Authors: Peter Buwalda
Hurt
? He had no idea what she was getting at. Her daughter did not make a hurt impression, at most she acted piqued, moody. Ever since what they continued to call “cold turkey,” their phone calls and e-mails increasingly focused on what she saw as his spineless gift for committing adultery. And when the conversation—all post-Almelo communication was carried out by phone or e-mail—came anywhere near sex she would text him: isn’t this difficult for you? Or: what would your daughters make of all this? Or: don’t you think of yourself as a bad person? Although it might have been better to explain to her that judging him was not exactly the job of a
maîtresse
, he wore himself out setting straight what she in turn would bend back out of shape for him. When he asked her if she thought Bill Clinton was a bad person, she answered that he mustn’t hide behind other people. When he tried to explain what it was like to wake up next to the same woman for twenty
years (“that’s for as long as you’ve been alive, Isabelle”), she replied: “You’re not even halfway there, man.” She was Monica Lewinsky and Kenneth Starr wrapped into one.
So now Monica and Kenneth were hurt. Instead of wondering about his own failings, he left the administrative building in the middle of the day, his eyes bleary with concern, and called her up. Why didn’t she tell him she was hurt? And what from, honeybunch? She answered that she was not his honeybunch and that he apparently did not appreciate what she was going through.
She
was always alone, she
slept
alone, she went to her parents’ alone, to parties alone—and the whole time, all she could think of was Siem Sigerius.
“And what about me then?” he said. “All I think about is you, Isa. And what goes through
my
mind is that
you’re
free,
you’re
the one who’s constantly running off.
You
and that Beauty Parlor of yours,
you
hanging out in one of your bars until four in the morning, three times a week.
You
going on one blind date after the other.” (This was true: she kept him fully abreast of the fratboys who accompanied her to galas and house parties all across the Netherlands.)
“Siem,” she sighed, “they’re pimply little creeps.”
“Maybe, but you go to bed with them. The pimply creeps get to have sex with you.”
Be-e-e-ep
.
He heaved a sigh, crossed the rain-soaked asphalt of the main road, and called her back. “I’m right, though, aren’t I?”
“Yeah,
my
turn, OK? You sleep every
night
with that wife of yours.”
“And I’m still happy. With us! Come on, Isa, just this once pretend to be an adult. When can we meet? De Appel is waiting.”
“You are
such
a coward.”
“Coward? I
crave
you. We can do whatever we want!” He stood with one arm outstretched, like a Shakespearean actor on the phone. It was cold, he blinked back the half-soft tears, trying to focus on the bare branches of the oaks and elms. “As long as you keep it quiet.”
She did not thaw, she exploded. She exploded just like SE Fireworks would explode a year later.
This
was precisely what pissed her off, every time, she shrieked. Did he
really
not get it? She was not someone for
on the side
. She was
disgusted
by his underhanded approach, she was disgusted by his asking her to keep it from her parents.
“Coward,” she snorted, “don’t you ever, and I mean
ever
, forbid me to be honest with the people who saved my life, you got that?”
“Isa sweetheart, just listen …”
“No, I will
not
listen, I’ve got our house bible in front of me, I know exactly what kind of manipulative little man you are, this book never lies. Listen is the last thing a person should do with cheats like you!”
Book? To his astonishment, a housemate of hers, a girl who sat on the corner of her bed drinking camomile tea during their conversation, had handed her a book entitled
Never Satisfied: How & Why Men Cheat
. The sorority’s “house bible” in which she’d spent an entire evening underlining passages with a ballpoint “because it was all just so familiar.”
“But Isa,” he moped, “at least tell me what I have to do.”
She went silent, a loaded pause like a piano being dropped from the tenth story, but instead of crashing to smithereens she answered with saccharine sweetness: “You’ve got a month to leave your wife.”
• • •
Put an end to it. A man in his position, a man who shoulders considerable ceremonial and administrative responsibilities, a man at the head of a family that would unanimously agree that they’d put up with enough already—a man like this, you would expect to put an end to it. But no. The only thing he can think of is Isabelle’s hand, that petite Asian hand that had so startled him that evening in Almelo; day and night he felt that phantom hand, tugging gently on his nervous system, driving him crazy, crazy with desire. There were moments when he was prepared to die for that hand. During that topsy-turvy month of March 1999 he tried to imagine himself inhabiting a future even more topsy-turvy, but because he was so turned around himself it hardly fazed him at all.
Often, at night, an hour or so after he had watched, from his half of the nuptial bed, Tineke remove her acres of textile and dig herself in, panting, next to him, he saw everything as clear as day: he would leave her, the woman who understood him so well, who for years had put herself second for his sake, the woman for whom he felt a massive, inert, deeply satisfied love—she had to go. Since Isabelle had issued her ultimatum he had difficulty falling asleep; tossing and turning, he abandoned himself to what began as practical, rational musings: he imagined short-term rentals in downtown Enschede he could move into until the divorce, he projected himself into Isabelle’s daily routine, saw himself sitting in her student kitchen on weekday mornings, his suit as crumpled as himself, drinking coffee from an oversized mug missing its handle. He pictured them driving off to Delft on misty Sunday mornings to visit his fifteen-year-younger mother-in-law-to-be, he pictured them at the procession into the Grote Kerk, arm in arm, for the opening of the academic year, Isabelle in a handmade hat intended for menopausal women—the idea of a middle-aged man with,
nota bene
, a Thai girl, would this go over well?—problematic scenarios
he eventually allowed, unresolved, to swirl around in the eddy of increasingly carefree fantasies: city trips to Barcelona and Paris, romantic evening strolls through Europe’s finest parks, hotels, or B&Bs for which he would foot the bill; and only when he had worked through
those
visions, only after that endless, chaste foreplay, did he give in to her slender hand. Sweaty and curved like a jumbo shrimp, he lay on his half of their Auping mattress, as close to the edge as possible, a suit of armor around his erection. He barely touched himself, afraid that his mechanical shaking would waken Tineke, meditating on the passionate maneuvers Isabelle would perform on him, maneuvers that by now he was painfully aware he dreaded. How was he going to get through this? In some things in life, Siem Sigerius was extremely talented, a champion, even, he’d proved himself over and over—but he was downright lousy in bed.
He’d never been much good as a lover. The only period of his life when he could lay claim to that qualification was in the mid-1970s, after Tineke’s conquest. For a year or year and a half they were bewitched by sex, and had sex the way sex was probably supposed to be had. For him it was utterly confusing, a drizzly no-man’s-land where he, without knowing it at the time, was busy replacing his one sacred goal—to become the world’s greatest judoka—with something else, something more uncertain, something completely absurd, that private dream world of formulas and graph paper. Aimless, vexed, a failure—that is how he felt at the climax of his sexual career, hopelessly out of condition too, but at the same time wound-up, and tense, and charged. In fact, it was the only phase of his life when he felt like sex.
Before that, when alongside his jobs he trained three, sometimes four hours a day (judo, running, wrestling, jujitsu, weightlifting—a man with muscles like a gorilla but the protein levels of
a hunger striker—the pockets of his duffel bag stuffed with raisins and bananas and dark chocolate, so that he didn’t keel over from exhaustion, and then fasting for days before weighing in, jogging in a rain suit, waking up in a pension next door to a tournament stadium with eyes glued in their sockets and a tongue of ox leather)—in those years his libido dangled on his consciousness like a sad, frayed shred, a strand of desire that tickled his loins maybe twice a month, nocturnal moments when he shook Margriet out of her drunken stupor and mounted her like a komodo dragon.
So he could pride himself on a sex life of a year and a half, slightly less than his military service, and then it was over; his physical interest in Tineke faded with alarming speed. Mathematics took hold of him, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, and poof, it was over. In retrospect he thinks—a thought that under no circumstances should be allowed to leave his mind—that his sexual surge was a form of de-training, the result of the pent-up physical energy accumulated on his camp bed in the little upstairs kitchen, the conversion of physical labor into mental gymnastics and wrestling. He used to lie on top of Kiknadze and Ruska and Snijders; later, he released himself onto Tineke?
It was humiliating how quickly he had reverted to his old obsessive, solitary self. Before he knew it they were in America, where everything went well for them, everything thrived and flourished in California: guavas, tangerines, lemons, his new daughters, his and Tineke’s love for each other—everything except their
moyenne
, a word that still makes him nervous if he comes across it in one of those adult-lifestyle magazines. In Berkeley and Boston he lived for numbers. Men of his ilk were now named Quillen and Wiles and Erdős, skeletal digi-poets made of translucent rice paper who had retreated into the furthest reaches of their own cranium. When visiting Berkeley, Paul Erdos occasionally stayed with them
in their clapboard house on Bonita Avenue, and then he and the maestro explored barren wastelands, penned an article the minute they had cracked a hypothesis, put in eighteen-, sometimes twenty-hour days, and once, when they sat talking in the grass in the backyard after one of those tabletop marathons, Tineke said jokingly to Erdős—but, oh yes, in effect to
him:
“Mathematicians, Paul, are little more than machines that convert coffee into hypotheses, don’t you think? Always those hypotheses of yours, I can’t bear to
hear
the word anymore,” at which Erdős guffawed in agreement and clapped his trembling hands.
In those days, as they lay in the bed she had hammered together herself out of pure love, Tineke sometimes slid her hand under the elastic of his pajama bottoms—his signal to launch into a soliloquy on algebra, on the glass wall separating him from the proof he was after, and how he was going to smash through that wall, tomorrow, once he was at his desk at Evans Hall. And yes, he felt guilty and inadequate. But Tineke appeared to accept his escape route, she followed his achievements closely, she seemed to believe that the cultivation of genius entails certain sacrifices, maybe she was simply happy that between seven and nine in the evening he did his damnedest to be a good father to Joni and Janis. By the time they had moved to Boston and he honed in on his breakthrough, sometimes sleeping on an air mattress in his office at MIT, sex was something they talked about like it was an overgrown lawn that needed mowing. And for the past ten years or so they talked about nothing at all. The erotic scenario was put off and, eventually, called off. They respected each other’s privacy. They kissed on the cheek when leaving or returning home.
Returning home was something, incidentally, he never did unannounced or noiselessly or as a surprise anymore, not since that time he inadvertently saw Tineke in the possession of an apparatus
made of gray East Bloc plastic, the color of an old-fashioned dial phone, out of which stuck an iron rod with a hard rubber knob on the end, and which, when you plugged it in, pounded violently up and down, a brutal, hammering rattle. A noisesome machine one might use to crack walnuts, but which his wife used after a hard day’s work in her studio, he discovered one afternoon when the sound drew him to the bedroom, to pleasure herself.
His memory tells him that he spent the month following Isabelle’s ultimatum in his study, half naked and at night. That was when he discovered the websites. His study is cube-shaped, but the slight curvature of the roof and the stacks of yellowed periodicals and dusty books in the corners and along the walls make it resemble the inside of a bird’s nest. It is the only room in the farmhouse to have evaded Tineke’s woodworker’s hand. It is his man cave. Daddy’s jerk-off den.
Isabelle had opened the faucet all the way, and rusty water, confined to the pipes for decades, gushed out. Their routine consisted of texting each other after Tineke fell asleep—Isabelle never went to bed before three, did she actually ever sleep?—and as soon as he received an answer, the jumbo shrimp slipped out of bed, swam up the stairs to his study and switched on his laptop. He excitedly sent her e-mails laying out the future he had been dreaming up for them. That it was mutual, he gathered from the visions she herself sent back: she wanted to take a long trip with him, she would like to live in a real house with him, she asked whether he was in fact sterilized, and more such talk that, coming from someone else’s mouth, sounded rather big.
Now that they were being so explicit, he sometimes succeeded in texting her away from her sorority house, luring her to her dorm
room, where she disrobed and, like him, sat naked at her computer. “Tell me exactly what you are going to do to me, soon, when we’re on that trip.” How literally Isabelle took that “soon” was evident the following afternoon. “Baby,” she texted him, “how did T react?”
How did T react?
Hang on, she’d given him a month. “I’m waiting for the right moment,” he texted back.