Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“And what about me then?” he said. “All I think about is you, Isa. And what goes through my mind is that you’re free, you’re the one who’s constantly running off. You and that Beauty Parlor of yours, you hanging out in one of your bars until four in the morning, three times a week. You going on one blind date after the other.” (This was true: she kept him fully abreast of the fratboys who accompanied her to galas and house parties all across the Netherlands.)

“Siem,” she sighed, “they’re pimply little creeps.”

“Maybe, but you go to bed with them. The pimply creeps get to have sex with you.”

Be-e-e-ep .

He heaved a sigh, crossed the rain-soaked asphalt of the main road, and called her back. “I’m right, though, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, my turn, OK? You sleep every night with that wife of yours.”

“And I’m still happy. With us! Come on, Isa, just this once pretend to be an adult. When can we meet? De Appel is waiting.”

“You are such a coward.”

“Coward? I crave you. We can do whatever we want!” He stood with one arm outstretched, like a Shakespearean actor on the phone. It was cold, he blinked back the half-soft tears, trying to focus on the bare branches of the oaks and elms. “As long as you keep it quiet.”

She did not thaw, she exploded. She exploded just like SE Fireworks would explode a year later. This was precisely what pissed her off, every time, she shrieked. Did he really not get it? She was not someone for on the side . She was disgusted by his underhanded approach, she was disgusted by his asking her to keep it from her parents.

“Coward,” she snorted, “don’t you ever, and I mean ever , forbid me to be honest with the people who saved my life, you got that?”

“Isa sweetheart, just listen …”

“No, I will not listen, I’ve got our house bible in front of me, I know exactly what kind of manipulative little man you are, this book never lies. Listen is the last thing a person should do with cheats like you!”

Book? To his astonishment, a housemate of hers, a girl who sat on the corner of her bed drinking camomile tea during their conversation, had handed her a book entitled Never Satisfied: How & Why Men Cheat . The sorority’s “house bible” in which she’d spent an entire evening underlining passages with a ballpoint “because it was all just so familiar.”

“But Isa,” he moped, “at least tell me what I have to do.”

She went silent, a loaded pause like a piano being dropped from the tenth story, but instead of crashing to smithereens she answered with saccharine sweetness: “You’ve got a month to leave your wife.”

• • •

Put an end to it. A man in his position, a man who shoulders considerable ceremonial and administrative responsibilities, a man at the head of a family that would unanimously agree that they’d put up with enough already — a man like this, you would expect to put an end to it. But no. The only thing he can think of is Isabelle’s hand, that petite Asian hand that had so startled him that evening in Almelo; day and night he felt that phantom hand, tugging gently on his nervous system, driving him crazy, crazy with desire. There were moments when he was prepared to die for that hand. During that topsy-turvy month of March 1999 he tried to imagine himself inhabiting a future even more topsy-turvy, but because he was so turned around himself it hardly fazed him at all.

Often, at night, an hour or so after he had watched, from his half of the nuptial bed, Tineke remove her acres of textile and dig herself in, panting, next to him, he saw everything as clear as day: he would leave her, the woman who understood him so well, who for years had put herself second for his sake, the woman for whom he felt a massive, inert, deeply satisfied love — she had to go. Since Isabelle had issued her ultimatum he had difficulty falling asleep; tossing and turning, he abandoned himself to what began as practical, rational musings: he imagined short-term rentals in downtown Enschede he could move into until the divorce, he projected himself into Isabelle’s daily routine, saw himself sitting in her student kitchen on weekday mornings, his suit as crumpled as himself, drinking coffee from an oversized mug missing its handle. He pictured them driving off to Delft on misty Sunday mornings to visit his fifteen-year-younger mother-in-law-to-be, he pictured them at the procession into the Grote Kerk, arm in arm, for the opening of the academic year, Isabelle in a handmade hat intended for menopausal women — the idea of a middle-aged man with, nota bene , a Thai girl, would this go over well? — problematic scenarios he eventually allowed, unresolved, to swirl around in the eddy of increasingly carefree fantasies: city trips to Barcelona and Paris, romantic evening strolls through Europe’s finest parks, hotels, or B&Bs for which he would foot the bill; and only when he had worked through those visions, only after that endless, chaste foreplay, did he give in to her slender hand. Sweaty and curved like a jumbo shrimp, he lay on his half of their Auping mattress, as close to the edge as possible, a suit of armor around his erection. He barely touched himself, afraid that his mechanical shaking would waken Tineke, meditating on the passionate maneuvers Isabelle would perform on him, maneuvers that by now he was painfully aware he dreaded. How was he going to get through this? In some things in life, Siem Sigerius was extremely talented, a champion, even, he’d proved himself over and over — but he was downright lousy in bed.

He’d never been much good as a lover. The only period of his life when he could lay claim to that qualification was in the mid-1970s, after Tineke’s conquest. For a year or year and a half they were bewitched by sex, and had sex the way sex was probably supposed to be had. For him it was utterly confusing, a drizzly no-man’s-land where he, without knowing it at the time, was busy replacing his one sacred goal — to become the world’s greatest judoka — with something else, something more uncertain, something completely absurd, that private dream world of formulas and graph paper. Aimless, vexed, a failure — that is how he felt at the climax of his sexual career, hopelessly out of condition too, but at the same time wound-up, and tense, and charged. In fact, it was the only phase of his life when he felt like sex.

Before that, when alongside his jobs he trained three, sometimes four hours a day (judo, running, wrestling, jujitsu, weightlifting — a man with muscles like a gorilla but the protein levels of a hunger striker — the pockets of his duffel bag stuffed with raisins and bananas and dark chocolate, so that he didn’t keel over from exhaustion, and then fasting for days before weighing in, jogging in a rain suit, waking up in a pension next door to a tournament stadium with eyes glued in their sockets and a tongue of ox leather) — in those years his libido dangled on his consciousness like a sad, frayed shred, a strand of desire that tickled his loins maybe twice a month, nocturnal moments when he shook Margriet out of her drunken stupor and mounted her like a komodo dragon.

So he could pride himself on a sex life of a year and a half, slightly less than his military service, and then it was over; his physical interest in Tineke faded with alarming speed. Mathematics took hold of him, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, and poof, it was over. In retrospect he thinks — a thought that under no circumstances should be allowed to leave his mind — that his sexual surge was a form of de-training, the result of the pent-up physical energy accumulated on his camp bed in the little upstairs kitchen, the conversion of physical labor into mental gymnastics and wrestling. He used to lie on top of Kiknadze and Ruska and Snijders; later, he released himself onto Tineke?