Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

Drink and think. He sags on the stiff sofa like a zombie. For a moment he feels like giving in to the heavy, deep fatigue, but then bolts upright. Blood rushes to his head. What about himself? When this gets out? A Minister of Education with a double watermark on his stationery: murder and prostitution. A son who bashed a man to death and a daughter turning tricks on the Internet. Porn times murder, behold the formula of his life. Oh yes, they’ll drag Wilbert into it for sure, everything will be dredged up. He’ll be drummed out of office, they’ll hound and humiliate him until there’s nothing left of him. What did I do to deserve this? Has my luck run out? The sweat beads on his back, his legs are sticky.

Try to remain analytical. Think in terms of solutions. It is a crisis, not a catastrophe — not yet, at least. He still has almost a week to take measures. He has to come up with a plan of action before they return, a strategy to defuse this crisis that’s not yet a catastrophe. Should he confront them? Take a hard line, give them a piece of his mind, should he unmask them, castigate them? Yes. No. He doesn’t know. Perhaps it’s better to collude with them; an enemy, he thinks, won’t be able to talk sense into them. What they’re doing is legal, they are adults. It isn’t manslaughter, after all. Antagonize them and you’ve lost them. It will only egg them on. You have to confront them and negotiate openly.

Sounds from outside reach him through a rising haze of alcohol; somewhere in a backyard, football fans are gearing up for the impending match. He has got over the initial shock. His anger subsides, the whiskey relaxes him somewhat. His thoughts flow into another channel, again he arrives at his father. Could he be off the mark? Just like his old man was off the mark? Are there, like back then, two realities? Two truths colliding? Is he keeping up with the times? Is that attic room no more than a frivolous youthful indiscretion? Again he grabs the racket and slams a dent into the edge of the table. Don’t be so soft, man! We’re not talking about judo . This is damn well about …

And yet. Something’s gnawing at him, a faint hypocritical nibbling, and the more he drinks, the more difficult it is to ignore. The ironic fact that he … that he happened upon this whole sordid business as a consumer, as one of Joni’s clients , that he wasn’t tipped off by a concerned third party, the fact is he paid , he transferred money to those two for exactly what he’s now so vehemently condemning — the mind-boggling, tangled duplicity starts to dawn on him. The hard white light of his moral indignation strikes a prism and is refracted into a spectrum of nuanced and emotional doom.

The years of Joni’s blossoming womanhood. His absurdly stilted efforts to avoid any semblance of erotic interest. Woody Allen’s relationship with his stepdaughter, he and Tineke watch the evening news, and he furiously switches off the television, can’t stand to hear it. Unbearable. How he prudishly stopped going in the bathroom while Joni showered, put an end to the tickling and roughhousing on the sofa or in the garden — memories he juxtaposes against the outrageous fate now confronting him, the awful awareness that this is the very same girl — woman — he has unwittingly been leering at and lusting after.

Anxiety about the Internet, which he has believed in since day one, which he even, as a scientist and administrator, helped foster, and that now has infiltrated his campus as a bordello. Grim thoughts of Aaron, of the young man who pretends to be his friend, whom he has admitted to his inner circle. Who is this Aaron Bever, actually? He glances around, takes a better look at Aaron’s things, the expensive Luxman amplifier and CD player, the electrostatic speakers, the thousands of books, the furniture he suddenly notices as remarkably exclusive, pricey.

Disquiet about his role as a parent. What did he do wrong? Did he miss the signals? Focus too much on achievement? Did he talk to her enough? In his mind he tries a case of nature versus nurture; proposed settlement: it is nature and nurture. Did not raise his son, did not conceive his daughters — the outcome would make him weep if the alcohol hadn’t tempered his nerves. Brooding over the year he had both of them under his wing, Wilbert and Joni, about his far-reaching suspicions regarding his own son, his concern for Wilbert’s hormonal response to the sudden flowering of his younger stepsister. One question mixes like poison into the stream: what can you expect from a stranger’s genes? Is she really his daughter? Who is Joni?

• • •

Meanwhile the whiskey also … softens him, eliciting a laissez-faire mood that’s entirely unlike him. The corset of his respectability, the straitjacket of his status, the restraints of his … generation? start to slacken. He is relaxed. He loves them, doesn’t he? He loves Joni, with all his heart, he even loves Aaron. Put yourself in their shoes. The seclusion and solitude of Aaron’s house invites him to do just that. The sincere question of why they do it — why do they do it? Does it give them pleasure? The answer is obvious, of course it gives them pleasure. It turns them on. They’re young, rich, reckless. They just do it. They do it out of lust and greed. And him? He likes Jim Beam.

It’s a quarter to eight. He stands up, giddy, totters over to the liquor cabinet, places the whiskey with a crystalline smack against the bottle next to it. He dabs his lips with his sleeve. Another mood has now taken over, a dark mood, a mood that perhaps doesn’t even matter. Shivers run through his body as he leaves the room. The stairs up to the next floor sound hollow. It doesn’t have to take long. His heart racing, he closes all the doors on the landing, laundry room, bathroom, study, bedroom. He takes a deep breath, grasps the folding attic stairs, lets go again, wipes his sweaty hands on his trousers. Consumed by vicious self-pity, I deserve this , he begins climbing the squeaking steps. The sweet scent of talcum powder whets his resolve. He is not Woody Allen, he is not the Minister of Education.

The attic is an attic in Kentucky. Holding his breath, he closes the trapdoor and surveys the room. How to go about this? There are so many possibilities. The silence is profound, but he still hears it, a little tune reaches him from the far corner, it’s coming from the shoe rack, the colorful pipe organ of high heels. Maybe the rack waited, let him blow off some steam first. Maybe it’s been beckoning him all along.

He sniffs, undoes his laces, and kicks off his shoes; the carpet presses itself softly and gently into the soles of his feet. He can’t swallow. His trousers and boxers rustle as they fall to his bare ankles; panting, he tugs his shirt over his head. He walks around the bed, gruesomely naked all of a sudden, there is a new nakedness that has concealed itself under his ordinary nakedness, and he picks up the satin pump from the floor. While holding his foreskin between thumb and index finger, as though his phallus were an inflated balloon, he examines the shoe from all angles. He presses the slender heel against his balls, traces a line along the underside of his erection. Something soft, panties, a slip. With the shoe in his hand he goes to the other side of the attic and squats down in front of the canvas drawers, pulling open the middle one: nylons, fishnet stockings, garters, body stockings, tops, skirts, bras, countless panties. He roots around, feels, looks, pulls out a sheer black stocking, thrusts his nose into it: that same dark, exquisite talc smell. Touching the infinitely fine-woven fabric catapults him back to the 1950s, he glides above Delft, descending into his sister’s bedroom, and makes a belly-landing on her twin bed. Home alone, he controlled himself for as long as possible, but eventually reached under the iron box-spring and pulled out the hatbox where she kept her stockings. He examined them, felt them, inhaled the soft, feminine scent, in order to better imagine the feel and smell of the untouchable women’s legs he saw on the street, in the tram, during Miss Rethans’s English lessons. He was ashamed of it, thought he was sick, thought himself a deviant, especially once he found out there was a special word for his peculiar interests, a word he, still after all those years, detests.