by Peter Geye
He reached his hand up and offered it to me. I knelt and took it. “My name is Otto Sverdrup. Captain of the Fram. I’ll call on you when next I visit this fair town.”
He let go of my hand and pushed the tender from the quay.
“When will that be, Herr Sverdrup?”
Already, the tender man had taken a turn on the oars. Sverdrup removed his hat and shouted, “Soon!”
[2017]
Greta and Frans had lunch the Friday after Thanksgiving at the Burnt Wood Tavern. Lasse and Liv and Greta’s father had as well, but now the kids and Gus were walking up Wisconsin Street toward the bookshop. Greta watched as the snow fell slowly around them.
Frans set his newspaper on his knee and checked his phone for the fifth time since they’d sat down an hour ago. He closed his eyes for a second and slipped his phone back in his breast pocket. The sandwich Greta had ordered sat on the table mostly untouched alongside a beer she’d hardly tasted. She could tell by how Frans sighed that he was looking at her. Imploring her, really. But she kept her eyes on the kids and her father as they crossed the street.
Frans picked up the newspaper again. “Says here highs in the thirties tomorrow,” he said. “All this snow’ll melt. You guys should have a great weekend.”
He said this more to himself, she knew, than to her. And she knew it would be better to keep her thoughts to herself. But the tone of his voice put her on edge, like it so often did. As if reading the weather report in the paper made him an expert? As if she hadn’t been able to judge the weather up here since she was a little girl? “There’ll be plenty more snow. Plenty more winter.”
She could see his grip tighten on the newspaper. His voice tightened too. “It’s always winter with you, Greta.”
“Please be quiet. Please.”
He again laid the newspaper on his knee and took measure of her. She could feel the little quiver of anger on her lip and sensed the slight pulsing of her eyes under the interrogation of his stare. She hated her tics, and his calmness in response to his own anger. In a voice he’d often used on the children when they were babies and toddlers, he said, “You should finish your sandwich. You haven’t eaten anything all week.”
“You have it.” She slid the plate across the table, then picked up her lukewarm beer and took a long swig.
Frans folded the newspaper and finally set it beside the uneaten sandwich. He shifted his eyes out onto the harbor and studied it for a long time. She watched him as she sipped the beer. She could tell he was trying. She knew she should be glad of that.
His gaze was still on the water when he said, “I was only talking about the weather, Greta. The snow and the weekend you guys might have. That’s all.”
“I know.”
He reached across the table for her hand, which she gave him without thinking.
“I thought, after last night—”
“No,” she said.
“Greta.”
“Don’t.” And now she withdrew her hand as quickly as she’d offered it.
“There was a time, you know, when it was always winter,” he said. “A hundred thousand years ago. Ten thousand years ago. A whole age. A hundred millennia.”
Now that was an idea she could take pleasure in contemplating. An ice age. The thought of it stilled her anger. Her breathing grew more natural.
A minute might have passed. Or five, she didn’t know. When she turned her attention to Frans she spoke as though she’d been deep in thought. “It’ll come again. That’s what you always say. Another ice age. Sooner than we know.”
How quickly he could regain his posture, the one full of confidence and expertise, that look that preceded one of his exegeses on the ill fate of the world and all mankind. As though he were still a practicing scientist, not just a subscriber to National Geographic and philanthropist for the cause. She knew what was coming, so before he could muster his sermon, Greta interrupted him. “Not now, Frans. Let me just watch the snow fall.” She reached across the table and touched the cuff of his cashmere sweater. This loosened him and she moved her fingertips from his sweater to his wrist and the skin there as soft as the wool. Still she didn’t look at him. She would take this silence, however it was given.
After a minute, she turned her own wrist up and looked at her watch, a beautiful stainless-steel Omega he’d given her for her fortieth birthday. “It’s almost one,” she said. He had a flight out of Minneapolis at nine, and with the snow it would be a five-hour drive. He would need to leave soon.
He had a sip of water and wiped his mouth and finally said, “Are you okay? Are we?”
Greta didn’t say anything.
“I could cancel this trip,” he continued. “We could stay here for another week. Keep the kids out of school. Or maybe your dad could take them home, get them off to school next week, and we could hunker down? You could do some more work on the fish house. We could go ski at Misquah. All this snow and we’d have the place to ourselves.”
Why would he put such a plan to words? Was he completely blind to her mood? Or was he trying to trick her?
He smiled. “What do you say?”
She couldn’t think of anything, and did not smile back. She rarely smiled anymore unless she was being cruel, and despite her frustration she didn’t wish to be so now. She knew he deserved an answer of some kind. But the best she could do was a nod, and not one intended to mean much. How many of their talks ended up in a ditch like this? In this baffling silence, inspired by her amazement and wild ambivalence? Sometimes the hush lasted for days, only to be broken by a quieter resignation that announced a false truce. She trusted none of it. Not the resignation, not the bogus truces, not the resentment that attended both.
“You might say something, Greta.”
“Such as? That keeping the kids out of school for a week’s a good idea? That spending another week up here with you is exactly what I need? Just what we need? That you’re right, the weather will turn beautiful and the snow’ll melt right away?”
“All I said is that it was going to warm up. I was just reading the goddamn weather report.”
“I don’t care about the weather, Frans. I don’t care if it’s hot or cold or snowy or not and I certainly don’t care about the fucking ice age. See?” She took another drink of beer and spoke before he could get a word in. “Of course you should go. I’m fine. I’ll be fine. Go now and you can get home for most of the ski season. That would make the kids happy. Maybe we can come back up at Christmas. I can work on the fish house then.”
He reached for her hand. “Do you regret taking me down there last night?”
As if she had no control over it, her hand recoiled again. Could he possibly understand this otherwise? That regret was the best thing she could say about it?
Over the few days before Thanksgiving, there’d been the usual round of stories about the hallowed fish house. All the trysts and secrets and solid things built in there. The livelihoods made. The loneliness kept. And because Greta had just started clearing it out, she asked if Frans wanted to go have a look after Thanksgiving dinner.
She unlocked the door and shouldered it open and they stepped into something still rooted so firmly against the wind off the lake, so quiet in the manner of unvisited places. In this it reminded her of her father. And of the other men who’d also haunted it. She was starting to feel more and more like them, more like the structure itself: silent and reserved and immovable against the wind. Certainly she felt calm in the hours she’d spent working there. She felt, too, that it was the only place left where she could track herself down. In her solemn hours of cleaning and sorting and imagining what it might become, she found herself stronger and more purposeful. On the occasions she’d brought the kids along, she discovered the kindness and patience she’d had for them as newborns. She rarely thought of Frans while she was there, a thing she realized only as she
walked in with him.
It was a mistake, she was sure of that. Once Frans lit the lantern and started pointing it into corners and babbling about things that required no intelligence whatsoever—They didn’t make those windows to catch daylight, did they? Sure this place has withstood the lake winds for a hundred years, since half of it comes right through. Ah, but those trusses will hold a winter’s worth of snow on the roof—she could hardly stand the noise. When he said, “Whoever laid this floor had in mind centuries of work”—as if it had been some stranger and not her great-grandfather who’d pounded those boards together, as if the feet of anyone outside her family had ever smoothed them, as if it were not she who’d spent the last season of weekends working to uncover them—she’d finally had enough and told him to just look.
It wasn’t that he was mistaken about any of it. The place was sturdy and rough and worth commenting on. It was, after all, the reason she’d brought him there in the first place. And of course he was trying to be part of something with her. And though she wanted none of it, she said “Follow me” and brought him to the counter along the northern wall. It spanned the fish house from east to west and on one end of the counter old fish boxes were stacked eight or ten high, each branded with the EIDE LAKE FISH logo. There were some tools on the pegboard above the counter and half a dozen vises clamped along its edge. The whole deal was shadowed by a cedar-strip canoe hanging above. “I was thinking I could plumb this corner. Put a sink here. Box this corner and put a toilet in,” she said. “This is where I’ll write, under this window. It has the best view of the lake. The best morning sun.”
He tried to be agreeable in the wake of her voice’s openness. He set the lantern down and leaned against the counter and looked around. “Well, it looks great.” There passed between them a moment of kindness.
Until recently, unkindness had never been their problem. Even now, it was Greta who lashed out. Never him. It was almost as if he were incapable of meanness. That his ancestry forbade it, insisting instead on decorum in every situation. It was a quality she’d once found attractive. He had other attractive aspects, too, then as now. He was intelligent. He’d earned his degrees from the universities of Bergen and Exeter, even if he hadn’t put them to much use lately. He read voraciously, a trait they shared. But he could be pedantic. And he still signed most of his correspondence F. Nansen, as though he might be confused with his great-great-great-uncle. There was a time in their marriage when this irked Greta, but she no longer cared. Loneliness, that was the only feeling she had anymore. She was lonely all the time.
The first casualty of this loneliness had been their sexual life together. It must have been a year since they’d last been intimate, so when she stepped toward him as he leaned against the counter in the fish house, when she turned down the lantern and looked up at him, the moonlight falling through the window and onto his face showed perfect surprise.
“Don’t say anything, do you understand?” she said. “If you talk, if you say one word, I’ll walk right out of here.”
She kissed him hard, almost violently. Their teeth met and she kissed him harder yet, then stepped back and lifted her sweater over her head. She reached behind her back and unclasped her bra. It was cold in the fish house and she felt her skin go taut. When Frans whispered her name, she twisted in his arms and grabbed for her sweater. But he raised a finger to his lips and pulled her back to him.
And so she unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned and unzipped his pants and pushed them to his knees, and as fast as she could kicked off her boots and took her own pants off. She pulled herself up onto the counter and in the next motion pulled him to her. Even though she was ready and wanting, it hurt. It hurt and then felt good. She watched him, his head thrown back, his eyes clenched shut even as they were turned up to the ceiling. She noticed the gray hair at his temples, the lines around his eyes. She noticed also that he was thinner than the last time she’d held him like this. His legs were muscled and the arms around her were those of his younger self.
And he was ecstatic, she could see. He looked almost pained. As he moved and clinched his eyes tighter, she realized he wasn’t making love to her but to that woman in Norway. The one he worked with, or used to, she wasn’t even sure anymore. Her name, she remembered, as her husband rolled his hips into her, was Alena. She was one of those long-armed, long-legged Nordic types with downy hair and hard eyes and heavy breasts. She was beautiful. Greta had met her twice and could understand why Frans had gone to her, and it was a relief that he had. A fantastic relief, actually, because it had spared her this part of their life together.
He was not long inside her. After a few minutes he threw his chin down on his chest and she saw the veins in his temples and felt him pulsing inside her. He went from his tiptoes to his heels and slid out of her and only then did he put his lips to hers. He kissed her and tried to wrap his arms around her but she pushed him away. Now his shoulders slumped and he folded his hands in front of his cock.
“Would you light the lantern again?” she said.
He stumbled back as though he’d been punched in the stomach. She put her bra and sweater back on and felt their warmth against the iciness of their lovemaking. She slid off the bench and pulled her underwear and jeans back on, she slipped her feet back into her boots. The moonlight made his pale and thin legs and his sunken belly appear almost malnourished.
She lit the lantern herself and when he finally looked up tears were welling in his eyes.
“My God, look at us,” she said.
She leaned back against the counter and watched him pull his pants up and hitch his belt. He would not meet her gaze. Would not so much as raise his eyes for her to see them. She wished to undo what had just happened, to have stayed up at her father’s house on the Burnt Wood River. To have let Frans adjourn for the night with his iPhone and what he thought were his secrets. She wanted that desperately now, would have waited for the whole house to fall asleep before sneaking outside for a cigarette with which to inaugurate another sleepless night. All of that would have been a thousand times preferable to this debacle. She reached into her purse and dug through to its bottom and removed her pack of cigarettes and her lighter and unthinkably lit one in front of him.
He finally looked up, his eyes flashing wet in the lantern light. He had beautiful eyes, blue like ice behind his tears. But she could not read them, and this infuriated her. They looked at each other for a full minute before she said, “I wonder if Fridtjof Nansen ever fucked his wife and then cried about it.”
The gloss on his eyes disappeared all at once, yet he said nothing. How often had she asked for quiet lately? But now that she had it she wanted something else. So she smiled, even if she didn’t mean to.
“You have no kindness left in you. Not one bit,” he said. “You could’ve come back to me. You know that, right? I love you and would take you back any time. I would forgive you right now.” He pulled his own shirt back on and walked halfway to the door.
That awful smile still hung on her face. She could feel it there. So she put her cigarette to her lips, hoping it would give her mouth something else to do.
“You decided it would be like this,” he said, and then crossed the fish house to stand at the door with his hand on the knob.
How could she tell him this wasn’t true? She no sooner chose for things to be like this than she did for the weather to behave one way or another. What she longed for was not some former version of themselves—when they were younger, with laughter in their lives, when she looked at him and felt happiness—but rather for something it had never been. Never could be. And though she knew this was true, and why it was, she could not explain it. She had learned, during these endless sleepless nights, that there weren’t words for everything the heart harbored. He took one last look at her, shook his head, and went to wait in the car.
Later that night she lay unsleeping. He snored beside
her and she felt shame and sadness looking down the bed at his naked legs. That fuck in the fish house, it was a betrayal. She tried to remember how it felt to have him inside her. Tried so she might have the pleasure of forgetting again. And then she played the same trick for the first time they made love, a month or so after they’d met. He was such a gentleman, so earnest and proper. It had been as unerotic as a glacier, which is what he’d spent so much time talking about on their first dates together. And mostly it had remained like that.
* * *
—
Frans said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought up last night.” He put his hand on the table. A lame offering. “You’re going to stare yourself blind, looking out at that harbor.”
She answered him softly. “Where else should I look, Frans? Should I watch you reading your newspaper? Checking your phone every minute? Or stare at the television over there?” She pointed toward the bar. “I hate basketball.” Now she looked around the Burnt Wood Tavern. “Maybe I should watch that old couple down from Canada and admire their smiling faces, wishing we could be so happy? Should I lie to you? Should I stare longingly into your eyes instead of out at the harbor? Would that make you feel better?”
“If we’re being honest, you haven’t looked at me except to scold me or mock me in a very long time.” Now he leaned toward her. “I try to reach you all the time. And you know what? You never answer. So you bet I’m reading the paper and checking my phone.”
She wanted to tell him to be quiet again. She wanted him to leave. To take his newspaper and phone and walk out the door. Did she want him never to return? Did she want for their life together never to have happened? Should she say those things? No. Even in all her coldness, those words would be too much. So she turned to him and said, “You have a plane to catch.”
He sat there, staring at her with that expectant look. What was he waiting for? Where had his self-assuredness gone? She’d made it vanish. Or at any rate it had vanished.