Northernmost

by Peter Geye

  Ava looked around the restaurant. “You are the only customer left. I will clean up and then take a drink with you?”

  “That would be nice.”

  Ava stood and tucked hair behind both ears. “Enjoy the rest of your crab. I will tell him to play another song. Less sad. He knows every song in the world.”

  “Please ask him to play that one again.”

  Ava said she would, then walked toward the kitchen.

  Greta swiveled around, her back now to the piano, her king crab cold before her. She buttered a piece of bread and ate it and took a long drink of water, the ice tinkling against the glass.

  * * *

  —

  There were other songs in her life. Summer songs and songs that reminded her of her kids. She decided, as she called Frans, that she would keep them to herself, and count them among the happy memories. But some others she would have to renounce altogether. She’d start making a list.

  “I didn’t think you’d call,” Frans said, his voice distant, the background noise boisterous. A restaurant or bar or party.

  “I didn’t either.”

  “You’re not at home. I spoke with your dad twice today.”

  “You don’t need to keep calling him.”

  “Where are you, Greta? What’s that music in the background?”

  “I’m in a church,” she lied.

  “A church?”

  She glanced over her shoulder at Stig Hjalmarson. “I should ask you the same question. It sounds like you’re at a party.”

  “I’m with colleagues.”

  “Colleagues? You mean Alena Braaten?”

  “No, I’m not with her.”

  “I don’t care if you are.” She turned back to the view out the window. “It doesn’t matter.”

  In the background of wherever he was, a woman’s voice came garbled and closer. “Fine. That’s fine,” he told her, or someone else, she couldn’t say. But the tone of his voice was suddenly detached.

  “She’s there,” Greta said. “How in the world could I feel guilty about not calling you sooner?”

  “Just a moment,” he said, and in only a few seconds the background noise was replaced by the sound of wind.

  “You’ve left her inside,” Greta said. “Now you’re standing outside the bar. It’s cold in Oslo, isn’t it? I can see you.”

  “Will you stop that? Can we talk sensibly for once?”

  “What sensible things do you have in mind?”

  “I’m sorry about the holiday. I know it wasn’t good for you.”

  “They never are, Frans. But that’s not why you should be sorry.”

  “And I’m sorry about what happened in the fish house. That’s not how it should be between us.”

  “How should it be, then?”

  He didn’t answer right away, so they sat with only the background sounds between them. Stig Hjalmarson played on. She took a sip of wine and set the glass back down by the candle burning on her table.

  Finally he said, “I don’t know how it should be. I’m sorry for that, too.”

  “I’m so unhappy,” she said, knowing it would quiet him and give her a moment to think.

  Stig finished the piece yet again, and she could feel the last note hanging in the air. Every part of her wanted to cut off the call and just listen to the music, let it comfort her. But she knew it would be better to get this conversation over and done with. “I’m not at home. I’m—” And she paused, deciding what to tell him.

  “You’re where?”

  “Dad’s with the kids. I needed to get away.”

  “Get away to where, Greta? And it’s not your dad’s job to raise Lasse and Liv.”

  “Not my dad’s job to raise them? That’s the sensible advice you’re giving me?”

  “Your unhappiness, it’s like a fucking anchor we hand off back and forth.”

  “I knew it was a horrible idea to call you.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Not this again.”

  “You’re right. The same thing all over again.”

  What would happen if she just hung up? Was it possible for him to somehow track her call? Would he catch a flight himself if he knew she was here? “I should go,” she said. “It’s not as if we’re even talking to each other.”

  “I’m trying to.” It sounded like he was whining, and she wanted to tell him to shut up.

  “That’s what you said when we were in Gunflint. That you’re trying.”

  “I am.”

  “No you’re not. You’re wanting to feel less guilty. You want the kids to be safe. You want your life exactly the way you like it. You want to go to the gym in the morning and have dinner ready when you get home in the evening. And you want to go to Norway and fuck Alena without me saying anything about it.”

  His voice rose in pitch and volume. “I’m in Norway raising money. I just left a table full of donors sitting there without their host. All so I can listen to you tell me how busy you are being unhappy. A full-time job, apparently.”

  “You called me, Frans. You called my dad. You keep texting. Tell me, what do you want?”

  “When are you going home? That’s what I want to know. And where are you?”

  “Are you afraid I’m in Oslo? What if I’m in that church right across the street? Can’t you see me?”

  “Stop it.”

  “The stars came out only an hour ago. Before that it was snowing.”

  “There’s no church across the street,” he said. “What a fucking mess.”

  Well, he was right about that. Again they fell silent.

  She thought of a run she’d taken just a month or so ago. It was a warm October morning in Minneapolis and she ran a ten-mile loop around the city’s lakes. Her legs were strong but her lungs were aching when she came up the western shore of Lake Harriet, then felt her breath go all at once. Her heart rate spiked, and she still ran. It felt like someone was squeezing her chest, but she kept going. Harder, faster, even as her vision narrowed. At Beard’s Plaisance, only a quarter mile from home, she crossed the parkway onto the grass and lengthened her stride to run up the hill that in winter they sledded down. She and the kids and now the puppy. Frans, too, when he wasn’t somewhere else. Under the best of circumstances taking that hill would’ve put her at her limit, but with her chest tightening more with each gasping breath, she stopped halfway up and put her hands on her knees and vomited in the grass. When she stood upright, her vision blurred and her knees buckled and she fell over. She thought she’d die on the spot. Was certain she would. Even welcomed the idea of it. Her thoughts went to Lasse and Liv, to the sound of their laughter and the feel of their soft, soft skin when they were babies. She lay down on her side and tried to vomit again but only heaved, fighting for breaths that wouldn’t come. She closed her eyes and rolled onto her back and vowed to hold the image of her children behind her eyelids as she died.

  No one came to rescue her. A woman dying in the park on a warm October morning. She didn’t know how long she lay there, but when she opened her eyes and sat up her breath came easy and her heart and chest felt loose. She might have been relieved to be alive.

  “Greta, are you still there?”

  “What?” she said.

  “What are we going to do?”

  She thought of standing up on that hillside, the backs of her legs covered in mud, her shorts grass-stained. She thought of walking home like a drunkard, her vision focusing and blurring with every other step.

  “Do you remember last month, when I came home from that run all muddy?”

  “That day you tripped?”

  “I didn’t trip. I was running up the hill at Beard’s Plaisance and just collapsed. I thought I was going to die.”

  “Jesus Christ, Greta. Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you lie to me?”r />
  “I lie to you all the time,” she said.

  Now it was his turn to go silent.

  “I’m so tired of it. Lying. Keeping things from you.” She took a long pull of wine. “I felt like I was having a heart attack. Couldn’t breathe, my chest was so tight. My pulse must have been two hundred-plus. And still I kept going up that goddamn hill.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you keep running? Do you hate our life that much?”

  “Hate is the wrong word.”

  “And I suppose you know the right one?”

  “No, but I might figure it out.”

  “I’m going to catch a flight tomorrow morning,” he announced.

  “I won’t be home.”

  “Okay.”

  “Should I tell my dad to expect you?”

  “Yes. If I can get the first flight, I’ll be home by bedtime.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  Another long lull filled the connection. She could hear the piano again. She saw the waitress standing at the cash register counting receipts. Outside the window, what was called Sørøsundet on the little hotel map lay drunk with starlight.

  “When will you get home, Greta?”

  “Soon. I don’t know.”

  “How’d you know it was snowing in Oslo? And starry now?”

  “My phone told me.”

  “Greta?”

  “What?”

  “Can we see a counselor?”

  “Let’s talk about it later. I’m going now.” She looked over and saw the waitress smiling from across the restaurant, raising a bottle of wine. “I’ll let you know when I’m coming home.”

  “Okay,” he said, then hung up.

  She sat there with the phone still at her ear. There was no more piano music. No sound at all. She felt liberated, and also that she might be honest now. When she lowered the phone from her ear, the picture of Liv kissing Frans popped up. She held it back to her ear and rehearsed the words twice before mouthing them, with not even a whisper, though she felt like she was screaming them: I’m supposed to love you.

  * * *

  —

  She stood up, walked past the fireplace, and pulled a chair from a table by the small platform on which the baby grand sat. The grin on his downturned face erased everything. She sat back and crossed her legs and gestured with her hand as though to say, Keep playing. He shook his head and closed his eyes, then started on some ragtimey number.

  “No,” she said, loud enough for him to hear. “Play the one you’ve been practicing.”

  “ ‘Vannhimmel’? It is no church hymn.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “You like the sad music?”

  “I do.”

  “Close your eyes,” he said. “Only listen. I will play it with the calvings and all the blue.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Just listen. But first…” He passed his hand across his eyes. When he revealed himself, his eyes were closed and that grin played on his lips again. Toothy and full-lipped and as genuine as the starlight outside. “Ava!” he shouted. “Dim the lights, would you?” Then he laughed, looked at her once more, and started playing.

  She kept her eyes closed through the first notes, which seemed to come from her own mind. But after a moment, she realized that it didn’t sound the same. This performance was more classical, the tempo perhaps even slower. When she looked at him—eyes still clenched shut, his head drooped, his expression exulted, his shoulders rolling as his hands moved up and down the keys—she instantly felt scandalized. A sudden warmth rose from the small of her belly up her chest and neck and cheeks.

  She glanced around as if she might be discovered. But no one else was in the restaurant except Ava, who was switching off the kitchen lights with a bottle of wine under her arm. Greta turned back to him, and almost impossibly the music came slower still. Her frustrated piano teacher had preached posture and composure, but Stig Hjalmarson played with a stoop in his wide shoulders, his head hung so low that his long hair fell like a curtain around his face. She brushed her own hair back off her damp forehead and watched him. His head and shoulders trundled faster now as the tempo built, as if he and the music were one, which she supposed was true.

  Her own sensibilities had not given music like this much credence. Or music played like this, anyway. Until this evening, music had mostly been something to allay grief. Even the saddest songs brought her peace. As he played—the song was changing movements, the clattering of high notes adding other dimensions, she thought, like a sun shower does—everything changed. The room became warmer, quieter. It was as if the simplicity of her life was finding its voice again.

  Stig struck the bass notes with his left hand, his right hovering, fingers limp, above the treble keys. One second, two. In a motion that seemed choreographed, he lifted both hands and swept off his wool sweater. It fell on the bench beside him and as though it were all part of the performance, a crashing and totally inharmonious sound came thundering from the piano.

  He opened his eyes like he’d been stabbed in the back and sought out her own. “A calving,” he said.

  As simply as that she understood what he’d meant. She closed her eyes against the feeling and just listened. By the time he finished, she was stripped and open wide and no longer despairing.

  And then he was walking toward the table she sat at. He was pulling the red sweater over his head and sliding his arms through the sleeves and, once it was on, tucked his heavy hair back behind his ears. He gestured to Ava at the bar for a glass to sip from and then was standing right across the table from her.

  He must have been six-foot-three, and his chest and shoulders eclipsed the window behind him. The candlelight flitted into his eyes and they speckled blue and gray like mica-flecked granite.

  “I’m Stig.” He reached his hand out and she could see the tufts of hair on each knuckle.

  “I know,” she said as she gave it a shake.

  “May I sit down?”

  She pulled out the chair next to her.

  He rearranged the three candles guttering on the table and looked at her through their flames.

  “I keep showing up to listen to you play,” she said.

  “I saw you at the church last night.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “ ‘No koma Guds englar.’ ”

  “It’s a Christmas song,” she said.

  “It is. We are getting ready for the season at church.”

  “And tonight? ‘Vannhimmel,’ you said? What kind of song is that?”

  “That is one of my own songs.”

  “What does ‘Vannhimmel’ mean?”

  Ava came to the table carrying a bottle of red wine under one arm and a glass of whiskey in the other. “Don’t ask him about his songs,” she said, sitting down. “He will say something dreary now, you can believe it. But I knew him when he used to ride his bike to school from the Rypefjord. His legs were so skinny he had to wear a rope around his waist just to hold his pants up.”

  Stig waved his hand as though to contradict her.

  “He wasn’t always such a serious man,” she concluded.

  “I am not serious even now.”

  They both spoke near-perfect English, only a slight lilt to their accents.

  “Answer her question, then,” Ava said.

  Stig looked at Ava and then switched his gaze to Greta, who stared right back. He rolled his whiskey around his glass. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it means something about all the ice melting.”

  Ava reached across the table to touch Greta’s hand. “See? With this one it is always about the world ending. He quit his job on the oil fields because he has a philosophy.”

  “The world is ending,” St
ig said, his eyes arched. “Arctic sea ice levels—”

  “A very good paying job,” Ava interrupted.

  “I want the world not to end.”

  “This is not how to romance two beautiful women!” Ava told him.

  He let out a throaty laugh, mouth open wide, head thrown back. The glasses resting atop his head fell to the floor. “Okay,” he said, reaching down to pick them up. “I will not make the night darker.” His eyes narrowed on each of them once, and then he took another sip of his whiskey. “Tell me,” he continued, “why are you in Hammerfest? Certainly not to follow the sad songs around town?”

  “I’m just visiting,” she said, though of course this was a lie. “My people are from here. Five generations ago.” That was true, but it wasn’t the answer to his question. She could tell by his eyes that he understood she didn’t know why she was there. They looked at each other for a full five seconds.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Did I not introduce you?” Ava asked. “This is Greta from America. She knows your name.”

  “I told her my name,” he said, his voice sounding softer, as if he wasn’t really sure about that. “Didn’t I?”

  “You did,” Greta said. “Stig Hjalmarson.”

  “What’s your family name?” he asked.

  “Nansen,” she said.

  “Not like Fridtjof Nansen?”

  “A distant relative, in fact.” As soon as she said it, she wished she hadn’t, that this was the last thing she wanted to get into. But the silence was so awkward that she added, “Cousins several times removed. And several generations, of course. It doesn’t matter. I can’t keep track.” That was not a lie, except these weren’t her distant relatives, they were her husband’s. Noticing how her fingers were pinching the stem of her glass, she casually lowered her hand beneath the table onto her lap.

  Ava poured herself more wine and said, “Men and boats and adventure,” needing to say no more.

  “We’re not all so simple,” Stig said.

  Ava rolled her eyes. “Stig lives on a boat.”

  For an instant, Greta felt as if she had been caught. “You really do?” she nearly blurted.