Bonita Avenue Read online

  Or was he mistaken? He glanced briefly in her direction in the hope that his conscience was playing tricks on him. No, that was Joni’s mother all right. But look how skinny she’d got, it was like she’d been halved; her surreally narrow hips were wrapped in brown slacks with a neat pinstripe, she wore a tailored jacket and under it a cream-colored blouse, on her feet were boots with thin, elegant heels that on the old Tineke Sigerius would have bored straight through the chassis of the train carriage. Her mid-length hair was graying, not unflatteringly, and lay in a studied knot above her weirdly sunken face, which radiated something most people would describe as decisive, independent, and even sympathetic, rather than what he suspected even back when he was still Joni’s boyfriend: ill-tempered, or downright nasty. And now it dawned on him: along with all that fat, the last bit of kindness had been boiled off, apparently for good. Although she had gained a certain femininity, the effect was undermined by an excess of loose skin around her cheeks and chin, by her baggy, pink-smeared eyelids that hung dejectedly over her lashes. She looked, in a word, bitchy.

  Sigeriuses did not belong in Belgian trains, Sigeriuses belonged at home in Twente, where he had left them nearly eight years ago. It was precisely to avoid this kind of encounter that he had skipped town. It wasn’t the cuisine that had drawn him to Linkebeek, a dump just south of Brussels where, he’d thought until five minutes ago, a person could start afresh as inconspicuously as in Asunción or Montevideo. He had imagined himself sheltered and unseen, Linkebeek was a village where the trees outnumbered the inhabitants, every lopsided thing that human hands had built was concealed from view by rustling, crackling, snapping wood.

  He stole a glance at Tineke’s hands. They lay in her lap, strangely fine and bony, emphatically segmented. How many tables, how many chairs, how many chests had those hands produced by now? Joni’s mother made furniture in a workshop behind the farmhouse, she did back then anyway, chic and pricey interior furnishings that found their way into villas, offices, and stately canal houses across the Netherlands. Now, the one hand took hold of a finger on the other, one after the other, and gave each a little—bitter, he presumed—tug.

  They had never hit it off, he and Tineke. They didn’t gel. He thought back to the first time he and Joni slept at her parents’ house; he, as usual, lay awake for hours on end, yearning desperately for Sigerius’s wine cellar, and finally crept out of the narrow guest bed and down the open staircase, through the cool front hall and into the living room. From the kitchen he descended—routinely, he knew the way—the creaking cellar stairs and removed one of Sigerius’s self-tapped bottles from the cast-iron rack, determined to uncork it at the kitchen counter and guzzle as much of it as possible in the hope that it would knock him out. But on his way back up the stairs he heard footsteps in the living room and had to duck back into the opening. Someone entering the kitchen, cupboards being opened and shut. Standing on his tiptoes, he peered over the edge, and what he saw was shocking and repulsive: he looked out onto a hideous back, a mountainside like you saw in nature films about South Africa or the Arizona prairies, but this was a mountain of flesh. It was Tineke. He counted six deeply pleated rolls of fat between her armpits and her backside, on which, halfway down, hung a sort of orange awning, which even with the best will in the world you couldn’t call a “panty.”

  Joni’s mother tore open a cardboard packet and poured its contents into her gaping mouth, half of it skittered off in all directions, chocolate sprinkles rained across the floor tiles. Once the package was empty she wrung it out, squashed it flat and shoved it deep into the trash can. He recoiled at the fleshy thud as she fell to her knees. She gathered up the spilt sprinkles with spit on her fingertips and palms. By then he had forgotten his cover, and as she sat there licking off her fingers she suddenly swung her head a quarter-turn and looked at him. “Hey,” he said, once they had both got over the initial shock. “I was thirsty.” She did not answer, she could at least have said, “I was hungry”; instead she hoisted herself up and stumbled out of the kitchen without a word, and only after he heard her bedroom door close down the hall did he return to his own bed.

  And now? What could they possibly say to each other now? The train was too full, he reassured himself, for a scene, and he therefore tried to imagine how a controlled variant might proceed. So, Aaron, how are you these days? God, now that was one question he did not relish. He would rather continue his journey on the roof of the intercity than give an honest answer. He’d just spent the weekend at his parents’ in Venlo—doctor’s orders, just as everything he did was on doctor’s orders. It was awful to have to admit he was sick, that he was tethered to neuroleptics and antidepressants. How do you tell someone you’re a five-star basket case? How was he to tell this woman he was insane? That’s me, Tineke: nothing but doctor’s orders.

  After the debacle in Enschede he worked briefly as a photographer for the better Brussels newspapers, but after a second severe psychosis in the winter of 2002 nearly did him in, he and his mental health counselors decided he should quit. Since then he had been driving around in a VW van refitted as a photo studio, taking individual and class pictures of primary-school children in Brussels and its surroundings. He would trace a numbered silhouette of each group photo on a lightbox. On his meticulously maintained website, fathers and mothers and grannies and grandpas could order reprints by clicking on a variety of formats, frames, and captions. The rest of his time—the hours, days, weeks, months that other men his age spent breeding, chasing careers, or maybe even raising idealistic hell somewhere—he just loafed about like some retired geezer, shuffling up the mossy steps to the town square, buying a newspaper in a secondhand bookshop appropriately called Once Upon a Time, picking up his meds in the pharmacy across from the ancient sycamore. Sometimes he snacked on a satay in the bistro at the end of the square, and then shambled back to the ridge, scuffing behind an imaginary Zimmer frame, and allowed himself to be swallowed up by his oversized, mortgage-free house.

  According to his doctors he was a patient who “identified and acknowledged” his own condition, which meant he took his capsules voluntarily and thus was capable of living on his own. But that was about it. He led an entirely aimless existence. His motivation in life was avoidance: avoid stimulation, avoid excitement, avoid motivation itself.

  He looked at his knees. What if he were to blurt it all out, right here in this chock-full train compartment? A detailed, concentrated, no-holds-barred monologue on his misery, on his psychosis-induced fears? A lecture, a short story, an epic poem on the immeasurable, irrational terror he had endured. The commuters hung cheek by jowl on their ceiling straps, no one could get away. If he really put his mind to it, if he were to wax eloquent, who knows, maybe the fear he described would spark over to his listeners, first to Tineke and the girl in the too-tight outfit, and then to everyone in the seats and aisles. And they would all be scared to death. His fear became everyone’s fear. Frenzied panic, as though the Semtex in his brain had finally exploded.

  He and Sigerius gelled just fine. In the winter of 1995 he had latched onto an intelligent, headstrong, beautiful girl named Joni, and Joni turned out to be a full-blood Sigerius. Two months later, to his amazement, there he was paying a house call to this guy and his family. And then the truly improbable happened: the man whom the entire campus sucked up to, the man whom he, the Venlo dropout, gawked at on the TV, that man extended him a calloused judo hand. And he accepted that hand, eager but also surprised. They became friends, and he took care not to wonder too often why.

  Once a month, on a Saturday, he and Joni went to dinner in the refurbished farmhouse on the edge of the campus, a completely renovated white-stuccoed residence so utterly desirable that passersby slid “if-you-ever-decide-to-sell” notes through the mail slot in the dark-green front door. Although he teased Joni about her clingy attachment to her parents (“Now don’t just call Daddy,” he said when a blown fuse suddenly left her student flat pitch-black and deserted), he alw
ays enjoyed those visits. As they cycled out to the farmhouse, downtown Enschede would melt into the Drienerlo woods, which in turn flowed seamlessly into the campus, the backdrop for their four-year relationship. On those Saturdays, Tubantia seemed heavily pregnant. The humming meadows looked grassier than on weekdays, in his memory the wooded paths rolled gently, they cycled through an undulating landscape that smelled of pollen and where the ponds seemed inevitable. The shimmering water had collected at the lowest parts, just as hundreds of scholars and thousands of students had flowed precisely here in order to shine. You could hear their brains rustling, the fields and the trees and the berm seemed statically charged by the billions of bits and bytes that zoomed through the campus network under their feet. And when they returned home late in the evening, a prehistoric darkness enveloped the route, the gentle hills had become shallow dells, the greens and woods lairs for slumbering academic buildings. Applied Mathematics lay like a brontosaurus in its lake, the Tyrannosaurus rex of Technical Physics stretched up to the highest treetops, its slumbering head among the stipple of stars.

  Sometimes they’d spend the night, and the next morning they would eat warm croissants with marmalade and drink jumbo glasses of fresh orange juice Sigerius squeezed for them after doing his forty laps of breast stroke in the campus pool, with the music of the Bill Evans Trio, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck in the background, easy-listening Sunday morning jazz, which, he said, worked like salve on their morning moodiness. “Can you turn the salve down a little?” Joni complained, but Sigerius ignored her. With a raised index finger and one eye shut, he would call out: “Listen!” His wife and two daughters fell silent, dutifully stopped chewing and concentrated, just to indulge him in something that bored them, and after about ten seconds Sigerius released them with words like: “Beautiful, how Scott LaFaro plays around Evans. Hear that? Around him. Yeah, now!, this, that meandering bass, listen.”

  “Dad, I hate jazz,” said Janis, or Joni, or both.

  “Just listen to this, it’s unreal! It’s foreground and background at the same time, accompanist and virtuoso. No way am I turning this down.”

  At moments like this, Aaron was the one—and this was the basis for their bond, the simple fact that he was a boy, and not a girl, although there are also certain breeds of boy that get the creeps from jazz, for whom jazz is a complete waste of time—who remarked how tragic it was that Scott LaFaro smashed himself up in a car crash, and that Bill Evans, after that dramatic loss in 1961, never found another bassist of that caliber, although Chuck Israels of course did come close, certainly on How My Heart Sings! And before he’d finished with his little spiel, another heart sang: that of his father-in-law, who divided the world into jazz lovers and ignoramuses, and who had often announced, even in company, that he’d never met a young person so clued-up about jazz as Aaron, a feather in his cap that he not only left there but also, now and then, when no one was looking, stroked.

  The Saturday evenings usually began in the sunroom, which was then spanking-new and, since the wall was taken out a year earlier, ran directly into the kitchen with its cooking island where Tineke prepared simple but tasty meals. After supper they retired, arguing or joking, to the old living room, and Tineke followed, carrying a tray of buttered krentenwegge and jittering coffee cups, and Joni opened the cabinet doors concealing the so-called unimportant television, and Sigerius kept up his end of the bargain by not answering his cell phone for an hour. The times when Janis went off to meet friends at a café downtown (usually right after Frasier, watching the end with her coat already on) and Tineke and Joni decided at around ten to watch a Saturday evening film, and Sigerius would ask: “How ’bout some tunes?” and he would not say no but yes, and they would disappear like a pair of schoolboys with a bottle of whiskey to the “music room,” a space on the ground floor fitted out with two dark-red Chesterfields, an expensive NAD amplifier and CD player, a Thorens turntable, and two man-sized B&W speakers on spikes and bits of NASA foam rubber that Sigerius had wangled from Technical Physics; and there, seated among framed photos of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans, they listened to democratically chosen records (with bilateral veto power), original American LPs that Sigerius kept in tall, narrow, waxed beechwood cabinets designed and built by his wife.

  Boys’ stuff, just like that judo of theirs. In the farmhouse entrance hung a blown-up photo of five hulking, bare-chested men dragging a tree trunk up a hill: Geesink, Ruska, Gouweleeuw, and Snijders, and there, second from the left, with the tensed pecs and cropped dark curls above the flat face, was Sigerius himself. The Dutch national judo team in training for a World Championship, it must have been ’65 or ’66. Geesink, coach as well as teammate, sent his line-up into the woods near Marseilles; according to Sigerius he was a slave driver, but when tree trunks had to be dragged uphill, he was out in front. Up on top, while the others lay gasping for breath, Geesink grabbed the trunk at one end and, palpitating, shoved it out in front of him ten or so times, tore the clothes off his steaming body and jumped in a mountain creek. “If we offered him a water bottle, he refused, thought it was a waste of his thirst,” said Sigerius, who soon discovered that Aaron had practiced judo until he was nineteen; and when he learned that he was even a black belt, Sigerius coaxed him into taking it up again, first in the senior group he coached on Thursday evenings at the campus athletic center, and when Aaron had regained, as they say, his old “feeling,” Sigerius asked if he felt like going for a dan exam together.

  Judo is a strangely intimate sport. A couple of times a week for a good two years, he and Sigerius rolled around the judo mat in each other’s arms. Intensive, concentrated hours with the gym entirely to themselves. Talk was kept to a bare minimum. They gave themselves one year to hone their throwing and grappling techniques, Sigerius going for his fourth dan, he for his second. Each training session closed with the savage bouts he often thought back on, even now. And after each session he climbed into bed, occasionally in her parents’ guest room, next to Joni, Sigerius’s painstakingly raised daughter, the apple of his eye, and then Aaron noticed that Joni smelled vaguely like her father—maybe it was the washing powder Tineke used, he couldn’t say. And while he mixed pheromones—he was a messenger of bodily scents, a bumblebee that traveled between two bodies of the same make—he felt that his strange happiness was doubled in their careful lovemaking after the training sessions, their muted groans in Sigerius’s guest bed, his hand sometimes firmly over Joni’s warm mouth to keep her from waking his strange friend a floor below.

  The train rolled through Leuven. Tineke had closed her eyes, she pretended to sleep so that they would not have to acknowledge each other’s existence. He admired her cold-bloodedness. He hadn’t seen a single Sigerius since late in 2000, the year everything was blown to pieces. Nevertheless they roamed stubbornly through his subconscious, he still had recurring dreams—nightmares mostly—of Enschede.

  Twilight was falling, the sky was purple, silvery on the edge of the wispy clouds. He caught the reflection of his own bald head in the window. He felt himself become calmer, and somber. A village unfurled itself alongside a canal, a wafery moon hung curiously early in the sky. Soon he would walk home through the moldy dusk of Linkebeek. The deadness that awaited him, the cold, high-ceilinged rooms he had longed for back in Venlo. He was just thankful that it was Tineke who sat there ignoring him, and not Sigerius himself.

  It had never been completely relaxed. In Sigerius’s company he could freeze up, literally, becoming dramatically paralyzed: his jaws clamped shut, bringing about a barely controllable tension that spread from his neck vertebrae and his shoulders throughout his entire body. He was, for hours on end, a statue of himself fighting against total paralysis, desperately talking all the while, praying his voice would continue to function. If Sigerius were to give him a push during one of these moments, he’d have fallen over and smashed to bits like a Chinese vase.

  He experienced their friendship as magical—before he’d
come to the campus to take up photography, he had flunked out of the Dutch program in Utrecht, was chucked out on his ear, and here he had simply walked right into the inner chamber of the academic heart, just like that—but mendacious as well. He made himself out to be more than he was. It all started with the jazz. One Sunday at the farmhouse, not so long after their first meeting, they slurped hot coffee from slim-handled mugs. Sigerius, distant, his mind on other matters, got up and went over to a hypermodern metal cabinet housing a record player and put on an LP. Jazz. Even before he’d sat back down on the long, pale-pink sofa next to his wife, Aaron recognized the music. He waited a bit just to be sure, but he was right: the theme, the round, slightly coquettish piano-playing, this was Sonny Clark, and the LP was called Cool Struttin’. He could see the classic Blue Note jacket before him, a pair of woman’s legs strolling over (he presumed) a New York City sidewalk. Over Joni’s and Tineke’s heads he said: “Nice album, Cool Struttin’.”

  Sigerius, with his amazing morning stubble (it would take Aaron a whole week to cultivate such a shadow), opened his brown eyes wide. “Cool Struttin’ is a great album,” he said, his voice more strident, higher, as though a piano tuner had taken a wrench to it. “So you know it. Cool Struttin’ is by far Clark Terry’s best LP.”

  Clark Terry? Aaron got it at once: Sigerius was mistaken, he was confusing Sonny Clark with Clark Terry, an amusing gaffe, but he decided not to rub it in. It was hardly tactful to swoop in like a schoolmarm and rap your new father-in-law on the knuckles, but to just play dumb, no, he was too proud for that. “I’m with you,” he said, “this was Sonny Clark’s best band, Philly Joe Jones, for once, holding back on the drums. Not going at the cymbals like a hooligan.”