Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“If I say yes, that is,” he heard Sigerius say. “Anyway, the party’s fed up with Kruidenier. Maybe he’ll just pack his bags himself. That’s what they’re hoping.”

Aaron was overheating, his jaw was clenched. Those pumps had suffered under Tineke’s weight, they were ruined. Sigerius sniffed. From the hallway came a loud, life-saving shout. Tineke. “ Boys! We’re about to start!”

“We’re coming,” Sigerius called back. He laid a hand on Aaron’s cotton shoulder and squeezed past him. From the doorpost he said: “I’ll tell them you’re getting changed. Mum’s the word for now.”

Blissfully alone, Aaron let the judo jacket glide off his clammy torso. He stepped out of the white cotton trousers, pulled on his stiff new jeans. He walked into the bedroom. Between the two copper-colored bedside tables, each with a tidy stack of books, was an unusually high double bed, with old-fashioned sheets and blankets. No clothes strewn about. He wriggled into the polo shirt Sigerius had lent him and stood at the full-length mirror mounted on the closet door. He examined his hot head. At the very crown of his skull there was still a small scab, a souvenir of his tumble against the men’s room door.

As he walked through the living room — heavy blue velour curtains kept out the evening sun, Joni’s Financial Times lay quartered on the sofa — he could already hear the clatter of cutlery. And like an ostinato, Sigerius’s bass voice.

“… so I know him a bit, once I had him work something out for the Socio-Economic Council, it was maybe … six years ago? He was still a partner at McKinsey. He came to give a presentation, and I have to say …”

Aaron halted in the middle of the room, long before he could be seen from the sunroom, and grabbed hold of the back of the swivel armchair. Were they talking about Boudewijn Stol?

There was a lull in the conversation, Sigerius did not finish his sentence, maybe they had heard him coming. With a sigh he propelled himself into motion, circumvented the two enormous ferns that guarded Tineke’s open kitchen, and stepped into the sunroom. “Bon appétit,” he said. Tineke smiled at him, Sigerius dished himself up some salad, Janis and Joni carried on eating without looking up. He sat down next to Joni, directly across from her father. She swallowed a mouthful and said: “Hey, guess what.”

“I give up,” he said stiffly. The sliding door was open, clumps of poplar fluff hesitated on the threshold, he heard the old chestnut tree rustle in the May breeze.

“While you were in the shower Boudewijn phoned, he asked if I would do my internship with him in Amsterdam.” She said it coolly, but her voice curled at the edges. He felt himself getting all hot and bothered again, this time with impotent rage. “Amsterdam?” he asked hoarsely. “I thought you were all gung-ho about going abroad. Why would you want to go sit in an office in Amsterdam? Seems to me a … a complete waste of time.”

She smiled at her parents across the whiteness of the table. “Aaron and Boudewijn Stol didn’t hit it off.”

“We hit it off just fine,” he said.

“Really?” Sigerius asked with a mouthful of food, ignoring his comeback, “I was just saying that I know Boudewijn a little …” He took a sip of wine, swallowed and continued: “He’s a decent guy, and extremely good at what he does nowadays. Sounds to me a golden opportunity, Joni.”

“Me too,” Aaron said weakly. “Naturally. But my point is that Joni shouldn’t sacrifice her foreign adventure for something like this.” This was a disadvantage of Sigerius: he was a friend you want to keep as a friend, and sometimes a little voice deep down wondered if that kind of friend really was a friend after all.

Sigerius nodded thoughtfully, but was startled by the loud metallic clink of Joni’s fork. She turned to Aaron, leaned back, and eyed him mockingly. “Oh, now listen to him,” she said, “that’s a good one. When I told you I wanted to spend a few months in America you were nearly in tears. You were practically clinging to my leg. And now this.”

There was a painful silence. He noticed that Janis, who never did pay him much notice, sat there smirking at him. In an attempt to regain his composure, he picked up the porcelain dish of potato croquettes and, with a trembling hand, scooped a few of them onto his plate.

“But I do have a funny story about that Stol,” said Sigerius, breaking the impasse. Although he was still keeping it to himself, the news from The Hague seemed to have perked him up. “After that SEC meeting he gave me a lift to Utrecht Station, and that was a memorable ride, I can tell you. My heart still races when I think about it.”

“What kind of car did he have?” Joni asked.

“Some sporty thing. A BMW, I think.”

“So what happened?” asked Janis.

Sigerius rested his broad, hairy forearms on the table and started telling them, in a relaxed tone of voice, that he and Stol were on the A12 just outside The Hague when they were ruthlessly overtaken by a Golf with an ostensibly normal-looking couple inside. He, in the passenger seat, got the fright of his life, and Stol even more so: he not only slammed on the brakes, but also sat on the horn. That was not entirely to the Golf’s liking. It slowed down alongside Stol’s BMW, the passenger window rolled down, a bleached-blond woman squirmed out, just about to her waist, and flung a paper sack of patates frites against Stol’s windshield. “Can you believe it!” said Sigerius. “We pulled onto the shoulder and spent the next fifteen minutes cleaning globs of mayonnaise and curry sauce and onions off the windshield. What’s the deal with those idiots in the west?”

Janis laughed. Joni said: “That Bo seems like just the type for an hour-long car chase.”

“Bo?” Tineke asked.

“Boudewijn,” she explained. “He said to call him Bo.”

Aaron thought he was losing his mind. For the second time in a week he was on the ropes thanks to that asshole Stol, and aside from being just plain fed up, he saw it coming: Joni was dying to give her parents a blow-by-blow account of his behavior during that dinner of Vaessen’s. She could hardly hold it in. She thought he had made a fool of himself, that he was a boorish exhibitionist, and while he himself had a different opinion on the matter, he estimated his chances of winning this contest here at the dinner table as fairly slim. When he heard Sigerius say that, in his opinion, “this kind of punk” deserved to be dealt with mercilessly, another tall tale occurred to him, a comparable situation involving his brother, and before he knew it he had commandeered the conversation. Enough of that Bo. Finito. End of story.

“Well, I’ve got another one,” he began, and waited until all four of them looked at him. “Back when I was still studying Dutch I was sitting in my taxi one weekend in Venlo …”

“You never drove a taxi, did you?” Joni asked.

“Briefly,” he lied, with more confidence in his voice than just now. “A year or so.”

In truth, it was his elder brother Sebastian who for years drove a provincial shuttle bus in Venlo every Saturday. But in his version it was he who, one Saturday afternoon, was heading toward Tegelen, just south of Venlo, on a two-lane road, and just before the hospital exit was nearly sideswiped by a red Ford Escort with black spoilers. The other driver swerved into his lane just before the red light, the car rocketing, tires squealing, in front of his taxi-van and up the entrance ramp to Sint-Maartens Hospital. “He missed ramming my front bumper by a hair,” he said, “so I honked and flipped him the bird.”

Just there, his anecdote brushed Sigerius’s, and he saw he at least had their attention, even Joni’s. Tineke asked Janis to pass her the bowl of cauliflower. “And so as I’m sitting there at the red light,” he continued, “the Escort, instead of driving into the hospital parking lot, pulls a U-turn, plows over the shoulder and stops. The door flies open and out gets this guy, about thirty. He tosses away a cigarette butt and marches over to my car. I can see right away he’s scum. He had to walk about twenty meters, his head tilted back the whole time so his chin stuck way out. He glowered at me over his jawbones, tongue pushed between his bottom teeth and lower lip. I could see that thick tongue of his, a nasty, blotchy slab. Greasy, jet-black hair, suede jacket, shiny red polyester training pants, Kappa, y’know, those Milan ones Gullit and Van Basten used to wear.”