Authors: Peter Buwalda
That was sneaky of him—I still remember thinking that. Sly old fox. We had hardly spoken to each other for two weeks, and there he was, Siem the couples counselor, armed with an excuse to break the silence. Brooding over life without Aaron, I walked into our big student-house kitchen, and two pancake-frying housemates pointed upstairs: “Your dad’s up in your room.” And what do you know, there sat Mr. University President in his shirtsleeves, his silk tie draped over the back of my desk chair, drinking green tea from a plastic milk cup. “I thought I’d just wait here for you, hope you don’t mind?”
He started by being nice about Ennio, was I able to sleep, he’d heard from Mom how upset I was, he was proud of me, so much empathy. Pause. Here comes Wilbert, I thought. Go on, lemme have it. I resolved to say absolutely nothing about the nerve-racking telephone conversation I’d had with Wilbert. (He came across as completely uninterested, his mutinous voice lower than usual, but no less malicious, and still as hard as nails. “If I ask if you guys are still alive,” he said, “it doesn’t mean actually I hope so.” “You living somewhere now?” I asked, tongue-tied. “How about you?” he shot back, “you living somewhere? Why don’t you come around, you can see where I live.” In between sentences he made strange
slurping noises. By the time I hung up I was exhausted, done in, drenched in sweat.)
But my father didn’t start in about Wilbert. “Joni,” he said, “do you want to tell me what’s going on with you and Aaron?” He had heard the “awful news” from my mother as well, and he wasn’t really surprised, he’d seen us together close-up, and he was the last one to underestimate the effects of a disaster like the fireworks accident, everything was intertwined, but, he said in closing: you couldn’t, under these circumstances, make decisions about a relationship. He wanted us to take a vacation together. “I’ll pay.”
“Get lost, Dad,” I said. “Butt out, will you. Leave me alone. You don’t know what you’re saying. I’m finished with that guy.”
He got up, shook his head, picked up his tie. “Come with me,” he said. “Let’s go grab a bite at De Beijaard.”
We got up early because of the heat, and left our rented Corsica villa at eight in the morning. Crossing the maquis via narrow, jagged paths we hiked inland, picking lemons and kiwis along the way. As the coast retreated we started getting sunburned, the heat was merciless on that island, and although we trudged mostly in silence, sometimes we suddenly had a serious talk, as often happens on vacation. My father’s intervention seemed to work. We talked a lot about him, and we realized full well that without him we wouldn’t be on Corsica right now, without Siem we’d probably have called it quits. We agreed that he deserved credit for putting out the fire.
But then, in those Corsican woods, we smelled
real
fire. Aaron had read somewhere that in the summer the
libeccio
, a sultry southwesterly wind, was at its most persistent, more treacherous than the mistral. Among the tall pine trees and cork oaks we heard the
brief thunder of galloping swine, the weightless rustle of mountain goats—animals you otherwise never saw—and before long we could see the fire, an orange fury that sucked away our oxygen, and we heard the sizzling and crackling. Making a dash back to the coast, laughing and looking over our shoulders, at times skidding to the ground, abandoning the bag with lemons and kiwis on the way—a waste, I thought as we clambered up the hill alongside the villa. So there I stood in my bikini, peering into the distance at the black ring of smoke surrounding the wooded hills, hand in hand with the guy who, on the way here, I had hated with a passion.
He had picked me up on Saturday morning, after more than a week of no contact. God, how I hated him then. Aaron being “dry” as usual, our first stop was the Central Pharmacy on the Beltstraat. He ran inside with one of the refill prescriptions a doctor friend of his had artfully photocopied; meanwhile, I scooted over to the driver’s side of the double-parked Alfa. When he slid into the passenger seat, a satisfied grin on his face, I snarled at him that he was a junkie, always upping his intake of sleeping pills, and then always
bigger
pills, a pill like a Christmas tree with a drip-tube next to Aaron’s bed, and after that a pill like a church steeple that stuck out above Aaron’s street. I charged out of Enschede toward Maastricht, intentionally reckless and belligerent, hanging over the wheel like a jaw surgeon, I braked late and aggressively, tailgated every car I could. If Aaron turned the air conditioning up a notch, I turned it back down a notch. We hobbled over the potholed Belgian roads in silence, my rancor filling the car like mustard gas. Outside, industrial parks coughed noxious rubber clouds into the June skies, the asphalt cracked under our wheels. We loathed each other. Just to punish him I avoided the toll roads, lurched at 90 kph over the parched provincial asphalt—the result being that we ended up in some shitty little pitch-black town and slept in separate shitty hotel
beds in a shitty fleabag hotel. The next day we drove the rest of the way to Sainte-Maxime in one surly sigh; the
Barbara Ann
lay in the gleaming marina, wagging its tail like a dog that knows full well something is up with its owners. We navigated out of the harbor, followed the coastline along Cannes, Antibes, Monaco, and brusquely cast anchor at San Remo, where we ate pizza with long faces and refueled.
Once we reached the open sea things relaxed a bit. Aaron realized it was up to him to start. I eyed him through my sunglasses from the foredeck’s Jacuzzi, he stood holding the cherrywood rudder that was actually meant for a sailboat, but that I had instructed the Palmer Johnson builders to put in anyway. “How was Ennio’s funeral?” he shouted; I pretended not to hear. Five minutes later I got out of the tub, balanced my way around the helm and through the sloping salon, changed into another bikini in the bedroom and climbed back up on deck. “It sucked, of course,” I shouted in his ear.
When he offered his condolences an hour later, I let rip. I raged about how much he pissed me off, his jealousy, his oafishness, his inane behavior—yeah, yeah, he understood that. And just to test whether he really meant it I told him I could start at McKinsey in Silicon Valley in August. “Did that Stol call you?” Aaron asked. I answered that just before we left I’d gone horseback riding with Boudewijn, and Brigitte of course, I quickly added, and because he reacted to that piece of news more maturely than I had expected, I went to the salon and brought out a bottle of white wine.
“So how’d it go with good old Bo?”
“That rhymes.”
“Yup.”
To spare him the details I made a point of the strange atmosphere in the dunes. It was weird. I’d caught an early train and taken
a taxi to Black Beauty stables. After a mozzarella and tomato bread roll at the bar, the three of us rode to the coast. Boudewijn proved to be a far worse rider than Brigitte and myself: we lost him during a vigorous, spontaneous gallop along Scheveningen beach, and after ten minutes’ wait, still no Boudewijn. “He’ll be OK,” Brigitte said. When we got back to the stable in the early evening, we heard that he’d returned his mare hours earlier. The man who hosed down our horses said that “Mister Boudewijn” was thrown off his horse while scaling the dunes and had twisted his ankle, if not worse.
Aaron laughed for the first time all week. “But instead of jumping straight into her Aston Martin,” I said, “or at least calling home, Brigitte offered me a complete tour of the stables.” More than an hour later, in the car, she suddenly gave me a worried look. “I wonder how he got home?” The couple lived in a gray cement villa that was like a jukebox museum on the inside. “Haven’t you started dinner yet?” Brigitte asked when we entered the sparse, low-ceilinged living room and found Boudewijn with an ice pack on his ankle. He was watching the Tour de France on a flat-screen TV, a crate of 45-rpm singles next to him. “What do you think?” he barked. Out of politeness I disappeared to the bathroom, where I pretended to pee by spitting tap water into the toilet, and took my time putting on lipstick. When I got back, Brigitte was in the kitchen stir-frying spring onions and Boudewijn was setting the long glass-topped table. A tense hospitality hung over the dinner table. Boudewijn followed a sulky account of a recent renovation project on the house with a few obligatory tips for if I were to get that internship in Silicon Valley.
“So it’s not sure yet?”
“It is now.”
“Did they say anything about me?”
“About you? Yeah of course, Aaron, you’re all we talked about.”
I chose not to say that Brigitte did in fact ask after Aaron, and rather eagerly agreed with me that I had some thinking to do about “that, um … boy,” and that we all couldn’t help thinking back on Etienne Vaessen’s wedding dinner. For my part at least, I recalled Aaron’s return from the bathroom, where he’d been hiding out for an idiotically long time, ten minutes, twenty, a half hour, in fact I’d already written him off. We gaped at him, the three of us, he looked terrible, as gray as papier-mâché, with a white tuft on the crown of his head—toilet paper, he told me later, to stop the bleeding—which made him look like a burst hard-boiled egg.
“So America it is,” he said now.
I nodded and looked out over the endless blue surrounding us. Boudewijn insisted on taking me to the station despite his bad ankle. The seclusion of his car seemed to perk him up. “She’s forgotten you the minute she’s sitting on a horse’s back,” he said. The leather steering wheel sliding in his hands, the easiness of his driving manner: alert and ironic instead of on the defensive. That’s how I remembered him from the wedding. As we glided over the highway he thanked me for sending my résumé, he thought I would make an excellent “Academy Fellow,” he would send a recommendation to his colleague in Silicon Valley on Monday.
“Nice guy?”
“Woman. Really nice woman. That is, as long as you turn in your ovaries at HR and save up your vacation days off until after you’re gone.”
“Funny term, ‘vacation days off.’ ”
“Perfectly normal one. Only not at McKinsey.”
“Funny word, ‘ovary.’ ”
Then, at last, he laughed, and just about the moment he took a slightly wild swing around the mini-roundabout, we both lost our balance and he grabbed hold of my leg, high and warm, his fingers between my thighs.
Aaron and I made a toast to the Ligurian Sea. And to the
Barbara Ann
, our ridiculously luxurious yacht that we whored up together and bought on a reckless whim—why, we weren’t really sure, maybe because two secret millionaires have to splash out on
something
. But it did the trick. This was ours. Who else could I sail across the open sea with except Aaron Bever? That very night, I think, we finally resumed our photo sessions. We sailed around Cap Corse and down the east coast of Corsica, past Bastia, and moored at Santa Lucia di Moriani, the small seaside resort where we had the rental house. We chatted freely about the immediate future, about America, we laughed about the number of pictures we’d have to take in advance. He said he was planning to come visit me in California, he’d like to join me there.
“Are you still going to go see Wilbert?” he asked a few days later.
“No,” I reassured him. “The day I was supposed to go see him, we’ll still be here. It’s better this way. Dad brought it up again when we went out to eat. He was afraid I was up to something. I didn’t tell him I’d already talked to him.”
“How’d you get his number?” Suspicion had crept back into his voice.
“Easy, from my parents’ phone.”
I didn’t tell Siem that either. I had a war president of a father who had dragged his son into court, just like that. Since then, our household was well and truly devoid of nuance: you’re either with
us, or against us. Wilbert’s name hadn’t been mentioned at the farmhouse since 1990. You didn’t dare. Let alone phone him up. Let alone go
see
him.
“Did you cancel?”
“Not yet.”
The afternoon of the bushfire Aaron asked how I’d feel if he didn’t return to the Vluchtestraat and I gave up my student house: “We’ll just ship all our junk,” he said, “you know, emigrate. And not come back for the time being. Ship our stuff? Heck, we’ll just ditch it. What do you think?” And although living together had never really occurred to me before, and was, more to the point, exactly the opposite of my conclusions over the previous weeks, I shared his audacity: Yes! Let’s do it! The more we philosophized about it, the more gung-ho we became about moving to California—
together
—after just six days on vacation, six days away from screwed-up Enschede, six days after our deepest ever relationship crisis, we were, to our amazement, talking about
living together
, we fantasized excitedly about a new start in the USA. Recovering from a crisis like this one, we told each other, requires more than patchwork, and as we stood there on our hill watching that bushfire, I wondered whether the prickly smell of millions of popping pine needles had cleansed our muddled heads, or in fact fogged them up.
Aaron’s head was smudged with soot. “It’ll all work out,” he said. I turned and looked down at the small marina where six, seven boats were moored; our blue-pink spear was by far the largest. “We could always just sail the hell out of here,” I said, and we retreated, smiling, to the coolness of the house they had bricked in under a
pair of especially flammable pine trees. While Aaron started frying some goat meat in a heavy cast-iron pan he’d pulled out of a kitchen cabinet, I rinsed the scent of charred bark out of my hair in the shower and imagined, for the first time, what it would be like to stay with him forever, start a family together—could I imagine something like that? How would it be to do it
without
from now on; I fantasized about walking into the kitchen with my hair wrapped in a towel and saying to Aaron: “Honey, I love you, how about we forget those stupid condoms?”
My office door opened, and from the impatient squeak of the hinges I could guess who was on the other side. “Joy—five minutes?” Rusty’s smile tickled me between my shoulder blades. I clicked away Aaron’s website but did not take my eyes off the monitor. It was the end of the day, and I wanted to be getting home. When he started counting backward from five I turned around. Holding on to the doorknob, Rusty leaned into Room 203 (we’d never bothered to unscrew the red-painted metal hotel room numbers), and said: “Been crying?”