Bonita Avenue (24 page)

Yes, he thought, that is crazy. Crying for a boy who dumped a bootful of sand on your face and twenty years later bashes a fullgrown man to a pulp. Strange indeed.

Things got even weirder at the dinner table. This is what happened. Janis was the first who could get a word in after Tineke told her daughters that Wilbert had inquired about their well-being. She cleared her throat and asked, with an atypically small voice, if Wilbert had phoned from prison. No, Tineke answered, he was free.

“Is that what Wijn was doing at the reception?” Joni demanded, harshly, distrustfully.

Those honorary doctorates—Aaron knew immediately what she was talking about. (“Oh. My. God,” she had said when a tall, badly dressed man with a battered face walked into the foyer. “That overdressed construction worker over there,” she’d whispered to him, “the one with the gray Schwarzenegger hair? That’s Menno Wijn.” She left it at that. So you’re Wilbert’s guardian angel, he thought to himself.)

“To tell us about Wilbert’s release,” Tineke said.

“And I only find out
now
?” asked Joni. It sounded unbelievably rude.

“The city has exploded, in case you haven’t noticed,” Sigerius said. He sat half-turned, staring outside, only his right hand lay on the table, his thumb and index finger fidgeted with a napkin ring.

“Mom,” said Joni, “repeat to me exactly what Wilbert said.” She grasped the tabletop with both hands. Either to provoke her husband, or because she was afraid Joni would flip the table over, Tineke did what was asked of her. It was a brief, bone-dry conversation. “Those two still alive?”—“Yes, they’re alive”—and that was about it.

“Where does he live?” Joni asked.

“America,” Sigerius said without turning around.

“How do you know?” asked Tineke. All four of them looked at the back of his sullen head; Sigerius’s ears resembled amputated fireworks fists.

“I don’t know anything,” he said. “I’m only wishing out loud.”

“How is he?” asked Joni.

Tineke told him that she had asked Wilbert just that, at the last minute, they were already finished—and he had brought the receiver back to his mouth and answered rather sarcastically that he was still alive too—and that was that. Just then Sigerius turned to them. “What a pity,” he said, his face still flushed from laughing. “It would’ve saved us a lot of trouble. Wilbert calling up to let us know he’s dead.”

Aaron was the only one who laughed, out of awkwardness. Janis and her mother were silent. Joni looked at her father for an entire second, her mouth trembling. She got up, picked up the Wedgwood platter of potato croquettes with both hands, turned her upper body a quarter of a turn (Tineke: “
Joni, what are you
doing!
”) and flung it to the floor with a shrill roar, smashing it to pieces. It was an unbelievable crash. Janis shrieked. They heard the shards skitter across the floor; the croquettes tumbled against the skirting boards, spun in little circles. Sigerius sat motionless like a deaf-mute.

“What a shitty thing to say,” she screamed, and yet it sounded restrained. She began to cry, short little gasps, they were more like angry sobs. They looked at her, the four of them, the way she stood there, her shoulders trembling, her furious eyes directed at her father.

“Malicious
coward
.”

That Sigerius did not make short shrift of this exhibition—Aaron did not understand that either. The man who just heard he was about to become a Cabinet minister, the man who steered a management team of twelve intolerable deans. It was as though he’d been crying all evening instead of laughing.

“Fuck it!” Joni shouted. She turned and rushed out of the sunroom, now sobbing at full throttle. They listened to the sound of her flip-flops as she crossed the living room into the wide entrance hall and stormed up the steps. Upstairs a door slammed.

The sounds from the garden, the rustling of the poplars, permeated the sunroom. Sigerius rubbed his hand over his stubbly jaw. “Well.” And then, when no one answered, casually, much too casually: “We should have stayed in America ourselves. We should never have come back. Never. I wish we were still in Berkeley. Don’t you, Tien?”

So back to feckin’ Dallas after all. Víctor Sotomayor got all persnickety about the bank guarantee, vetoed the notary Rusty and I had suggested, and a portion of those millions had to be funneled through a bank in Havana to a private company in Amsterdam. To make a long story short: endless niggling and hair-splitting that we just swallowed for fear the Barracks might elude us yet. So Dallas it was, there was no getting out of it. Just before leaving Sunset Boulevard for LAX I checked my various in-boxes and was slightly unnerved to see that Aaron had sent me seven messages in the past few days. I really wasn’t in the market for a pen pal. I skimmed the first e-mail, the longest one; the rest were brief PSs. “Why haven’t I heard anything?” he mailed the day before yesterday. “You aren’t sick, are you? Maybe you’re on vacation.”

Mulling over his letters in the plane, I decided not to answer for the time being. He’d kind of started off on the wrong foot by inviting himself out to Los Angeles, which he subsequently took back, saying that his “health” would “probably” prevent long-distance travel. In the third or fourth e-mail he backtracked again, that it would still be “really and truly special” to see me and go to Berkeley together; now that bygones were bygones he thought it would be “cathartic” for us both, he was “dying” to see where I’d spent my youth, having heard so much about it. I was extremely happy there, he knew, couldn’t we … etc. etc.

No, we couldn’t.

I eventually managed to iron things out with Sotomayor up in his Stone Tower penthouse. I couldn’t help thinking that I’d been summoned back to that mahogany-polish-stinking office of his just as a reminder of who was boss. After an interminable prelude on his part, the business details were worked out in a matter of minutes; he then led me through two heavy doors to an adjacent space. Valued business partners, he said with satisfaction, should have the opportunity to see this. What’s up, you Cuban porker, I thought. For the moment I was afraid Víctor had got wind of our plans for his Barracks, that Rusty had shot off that flounder-mouth of his. He led me into an ominously old-fashioned-looking office: large, dusty succulents in brown gravel, yellowy-brown Venetian blinds I hadn’t seen in any of the other offices. The spherical feet of a heavy oak desk rested on a faded Persian carpet. On the desktop with inlaid green leather stood an ancient, bulky computer in the same mashed-potato color as the rest of the room. Lots of photos in gilded frames. Right in front of the high-backed, cracked leather desk chair was a pile of yellowed documents, a pair of horn-rimmed reading glasses, and, on a flattened-out gentleman’s handkerchief, a small steel-nosed instrument whose tongs clutched tiny curls of black hair. I eventually realized it was a nose-hair trimmer.

Behind the desk was an open cupboard holding about 100 black cardboard dossiers, with the year—ranging from the mid-’60s until 1991—handwritten on the spine. It smelled like death in here. I wasn’t completely comfortable with this setup, I expected a hairy paw at any moment to grab my neck and force me to bend over that desk. So I asked the asthmatic Sotomayor, who stood panting behind me, if his secretary had the day off. “Here, Miss Sigerius”—his high-pitched voice took on an emotional warble—“in this very room, this cherished chamber, my dear father once
worked. My late father was the founder and first director of our company.” But even with this holdup I finished with Sotomayor surprisingly quickly, and after reporting back to Rusty I treated myself to a London broil in the steak house next to my hotel. It was so quiet all I could hear was the grinding of my own molars. I got the uneasy suspicion that Aaron was already on his way. Could be, of course. That he got it into his head to book a flight. When I flew back to L.A. the next morning I seriously considered the possibility that I’d find him standing on my doorstep with outstretched arms. But I found my house as quiet as I’d left it.

I had to be off again straightaway. For the past year or so I had been Rollerblading with a group of about forty people every Tuesday evening through Santa Monica, often into West Hollywood or downtown L.A. Relaxing outings which required just enough concentration that for the entire evening I felt completely at one with the warm air flowing through my hair and the purring asphalt under my wheels. The ever-growing club met at the Pacific Coast Highway, just beyond the pier across from Seaside Terrace, a little more than half a mile from my house.

I buttered a bagel and carried my Rollerblades to the elevator that would take me down to street level. I skated the first few meters between the imposing pillars that supported most of my house, hummed around Sunset’s curves toward Ocean Drive, but instead of liberation I felt a nervous kind of melancholy. Aaron was troubling me. Twice I was passed by oncoming taxis, and twice I saw him sitting in the passenger’s seat. I turned onto the coastal road, crossed a busy line of traffic, and skated with measured glides toward the pier.

But I had second thoughts once I got a glimpse of the raucous group off in the distance. I just couldn’t face it. With a sharp turn I skated up onto the pier, took off my Rollerblades and socks and
strolled among the throngs of tourists. My gaze focused on the warm, knotty planks; I walked past the seafood stalls and Pacific Park’s neon-lit Ferris wheel. The slamming of the waves against the piles under my feet. At the end of the pier, a couple of hundred yards into the ocean, I spent the next half hour staring out onto the glistening expanse, and then headed home.

I had to laugh at my own paranoia: a new message from Aaron. His tone was agitated. “I won’t be coming any time soon,” he wrote. “Berkeley is probably a bad idea anyway. You probably went there with Stol. Am I right?”

Bo and I had been living in San Francisco for a while when, one Saturday morning, we strapped Mike into the backseat of the Land Rover and drove across the Bay Bridge over to Berkeley. Mike was screaming blue murder so we made a short stop on Treasure Island, a man-made island halfway across the bay, and wondered over a cup of coffee whether we should just turn around. “Is this a good idea?” Boudewijn asked. “All those memories.” “No,” I answered, “but it’s also stupid not to go. It’s a stone’s throw. It would be ridiculous not to.”

We continued along I-80 through Oakland, through
rundown
Oakland, I noticed, and drove down University Avenue to the entrance gate at the west edge of the UC Berkeley campus. We parked the Land Rover and Bo put the drowsing Mike in the baby sling. We walked onto the campus past drumming students in Bears sweatshirts. Boudewijn asked what was going on: didn’t we know?—in a couple of hours the Berkeley football team was playing UCLA, you guys need some tickets?—but our goal was farther along. Evans Hall, the cube-shaped Mathematics Department where my father had cooped himself up with his knots for those
two eternal years. I recognized the gravel paths, the white neoclassical academic buildings that had survived twenty years of seismic stir. Students sat under enormous oak and willow trees, chatting and laughing like actors in a campus soap. Bo, who in his redvelour hip pants and herringbone jacket looked like a well-heeled alumnus, seemed impressed by the pastoral beauty. We crossed a six-sided court planted with a matrix of pollard willows, on which he figured Nobel Prizes grew, walked around a trimmed lawn and suddenly found ourselves in front of the hideous Evans Hall. As though it were yesterday, I pushed open the brown steel and reinforced-glass door and led Boudewijn and Mike to a wood-paneled elevator that took us up to the tenth and top floor. I automatically turned left and walked down the oatmeal-colored linoleum to the small office where my father worked.

“Go ahead and knock,” Boudewijn said when he saw me hesitate in front of the door. The next room, a classroom, was open; you could see whiteboards and lecterns and the open air. “Or we could just have a look in here,” I suggested, but Boudewijn said: “Knock.”

No one answered. I turned the door handle downward and pushed, but the room once inhabited by Dr. S. Sigerius was locked up tight.

“And now?” Boudewijn had strapped Mike in and started the car.

“Just drive.”

I directed him to Telegraph Avenue, after which we followed Bancroft back toward the bay, so we could swing by Berkwood Hedge, the small elementary school with the waxed floors where Janis and I walked, hand in hand, every weekday morning for two
years. Here, too, typical Californian streets, every house different from the others, Cedar Street undulating like a gray belt toward the bay, the glistening vanishing point of every perspective here. The intersections we crossed, with their just-for-show traffic lights, brought me inexorably back to 1982, and suddenly I saw the school building, damn, there it was, a stuccoed thing with a blacktop playground out in front.

“You want me to stop?” Boudewijn asked.

A classroom full of American know-it-alls, sharp as tacks and not particularly nice. Back in Utrecht, six months before I parachuted into their midst, I knelt in front of the record player as it cranked out the red Beatles double LP and looked up “Love Me Do” word for word in an English dictionary. That was the extent of my English. But I just pretended I understood. A yes here, a no there, mustn’t let them get me down, and if they managed to get Janis down I cheered her up all the way back to Bonita Avenue. Buck up. Don’t cry. What will Mom and Dad think?

“Turn left here,” I said to Boudewijn, “we’re getting close to our old house.”

A few blocks northward on the busy Martin Luther King Way, a jog right and left, and we drove onto Bonita Avenue, a quiet street with telephone poles and neatly parked family cars and lush, full trees. Siem said he’d picked this street especially because I thought “Bonita” was such a nifty word. I wrote the address at the front of the Enid Blyton book I’d brought with me from Utrecht. Joni Sigerius, 1908 Bonita Ave., Oakland, CA, USA, World, Universe. Maybe because the trees in the yards and along the sidewalks had grown since then, greener, fuller—but after a short delay I realized that everything else seemed smaller. What a crummy little street. The Land Rover crept along the spotty asphalt. With my hand resting on the warm roof I peered at the passing wooden houses.