by Peter Geye
“That’s Kjersti Anne,” he said.
“What a beautiful girl.” She took one more look and stood up straight. “She looks just like you.”
Stig handed her the aquavit. “She died almost three years ago.”
“Oh, Stig.”
“Cystic fibrosis. Seven years old.” He got lost looking down at the little, braided girl in the photograph. She sat on a toboggan in the snow, her cheeks wind-kissed, her eyes as brilliant as the sky through the skylight on his boat. When Stig turned back to Greta, he said, “She was so beautiful.”
“I can see that. I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine.”
“You have two children. You can very well imagine.”
She moved to the settee now and sat down, and Stig sat across from her on a leather chair.
He crossed his legs and took a sip of his drink. “She died when I was gone. For work. This is why Jorunn blames me.”
The burden of being apart from Liv and Lasse settled on her then, and she had to take a deep breath. Her children were fine, of course. Neither of them had cystic fibrosis or anything at all wrong with them. They were with her father or her husband. Perhaps even both. They would soon be getting ready for school, coming messy-haired and sleepy-eyed down the staircase, stopping at the bottom to lay their arms around the dog before stepping into the kitchen for cereal and strawberries.
It was her job to get them breakfast, yet here she sat, on a strange man’s boat, some three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle.
“I used to work for Statoil. I was on a platform in the Snorre oil field in Tampen. That is the whole story. Jorunn called me on the telephone. ‘Kjersti Anne,’ she said. I knew as soon as she said her name. It was before Christmas. Three years ago.”
Greta went to him and put her hand in his hair and held it there. It was how she greeted her children as she poured milk over their cereal.
Stig looked up at her and smiled and said, “It is very sad. I am still very sad, naturally. But now I am better, too.” He took her hand in his and held it and then said, “Your husband?”
Greta sat back on the settee. “His name is Frans.”
“Nansen?”
“Yes. A distant cousin or something. But related.”
“What is your maiden name?” he asked.
“Eide.”
“How do you spell that?”
She spelled it for him, and he said it differently. Eid-ee. The Norwegian pronunciation, she assumed.
“Yes,” she said.
Now a much broader expression came across his face. “This is a very famous name here. Do you know?”
“Know what?”
“There was a man named Odd Einar Eide—”
“My great- and great-great-great-grandfathers were both named Odd Einar.”
“He is like a folk hero. Is that the name, folk hero?”
“What do you mean?”
“In the 1890s this Odd Einar Eide worked on a seal-hunting boat and was stranded on Spitzbergen. He survived for many days. In snowstorms. Without food. All alone. His partner was killed by a polar bear. They wrote a book about him. Ever since he has always been a story we tell. To make us feel strong and clever.”
As soon as Stig said this, Greta felt something dislodge inside—like a calving glacier, it came to mind—and she understood that a whole part of her family’s history had been kept secret by the lack of this knowledge. Thea Eide, dead in childbirth. Odd Einar Eide, drowned on Lake Superior. Harald Eide, her grandpa, suicide in the Devil’s Maw. These deaths had, she now realized, created the sense of impending doom she’d felt her entire life. Like it was only a matter of time before some weird and crushing fate befell her, one she was powerless to change. And she’d lived accordingly.
She looked at Stig, sitting there with his drink, looking at her as if he’d searched his entire life—sailing the northern seas, studying the starry skies—in order to discover her. No one had ever looked at her like this before. And no one had ever given her such gifts, and simply by existing.
Twelve hours. That’s how long she’d known him. And already she believed in both the gifts and the hours and them. So much so that she put her aquavit down on the counter, stepped to him again, put both of her hands in his hair, tilted his head back, and bent to kiss him. The taste of licorice. Still a trace of mint. The heat of his lips. The reach of his hands around her waist, and the ease with which he pulled her onto his lap.
She spoke with her lips still brushing his. “I want this.”
He pulled back, looked at her, took a tremulous breath. “Yes.”
“I want to know you. I want to know why we found each other.”
He kissed her again, deeper.
She kept her hands in his hair, trying to pull him closer, and spoke again, their lips still together. “I had no idea you existed.”
He pulled back again, only to settle his face into the small arch of her neck. “I thought exactly the same thing,” he whispered. “I cannot believe it. I think I must be dreaming. Du er som et skip for å redde meg.”
“What does that mean?” she asked, her voice almost panicking.
“You are like a rescue ship.”
“Yes. Exactly. I am a ship to rescue you.” And she kissed him again, reaching this time for his chest, which filled her hands. She ran them up over his shoulders and down his arms and found his own hands, which she lifted to her breasts. She shivered as the warmth of his touch coursed through her body.
She’d felt desire before. Of course she had. But this was different: she felt herself thawing. All of her iciness melted into the bottom of her belly and was radiant there. She held him close. And as if he understood what was happening to her body, he made a bowl of his arms and scooped her up and carried her to his berth. He set her down on the bed and she felt herself dispersing. She felt herself spilled.
He bent and rested his knees on the edge of the bunk and took hold of her. She watched as his hands engulfed her feet, then ran up her calves and around to her knees, which she parted just slightly. Even in the wan light of that boat’s sleeping quarters, she could read his eyes. They were doubtful, even afraid. But also fierce, and she could see him staring into a hurricane on the Barents Sea, his hands on the Vannhimmel’s wheel, his sails reefed.
The thought of a storm made her realize suddenly how cold the boat was. In her hands, stretched out on either side, she clenched down and cotton and pulled the comforter back and then over her, leaving a corner turned for him.
Stig reached down to remove his shoes and then with one hand pulled his sweater over his head and off. He balled the sweater and stuffed it into a cubby on the bulkhead by the foot of the bed. His baby-blue oxford shirt hung wrinkled and slightly too large, and when he stood upright again she could see what she hadn’t yet noticed, that he had a small paunch to go along with his booming hands and chest and shoulders. In the time it took her to register this, she also noted that he must outweigh Frans by a hundred pounds. The thought of her husband crossing her mind did not trouble her, though. She knew that being here was a violation of those long-ago vows. But what did distress her was the realization that she’d gone so long without feeling this urge. Like years of her life had been laid to waste. And now she was thrilled to discover she had only gone dormant, not dead.
And it thrilled her again to see him crawling toward her on the bed, to feel him burrow under the comforter, to herself awaken still more under the gravity of his hands, to be devoured by the gentleness of his eyes. “I do not want to make love to you?” he said. And then, as though to contradict himself, he kissed her more fiercely than he had yet, his left hand tracing the length of her from shoulder to knee.
In answer, she pressed herself against him as her whole body flushed, like a fever had broken. And almost as if he knew what she was feeling, he leaned back and brou
ght his hand to her forehead, where he brushed the now-damp tendrils of her hair back over her ear.
“I mean, I want to very much. You”—he lost himself searching, she thought, for the right words—“are the most unexpected thing. When I saw you in the church, I thought, That woman! But then I could not think more. Only dream you would come back. And then I saw you in the taxi and I—”
“I had to come back,” she said, reaching to touch his face.
As though he hadn’t heard her, he said, “How would I have found you?”
Now she kissed him, her fingers playing with his beard. The boat rolled, knocking against the fenders on the dock, and she broke away.
“Another boat has passed on the sound. It is okay. That is the waves behind the other boat.”
“The wake,” she said, then covered her eyes in embarrassment.
“Yes,” he said, running his hand down her arm now.
And so the passing of another boat had brought them back above water. She peeked at him from between her hands and laughed lightly. Stig brushed her hair back off her forehead again and then did the same to his own, pinning the loose strands behind his ears. He rolled onto his back and pulled her into the shelter of his arms.
“I have never done this,” he said.
“Done what?”
“Brought any woman to my boat, much less a married American. Drunk aquavit at noon. Climbed into bed.”
“Are you feeling regretful?”
“I am feeling very happy.”
“Me too.”
“What about your husband?”
Now she rolled onto her back so they lay shoulder to shoulder, both staring up at the skylight in the deck above his berth. She had an instinct to lie about Frans. To say that she hated him and wished she’d never met him. That he was cruel, or worse. But instead she simply told the truth. “I have been married for a long time. Almost twenty years. Everyone thinks we’re happy. We have every reason to be. But I don’t love him. I think I used to.”
“Why don’t you love him?”
“Whenever I’m with him—and I try to be as little as possible—my overwhelming feeling is loneliness. It’s like he’s made me less than I used to be, instead of more. Isn’t the opposite supposed to happen? Isn’t your partner supposed to make you better?” She said all this before she’d thought it out, and it occurred to her that it might be more information than Stig wanted, so she changed course. “He has a lover. A Norwegian woman, actually. Alena is her name. Frans is down in Oslo with her now. Or was in Oslo. I think he went home yesterday.”
“And now you are on the other end of Norway. Is this…what is the word for ‘hevn’? Getting even?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But maybe?”
“No,” she said. “No, I’m not. I don’t like it that he lies to me, but I guess people lie all the time.”
“I don’t want to lie.”
She turned to rest a hand on his wrinkled shirt. “I’m not lying. I won’t. Not about anything. Let’s just not do that.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not here to get even with Frans. I’m here”—and she pointed her finger into Stig’s chest—“because I had to know what this felt like. When I saw you in the church…I don’t know, I had to meet you. And then I did, and I was so smitten. And I had to know you better.”
“Smitten?”
“Charmed, captivated. I think you’re beautiful.”
“So you are happy to be here?”
“ ‘Happy’ doesn’t begin to describe it.”
He pulled her closer. Relieved, she thought.
“What about Jorunn? Did I say that right?”
“Yes. Jorunn. I have not even seen her in six weeks. I told her we should divorce, but she does not give me an answer.”
“Do you still love her?”
“I love that she was Kjersti Anne’s mom. She loved our daughter very much and that made me happy.” Now he rolled onto his side, their faces only a foot apart. “I married her because I thought it is what every man does. She is an interesting woman. She likes music and art and having fun. She has a good job. We have traveled all over. But I always wondered if I loved her. Just for myself, I mean. Or if I only loved her for Kjersti Anne.”
When he said his daughter’s name, his pupils enlarged and she could see the lines around his eyes twitch. “I bet she loves you,” Greta said, and then thought, How could she not?
“I have been thinking lately, if I have to wonder if I ever loved her, probably I did not.”
That rang true, especially when Greta held her feelings for Frans up to her own reflections over the last few days.
“Anyway, I think she has a new man too. In Bodø. She is living with her mother there. Her mother tells me things. I do not care. I hope she is happy.”
Greta tried to imagine what Jorunn looked like. And also this man’s mother-in-law, and the house where she lived in a place called Bodø. She’d never heard of it before today. She tried to imagine Jorunn’s lover, and wondered if she even had one, or if Stig had conjured him up to make himself feel better for her. Less responsible for her. She tried to imagine the loss of a child. A seven-year-old child. And how slowly three years could pass.
Then she looked ahead, and wondered how fast time really did move. In the space of the last thirty minutes, her life had become impossibly large. She nestled her head onto his chest and lay there listening to the muffled beat of his sweet heart. She knew with certainty that she wanted this man. And not just to fuck. Not just to fill a spot in her left empty for years. No, she wanted to know him. She wanted to love him. She wanted to someday stand on the deck of this boat while he hoisted the mainsail to catch the wind that would bear them off. That’s how she now wanted to move through time.
“You’ll be happy too,” she said, undoing the top button of his shirt.
He touched her hand, as if to ask her to stop.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I also want to go slow. I just want to feel you beside me.”
He shook his head slowly, and she unbuttoned the rest of his shirt and then unpeeled it from his left shoulder, which she beheld in awe—and nearly laughed that it could stir so much desire. She put her teeth to his flesh and then her tongue between her teeth and tasted him. A tremor ran the length of his body and in its aftermath he seemed to relax. With his hand on her lower back, he lifted her on top of him, pulling the bunched comforter from between them in the same motion.
Now she sat astride him and rolled her hips into him. She had to break from kissing him to swallow twice, and the ache between her legs was astonishing. The only relief she found came when she rode against his prick, but after each pass the ache grew worse. She’d never felt this kind of insatiable wanting or suffered the inability to do something about it. So she abandoned herself to it entirely. To his hands. To the spreading of her fucking want.
Then she sat up and the weight of her body funneled into his center, and it was him rolling his head back into the pillow. She slid his shirt from the other shoulder and tossed it aside, never moving her eyes from his own. He appeared as helpless as she herself felt. But without any awareness at all. As though he were stunned or even shocked. To help him, she kissed him again, her hands running up his arms as he’d run his up her legs, starting at his wrists and then slowly, slowly up and around his forearms and elbows and around the fleshy part of his upper arms and finally to his shoulders, which she used to press herself up again.
With her back to the door, she shadowed the light from the main cabin, so only the midday stars speckled him with light. But even so she could see the contours of his hairless chest, the undefined strength of his body, the wanting in it, how his skin had grown taut without the comforter to warm him. His lips moved almost as if he were attempting to speak, but he’d either found no words or w
as keeping them to himself. Rather than speak, he fixed her in a new gaze—one she read as questioning—and ran his hands under her shirt so they held her bare waist. Those hands on her flesh brought with them something like the beauty and longing of the songs he played on the piano, and, in much the same way she’d wanted to hear that song over and over again, she wanted also to remain in his grasp.
The thought must have come out in her expression because he ran his hands farther up her body, her shirt rising with them, her arms lifting as though pulled by strings from above, until she felt the newness of her skin under the same starlight that freckled him. He didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink. And only when he reached behind her with his left hand and unclasped her bra did she realize she was breathless herself. With his pinkies under the straps of her bra, he peeled it from her body. And when her breasts came free, he finally took a gulping breath. But for all that his eyes questioned, they never so much as twitched. His steadiness was stunning.
And when his hands came around her ribs and cupped her breasts, when his heavy thumb tips glanced across her nipples, when each of his fingers followed, one by one, each softer than the last, each finding a quieter key, she felt a relief she hadn’t known from another’s hands in years. But this also aroused a new, more urgent need, so she slid away and unzipped his jeans and tugged them down until they were off his hips and then, with less confidence or more shyness, she reached under the waistband of his boxers and took hold of him. He tilted his head back, exposing the soft flesh of his neck beneath his beard, where she could see his thumping pulse. She wanted to put her legs around him, to slide him into her, to feel this hard cock with its soft skin in her hand fill her up inside. But she didn’t, and not only because they’d agreed not to. No. She also wanted to preserve the possibility of what that act would have in store for them. To hold this anticipation, to have longing become a part of her daily life. She wanted, she realized already, the semblance of a romance. She wanted to fall in love.
