Foreigners

by Stephen Finucan

  He sat there, his feet resting on the radiator, looking out at the autumnal colours, and dialled the number for Kathryn’s cellphone. Payne experienced a slight twinge of desire as he waited for the call to go through. Kathryn, if he recalled her timetable, would be in Foden’s classics at Wieschuck Hall on the main campus. She would most definitely have switched the ringer to vibrate, so as to avoid the embarrassment of disturbing the lecture. Payne closed his eyes and listened to the tone, trying to picture the phone jiggling against her flesh—Kathryn kept it hooked on her belt loop—and leaning back in his chair, breathed deeply, imagining the sweet scent of the skin below her navel, and the fine downy fluff there that had tickled his nose just a few hours earlier.

  “Hello?”

  “Koochie-koo, sweetie?”

  “Harvey? What are you doing? I’m in the middle of a class here.”

  She sounded upset, and Payne thought for a moment that he’d made a mistake, that she wouldn’t share his excitement.

  “I’ve got some wonderful news,” he said, his voice a little too eager.

  “Well, what is it?”

  He paused. She was clearly in a sour mood.

  “This isn’t a good time, is it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Later, then. Come to my place. I’ll make you dinner and tell you then.” There was silence on the line. “It really is wonderful,” he added.

  “Fine, Harvey. Fine. I’ve got to go. Professor Foden’s staring at me.”

  She hung up without saying goodbye. Payne looked at the telephone in his hand. Yes, a mistake. He should have waited. Kathryn was temperamental at the best of times, and drawing the ire of Gil Foden, who was a genuine tyrant, would set her off to no end. Still, candlelight, gnocchi and a sweet red might bring her back round. And if that didn’t, Payne was sure Amsterdam would.

  The drop-down dinner tray nudged against his belly. The passenger in the seat in front of him insisted on having his seat fully reclined, and Payne decided to suffer the discomfort rather than have to engage in any conversation, no matter how trivial. He looked down at his meal. He had chosen the beef over the fish, having never been partial to seafood. It was meant to be stroganoff, but the limp noodles and minuscule cuts of meat seemed to him insufficient. The dessert, an unidentifiable custard, both in colour and taste, was too airy. And the plastic wrap over his cheese had a hole in it, leaving the contents hard and stale. He enjoyed his wine, though, a nondescript Merlot in a small twist-top bottle. He considered asking the flight attendant for another, but stopped himself. There was no point, he concluded, in muddling his senses when he was going to have to navigate his way through the airport to find the connecting flight to Maastricht, and from there the train to Hoogeveen.

  “Are you finished, sir?” The flight attendant stood in the aisle beside him, her hand on the back of his seat, leaning in so that her face was close to his. She had large dark eyes and brown hair cut in a bob, her skin pale, with just the faintest dusting of foundation. “No … I mean, yes.” Her closeness made Payne anxious, and he could feel his face begin to flush. “Yes, I’m finished, thank you.”

  “A little more wine, maybe?” she asked, with a smile that revealed a neat row of straight white teeth. Her lips, Payne could see, were moist, as if she had just passed her tongue across them.

  “No, thank you. I’m fine, really,” he said, and nodded, almost banging his forehead against her chin.

  “Very good then,” she replied, and lifted the half-finished remnants of his dinner from the tray. Then she reached across and took away his neighbour’s platter. Payne closed his eyes as the fabric of her blouse brushed his cheek.

  He had noticed early on in the flight that the attendants were, to a one, quite attractive, and it had made him nervous. Payne had always been uncertain around pretty women. He couldn’t help but watch them, how they moved, how they reacted to others. What it must be like to be a beautiful person in this world, he often wondered, when there are so many people who simply are not.

  His uneasiness was heightened now by the knowledge that these women, in their loose white blouses, their snug navy skirts and vests, and silk neckerchiefs, were Dutch. He’d heard the stories about the Dutch, about their permissiveness. After all, it was this that had so excited him about Amsterdam. As the flight attendant moved on and leaned over to speak to another passenger, Payne stared at her buttocks and contemplated the wondrously indulgent feats she might be willing to perform.

  He recalled reading somewhere that at Schiphol Airport there was a brothel lounge, completely legitimate, certified by the government. The idea was to pander to international businessmen who had to pass through, on their way from one stress-filled corporate engagement to another. Briefly Payne considered checking the duration of his layover between flights, but before he could even dig his itinerary from his jacket pocket, misgiving quashed any idea of an assignation.

  He’d been right, Kathryn was angry.

  “Do you know what it’s like?” she said, standing in the doorway of his kitchen, one hand firmly planted on her hip, the other waving a smouldering cigarette accusingly in his direction. “Do you even have an inkling of how it felt to be singled out in the middle of a lecture hall by that man?”

  Payne kept his head down and tried to concentrate on the potato dumplings boiling in the pot before him, while at the same time making certain his sauce didn’t burn. He needed a few more drops of olive oil in the water to keep the gnocchi from sticking, but to have added it would’ve simply upset Kathryn further. She’d already accused him of not paying enough attention to her needs.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, casting a furtive glance toward the doorway.

  She let out an exasperated breath and brought the cigarette to her lips. Through a cloud of smoke she said, “You know, Harvey, you can’t always be sorry.”

  Then she turned and walked into the living room, and soon the thumping of the stereo, its volume tuned higher than he would have thought possible, reverberated through the house. Payne had never understood her taste in music: angry, violent, discordant. He’d tried several times to coax her toward his own musical preferences. But she’d turned up her nose at Schubert and Chopin, and when he’d parried with Leonard Cohen, she’d fallen asleep halfway through the first side of the album. In the end he had to admit that it was her disregard for his own notions that attracted him; he was drawn to her wilfulness and occasional contempt. A failing on his part, possibly, but then again, failing was something Payne understood intimately.

  The gnocchi, drenched in thick marinara sauce; the bruschetta with the crisply toasted Italian bread, fresh hothouse tomatoes and finely diced onions; the sweet gelato; the perfectly aged Chianti: all had the desired effect. Kathryn, sated, had relaxed considerably. Stretched out on the sofa, eyes closed, her head in Payne’s lap, she breathed steadily, edging toward slumber. For his part, Payne had to suppress the urge to belch, not wanting to disturb the moment.

  “I’d completely forgotten,” she said lazily, opening her eyes to him. “You wanted to tell me something, didn’t you?” Then added, mockingly: “Something wonderful.”

  Payne shifted so that Kathryn had to lift herself into a sitting position, then he put a hand on each of her shoulders. He looked her straight in the eye, and in a voice he hoped would sound both mature and enticing, said, “What is the first thing you think of when I say Amsterdam?”

  “Anne Frank,” Kathryn replied, without missing a beat.

  “Oh. Well … Really?” Payne said, rather at a loss. “Yes, I guess I could see how someone could come up with that. It’s not quite what I had in mind.”

  Payne cleared his throat.

  “Let’s try it again,” he said, and furrowed his brow, as if to imply that Kathryn should concentrate a little harder. “Now, without being so morbid, what’s the first thing you think of when I say Amsterdam?”

  She took a moment longer to answer him the second time: “Canals?”

&n
bsp; Payne grimaced.

  “Windmills?”

  His head drooped.

  “Wooden shoes? Rembrandt? Vermeer?” Kathryn pushed his hands away and huffed: “Oh, for God’s sake, Harvey. How am I supposed to know what you want me to think?”

  Sensing another shift in her mood, toward one that would hardly be conducive to his plans for the remainder of the evening, Payne placed a reassuring hand on her thigh.

  “Look, sweetie, I apologize. I shouldn’t play games like that.”

  “I hate games.”

  “Yes, I know. It’s just that …” Payne slid a little closer to her. “It’s just that I was so excited, I guess I wanted to build up the suspense a bit.”

  “If you have something to tell me,” Kathryn said, straightening herself, “I wish you would just come out and say it.”

  “Very well.” Payne could no longer hide his sly grin. “I’ve been invited to a symposium in Holland in January and I want you to come with me.”

  There was a long silence, during which neither of them moved, and Payne could feel his grin begin to wane.

  “You want to take me to Holland?” Kathryn said, after what had seemed an eternity. There was little in her tone or expression that gave Payne any reassurance.

  “Yes,” he said meekly.

  “Oh, Harvey!” She threw her arms around him and pulled him so close that for a moment he lost his breath. “Harvey, that’s wonderful.”

  She kissed his cheek and then his ear, taking the lobe between her teeth.

  “I thought you might like that,” he said, his words now flush with confidence.

  “Like it?” she said, her breath warm in his ear. “I think it’s amazing.”

  Then she pushed him roughly away, and Payne fell backward, banging his head on the armrest of the sofa.

  “Amsterdam!” she blurted, and then in a low, growling voice, as she crawled toward him: “Oh, Harvey, you naughty little boy, you.”

  Although he had never really been one for films, Payne had been looking forward to the in-flight movie. The television screens, suspended from the ceiling at ten-foot intervals, had advertised a romantic comedy. He had no doubt that it would be utterly vacuous and implausible, but still Payne had welcomed the thought of a diversion. Unfortunately, it was not to be. A malfunction in the airplane’s audiovisual system saw to that. Not only was the film, as well as the news and sports programming, cancelled, but the personal headsets offered nothing beyond static. Payne switched back and forth among the twelve channels on his armrest console and found nothing but white noise.

  Looking around, it seemed to him that he was the only one bothered by the situation. The little man beside him was curled neatly against the window, his complimentary blanket tucked under his chin, fast asleep. Payne wished he could sleep, wished he could close his eyes and let the rest of the flight slip by unnoticed. But there was little chance of that. He felt strangely wide awake, fidgety even. And to add insult to injury, in place of the televised entertainment, a map of the airplane’s progress was displayed on the screens.

  The childlike image of a white aircraft was superimposed over a tract of bright blue labelled Atlantische Oceaan. From the tail of the little plane stretched a long red line reaching all the way back to Toronto. Below the crude map was a list of figures: air speed, altitude, elapsed time and time to destination. Looking at the screen, Payne was reminded of the old saying: a watched pot. And for a moment, he could have sworn that he saw the tiny white airplane move backward.

  If only that were possible, Payne thought, and imagined flicking a switch on his console that would set everything in reverse, like the rewind button on the tape deck of his stereo. He didn’t want to go too far back, just to the departure lounge and his phone call to Kathryn—or maybe two weeks earlier. Yes, two weeks earlier would be better. Then again, if he was honest with himself, a rearward leap of a month would be his best bet to set things straight. A month would allow him to nip the whole thing in the bud, sever the shoot before it even had the chance to bloom.

  Just thinking about it was beginning to upset him, to give him an uneasy feeling in his stomach, as if the fruity Merlot were doing battle with the unsavoury stroganoff. So he turned his mind instead to the new lines he’d scribbled after he’d finished eating.

  Payne had peppered this new draft of his address with empty appreciation of his Dutch colleagues, as well as mention of a tenuous kinship in the plight of their respective cultures in the face of overwhelming outside influence. It was, he knew, utterly transparent, and would be recognized as not only slapdash but insincere. He no longer cared, however. Everything about this excursion now seemed delusive to him. The thin blankets and flat pillows handed out to the coach passengers as a pretense to comfort, the sinewy strips of beef in his inedible dinner, even the forced pearly smiles arbitrarily dispensed by the comely flight attendants struck Payne as dishonest. The symposium itself, as Gil Foden had so smugly pointed out to him the previous week, was also a sham: the dubious mandate of an equally questionable EU funding scheme.

  But most deceitful of all, Payne decided, closing his notebook and putting it to one side, was the empty seat between himself and his slumbering neighbour.

  The marijuana they’d smoked in preparation for their excursion to Amsterdam took Payne back to his own student days, but the tales he recounted for Kathryn, while they took the slightly acrid smoke into their lungs, were more fiction than fact. The actualities, which flooded back into his lightened head as the pot began to obstruct his senses, were those of frightened paranoia, unruly limb-twitching tics and the desperate need to belong. He remembered darkened parties in pungent, squalid basement apartments where the incessant permutations of progressive rock LPs replaced conversation and keggers with meaty-fisted frat boys jamming roaches in his face and calling him “faggot” if he declined. Payne mentioned none of this to Kathryn.

  He borrowed sexual lore as well. And one night, as he settled his nose between her thighs, he related to her the particulars of an ancient Playboy article that had remained with him since his youth. The photograph, a two-page spread that accompanied the text, had burned itself into his inexperienced brain. A tangle of naked bodies—he’d counted twenty-three, always imagining himself the uncommitted extra man—all tongues and teeth and fingertips licking and nibbling and pinching strange nipples and nether parts. Many a night that sybaritic vision warmed the otherwise cold sheets of his bed. Forsaking verity, he performed a quick mathematical function, subtracting twenty gyrating torsos, so that the solution contained only himself and two eager yet unskilled coeds, hungry for tutelage in the more slippery arts.

  He harboured no illusions about Kathryn’s gullibility: it was doubtful that she believed his tales. Rather, she took from them only what she required. Just as had been the case when she’d sat across the desk from him that first time two semesters before and explained that she would need at least a B+ average in his CanLit 301 to get into the grad school of her choice. She knew what she wanted, and he had it to give. But things had gone on from there, much to Payne’s surprise; a pleasant surprise. And soon he found that they each had something the other needed, though he did at times feel that she was after more than he. Especially in the bedroom, where he thought he might be gaining the upper hand, that is until she arched her back and in a breathy voice said, “You know, Harvey, that might be an idea.”

  “What might be?” he asked, craning his neck, trying to see her face.

  “You know,” she said languidly.

  Payne lifted himself slightly and looked over the slight plumpness of her belly, but her generous breasts, even though somewhat flattened in repose, still hid her from view.

  “No,” he replied, a quaver coming into his voice. “I don’t know that I do.”

  Kathryn raised herself on her elbows and smiled coquet-tishly down the length of her bare torso.

  “Another body,” she said with counterfeit schoolgirl innocence. Then added, with the growl s
he’d taken to using since he’d told her of the trip: “Why, a little ménage à trois, my darling.”

  Payne felt his excitement begin to slacken and then go limp, replaced by a flush of panic that was, thankfully, masked by the dimness of the bedroom. He suppressed the urge to ask what gender she had in mind, afraid, either way, of what her answer might be, and instead replied: “Why tinker with a good thing?”

  Kathryn laughed and pressed her thighs against the sides of his head so that they covered his ears. Her voice came to him as if he were under water, and Payne had to wriggle free of her grip and ask what she’d said.

  “I said, ‘You poor dear,’” she repeated, bringing her feet together midway down his back, “‘there’s always room for improvement.’” And then, flexing her solid calf muscles, she forced him back down to business.

  Payne closed his eyes, not out of tiredness but because with them open he couldn’t keep from staring at the television monitors, watching and waiting for another minute, another mile to tick by. He’d abandoned the address, for now at least. There would be time enough to finish it on the train, during that last leg to Hoogeveen. He turned his thoughts instead to Noel Gaynor, to his book, which he was now certain—as certain as he was that he was sitting in a KLM 747M 31,000 feet above the Atlantische Oceaan—would never be finished.

  He’d brought his notes along, had packed his jottings and the three and a half chapters he’d rushed through in the weeks leading up to the trip, as well as the photocopies of the few unsent letters Gaynor had written to his wife, whom he’d left behind in England when he made his journey to the New World. All was crammed into the attaché case wedged in the overhead compartment.