Bonita Avenue (3 page)

Once a month, on a Saturday, he and Joni went to dinner in the refurbished farmhouse on the edge of the campus, a completely renovated white-stuccoed residence so utterly desirable that passersby slid “if-you-ever-decide-to-sell” notes through the mail slot in the dark-green front door. Although he teased Joni about her clingy attachment to her parents (“Now don’t just call Daddy,” he said when a blown fuse suddenly left her student flat pitch-black and deserted), he always enjoyed those visits. As they cycled out to the farmhouse, downtown Enschede would melt into the Drienerlo woods, which in turn flowed seamlessly into the campus, the backdrop for their four-year relationship. On those Saturdays, Tubantia seemed heavily pregnant. The humming meadows looked grassier than on weekdays, in his memory the wooded paths rolled gently, they cycled through an undulating landscape that smelled of pollen and where the ponds seemed inevitable. The shimmering water had collected at the lowest parts, just as hundreds of scholars and thousands of students had flowed precisely here in order to
shine. You could hear their brains rustling, the fields and the trees and the berm seemed statically charged by the billions of bits and bytes that zoomed through the campus network under their feet. And when they returned home late in the evening, a prehistoric darkness enveloped the route, the gentle hills had become shallow dells, the greens and woods lairs for slumbering academic buildings. Applied Mathematics lay like a brontosaurus in its lake, the Tyrannosaurus rex of Technical Physics stretched up to the highest treetops, its slumbering head among the stipple of stars.

Sometimes they’d spend the night, and the next morning they would eat warm croissants with marmalade and drink jumbo glasses of fresh orange juice Sigerius squeezed for them after doing his forty laps of breast stroke in the campus pool, with the music of the Bill Evans Trio, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck in the background, easy-listening Sunday morning jazz, which, he said, worked like salve on their morning moodiness. “Can you turn the salve down a little?” Joni complained, but Sigerius ignored her. With a raised index finger and one eye shut, he would call out: “Listen!” His wife and two daughters fell silent, dutifully stopped chewing and concentrated, just to indulge him in something that bored them, and after about ten seconds Sigerius released them with words like: “Beautiful, how Scott LaFaro plays
around
Evans. Hear that?
Around
him. Yeah,
now!
, this, that meandering bass, listen.”

“Dad, I
hate
jazz,” said Janis, or Joni, or both.

“Just listen to this, it’s unreal! It’s foreground and background at the same time, accompanist
and
virtuoso. No way am I turning this down.”

At moments like this, Aaron was the one—and this was the basis for their bond, the simple fact that he was a boy, and not a girl, although there are also certain breeds of boy that get the
creeps from jazz, for whom jazz is a complete waste of time—who remarked how tragic it was that Scott LaFaro smashed himself up in a car crash, and that Bill Evans, after that dramatic loss in 1961, never found another bassist of that caliber, although Chuck Israels of course did come close, certainly on
How My Heart Sings!
And before he’d finished with his little spiel, another heart sang: that of his father-in-law, who divided the world into jazz lovers and ignoramuses, and who had often announced, even in company, that he’d never met a young person so clued-up about jazz as Aaron, a feather in his cap that he not only left there but also, now and then, when no one was looking, stroked.

The Saturday evenings usually began in the sunroom, which was then spanking-new and, since the wall was taken out a year earlier, ran directly into the kitchen with its cooking island where Tineke prepared simple but tasty meals. After supper they retired, arguing or joking, to the old living room, and Tineke followed, carrying a tray of buttered
krentenwegge
and jittering coffee cups, and Joni opened the cabinet doors concealing the so-called unimportant television, and Sigerius kept up his end of the bargain by not answering his cell phone for an hour. The times when Janis went off to meet friends at a café downtown (usually right after
Frasier
, watching the end with her coat already on) and Tineke and Joni decided at around ten to watch a Saturday evening film, and Sigerius would ask: “How ’bout some tunes?” and he would not say no but yes, and they would disappear like a pair of schoolboys with a bottle of whiskey to the “music room,” a space on the ground floor fitted out with two dark-red Chesterfields, an expensive NAD amplifier and CD player, a Thorens turntable, and two man-sized B&W speakers on spikes and bits of NASA foam rubber that Sigerius had wangled from Technical Physics; and there, seated among framed photos of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk
and Bill Evans, they listened to democratically chosen records (with bilateral veto power), original American LPs that Sigerius kept in tall, narrow, waxed beechwood cabinets designed and built by his wife.

Boys’ stuff, just like that judo of theirs. In the farmhouse entrance hung a blown-up photo of five hulking, bare-chested men dragging a tree trunk up a hill: Geesink, Ruska, Gouweleeuw, and Snijders, and there, second from the left, with the tensed pecs and cropped dark curls above the flat face, was Sigerius himself. The Dutch national judo team in training for a World Championship, it must have been ’65 or ’66. Geesink, coach as well as teammate, sent his line-up into the woods near Marseilles; according to Sigerius he was a slave driver, but when tree trunks had to be dragged uphill, he was out in front. Up on top, while the others lay gasping for breath, Geesink grabbed the trunk at one end and, palpitating, shoved it out in front of him ten or so times, tore the clothes off his steaming body and jumped in a mountain creek. “If we offered him a water bottle, he refused, thought it was a waste of his thirst,” said Sigerius, who soon discovered that Aaron had practiced judo until he was nineteen; and when he learned that he was even a black belt, Sigerius coaxed him into taking it up again, first in the senior group he coached on Thursday evenings at the campus athletic center, and when Aaron had regained, as they say, his old “feeling,” Sigerius asked if he felt like going for a dan exam together.

Judo is a strangely intimate sport. A couple of times a week for a good two years, he and Sigerius rolled around the judo mat in each other’s arms. Intensive, concentrated hours with the gym entirely to themselves. Talk was kept to a bare minimum. They gave themselves one year to hone their throwing and grappling techniques, Sigerius going for his fourth dan, he for his second. Each training
session closed with the savage bouts he often thought back on, even now. And after each session he climbed into bed, occasionally in her parents’ guest room, next to Joni, Sigerius’s painstakingly raised daughter, the apple of his eye, and then Aaron noticed that Joni smelled vaguely like her father—maybe it was the washing powder Tineke used, he couldn’t say. And while he mixed pheromones—he was a messenger of bodily scents, a bumblebee that traveled between two bodies of the same make—he felt that his strange happiness was doubled in their careful lovemaking after the training sessions, their muted groans in Sigerius’s guest bed, his hand sometimes firmly over Joni’s warm mouth to keep her from waking his strange friend a floor below.

The train rolled through Leuven. Tineke had closed her eyes, she pretended to sleep so that they would not have to acknowledge each other’s existence. He admired her cold-bloodedness. He hadn’t seen a single Sigerius since late in 2000, the year everything was blown to pieces. Nevertheless they roamed stubbornly through his subconscious, he still had recurring dreams—nightmares mostly—of Enschede.

Twilight was falling, the sky was purple, silvery on the edge of the wispy clouds. He caught the reflection of his own bald head in the window. He felt himself become calmer, and somber. A village unfurled itself alongside a canal, a wafery moon hung curiously early in the sky. Soon he would walk home through the moldy dusk of Linkebeek. The deadness that awaited him, the cold, high-ceilinged rooms he had longed for back in Venlo. He was just thankful that it was Tineke who sat there ignoring him, and not Sigerius himself.

It had never been completely relaxed. In Sigerius’s company
he could freeze up, literally, becoming dramatically paralyzed: his jaws clamped shut, bringing about a barely controllable tension that spread from his neck vertebrae and his shoulders throughout his entire body. He was, for hours on end, a statue of himself fighting against total paralysis, desperately talking all the while, praying his voice would continue to function. If Sigerius were to give him a push during one of these moments, he’d have fallen over and smashed to bits like a Chinese vase.

He experienced their friendship as magical—before he’d come to the campus to take up photography, he had flunked out of the Dutch program in Utrecht, was chucked out on his ear, and here he had simply walked right into the inner chamber of the academic heart, just like that—but mendacious as well. He made himself out to be more than he was. It all started with the jazz. One Sunday at the farmhouse, not so long after their first meeting, they slurped hot coffee from slim-handled mugs. Sigerius, distant, his mind on other matters, got up and went over to a hypermodern metal cabinet housing a record player and put on an LP. Jazz. Even before he’d sat back down on the long, pale-pink sofa next to his wife, Aaron recognized the music. He waited a bit just to be sure, but he was right: the theme, the round, slightly coquettish piano-playing, this was Sonny Clark, and the LP was called
Cool Struttin’
. He could see the classic Blue Note jacket before him, a pair of woman’s legs strolling over (he presumed) a New York City sidewalk. Over Joni’s and Tineke’s heads he said: “Nice album,
Cool Struttin’.
”

Sigerius, with his amazing morning stubble (it would take Aaron a whole week to cultivate such a shadow), opened his brown eyes wide. “
Cool Struttin’
is a
great
album,” he said, his voice more strident, higher, as though a piano tuner had taken a wrench to it. “So you know it.
Cool Struttin’
is by far Clark Terry’s best LP.”

Clark Terry? Aaron got it at once: Sigerius was mistaken, he was
confusing Sonny Clark with Clark Terry, an amusing gaffe, but he decided not to rub it in. It was hardly tactful to swoop in like a schoolmarm and rap your new father-in-law on the knuckles, but to just play dumb, no, he was too proud for that. “I’m with you,” he said, “this was Sonny Clark’s best band, Philly Joe Jones, for once, holding back on the drums. Not going at the cymbals like a hooligan.”

Eyes like saucers, briefly, then suddenly shut. “Terry. It’s Clark terry.”

“This is Sonny Clark on piano,” Aaron said, more decisively than necessary. “Terry’s a trumpet player.”

“You sure about that?” Joni asked.

Sigerius bolted up off the sofa and slid past his wife, his heels ticking as he marched over to the novel metal cabinet which, he learned later, Tineke had made herself. He pulled out the record jacket, glanced at both the front and back cover, propped it up next to the turntable and closed the cabinet. He returned, painfully slowly, to the sofa and sat back down.

“You’re right. Of course you’re right. And damn, I even saw that Terry in the Kurhaus. And in Boston too, later. Ladies, I’m going to have to watch my words from now on.”

That is precisely what Aaron did for the remaining quarter of an hour; Sigerius didn’t catch that his knowledge of jazz was wafer-thin after all, that the Sonny Clark album was pure luck. He knew
Cool Struttin’
so well because of that pair of legs, he’d picked up the album at a flea market because of the jacket, it spent a few years taped to the door of his wardrobe, the vinyl disc collecting dust on the turntable. Sure, he liked jazz, but to be honest, his heart lay with blues and rock ’n’ roll.

But honesty was not his speciality. Now that Sigerius had promoted him to jazz expert, to someone with an encyclopedic
knowledge on, of all things, his own turf, to a kindred spirit, he needed to get to work. That same week he let a nervous guy in a black turtleneck at Broekhuis bookshop talk him into the
Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD
, a 1,500-page jazz bible that, according to the turtleneck, not only contained the entire history of jazz, but separated the wheat from the chaff with a handy system of stars. Across from Broekhuis, at the discount-book warehouse, he bought a biography of Miles Davis, a
Jazz for Dummies
and a book called
Billie and the President
. In his wallet he had the business card of a retired dentist in Boekelo, a silver-gray man in red trousers who had been standing behind him one day at the campus record library as he checked out a Bud Powell record. The man told him he had 800 original jazz LPs at home—American pressing, thick, pitch-black vinyl, sturdy cardboard jackets—“you can have them for a guilder apiece,” at which Aaron nearly hit the roof with fermented craving. “Give me a call,” the man said, and he did just that, the very same evening, and he kept on calling him, twice a week at first, then twice a month, brief, hasty exchanges in which the man was always too busy, or he was about to leave for the States, or he was ill, or was about to be; “call me again soon,” but “soon” gradually became more of an obstacle, a testiness crept into the exchanges—until Aaron stopped believing him. Stick your LPs up your retired old ass. But now he decided to take the plunge and cycled out to Boekelo, on the other side of town. He rang the bell at a seniors’ apartment that corresponded to the address on the tattered card. A Turkish man answered the door.

So he plundered the record library and, when Joni wasn’t with him, studied jazz history as if he had to program the North Sea Festival that summer. He perused the artist entries, concentrating first on the big shots who got the most pages—the Parkers, the Ellingtons, the Monks, the Coltranes, the Davises—and after that,
the rest of the ’50s jazz greats: Fitzgerald, Evans, Rollins, Jazz Messengers, Powell, Gillespie, Getz. He listened to all their records, jotted down biographical particulars in a notebook, etched it all in his memory, Blue Note, Riverside, Impulse!, Verve, Prestige. It was like his former studies, only that fucking
Kapellekensbaan
had taken him three weeks and
Giant Steps
just thirty-seven minutes and three seconds. Books had dominated the first half of his 1990s, he read like a maniac, entire evenings, at bus stops and in waiting rooms, when he lay awake at night: tallying titles, keelhauling oeuvres, five years of forced labor to recoup his humiliating comedown in Utrecht—now it was “mission accomplished” in just five
weeks
. Then he knew it was safe to go back in the water. Another five weeks later, he stood next to Sigerius in De Tor listening to the Piet Noordijk Quartet, sipping whiskey and putting his faith in a silicone-implant jazz knack.