Western Alliances, page 35
Once inside her, he looked at her lying there until she made eye contact, exposed, sprawled beneath him, her wig crooked but part of the sexiness of the scene. “I see you wear a wig,” he said. “You are in disguise. You are not Emilie Jenssen—who are you really?” He began to sway back and forward, ending the forward thrust more abruptly. “Tell me, who are you?”
“I am one of the Russian women you see in the high-priced hotel bars.”
“A Russian whore?”
“Det … er perfekt, keep like that, ja? I am very high-priced. You cannot afford, I think.”
Roberto, inspired, reached over to his suitcase, where he had an inner zipper pocket in which he had a bank envelope of euros, which were no good in Norway. Five hundred in twenties. He took the money and put the stack in her face. “Maybe you would rather I fuck you with this, hmm?” The money went everywhere. “Open your mouth…” She blew the money away, laughing. “You are worth every dollar, euro, kroner…”
“That is not even close to what I charge my clients…”
This and a few other semi-scenarios with campy dirty talk provided what she was looking for, and with Roberto inside, and an assist from her own hand, she found her way easily to orgasm. She always went quick, Roberto remembered, but no, Take a bow, he told himself. This is the first time you have managed to please a woman in the longest time. Contact the historical society to erect a plaque. He felt warm and prideful—perhaps, at last, he was on the comeback trail.
When they lay there recovering, side by side, she reached over since it was “his turn,” but the evanescent circulatory moment had passed.
“It’s the blood thinners,” he said. “It is a sign of your irresistible sexiness, Emilie, that the slumbering beast rose from its den once more. You had a nickname for it, something Norse, but I’ve forgotten it.”
“Thor’s hammer, perhaps.”
“Oh, please, since the beginning of time, every Norwegian girlfriend has lied to her mediocre lover and called his cock Thor’s hammer. It was a dragon or a serpent…”
“Ja ja ja, it was Jörmungandr, the longest snake on earth. Wrapped around the whole globe, in fact.”
They were hungry, and Roberto found that his passion for authentic Norwegian dining—the Matjes herring, the cured fish, the reindeer sausage with lingonberry compote—was deserting him. It was all Norwegian 7-Eleven junk food around the clock.
They bought prepackaged sandwiches and went for a picnic to the just-opened opera house, a wondrous modern temple where slanted planes of white marble allowed people to wander above, beside, around the auditorium, down to the harbor, up to a precipitous knife-edge height to see the futuristic rows of eye-catching skyscrapers designed for contemporary Oslo. The mirrored walls reflecting the planes made it an Escher staircase brought to life, causing one to stare, squint, and attempt to resolve the true perspectives when seen across the harbor.
Roberto mentioned his plan to teach conversational English in Svalbard.
“Do watch out for the polar bears. They eat one or two people a year.”
“I need to get away, isolate myself from my family’s money drama.”
“I sometimes think,” she said, trying to manage a tuna sandwich in which the filling was squirting out both ends, “that you and me should have been…” Her English gave out. “Maybe I should have picked you and not Karl.”
“I bet Karl has no circulation problems,” Roberto said, hoping to keep it light.
“No, he is always ready to go. But if you had married me, we would be in Florida or California, somewhere warm. You would work on your Notebook; I would sleep with hotel bellboys and tourists from around the globe. We would have traveled the world, hiked up every mountain … I am like a character in Ibsen, having married wrongly.”
“If you’re Hedda Gabler, then that means you will put my Notebook in the fireplace.”
“And that you must have vine leaves in your hair. Which you do, metaforisk—how you say?”
“Metaphorically.”
“Would you have had children with me?”
Who could say no to children with this woman, though? Sweet, smiling, maternal, patient Emilie, good genes … But why say that to Emilie, who was feeling around for reasons to be happy where she was? “Never,” he insisted, a little dramatically. “Do not want kids. And you are a natural mother, so it would be a crime if you ended up with me.”
Her phone buzzed. It was a text, and her expression changed. “Dritt. Karl has come to get me at the dentist’s, and of course I am not there. He may suspect…” Her mind worked through a small drama. “If he asks them, they will say I canceled, so I have to explain where…”
Roberto stood, and they started walking three blocks to the train station. “I was going to take you and Karl out for dinner this Friday, right?” he asked. “Say I felt bad but will have to leave for Svalbard early; I misjudged the trains and ferries. But I left money to take you both out, and I insisted you come to get it.” Roberto reached into his jeans for the big-euro bills he thoughtlessly reassembled and stuffed in his pocket when dressing back at the hotel room. “Take these and say I gave them to you last night, but you had to go to the train station to exchange the bills for kroner. And it was all supposed to be a surprise, but alas, now he has learned. Text him and say you’ll meet him at the station.”
“Ja, that’s … that’s good. Okay, I will pay you back.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
She kissed his cheek and started for the station, just three blocks away. Waving, smiling, winsome, and Nordic—whoa, she came running back. “Um, take the wig. Karl will know something is up if I went out in the wig.”
Roberto took the mass of blond tresses and offered her his wool cap.
“No,” she said. “He knows all my caps. But I’ll freeze…” She pulled it on her head. “I’ll say you left it and I was returning it … but why didn’t I take my own cap?” She handed him back his cap. “It is my punishment to have a cold head—here.” She skipped away, now twice as fast to limit her time outside. Only a block away did she turn around and wave, smiling, laughing at herself. It had been a great adulterous one-off adventure. There would be a bit of nerves as she lied several lies in succession but Karl would not notice or if he did he would not pry to learn what he did not want to know and life in Grefsen would continue in its pace. Was this their last visit? Would he look her up again? Probably not, to preserve their fond ending and not invite further sordidness.
How odd it seemed. Here on the threshold of all the money and time and life ahead of him to be with friends and lovers, it felt instead as if he were on some kind of farewell tour, a concert pianist on a retirement series of encores. Hélène, Lucrezia, Emilie, goodbye, goodbye, remember me fondly as you race with open arms toward middle age and the suburbs. Was I a good memory? Do I warrant a smile when you’re standing at your sink some late afternoon? Goodbye, even, to Rachel and Merle. Rupesh would live on; they were each other’s last man standing.
He walked back to the hotel so as not to run into Karl solo or Karl and Emilie together. Particularly carrying her blond wig. He might as well follow his lie and pack up, leave for Svalbard early, working his way up the coast.
If you are a lucky traveler, you will have some excuse to head north up the coast of Norway, where the most comfortable ingenious towns cling to the most spectacular scenery on the planet.
Roberto, earning the resentment of passengers in the forward lounge, would open the door to the cold foredeck of the ferry. Leaning into the chill of the April wind like the figurehead on the prow of the ship, cursing, screaming aloud, enduring the face-numbing agony, Roberto was victorious in getting the photos of these wondrous storybook fishing villages. They were affixed, somehow, to the sharp rocks on this rind of coast, where thousand-meter cliffs plunged to the waterline. These were the wild waters of the Kraken. This was the home of the Maelstrom, the whirlpool that presented itself when the inner bay of the Lofoten Islands contrasted grievously with the outer ocean, and tides, temperatures, and winds collaborated to open a hole in the ocean. Actually, the Maelstrom of Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe and Pirates of the Caribbean, swallowing ships swirling ever downward to a vortex of a dry, dark ocean floor, does not exist … but looking around at the roiling seas, you wouldn’t put it past the Norse gods to let it rip on occasion.
Roberto had a cabin for the final leg of the trip, to Tromsø, the last city with a large-enough airport for an escape. He would stay the night there and decide: follow through and head North Pole-ward to Svalbard … or bail out, giving health reasons, which would be a plausible excuse, and go back to Oslo, then Amsterdam, then Rupesh’s bed.
Tromsø was aglow with interior lights, which gave a muted sheen to the snow on the ground and low fog in the sky, cozy, inviting. The Radisson Hotel (among the pricier chains in the U.S., among the cheaper in Norway) had every human comfort, a still-open restaurant, a bar … great Wi-Fi.
He looked over the recent dabblings on his Notebook’s preface. So much was dated or immature, unusable. Even an exuberant alternative intro that he had just written in Oslo:
As I write in 2009, I can’t help but think about the long-awaited change of the empowered generations in North America—Justin Trudeau in Canada, Barack Obama in the United States—will be part of the West’s further advance beyond the parts of the world organized by tribe or ethnicity or subject peoples passed from dictator-father to dictator-son. Am I wrong to think that a Golden Age of European–UK Commonwealth–American alignment is now imminent? Isn’t this the very combination of powers and sensibilities who will rally to defeat climate change? Income equality? World hunger
… yeah and cure cancer and give everyone lollipops. He can’t just propagandize for the Western world. Merle just maybe had a point. His Notebook’s warehouse of notes, of riffs, of musings, was nowhere near becoming a proper consideration of culture.
All right, north to Svalbard! To the pole! Three or four months locked away in the cold, with no social life or love life, writing and refining every day, would do the trick!
And Now, the Police
But it did not take any time at all for the old traps and snares to present themselves.
The lovely administrator at the Activity Center (Ragnhild) slipped him a phone number; at least two of his students—the svelte Russians, Natalya and Svetlana—had let it be known he was attractive; the obviously gay guy from Food Services in the university food hall, Dogukan, from Central Asia, with those irresistible Eurasian eyes and golden skin, gave him a second look.
Longyearbyen delivered on that end-of-the-world-outpost sensibility. It was still night most of the time in March; to the north, there was the faint green smudge of the aurora borealis, to the south, there was a turquoise glow as daylight kept getting ever closer to peeking over the horizon. Svalbard’s main town was just a few north-south streets, a hotel or two, a bistro or two, a coffeehouse or two, the university at the bottom of the hill, an array of housing built for polar conditions, and the famous Seed Vault plugged into the side of a mountain, where a million seeds are preserved in a chamber five hundred feet under the earth, in the event of doomsday, nuclear exchange, global extinctions. For the longest time, the concept seemed fantastic.
Roberto selected, from his list of rental possibilities, the farthest-away house from town. He hoped he could see polar bears wander down the slopes to look through a trash can or two, then turn around for the interior. Everyone seemed quite alarmed about the polar bears, grateful to go months without seeing one. Roberto wanted to see one, just not face-to-face. If you traveled away from the village, you had to be armed—that was a rule. Another rule: you must make every effort not to die in Longyearbyen. The original Norwegian settlers of this Arctic isle learned the hard way: the body will not rot in the frozen earth, and the bears will detect the carrion odor and come dig you up for a meal.
His reward for choosing a place so far from the coffee shop in which he conducted the lessons was 1) bad phone service—he would have to buy a local phone and a Norwegian-based service contract to solve that—and 2) some of the coldest walks of his lifetime.
His sister, in their past life, had had another kind of picture-transfer they enjoyed—to find the remotest, most desolate, most underfunded schools, take a picture of the most unloved 1950s building, and send the photo to the other, writing, OH LOOK, I HAVE FOUND THE PLACE WHERE YOU’LL END UP TEACHING! Some snow-covered polytechnic in Slovakia, repurposed from a communist-era compound. An inhumanly Bauhaus series of concrete box buildings in provincial Luxembourg in the rain, and so on. And he had hoped that the university branch in Longyearbyen would top them all: some rusted-out, winter-battered, corrugated metal series of huts, slit windows from which teachers and students looked out longingly, yearning for some kind of Bergman-film death by lying down in the winter drifts … But of course not.
This was Norway. The Polar Institute looked warmer, lovelier, and more up-to-date than half the campuses in America. There were computers, a great Wi-Fi signal, banks of outlets for recharging all one’s devices. Message boards were exciting—who wanted to run out to the Sassen-Bünsow Land National Park to help resupply the Climate Change Polar Ice Measuring Team? And the students were from central casting—Norwegian could-be Olympians, pink with sun- and windburn, out cross-country skiing, rifles across their torsos (for the bears or maybe target shooting), fit, blond, clad in enviably patterned sweaters, sexy, inspiringly omni-capable.
Word spread that Roberto was halfway entertaining, and he kept gaining students. Two more guys from Ukraine—he combined their tutorial; an older Norwegian woman whose English was just fine, though she felt inadequate (perhaps the lessons were so she might have company); and a few others signed his sheet but did not show. But his intensest focus was on the two Russian women, Natalya and Svetlana, both recent immigrants to Norway, hoping to lose the Russian accents, which Roberto (and anyone interested romantically in women) hoped they would never lose.
“Ve have wery big party at house. You come? Bring wodka?” Svetlana’s hour of instruction was devoted mostly to rounding the rough edges of her English; her only topic was Moscow and how much she missed it. He learned her brother-in-law’s name was Yuri.
“Not Yuri Yurkov?” he asked as suddenly an ancient name came flooding back to him. How could he have forgotten it? The pale, pouty-lipped Russian model that Lucrezia made him kiss in the disco. It was Yuri Yurkov who told him, “My last name sound like jerk off in English, yes?” And indeed, through the years, on some occasional moods, the last name for Roberto had proven prophetic …
“Yuri yours friend?”
“Is Yuri a friend of yours? you should say.”
“Too many words, such clutter! Is Yuri friend of yours?”
Eh, close enough. “Yes.” And Roberto lied for efficiency, saying he modeled in Milan and Yuri was a colleague there. Did he have a web page? Could they find him on the internet? Svetlana could tear through the Cyrillic pages lightning fast; Roberto was happy to have her perform this service.
“If he was pretty and famous model, he maybe no come home, da?”
But after very little searching of Юрий Юрков and, for good measure, модель (modeli), a professional page turned up.
“Ahh,” she said. “Too pretty for straight man.”
The last round of photos was from 2007, so perhaps Yuri of the pouting lips had moved on to another profession. One photo had him smiling in front of an upscale clothing store in Moscow.
On the third lesson, she had asked him to come to her apartment. The wreckage from her wery big party had not entirely been cleaned away. An empty vodka bottle—Finnish, in a lack of Russian patriotism—sat atop the fish tank. After ten minutes about familiarity versus formality, Svetlana said, “We have old proverb. Russians always with proverbs, da? Romansy sozdayutsya na nebesakh. ‘Couples made in heaven.’ Understand meaning? If two people each other are to love, it was first in mind of God.”
“We have a venerable philosopher, Dolly Parton, who in her teachings wisely noted, ‘If two people are gonna fuck, then they’re gonna go ahead and fuck.’”
Svetlana thought about it and then nodded. “Yes.” She began unbuttoning her shirt. “I love American music. I know of who Dolly Parton. With the…” She pantomimed bosoms, which she did with a sneer, being so different from her less buxom attributes.
“I need to tell you something, my Sveta.”
“Oh.” She began buttoning back up. “Dolly Parton–knowing, friend-of-gay-Yuri . . you are no for woman. Konechno, prosti, prosti, prosti…”
“No! Something else.” Roberto pulled down the neck of his Brown University sweatshirt until the heart-operation scar was evident. He explained his heart condition and that things down below might disappoint, but he would assure her pleasure.
“Disappoint?” She laughed, the buttons now recommitted to unfastening. “Russian men after wodka is same.”
So this period of isolation, this self-imposed exile of work, a serious draft of his Notebook—this was already giving way to wery big parties with new friends, coffee with the Polar Region students in the morning, time-waste with the Wi-Fi at the university, then afternoon lessons leading to sleeping with his conversational English students, the standard pattern worn into the earth like the migration of reindeer herds, just as Roberto had done for the last, oh, nine years. Henry James spoke of his admiration for Byron for moving himself for months to the most boring town in Italy, Ravenna, which was bereft of society in the nineteenth century, so he could finish Don Juan. It showed the scoundrel, playboy, rhymester could knuckle down and get to business, after all. Not so, apparently, for Roberto Costa … On the other hand, you read about the work habits of Balzac (the rich gourmandizing) and Hugo (the two mistresses) and Maupassant (sex ten times a day with any woman, anywhere), and his own creative methods were comparatively chaste. But then, he wasn’t French.
