Bonita Avenue (22 page)

Sigerius nodded thoughtfully, but was startled by the loud metallic clink of Joni’s fork. She turned to Aaron, leaned back, and eyed him mockingly. “Oh,
now
listen to him,” she said, “that’s a good one. When I told you I wanted to spend a few months in America you were nearly in tears. You were practically clinging to my leg. And now this.”

There was a painful silence. He noticed that Janis, who never did pay him much notice, sat there smirking at him. In an attempt to regain his composure, he picked up the porcelain dish of potato croquettes and, with a trembling hand, scooped a few of them onto his plate.

“But I do have a funny story about that Stol,” said Sigerius, breaking the impasse. Although he was still keeping it to himself, the news from The Hague seemed to have perked him up. “After that SEC meeting he gave me a lift to Utrecht Station, and that
was a memorable ride, I can tell you. My heart still races when I think about it.”

“What kind of car did he have?” Joni asked.

“Some sporty thing. A BMW, I think.”

“So what happened?” asked Janis.

Sigerius rested his broad, hairy forearms on the table and started telling them, in a relaxed tone of voice, that he and Stol were on the A12 just outside The Hague when they were ruthlessly overtaken by a Golf with an ostensibly normal-looking couple inside. He, in the passenger seat, got the fright of his life, and Stol even more so: he not only slammed on the brakes, but also sat on the horn. That was not entirely to the Golf’s liking. It slowed down alongside Stol’s BMW, the passenger window rolled down, a bleached-blond woman squirmed out, just about to her waist, and flung a paper sack of
patates frites
against Stol’s windshield. “Can you believe it!” said Sigerius. “We pulled onto the shoulder and spent the next fifteen minutes cleaning globs of mayonnaise and curry sauce and onions off the windshield. What’s the deal with those idiots in the west?”

Janis laughed. Joni said: “That Bo seems like just the type for an hour-long car chase.”

“Bo?” Tineke asked.

“Boudewijn,” she explained. “He said to call him Bo.”

Aaron thought he was losing his mind. For the second time in a week he was on the ropes thanks to that asshole Stol, and aside from being just plain fed up, he saw it coming: Joni was dying to give her parents a blow-by-blow account of his behavior during that dinner of Vaessen’s. She could hardly hold it in. She thought he had made a fool of himself, that he was a boorish exhibitionist, and while he himself had a different opinion on the matter, he estimated his chances of winning this contest here at the dinner table as fairly slim. When he heard Sigerius say that, in his opinion, “this
kind of punk” deserved to be dealt with mercilessly, another tall tale occurred to him, a comparable situation involving his brother, and before he knew it he had commandeered the conversation. Enough of that Bo. Finito. End of story.

“Well, I’ve got another one,” he began, and waited until all four of them looked at him. “Back when I was still studying Dutch I was sitting in my taxi one weekend in Venlo …”

“You never drove a taxi, did you?” Joni asked.

“Briefly,” he lied, with more confidence in his voice than just now. “A year or so.”

In truth, it was his elder brother Sebastian who for years drove a provincial shuttle bus in Venlo every Saturday. But in his version it was he who, one Saturday afternoon, was heading toward Tegelen, just south of Venlo, on a two-lane road, and just before the hospital exit was nearly sideswiped by a red Ford Escort with black spoilers. The other driver swerved into his lane just before the red light, the car rocketing, tires squealing, in front of his taxi-van and up the entrance ramp to Sint-Maartens Hospital. “He missed ramming my front bumper by a hair,” he said, “so I honked and flipped him the bird.”

Just there, his anecdote brushed Sigerius’s, and he saw he at least had their attention, even Joni’s. Tineke asked Janis to pass her the bowl of cauliflower. “And so as I’m sitting there at the red light,” he continued, “the Escort, instead of driving into the hospital parking lot, pulls a U-turn, plows over the shoulder and stops. The door flies open and out gets this guy, about thirty. He tosses away a cigarette butt and marches over to my car. I can see right away he’s scum. He had to walk about twenty meters, his head tilted back the whole time so his chin stuck way out. He glowered at me over his jawbones, tongue pushed between his bottom teeth and lower lip. I could see that thick tongue of his, a nasty, blotchy
slab. Greasy, jet-black hair, suede jacket, shiny red polyester training pants, Kappa, y’know, those Milan ones Gullit and Van Basten used to wear.”

“And Rijkaard,” Janis said.

“And Rijkaard,” he said. The anecdote was etched in his memory; he’d heard it from Sebastian at least three times, go on, tell it again, and he had retold it himself so many times he could recite it in his sleep. “So this guy,” he continued, suddenly more self-confident than he had felt until now, “was wearing black leather clogs with white socks. That’s how Venlo trailer trash goes out in public. I knew right away this guy was trouble. That sort of trash is easy to spot.” He told them that because of the balmy late-summer temperatures his passenger window was wide open. It seemed wise to raise the window: storm a-brewing. “So I hold down the button. But it goes slowly. Just before the window’s shut, the guy grabs the top edge of window with his fingers and deposits a great big green gob of spit onto the glass. He hangs there on it with his full weight. Our eyes are glued on each other as I keep my finger on the button. He screams: “Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” For a second his fingers are caught, but then he pulls the window down with one long, slow tug.” Aaron demonstrated this with both hands, his face contorted into a malicious grimace. “
Snap
went the little motor. The guy leans halfway into the car and grabs me by my work tie.”

“What a creep,” Tineke said, still busy loading up her plate and otherwise uninterested. Sigerius was paying close attention, that’s what mattered. “A creep?” he grinned. “But nothing happened.”

“Drop the tough-guy act, Dad,” said Janis, “you’d be peeing in your pants.”

“I’d be peeing in
his
pants,” her father answered. Aaron looked over at Sigerius, inwardly satisfied. He had not seen him like this all week, momentarily relieved from his irritable earnestness. He
had shifted into fighter mode: don’t vacillate, take quick action—entirely atypical for a man of his age and position. Janis scornfully shook her close-cropped head.

“So then what does this guy do, he gives my tie a tight twist and winds up with his free arm,” he continued. “Now I’m going to get a fat lip, I thought. I pictured myself staggering off to the emergency room. But he doesn’t hit me. He yells something pretty vulgar and pushes off with his fist in my throat. He slides back out the window, sidles back to his car, and drives into the hospital parking lot.” He was impressed by his uninhibited word choice, he felt a million times better than ten minutes ago.

“So what did he yell at you?” Sigerius held the porcelain gravy boat in the air, five centimeters above the damask like a ghost galleon. He stared at Aaron, and traced circles with his tongue on the inside of his gray-stubbled cheeks.

“Drop it,” Joni said. “I don’t think I want to know.”

Aaron glanced at her; her face was glazed with disdain. Maybe the others figured her scowl was meant for her father. No siree. The family bitch was ashamed of
him
, ashamed of her other half, she was worried about the show he was planning to put on this time. In theory, a week like this was a perfect opportunity to show her parents what a refreshingly nice couple they were. Usually this was something she excelled in: play nice for Mommy and Daddy, pretend they had nothing to hide. Usually she reveled in pretense, theatre, flashy falsehoods. Not now. Now she was entrenched in the homeyness of her family, she observed him through her parents’ eyes, and what she saw was a jealous dork who prowled around her childhood home in the middle of the night.

“Go on, tell us anyway,” Sigerius said.

In a strange, hyperconscious way, Aaron knew he had landed on the right side of his fatigue: the temazepams he took last night
had worn off; he felt lucid. “First he spat at me, another great big wad, this time at my ear. He yells: ‘BALD TWAT!’ at the top of his lungs. The cyclists at the stoplight turned and gawked. And then turned straight ahead again.”

“See what I mean,” said Joni. Sigerius shook his head and sniffed.

“And suddenly, with three cars honking behind me, I’m
pissed
. Furious. Not because of that twat, or because of that green spitwad on my head, no, not—well, yeah, that too. But mostly because of my window. That lowlife busted my window.” His lack of sleep allowed him to
become
Sebastian. “I pictured myself having to face De Zwart, my boss. Not the most easygoing. I can kiss my overtime goodbye, that’s De Zwart. ‘It’s coming out of your paycheck, Bever.’ De Zwart doesn’t ask if you’re OK, De Zwart withholds your salary. God damn it, I think. So I park my minivan next to that Escort and walk over to the hospital.”

Sigerius’s face breaks into a conspiratorial smile, the gravy boat makes a safe landing, finally, and with his now-free hand he strokes his deformed zero-tolerance ear. “So you go after the guy,” he says. “Way to go.”

The setting sun warmed the glass sunroom where they were eating, made their faces glow, reflected orange-red in the tableware, and Aaron described, also to himself, how in that hospital you had a long, low reception desk to the right and, to the left, a busy self-service cafeteria. “I couldn’t see the guy anywhere. Not at reception, maybe he’d walked through into the central hall. Just as I was about to ask where they’d sent the gentleman in the red training trousers, I spotted the asshole.”

“Is that what you said: red training trousers?” Sigerius asked.

“Of course not.” Joni.

Without looking at her, Aaron tut-tutted her with his left hand. “There he was in those clogs, his anabolic back to me, wedged in
between the rest of the grazers, shuffling past the window displays with a tray in his hands. I walk over to him, on his plastic tray are two sweaty half-liter bottles of Heineken. Three sausage rolls hang over the edge of a too-small plate. But I smell sweat and piss. I tap him on the shoulder, he turns to me, he’s a head shorter than I am, and from down there he looks up as though he’s never laid eyes on me before. I say to him: ‘Sir, you just broke my car window. How are we going to resolve this?’ Even the blackheads on his forehead look startled. ‘Me?’ he says, ‘whatcha talkin about?’ ‘Outside, just now,’ I say, ‘you were in that red Ford Escort.’ ‘You got the wrong guy,’ he says, ‘I don’t know you, I just come from my sick mama.’ ”

“Did he say ‘sick mama’?” Sigerius’s mouth flew wide open, his brown eyes squinted into two little slits—he laughed noiselessly.

“Weren’t you scared?” Janis asked. “You could’ve just gone back to work and called the insurance company.” Which is more or less what Aaron had suggested to his brother at the time. He felt fascination, but also apprehension, a vicarious fear.

Sigerius: “He could have gone sniveling back to his minivan. He could have shouted ‘He-e-e-e-lp!’ But some people take action when action is called for.” Behind his dark, stubbly face, a face that did not suit a
rector magnificus
because it had nothing solemn about it, that did not suit a Fields laureate because there was no unworldly genius radiating from it, and that least of all suited a Minister of Education, a transformation took place—you saw Sigerius change into the man for whom, in some distant past, that sensual, folksy head had been intended. A man who himself was capable of impulsive, quick-tempered action, who had once recalled, with great relish, an incident that took place in the canteen of an American swimming pool where he sat waiting while Joni and Janis had their swimming lesson on the other side of
the plate-glass wall. He wanted a cup of coffee and made three grown-up attempts at getting the attention of the canteen kid at the far end of the counter, who stood shooting the breeze with two swim-moms. Sigerius was a swim-dad who, in such circumstances, didn’t try a fourth time, but reached over the bar, fished a soggy yellow dishrag out of the sink and hurled it in a perfect parabola against the young layabout’s ear: coffee, please.

“A little scared,” he said to Janis. “But anyway I say to this trailer trash, because that’s what he was, of course, trailer trash, I say: ‘Oh yes, just now you stood out there alongside my taxi. You demolished my window.’ The guy glances around and says: ‘I’m gonna eat. So quit talkin crap. I’m going to sit down and have a peaceful bite to eat,’ and he slides his tray a little farther. All this in coarse, Venlo trailer trash lingo.”

“Now that’s a fact,” Joni said drily. “Trailer trash, there’s a lingo for you.”

Aaron had arrived at the heroic portion of the story. Not only had he appropriated his brother’s heroism, but he also jazzed it up a bit. “I bend over that sweaty neck of his,” he said, “and whisper into his ear: ‘You’re gonna pay.’ The guy whirls around. ‘You know who you’re talking to, asshole?’ he screams. Like a banshee. The whole cafeteria goes dead quiet. ‘Manus Pitte’—again at megaphone volume. OK, I got the picture. The Pittes are a notorious Venlo family, and not because of the smell of their cooking. A whole clan of hooligans. Half of them are behind bars—violence, drugs, prostitution, the works.”

“We know just what you mean.” Sigerius.

“Speak for yourself.” Joni.

“Joni also knows exactly what you mean.”

Tineke’s chair squeaked. Aaron looked at her. She leaned back and observed him with distant, chilly eyes.

“Before I could respond, this Pitte guy shoves his tray aside, one of the half-liter beers crashes to the floor,
bang
, glass everywhere.”

“Beer in a hospital?” Joni.

“Take it up with Customer Service. Pitte leans over sixty degrees, not forward, but sideways, from his waist—despite all those deep-fried meat snacks and satay hot dogs, the guy’s nothing but muscle—and while he stands there like a gymnast (he only stood like that for a second, but it’s a pose I’ll never forget) he grabs my pant leg with one hand, just above the knee, and my chauffeur’s jacket with the other hand. He starts dragging me toward the door. ‘Ousside,’ he yells, ‘ousside. Gonna bust on ya.’ He kept yelling it, all the way through the dead-quiet foyer. ‘Ousside. Bust on ya.’ ”