Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

Off to the right, under the Velux window, he sees a small desk with a PC; lower, at eye level, where the sloping ceiling disappears into a sharp, dark corner, clothes spill out of canvas drawer units on casters: dresses, it appears, lingerie, so there they are, the sales boosters. Across the room, a green dressing table with an oval mirror; on it are various spray cans and roll-on deodorants, in front of it a nostalgic mannequin with, instead of limbs, a four-legged frame on wheels. Atop the faceless wooden head rests the straight black wig of his forebodings. Feeling as if he’s been struck, he realizes that the objects on the dressing table are not deodorants, but plastic penises. His eyes well up with tears. Dildos. He can think the word, that far he can go, but he will never be able to say it out loud.

For a few minutes he stares, panting, at the peak of the roof, poisoned by the scent of talcum. A supporting beam runs across the entire breadth of the attic. Just swing a rope over it. The moment he realizes that his eyes are searching for a chair, he bangs both fists on the carpeting, hard, he almost loses his balance, the ladder underneath him wobbles and creaks.

He is a man who knows how much effort it takes to achieve something people will be impressed by, often for a disappointingly short time, perhaps because they do not appreciate the immensity of the preparations involved. The first time he detected a trace of that talent in Joni — the ability to work long and hard toward a distant goal — was in Boston. She had to prepare a final project on a subject of her choice, and this eleven-year-old girl produced a twenty-page paper on Dwight D. Eisenhower. While her classmates chose subjects like Afghan hounds or volcanoes or the Boston Red Sox, she gave an in-depth account of West Point, the Normandy invasions, the United Nations, Ike in the White House — knowledge she had collected from various sources in the MIT library, where, using his pass, she spent several afternoons perusing and photocopying illustrations and text. He was touched by Joni’s project, for which she got an A-minus (that “minus” being the discrepancy between her own middling English and the too-perfect English of the excerpts she’d overenthusiastically copied from thick Harvard biographies — she admitted as much). It instilled him with confidence in her future.

The knowledge that she applied that same thoroughness, the same intelligence and tenacity, to concocting this Internet brothel … Is this why he encouraged her schoolwork? Taught her to follow through? To put together a fake bookcase? To play the whore up in some attic?

Behind him he discovers a rack of pumps. He recognizes the shoes, right down to the last pair, the patent leather pumps in every jellybean color, the white ones with the little bows, the Burberrys, the ankle straps, the open toes. Shoes he’s never seen his daughter actually wear. With great effort he reaches for the rack and just manages to flick off a black satin number, lifting it over with his pinkie. The heel is slender and delicate, above the toe there’s a small, soft fabric rosette. “Karen Millen” is printed on the insole. He caresses the heel with his index finger. Then he hurls it across the room, it hits the bookcase with a hollow clack and falls to the floor.

He orders his numbed legs back down the folding stairs. On the landing he thrusts the bolt cutters back into the carryall, he wants to push the ladder back up, but reconsiders. To be alone for longer. No one around. Panic at the idea of having to watch a football match in a full students’ union. Clutching the tennis bag he goes downstairs and walks into the deathly quiet living room. He puts the bag on one of the leather armchairs and sinks onto the purple sofa, gets up again and squats in front of a low oak cupboard with etched-glass doors; glasses on a shelf, bottles of liquor in the wooden belly. He pulls out an open bottle of Jim Beam, fills an old-fashioned tumbler and stretches out on the sofa with the bottle and the glass. He drinks with his eyes closed. And now? Now what? His thoughts, he realizes, have not yet gone beyond this point, all these weeks he has unconsciously firmly planted himself on the axis of the lucky break. That dimension has been pulverized, curled up, retracted: he is a flatlander, his new reality is level and bleak. He can no longer dodge the fact that his daughter and her boyfriend were … he is reluctant, no, he is unable to use the word “porn,” it is too ignominious, the word itself makes him feel too wretched. He wants to tear it apart, letter for letter, burn each letter separately, scatter the ash on five different continents. He refills the tumbler to keep from flinging it through the television screen. Above the TV hangs a large painting, a landscape with thick brush strokes, art on loan. Something has to be broken. Whiskey against canvas, in his mind’s eye he sees the tumbler shatter, the alcohol dissolving the paint. Once, just once, he’d set foot in a sex shop, one of those places with blackened windows, a place that cannot endure daylight. Rent one of those films, Tineke’s suggestion, no, a friend of Tineke’s. You two should try one of those films. “Why do you discuss our sex life?” “What sex life, Siem?” So all right, he goes. But what a sorry sight. Walking into that blacked-out, backstreet joint. Everything in him resists walking into a place with a nude broad painted on the front. But he does it. Once inside, the thought that soon he’s got to go back outside again. The smell of plastic videotapes, man sweat, carpeting. The smell of semen. The louse behind his cum-counter. The displays of tapes, the plastic dicks, the men creeping out of the cabins like cockroaches. The looking , which film, hurry up, decide , for God’s sake. And while he’s standing there, roach among the roaches, awkward, miserable, horny, in comes a guy in a raincoat. Sets a stack of videotapes on the counter; “late,” he mumbles. Out of the corner of his eye he watches the louse retrieve them and stab at a calculator. “That’ll be 1,043 guilders and 30 cents.” Just once he sets foot into this kind of joint and this happens. The raincoat digs around in his pockets, counts out eleven 100-guilder bills and leaves. That is porn, Joni.

The whiskey plows furrows in his throat. He has to try to address a number of questions in the right order. How bad is this? Start there. How bad is a daughter who prostitutes herself? He has to assess the damage. How bad is what his daughter is doing? And is it really prostitution? Yes, he thinks it is — and is immediately indignant: she, with her brains, with her opportunities. Your daughter sells close-ups of her genitals on the Internet. It’s a disaster. She is bankrupt. He is bankrupt.

More Jim Beam, the gulp goes down like a dagger, try to calm down. It is a bottle he’d brought back with him from Shanghai — he realizes that he hasn’t for a second thought of Aaron. What’s his part in all this? This is Aaron’s house, it is his attic, his computer, his photography equipment. Coercion? He lunges forward, grabs one of the badminton rackets and smacks the edge of the table. Is he coercing her? No — he knows those two too well to believe that, it’s impossible. Joni can’t be coerced, she is too headstrong, too dominant. The epitome of free will. Aaron is a follower — he thinks this to his own surprise. Only now does he despise himself for his concern . When he still hoped for a happy ending, he was mainly concerned for Joni, he loved his daughter so much that it was her future that mattered most. Was she mentally sound? Was she under pressure? But now: forget it. He is incensed, now that the truth spits in his face he’s livid . What does that little bitch think? How could she be so stupid? So sleazy, so perverse. How could she? Do you realize what you’re doing, Joni? The risks you’re taking? Public risks? What if this gets out? How ostracized do you want to become, Joni Sigerius?