Bonita Avenue (18 page)

It all began at Jaap Visser’s farewell reception. Visser, head of Communications since the early ’80s, who had been at his post for about ten years too long, and whom he should have dealt with as soon as he became rector. Siem gave a concise, warm speech. The reception was held in the Bastille club, a grand, dark bowel of brick and burnished copper, where he stood at the end of the massive bar talking to Vlaar, his spokesman, and four of his policy assistants. And the same waitress kept coming by with a tray of drinks,
a delicate Asian girl with an open, attractive face who looked him briefly but intensely in the eye every time she handed him a glass of white wine or mineral water. She looked at him as though she was waiting for his reaction to a witty comment.

By around seven, just before it had begun to thin out, he’d had enough. He went over to the far corner of the club, where Visser and his wife were surrounded by three timid sons and some ex-colleagues. He offered a round of handshakes, wished the man all the best, and tried to make it to the exit without getting buttonholed. The girl stood rinsing glasses at the end of the bar. As he put on his scarf and stuck his arm into the sleeve of his overcoat, he could feel her looking at him. “Wait a second,” she said when he made eye contact.

Later, when they couldn’t get enough of analyzing that first encounter, he told her that in his recollection she didn’t walk around the bar, but leapt over it like in a cartoon, to which she responded that she didn’t take kindly to being compared to a comic strip character.

“Don’t you remember me?” Dark-brown eyes streaked with slivers of bright copper looked up at him, she wasn’t that tall, but slender, and now that she was standing under his nose and he could smell her jet-black, put-up hair, she looked nothing at all like a comic strip character. It was a long time since he had stood so close to a young, unfamiliar woman.

“Give me a hint?” he said.

“No, that’s too easy. Put on your thinking cap.”

“Let me guess, you’re a Student Union officer.” He knew she wasn’t, but it seemed to him a complimentary remark.

“No, but give me a couple of years. Think.”

He looked at his watch and said he ought to be getting home. She said she thought a
rector magnificus
could decide for himself
what time he got home. “I’ll help you out. It was … let’s see … six years ago.”

He acted as though he thought six years was an awful lot and surprised himself with a wisecrack: “Six years ago you were clapping out the erasers for your teacher.”

She poked him in the belly with her index finger. “Just for that you owe me a glass of wine.” With supple agility she slid behind the bar, uncorked a bottle in a flash and filled two glasses without spilling a drop. “Does the name Marij Star Busman ring a bell?” she asked without looking up.

No way, he thought. Are you Marij Star Busman’s daughter? He needn’t have felt terribly guilty that he didn’t see it: Marij Star Busman was a stout, strawberry-blond prototype Dutch woman whose heavy-set figure appeared more fertile than it actually was. In the early ’80s she and her husband had adopted this little Thai girl, and later a boy from Burma; the information arranged itself in his head. He’d got to know the family later, during his first year as rector, when he made it a priority to hire female professors. At that time Tubantia had just one, an embarrassing track record surpassed even by universities in the Islamic world. There had been a young female lecturer at Chemical Technology who published non-stop, even in
Nature
, and whom the students had elected teacher of the year. I must have her, he thought straightaway, and after an informal lunch he was even more convinced. Marij Star Busman was an ambitious, intelligent, extremely capable scientist who, he felt, had to be given a full professorship, and fast.

Hardly a week after he’d put his case to the university administration, he had received news of a pile-up on the misty A1 near Zwolle involving his new protégée, two hard, opposing but by no means self-canceling metallic jolts. At first, Marij Star Busman appeared to have escaped with just a broken nose, but after a few
weeks she was nearly immobilized with back and neck pain. She ended up at home on the sofa with a neck brace, mood swings, and a memory like a soggy punchcard. Sigerius visited her every few weeks during her six-month recuperation, once or twice together with Tineke, and gradually a polite friendship took root. In addition to an extremely amiable husband and that Burmese toddler, a shy, skinny, slanty-eyed little girl fluttered around their Schothorst duplex; and the instant that same little girl, now a fully blossomed young woman, handed him a glass of wine, he remembered her name.

“Isabelle,” he said. “Welcome back to Enschede.”

To his chagrin, the family had moved to the west of the country after the dean of Chemical Technology started to quibble with Star Busman’s appointment (too young, too inexperienced, too difficult), tensions that, to make matters worse, the university newspaper got wind of. Predictably, the Delft University of Technology snapped her up with the offer of a department chair. Three years later Star Busman received the Spinoza Prize for the construction of complex molecules and hyperselective catalyzators. He felt justified in rubbing it in over at the stodgy chemists’ clique.

“Cheers,” her adopted daughter said. Isabelle showed an unbridled interest in his doings, subjecting him to a barrage of questions alternated with coquettish asides and charming titters, all of which contrived to make him increasingly shy. How he liked Enschede, why he didn’t take that Cabinet post (how did she know that?), how many of these dos did he have to “schlep” through, whether he still practiced judo. Did he remember that her little brother asked him what happened to his ears? No, he said, smiling, not mentioning that he also remembered precious little of the thirteen-year-old Isabelle. She told him that her mother was still grateful to him, even though things had taken such a weird turn. She told him she was
studying management, lived in a “pretty OK” dorm and “sororitized” with Joni, who by the way had hazed her. She didn’t take her eyes off him, not even once. When he left the Bastille a half hour later and walked past the gym and the minimart on his way home, he felt a strange … lightness.

Two days later his secretary forwarded him an e-mail from a certain Isabelle Orthel. Isabelle Orthel? Only after reading the message—“Hi Siem, did the wine floor you too? Rotgut. Café De Appel in Hengelo has a really good red”—did he realize that Star Busman was her mother’s maiden name. But Isabelle Orthel wasn’t any name for a Thai girl, it was a name for a seventeenth-century French lyrical philosopher. Should he respond? It was a busy Wednesday, and he let his reluctant curiosity simmer for the rest of the day. In fact, he’d decided to drop it when, out of the blue, he sent off a reply just before heading home. “No hangover. Better to mail me at [email protected] from now on. Bye Isabelle.”

Only at half-past seven the next morning, as he walked through the ice-cold administration wing, did he think of her again, and instead of making coffee he first checked his private e-mail account. She had sent him two messages. The first was a full-length paragraph about how “inspiring” their conversation was, about her participation in the D66 youth council and how his name was mentioned there often. This alarmed him. In the old days, before he was married, he had had difficulty recognizing flirtatious females; in the meantime he’d got good at it, but these days he couldn’t tell genuine interest, erotic or not, from what one now benignly called “networking.”

The second message was short and to the point. “So
do
you like red wine?”

He was at a complete loss. For twenty-five years he’d reacted to female advances in the same way, namely by
not
reacting, and yet
he noticed that all weekend his thoughts were funneled toward this girl. At night, lying next to the unconscious Tineke, he imagined them sitting across from each other at that cafe of hers; stretched out on his back he tried to recall certain parts of her body. On Monday morning in his office, in an unguarded moment, he typed: “Isabelle, I’m dying for a good glass of wine.”

Their e-mail correspondence snowballed, eventually it hit thirty in a single day. That ever-flattering attention: she buried him in cheerful, energetic, infinitely interested paragraphs and sentences, questions about his work, about his daughters, his opinion about this and that, about films and books he knew, or maybe didn’t know, about his past, about his youth—for days on end, until he couldn’t stand it any longer and started to tweak the tone of their exchange. Yes:
he
was the one who started openly lusting. Loosening up the attitude. After a fortnight, even periods and commas carried a double entendre. If she mentioned having gone swimming he asked her to describe her bathing suit; when she described her bathing suit, he asked what kind of underwear she had on, right now for instance.

“None,” she replied.

“None?!”

“My God, Siem, of course I’m wearing underwear.”

“Isabelle, what
kind
of underwear?”

“What kind of underwear would you like me to be wearing?”

He was surprised by his own randiness. He was not the sort of man to slack off at work while chasing erotic thrills, let alone allow a nineteen-year-old teenybopper to undermine his stable, entirely becalmed private life. Not that he never took any risks in life—he felt that he was constantly taking risks, but these were dangers that presented themselves to him in broad daylight and were
far removed from adulterous urges. He was a man without erotic secrets. Maybe even without erotic desires.

Nevertheless he spent those first few weeks scouring the campus in the anxious hope of catching a glimpse of Isabelle Orthel. He pored over her sorority yearbook (on his office bookshelf: he had penned the preface) and found two photos—God, that’s her all right. And still he was gobsmacked when, at the official opening of a new hockey canteen, he saw her standing right up in front. Was she
that
beautiful? Her pale face seemed illuminated, like a landmark town house. He’d forgotten how nonchalantly she put her straight, black hair up. Forgotten how she stuck her thumbs into the waistband of her jeans when she listened to someone, and how attentively her glistening mouth pursed, eager to reply.

Fortunately she waited an hour before approaching him, apparently the time she herself needed to summon her courage. It was absurdly wonderful. Only later did he worry about how it looked, the hotshot and the hockey babe: broad gestures, nonchalant touches to the shoulders and forearms, whispering in each other’s ears, unrestrained bursts of laughter—at one point she even gave him a little rap on the cheek, “Rascal!” she laughed at something, he had forgotten what.

Among his injudicious resolutions for 1999 was a date in a bistro in Almelo, the nearest place he dared to meet her in public. He hadn’t laid a hand on anyone other than Tineke since 1974, and all evening he felt like he was in heaven. They talked about his bleak youth in Delft, about her scintillating plans for the future, the difference between jazz and classical (she had once toyed with the idea of studying voice at a music conservatory), about neckties and the benefits of being a girl, about her curious aversion to Thailand, about fidelity and infidelity, and he realized: I am in love. On their way back to the station in the dark (he traveled first class as
a precaution—“chicken,” she called him) she shoved him into an alleyway and started to kiss him. He rested his ice-cold hands on her shoulders, and was aware of her own hands as they explored his body under his clothes, ended at his buttocks and, after a few minutes, undid his trousers. She removed her deerskin gloves, but he pushed her fingers away. With a “quit fussing” gesture that took him rather by surprise, she released his penis and pulled at it. He was a head taller than she, so that he could avoid her coppery foxlook. He felt discreetly uncomfortable.

The train journey through the evening landscape made him tender and reflective. From his otherwise empty first-class compartment, his startled, half-erect member pressing against his inner thigh, he stared out at a nearly full moon, knowing that somewhere else in the same train an unruffled, gentle, improbably attractive girl was staring at that same scoop of ice cream, thinking of
him
. He was amazed by her audacity, by her vivacity, her strength. No trace of the kowtowing he was accustomed to, because he was thirty-five years older, because he was the boss of the university where she still had to pass her qualifying exams. Isabelle Orthel was brimming with confidence. He involuntarily compared her to Margriet Wijn, the only other nineteen-year-old girl who had ever shoved him into an alley. The differences were
so
great that he suspected he was in love with the contrast itself.

He had spent enough time at the Star Busman home to know that any member of the exemplary family where, by a twist of fate, Isabelle had found refuge, had standards to live up to. Her adopted grandfather sat on the Supreme Court and in his free time wrote biographies of the Dutch maritime heroes Maarten and Cornelis Tromp. He was a man who fathered professors rather than children. Like her mother, the impressive clutch of aunts and uncles
Isabelle mentioned were Ph.D.s in one thing or another—collectively, it seemed, serious people with serious positions at universities, law courts, or human rights organizations; if not, they painted or sculpted something that merited exhibiting. The old oak tree had branched out sufficiently over two generations to provide Isabelle with a cousin or two in pretty much every college fraternity in the country—the Star Busman clan was, to put it bluntly, a potent entity that convened at least twice a year in Isabelle’s grandparents’ villa in The Hague to report on its advancement in society. Isabelle rose to the occasion. Like her adopted family, this privileged girl, who waltzed through her exams, who earned her pocket money as a singing waitress in a piano bar, who organized a student trip to Prague (including a visit to Theresienstadt), who had the choice of three women’s debating societies, knew exactly what she wanted out of life.