Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

He gathered his composure and texted back that she must be a pretty good dancer. He waited in vain for another half hour, but the cold drove him down to the living room for a glass of whiskey. Back in bed he switched his cell phone to silent mode and set it on the floor next to him. Every two minutes he checked to see whether she had come through. After a miserable hour and a half he fell asleep.

The next afternoon he received a formal rejection letter on his office computer. She had thought about it long and hard, but she “couldn’t handle it anymore.” Until now she had managed to block out all thoughts of his wife, but the fact remained that he was a “cheat,” a “rat,” an “adulterer,” an “unreliable man.” Now that they had become “more intimate,” she considered it an “insoluble problem.” She regretted it. “Don’t e-mail or text me anymore.”

He gave computers a wide berth for the next few days, like a lifelong smoker determined to kick the habit. Every fiber in his body, every one of his brain cells, screamed out for contact. In the evening at home he heard his cell phone chirp with phantom texts. Three days after receiving her Dear John letter, just before four in the afternoon, he typed out a message, his heart pounding: “consider this message unsent” and nothing else. Once he’d clicked “send” he despised himself for it, but at the same time hoped it would make her laugh and break her silence. He spent the last hours of his workday gazing at his in-box like a fisherman waiting for a nibble, refreshing the page every few seconds, until he was engulfed in darkness. The low-rise administrative wing, with his spacious office at the end of it, stuck like a foot out of the tower adjacent to the campus’s main entrance. He gazed out of the picture window across the empty parking lot. If I turn on the light, he thought, there’ll be a madman on display.

And for days on end, nothing. At night, he hardly closed his eyes; usually between three and four in the morning he took to his study with a glass of whiskey and a packet of tissues, and sat in his leather reading chair jerking off to her yearbook photo. Twice he wrote her lengthy, pathetic letters on his laptop and then deleted them, not out of common sense, but out of fear. Isabelle’s principled tone unnerved him. When, after the weekend, he returned to his office at 11 a.m. from a meeting and, against his better judgment, opened his private e-mail account, the name Isabelle Orthel appeared like a burning bush on his computer screen. He touched his left ear and opened the message.

“Is it such cold turkey for you too?”

He wonders how she’s doing. Is she still living on campus? Maybe she was in Roombeek at the time of the accident. He and Aaron walk deeper into the dressing room, an illogically L-shaped space. Around the corner, along the base of the L, his wife has built shallow, made-to-measure shelves for their shoes; on the rear wall is a walnut cupboard with steel modular shelves, a hanging section on the left for his academic robes and dress tails. It smells of the dried lavender Tineke has placed in sachets among his clothes. He squats down, his joints make a snapping sound, and like a forklift he pulls two judo suits from the lowest shelf.

“The jacket to this one,” he says to Aaron, his chin on the top suit, “probably won’t fit you. The bottom one is my old competition suit. Take that jacket.”

Aaron takes the stack from him. “Try it on here?” he says.

“You sleeping all right?” He can see that Aaron does not like the question. “You look knackered.”

“Reasonably. It gets pretty warm at night.”

Sigerius turns, reaches up and pulls an old black belt from the uppermost shelf, a supple, time-worn thing; the spot where the button dug itself in, year after year, has been scuffed white. Aaron wriggles out of his shoes. Sigerius waits until his new jeans have dropped to his ankles and he wobbles on one leg while removing the other. “Here,” he says at precisely that moment, “my lucky belt,” and tosses it too hard — flings it — at his shoulder, it is a ridiculous gesture. But Aaron does not notice, or pretends not to.

“Thanks,” says Aaron, and bends down to pick up the belt. “Your competition belt?”

“That too. Just my old belt.”

He watches as Aaron pulls the bleached-white judo trousers up over his long, suntanned legs and bony hips, ties the string of the waistband in a bow. His torso is lanky and has the form of a question mark. Aaron wouldn’t do something like that. It is unkind of him to take out his paranoia on this kid. Isn’t it the same old tune? he suddenly wonders. Him and sex. Isn’t he always projecting his guilt onto others when it’s about sex? Did he conjure up his idiotic, paranoid ideas because the moralizer in him feels he should be punished for all that Internet cruising? Isabelle would say: Yes .

After they picked up where they had left off, she told him during one of their battery-guzzling telephone conversations that he owed it all to her mother. Owe all what to your mother? Well, she said excitedly, her mother watched her pine for the past four days and said: just e-mail the guy.

“Your mother?” he exclaimed, “does your mother know about this?”

“Of course she does,” she said, “what d’you think?”

“You’re kidding, this isn’t something you go and tell your mother . What we have going here is strictly confidential, Isabelle.”

She burst out laughing. “Get used to it, big guy, in our family we tell one another everything .”

He did not get used to it. Worse: now, eighteen months later, he still cringes at the thought of Marij Star Busman knowing about his escapade with her adopted daughter. When he sent her a tentative e-mail a few weeks after Isabelle had spilt the beans—“I just wanted to say, Marij, what a nice, spontaneous daughter you have”—her reply was not moralistic, but dead serious: “I have complete faith in your intentions, Siem, but I don’t like seeing my daughter hurt.”

Hurt ? He had no idea what she was getting at. Her daughter did not make a hurt impression, at most she acted piqued, moody. Ever since what they continued to call “cold turkey,” their phone calls and e-mails increasingly focused on what she saw as his spineless gift for committing adultery. And when the conversation — all post-Almelo communication was carried out by phone or e-mail — came anywhere near sex she would text him: isn’t this difficult for you? Or: what would your daughters make of all this? Or: don’t you think of yourself as a bad person? Although it might have been better to explain to her that judging him was not exactly the job of a maîtresse , he wore himself out setting straight what she in turn would bend back out of shape for him. When he asked her if she thought Bill Clinton was a bad person, she answered that he mustn’t hide behind other people. When he tried to explain what it was like to wake up next to the same woman for twenty years (“that’s for as long as you’ve been alive, Isabelle”), she replied: “You’re not even halfway there, man.” She was Monica Lewinsky and Kenneth Starr wrapped into one.

So now Monica and Kenneth were hurt. Instead of wondering about his own failings, he left the administrative building in the middle of the day, his eyes bleary with concern, and called her up. Why didn’t she tell him she was hurt? And what from, honeybunch? She answered that she was not his honeybunch and that he apparently did not appreciate what she was going through. She was always alone, she slept alone, she went to her parents’ alone, to parties alone — and the whole time, all she could think of was Siem Sigerius.