Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“Siem,” he said softly.

His teeth chattered as though he were in a cold tub, he bit his lower lip as hard as he could. What was he going to say?

After an eternity that seemed to last no more than a second, he heard the steps again, the creaking, a loud thud. Did he jump the last few treads? Heavy shoes came crashing down the stairs. He was furious!

Aaron cleared his throat. “Siem,” he whispered, he could not get any volume into his voice. He raised his hands in defense. He wanted to scream — but instead he shat himself. His boxer shorts streamed full with warm shit. “Siem …,” he whimpered. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” The shit oozed from the bottom of his shorts, poured between his thighs.

The front door slammed with a massive thud, footsteps retreated down the paving stones of his front path. He exhaled. A car door thumped shut, an engine started, and it drove off.

When he jolted awake it was still pitch-dark. It stank in his dream too, but what he now smelled was unbearable; he gagged. His excrement had cooled off and stuck like caked lava between his bottom and the seat of his jogging pants. He stood up, bile in his mouth, holding the lukewarm pile in place with both hands. Choking with disgust, he crossed the room and went into the passage. He stumbled up the stairs, turned on the shower tap (the water only grudgingly started running; it was days since he had stood under it), and undressed in the shower. He dropped his soiled clothes and stamped on them as though he were treading grapes. The hot water splashed heavily, he kept on treading, squirted endless amounts of shampoo and bath gel between his feet, half an hour, an hour, as long as it took until all the foaming sewer water had disappeared down the drain and all he smelled was Palmolive.

Only then did he soap himself up, scrubbing his groin, his shoulders, his arms, his belly, his legs, until his skin flushed. He washed the congealed sweat from his armpits, and squirted Zwitsal baby shampoo on the thin strip of hair around the back of his head.

He dried himself off slowly, mechanically. Then he wrapped a towel around his waist and went out on the landing. Taking a deep breath, he took hold of the folding steps and climbed up to the attic. It was a disaster area. The rack with Joni’s shoes appeared to have been kicked over, the pumps lay scattered around the floor. The white baskets had been wheeled into the middle of the room, panties, tops, and stockings lay strewn about. The drawers of his computer desk were open. He went over to the tussled bed and bit into the waterlogged heel of his hand. What had Sigerius been doing here? Hadn’t he been up here once before? Or had it been like this for months?

His attention shifted to a pile of clothes next to the opening in the floor. Men’s clothes. A light-gray pinstripe suit: jacket, trousers, an entire outfit. Under the trousers a pair of white boxers. The white button-down shirt had soft pink stripes, the cuff links were still in the buttonholes. Those shoes … they were Sigerius’s expensive Greves, unmistakable, one of them had a heel lift. What were his clothes doing here, for God’s sake? Had he brought them over with him? Why? He felt the pockets of the trousers and jacket. Keys, a loose house key, a wallet, a dead cell phone.

He walked back to the bed and flopped down on it. And lay there, God knows how long. Maybe he slept. Anyway he was chilled to the bone when he got up and walked over to the heap of clothes. He dropped the towel and, shivering, started to put them on.

The first weekend of December he only gets back to Enschede on Saturday evening. Tineke is disappointed that they’re “not doing Sinterklaas” this year, so he bought a silver bracelet with freshwater pearls for her at a jeweler in The Hague. She takes him to a recently opened vegetarian restaurant on the Hengelosestraat, and after they’ve ordered she tears open the marbled wrapping paper. Her reaction strikes him as more surprised than pleased; her eyebrows raised, she wriggles the bracelet around her fat wrist. “This isn’t like you,” she says, and that’s true — spontaneous gifts are not like him, there’s always something behind it. These are penance pearls, a single pearl is equal to one year less of purgatory. He sits grinning like a freshwater swab.

He fills her in on Cabinet doings. They eat something with pak choi and chickpeas. He nearly chokes when she says: “I spoke to Joni.”

“Oh? Did she phone you?” The restaurant is dark, he hopes she doesn’t notice he has to pull himself together.

“I pho—”

“But we don’t have her number.” Don’t get too agitated, he thinks, nothing to be done about it now.

“I was tired of waiting.” She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. “I know time flies with her, but really, I think five months is—”

“Four. You phoned from Crete.”

She’s taken aback, looks at him. “What’s the difference. All right, four. Anyway, I think four months is long enough. So I called McKinsey. Just on the outside chance. And sure enough.”

He rubs the rough of his chin, hoping to rasp away his nerves. He wishes he could hear exactly what they said to each other, word for word, not from Tineke’s mouth, but rather from a cassette tape he can play at his leisure and rewind when necessary. He needs time to plot his course. It was all going so well. For a few weeks now, he has tried to convince himself that his nighttime offensive paid off. Since bluffing on Wilbert’s voice mail — at least, what he assumes was Wilbert’s voice mail — things have been quiet. But he is not reassured. He has not, for instance, been back to parliamentary question hour.

“And?” he smiles, “what did she have to say?”

“Oh, you know. We kept it short, of course. I caught her off guard. She sounded tired. But it seems like her internship’s going well. She thinks they’re going to offer her a job.”

“She coming to France?”

“Probably not. She’ll be tied up all month with a big client.”

“Then she’ll be doing overtime during the Christmas break,” he says. He tries to hide the relief he feels breezing through his insides. “Where’s she working?”

“Where? At the office.”

“Which company, I mean. At Christmas.”

The nonchalant way his wife considers his question puts him at ease. “IBM?” she says. “Yeah, IBM.”

“Oh well,” he says. “I wonder if Hans and Ria are really her cup of tea anyway.”

“She always likes skiing. I discreetly asked about Aaron.”

“Aha. And?”

“She said it’s better this way.”

• • •

They drive through the drizzle back to the farmhouse. Sometimes, come evening in The Hague, he longs for Enschede, but now the thought of Tineke rambling around this empty, embalmed beast, day in and day out, makes him itch to return to the intoxicating flurry of his department. He parks on the gravel driveway, they use the back door, the utility room smells of warm washing. Tineke opens the drum of the machine and pulls out the wet strand, he walks into the darkened living room, switches on lamps.

“Was there much mail?” he calls, but Tineke does not hear him. He goes to the front hall, smells the familiar scent of slate and soaked wood stain. He turns on the light above the chest of drawers, the stack of envelopes and magazines reaches to the edge of the Marseilles photo, next to it, the newspapers he’s asked her to save for him. Among the envelopes is a packet containing a book he’d ordered a while ago, there’s an envelope from Japan, the new issue of Pythagoras , a smattering of belated congratulations on his appointment, two Football International s, bills, a letter from the Royal Academy of Sciences and a lumpy, middle-sized padded envelope whose address has been crossed out with red pen, under which Tineke has written “addressee unknown.” There’s something hard inside. He gasps, his vocal cords vibrate, as he reads whom it is addressed to. “Mr. F. Wanker,” written in a childlike scrawl, Langkampweg 16, 7522 CZ Enschede—“Langkamp” instead of “Langenkamp.”