Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

Twilight was falling, the sky was purple, silvery on the edge of the wispy clouds. He caught the reflection of his own bald head in the window. He felt himself become calmer, and somber. A village unfurled itself alongside a canal, a wafery moon hung curiously early in the sky. Soon he would walk home through the moldy dusk of Linkebeek. The deadness that awaited him, the cold, high-ceilinged rooms he had longed for back in Venlo. He was just thankful that it was Tineke who sat there ignoring him, and not Sigerius himself.

It had never been completely relaxed. In Sigerius’s company he could freeze up, literally, becoming dramatically paralyzed: his jaws clamped shut, bringing about a barely controllable tension that spread from his neck vertebrae and his shoulders throughout his entire body. He was, for hours on end, a statue of himself fighting against total paralysis, desperately talking all the while, praying his voice would continue to function. If Sigerius were to give him a push during one of these moments, he’d have fallen over and smashed to bits like a Chinese vase.

He experienced their friendship as magical — before he’d come to the campus to take up photography, he had flunked out of the Dutch program in Utrecht, was chucked out on his ear, and here he had simply walked right into the inner chamber of the academic heart, just like that — but mendacious as well. He made himself out to be more than he was. It all started with the jazz. One Sunday at the farmhouse, not so long after their first meeting, they slurped hot coffee from slim-handled mugs. Sigerius, distant, his mind on other matters, got up and went over to a hypermodern metal cabinet housing a record player and put on an LP. Jazz. Even before he’d sat back down on the long, pale-pink sofa next to his wife, Aaron recognized the music. He waited a bit just to be sure, but he was right: the theme, the round, slightly coquettish piano-playing, this was Sonny Clark, and the LP was called Cool Struttin’ . He could see the classic Blue Note jacket before him, a pair of woman’s legs strolling over (he presumed) a New York City sidewalk. Over Joni’s and Tineke’s heads he said: “Nice album, Cool Struttin’. ”

Sigerius, with his amazing morning stubble (it would take Aaron a whole week to cultivate such a shadow), opened his brown eyes wide. “ Cool Struttin’ is a great album,” he said, his voice more strident, higher, as though a piano tuner had taken a wrench to it. “So you know it. Cool Struttin’ is by far Clark Terry’s best LP.”

Clark Terry? Aaron got it at once: Sigerius was mistaken, he was confusing Sonny Clark with Clark Terry, an amusing gaffe, but he decided not to rub it in. It was hardly tactful to swoop in like a schoolmarm and rap your new father-in-law on the knuckles, but to just play dumb, no, he was too proud for that. “I’m with you,” he said, “this was Sonny Clark’s best band, Philly Joe Jones, for once, holding back on the drums. Not going at the cymbals like a hooligan.”

Eyes like saucers, briefly, then suddenly shut. “Terry. It’s Clark terry.”

“This is Sonny Clark on piano,” Aaron said, more decisively than necessary. “Terry’s a trumpet player.”

“You sure about that?” Joni asked.

Sigerius bolted up off the sofa and slid past his wife, his heels ticking as he marched over to the novel metal cabinet which, he learned later, Tineke had made herself. He pulled out the record jacket, glanced at both the front and back cover, propped it up next to the turntable and closed the cabinet. He returned, painfully slowly, to the sofa and sat back down.

“You’re right. Of course you’re right. And damn, I even saw that Terry in the Kurhaus. And in Boston too, later. Ladies, I’m going to have to watch my words from now on.”

That is precisely what Aaron did for the remaining quarter of an hour; Sigerius didn’t catch that his knowledge of jazz was wafer-thin after all, that the Sonny Clark album was pure luck. He knew Cool Struttin’ so well because of that pair of legs, he’d picked up the album at a flea market because of the jacket, it spent a few years taped to the door of his wardrobe, the vinyl disc collecting dust on the turntable. Sure, he liked jazz, but to be honest, his heart lay with blues and rock ’n’ roll.

But honesty was not his speciality. Now that Sigerius had promoted him to jazz expert, to someone with an encyclopedic knowledge on, of all things, his own turf, to a kindred spirit, he needed to get to work. That same week he let a nervous guy in a black turtleneck at Broekhuis bookshop talk him into the Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD , a 1,500-page jazz bible that, according to the turtleneck, not only contained the entire history of jazz, but separated the wheat from the chaff with a handy system of stars. Across from Broekhuis, at the discount-book warehouse, he bought a biography of Miles Davis, a Jazz for Dummies and a book called Billie and the President . In his wallet he had the business card of a retired dentist in Boekelo, a silver-gray man in red trousers who had been standing behind him one day at the campus record library as he checked out a Bud Powell record. The man told him he had 800 original jazz LPs at home — American pressing, thick, pitch-black vinyl, sturdy cardboard jackets—“you can have them for a guilder apiece,” at which Aaron nearly hit the roof with fermented craving. “Give me a call,” the man said, and he did just that, the very same evening, and he kept on calling him, twice a week at first, then twice a month, brief, hasty exchanges in which the man was always too busy, or he was about to leave for the States, or he was ill, or was about to be; “call me again soon,” but “soon” gradually became more of an obstacle, a testiness crept into the exchanges — until Aaron stopped believing him. Stick your LPs up your retired old ass. But now he decided to take the plunge and cycled out to Boekelo, on the other side of town. He rang the bell at a seniors’ apartment that corresponded to the address on the tattered card. A Turkish man answered the door.

So he plundered the record library and, when Joni wasn’t with him, studied jazz history as if he had to program the North Sea Festival that summer. He perused the artist entries, concentrating first on the big shots who got the most pages — the Parkers, the Ellingtons, the Monks, the Coltranes, the Davises — and after that, the rest of the ’50s jazz greats: Fitzgerald, Evans, Rollins, Jazz Messengers, Powell, Gillespie, Getz. He listened to all their records, jotted down biographical particulars in a notebook, etched it all in his memory, Blue Note, Riverside, Impulse! Verve, Prestige. It was like his former studies, only that fucking Kapellekensbaan had taken him three weeks and Giant Steps just thirty-seven minutes and three seconds. Books had dominated the first half of his 1990s, he read like a maniac, entire evenings, at bus stops and in waiting rooms, when he lay awake at night: tallying titles, keelhauling oeuvres, five years of forced labor to recoup his humiliating comedown in Utrecht — now it was “mission accomplished” in just five weeks . Then he knew it was safe to go back in the water. Another five weeks later, he stood next to Sigerius in De Tor listening to the Piet Noordijk Quartet, sipping whiskey and putting his faith in a silicone-implant jazz knack.

Deceitful? Of course it was. But everyone in that farmhouse lied. They were a family of prevaricators. Although he knew this was a lame excuse, he told himself that all of them had secrets — Sigerius, Tineke, Joni, him, they all had something to hide. How long had he not known that Janis and Joni weren’t Sigerius’s real daughters? Long. And they’d have been quite happy not to tell him at all. Not a word about the real genetic set-up. Sometimes he had the impression that they’d forgotten it themselves.