Authors: Peter Buwalda
“But the worst part was, he was so damn funny. Janis and I, and Mom too, got such a charge out of him. He turned everything into an act. If my father asked him to refill the gravy bowl, he didn’t get up, no, he’d take a dishcloth from the table and lay it across his lap just so, and pretend he was ninety years old and his chair was a wheelchair, squeaking, squawking, turning, and twisting, and shuffle over to the counter. ‘Wankin’ around, nothing to do but pound, randy days and Mondays always crank me down,’ he bellowed all through the house in his best Muzak voice after my mother had been given a Carpenters CD.”
Aaron did not laugh. He wriggled his shoulder out from under her head. “Guess you just had to be there.”
He stared silently across the room, toward the pale-pink curtains with white horses woven into them. Her mother had covered the seat cushions of two wooden desk chairs in the same material.
With new eyes, apprehensive eyes, he examined the stuffed animals on the pink-painted bookshelf that also housed her literature list titles. He imagined the adolescent Joni, curled up on her bed with these books, blinking, startled, when Wilbert came roaring up the drive. Or did she perk up? Inside the white wardrobe, its sliding door open, he saw shoeboxes that undoubtedly contained her old school datebooks, her exam papers and notebooks full of “a”s and “o”s drawn like Bubblicious bubbles. He felt the urge to sift through them for signs of Wilbert: his name, a Public Enemy emblem, anything. On top of a stool lay a stack of
Elle
s, precisely one year’s worth, the subscription they’d given her, after incessant begging, for her fifteenth birthday, but having found it so “irritating” she was allowed to cancel it after just three months. This kind of trivia,
this
was what she’d inundated him with. Jesus H. Christ. No matter how hilarious she thought that prick was, 1989 must have come to a sorry end.
He asked: “What went wrong?”
No answer. Then: “We’ve got to get some sleep.” She reached under her pillow and brought out a sleeping mask.
“What went wrong. Come on.”
“Did something go wrong? Yeah, it went wrong.” She put the mask back under the pillow and exhaled slowly. “At home, actually. It all happened too close by, more or less in Dad’s face, and then enough was enough. After eleven months Siem had totally had it with him. Wilbert had to go, the rotten apple had to be chucked out, and soon, before they hurt each other. That mood hung in the house for weeks. They needed a scapegoat.”
“A scapegoat is someone who’s innocent.” He slid his hand between the covers and her belly, he felt her pull back. With a sigh he switched off the bedside lamp.
“I was getting tutored in French at the time,” she said. “And
those tutorials were given by a woman—an adult, or so I thought at the time, but in fact she was still a girl, about as old as I am now—who had just graduated cum laude from Utrecht specializing in, um … whatshername, Sartre’s battleaxe.”
“De Beauvoir.”
“Yeah. Her. But shit, what was that girl’s name again …” She was concentrating hard, it was something with an F, she said.
“Does her name matter?”
“She was a prig, but a pretty prig. Well groomed, chic, uppity, like one of those governesses in a film. Lily-white, beauty spots.”
“You were being tutored,” he pressed. Stick to the subject—but she launched into an exposé of the educational regime in their home. The minute she or Janis were faced with a C-minus, her parents would rustle up a private tutor. “Achievement is the secret code word in this family, although they’ll never admit it. Just graduate? Come on. I didn’t
have
to be valedictorian, but it would be nice. In Berkeley they didn’t send me to just any private school. Berkwood Hedge: small classes, emphasis on culture, tuition in the thousands. Later, in Boston, Kids Are People Middle School—American Montessori education, a Shakespeare play a year. A ‘C’ was way below par for a Sigerius.”
“And meanwhile a juvenile delinquent sat in the garden revving his motorbike,” he said.
“… Vivianne! Vivianne Hiddink. My parents doted on her. She had lived in Strasbourg, studied for a year at the Sorbonne, had started organizing programs for Studium Generale here in Twente. We’d hardly started the lessons and already my father had to invite her round. In America they used to have Richard Feynman over, if the name means anything to you, but anyway Mademoiselle Hiddink was interesting too, so why not.”
“Sure, why not?” He felt himself getting angry, all that elitist
hot air, in that respect Joni was a bit soft in the head too. But he held back, for fear of stalling her.
“This boyfriend of hers, Maurice was his name, had a doctorate in theoretical physics. Early thirties, squeaky-clean black hair, British tweed jacket, Van Bommel dress shoes. Spent the whole evening squinting drily through his little Schubert specs, one witticism after the other. Never met anybody since then who was so completely different from Wilbert. It hurt your eyes to see those two at the same table. But you couldn’t very well send Wilbert to the kitchen to eat his steak, although that would have suited Dad fine. I remember that Wilbert, who had otherwise kept unusually quiet, asked Maurice what he actually did all day at that ‘research institute’ of his. ‘I’ve got a room there,’ he answered, polishing his Schubert specs with a soft cloth, ‘with just a sofa, that’s it, and I lie on it all day, thinking.’ That must have sounded familiar to Wilbert: your own room with nothing but a bed to lie on and think.”
She chuckled softly, probably pleased with herself. She was a good talker and she knew it.
“So Vivianne always came to the house on Saturday mornings, from half-past nine to half-past eleven, for me it was torture, and on top of it I had to get dressed in a big hurry. We used this room, sat there at Grandpa Sigerius’s desk, which she so smartly called a
bureau ministre
, and from then on so did we.”
“And me too, now.”
“Except Wilbert,” said Joni. “He had another kind of French on his mind. We all noticed how he hung around downstairs early Saturday morning, way too early for him, and stole every glimpse of Vivianne he could. If he got the chance he’d take her coat, hang it neatly on the hallway coatrack—we teased him for being such a show-off, gently of course. What the heck, I thought it was sweet
and understandable. Vivianne was quite a … sight in her
ensembles
. The house smelled like Chanel until dinner time.”
He pressed his nose into Joni’s neck.
“And then one Sunday afternoon Maurice was on the line for Dad. A nonplussed conversation, not the least bit witty or clever, from the sound of it—within two minutes he went to take it upstairs, asked if I would hang up the receiver below. Fifteen minutes later he came into the living room. He said: ‘Vivianne won’t be coming anymore.’ And that was it.”
“Oh?”
“Later that afternoon, when Wilbert was off to who knows where on his motorbike, Dad said she was considering filing a police report.” She cleared her throat and swallowed. “It all started with her scarf, which should have been tucked in the sleeve of her coat but wasn’t. Maybe she’d left it somewhere, lost it. These things happen. The next week, this Maurice guy tells my father, on her way home Vivianne reaches into her coat pocket for a handkerchief, Irish linen, one of those perfumed ladies’ hankies. I’d seen those
accessoires
of hers. Well, that hankie had been transformed into a clammy wad. It no longer smelled of Chanel, but of lukewarm sperm. Although it was ‘horrid,’ she said, ‘horrid,’ she kept her mouth shut about it, even to Maurice. Of course she could guess whose glue douche that was.”
Joni paused for a moment, turned her shoulders. The bed creaked.
“Let’s be adults about this, Vivianne resolved, the kid’s a teenager, a bit of a lout, she had already caught on to that. And besides, she really
liked
coming to our place, it
clicked
. Maybe she was even flattered, who knows. A wad of spunk is a compliment in a way, isn’t it?”
“A pleasantry, at least.”
“Two weeks after that hankie incident, which no one except she and Wilbert knew about, Vivianne and I were sitting up here and as usual, sometime during the second hour, after my mother had brought us coffee and
krentenwegge
, she went off to use the toilet, here in the upstairs bathroom. So she’s sitting there, door locked, and soon enough she hears something behind the shower curtain, she hears a noise. She hears someone breathing—that’s how she put it in court—”
“In
court
?”
“In court, yeah. She hears breathing, and freezes. For a moment she thinks she’s just heard herself, her own panting. Then she braces herself and yanks open the curtain. There he is: stark naked, his jogging pants around his ankles, holding that Scottish scarf she’s been missing for the past three weeks. He’s standing there jerking off, sniffing that fucking scarf, just a few feet from Vivianne—”
“Fucking hell.”
“But what does she do? She doesn’t scream. She spares him, not deliberately, mind you, no motivation behind it whatsoever, she says later—she saves his ass by
not
screaming. ‘What do think you’re doing?’ she whispers, and he comes. She just sits there. He takes a step toward her, so he’s almost hanging over her, and sheds …”
“Spurts.”
“OK,
spurts
cum all over her wrist and thigh. ‘You’re out of your mind,’ she hisses, and still manages to contain herself, maybe paralyzed by the shock, at least that’s her take on it. She tugs the curtain closed again, wipes the muck from her legs with some toilet paper, pulls up her pantyhose and skirt, forgets to flush, does think to wash her wrist and walks back to my room.”
“What a scumbag,” said Aaron.
“Yeh …,” she said with a shrug. She went quiet for a moment. “But,” she continued, “that Vivianne was a strange one too. She walks back into my room, goes over to the mirror, smoothes out that Laura Ashley blouse of hers, and sits down. ‘
Bon,
’ she says, ‘where were we.
Future du passé
, always a tricky one …’ Nothing! Not a word about Wilbert. I swear, until that phone call I didn’t even know anything had happened. That woman just finished off our French lesson, I walked her downstairs as usual, we even stood chatting with my mother in the hall, and then she gets into her little Renault and drives off to Maurice.”
Outside, beyond the campus, probably from the tracks leading to Drienerlo Station, an intercity train blew its horn. The drawn-out sound penetrated the guest room and brought him to himself. He couldn’t gauge the atmosphere. What kind of mood was she in? She seemed to be criticizing the woman. Or not? For days he’d been misreading everything and everyone.
“Sounds like Vivianne wanted to think things over first,” he said. “She wasn’t stupid, of course. She didn’t scream blue murder straightaway, you could call that self-control.”
“True,” said Joni. “But at the same time it’s weird. It’s weird not to utter a peep about something like that. As if nothing happened in that bathroom, that’s how she acted. And who says anything did happen?”
Rather than letting the suggestion sink in and pretend to at least consider the possibility, he barked: “You can’t be serious! Nobody makes up something like that. Of course it happened.”
“Hang on a minute,” she said, “he never admitted it …”
“Yeah, right. Why would he?”
“You say nobody makes up something like that, but you could also say: nobody does something like that. You’d sooner make it up than actually do it.”
He felt himself getting angry. “Beating a guy to a pulp with a sledgehammer, Joni, that’s something I’ve also considered on occasion. And I still didn’t do it. That Wilbert of yours, he does whatever pops into his head. That’s where it all goes wrong. I take it the judge agreed with me?”
She turned away from him, thumped her backside into his pelvis like a boxing glove. “It was his word against hers,” she said. “There was no proof. No one saw or heard anything.”
He sprang upright and looked at the dark outline of her shoulder blades against the sheets. Was she serious? Did she really doubt what had happened in that bathroom? “Joni,” he said, “don’t be so incredibly naïve. And what about that jizz-hankie? Made up too? Come on, be reasonable.”
“Look who’s talking,” she snarled. “You’re going to tell me what’s reasonable and what’s not?”
“I’m just expressing an opinion, and yes, I think you’re being highly unreasonable. What was the upshot of the case?”
“Highly unreasonable …” She sighed theatrically. “Goddammit, Aaron,” she exploded, “I can’t really take this right now. You’ve been acting like an imbecile all week, just now too, at the table, with your tales of heroism, and you’re calling
me
unreasonable? Go take another sleeping pill. Good night.” She jerked the sheet farther to her side and buried her head in her pillow. He was glad the light was out, because he could feel himself blushing. “Tales of heroism?” he said as calmly as possible. “What are you talking about?”
She did not answer.
“Well?”
“Aaron. You don’t really think I bought that crap about Manus, do you?”
“Then don’t buy it.”
“I don’t believe a stinking word of it.”
Silence. Five minutes. Ten minutes? He gazed at the gently billowing curtains. He started to believe she was sleeping, and that infuriated him. She knew he couldn’t sleep after an argument. You don’t sleep
without
an argument either, she’d say tomorrow. In the silence he suddenly sensed that she was keeping something from him. She fobbed him off with a sanitized, Aaron-friendly version of the story. She knew better than to be honest about anyone with a pecker. In the four years of their relationship, jealousy had become such a powerful mechanism that it was impossible to guess what she actually thought of the guy. Even if she’d had twins with that Wilbert she wouldn’t tell him.
“Another one of your crushes, I’ll bet,” he snapped.
“Whatever,” she snapped back.
He swallowed his anger. “And you still haven’t answered my question. Why the tantrum? Why smash a dish of potato croquettes to smithereens?”