Bonita Avenue (33 page)

Only later that evening—after the three visitors had hotfooted it home, after Geesink had repeated his punishment drill for good measure, but only the light version—when he cycled back to the barracks with Jan and Peter Snijders, glowing with satisfaction, did he hear that the Amsterdammer with the straw-colored hair wasn’t Jon Bluming at all. Say what? “Don’t let Wijn kid you, Sigerius,” said Jan Snijders. “The blond guy you’re talking about is much younger than Bluming, name’s Ruska. Willem Ruska.”

It’s a quarter to eight, he’s got to get back to campus before eightthirty. He returns the ruined chair to the utility room, pushing the leg a bit into the splintery wound. The only place left is the study, the room facing the street, maybe he’ll find that key after all. The poorly laid wood floor glows pale brown in the sunlight, it looks to him like a simple floor base, it’s not tiled or carpeted. The room is a sauna, sweat oozes from his pores, he feels the heat in his shoes. On the wall opposite the window, his family looks at him through non-reflective glass: the portraits Aaron took for their twentieth anniversary. In the middle of the room is a mattress with rumpled bedclothes, there are two cheap bookshelves filled with academic books:
Sentence Analysis, Child Language Development
, a poetry handbook. He sees binders of
Tubantia Weekly
s, a meter
of
Willy & Wanda
comics. In the right-hand corner, halfway under the window, a desk, bare wood on aluminum legs. There’s a PC on it. He keeps looking outside, the street is empty. He sits down on the gray plastic desk chair and pulls open drawers, one of them is locked, the others are stuffed with bank statements, business correspondence, old birthday cards. He takes a few random samples. Uninteresting. No key.

A bulletin board above the desktop is thumbtacked full of newspaper clippings, cartoons, postcards, baby announcements, and photographs: Aaron with his parents and a formal-looking boy that vaguely resembles him, a strip of passport photos of Joni. He then digs doggedly in the plastic stacking boxes on the corner of the desk. Warranty receipts, a phone company contract, bills to the
Weekly
, a magazine missing its cover. A glossy blue cardboard folder, a brochure, in the middle bin catches his eye. He takes it out, “Palmer Johnson,” it announces, “the most desirable luxury high-performance yachts in the world.” The aerial photo on the cover shows a streamlined yacht cutting through the dark ocean, the metallic blue bow trailing a train of snow-white foam; the lounge sofas on the roof and rear decks are antique pink. Only when he realizes that the little pink postage stamp on the aerodynamic foredeck—the ship seems to be nothing but bow—is in fact a swimming pool, do the proportions fall into place.

He leans back and thumbs through the folder. On top are two loose photos on regular photographic paper, one of them is apparently the same ship as on the cover, anchored among similarly macho yachts in a sunny harbor, the other probably taken from the deck, out at sea, a coastline in the distance, no people. In the brochure itself: horizontal and vertical cross-sections, technical specifications, pictures of the innards: a living room bigger than the one downstairs; glossy, curved, built-in amenities; recessed lighting; a
bedroom with the looks of a five-star hotel suite. At the back he finds a receipt from Port Privé de Sainte-Maxime. In barely legible handwriting there are two dates and a name. “Barbara …,” and something short after it, a brusque “A” and two “w”s. And a “Monsieur Bever”—does it really say that?—who agrees to the sum of 12,779.75 French francs.

He stares at the boat on the cover for a moment, then takes a pen from a holder full of pencils and shavings and paper clips, and jots down the name of the manufacturer and the model number on the back of the receipt, which he then folds up and slides into his wallet.

Why would Aaron rent a thing like that? It’s one of the questions that plagues him at home while he watches the soccer game, pillows propped behind his back. Holland is slaughtering the Danes, and he cheers each goal right on time along with his daughter, but he’s not really there, he needs to know about that boat. After the match Janis decides at the last minute to return to her room in Deventer, Tineke offers to take her to the station, and, as soon as he sees the Audi drive past the living-room picture window, he goes upstairs to his study and switches on his laptop. It’s too late to phone that marina in Sainte-Maxime, so he goes to the manufacturer’s website, and what he sees only fuels his anxiety. He is no boat expert, but he doesn’t need to be, even a Swiss bumpkin could see that this is the top of the line. Palmer Johnson’s website oozes exclusivity. His heartbeat accelerating, he looks over the boats, the interiors, specifications. The “sport yacht” in the brochure is relatively small, just twenty meters long, and apparently there were only three of them made, the last one in 1997. His eyes nearly devour the monitor, but nowhere does he see how much the
yacht costs, apparently Palmer Johnson considers itself too classy for a price list. He opens Google and types in the model number and “price” in the search field. He lands on a website in North Miami Beach that doesn’t sell yachts, but rents them. During low season you can sail along the Florida coast for $110,000 in a PJ 115 Sport Yacht, in peak season you’ll shell out $130,000. Per week.

The site sagged under children seated at classroom desks, children clasping toys, children in steel pedal cars that brought back memories of my own primary school days. The kiddies’ pal himself was nowhere to be seen. On a separate page he offered his services as a restorer of antique black-and-white pictures. (“Aaron Bever employs the most up-to-date apparatus and techniques in photographic restoration. The difference is in the details!”) In the sample photograph I recognized the half-disintegrated wedding portrait of his grandparents, a time-worn, warped, and water-pocked piece of paper that he kept propped on his bookshelf and with the slightest puff of breeze fluttered to the
floor like an autumn leaf. Alongside it the spruced-up, spotless version. I looked at his grandmother’s awkwardly fitting wartime dress. The hairline of the young man who had been his grandfather was already receding, but even in his Venlo nursing home he wasn’t as bald as his grandson.

My own head was still heavy from yesterday. After work about thirty of us boarded three Chrysler vans that took us from Coldwater to the Gold Digger, Rusty’s favorite hotel bar in downtown L.A. He treated, said we had to celebrate the Barracks deal. Earlier that day Rusty, Debra from Personnel, and I had already been to see a renowned interior architect on South Hope Street, offices on every continent. This was just the ticket, Rusty said, these guys (who turned out to be two women and one man) had done Amazon.com, Deutsche Bank, a complete make-over of the Sheraton, they’re the tops, he guaranteed they’ll be purring once they saw the Barracks. If we’re gonna go bankrupt, Joy, then let’s do it in style. But he’d rather end up in
Fortune
’s 100 Best Companies to Work For, did I get his drift? That list was an obsession from his Goldman Sachs days, and although I cautiously prepared him for a letdown—I couldn’t imagine a firm like this wanting to take us on—they actually warmed to our proposal, and after that Rusty was unstoppable. That evening, in the Japanese restaurant where we all sat around one of those teppanyaki tables, he launched into a slightly boozy State of the Union address, a discourse on corporate identity, the revolutionary “open plan” office interiors, the “cool” titanium scooters we would glide up and down the long hallways on. He managed to get all of us into the Digger before midnight, where we stood on the hip rooftop bar until the wee hours catching cold. It was already light when the van dropped me off on Sunset Boulevard.

I washed down two Tylenol with a gulp of coffee and reflected
on Aaron. What kind of life did he lead in that Belgian hick town? The thought of him at those primary schools pained me in a complicated way. I wondered if I had any right to feel like that. Looking at the goofy website, I realized that someone who didn’t know better would think he had found his niche. But this wasn’t the Aaron I knew; if I had predicted this future to the old Aaron—putzing around primary schools,
Belgian
primary schools, in a minivan—then he wouldn’t have even scoffed at me, he’d have begged me to put him out of his misery then and there.

I straightened my shoulders. This meticulously maintained website aroused latent feelings of guilt in me, even more than those creepy e-mails of his. The suspicion that I had tricked him into starting that sex site (like the accusations against Colin Powell and Tony Blair) reared its head again. The same old reflex: it was all my fault. I inhaled hard through my nose. I had sealed our fate just at the moment I wanted to be rid of him—that kind of agonizing. For a brief moment I was back on the Vluchtestraat, sitting across the breakfast table from him, that morning long ago when I put his head on the chopping block. We had been taking pictures for months, just for the fun of it—so I said, and so he believed—and it was then that I laid my plan on him. We’d had a degrading night; in the middle of it I woke with a shock to a terrible scream, a curse, and saw Aaron cowering on the chair in the corner where I had draped my clothes a few hours earlier. He was crying. On the floor all around him: a notebook, ripped to shreds, that I immediately recognized as a school notebook we’d already argued about interminably. Since I was thirteen I had kept a kiss list on the two glossy inside covers, a chronological inventory of all the boys I had at least made out with, date, age, first name, location, eye color, hair color, hair
length
, God knows what else. In all there were more than 100
names, a number Aaron called “astronomical,” and he accused me of being an “astronomical slut,” he kept going on about that stupid list, and why were there two girls’ names on it? (“Why do you think?”)

I had long since stopped being amused by his jealous whining, and actually I had decided to dump him weeks earlier—just beat it, go jump in the lake—but when I saw him sitting there surrounded by shreds and wads of paper, I was struck by the powerful emotions I had released in him. I knew I had a certain sexual clout, I was aware of my effect on men, but this? He was in my power. This guy would not only never leave me, but he would also do anything necessary to
keep
me. That’s why I didn’t break up with him that morning, but instead, between two bites of toast, said there was something I had to tell him. “I’m going to start a sex site,” I said. “You know, on the Internet.” I still remember his jaw dropping open, I could see the glop of half-chewed bread and aged cheese on his tongue. “Preferably with you, of course,” I said to reassure him.

There were voices in the hallway; Rusty was showing his guests out, I heard them talking as they clattered down the stairs. Once it was totally quiet again I clicked on a button called “Backgrounds,” half expecting to read about how Aaron had ended up in the exciting and fulfilling world of school photography, but I was wrong, it was a page of background patterns for behind the portraits: solid light blue, soft pink roses, speckled pastel tints, “or why not try something completely different: linen! For that special effect, Aaron Bever will print your son’s or daughter’s portrait on a genuine linen canvas, so your school picture will resemble a freshly made oil painting.”

• • •

The
children … 
A thought so painful that I clapped my hand over my mouth, it slid into my consciousness, filled it—of course he hadn’t just randomly chosen this profession, these kids were the whole point. Going through his e-mails in my head, I knew for sure he was childless. For a man in his late thirties this was not earthshaking, but I knew that Aaron had a deep-seated and lifelong yearning for children. With his illness, the schizophrenia from which he surely suffered, it seemed unlikely to me that he’d ever find a woman who would dare get pregnant by him. It wasn’t rheumatism or allergies—as far as I could tell he was halfway to hell. I knew something of the progressive misery that plagued him. (Rusty, of all people, had told me the story of a schizophrenic man in the apartment below his, back in his start-up days in Redondo Beach. Rusty called him “The Voice,” and he wasn’t referring to Frank Sinatra either, although the downstairs neighbor was famous for his timing and phrasing: for two years the guy opened his throat, at random times [but always at night], bellowing surreal texts at the top of his lungs; sometimes it was a song, “Black Betty” by Ram Jam, or an AC/DC number, but mostly he yelled the same mantra over and over at stadium-filling volume, something Rusty would perform with a grin, relieved that this period of his life was over: “BIIIIIIILLLL!!! You hear me,
BILLLLL?!
You owe me one point two FUCKIN!!! BILLION!!! DOLLARS!!!,
BIIIILLLLL!!!!
” For hours on end, half the night, without a break, without Clinton ever coughing up the dough. Rusty called 911 a few times and pointed the receiver at the floor, to which the dispatcher asked why he had invited the man—a regular at the Redondo Beach mental health services—into his apartment. It was not a disease to snag girls with. Nor to start a family with.)

“I want children.” It was one of the first things Aaron confided
in me. If I’m not mistaken it was the first time we met, a curious conversation we had in the snow in front of the Technical Management Studies building; a camera hung around his neck, a flat woolen cap on his head—I knew about his ambitions to have a large family before I even knew he was bald. Still, I only grasped how serious he was when I dumped him four years later. “Do you know what Aaron told me?” my father asked just before we left on that last vacation. “That he wants you to be the mother of his children.”