Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

The stairs led to a granite corridor, a sort of circuit, I figured. I took a left, turned another corner thirty yards later, and immediately recognized the narrow windows of the exterior wall: handy for those looking to hurl themselves a few stories down. The floor glittered with broken glass, so I put my shoes back on, and as I turned the corner I heard, above the echoing click of my heels, a mechanical hum that intensified when I turned another corner and continued under a broad arched construction. I retried Boudewijn’s number, but again no luck. Boudewijn was the primary parent; for years he had been giving the boy his undivided attention and devotion. And Mike was crazy about Boudewijn, he never went willingly to his mother. Perhaps it was better like that. The decision, the entirely natural decision, to leave Mike in Boudewijn’s care, was for all parties the best choice.

The space widened unexpectedly, and with it I caught a whiff of iron and sand: I had entered the immense drill square and become as small as a chipmunk. At the left of the concrete floor, under an arched roof supported by Eiffel Tower — like trusses, three toy cars were parked. Diametrically opposite I saw one of our trucks and an unfamiliar pickup, and next to them a couple of generators on wooden pallets vibrating at high frequency. My cell phone gasped desperately for a signal. I whipped off a text message (“smt w/mike?”) that took three tries to send. I already knew that Boudewijn wouldn’t understand why I’d texted rather than call; compared to his ceaseless care, whatever interest I showed came over as secondhand and spineless. I was happy to admit without reservation that he made a fantastic father, from day one, and even before that: during my pregnancy he outdid me with nearly academic knowledge of what was going on in my womb. He drove to San Francisco for homeopathic morning sickness pills, organic cosmetics, and dandelion tea for water retention, which he then made for me with concentration and precision. “Sharon, one of the secretaries, says the prenatal yoga classes on Valencia Street are terrific.” He was probably so on top of things because he rightly suspected me of prenatal depression, and was afraid I’d throw myself belly-first down a flight of stairs.

I took my shoes back off and walked around the mobile power station. No one was manning it, the machinery functioned on its own. With half an eye on my cell phone I followed the thick black electricity cables.

“ There she is,” Kristin said. I had cut through a dusty gym with rings and climbing frames and arrived, after yet another long brick corridor, at a scene of noisy activity. She and Q stood in the doorway to the ballroom I recalled from the tour with Sotomayor’s assistant: an expansive space with narrow strips of parquet flooring like an old-fashioned dance school. Inside, the guys from lighting were setting up a powerful stage lamp.

“Hi doll,” Kristin said. “This place is amazing.”

“Thanks,” I replied.

“You know how cool I think it is that you’re going on film again? Are you psyched?”

“Can’t wait.” I smiled at Q, who lowered his eyes and ran a big white hand down his cheek. The truth be told, I was dreading it like the plague. After Boudewijn’s call, I was feelng anything but sexy. Maybe Bobbi had some cocaine.

“Where’s Rusty and the new guy?” Kristin came right up in front of me and took my face in her hands. I could see her contact lenses.

“Checking out the building. Wells is turning it into a guided tour.”

“Go ahead and change,” said Kristin. “Nice blouse.” Through the satin she pinched my left nipple with her thumb and index finger, gently twisting it in circles like I was a radio that needed fine-tuning.

“Macy’s,” I said. “Sale bin.”

She smiled. “That door. Bobbi’s here already. It’s all kind of makeshift, Joy. Can you make sure she puts on something cheerful?” She took obvious pleasure in giving orders to the woman who had cut her off at the pass. When I first met Rusty at the reception of the independent film festival, he had introduced Kristin as his right-hand woman. A half-hour later he catapulted me, to her unconcealed chagrin, pretty much to co-director. Since then, she’d become my right-hand woman.

The washroom block had none of the warm coziness of Coldwater’s dressing rooms, no deep-purple velvet wallpaper, no lacquered make-up tables, no theatre mirrors surrounded by soft-white bulbs. The white plastered walls reflected the harsh fluorescent lighting, the floor consisted of a honeycomb of hexagonal tiles that thousands of officers and cadets had once traversed on their way to the battery of urinals in a break from the military regime, a moment alone with the yellow fluid and the smell of grainy soap from a bucket. Someone, Q probably, had laid a couple of wide planks across a row of twelve washbasins as a sort of improvised make-up table. Two rickety chairs — on one of them hung a pair of jeans and a T-shirt — stood in front of a long mirror, which was half misted up, an undercoat of rust showing through. To the right were two galvanized racks with kinky stuff I recognized from the Coldwater dressing rooms. Lavender soap and steam tickled my nose. To the left, an open door with cracked frosted glass led to an abattoir-ish shower room with eight drippy showerheads dangling from the ceiling. In the middle of the room, a girl stood on the wet tiles, drying herself off with a large white hotel towel. Bobbi glanced skittishly over her shoulder.

“Hello …,” she said with faux bashfulness. She had obviously read Kristin’s script.

“Don’t move.”

I walked across the wet floor and studied her back and remarkably narrow hips. Since living with me she had got two stars tattooed on either side just above her buttocks. The one was red with a thin black outline, the other black with a red outline, probably something Jekyll and Hyde-ish. You didn’t find many under-twenty-fives in this town without a tattoo.

She made a move to turn around, but I gave her a hard slap on her left buttock; she drew a deep breath, a shower cap fell to the floor.

“Did you hear me?” I grabbed her buttocks — both of them now nineteen years old, the left one emblazoned with my handprint in red — and squeezed them. “Legs wider.” She shifted her feet farther apart. I squatted down, stuck my thumbs deep into her butt crack and pulled her cheeks apart; her cleanly scrubbed anus opened up like a monkey’s mouth. I spat on it and eased my thumbs inside; the sphincter closed around them in a sucking reflex.

“Hello, Bobbi, nice to see you again.”

Since the coffee table incident, which seemed to have encouraged rather than embarrassed her, we phoned each other every few months. If I was at Coldwater whenever she did a shoot for one of our websites, I’d drop by the dressing room, if she hadn’t stopped by my office on the way to say hello.

“Yes … ma’am,” she said. “I’m so pleased to be working with you at last.”

“I wouldn’t be so eager if I were you,” I said. “How’d it go with Tyra, Bobbi?”

“Tyra Banks is a … bitch,” she replied. “D’you see it?”

I pulled my left thumb out of her. “ Ma’am, ” I said, and gave her four vicious slaps on her left buttock. “Did you see it, ma’am ?”

As she let out her breath she said: “Did you see the show, ma’am?”

“You were great.”

“But Joy,” she said, suddenly matter of fact, “that whole fucking show was, like, fucking fake.”

I let go of her and stood up. She turned toward me. She was putting the game on hold.

“Oh yeah?”

“They film it in New York, you know?” she said. “On the phone beforehand one of the production assistants says: wear whatever you think is nice.” She shivered for a second, walked over to the chairs by the mirror, and sat down. I took the towel from her and dried her shoulders. “So I fly to New York a whole day early for those people,” she continued, “and spend the afternoon shopping on Madison Avenue. Skinny jeans, a top, earrings. I kinda want to look good on that sofa of hers on national TV, you know? I buy two pairs of Christian Louboutins because I can’t make up my mind, all of it with my own money. Next morning I show up at the studio, and what do you think?”