Authors: Peter Buwalda
And Margriet? What did Margriet think about when she was nineteen? Not about booze yet, at least not the whole goddamn day anyway. What went on in that foggy head of hers was a mystery to him; in any case, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the future. Bugaboos, worries, complexes—his first wife had been stuck in an emotional morass that would have swallowed up
anyone
in postwar Holland, no matter what their background: rich or poor, clever or stupid, privileged or not.
He got up and followed the moon through the train carriages, first class, second class, until he found Isabelle reading a newspaper. Finger to his lips, he slid into the seat next to her and kissed her wondrous softness until they had to get off in Drienerlo. “Ladies first,” he simpered. He gave her a 100-meter head start, then followed her through the darkened campus, never once taking his eyes off the green leather jacket and the moonlit bluish hair above
it. She did not look back when she turned right onto the Calslaan and he continued on toward the farmhouse. He would never have believed that the high point of their affair was already behind them.
He goes first, Aaron follows. The wedding shoes he is still wearing click across the flagstones. He’s been listening to him talk about buying a new judo suit for the past two days, and kept postponing his generosity.
Just wait
. As long as he doesn’t know for sure, he finds it difficult to be cordial. He finds it difficult not to look at that bald head with the watery-blue eyes and think: who the hell are you anyway? Supposing it’s true—what’s your role in it? He notices a conspicuous but perhaps logical division in his frame of mind: what for Joni arouses concern, for Aaron elicits aggression. Premature aggression, he’s aware of that. He forces himself to suspend judgment. Supposing, supposing, supposing … You need
proof
. Certainty. And then:
think
, stay calm, be analytical. Avoid knee-jerk reactions.
“Nice of you, Siem,” the kid says, “but it’s really no problem to buy my own.”
“Don’t complicate things, man.”
For two days he’s been wandering aimlessly and awkwardly through his own house; he’s been caught unawares by the unexpected invasion of his home, Joni’s weeping about her injured friend, that phone call from Wilbert, the sooty smell emanating from the lacerated, smoldering city—everything permeates his farmhouse. Fate has turned it into a country estate from a second-rate Agatha Christie. Crammed together
now
, of all times. His protectiveness means he is forced to keep an eye on the telephone, fearful of another call from Wilbert; right now he is anxious,
because the phone is out of reach. Without speaking or looking back, they enter the master bedroom. Tineke has made the bed and opened the terracotta-colored curtains. The mustard-yellow carpeting turns Aaron’s shoes into soundless slippers. “Come on,” he says, and opens the door to the dressing room.
Last night, wide awake at half-past two, he got up and fished his wallet out of his trouser pocket, with one ear tuned in to Tineke and the other to the restless city. He crept upstairs by the light of the summer night. Windows open throughout the house, the pregnant summer air pervading the rooms. He tiptoed past the guest room and along the hallway, opened the door to his study, closed the windows above his desk, shoved a stack of documents to a corner of the cool desktop and, in the light of his desk lamp, switched on his laptop. He hadn’t looked at the website in months. It took some courage. A seven-centimeter plastered wall, and behind it, that pair in the guest bed. The modem dial-up resounded like the pealing of a carillon. He knew this would accomplish nothing, and even if it did: what then? Crash through the wall and drag the two of them out of bed? Beat the living daylights out of them? Throw himself at them, weeping? He was appalled anew by the home page, a sensation incompatible with the complacent lust that he could recall from the two or three months in which he had been no more than a casual consumer, a satisfied, unscrupulous dirty old man. The sight of the stylized opening photo of the girl (resemblance, of course, is not a matter of eye or hair color, he understood that, but of form, the angles of the face, the unmistakable triangle between the corners of the mouth and the rounding of the chin, the way the broadish jaw catches the light, the thin arch of the eyebrows) plunged him into a panicky sorrow. He took out his credit card and began entering it on the billing page, precision work requiring the exact input of
random characters that failed three times in a row, he’d punched in the wrong number or skipped a letter, and then the modem cut him off. His bare thighs stuck to the leather seat of his desk chair.
During his fourth attempt he heard, through the merciless screech of the modem, a door being opened. There was someone in the hallway. Joni or Aaron. His heart stopped beating, he posthumously switched off the desk lamp, clumsily attempted to close the browser, his clammy fingers fumbling with the mouse—in vain: the page froze—and as a last resort he slammed the laptop closed.
He pricked up his ears in the suddenly humless darkness. After a few terrified moments in which he had repeated visions of the door flying open he heard a distant squeak, the squeak of the bottom tread of the staircase. But why, they had their own bathroom here at the end of the hall? In his left hand he held a hole punch that he squeezed gently until he lost his grip and it fell to the carpeted floor with a thud. He bent down to pick it up, felt that its clear plastic bottom was still attached to the reservoir. He waited and waited, until he began to suspect he missed whoever it was returning to their room. He waited even longer, and then snuck like a thief back to his bedroom, where he was slightly alarmed to find an empty bed. He was already lying on his side, pretending to sleep, when Tineke returned and proceeded to brush her teeth in the darkened bathroom.
“Where were you?” she asked when she came back in. He did not answer. As she lowered the heavy freight of her body into the bed, puffing and panting, she said: “I know you’re awake.”
“Had to pee.”
“Not true,” she said.
“Is too—upstairs. Downstairs was occupied. And you? Have you been eating?”
• • •
He had returned from his Almelo adventure to a slumbering farmhouse. He undressed in the laundry room and put his clothes in the hamper, regretfully showered off Isabelle’s perfume, and climbed into bed next to Tineke. But the evening’s events were too exhilarating for him to fall asleep. What was now sizzling through his body was far more blissful than the pleasure that other, legal, ostensibly more important events had brought him—so that for the first time in his life he doubted the point of it all. What good was half a lifetime of cerebral discipline? All that solitary perseverance! He thought of Isabelle, at this very moment sleeping somewhere on campus, and felt like smacking himself on the head for all his dutiful sublimation. In a surge of guilt he laid a hand on the comatose mountain next to him. Compared to that delicate figure in the alley, Tineke’s back and hips were like the still-warm cadaver of a rhinoceros. He tossed and turned for hours, imagining Isabelle’s slender body against his own, and each time he rolled over he became even more aroused.
And that night, too, he got out of bed and went upstairs to his study, this time wearing a bathrobe and heavy woolen socks. Sitting at his ice-cold desk, he did something that went against his nature: he texted Isabelle in the middle of the night. He told her how wonderful it was, and that he wanted more. Texting a college freshman at 3:30 in the morning—had he lost his mind?
To his amazement, he received an answer almost immediately: she also thought the food was great. Wha—? “Wiseacre,” he texted back, grinning. “Did I wake you?” After twenty minutes that felt like a week at the North Pole she replied that she was “letting her hair down” at the beauty parlor. Letting her hair down at the
beauty parlor? It took him a few seconds to solve the cryptogram: the Beauty Parlor was a disco in downtown Enschede. The jolt of jealousy that shot through his body was not generated by that nightclub, nor by the vivid image of Isabelle on a sweaty dance floor, but by the realization that his Asian lover had followed up their intimate candlelight dinner by hitting the town. He imagined how she touched up her make-up, changed into a slinky dress, and cycled into Enschede. Jesus.
He gathered his composure and texted back that she must be a pretty good dancer. He waited in vain for another half hour, but the cold drove him down to the living room for a glass of whiskey. Back in bed he switched his cell phone to silent mode and set it on the floor next to him. Every two minutes he checked to see whether she had come through. After a miserable hour and a half he fell asleep.
The next afternoon he received a formal rejection letter on his office computer. She had thought about it long and hard, but she “couldn’t handle it anymore.” Until now she had managed to block out all thoughts of his wife, but the fact remained that he was a “cheat,” a “rat,” an “adulterer,” an “unreliable man.” Now that they had become “more intimate,” she considered it an “insoluble problem.” She regretted it. “Don’t e-mail or text me anymore.”
He gave computers a wide berth for the next few days, like a lifelong smoker determined to kick the habit. Every fiber in his body, every one of his brain cells, screamed out for contact. In the evening at home he heard his cell phone chirp with phantom texts. Three days after receiving her Dear John letter, just before four in the afternoon, he typed out a message, his heart pounding: “consider this message unsent” and nothing else. Once he’d clicked “send” he despised himself for it, but at the same time hoped it would make her laugh and break her silence. He spent the last hours of his workday gazing at his in-box like a fisherman waiting
for a nibble, refreshing the page every few seconds, until he was engulfed in darkness. The low-rise administrative wing, with his spacious office at the end of it, stuck like a foot out of the tower adjacent to the campus’s main entrance. He gazed out of the picture window across the empty parking lot. If I turn on the light, he thought, there’ll be a madman on display.
And for days on end, nothing. At night, he hardly closed his eyes; usually between three and four in the morning he took to his study with a glass of whiskey and a packet of tissues, and sat in his leather reading chair jerking off to her yearbook photo. Twice he wrote her lengthy, pathetic letters on his laptop and then deleted them, not out of common sense, but out of fear. Isabelle’s principled tone unnerved him. When, after the weekend, he returned to his office at 11 a.m. from a meeting and, against his better judgment, opened his private e-mail account, the name Isabelle Orthel appeared like a burning bush on his computer screen. He touched his left ear and opened the message.
“Is it such cold turkey for you too?”
He wonders how she’s doing. Is she still living on campus? Maybe she was in Roombeek at the time of the accident. He and Aaron walk deeper into the dressing room, an illogically L-shaped space. Around the corner, along the base of the L, his wife has built shallow, made-to-measure shelves for their shoes; on the rear wall is a walnut cupboard with steel modular shelves, a hanging section on the left for his academic robes and dress tails. It smells of the dried lavender Tineke has placed in sachets among his clothes. He squats down, his joints make a snapping sound, and like a forklift he pulls two judo suits from the lowest shelf.
“The jacket to this one,” he says to Aaron, his chin on the top
suit, “probably won’t fit you. The bottom one is my old competition suit. Take that jacket.”
Aaron takes the stack from him. “Try it on here?” he says.
“You sleeping all right?” He can see that Aaron does not like the question. “You look knackered.”
“Reasonably. It gets pretty warm at night.”
Sigerius turns, reaches up and pulls an old black belt from the uppermost shelf, a supple, time-worn thing; the spot where the button dug itself in, year after year, has been scuffed white. Aaron wriggles out of his shoes. Sigerius waits until his new jeans have dropped to his ankles and he wobbles on one leg while removing the other. “Here,” he says at precisely that moment, “my lucky belt,” and tosses it too hard—flings it—at his shoulder, it is a ridiculous gesture. But Aaron does not notice, or pretends not to.
“Thanks,” says Aaron, and bends down to pick up the belt. “Your competition belt?”
“That too. Just my old belt.”
He watches as Aaron pulls the bleached-white judo trousers up over his long, suntanned legs and bony hips, ties the string of the waistband in a bow. His torso is lanky and has the form of a question mark. Aaron wouldn’t do something like that. It is unkind of him to take out his paranoia on this kid. Isn’t it the same old tune? he suddenly wonders. Him and sex. Isn’t he always projecting his guilt onto others when it’s about sex? Did he conjure up his idiotic, paranoid ideas because the moralizer in him feels he should be punished for all that Internet cruising? Isabelle would say:
Yes
.
After they picked up where they had left off, she told him during one of their battery-guzzling telephone conversations that he owed it all to her mother. Owe all what to your mother? Well,
she said excitedly, her mother watched her pine for the past four days and said: just e-mail the guy.
“Your mother?” he exclaimed, “does your
mother
know about this?”
“Of course she does,” she said, “what d’you think?”
“You’re kidding, this isn’t something you go and tell your
mother
. What we have going here is strictly confidential, Isabelle.”
She burst out laughing. “Get used to it, big guy, in our family we tell one another
everything
.”
He did not get used to it. Worse: now, eighteen months later, he still cringes at the thought of Marij Star Busman knowing about his escapade with her adopted daughter. When he sent her a tentative e-mail a few weeks after Isabelle had spilt the beans—“I just wanted to say, Marij, what a nice, spontaneous daughter you have”—her reply was not moralistic, but dead serious: “I have complete faith in your intentions, Siem, but I don’t like seeing my daughter hurt.”