Authors: Peter Buwalda
And again that crystalline laugh Joni reserved for special
occasions, a laugh that began deep in her chest and lacked gracefulness. What he heard was unconditional surrender. Not that this guy was in any way a comic genius, his jokes were lazy, simplistic—it was
power
that exerted, via an unmarked detour, an influence on Joni’s humor. The full-fat power on which he gorged himself stretched the button of the white dinner jacket Stol had pulled out of his walk-in closet this morning. He had chosen this white jacket to quash any misunderstandings, just like a dominant chimpanzee wastes no time in pushing his ass into your face. An alpha male, Aaron had read in the career brochures that he summarily chucked in the wastebasket, the type who makes his subordinates sniff his feet because he thinks they smell like raspberry pie. He placed the lens back in his eye. If Joni saw that he was already starting to lose it, this dinner would be his Waterloo. She was not to find out that he was scared to death of this guy.
Well, if
this
wasn’t poetic justice. He and his spiteful swagger about this kind of man. Consultants are charlatans, stupid and greedy, he would sermonize whenever Joni mentioned a possible future in consultancy—a future, by the way, she was being trained for as a Technical Management student, a future she had in fact already opted for and which she would undoubtedly take by storm. Instead of supporting her, as soon as she said anything positive about a company like McKinsey he scrunched his forehead into horns, perfidious drivel dripping from his cloven hooves. The “consultancy sector” was a decadent indulgence, he would say, “bullshit” in plain English, a perverse luxury that would evaporate the minute the stock markets crashed. His idle contempt was always ready. And whenever Joni let him goad her into contradicting his clichés, he would snort something snide about the untalented boys and girls these days who turned up their noses at a proper professional training and instead ate away at their college education like
aphids. Unhindered by any decent form of ambition, they coasted into law or economics or communication or some other Styrofoam discipline, after which, at age twenty-two, off they went to peddle spurious advice.
To illustrate this constructive criticism he would drag his own friends through the mud. Etienne was a classic example of this breed: the former biology student who egoistically jettisoned that old radio-show slogan “Keen for Green” once he realized that it did not apply to his biologist’s salary. And now? Now Etienne wrote reports full of corporate gobbledegook acknowledging the inevitability of layoffs, or mergers, or this or that sort of white-collar crime, summarized on a single corrupt PowerPoint page, which some hoity-toity board chairman could wave as he sashayed into the workplace, announcing: I regret, dear employees, to have to fire you, it’s all here, read it for yourselves. She wanted to waste her talent on
that?
A master’s in Lame Excuses? “Aaron,” she would sigh (implicitly forgiving him, because his argument was no more than subversive claptrap, and they both knew it), “I’m going to be an engineer.”
He swigged back his glass of Corton-Pougets and stared at the plaster grapevines on the ceiling. What now? One way or another, the conversation had to be steered away from McKinsey. In answer to another of Joni’s questions he had missed, Stol replied that his consultants were today’s mineworkers: every company had value, if you dug deep enough. The conversation turned to the quickest, most efficient methods of digging. For the first time, Aaron got a good look at the woman next to Stol. She was a damn sight younger than her husband, translucently pale, slightly over-muscular and slightly over-perfumed: he realized that the smell coming from across the table, penetrating his veal cheeks with sautéed escargot, must be her scent.
“So what does your daughter do?” he heard himself ask with a pinched voice.
Now all three of them were looking at the woman. She was weighed down by rather a lot of gold: rectangular earrings, four chunky rings, a necklace kept at body temperature by her decidedly trashy cleavage; the upper part of her dark-blue dress consisted of a loosely draped flap of velvet that covered her large breasts like a black bar across a criminal’s eyes. Her intelligent, subtly made-up face was at odds with this rampant eroticism. Her long, pale hands were covered in freckles.
“Brigitte is my wife,” said Stol. “I was just saying to your charming sister here that a few years ago I bought a stable for Brigitte. It was on the verge of bankruptcy, and dilapidated, you’d hardly recognize it now, she has—”
“—her own mouth,” Brigitte interrupted. She looked at Aaron with warm, dark-brown eyes; he couldn’t distinguish the iris from the pupil. “But he’s right, it was a dream come true. I’m mad keen on horses.” She had a thick Hague accent.
Stol said: “You mean you love horses.”
“When we bought it, the stable had just one star, now we’ve got three. Like I said, I’m mad keen.” Or was it a Leiden twang? As common as dirt, anyway. The point was, though, he had struck a chord with her, the equine chord, because she shifted her chair, as though to reposition herself for her moment of glory. She was hot to trot. “How many horses do you have?” he asked, interested, “or, no, sorry, what I meant to ask was, where’s the stable?” Joni shot him a surprised, questioning glance.
“Between Scheveningen and Wassenaar,” she answered, “right on the beach. You couldn’t ask for a better location, smack in the middle of the dunes.
Black Beauty Manège
, do you remember that TV series? We thought it was a neat name. It was his idea.” She
gestured at Stol; her index finger sported a golden ring with a ludicrous little watch on it.
“I always watched
Black Beauty
as a kid,” said Joni. “I’m crazy about horses.”
“What’s also interesting,” said Brigitte, steeped in her own story, “is that when Máxima and Alexander go riding along the beach they always stop in for a cup of coffee, once a week at least”—she paused for a moment to gauge the effect of her hobnobbing with the royal couple. “Then I’m like, we’re not doing so bad after all. Hey, hon?” She snuggled her shoulder against Stol’s.
“Not bad indeed,” he said. “But Willem-Alexander has to drink coffee somewhere, doesn’t he, babycakes?” He stared listlessly at a distant point beyond Aaron’s shoulder. The mist of boredom between these two was too thick and clammy to ever burn off; Joni thought so too, he saw from the brazen twinkle with which she caught his eye. “I rode until I was sixteen,” she said. “Do you ride too?”—that’s right, Aaron thought, shift the attention to the person who
does
interest you. In fact, he and babycakes were completely irrelevant, they were just along for the ride. “A little,” replied Stol, “but I’m sure you ride better. I can definitely picture you astride a galloping horse.”
Aaron’s molars crackled. “Naked and bareback, I suppose?” he quipped. It was meant as a joke, but it came out sounding like he had a throbbing pain somewhere. Stol and Brigitte exchanged glances. Joni laid down her silverware, wiped her mouth, and gave him a look of feigned fondness. “We’ve been together for four years now,” she said, “but Aaron’s fantasy is as vivid as always.”
Stol chuckled quietly. “Say,” he asked in a theatrical attempt to rescue the conversation, “what does the young lady actually study, to know so much about McKinsey?”
Aaron butted in before Joni could answer. “She has a computer,”
he said, again with that strange pinched voice, “and what d’you know, it’s got Internet on it. And on that Internet she surfed all on her own to the McKinsey website. That’s how.”
A new silence, a few shades deeper than the previous one. Regret filled Aaron’s sinuses. What he had just done, what he had just done
twice
, was the verbal equivalent of punching someone in the face; he was trigger happy tonight, suffering from a serious loss of self-control. With the least provocation he lashed out like a brute. Stol looked at him with a devious, slightly amused expression. Hard-blue eyes that scorched the peeling paint of his inner self. Aaron knew exactly what Stol saw: if anyone could tell how morbidly jealous he was, then he could. He was a calamity. How would Stol react if he told him about the night before Joni’s interview for an internship at Bain & Co., maybe a year ago, how after a few hours of agitated tossing and turning, he snuck out of bed, took the stack of clothes Joni had laid out into the bathroom and subtly spattered tangerine juice over her blue skirt and white blouse, tore tiny runs in strategic places in her stockings? He couldn’t stop himself. He was convinced that Joni would dump her freelance photoboy the minute she set foot in one of those mirrored-glass office towers. Somewhere in the world was a skyscraper that would steal her from him. London, New York, Tokyo: he was going to lose her to consultancy.
Of course he often wondered where this fear came from. At first he presumed it was just a stubborn offshoot of garden-variety jealousy; the first few euphoric months of all his relationships were coupled with the disproportionate fear that a rival would put paid to his happiness. But with other girlfriends his paranoia waned after a month or two, along with his affection. In Joni’s case, nothing waned. Naturally, anyone who wanted to go out with Joni Sigerius had to deal with it, she was exceptionally beautiful, she was
intolerably
beautiful. Intentionally or not, she bombarded the nuclei of masculine propriety with beta particles, men would lose all sense of decorum as soon as Joni Sigerius came anywhere near them, and that nuclear reaction created aggressive hunters, he’d seen it happen so many times. She allowed a teacher from her own art school to body-paint her a couple of times a year, and twice she had won the campus wet T-shirt contest. Portrait photographers plucked her from the sidewalk for so-called artistic sittings. Who was it that he heard texting her in the middle of the night? And the unfamiliar first names and phone numbers in her diary? In clubs, men growled hoarsely in his ear that his turn was up. For years she was woken up in the morning by a heavy breather—turned out to be the dean of her department. What’d she mean, the masseur insisted it was “on the house”? Every few months she’d get antsy and go to Amsterdam with a gay friend for a night in the iT, in a T-shirt so flimsy Ray Charles could see through it. And him? He sat at home in front of the TV with a slice of apple strudel. Drove him up the
wall
.
“Anything exciting happen?” he would ask when she returned at six in the morning.
“Nothing much. Getting in was kind of a hassle.”
“Oh? How come?”
“I had to turn in my bra.”
“
Wha-huh?
”
“My bra. Turn it in.”
“What kind of nonsense is that?”
“The bouncer said so.”
“The bouncer? What kind of bouncer is that? And then?”
“And then I turned in my bra.”
He was a calamity—but so was she.
Calamity Joni smiled at Stol. “If I want to know anything about McKinsey,” she said, ostensibly unperturbed, “I can always turn to
Aaron. He knows
everything
about consultants.” Exactly how Joni was going to carry out his execution, he wasn’t sure, but that it was going to happen—that was inevitable. His disastrous jealousy had a parallel effect on her.
If only he could get out of here
. “As far as this one here is concerned,” Joni continued, “McKinsey is not a free agent. You people are corrupt. According to Aaron, McKinsey shits reports on demand.” He felt her hand on his shoulder, she was about to say something else, but off to one side a voice called out his surname.
All four of them looked to the right and saw the towering bridegroom approach, weaving his way through his chattering dinner guests. A telephone was pressed against Vaessen’s ear, not a sleek cell phone but a house telephone with a rubber antenna; he nodded his blond head at Aaron, a smug little lift of that self-satisfied chin. Twit, he thought, inviting your boss to your wedding, sleaze-ball, brownnoser. “Yeah, he’s here … just a sec,” said Vaessen. “Bever, for you.” He passed him the telephone across the table, and then squatted down between Stol and Brigitte for a chat.
“Hello?”
“Aaron, you are one hard-to-reach dude.”
He had to think a moment before realizing it was Thijmen Akkerman on the line. Thijmen, his personal physician, had studied medicine in Utrecht, but was working as sales manager for a high-tech prosthetics firm, computer-driven limbs, hips made from Playmobil plastic. Thijmen had been supplying him with sleeping pills via scrips pinched from his father, who
was
in fact a bona fide GP. It sounded like he was hanging on a Delta kite.
“Speak up, Thijmen,” he said, “I can barely hear you. I’m at a wedding. How did you find me?”
“I phoned your home number,” Thijmen yelled, “but there was no answer. So I went looking for you. I’m right near your house. I
only just remembered you two were at Groeneweide.” That’s right, Aaron did tell him about the wedding; apparently as a student Thijmen had had a job there as a dishwasher. “Your whole neighborhood’s on fire,” Thijmen continued. “It’s unreal what’s happening here.”
“What about my house?” Vaessen, he saw, had already buggered off. Stol and Brigitte looked attentively at him; Joni, unruffled, carried on eating. Just that irritating way she sat there stuffing her face made him know exactly how he had to handle this. He knew it.
“There’s a blaze,” Thijmen shouted, “right across from your house. An inferno, I’m not kidding you. But they say it won’t spread to the other side of the street. The fire department says the wind’s blowing the other way. I’m just calling to set your mind at ease. I’ll bet you two are shitting yourselves.”
“An inferno, you say?” he said. “Jesus Christ. And my house?” He heard sirens in the background, and a roar. “Thijmen, you still there?”
“Yeah, yeah. Sorry, a couple of fire engines just passed by. Hang on. Your house is still OK, but the glass wall is busted, you know, that …”
“The sliding doors?”
“Yeah, those. They’re gone. Wait. They’re shooing me away. All the windows have been blown out. Everywhere. Unbe
fucking
lievable.”