Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“Brigitte is my wife,” said Stol. “I was just saying to your charming sister here that a few years ago I bought a stable for Brigitte. It was on the verge of bankruptcy, and dilapidated, you’d hardly recognize it now, she has—”

“—her own mouth,” Brigitte interrupted. She looked at Aaron with warm, dark-brown eyes; he couldn’t distinguish the iris from the pupil. “But he’s right, it was a dream come true. I’m mad keen on horses.” She had a thick Hague accent.

Stol said: “You mean you love horses.”

“When we bought it, the stable had just one star, now we’ve got three. Like I said, I’m mad keen.” Or was it a Leiden twang? As common as dirt, anyway. The point was, though, he had struck a chord with her, the equine chord, because she shifted her chair, as though to reposition herself for her moment of glory. She was hot to trot. “How many horses do you have?” he asked, interested, “or, no, sorry, what I meant to ask was, where’s the stable?” Joni shot him a surprised, questioning glance.

“Between Scheveningen and Wassenaar,” she answered, “right on the beach. You couldn’t ask for a better location, smack in the middle of the dunes. Black Beauty Manège , do you remember that TV series? We thought it was a neat name. It was his idea.” She gestured at Stol; her index finger sported a golden ring with a ludicrous little watch on it.

“I always watched Black Beauty as a kid,” said Joni. “I’m crazy about horses.”

“What’s also interesting,” said Brigitte, steeped in her own story, “is that when Máxima and Alexander go riding along the beach they always stop in for a cup of coffee, once a week at least”—she paused for a moment to gauge the effect of her hobnobbing with the royal couple. “Then I’m like, we’re not doing so bad after all. Hey, hon?” She snuggled her shoulder against Stol’s.

“Not bad indeed,” he said. “But Willem-Alexander has to drink coffee somewhere, doesn’t he, babycakes?” He stared listlessly at a distant point beyond Aaron’s shoulder. The mist of boredom between these two was too thick and clammy to ever burn off; Joni thought so too, he saw from the brazen twinkle with which she caught his eye. “I rode until I was sixteen,” she said. “Do you ride too?”—that’s right, Aaron thought, shift the attention to the person who does interest you. In fact, he and babycakes were completely irrelevant, they were just along for the ride. “A little,” replied Stol, “but I’m sure you ride better. I can definitely picture you astride a galloping horse.”

Aaron’s molars crackled. “Naked and bareback, I suppose?” he quipped. It was meant as a joke, but it came out sounding like he had a throbbing pain somewhere. Stol and Brigitte exchanged glances. Joni laid down her silverware, wiped her mouth, and gave him a look of feigned fondness. “We’ve been together for four years now,” she said, “but Aaron’s fantasy is as vivid as always.”

Stol chuckled quietly. “Say,” he asked in a theatrical attempt to rescue the conversation, “what does the young lady actually study, to know so much about McKinsey?”

Aaron butted in before Joni could answer. “She has a computer,” he said, again with that strange pinched voice, “and what d’you know, it’s got Internet on it. And on that Internet she surfed all on her own to the McKinsey website. That’s how.”

A new silence, a few shades deeper than the previous one. Regret filled Aaron’s sinuses. What he had just done, what he had just done twice , was the verbal equivalent of punching someone in the face; he was trigger happy tonight, suffering from a serious loss of self-control. With the least provocation he lashed out like a brute. Stol looked at him with a devious, slightly amused expression. Hard-blue eyes that scorched the peeling paint of his inner self. Aaron knew exactly what Stol saw: if anyone could tell how morbidly jealous he was, then he could. He was a calamity. How would Stol react if he told him about the night before Joni’s interview for an internship at Bain & Co., maybe a year ago, how after a few hours of agitated tossing and turning, he snuck out of bed, took the stack of clothes Joni had laid out into the bathroom and subtly spattered tangerine juice over her blue skirt and white blouse, tore tiny runs in strategic places in her stockings? He couldn’t stop himself. He was convinced that Joni would dump her freelance photoboy the minute she set foot in one of those mirrored-glass office towers. Somewhere in the world was a skyscraper that would steal her from him. London, New York, Tokyo: he was going to lose her to consultancy.

Of course he often wondered where this fear came from. At first he presumed it was just a stubborn offshoot of garden-variety jealousy; the first few euphoric months of all his relationships were coupled with the disproportionate fear that a rival would put paid to his happiness. But with other girlfriends his paranoia waned after a month or two, along with his affection. In Joni’s case, nothing waned. Naturally, anyone who wanted to go out with Joni Sigerius had to deal with it, she was exceptionally beautiful, she was intolerably beautiful. Intentionally or not, she bombarded the nuclei of masculine propriety with beta particles, men would lose all sense of decorum as soon as Joni Sigerius came anywhere near them, and that nuclear reaction created aggressive hunters, he’d seen it happen so many times. She allowed a teacher from her own art school to body-paint her a couple of times a year, and twice she had won the campus wet T-shirt contest. Portrait photographers plucked her from the sidewalk for so-called artistic sittings. Who was it that he heard texting her in the middle of the night? And the unfamiliar first names and phone numbers in her diary? In clubs, men growled hoarsely in his ear that his turn was up. For years she was woken up in the morning by a heavy breather — turned out to be the dean of her department. What’d she mean, the masseur insisted it was “on the house”? Every few months she’d get antsy and go to Amsterdam with a gay friend for a night in the iT, in a T-shirt so flimsy Ray Charles could see through it. And him? He sat at home in front of the TV with a slice of apple strudel. Drove him up the wall .

“Anything exciting happen?” he would ask when she returned at six in the morning.

“Nothing much. Getting in was kind of a hassle.”

“Oh? How come?”

“I had to turn in my bra.”

“ Wha-huh? ”

“My bra. Turn it in.”

“What kind of nonsense is that?”

“The bouncer said so.”

“The bouncer? What kind of bouncer is that? And then?”

“And then I turned in my bra.”

He was a calamity — but so was she.

Calamity Joni smiled at Stol. “If I want to know anything about McKinsey,” she said, ostensibly unperturbed, “I can always turn to Aaron. He knows everything about consultants.” Exactly how Joni was going to carry out his execution, he wasn’t sure, but that it was going to happen — that was inevitable. His disastrous jealousy had a parallel effect on her. If only he could get out of here . “As far as this one here is concerned,” Joni continued, “McKinsey is not a free agent. You people are corrupt. According to Aaron, McKinsey shits reports on demand.” He felt her hand on his shoulder, she was about to say something else, but off to one side a voice called out his surname.

All four of them looked to the right and saw the towering bridegroom approach, weaving his way through his chattering dinner guests. A telephone was pressed against Vaessen’s ear, not a sleek cell phone but a house telephone with a rubber antenna; he nodded his blond head at Aaron, a smug little lift of that self-satisfied chin. Twit, he thought, inviting your boss to your wedding, sleaze-ball, brownnoser. “Yeah, he’s here … just a sec,” said Vaessen. “Bever, for you.” He passed him the telephone across the table, and then squatted down between Stol and Brigitte for a chat.