Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

E-mail beats Chinese water torture hands down as an instrument of agony. Not a damn word from her. In the old days you had that thin, blue, pre-gummed airmail stationery that you folded up on itself, licked closed, and, after a refreshing stroll around the corner, deposited in one of those red boxes on legs, and the rest of the week you could lead a normal human existence. He tried to restrain himself, but sent another e-mail anyway. “At least tell me if you went to see Wilbert. How was it?”

Smacking himself on his bald head, he put on a summer jacket and pulled the door shut behind him. He walked down the hill. It was still warm outside, the elder bushes in the gardens, the hawthorns and hornbeams, were starting to thicken. His neighbor across the way, a blond Dutch guy with an assortment of children, rounded the corner on his old-fashioned racing bike on his way home from work. They nodded at each other. He strode down the sun-flecked Grasmusdreef, followed the shallow curve of the Kasteeldreef, continued for a kilometer, and crossed the railroad tracks. He kicked a stone onto the shoulder. She could skate here too. You didn’t need palm trees to skate.

A shortcut through a stretch of trees led him to a path that wound its way under a young but thick canopy of leaves. Mossy air that smelled of damp earth; he listened to his own breathing. After about 100 meters he could see, in a clearing off in the distance, the Roze Molen, a ruin of dirty white pumice that you could indeed call pink. He walked around the mill house and inspected the rusty waterwheel sticking out of the creek, just as it had done for centuries. Until a few years ago the place had been a youth hostel and had still generated its own electricity.

As he strolled across the rough, grassy meadow, he thought of Dr. Haitink: she had put him up to it, coming here to live. What else was he to do? Enschede was over and out, everything that bound him to the city had either emigrated, exploded, or — he was convinced — was after his scalp. “Just imagine being in a place where you’re the most content, or once was”: Haitink’s advice for when he got antsy, a psychotherapeutic trick which he grumblingly accepted and which led him straight to this pile of stones.

Right about where he now stood, under the stringy branches of perhaps even this exact same willow, his parents, his brother, and he had stopped, entirely by coincidence, to camp one summer in the 1970s. Early one morning they ended up at this very spot in their raspberry-red Citroën van after fruitless attempts to find a hospital in Brussels. All night long, or so it felt to him, his father had dashed on and off the motorway, constantly getting lost in poorly lit suburbs, their mother groaning next to him in the passenger seat, while he and Sebastian sat silently in the back, staring at the impressive lump on her shoulder. They had left Venlo the previous evening, destination: campground in Brittany. He and Sebastian were expected to sleep in that clattering tin can, but instead they spent the entire trip teasing and taunting each other, bickering, hitting, spitting, until he ripped a fistful of pages from his brother’s library book and their mother lost her temper and attempted to smack him with a backward fling of her arm. Dislocated shoulder. She wailed like a banshee. His fault.

So they drove around for hours, each pothole and bump sending his tearful mother into paroxysms of agony, he himself terrified that the ball of her upper arm would rip through the bloodless, tautly stretched skin. Finally their father just pulled over somewhere, jerked on the parking brake, and ran in barely concealed panic toward a dimly lit clump of stones, this mill house — to ask directions, they thought, but he came back with a huge man named Jean-Baptiste, who carried his mother into his big pink abode, his father close behind. There, out of the children’s earshot, the two men rammed and jammed his mother’s shoulder back into place.

That same afternoon his father and brother pitched their tents in the tufted grass where he now sat, while his mother went to Jean-Baptiste’s doctor on the Linkebeek village square. His parents apparently clicked with the miller and his wife, because they stayed for a week. It was unforgettable. He and his brother befriended the daughter and son, twins about his own age, who took them to building sites, orchards, creeks, the ruins of a castle where they spent long evenings enacting knightly exploits. The girl was named Julie, she had fluffy brown hair and taught him, somewhere in these woods, how to “kino-kiss”: two wide-open fish mouths that exchanged moist air, like in the movies. The next year, and the one after that, he already started dropping hints in April: Mom, Dad, can we go back to the mill this year? How about if we, etc., etc. They never went back. Years later, Sebastian told him that his mother had fallen in love with Jean-Baptiste. Their father found out they’d been corresponding via a post office box near her work.

Maybe Joni got found out , he thought suddenly. He had never considered the possibility. That aborted career at McKinsey — had somebody stumbled across those photos? There were bound to be pictures still circulating on free sites. Maybe someone recognized her, once it got out, she’d be finished, no way you’d keep your job after that in puritanical America. Could it be? It would explain her keeping her head down.

He closed his eyes. The rough bark of the willow chafed the back of his head. Compassion filled his tear ducts. He wasn’t the only loser: 2000 had been a massacre. And that was why he longed for Joni, they could talk about it, he would comfort her. They shared a wild, disastrous past that together they could put behind them. Joni could come live with him; they could transform his absurd, empty, sad house into a home. She could easily find a job in Brussels, or in Linkebeek. Just last week he saw there was an opening at the library, not for a back-to-work mom but someone serious about maintaining the collection. And in Brussels there was plenty of office work.

He thought it was a great idea. She knew him inside out, knew him before he got sick. She could bring her children with her. He would raise them lovingly, just as her stepfather had done. And who knows. Who knows . How old was she now? Thirty-five? Thirty-six tops. He tried to imagine a thirty-six-year-old Joni. What did she look like? (All week he hadn’t succeeded in recalling her natural, relaxed face.) He tried to envisage her … He tried to imagine how Joni, here in Linkebeek … how she would look pregnant .

Instead of that he saw something else, as so often when he thought of her: that wide-eyed, stunned grimace — her expression during the last seconds that they had a future together.

She was sitting on the floor, half under the table. He came running into the room, alarmed, the neon-yellow Oilily bag with their dirty washing from Corsica slung over his shoulder, and there she sat, arms wrapped around her knees, the dining room table a canopy, as though she had taken cover from a shower of shards. On the table and on the floor around her lay envelopes and newspapers and slivers of glass, an orderly, serene still life compared to her face, which appeared to have been struck by something high up on the Richter scale. They gaped at each other for a few moments, her eyes bulged, her eyelids were bunched-up like sweater sleeves. In a thick voice she said that it was her father, that he knew everything, and that he just charged through the sliding glass door, “he just walked straight through the glass.” She sat there stock-still.

Not Aaron. He dropped the Oilily bag, his heart kicking and pounding in his chest, he couldn’t talk through his panting, did he hit you? he wanted to ask, she looked like she’d been knocked senseless, but he couldn’t talk, he was dizzy — which is why he strode, with two big steps, through the splintery frame of the sliding door, out to the back terrace. “Blood,” he stammered, there were thick splatters of blood amid the broken glass on the paving tiles. He walked farther onto the grass, “damn,” he blustered breathily, “damn, damn, damn,” but stopped abruptly, something moved, sunlight, he gestured defensively, don’t hit me , bounded back in the living room, looked back into the yard, his breath rasping, and saw that it was only his bicycle, the sun reflecting off his bike. Joni was still sitting like a sculpture on the floor, her eyes bulging, staring blankly into space. She sniffled. He walked back, jerked the curtains closed, banged his shin against the coffee table, went into the hallway, and locked the front door without looking down the street. He stood with his back against the wavy glass. Then he launched into a lamentation, an uncontrolled stream of clichés, verbal diarrhea, this is what you get, they asked for this, fuck, Joni, fuck , they should have stopped, why did they even start, he stumbled into the living room grasping his sunburned head, “I was always afraid of this, why—”