I will not lie on the mat, but will sit up straight while listening to the sensei’s instructions.” “I will remember to brush my teeth before going to the judo lesson.”

Haitink was still looking at him. Her expression was mildly mocking, the look of someone who, because of her ’60s upbringing, was obliged to play the enlightened woman of the world. Fine. Instead of lecturing her on the degree of betrayal they were talking about here, on the devious measures you had to take before you had a secret, well-organized sex site up and running, he asked her if she had children herself.

“A son,” she said.

“That’s a pity,” he said. “Married?”

“Ingmar has a boyfriend.”

“Terrific. Even better. I’ll just assume Ingmar and his friend are nice, decent guys, sociable, good at their work. I’ll bet he’s good-looking.”

She frowned at him. “Ye-e-s-s …,” she said.

“OK. So one day you get a tip. Go to this or that Internet site, and you do, and you discover a meticulously designed website, a site your son updates every week with new pictures of himself. Crisp photos of Ingmar and his hard cock. I’m just putting it in clear English for you. And if you type in your credit card number you can have access to thousands of photos showing the vast assortment of meat and plastic that gets rammed up Ingmar’s spit-lubed anus — as long as it takes for that handsome face of his to contort into a grimace and his smooth-shaven dick to ejaculate. The following Sunday you see them again, your son and his boyfriend, but this time in the flesh. They’re coming over for dinner.”

For a split second she sat there frozen, maybe because of the imagery, maybe because of his rough language, and he intensely enjoyed seeing her brick-red mouth hang open, a filament of saliva stretching between her smallish, aged teeth. Her wise, pistachio-green eyes stared straight ahead, aghast — but then she regained her composure. “I wouldn’t exactly break out the champagne, no,” she said. “But—”

“Sigerius would go apeshit,” he interrupted, more rudely than he had intended. “He’d blow a fuse. Siem Sigerius discovers that the apple of his eye is an Internet whore?” He bit his upper lip and cringed. “I’d be first,” he said. “First he’d slit my throat, and then his own. You know, if I wasn’t safely locked up here I’d be lying at the bottom of Rutbeek Lake right now. And Siem next to me.”

She eyed him pensively. She was thinking. And now, seven years later, he finally knew what about: the dead Sigerius. But instead of telling him there was nobody alive anymore who wanted to slit his throat, she asked: “So why didn’t you just stop?”

It had started to rain. Cold droplets spattered on the back of his monitor and the photographic paper on his desk. With a shiver he reached over and slammed the window shut.

The key question, of course. Why didn’t he quit? He didn’t know himself, not exactly at least, it was a medley of motives, some of them clearer than others, something muddy that had kept him, despite intense attacks of guilt and doubt, from stopping. On and on, week after week. He could have given Haitink five different honest reasons, motivations he could classify from light to dark, from logical to completely off the wall, from courageous to cowardly and back again.

Just to be done with it, he pulled out the most superficial. An incentive for all ages: the dough. Moolah. Big bucks. The incredible mountain of dollars the website raked in. From day one, men from all corners of the globe signed up — at least he’d assumed it was men — and the filthy lucre started pouring in, thousands of dollars at first, pretty soon tens of thousands, month in month out, for four years — more money than they knew what to do with. Money they sank into a brand-new Alfa Romeo in which they floored it to a bank in Luxembourg, money with which they secretly bought a luxury yacht that never left the Mediterranean, money no one else knew they had. For Joni it was a dream come true, years ahead of schedule. He didn’t know anyone else with a subscription to the Financial Times . When they started she was twenty and already the owner of a portfolio of shares and stock options. She did her trading at the beginning of each trimester. “Hey Miss Frumpy,” he said when he first found her up in her student attic room sitting cross-legged with the telephone in one hand and the stock market pages in the other, four in the afternoon in her nightie, window shades shut, plates caked with yesterday’s spinach pasta on the floor, “don’t you need to shower?” She still smelled deliciously like nighttime. “I earned 6,000 guilders today,” she said without looking up, “how about you?” On their first date, when he asked her why she was studying Technical Management Science, she did not give the typical freshman-girl answer—“to be involved with people in an organization”—but, simply, “to get rich quick.” He had burst out laughing, she wasn’t serious, but she was serious. “In home economics class you learn home economics, at the dance academy you learn to dance, and in Technical Get-Rich-Quick Science,” she said, smiling, “you learn to get rich quick.” And that is precisely what she was planning to do: Joni Sigerius envisioned herself starting her own business, taking it to the stock market, and selling it before she turned forty.