Authors: Peter Buwalda
The whiskey plows furrows in his throat. He has to try to address a number of questions in the right order. How bad is this? Start there. How bad is a daughter who prostitutes herself? He has to assess the damage. How bad is what his daughter is doing? And is it really prostitution? Yes, he thinks it is—and is immediately indignant: she, with her brains, with her opportunities. Your daughter sells close-ups of her genitals on the Internet. It’s a disaster. She is bankrupt.
He
is bankrupt.
More Jim Beam, the gulp goes down like a dagger, try to calm down. It is a bottle he’d brought back with him from Shanghai—he realizes that he hasn’t for a second thought of Aaron. What’s his part in all this? This is
Aaron’s
house, it is his attic, his computer, his photography equipment. Coercion? He lunges forward, grabs one of the badminton rackets and smacks the edge of the table. Is he coercing her? No—he knows those two too well to believe that, it’s impossible. Joni can’t be coerced, she is too headstrong, too dominant. The epitome of free will. Aaron is a follower—he thinks this to his own surprise. Only now does he despise himself for his
concern
. When he still hoped for a happy ending, he was mainly concerned for Joni, he loved his daughter so much that it was
her
future that mattered most. Was she mentally sound? Was she under pressure? But now: forget it. He is incensed, now that the truth spits in his face he’s
livid
. What does that little bitch
think?
How could she be so stupid? So sleazy, so perverse. How could she? Do you realize what you’re doing, Joni? The risks you’re taking? Public risks? What if this gets out? How ostracized do you want to become, Joni Sigerius?
Drink and think. He sags on the stiff sofa like a zombie. For a moment he feels like giving in to the heavy, deep fatigue, but then bolts upright. Blood rushes to his head.
What about himself?
When this gets out? A Minister of Education with a double watermark on his stationery: murder
and
prostitution. A son who bashed a man to death and a daughter turning tricks on the Internet. Porn times murder, behold the formula of his life. Oh yes, they’ll drag Wilbert into it for sure, everything will be dredged up. He’ll be drummed out of office, they’ll hound and humiliate him until there’s nothing left of him. What did I do to deserve this? Has my luck run out? The sweat beads on his back, his legs are sticky.
Try to remain analytical. Think in terms of solutions. It is a
crisis, not a catastrophe—not yet, at least. He still has almost a week to take measures. He has to come up with a plan of action before they return, a strategy to defuse this crisis that’s not yet a catastrophe. Should he confront them? Take a hard line, give them a piece of his mind, should he unmask them, castigate them? Yes. No. He doesn’t know. Perhaps it’s better to collude with them; an enemy, he thinks, won’t be able to talk sense into them. What they’re doing is legal, they are adults. It isn’t manslaughter, after all. Antagonize them and you’ve lost them. It will only egg them on. You have to confront them and negotiate openly.
Sounds from outside reach him through a rising haze of alcohol; somewhere in a backyard, football fans are gearing up for the impending match. He has got over the initial shock. His anger subsides, the whiskey relaxes him somewhat. His thoughts flow into another channel, again he arrives at his father. Could he be off the mark? Just like his old man was off the mark? Are there, like back then, two realities? Two truths colliding? Is he keeping up with the times? Is that attic room no more than a frivolous youthful indiscretion? Again he grabs the racket and slams a dent into the edge of the table. Don’t be so soft, man! We’re not talking about
judo
. This is damn well about …
And yet. Something’s gnawing at him, a faint hypocritical nibbling, and the more he drinks, the more difficult it is to ignore. The ironic fact that he … that he happened upon this whole sordid business as a consumer, as one of Joni’s
clients
, that he wasn’t tipped off by a concerned third party, the fact is he
paid
, he transferred
money
to those two for exactly what he’s now so vehemently condemning—the mind-boggling, tangled duplicity starts to dawn on him. The hard white light of his moral indignation strikes a prism and is refracted into a spectrum of nuanced and emotional doom.
The years of Joni’s blossoming womanhood. His absurdly stilted efforts to avoid any semblance of erotic interest. Woody Allen’s relationship with his stepdaughter, he and Tineke watch the evening news, and he furiously switches off the television, can’t stand to hear it. Unbearable. How he prudishly stopped going in the bathroom while Joni showered, put an end to the tickling and roughhousing on the sofa or in the garden—memories he juxtaposes against the outrageous fate now confronting him, the awful awareness that this is the very same girl—woman—he has unwittingly been leering at and lusting after.
Anxiety about the Internet, which he has believed in since day one, which he even, as a scientist and administrator, helped foster, and that now has infiltrated his campus as a bordello. Grim thoughts of Aaron, of the young man who pretends to be his friend, whom he has admitted to his inner circle. Who is this Aaron Bever, actually? He glances around, takes a better look at Aaron’s things, the expensive Luxman amplifier and CD player, the electrostatic speakers, the thousands of books, the furniture he suddenly notices as remarkably exclusive, pricey.
Disquiet about his role as a parent. What did he do wrong? Did he miss the signals? Focus too much on achievement? Did he
talk
to her enough? In his mind he tries a case of nature versus nurture; proposed settlement: it is nature
and
nurture. Did not raise his son, did not conceive his daughters—the outcome would make him weep if the alcohol hadn’t tempered his nerves. Brooding over the year he had both of them under his wing, Wilbert
and
Joni, about his far-reaching suspicions regarding his own son, his concern for Wilbert’s hormonal response to the sudden flowering of his younger stepsister. One question mixes like poison into the stream: what can you expect from a stranger’s genes?
Is
she really his daughter? Who
is
Joni?
• • •
Meanwhile the whiskey also … softens him, eliciting a laissez-faire mood that’s entirely unlike him. The corset of his respectability, the straitjacket of his status, the restraints of his … generation? start to slacken. He is relaxed. He loves them, doesn’t he? He loves Joni, with all his heart, he even loves Aaron. Put yourself in their shoes. The seclusion and solitude of Aaron’s house invites him to do just that. The sincere question of
why
they do it—why do they do it? Does it give them pleasure? The answer is obvious, of course it gives them pleasure. It turns them on. They’re young, rich, reckless. They just do it. They do it out of lust and greed. And him? He likes Jim Beam.
It’s a quarter to eight. He stands up, giddy, totters over to the liquor cabinet, places the whiskey with a crystalline smack against the bottle next to it. He dabs his lips with his sleeve. Another mood has now taken over, a dark mood, a mood that perhaps doesn’t even matter. Shivers run through his body as he leaves the room. The stairs up to the next floor sound hollow. It doesn’t have to take long. His heart racing, he closes all the doors on the landing, laundry room, bathroom, study, bedroom. He takes a deep breath, grasps the folding attic stairs, lets go again, wipes his sweaty hands on his trousers. Consumed by vicious self-pity,
I deserve this
, he begins climbing the squeaking steps. The sweet scent of talcum powder whets his resolve. He is
not
Woody Allen, he is
not
the Minister of Education.
The attic is an attic in Kentucky. Holding his breath, he closes the trapdoor and surveys the room. How to go about this? There are so many possibilities. The silence is profound, but he still hears
it, a little tune reaches him from the far corner, it’s coming from the shoe rack, the colorful pipe organ of high heels. Maybe the rack waited, let him blow off some steam first. Maybe it’s been beckoning him all along.
He sniffs, undoes his laces, and kicks off his shoes; the carpet presses itself softly and gently into the soles of his feet. He can’t swallow. His trousers and boxers rustle as they fall to his bare ankles; panting, he tugs his shirt over his head. He walks around the bed, gruesomely naked all of a sudden, there is a new nakedness that has concealed itself under his ordinary nakedness, and he picks up the satin pump from the floor. While holding his foreskin between thumb and index finger, as though his phallus were an inflated balloon, he examines the shoe from all angles. He presses the slender heel against his balls, traces a line along the underside of his erection. Something soft, panties, a slip. With the shoe in his hand he goes to the other side of the attic and squats down in front of the canvas drawers, pulling open the middle one: nylons, fishnet stockings, garters, body stockings, tops, skirts, bras, countless panties. He roots around, feels, looks, pulls out a sheer black stocking, thrusts his nose into it: that same dark, exquisite talc smell. Touching the infinitely fine-woven fabric catapults him back to the 1950s, he glides above Delft, descending into his sister’s bedroom, and makes a belly-landing on her twin bed. Home alone, he controlled himself for as long as possible, but eventually reached under the iron box-spring and pulled out the hatbox where she kept her stockings. He examined them, felt them, inhaled the soft, feminine scent, in order to better imagine the feel and smell of the untouchable women’s legs he saw on the street, in the tram, during Miss Rethans’s English lessons. He was ashamed of it, thought he was sick, thought himself a deviant, especially once he found out there was a special word for his peculiar interests, a word he, still after all those years, detests.
With the stocking in his right hand, he gropes with his free hand in the drawer until he finds a pale pink elastic thong. Gulping back the tears, he steps into it, pulling it along his rounded judo calves and over his hairy thighs. The small triangle glides over his testicles, forcing his member up against his belly.
“There.” His voice sounds heavy and close by.
He inserts his left arm, his arm of choice, into the stocking until it reaches past his elbow. The fascination. Perhaps it is the delicacy. The gossamer fabric that is more womanly than the woman herself. He crosses the bloodred floor to the shoe rack and drops to his knees. Eighteen pairs, he counts, each one more tasteful than the other. No cheap junk, no sleazy overkill. Stylish, feminine. He doesn’t even bother with a photo series without them. In fact, stark naked doesn’t interest him. He doesn’t really even care for bodies. In that sense he is still a boy of twelve. He removes the shoes, one pair at a time, from the rack, arranges them around him as though they were Märklin model railway cars—
He desperately needs to pee. For a moment he tries to ignore the pressure on his bladder, but no, it’s the implacable Jim Beam. He’s on his feet, hurries down the groaning ladder, goes back down the stairs, his bare feet slapping against the steps. He ducks into the lavatory just off the passage. Evolutionary oversight: it’s either urinate or ejaculate. To make himself go limp he studies the calendar that hangs next to the roll of toilet paper,
The Super-Scrub Household Calendar
it’s called, nothing you’d expect Aaron to have, he looks up his own birthday, “SIGERIUS” is written in what must be Aaron’s handwriting. As soon as he has softened slightly, his urine begins to flow, the thong still snugly around his testicles.
Before he’s even finished his penis bounces back up like a spring, thwack, against his belly. He hears a nearby sound that makes his
blood run cold. The jangle of keys, a lock opening—
the door
. For a moment he feels only ice, his blood has frozen in his veins. Shoes scuffing against a threshold. He has to brace himself against both walls to keep from fainting. The neighbor. Tineke. Aaron’s parents.
“Gosh, lots of post.”
Joni
.
In a reflex he switches off the light. His mouth wide open, as though in the pitch-blackness he hears with his mouth: footsteps. Someone brushes against the lavatory door. Cramp in his chest, he’s having a heart attack.
He’s dying
. He seizes his penis, mortified, he grasps it tight, if he lets go he’ll disintegrate.
A door creaks open, the living room door? She goes into the room. Then: stronger footsteps, wiping feet. A hacking cough.
Aaron
. Every sound pierces through him. He’s caught in a tiled trap: intestines are primitive brains, Aaron’s and Joni’s know they are home and will be wanting to relieve themselves.
Aaron is approaching
. But Aaron, too, disappears into the living room. He wants to exhale, but instead he breathes in even deeper and kneads his erection with his free hand, slick with sweat.
Think
, damn it. Nothing comes.
Run for it. You have to run.
Someone turns on the television, TV-station sounds, the voice of a commentator. “Let’s unload the car now.” Aaron. He ejaculates. A stabbing wave surges through his back. Footsteps in the passage. Warm semen falls onto his left foot, his own scent. Silence, then footsteps again, they’re going outside.
They’re out at the car
.
Run for it. Now is the moment. Go,
now
. The only way is through the kitchen. He opens the lavatory door and with three giant steps bounds into the living room.
“I’ll give you a hand, honey.” Joni, standing at the dining table, her back to him, examining something, a stack of envelopes and
newspapers. Her neck is tanned, her pinned-up hair blonder than usual. The curtain has been pulled open. The room is bathed in devastatingly clear evening light.
“There’s a postcard from your brother.”
His teeth chatter. His daughter turns, the muscles in her suntanned face tighten, then slacken—and then shoot every which way. Her beautiful face dissolves. Joni herself collapses, she literally collapses. He sees himself in her grimace: naked, disheveled, one arm stuck in a nylon stocking. A raw scream comes splintering out of her contorted mouth.