“Oh, pappa,” she says, tossing the book back into the suitcase.
In bed, trousers off, she drinks her whiskey on the rocks; she uses the ice liberally. The TV is on a sideboard across from the foot of her bed. As she’s looking straight down her body, it appears as though she’s standing on its gray and bulbous screen. She wiggles her toes to the left, and then to the right, and then whatever way she wants, dancing on the little glass moon. Her body is under her complete control but she has no idea how. Her imagination, however, might not be.
Sigrid spreads her legs a little wider and tries to feel—for a fleeting moment—what a tryst in a place like this might be like. She pictures the kind of man who would probably be here with her. It is not the best way to start a fantasy. She might as well have picked the steward from the airplane because he was beautiful but her own sense of hyper-realism intervenes and produces a more appropriate lover: A man, eyes closed, up on his elbows, old enough to be concentrating on his own orgasm rather than hers, wears an expression of someone trying to hump a refrigerator up a flight of stairs. On her back, the gravity pulls her own cheeks taut, making her appear younger and thinner from his perspective. Unfortunately, from her perspective, that same gravity slides his old and thinning skin down his cheeks, creating jowls. His lips have fallen away from his teeth, turning his mouth into a black orifice from which something scarier than a groan might emerge. His face becomes redder for all the pumping and straining, and underneath it all is Sigrid, who is looking at this man from the same angle that the toilet sees the drunk.
She crosses her legs at the ankles, shifting her attention to something more productive like wondering who Marcus’s girlfriend might have been and what had happened to them as a couple. In one letter she caught the first name: Lydia. But no last name. No details.
What kind of woman would attract Marcus? What kind of woman would be attracted to him? Did both of these things even happen?
Sigrid imagines Lydia with dark hair and brown eyes. She’s attractive but no model. They spend weekends in a rustic cabin two hours from the university, out in the woods by the Canadian border. Not by a lake. They wouldn’t have that kind of money. This place is more simple; a retreat. The walls are covered in books and board games, with blankets on the sofa and logs for a fire that are dry enough to light with a match. Lydia’s smile is more maternal than saucy. It would be no mystery to either of them—smart as they are—that Marcus is attracted to Lydia both for who she really is and who he needs her to be: the mother he lost. The lover he craves. The feel of home that envelops him like a scent and is all-encompassing but also proves elusive and ephemeral.
Why would it have ended? Sigrid lies there and wonders. The obvious answer would be that Lydia wanted to be more than a projection of Marcus’s needs. She would have been happy to fill that void for him also, but not only. She was too mature, too much of an adult, to assume the role of savior or mother. She would have known, and perhaps even said, that she didn’t need a forty-six-year-old son. At her age—at Sigrid’s own age—she would have treated time as precious. And even if she were resigned to not having children, she would not have dismissed a chance at long-term happiness founded on a mutually appropriate relationship. Sigrid surmised that it would have been Lydia who raised the topic. Gently, perhaps, but with certainty. Marcus would only be truly attracted to a smart woman. And if she was smart, she would have taken seriously the obstacles rather than try to overcome them with romantic ideals and short-lived passions.
And now, Sigrid thinks, Lydia is gone. Maybe she works at the university too. If she does, it means that every day she passes by his window on campus. He possibly glimpses her—purposefully, to hurt himself—at the café nearby where she likes to grade papers at a round table in the corner that no one else likes because once you sit there you’re stuck. Lydia, though, finds the crowd comforting.
Sigrid places the spent whiskey glass on the end table by the ugly lamp. Really, she concedes: Who knows? She has nothing to go on. As far as she knows Lydia is a blond trucker shaped like a turnip.
Sigrid falls asleep on top of the blanket without brushing her teeth.
Not Home
Copernicus knew the world was round. So did Galileo. Ferdinand Magellan actually circumnavigated the earth. But none of these men ever experienced jet lag. Not one. They couldn’t have possibly imagined it.
Brussels and Geneva are both in the same time zone as Oslo: no jet lag. Sigrid also made two trips to Britain, which sets its clock a mere hour earlier than Europe. But a six-hour time difference after a day flight and a nearly sleepless night filled with whisky? This is something new.
Sigrid wakes at four a.m. and, instead of feeling tired or hung over, is wide awake, her mind revving up like a motorbike.
The hotel room is hot. She looks to the wide ivory air conditioner mounted near the ceiling; it’s producing noise but neither moving nor cooling the air. The
