Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

It was humiliating how quickly he had reverted to his old obsessive, solitary self. Before he knew it they were in America, where everything went well for them, everything thrived and flourished in California: guavas, tangerines, lemons, his new daughters, his and Tineke’s love for each other — everything except their moyenne , a word that still makes him nervous if he comes across it in one of those adult-lifestyle magazines. In Berkeley and Boston he lived for numbers. Men of his ilk were now named Quillen and Wiles and Erdős, skeletal digi-poets made of translucent rice paper who had retreated into the furthest reaches of their own cranium. When visiting Berkeley, Paul Erdos occasionally stayed with them in their clapboard house on Bonita Avenue, and then he and the maestro explored barren wastelands, penned an article the minute they had cracked a hypothesis, put in eighteen-, sometimes twenty-hour days, and once, when they sat talking in the grass in the backyard after one of those tabletop marathons, Tineke said jokingly to Erdős — but, oh yes, in effect to him: “Mathematicians, Paul, are little more than machines that convert coffee into hypotheses, don’t you think? Always those hypotheses of yours, I can’t bear to hear the word anymore,” at which Erdős guffawed in agreement and clapped his trembling hands.

In those days, as they lay in the bed she had hammered together herself out of pure love, Tineke sometimes slid her hand under the elastic of his pajama bottoms — his signal to launch into a soliloquy on algebra, on the glass wall separating him from the proof he was after, and how he was going to smash through that wall, tomorrow, once he was at his desk at Evans Hall. And yes, he felt guilty and inadequate. But Tineke appeared to accept his escape route, she followed his achievements closely, she seemed to believe that the cultivation of genius entails certain sacrifices, maybe she was simply happy that between seven and nine in the evening he did his damnedest to be a good father to Joni and Janis. By the time they had moved to Boston and he honed in on his breakthrough, sometimes sleeping on an air mattress in his office at MIT, sex was something they talked about like it was an overgrown lawn that needed mowing. And for the past ten years or so they talked about nothing at all. The erotic scenario was put off and, eventually, called off. They respected each other’s privacy. They kissed on the cheek when leaving or returning home.

Returning home was something, incidentally, he never did unannounced or noiselessly or as a surprise anymore, not since that time he inadvertently saw Tineke in the possession of an apparatus made of gray East Bloc plastic, the color of an old-fashioned dial phone, out of which stuck an iron rod with a hard rubber knob on the end, and which, when you plugged it in, pounded violently up and down, a brutal, hammering rattle. A noisesome machine one might use to crack walnuts, but which his wife used after a hard day’s work in her studio, he discovered one afternoon when the sound drew him to the bedroom, to pleasure herself.

His memory tells him that he spent the month following Isabelle’s ultimatum in his study, half naked and at night. That was when he discovered the websites. His study is cube-shaped, but the slight curvature of the roof and the stacks of yellowed periodicals and dusty books in the corners and along the walls make it resemble the inside of a bird’s nest. It is the only room in the farmhouse to have evaded Tineke’s woodworker’s hand. It is his man cave. Daddy’s jerk-off den.

Isabelle had opened the faucet all the way, and rusty water, confined to the pipes for decades, gushed out. Their routine consisted of texting each other after Tineke fell asleep — Isabelle never went to bed before three, did she actually ever sleep? — and as soon as he received an answer, the jumbo shrimp slipped out of bed, swam up the stairs to his study and switched on his laptop. He excitedly sent her e-mails laying out the future he had been dreaming up for them. That it was mutual, he gathered from the visions she herself sent back: she wanted to take a long trip with him, she would like to live in a real house with him, she asked whether he was in fact sterilized, and more such talk that, coming from someone else’s mouth, sounded rather big.

Now that they were being so explicit, he sometimes succeeded in texting her away from her sorority house, luring her to her dorm room, where she disrobed and, like him, sat naked at her computer. “Tell me exactly what you are going to do to me, soon, when we’re on that trip.” How literally Isabelle took that “soon” was evident the following afternoon. “Baby,” she texted him, “how did T react?” How did T react? Hang on, she’d given him a month. “I’m waiting for the right moment,” he texted back.

The days and nights passed, and again something changed in Isabelle’s attitude. He had previously seen her switch from admiring and uninhibited to preachy and moralistic — and now she turned harsh. Her e-mails became shorter, more time elapsed between them. “When are you going to tell her?” she answered when he asked if she was turned on. Sometimes she would get him aroused, and then give him the silent treatment for a quarter of an hour, an hour, the whole night. And because it was, in the end, always a letdown, because she never really cooperated — but also because he never gave up, addicted as he was to those little digital envelopes — he began, out of desperation, scouring the Internet. Driven insane by deferred fulfilment, he found photos where he could actually see what Isabelle was withholding from him. He was shocked to discover how many girls, Asian or otherwise, he could conjure up on his screen with just a few simple search terms. But it worked — and how. By the time Isabelle went to bed — always suddenly and unannounced — his laptop nearly melted from the tabbed sex sites, downloaded pictures of floozies in all manner of positions, pop-ups and weird, virusy dial-up programs. Sometimes it took him a good fifteen minutes to clean his hard drive, after which he would do the same in the upstairs bathroom to the raw chipolata between his legs. The release was followed by a peaceful gloom that got him restfully through the remainder of the night.

• • •

“Who knows if I’ll even get to see the inside of the house again,” says Aaron. He puts on the judo jacket, his hands and forearms shoot out of the sleeves like broomsticks, he overlaps the front flaps.

“Don’t be so pessimistic.”

They hear the soft thwap of flip-flops from down the hall. “Guys?” Joni. “Dad, Aaron, you guys ready to eat? The table’s set.”

Aaron squats down and picks the belt up off the floor from between his bare feet.

“Where are you?” Her footsteps echo as she walks through the gently ventilated bathroom into the dressing room. “Am I disturbing?” Her face does not express irony, but irritation.

“You never disturb, honey,” he mumbles, with exaggerated sweetness.

“Coming,” Aaron says.

She sniffs and walks off without a word. The last time Joni disturbed him was at the end of the month Isabelle had given him; after a sleepless night he sat in the administrative wing like a prepped corpse. Something that seldom happens, happened: his secretary announced Joni. What was she doing there? He still remembers how optimistic she looked: spring was still pondering its next move but Joni was already wearing a summer frock. Her appearance cheered him up, they kissed on both cheeks, sat down at the corner of the conference table. He looked tired, she said; I have a busy job, he answered.

She said: “When you’re in love, anything’s possible.”

He asked: “How do you mean?”