Authors: Peter Buwalda
Again he shoves the laptop away from him and flops back onto the mattress. Why in God’s name does he even want to know the truth? Monday, when he’s back in Enschede, he’ll unsubscribe from the site and never give it another thought. Unfortunately, that is just not how he is. For a while he stares up at the wooden blades of the ceiling fan. Your mind’s in a muddle. Maybe Tineke was right. It’s that business about Wilbert, it’s paranoia. Be realistic. The chance that Joni resembles that girl is thousands of times greater than that it’s actually her. Everybody has a double, there might be 100 of his own walking around. Smooth-skinned girls are a dime a dozen. He sits up and brings the computer back to his lap. The plastic underside is hot. Turn it around—you owe it to her to turn it around. Look for evidence to the contrary.
He enlarges the photo, zooming in at its edge, focuses on the bookcase. He can read the spines. English-language paperbacks and hardcovers: Mary Higgins Clark, Harold Robbins, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, John Grisham, Sue Grafton. Pulp. On the next shelf down there are larger books, also in English, books about gardening (
The Practical Rock & Water Garden
), cookbooks (
Eating by the Book: What the Bible Says About Food, Fat, Fitness & Faith
), self-help junk (
Narcissism: Denial of the True Self
). Come on, this is a genuine American bookcase! This half-baked little library is somewhere in Utah. Belongs to a completely different girl. Who is this Linda, anyway? She still lives at home, no, she’s being raised by her deaf great-aunt and this is the long-forgotten attic room. He drags the photo upward with the cursor, bringing the bottom shelf into view. Behind the slender zoomed-in ankle and chair leg he sees four books in familiar yellow and black.
Beekeeping for Dummies, BBQ Sauces, Rubs & Marinades for Dummies, Jazz for Dummies …
Jazz for Dummies
. A brand-new thought comes bulldozing through his head: who does this babe make her coquettish crap
with
? He zooms back out, studies the entire picture again, clicks ahead a couple of photos: they are professionally done, they’re almost … slick. She can’t do it alone, of course she’s not doing this alone. Just say—just say this girl
is
Joni, then it would have to be … that makes … the guy whom he meets twice a week on the judo mat responsible for … Stop it, stop right now. Joni
and
Aaron?
He clicks further, pausing at a photo taken in what looks like a boat. She is naked, except for a green bikini top (does he know Joni’s bikinis?—no, of course not), lying on a round bed with a red coverlet. In the background he sees arching wooden cabinets, a transparent door that probably leads to the shower cubicle and, higher up, rose-colored portholes. Her black hair has now been put
up (can you put up a wig?), she holds the tip of her tongue against her upper lip and looks into the lens with blasé nonchalance. In the next photo she is kneeling in front of the bed, left cheek on the beige carpet, her back hollow, breasts on the floor. Knees spread, the pink soles of her feet closest to the camera, she thrusts her butt backward, still looking at the camera, to the left, next to her face, a pair of silver heels. The sharpness of the face: he can make out the grains of mascara on her eyelashes. The brazen litheness with which she offers her ass and gazes at him with that open, stunning, indifferent look. In the next shot she’s holding her smooth-shaven netherlips open with her index and middle finger, after that one, there’s a dildo; suddenly this huge black thing penetrates her, deeply at first, and since she is pulling apart her butt cheeks with both hands, with each successive photo it’s slightly less deep, until the plastic penis is lying on the rug. The last photo is a close-up of her face.
Those eyes, he sees in slow motion, are blue. The eyes are
steel-blue
. A wave of euphoria flows through his body. Joni’s eyes are dark brown! He pushes the laptop aside, gets up and walks back and forth between the curtains and the bed. He goes into the bathroom, splashes cold water on his face.
It isn’t her. Of course it isn’t her
. He walks back to the bed, closes Windows, turns off the computer. Turn it off, all of it.
He takes his trousers from the chair, fishes around for his cell phone. Call Joni, say something nice to her. It’s half-past eleven, making it … four-thirty in Holland. He scrolls through his contacts until he finds her name, presses the green telephone icon. A Chinese voice says something, and then the line goes dead. No connection? He finds the number of her student house and dials. Rustling silence, ever deepening, then a busy signal.
Still relieved, he throws off his robe and walks naked to the
minibar. He takes out a second Budweiser, sits on the high bed, pillows propped behind his back. He turns on the television and takes long swigs of beer. He surfs along a Chinese opera, a film with Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston, a kick-boxing match. He gets caught up in a news broadcast, a Chinese female newscaster is talking about President Jiang Zemin, he sees Madeleine Albright getting off an airplane somewhere. Then there’s an item about an accident in some foreign country. He sees a European-looking residential neighborhood with fireworks exploding above the houses in broad daylight. The crackle and claps on the TV get louder, the picture becomes choppy—his eyes fall shut. Only now that the catastrophe has been averted does he realize how exhausted he is. He lets the remote control slip out of his hand and rolls over onto his side.
Until this morning, my sister was the only one from Enschede I’d heard anything from, more than five years ago already. It must have been late summer 2003, just before I moved to Los Angeles and disappeared off the face of the earth, and the first time since Siem’s death that anyone from the family had contacted me. I was still leading my cushy bourgeois existence with Boudewijn and Mike in San Francisco. Janis was traveling along the West Coast for a month with a guy named Timo. They stayed with us for one night up on the hill.
Janis had already been in California for two weeks when she phoned. Maybe it was the migraine, but I didn’t recognize her voice right away. She was calling from a pay phone in Monterey, disturbingly nearby, en route to San Francisco—
you do live there, don’t you?—that is where you live, right?
They’d spent more than thirty dollars tracking down my number, a complicated phone marathon that started with McKinsey Amsterdam. I was touched that she’d taken the trouble.
The next morning, a blue rental Ford crunched up the driveway and out stepped a sunburned Janis, followed by a pallid fellow who wore his lustreless black hair in a long braid. Despite the heat he was dressed from head to toe in heavy black clothes. By way of contrast, Boudewijn ambled over to them in his espadrilles, a hotpink polo shirt and minuscule bathing suit, and led them, chatting cheerfully, around the side of our typical Russian Hill house to the
secluded backyard. There I stood, at the edge of the kidney-shaped swimming pool, and found myself in an awkward hug with Janis. She had got heavy; she had our mother’s figure. “So you’re Joni,” Timo mumbled, without taking off his sunglasses.
I showed them the New York-designed living room and felt an odd apprehension as they walked over to the panoramic glass wall and looked out silently over the Marina District. No one had ever stood there without oohing and aahing. The glass curved around the corner and into the kitchen, it made you want to hang glide down to the ocean. “To the left, in the distance, you can see the Golden Gate Bridge,” I said, “and Alcatraz off to the right,” but they didn’t say a word.
I led them downstairs, where I had made up a double bed in the garden room. Timo traced his finger through the dust on Boudewijn’s Seeburg V200 and asked if we had a room
without
a jukebox. So I showed them their bathroom, after which I threw open the doors to the sloping lawn. Janis walked across the grass with a choppy gait, inspected the flower beds and the pruned palm trees, and squeezed her broad backside into the Toys “R” Us swing set bought with Mike’s future toddler years in mind. “Do you guys have a gardener?” she asked.
When we went back up a while later, we were met by a muted whining: Mike, who had woken up from the unfamiliar bonk of Timo’s boots on the stairs. A brief but intense splash of surprise across Janis’s red face. A child? Without a word she bent over Mike’s crib in his baby-blue room and lightly ran a finger over his stomach.
“I didn’t know Janis was an aunt,” Timo said to break the silence.
“I didn’t know Mike had an uncle,” I answered.
After a taciturn lunch at the Japanese Tea House, which Timo paid for with an edgy snicker, we walked in pairs through Golden
Gate Park, Janis and I side by side, Boudewijn pushing the stroller and conversing with the pasty-white “commie,” as he called Janis’s boyfriend in the blissful privacy of our own car. I could tell that Boudewijn stepped up their tempo to give Janis and me some time to ourselves. As the men turned into little dolls, Timo a squaw with that braid of his, my sister and I sauntered through the decor of blossoming willows and ancient oaks. It was hot and humid, and sweat beaded up under Janis’s cropped henna-hair. Our parents used to bring us here when we lived in Berkeley, twenty eons ago; we would pile into the pickup and drive from Bonita Avenue over the Bay Bridge, Janis and me on the sticky front seat, wedged between my parents, my father at the wheel. I asked her if she remembered that.
“I hardly remember anything about California.”
The path sloped slightly. Our footsteps crunched precisely in time. How old was Janis back in 1982: five?
“Tineke used to fill that red wicker basket with food,” I said to refresh her memory, “you know, the one out on the front porch of the farmhouse in Enschede.”
“You’re calling your mother by her first name? What’s the deal?”
I took a deep breath and said: “Janis—why do you think Siem killed himself?”
Her pace faltered for a moment. She took her sunglasses off her spiked hair and set them on her nose, which by now had taken on the color of a grilled sausage.
“Do you and … Mom think
I
had anything to do with it?”
She stopped and placed a sweaty hand on my shoulder. “There’s something in my shoe,” she said, wobbling, as she wriggled a swollen foot out of her All Star. Someone, maybe Pocahontas over there, had drawn a peace sign on the green canvas with a blue ballpoint pen. She shook a pebble out of the sneaker and got down on one knee to put it back on. “Joni,” she said to my thigh, “Mom and
I haven’t heard from you in three years. You weren’t at the funeral. We don’t think about you much. And if we do think about you, we’re more inclined to think you have nothing to do with anything at all.”
After we had put Mike to bed, with those two almost palpably killing time in the living room, Bo installed himself in the open kitchen as a man who is out to impress his twenty-years-younger in-laws and whipped up some pasta with fresh Bay crab. I sat upright on the sofa across from Timo and Janis and listened to a peevish account of their tours of those “ludicrously commercial” Hollywood film studios and endured a report of the financial details concerning their recently acquired row house in Deventer. There was some to-do about a permit regarding a tree in their neighbor’s yard, or maybe the tree was in their own yard, and the tree needed to be chopped down or not chopped down, and Timo was taking or not taking legal action. He was clearly a good match for my sister; I could tell he detested me on ideological grounds. I was too rich, I was too pretty, I had a despicable boyfriend, McKinsey was despicable. The deliberate way he nodded when I said anything, or just sat there fiddling with his black cuffs, indifferently picking at a loose cuticle—his entire demeanor announced how pleased he was with the 9,000 kilometers between San Francisco and Deventer.
The evening sun nudged our shadows across the floor tiles; below us, the illuminated houses of the Marina twinkled like a thousand tea lights. We talked awkwardly about nothing. I was already longing for my bed when Janis suddenly launched into an account of the terrible ordeal our mother had been through, the heartbreaking sale of the farmhouse six months after Siem’s death,
and how she phoned her every day in her rental flat in Hengelo, for a chat, but in fact to make sure she was still alive.
“She hates me because I left my mother in the lurch,” I said to Boudewijn later in bed. “And because I didn’t tell them about Mike.” Now that those two were downstairs soiling our sheets, I felt the anger well up.
“Sisters don’t think that kind of thing,” Boudewijn said from his half. “This just takes some getting used to. She didn’t just show up for no reason. You’re obsessing. I didn’t think it was so bad. Tomorrow, after breakfast, we’ll take a walk through Chinatown, let Timo loose among the comrades. They’ll thaw, you’ll see.”
My irritation had subsided by the time I got up at 4 a.m. to soothe a crying Mike. As I calmed the little guy down I realized that Bo was right: Janis was the one who’d taken the first step, not me, even though that step hadn’t really amounted to much yet. Even in the old days, when we were just starting to think for ourselves, we argued about fundamental issues, had furious arguments about nuclear weapons, about money, about music, capitalism—anything, as long as it was principled and painful—in each other’s face like a pair of bickering fishwives, after which, as if by magic, a contrite peace came over us, probably thanks to the fact that we were in the same genetic boat.
Come morning, I fetched Mike and laid him in bed next to Boudewijn while I padded downstairs in a cotton dress. I had a strange urge to really splash out, flaunt our bourgeois American Dream. So on Friday, just after Janis’s phone call, I had left Silicone Valley, throbbing migraine and all, and interrupted an already long drive home to stock up at Safeway and even went all the way to a Holland Deli in Palo Alto, a ridiculous little shop with a ridiculously oversized wooden clog as big as a small car at the front entrance. I bought Gouda cheese, Dutch gingerbread,
currant buns, and
speculaas
. Already at the checkout counter I hated myself for going the whole hog, but now I was glad I did. Whatever Janis reported about me back in that chickenshit country, it wasn’t going to be my fault.