Morten puts his hands into his pockets to fish for his pipe but it is not there.
“He wrote me a letter. He said it had happened again. At first I didn’t know what he meant. But now,” he says to Astrid, “I’m wondering if it had something to do with you.”
My Mother
Sigrid wakes to the sound of Irv in the shower bellowing out a song she doesn’t know. It involves somebody knockin’ and whether Irv should let him in. And then something about the devil and blue jeans.
He is quite committed to the tune.
It has been a long time since Sigrid has shared a bottle and talked for hours. She tried with her Ambien-recommending friend Eli after the Horowitz case last month but it didn’t work. Unfortunately, Eli isn’t very good at drinking. She doesn’t understand that as a bottle drains, it does not become empty so much as it becomes filled with the room around it; its moods and emotions mix with whatever remains in the bottle so that every subsequent drop expounds greater truths and erstwhile beauties.
But only if you can hear it. And Eli, poor Eli, simply does not have the ear.
Irving does.
This morning Irv sings and Sigrid lies against the pillow, beneath the warm blanket. The first cars of the day make their way across the dew-soaked asphalt outside. Across from her is the old cathode-ray television and a cream-colored hotel phone with a key pad that looks ancient today. This room hasn’t returned to the 1980s but has stayed there. Shabby as it is, there is a comfort in the familiar.
In Oslo, Sigrid lives alone. She is accustomed to solitude. But there is a new quality to solitude here in America—one that is less about being alone and more about standing beside time itself as though it is a river you can watch flow past from the bank. In Norway, she always feels the presence of the city, the country, and government, the grand agendas of politics and continental debate. Even in her solitude there, she feels connected—not emotionally, perhaps, but factually, as if the shared journey is always a character in her life.
Not here, though. Not in this motel that is separate from the flow of time. Here she is an individual. Classic rock songs on the radio sound current and cowboy boots are tomorrow’s fashion, not just yesterday’s. And unlike anyplace she’s been in Europe, here she feels . . . separate. She can slip into oblivion if she chooses or rend her clothing from the top of a building and demand the attention of the world. The choice, though, is hers.
Until this moment she’s always thought of America’s lack of interest and sophistication about Europe—and the rest of the world, it seems—as a kind of ignorance and inferiority. But lying here, she has the most unexpected sensation of destination; as if here is all that really exists and is the only place she is meant to be. It isn’t a wonderful place, or even special. But it is present and vivid, the way life was as a child.
Beyond the American shores—from that television on the dresser—come stories about life and events elsewhere. But they feel removed and abstract and safely, even inherently, far away. Sigrid does not feel cut off from the wider world so much as she feels it doesn’t really exist. Is that what it feels like to be American?
The singing stops and the water with it. He starts to whistle. He’s terrible. This becomes a hum when he brushes his teeth and then—surprisingly—blow-dries his hair. He appears in the doorway in a towel with the smile and swagger of a man who’s won a prize for something made in his garage with a spot welder.
“Howdy,” he smiles.
“OK.”
“It’s gonna be a good one. I can feel it,” he says, whipping off the towel and dressing as if they were married. “We’re going to go out there under that warm sun in a rented canoe, we’re going to shimmy up to your brother, who’s going to be so glad to see you that a tear comes to his eye, you’re going to convince him to come back and tell us the story, and then we’re going to bring the stakeholders to this nightmare together and see if we can’t find a smart way to ease us all back from the brink of a new race riot—oh yes, we are. And later, when President McCain pins that Medal of Freedom on my chest, I’m going to accept it with all the humility that befits my station . . .”
“Good God, Irving. What is it with you people and all the words?”
“I’m as energized as that little pink bunny this morning.”
“We didn’t have sex last night.”
“And yet I feel like I did. Isn’t it fantastic?”
Irv buckles up his pants as Sigrid walks in her panties and Marcus’s T-shirt to the steamy bathroom. Kicking Irv out, she showers. When she emerges Irv is not in the room at all. Alone, she applies more than her usual amount of makeup, in part to remedy her late night of drinking and not sleeping, and also because the memory of her face on television is still fresh.
Irv returns twenty minutes later with three local newspapers and a bag full of muffins. He is balancing two cups of coffee in a cardboard holder,
