Bonita Avenue (61 page)

“Please. Go.”

In order to restrain myself a second time,
not
to go, to flee from this hellhole, I tried to picture him on his black Batavus. Remember who this is. I saw him sitting on that big bike with its
double crossbar, his sheepskin coat open, a silk shirt underneath that could just as well have been a ladies’ blouse, this nonchalant grasshopper on a bike, oversized boots half sliding off the pedals, leisurely cycling off to buy this very bed with me. With that Aaron in mind, I laid my hand as gently as possible on his sweat-drenched thigh, and called him “sweetheart.” It was with
that
Aaron in mind that I’d come to Enschede, with
that
Aaron in mind I’d decided to keep it.

For weeks, Boudewijn was the only one who knew I was pregnant. I was avoiding all contact with Enschede (and Enschede with me), and at McKinsey I kept mum about it as long as I wasn’t showing. From Day One of my internship in Silicon Valley, Boudewijn and I e-mailed each other daily, a routine with which he rounded off his afternoons in Amsterdam and I began my mornings in California. At first they were mostly jokey, corny e-mails, sometimes unexpectedly candid, with an unambiguous undertone on his part that I rather enjoyed. “You’re the only person I trust,” I wrote one day in October. “Of course, of course,” was his almost gilded answer, so I told him I was pregnant and confessed right up front that I was considering an abortion. “Considering” was my euphemism for the appointment I had already made at the Stanford University Family Planning Service. That sure cured him of his corniness; he turned into a sponge that wanted to soak up everything with exacting precision, so I told him everything with exacting precision—but how precise was it all
without
the sliding glass door and the website?

His reaction caught me off guard: he explicitly
forbade
me to go to that Stanford clinic. “Put off your decision for as long as possible,” he wrote, “ask for a cooling-off period.” “I’ve got one already.” “Then ask for another one,” and he reminded me I had
responsibilities
, not only with regard to the “life” but to the father as well.
Excuse me? Really, he was dead serious, he considered having an abortion behind Aaron’s back, “how can I put it mildly,” he said, a
crime
. “But I don’t want anything to do with the guy,” I protested. “That’s beside the point,” he wrote, “who says you have to have anything to do with him? Who says he wants a child?”

What Aaron wanted was a tranquilizer dart. His fear itself was terrifying, and still I persevered: little by little I made progress, unhurriedly caressing his thickly clothed arms, his shoulders, until his dread seemed to gradually subside. Both bedside tables, the open drawers, the floor—everywhere, actually—were littered with pill strips and liquor bottles, all of them empty. After rummaging frantically through one of the bedside tables I came up with two sleeping tablets. “Here,” I said, “take these.” But he spat them out, and again I wriggled the soggy capsules into his mouth. I found a bottle of jenever with a swig or two left, put it to his lips and he swallowed. He let me nestle up against him and I continued stroking his arms, his face, his chest, until his breathing relaxed. And only then, when I had calmed down some myself, did the reality of the situation hit me:
he didn’t notice
. Even if I were to take off my heavy winter coat, even if I took off
all
my clothes and climbed onto his lap with my six-month belly, even
then
Aaron wouldn’t notice I was pregnant, let alone
comprehend
it.

It was a job and a half getting him down those stairs. He thrashed about and wedged himself between the wall and the railing. His body odor made me gag. In front of the house he fell to his knees in the snow, and while I hastily swept the snow off the Alfa he lay there curled up in a fetal position, wailing and ranting; I smiled at passersby while coaxing him, patiently but firmly, into the car.

We arrived at the Twentse Tulip before dusk; I had never been
there before, it was surrounded by woods and had a huge Christmas tree in the granite foyer. After a good deal of pleading and explaining on my part they agreed to keep Aaron overnight for observation. I watched as he, meek as a lamb, gulped down two bright purple antipsychotics with a large glass of water; it was as though I was quenching a week-long thirst myself. Only when they asked me for his particulars—parents? employer?—did I realize how extraordinary it was that he’d managed to get to this stage. I’ll bet no one had been at his house in months. His parents lived down in Limburg, and they phoned, as far as I knew, infrequently. And what about his work? Was this the fate of a freelancer? I found Cees and Irma Bever’s number in my cell phone and gave it to the staff nurse.

I wanted to get out of there. Move on. While Aaron was being examined by one of the psychiatrists, I slipped out of the building. I looked up at the snow-covered oak trees and sycamores, the endless depth of the stone-cold sky above, and thought: this is as good a place as any for insanity to evaporate.

Driving south through salty slush, coat buttoned up, window open, dazed, I thought: did I really just go through all that? I only braked in Liège, soon after midnight, and checked into the most expensive room I could find. Should I have seen this coming? My suite had those little pillows a pregnant woman can prop under her belly while lying on her side, but sleep evaded me nonetheless.

I think it was already September by the time I realized it. I lived in a sort of student pueblo with undergrads, foreign post-docs, and beginning consultants, situated in the woods between the Stanford campus and the office park where McKinsey had its local division. I shared a top-floor apartment with two somewhat disagreeable
French girls who had allotted me a square bedroom looking out on three sides at the tall, pointy pines. For the first few weeks I was lonely and depressed, I missed Enschede, I missed Aaron, I missed my father. Now that I was alone, guilt got a foot in the door. Hadn’t everything gone haywire essentially because of me? Wasn’t it my greedy exhibitionism that had driven us, a three-way bond with the strength of a water molecule, apart? I saw Siem crash through that glass door more often than I wanted to, I realized all too well what exactly had been smashed to smithereens—but at the same time I was liberated; the newness of being on the other side of the world banished the darkest thoughts of Enschede, distracted me from the irrevocability and hopelessness of the situation. On weekdays I worked long hours; at the weekends colleagues took me with them to San Francisco, where we spent days on the beach and nights in the clubs. This is good, it is good you are in California—and as soon as I started thinking this, sometimes even saying it out loud, I discovered I was pregnant.

“Prosaic” is too nice a word for how it all went. The youngest intern there, I was sitting in on a conference call with a McKinsey team for a page-by-page review of a final report for an Asian client; I was nauseous and the itch on my breasts was driving me insane. Don’t scratch, don’t scratch; if somebody had asked me anything I’d have answered, “don’t scratch,” but no one asked anything, giving me plenty of time to put two and two together: the itch, my late period, and all that the Enschede palaver had truly made me forget—that back on Corsica Aaron and I had had unprotected sex.

I got up, white as a sheet; the associate principal who chaired that witches’ coven asked if I was “OK” and whether they should call a doctor. Yeah, an abortion doctor, I thought, but left the conference room with my hand over my mouth, took the glass elevator downstairs, nodded weakly at the receptionist, and walked straight
to the drugstore on Palo Alto Square where I bought two different pregnancy test kits and peed on them both, one after the other, back in the pueblo. Fat pink stripes. I sat there on the toilet until my legs fell asleep. Damn it to hell, I was pregnant by Aaron Bever.

I lay in bed for the rest of the week. Too sick to work. At night I puffed my sniveling self up into a zeppelin of self-reproach, and when I jolted awake in the morning from muddy dreams, that ink-black airship hung above the pine trees, casting a shadow and on the verge of combustion. I only got up toward afternoon, ate a little something, and marched through the woods, furious, overwrought, stamping pine cones to splinters. My atheism teetered: it was difficult not to see the punitive hand of some god or other behind this new ordeal, that damn God of Wilbert’s. I cursed the hunk of wood on Wilbert’s wall and at the same time prayed for a miscarriage: Dear Lord, please let me be rid of this, I don’t want it. Internet pregnancy forums list all kinds of things mothers-to-be should expressly
not
do, and so I worked overtime, slept too little, drank as much alcohol as possible, at home, up in that little room, wine, whiskey, vodka. Weekends I ate with those two pocket-sized French girls, who chatted with each other in incomprehensible Parisian, perhaps about my cooking (they invariably sliced open the meat I had cooked for them, scrunched up their tiny noses and brought it back to the kitchen to finish the job), perhaps about my constant nausea. I called the Stanford University Family Planning Service. I e-mailed Boudewijn.

He phoned while I was sitting in the empty breakfast room in Liège eating Nutella on French bread.

“Where are you?”

“Liège.”

“And. How did he react? They gave Arend a downer—and then? What’d he say? Tell.”

“And then nothing, Bo. There’s nothing much
to
tell. My ex-boyfriend’s got a psychosis, a whopper of a psychosis. He thinks the sun is made of yellow jam he can smear on his toast. It’s really awful.”

“So he’s not going to miss the little one for the time being.”

Only months later, when I was less self-absorbed, when I wasn’t afraid Boudewijn would find out I’d been trying to unload a $1.5 million boat, when I no longer dreaded seeing my parents, when we were already safely ensconced on our hill in San Francisco—only then did I figure out what he had been up to. In retrospect I understood his loyalty, his empathy, the earnestness of his e-mails, how he managed to get me to cancel the appointment at that Stanford Family thing and think “for at least five minutes per day” about “the joys of motherhood,” a phrase that leapt with surprising ease to the lips of this fifty-year-old childless man. In retrospect I understood his satisfaction when I passed the twelve-week mark and announced my pregnancy at McKinsey. The story behind his smile at Schiphol Airport, where he whisked me into a business-class lounge I called “louche” and why he, in the middle of that joint and with a mouth full of crab salad, had laughed so hard. “I’ve got really sad news,” he said, “Brigitte and I are splitting up. I’ve filed for divorce. We’re driving each other bonkers.” Then he put me on the train to Enschede and as a farewell laid his ringed hand briefly on my belly. (And
still
I hadn’t caught on, no idea that he’d already started finagling his transfer to San Francisco, no idea that he was already planning to cradle my head during delivery. A few years ago I dug up some old e-mails from that time, and sure enough, there it was in black-and-white: in October 2000 Boudewijn wrote that Brigitte was making a big deal—rightfully so, he felt—of his infertility.)

Now he said: “And soon, your parents. Be sure to greet your father for me.”

“I’ll do that.”

That boat. The fucking
Barbara Ann
. We really had to get rid of it, preferably in one shot, one viewing, because I was not about to travel back here from the States a second time. She was moored in the marina where we’d left her the previous summer. I was to meet the potential buyer the day after tomorrow in Sainte-Maxime, a wealthy American ICT guy I had met through McKinsey who spent his winters in Monaco and had recently been on the lookout for a Palmer Johnson like ours.

I crossed into France well before noon and decided to push on until Lyons, so as to arrive in Sainte-Maxime early the next day and take my time readying the boat. The
route de soleil
was, on my own in the Alfa, a different experience altogether: a bleak, monotonous streak through restlessly leafy hills, the sleepy
aire
restaurants and parking lots, no sunflowers, no traffic jams, no expectations. I had to do my best not to constantly think back on the Vluchtestraat and what I’d seen there. Why did things always go differently than you expected? Hours of dark toll roads later I found myself in Christmassy downtown Lyons, booked into a hotel with a sagging bed where I didn’t get a wink of sleep.

At the end of November my mother called me at McKinsey. She caught me so by surprise I didn’t even have time to die of shock. Suddenly I was sitting in a full office courtyard with my mother on the line—I had no idea what to expect, and in fact I’ve never figured out whether she was just pretending everything was hunky-dory, or if everything really
was
hunky-dory. She was as sweet as pie, gave no indication that she knew anything about the
glass door incident. She asked if I would come to Val-d’Isère for Christmas. The half-second delay allowed me to invent an excuse: sorry, Mom, tons of work to do over Christmas. A few days later I really
was
sorry, because since deciding to keep the baby, something else was growing in me as well, an idea, a plan, a notion that I had started to cherish as though I were carrying twins. I took folic acid to strengthen them both at once.

The next morning, completely wiped out, I drove through Provence. Despite the mild weather I was still cold; a profound melancholy began to seep into my bones. At Chambéry, the exit I would use tomorrow to head back up to Val-d’Isère, I saw a bright speck of light. A minuscule hole in my perception, as though an extra-intense white heat pricked through the day’s movie screen. I glanced at the dashboard, at my hands on the sporty three-spoke steering wheel, and then back to the road.

“
Fuck.
”

Here we go again. I’d been asking for this for weeks, I was well aware of that. The last one was before the fireworks disaster, so I’d had, believe it or not, six migraine-free months behind me, I had warded them off with abracadabras and incantations. But the day of reckoning had arrived. Within minutes the illuminated speck spread into a fist-sized, swirling diamond of light—more eager than usual, it seemed, as though someone wanted to fast-forward the misery. The aura phase, the doctors call it. I had been familiar with the routine since high school: fifteen minutes from now all I’d see would be fireworks, everything would become a dancing, burning, full-screen light show. After a while the diamond would disappear, followed by a half-hour respite. Then the migraine would hammer a nail into my temple.