Adventures of Pebble Beach

by Berger, Barbara

  Molly did not succeed in instilling sufficient fear in Pebble Beach (not a new situation). And it wasn’t due to any lack of persistence on Molly’s part. Molly tried every trick in the book to persuade her daughter that traipsing off to Greenland was not the thing for an up-and-coming, newly divorced career woman to do. But when it finally dawned on her that her marry-a-rich-man-this-time tactics had failed, she resorted to other, coarser scare tactics like danger, disease and disillusionment.

  “What if you end up way out in the wilderness and you don’t even like him?” Molly probed. “I get the impression that you hardly know the man.” They were drinking coffee together in Pebble’s white living room, the afternoon before Molly’s departure for New York. Pebble was happy her mother would soon be out of her hair, but hated to see her go. If only Molly would talk about something else.

  The problem was Molly was right. Pebble didn’t really know Albert, but she didn’t want to admit it. If her mother had known the truth – that Pebble had never spent any amount of serious time with Albert – she would have thrown a fit, right there on Pebble’s authentic hand-woven olive-green and black Greek rug. Which would have made their last afternoon together even more gloomy. Copenhagen winter afternoons are dark, even at three. And foreigners, like Molly, always tend to get depressed in the cold Nordic dark.

  “How can you live in such a gloomy place?” Molly asked for the hundredth time, hoping Pebble would tell her she was moving back to New York next week.

  “I’m used to it,” replied Pebble, glad at least that Molly had changed the subject. The weather was a lot less dangerous than talking about Albert. Pebble didn’t want her mother to know she was only chasing a dream. She just wasn’t ready to admit it yet, not even to herself. Not so soon after her divorce from Slim. She needed something to deaden the pain of being on her own while she struggled to build a successful career.

  But how could she explain that to Molly, who’d never spent a day alone in her entire life? Molly had no way of understanding the cold-turkey syndrome that newly divorced women go through. Pebble needed her dream, and Albert was far enough away to be perfect. He couldn’t destroy her illusions. Pebble was glad Molly didn’t ask her how many days she had actually spent with Albert last summer when he passed through Copenhagen. Pebble could count the days on one hand.

  So what could Pebble, who was determined to go to Greenland anyway, say?

  When Molly got back to New York, she made one last-ditch attempt to bring Pebble back to sanity – a midnight phone call right before Pebble’s departure.

  “Who ever heard of going to Greenland, in the middle of winter, for a vacation?” Molly croaked over the line. Pebble was half asleep, her plane scheduled to leave Copenhagen the next morning at 10 a.m. She thanked her lucky stars that Molly was on the other side of the Atlantic.

  “And what if Einar Bro calls you,” Molly tried another angle. “He might want to get in touch with you to offer you that job he’s been talking about.” Molly thought she was scoring a major point. Pebble knew her mother was right, but didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of agreeing with her.

  “I have the right to take a vacation without asking Einar Bro for permission.” Einar actually called her that very morning and they had an appointment for lunch in two weeks’ time. Neither mentioned Einar’s departure or Albert’s call the other night. Einar needled Pebble again about the WonderLift campaign, asking her how her assignment was progressing and when it was due. But she just babbled away without revealing anything, Pebble didn’t even tell Einar she was going to Greenland. “Mother, I’m going to lunch with Einar when I get back, so don’t worry. I’ll call you from Greenland. They do have phones up there.”

  And so Pebble went (not without suffering excruciating last-minute doubts when her flight was delayed at Copenhagen Airport). And finally she landed, somewhat older than when she left, at the Søndre Strømfjord airbase on the West Coast of Greenland in the middle of the night (instead of at two in the afternoon as scheduled) with a planeload of drunken cowboys. The delay was so long (normal procedure on routes to Greenland due to the fierce and unpredictable weather up there) that the planeload of Greenlanders and other assorted mavericks had ample time to get pissed and crazy. (Free food and booze provided at the airport couldn’t be turned down, especially when most of these people were going to self-imposed exile on an enormous icecap. Except of course for the native Greenlanders who, like most conquered Indians, just liked to get pissed for the fun of it.) All the drunks on the plane didn’t exactly make Pebble feel any better. She’d heard plenty of stories about Greenland from her friends before she left Copenhagen.

  Mainly what they said was this, “Most of the men who go to work on Greenland are misfits. (The few women who go are definitely misfits!) They’re all wild or crazy or have broken marriages behind them.” Not the kind of men you want to bring home to Daddy. Or Molly. “They have problems adjusting to life in the real world, so they go up there. Some to hide; some just to get away from the problems they can’t handle down here. How else could they stand living up there? It’s a hard, lonely life, and they’re almost completely cut off from the rest of the world.” Or so people said when Pebble told them she was going to Greenland to visit a man. “You’ve got a boyfriend up there? When did this happen?” None of her friends had met Albert. Even Clare, her closest girlfriend, shook her head in dismay. Pebble’s accountant, stable enough to be the kind of man Molly would have loved for a son-in-law, added, “Greenland isn’t just cold and far away, Pebble, it’s a lonely, primitive place. I’m sure it’s beautiful up there, in a cold, harsh way. But I wouldn’t want to go there, even to visit. You hear so much about the drinking and the violence. A lot of the people who live up there are alcoholics.”

  Pebble had tried not to listen.

  She really didn’t want to know. Why did people always have to justify every little thing they did? Wasn’t there any room for experimentation? Why was everybody always warning her? Couldn’t she be permitted to chase her dreams in peace? She didn’t want to have to explain to her mother or her friends, because she couldn’t. And if there was violence and alcoholism on Greenland, Pebble didn’t want to know.

  But later, sitting on that middle-of-the-night run, Pebble was convinced that everything her friends said was true. They were right; she’d made an insane mistake. What was she doing on a plane full of drunken Greenlanders? Horny men with foul-smelling breaths were pawing all over her. Quite a change from business meetings in soundproofed conference rooms at advertising agencies, or sipping drinks at the Hotel D’Angleterre on Copenhagen’s classy Kongens Nytorv. She might have been chasing a dream, but she wished she’d have chosen a more comfortable and safe way to do it. She didn’t belong on that plane. How come she hadn’t realized it before she’d bought her ticket? Why was she so pig-headed? If Albert loved her so, he could have visited her. Obviously! Why hadn’t she thought of that before? What if Albert turned out to be like the rest of the drunks on the plane? She wouldn’t know what to do. Fourteen days could be a very long time.

  These are the very same guys, thought Pebble Beach, who would have gone West in America, digging for gold if they could have. Maybe that was their problem – they should have been born a couple of hundred years earlier. But in a world without frontiers, where could men like this go? I guess Greenland is one of the few places left, thought Pebble, wishing she was safe in her snug walkup apartment on Gothersgade across from the King’s Park. Soon spring would return and the chestnut trees would bloom. Copenhagen was always glorious in spring. People plastered on park benches everywhere, lapping up the first rays of sun.

  Franz, the man on her left, (she’d removed his hand from her thigh numerous times during the five-hour flight), was asking her if next time (NEXT TIME!) she went to Greenland she’d like to fly with him in his little Cessna. Pebble shivered at the thought of flying across this ice continent all alone with a horny guy like Franz. Molly, safe in her New York apart
ment would have died at the thought.

  “Sounds like fun,” Pebble smiled, trying to keep a cool distance. He leaned way over towards her and smelled of booze. He wanted woman.

  “My plane is parked at Roskilde airport outside Copenhagen.”

  “Isn’t it a long way to fly in such a little plane?” Pebble didn’t know what to say.

  “Well, you can’t do it all in one stretch. We’d have to fly to Norway first and refuel, then to Iceland and refuel, and then Søndre Strømfjord. It takes a couple of days, but think of all the fun we could have along the way!”

  Fun? thought Pebble, looking at his strong arms. Actually he wasn’t too bad looking, now that she took the time to study him. He was positively gorgeous compared to Einar Bro. But not compared to Albert.

  “I’ve made the flight lots of times,” Franz continued. “It’s a beautiful trip. Flying across Greenland is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”

  “I’m sure,” replied Pebble, thinking, Holy Christ, a couple of days alone with this guy, flying over the Arctic wilderness. Sounds like just what I need!

  “That way you really get to see Greenland.”

  Pebble was sure he was right. He’d already told her about his Eskimo wife. He’d been married to her for 19 years, had a booming fish factory somewhere above the Arctic Circle in a tiny village on the Disko Bay called Jakobshavn or Iluissat in Eskimo language. He was making tons of money, but his wife bored him. So he traveled a lot, selling his fish, and keeping his hands in warm places.

  Well, you can’t say that men like this don’t have a certain charm, thought Pebble, who wondered why she was often tempted to let her cunt make decisions for her instead of her brain. Am I the only 40ish woman in the world like this? Pebble had to admit that Albert wasn’t a whole lot different from all the other men on this plane. She wasn’t sure if this was fun or not. Maybe she really liked spending the five-hour flight pushing warm hands away from her body. But it’s not exactly easy to admit things like this.

  Is this why I’m mad about Albert? Pebble asked herself. Do I need adventure this bad? Is my life really that boring? (Yes!) Or am I just horny? (Yes!) Oh why do I want it so bad? The thought puzzled her. It wasn’t like she couldn’t get plenty of it in Copenhagen. Einar Bro wasn’t the only man she knew who’d like to go to bed with her. What’s so special about Albert? But it wasn’t actually the right moment to analyze her feelings for Albert, now was it? Because Pebble couldn’t do a whole lot about it, since they were just about to land at Søndre Strømfjord. It would be hard to just change her mind, call a taxi and go home. But the thought bothered her. What am I going to do, she thought, if I wake up and find that I’m just a sex-crazed woman in her 40s, after all, desperately trying not to grow old?

  Pebble’s first glimpse of Søndre Strømfjord from the landing airplane didn’t do much to cheer her up. The plane shuddered in the wind as they approached. And peering out the window into the pitch-black night, all Pebble saw was a few lights twinkling from what was once a very forlorn-looking American military base, a tiny airline terminal and a few scattered houses. This tiny spot of humanity had just suddenly appeared, out of nowhere, after flying for a very long time over a giant piece of ice called Greenland. Pebble was lucky she’d been flying across that immense island country at night. If it had been daytime and clear, Pebble would have seen that there was absolutely nothing for almost a thousand miles but snow and ice and mountains. The feelings of loneliness which plagued her so often since her divorce would have probably been even more intense. At least as it was, it was night and she was surrounded by warm-blooded human beings. There was some semblance of belonging to the brotherhood of man, even if it was a very drunk and pitiful brotherhood.

  Everyone, even the most loud and obnoxious, got very quiet as the plane circled in to land. Pebble thought it was as if for one solemn moment, everyone realized what they were doing and where they were going.

  “Nobody really likes Greenland,” said Franz on her left in a very serious voice. She turned and looked at him. His blue eyes were kind in his weather-beaten face, and he wasn’t lying. The bravado was gone. He placed his warm hand over hers.

  For the first time during the flight, Pebble made no attempt to move it.

  God, she thought, I need a man who is real.

  When the plane landed, everybody cheered. It surprised her. She’d never seen people cheer before, even though she’d landed many times around the world. It only made it more scary.

  * * *

  The midnight cold of minus 29 hurt Pebble’s nose as she stepped off the airplane. Franz and the hundred other men tottered off, too. The few women on board all looked either distraught or disheveled. The light glared and the stewardesses standing by the cold open doorway, smiled as if they had just landed in sunny Spain. The ice of the runway crunched under Pebble’s feet as she tried to walk without skidding, sliding or falling on her face. Franz walked besides her, but he made no attempt to be a gentleman or help her.

  No friends were there to greet her. But she’d known that in advance. She was on her own here. But it hadn’t scared her as much in Copenhagen as it did now.

  Since she and everyone else obviously missed their connecting helicopter flights to whatever village they were going to, a lot of people were going to be holed up at Søndre Strømfjord. That was what always happened, or so people had warned her. Søndre Strømfjord was only a transit spot, a link-up point to the rest of Greenland. The crowded Air Greenland planes landed in Søndre Strømfjord because there wasn’t anyplace else to land. Then people proceeded by helicopter to whatever tiny outpost of civilization they were bound for. Nobody actually lived in Søndre Strømfjord except the pilots and the people on the airbase. But everyone who ever went to Greenland knew they had more than a good chance of getting stuck in Søndre Strømfjord, and God only knew for how long. Albert had warned her on the phone. Some people got stuck there for days as fierce storms raged and conditions were too dangerous for helicopters to fly. Franz had warned her too, on the plane, when it was obvious they wouldn’t make their connecting flights. He told Pebble that she could just as well leave her big city restlessness with the rest of her life back in Denmark. Her city ways wouldn’t help her up here.

  “Here the elements rule,” Franz said to her, more than once, on the flight up. He knew she was worried about missing her flight to Albert’s village. “There’s nothing you can do about it, Pebble, God and the weather have the final say up here.”

  “Let me buy you a drink when we get to Søndre Strømfjord,” he suggested. “It’s not a place for a woman like you to be alone in anyway.”

  Pebble had smiled at him weakly. She didn’t want to even think about being stranded in Søndre Strømfjord for a couple of days.

  Franz was basically an easygoing guy. His long years in Greenland had taught him well. He really wanted Pebble to just relax and party a little with him. City girls were just so damn uptight. Franz had seen it before, and liked their energy, for a while anyway. How could he explain to Pebble, all revved up to go somewhere and sleep with some cowboy that there was nothing else to do in such a godforsaken place anyway? Albert wasn’t going nowhere no how. If her boyfriend lived up here, he knew the score. Pebble could just as well pass the time pleasantly with Franz.

  But Pebble didn’t know what she wanted to do. It did occur to her more than once as they approached Søndre Strømfjord (when it finally sunk in that she’d be delayed) that Franz was too masculine and she was too vulnerable. She didn’t trust herself. But she didn’t want to be alone in Søndre Strømfjord, surrounded by hoards of intoxicated men either. The Arctic night was too cold for that.

  “We’ll go over to the club for a drink,” he said. “I know it’s late,” (it was 2 a.m.), “but you won’t be able to sleep right away anyway.”

  I wish I knew what life was all about, thought Pebble. Her heart beat with fear as she accepted his invitation. Albert wasn’t there to protect her. Why do I do the t
hings I do? Travel had a way of waking Pebble up. Adrenalin coursed through her body. Stepping outside her daily routine, away from her kids, the rat race, making money, things looked different. Who was she anyway? She knew she wasn’t important. The universe was immense. She was just a tiny spot of lonely woman on a cold night. The air was startlingly clear. Everything felt crazy, new. Why not live? Right now, this moment? What was she running after anyway? Was it just love? Adventure? Money? Mind-boggling orgasm? She wasn’t different from anyone else. Being so far away, she could admit it. Thoughts raced through her brain. She might feel scared, but she also felt incredibly alive. And aging fast. 40 had already passed. A blink of the eye. Why am I so afraid of living? She took Franz’s hand, too far away from the world she knew to care.

  How can you be afraid of life and long to live it, both at the same time?

  The smoky atmosphere at the club, even at that late hour, helped Pebble relax a little. Franz knew everyone and everyone wanted to know Pebble. In this company, she was more than a star. She was a gorgeous creature from another world. You don’t find women like Pebble wandering around on Greenland. They treated her like a queen. Any new woman in town was an event at Søndre Strømfjord, and Pebble radiated big-city energy. Franz and Pebble sat down at an empty table and Franz ordered beers. Jaunty-looking helicopter pilots who’d been sitting at the bar came over and joined them. They were the kind of men who could make Pebble’s mouth water. Men who could drink and laugh and make her feel real and alive. Not the two-toned, cautious types Molly swore by. Would Molly ever understand?