Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

Once we reached the open sea things relaxed a bit. Aaron realized it was up to him to start. I eyed him through my sunglasses from the foredeck’s Jacuzzi, he stood holding the cherrywood rudder that was actually meant for a sailboat, but that I had instructed the Palmer Johnson builders to put in anyway. “How was Ennio’s funeral?” he shouted; I pretended not to hear. Five minutes later I got out of the tub, balanced my way around the helm and through the sloping salon, changed into another bikini in the bedroom and climbed back up on deck. “It sucked, of course,” I shouted in his ear.

When he offered his condolences an hour later, I let rip. I raged about how much he pissed me off, his jealousy, his oafishness, his inane behavior — yeah, yeah, he understood that. And just to test whether he really meant it I told him I could start at McKinsey in Silicon Valley in August. “Did that Stol call you?” Aaron asked. I answered that just before we left I’d gone horseback riding with Boudewijn, and Brigitte of course, I quickly added, and because he reacted to that piece of news more maturely than I had expected, I went to the salon and brought out a bottle of white wine.

“So how’d it go with good old Bo?”

“That rhymes.”

“Yup.”

To spare him the details I made a point of the strange atmosphere in the dunes. It was weird. I’d caught an early train and taken a taxi to Black Beauty stables. After a mozzarella and tomato bread roll at the bar, the three of us rode to the coast. Boudewijn proved to be a far worse rider than Brigitte and myself: we lost him during a vigorous, spontaneous gallop along Scheveningen beach, and after ten minutes’ wait, still no Boudewijn. “He’ll be OK,” Brigitte said. When we got back to the stable in the early evening, we heard that he’d returned his mare hours earlier. The man who hosed down our horses said that “Mister Boudewijn” was thrown off his horse while scaling the dunes and had twisted his ankle, if not worse.

Aaron laughed for the first time all week. “But instead of jumping straight into her Aston Martin,” I said, “or at least calling home, Brigitte offered me a complete tour of the stables.” More than an hour later, in the car, she suddenly gave me a worried look. “I wonder how he got home?” The couple lived in a gray cement villa that was like a jukebox museum on the inside. “Haven’t you started dinner yet?” Brigitte asked when we entered the sparse, low-ceilinged living room and found Boudewijn with an ice pack on his ankle. He was watching the Tour de France on a flat-screen TV, a crate of 45-rpm singles next to him. “What do you think?” he barked. Out of politeness I disappeared to the bathroom, where I pretended to pee by spitting tap water into the toilet, and took my time putting on lipstick. When I got back, Brigitte was in the kitchen stir-frying spring onions and Boudewijn was setting the long glass-topped table. A tense hospitality hung over the dinner table. Boudewijn followed a sulky account of a recent renovation project on the house with a few obligatory tips for if I were to get that internship in Silicon Valley.

“So it’s not sure yet?”

“It is now.”

“Did they say anything about me?”

“About you? Yeah of course, Aaron, you’re all we talked about.”

I chose not to say that Brigitte did in fact ask after Aaron, and rather eagerly agreed with me that I had some thinking to do about “that, um … boy,” and that we all couldn’t help thinking back on Etienne Vaessen’s wedding dinner. For my part at least, I recalled Aaron’s return from the bathroom, where he’d been hiding out for an idiotically long time, ten minutes, twenty, a half hour, in fact I’d already written him off. We gaped at him, the three of us, he looked terrible, as gray as papier-mâché, with a white tuft on the crown of his head — toilet paper, he told me later, to stop the bleeding — which made him look like a burst hard-boiled egg.

“So America it is,” he said now.

I nodded and looked out over the endless blue surrounding us. Boudewijn insisted on taking me to the station despite his bad ankle. The seclusion of his car seemed to perk him up. “She’s forgotten you the minute she’s sitting on a horse’s back,” he said. The leather steering wheel sliding in his hands, the easiness of his driving manner: alert and ironic instead of on the defensive. That’s how I remembered him from the wedding. As we glided over the highway he thanked me for sending my résumé, he thought I would make an excellent “Academy Fellow,” he would send a recommendation to his colleague in Silicon Valley on Monday.

“Nice guy?”

“Woman. Really nice woman. That is, as long as you turn in your ovaries at HR and save up your vacation days off until after you’re gone.”

“Funny term, ‘vacation days off.’ ”

“Perfectly normal one. Only not at McKinsey.”

“Funny word, ‘ovary.’ ”

Then, at last, he laughed, and just about the moment he took a slightly wild swing around the mini-roundabout, we both lost our balance and he grabbed hold of my leg, high and warm, his fingers between my thighs.

Aaron and I made a toast to the Ligurian Sea. And to the Barbara Ann , our ridiculously luxurious yacht that we whored up together and bought on a reckless whim — why, we weren’t really sure, maybe because two secret millionaires have to splash out on something . But it did the trick. This was ours. Who else could I sail across the open sea with except Aaron Bever? That very night, I think, we finally resumed our photo sessions. We sailed around Cap Corse and down the east coast of Corsica, past Bastia, and moored at Santa Lucia di Moriani, the small seaside resort where we had the rental house. We chatted freely about the immediate future, about America, we laughed about the number of pictures we’d have to take in advance. He said he was planning to come visit me in California, he’d like to join me there.

“Are you still going to go see Wilbert?” he asked a few days later.

“No,” I reassured him. “The day I was supposed to go see him, we’ll still be here. It’s better this way. Dad brought it up again when we went out to eat. He was afraid I was up to something. I didn’t tell him I’d already talked to him.”

“How’d you get his number?” Suspicion had crept back into his voice.

“Easy, from my parents’ phone.”

I didn’t tell Siem that either. I had a war president of a father who had dragged his son into court, just like that. Since then, our household was well and truly devoid of nuance: you’re either with us, or against us. Wilbert’s name hadn’t been mentioned at the farmhouse since 1990. You didn’t dare. Let alone phone him up. Let alone go see him.

“Did you cancel?”

“Not yet.”

The afternoon of the bushfire Aaron asked how I’d feel if he didn’t return to the Vluchtestraat and I gave up my student house: “We’ll just ship all our junk,” he said, “you know, emigrate. And not come back for the time being. Ship our stuff? Heck, we’ll just ditch it. What do you think?” And although living together had never really occurred to me before, and was, more to the point, exactly the opposite of my conclusions over the previous weeks, I shared his audacity: Yes! Let’s do it! The more we philosophized about it, the more gung-ho we became about moving to California— together —after just six days on vacation, six days away from screwed-up Enschede, six days after our deepest ever relationship crisis, we were, to our amazement, talking about living together , we fantasized excitedly about a new start in the USA. Recovering from a crisis like this one, we told each other, requires more than patchwork, and as we stood there on our hill watching that bushfire, I wondered whether the prickly smell of millions of popping pine needles had cleansed our muddled heads, or in fact fogged them up.