Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

His own marriage was, if possible, even worse. He remembers the whopper of a fight that broke out between him and Margriet just before the party, they were at each other’s throats in their kitchen, their floor was the ceiling under which Tineke was welcoming her first guests with beer and liverwurst (how old were they? Twenty-five?), and he can still recall the exact anger in their bodies as they walked down the stairs from 59B and rang the doorbell of number 59A. Memories of the actual gathering, no, not really — the Antonius Matthaeuslaan was a regular party street in those days, and since everyone had a workday ahead of them, most had already left by midnight, with the exception of a few hangers-on, including Margriet and him. And when the hangers-on had pushed off, Margriet started tugging at his sleeve (the booze was finished), but, contrary to his usual way of doing things, he suggested, no, he announced , that he was going to finish his own drink and, entirely contrary to her way of doing things, Margriet went home alone, upstairs. “I’m going to turn in, honey,” she said to Tineke.

After which things took a turn for the worse — or the better, of course. As soon as everyone had gone and he and Tineke were left alone and he stayed sitting next to his fresh-faced, good-humored, intelligent, interested neighbor, next to each other on Theun’s orange three-seater, among the empty glasses and the full ashtrays, his leg against hers, a broad, warm thigh against that still-slender thigh of hers — precisely at that moment, the incident that had been two years in coming, came. Before they knew it Siem was on top and Tineke underneath, kissing, intensely, without so much as a chuckle or introductory mumbling, a transgression that had been brewing ever since he lay plastered together in his bed, from the first time Tineke had paid him a daytime visit, offering him companionship while he recovered from that scooter accident. Why did she come, actually? Just because, just to drink a cup of coffee with someone different , with a man , not to have to talk about the kids of friends of friends? Even back then they were preparing to take this leap.

And when they’d found themselves without passports in those sublime, overwhelming foreign lands, they decided, with no discussion, to stay there longer. They stood up, he and his stable, friendly downstairs neighbor, kissing with ever more abandon, we can’t , he whispered— can’t what? — do this , but it was only a half-hearted protest, more passionate than guilty, and they staggered toward the bedroom, through the narrow passage, and one door farther (and yet another door farther, who was sleeping there? Little Joni), turned the handle, stumbled into the bedroom, flopped onto the double bed that had stood there waiting for years, a bed under a humongous Kralingen poster, he recalled, Mojo Mama in between Dr. John the Night Tripper and Tyrannosaurus Rex, there you are, Teuntje Beers’s triumph that the upstairs neighbor did not register, a triumph that paled the moment he laid Tineke down on the crocheted bedspread.

Although the shortest route is tempting, to be on the safe side he stumbles with his gnarly feet in ladies’ socks around the campus rather than through it, takes the now-darkened path through the woods north of the Langenkampweg — the harbor in view, but which harbor? He knows Tineke well enough to be sure she’ll be asleep when he gets home. But what about tomorrow? He’s got to tell her something , even if it’s just to be a step ahead of Joni and Aaron. Entirely unpredictable what those two will do. Will they assume he talks to Tineke? No idea. He carefully touches his shoulder. Can he even keep it under wraps? Can he lie yet again to the woman to whom he once, long ago, had to give his radical, blind, immediate trust?

For they had made a mistake. They neglected, in their overactive, dizzy state, one small detail. How human of them. The front door is not shut. They were too busy to notice that it was ajar — left that way by Margriet from upstairs, simple Maggie Sigerius, maybe a tad less fresh-faced, interested, and intelligent than the woman he is feverishly undressing, but not born yesterday. A drinker, and emotionally labile — but not blind.

And Margriet goes all the way upstairs (at least that’s how he reconstructed her movements, in retrospect, in detail), climbs the steep stairs to their cramped apartment, and then goes straightaway to the upper floor, into the front bedroom (who is sleeping there? Wilbert, sucking his thumb), and, holding her breath, she looks at her little boy, for maybe a full minute, as though she’s listening to his dream. A good mother. Am I? But actually she’s not thinking about Wilbert, in fact her hearing is directed two floors below, to the downstairs neighbor’s open front door, and walks slowly back down — but stop, first into the kitchen, she forces herself to go into the kitchen, where she pours herself a glass of wine and commands herself to drink it slowly , calmly, give them time, five, no, seven minutes’ more self-control. And while she drinks, one glass, two glasses, her ears are lying like rubber dinghies on the kitchen floor. After seven torturous minutes she takes off her boots and walks silently down the steep stairs to the front door. Hi, I’m back .

He reaches the Langenkampweg, walks past the first four detached houses that look out onto the street, averting his gaze, he hardly talks to these people anyway, the hell with ’em. As soon as the leafy canopy reveals the front of his house he stands still. There’s a light on downstairs, a faint glow, she’s left a light on for him.

Margriet Sigerius, twenty-three years old, walked in the direction of the sleazy, sordid sound that she could just hear above her heartbeat — her heart, too, was bigger than usual, her heart is a pounding machine, but cutting through that pounding she hears it: the far wilder banging from the room adjacent to the still-warm birthday room with the showy wicker-and-beanbag interior. She stands at the bedroom door, clammy hand trembling above the handle, but she chokes. Can’t go in. She listens, petrified. Then she takes a deep breath, and screams. Melted together with his downstairs neighbor for the first time, Sigerius hears his own wife screech at the top of her lungs, “SIE-IEM”—she screams his name three times, and then: “ What are you doing, what are you doing, I hate you. ” Like stiffened corpses they lie on top of each other, he and Tineke, the rapture never existed. Out in the passage it goes quiet. Dead still. Maybe we’re dead ourselves?

Then the door flies open, smacks against the wall, the frosted glass shatters into tiny fragments. He looks into Tineke’s wide-open eyes. She’s watching them . “You’re never setting foot back in that house, asshole. Never, do you understand? Don’t you dare try coming back home, goddammit.”

He remains silent, his impudent tongue lies in state in his mouth. They do not hear her leave, the front door slams all the more deafeningly, a grenade. The door to 59B, her own front door, hers and her little boy’s, formerly also of Siem Sigerius: she bolts it shut.

The farmhouse, finally. He takes the gravel path around the back, shuffles onto the grass of the backyard, too dark to see his hand in front of his face. Thanks to Janis’s habit of leaving her house keys in Deventer there is a spare key hidden in the bird house at the far end of the terrace. He finds it without much trouble and walks over to the garbage can next to the workshop. He bangs mercilessly into the tree stump for chopping hardwood, clenches his teeth against the pain, and removes the worn-out socks from his feet. The left one is drenched in blood. He wraps them in the dishcloth from his head and squashes the wad as deep as possible under the cardboard boxes and scrap wood in the plastic bin.