Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“I don’t know how you were doing at twenty-six,” he said to Haitink, “but I sure didn’t mind earning as much as Dennis Bergkamp.”

“That’s a football player, isn’t it? I hate football.”

“With a weekly evening photo session we earned as much as a pro footballer. At our peak in 1998 we had 11,000 subscribers …”

“Subscribers?”

“Paying members. Men willing to shell out twenty bucks a month. Eleven thousand . Tally that up, why don’t you.”

Haitink draped one slender leg over the other and flicked at an imaginary abacus on the wall behind him. “Yes,” she said after a few seconds, too short to have really worked it out, “that’s quite a bundle. Amazing. So it was all about the money?”

“Yeah. Well, that too. Mostly it was—”

“Hang on a second,” she interrupted. She leaned over to her desk and reached for a large calculator. Several ticks later she looked up with girlish excitement. “Eleven thousand subscribers at twenty dollars a month,” she said, “and that for a year, that comes to … $2.6 million, that’s almost, no, more than five million guilders … Aaron, are you pulling my leg?”

“No. I’m dead serious. Sigerius — it’s his leg I was pulling.”

“But that’s … I mean …”

“It was insane and incredible and awesome, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Even keeping it a secret was fantastic … Addictive. Nobody knew, but meanwhile 11,000 guys did know, they knew everything … It was unbelievably exhilarating. A source of continuous conspiratorial … um …”

She looked at him musingly. “Sexual arousal?”

“Horniness, yeah. That’s the word I was looking for.”

He phoned the Thai take-out on the edge of town, ordered a green curry with rice, and showered in the half hour before the delivery scooter drove up the hill to his house.

It made you inhumanly horny. Naturally. Every week they almost floated out of his attic room, or wherever they did the shoot, in five-star hotels, on the Barbara Ann , at bed-and-breakfasts in Zeeland or East Groningen with museum flyers next to the electric kettle. It was always good. For years, their week was a cycle of horniness that started with provocative preparations, scouting out locations, buying new lingerie for Joni in chic or downmarket shops, with the ecstatic event taking place on Tuesday or Wednesday evening. They spent hours making the 100 to 150 photos they owed their clients, and the days that followed were consumed by an exhausted, satisfied after-session that consisted of examining what was being simultaneously examined on 11,000 other computers — by 1998 standards, a mind-blowing concept — and once they’d had enough of themselves they checked their bank balance, withdrew 1,000 guilders and drove to Paris, or to Berlin, or to Ameland for a new session. Their arousal seemed insatiable and its source inexhaustible. Sometimes it was like living in a dream, he imagined himself the rector of his own paradisiacal campus — until the high wore off. When the thrill passed, the real campus reappeared, a grassy campus with a damned real farmhouse, and in that farmhouse lived a real-life rector, Joni’s father, whom he stood next to in the university sport center’s showers twice a week.

He turned off the water. There was, he considered, also a reckless aspect to it, something masochistic. Constantly pushing his luck by gravitating ever closer to Sigerius. As though he were deliberately trying to get caught.

He paid for his food and ate it in his workroom. When the plate was empty he went back to the iMac and reread Joni’s e-mail. He noticed that he kept getting stuck at a remark that had, of course, stung him right from the start, but that he hadn’t yet found the time to get worked up about.

“I did live in San Francisco with Boudewijn Stol for a while,” she wrote, “maybe you still remember him.”

Boudewijn Stol — so she’d been with that goon after all. Behind the shock of Sigerius’s suicide, something else started to itch. Maybe it was just an old reflex, but he could not let go of the idea that Joni was taunting him with that “maybe you still remember him.” Of course he remembered him. So those two had shacked up. The minute he tried to imagine it, Joni under the same roof as that arrogant greaseball, he just about burst a blood vessel. The poison associated with that time! He was surprised how easily he fell back into his old love spasm, an echo, certainly, but still: neuralgia he hadn’t felt in years. His and Joni’s story was also a story of four years of pathological jealousy. One-sided jealousy, mind you: his . The constant fear she would leave him. The fear of being dumped. Of being supplanted. At her parents’ house. Behind his camera. (He: “You know, I also kept it up because I knew I was expendable.” Haitink: “You mean you were afraid she’d carry on with someone else if you called it quits?” He: “Yes.” Haitink: “Was that realistic, do you think?” He: “It seemed to me a foregone conclusion.”)

The memories of Etienne Vaessen’s wedding came crashing over him, that intense exhaustion once again poured into his legs, his obnoxious recklessness, the humiliation — it all came rushing back. How he was wrung through the mangle of jealousy during the dinner that had kept them away from Roombeek on May 13, 2000.

They had been sitting glued to the hotel-room television for too long, and suddenly they had to rush. So while the horsemen of the apocalypse were galloping through their neighborhood in Enschede, they careered at 140 kph toward the Groeneweide estate. Joni fussed with his crookedly knotted bow tie; he mused sourly on the garish bash that awaited them. Arriving late, they parked the Alfa next to an enormous pond stocked with swans. “Don’t panic,” he exhorted her as they trotted up the broad marble stairs. They were courteously greeted by young men in livery, one of whom hurried ahead through the cool foyer decorated with gilded friezes and life-size oil paintings. Rooms off to each side were being prepared for the festivities later on in the evening, and somewhere in the depths of the estate a klezmerish ensemble could be heard rehearsing. They stopped before a pair of velvet-clad doors, which the lackey carefully opened, revealing a banquet hall so vast that from a distance the company resembled a kindergarten class at their cookie break. The decor was even more over-the-top than he had expected. Amphoras with long-stemmed sunflowers; here, too, oil portraits and hunting tableaux; an ornamental plaster ceiling, blue and gold regimental-striped wallpaper, the parquet floor a geometric mosaic of various kinds of wood over which waiters skated back and forth.

Their Louis Seize chairs must have been empty, disturbingly empty, for a good twenty minutes, and as though she wanted to make up for lost time, Joni strode ahead of him, ticking across the slick floor, and sat down, smiling, at one of the empty places. His soles slipping out from under him, he creaked around the grid of lavishly set tables, his gaze focused above the alternately black and bare backs of the guests, his destination being the bridegroom’s reddened ear, into which he whispered their alibi, concise, euphemistic: there was some problem in Enschede, nothing to be alarmed about, carry on eating. When he walked via the other side of the dining room to his seat, he saw to his satisfaction that the news of the fireworks factory caused no more of a ripple than a pebble tossed into the surf. Vaessen was already laughing again.

Meanwhile Joni had struck up a conversation with an older man in a white dinner jacket. Something he was saying made her laugh, “… and when I got home that evening,” he caught, “she’d bought another thing with an electrical cord.” Next to the man sat a much younger woman with gathered-up brown hair who said something back that he didn’t catch. “Long story short, something had to be done,” the man said, exclusively to Joni. “Eventually she was bathing the garden gnome twice a day.” Aaron cleared his throat and pulled in his chair. It took the man a fraction too long to notice him; he cut himself short as though Aaron was meddling in some way.