Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

He stares at the boat on the cover for a moment, then takes a pen from a holder full of pencils and shavings and paper clips, and jots down the name of the manufacturer and the model number on the back of the receipt, which he then folds up and slides into his wallet.

Why would Aaron rent a thing like that? It’s one of the questions that plagues him at home while he watches the soccer game, pillows propped behind his back. Holland is slaughtering the Danes, and he cheers each goal right on time along with his daughter, but he’s not really there, he needs to know about that boat. After the match Janis decides at the last minute to return to her room in Deventer, Tineke offers to take her to the station, and, as soon as he sees the Audi drive past the living-room picture window, he goes upstairs to his study and switches on his laptop. It’s too late to phone that marina in Sainte-Maxime, so he goes to the manufacturer’s website, and what he sees only fuels his anxiety. He is no boat expert, but he doesn’t need to be, even a Swiss bumpkin could see that this is the top of the line. Palmer Johnson’s website oozes exclusivity. His heartbeat accelerating, he looks over the boats, the interiors, specifications. The “sport yacht” in the brochure is relatively small, just twenty meters long, and apparently there were only three of them made, the last one in 1997. His eyes nearly devour the monitor, but nowhere does he see how much the yacht costs, apparently Palmer Johnson considers itself too classy for a price list. He opens Google and types in the model number and “price” in the search field. He lands on a website in North Miami Beach that doesn’t sell yachts, but rents them. During low season you can sail along the Florida coast for $110,000 in a PJ 115 Sport Yacht, in peak season you’ll shell out $130,000. Per week.

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The site sagged under children seated at classroom desks, children clasping toys, children in steel pedal cars that brought back memories of my own primary school days. The kiddies’ pal himself was nowhere to be seen. On a separate page he offered his services as a restorer of antique black-and-white pictures. (“Aaron Bever employs the most up-to-date apparatus and techniques in photographic restoration. The difference is in the details!”) In the sample photograph I recognized the half-disintegrated wedding portrait of his grandparents, a time-worn, warped, and water-pocked piece of paper that he kept propped on his bookshelf and with the slightest puff of breeze fluttered to the floor like an autumn leaf. Alongside it the spruced-up, spotless version. I looked at his grandmother’s awkwardly fitting wartime dress. The hairline of the young man who had been his grandfather was already receding, but even in his Venlo nursing home he wasn’t as bald as his grandson.

My own head was still heavy from yesterday. After work about thirty of us boarded three Chrysler vans that took us from Coldwater to the Gold Digger, Rusty’s favorite hotel bar in downtown L.A. He treated, said we had to celebrate the Barracks deal. Earlier that day Rusty, Debra from Personnel, and I had already been to see a renowned interior architect on South Hope Street, offices on every continent. This was just the ticket, Rusty said, these guys (who turned out to be two women and one man) had done Amazon.com, Deutsche Bank, a complete make-over of the Sheraton, they’re the tops, he guaranteed they’ll be purring once they saw the Barracks. If we’re gonna go bankrupt, Joy, then let’s do it in style. But he’d rather end up in Fortune ’s 100 Best Companies to Work For, did I get his drift? That list was an obsession from his Goldman Sachs days, and although I cautiously prepared him for a letdown — I couldn’t imagine a firm like this wanting to take us on — they actually warmed to our proposal, and after that Rusty was unstoppable. That evening, in the Japanese restaurant where we all sat around one of those teppanyaki tables, he launched into a slightly boozy State of the Union address, a discourse on corporate identity, the revolutionary “open plan” office interiors, the “cool” titanium scooters we would glide up and down the long hallways on. He managed to get all of us into the Digger before midnight, where we stood on the hip rooftop bar until the wee hours catching cold. It was already light when the van dropped me off on Sunset Boulevard.

I washed down two Tylenol with a gulp of coffee and reflected on Aaron. What kind of life did he lead in that Belgian hick town? The thought of him at those primary schools pained me in a complicated way. I wondered if I had any right to feel like that. Looking at the goofy website, I realized that someone who didn’t know better would think he had found his niche. But this wasn’t the Aaron I knew; if I had predicted this future to the old Aaron — putzing around primary schools, Belgian primary schools, in a minivan — then he wouldn’t have even scoffed at me, he’d have begged me to put him out of his misery then and there.

I straightened my shoulders. This meticulously maintained website aroused latent feelings of guilt in me, even more than those creepy e-mails of his. The suspicion that I had tricked him into starting that sex site (like the accusations against Colin Powell and Tony Blair) reared its head again. The same old reflex: it was all my fault. I inhaled hard through my nose. I had sealed our fate just at the moment I wanted to be rid of him — that kind of agonizing. For a brief moment I was back on the Vluchtestraat, sitting across the breakfast table from him, that morning long ago when I put his head on the chopping block. We had been taking pictures for months, just for the fun of it — so I said, and so he believed — and it was then that I laid my plan on him. We’d had a degrading night; in the middle of it I woke with a shock to a terrible scream, a curse, and saw Aaron cowering on the chair in the corner where I had draped my clothes a few hours earlier. He was crying. On the floor all around him: a notebook, ripped to shreds, that I immediately recognized as a school notebook we’d already argued about interminably. Since I was thirteen I had kept a kiss list on the two glossy inside covers, a chronological inventory of all the boys I had at least made out with, date, age, first name, location, eye color, hair color, hair length , God knows what else. In all there were more than 100 names, a number Aaron called “astronomical,” and he accused me of being an “astronomical slut,” he kept going on about that stupid list, and why were there two girls’ names on it? (“Why do you think?”)

I had long since stopped being amused by his jealous whining, and actually I had decided to dump him weeks earlier — just beat it, go jump in the lake — but when I saw him sitting there surrounded by shreds and wads of paper, I was struck by the powerful emotions I had released in him. I knew I had a certain sexual clout, I was aware of my effect on men, but this? He was in my power. This guy would not only never leave me, but he would also do anything necessary to keep me. That’s why I didn’t break up with him that morning, but instead, between two bites of toast, said there was something I had to tell him. “I’m going to start a sex site,” I said. “You know, on the Internet.” I still remember his jaw dropping open, I could see the glop of half-chewed bread and aged cheese on his tongue. “Preferably with you, of course,” I said to reassure him.