The Copenhagen Affair

by Amulya Malladi

  Instead of asking Mira to go fuck off, Sanya would look at her potbelly and feel a rush of shame and ask for the details of the diet. Instead of asking Harry to defend her—say something, anything—she would remain silent.

  It wasn’t like she was obese or unhealthy. She was a size eight. She jiggled a little bit here and there, but she was like any other woman in the world with some body parts that excelled and some that did not. But Sanya would not challenge her family and never told them that they made her feel small and irrelevant, even though they believed they were being helpful by pushing Sanya to be a better person. She never fought back, and in fact she never acknowledged, even within the confines of her consciousness, that she was playing dead and submerging every negative feeling she had about the people around her and herself.

  The biggest fraud she committed upon herself and the people around her was to hide the real Sanya, who was not happy or positive but afraid and unsure, and had used the technique of lying down and letting her life and the people in it run all over her so as to not deal with herself or her inadequacies.

  Living such an inauthentic life meant that there was a pressure valve that would eventually have to give out to release the steam of Sanya’s personal mendacity. So when the pressure became unbearable, boom she went, and imploded with a bang.

  Chapter 2

  Exiled

  They moved to Copenhagen in early May, nearly four months after Sanya’s mental collapse. The weather matched her mood, and she watched the gray skies and the pitter-patter of unrelenting pins-and-needles rain from the window of their bedroom as she peeked from under the fluffy Georg Jensen white down comforter. Even though it was May, Harry informed Sanya that people had told him the weather might stay fall-like, windy, rainy, and gray until nearly June and maybe beyond if they were unlucky.

  Despite the uncooperative weather, so drastically different from sunny, blue-sky California, Harry was pleased with his decision to move. Because now Sanya sometimes ventured out of the bedroom and sat down to watch television, which is what she was doing when Lucky, Harry’s best friend and right hand at work, came to discuss matters of great corporate importance with Harry, in this case, a dinner party.

  “Can you please keep your voice down? I don’t want anything, and I mean anything, to screw with her recovery,” Harry whispered to Lucky.

  Sanya could hear them. Of course she could. She had imploded; she hadn’t gone deaf.

  Their new apartment in Copenhagen had two living rooms connected by glass doors that could not be closed due to some hiccup with the hinge that the landlord still needed to fix. The men sat in the small living room that had been converted into an office while Sanya sat in the large living room watching television. Since everything in Denmark was subtitled, she didn’t have to get used to watching Friends in Danish. Friends in German, she had discovered on a rare business trip to Frankfurt, was just not the same.

  “Then don’t take her with you for this dinner,” Lucky whispered back. “These are important people.”

  “I can hear you,” Sanya called out.

  Amply medicated, she was amused that their five-room apartment had a layout called “pork chop.” Lucky, with the help of real estate agent Lilly Nielsen, had found the place in the unpronounceable Østerbro area, one of the ten districts of Copenhagen, just north of the city center, where the buildings were over a hundred years old. The double living rooms were in the front with a narrow hallway ensconced by a small bathroom, bedroom, and at the very end of the “chop,” a kitchen and a maid’s quarters, which now was a spare bedroom.

  The furnished apartment had been seriously renovated and modernized. The living room couch—Sanya’s domain—came from some big-time Danish designer, and Harry favored a red chair shaped like an egg from the same designer. The coffee table was glass and metal, all clean lines and minimalistic. Lilly Nielsen had even gone on about the faucets in the apartment.

  “It’s all Arne Jacobsen,” she told them. Like that meant something to Sanya. She didn’t know Arne Jacobsen from her ass.

  “And the china is Royal Copenhagen, the silverware Georg Jensen. The furnishings are from Illum Bolighus,” she said to them with a sparkle in her eyes. “This is as upmarket as it gets.”

  Harry had enthusiastically shown his appreciation for the coolness of the apartment, as well as the location. He loved it all, he told her. It was just the way he had imagined a European capital would be. Old dwellings divided by narrow streets. Green copper turrets with specks of gold. Red rooftops. Clothing stores with unfamiliar names displaying dark and beige-colored clothes on mannequins. Cheerful wine bars advertising their selections of Italian, French, and Spanish wines. Outdoor cafés outfitted chairs with blankets and had gas and infrared lamps in case it got cool in the summer evenings (spoiler alert: it did). Bicycle lanes on all the main roads and more bicyclists than one could count crowding the streets during rush hour. Small cars that expert parallel parkers squeezed into smaller spaces. Unlike Paris, Lilly told them, here people did not dent the cars when they parallel parked, so Harry’s new Audi A5 would not be damaged on the street, because obviously when one lived in a city that was nearly a thousand years old, there was a scarcity of parking.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucky said to Sanya, including her in their conversation.

  Lucky, too, was being careful with Sanya, as Harry was. Lucky had always been there, since business school. Lucky was Harry’s fixer, his whip. Attached to Harry’s hip. And it was inevitable that Sanya and Lucky had also developed a relationship, an odd one where they knew each other well but only through Harry.

  Harry and Lucky were alike in many ways. Like Harry, Lucky was also fit. Unlike Harry, who ran every morning come hail or rain and did at least one marathon a year, Lucky was into CrossFit. He had a penchant for slim-cut gray suits. Never blue or black. He wore crisp white dress shirts with cufflinks. His ties were gray with black stripes, gray with white stripes, gray with polka dots. He slicked his black and plentiful hair back with enough hair gel to give Danny Zuko a run for his money.

  “Lucky, I’m not going to flip out over dinner. And it’s been forever since I had a nervous breakdown, so stop stressing about it,” Sanya said flippantly. “Where is this dinner?”

  Harry smiled his Colgate smile. No cosmetic help. Never a cavity.

  “At the American ambassador’s residence,” Harry said. “This guy whose company we’re buying, IT Foundry, he’ll be there with his wife.”

  Sanya nodded. “What time?”

  “If you’re ready by seven, that’ll be great,” Lucky said carefully. “And you’ll meet Mister Ambassador, of course, and his wife Cindy, Cynthia Wells. Anders Ravn, the owner of IT Foundry, as Harry said, and his wife, Mandy. Also invited . . .”

  There were going to be how many people at this dinner? Sanya felt anxiety spread its tiny fingers around her windpipe and slowly choke her. In defense, she raised her hand as she walked toward them. “You’re killing the suspense, Lucky. Let me get there and find out. If I know everything now, that’ll just ruin the fun.”

  As she left the room Sanya heard Lucky say, to her satisfaction, “She’s not going to take that attitude to dinner, is she?”

  You bet she is, Sanya thought gleefully.

  Chapter 3

  Sanya and Harry, a Happy Couple?

  Harry met Sanya at UC Berkeley. He had just broken up with a girlfriend—like fifteen minutes before he came to the Starbucks on Oxford.

  A woman was standing in line in front of him. She wore pearl earrings, the kind that dangle. He could only see her dark hair and her earrings as he stood behind her. But once they were at the counter, she turned around, a dazzling smile on her face, and he fell hard. He followed her when she left with her latte, abandoning his coffee that the barista was making for him.

  “Hey,” Harry said when he caught up with her outside the coffee shop.

  The woman looked around her, as if he were talking to someone past her. “Me?”
she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Have I seen you before?”

  “How would I know if you did?”

  “You’re right,” Harry said. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  She held up the Starbucks cup and smiled. “I already have coffee.”

  That was when Harry felt foolish. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and nodded. He turned around and was walking away when she called out, “But you can buy me a glass of wine tonight.”

  He had gotten her name, number, and address, and that evening he took her out to Blake’s, one of the student hangouts in Berkeley. They had beer instead of wine.

  He had been fascinated with her. She had gotten into Tufts, she told him, but had decided to come to Berkeley to get away from Boston. Harry had gotten into UC Berkeley with sheer hard work, which had earned him a scholarship that alleviated most of the tuition burden; for the rest he had taken a loan, and he was working as a waiter on weekends to pay for living expenses. Sanya didn’t have a job to pay for living expenses. She didn’t have to take out a loan to pay for school. Her father was a surgeon.

  That evening as they sat in the Rathskeller, Blake’s subterranean beer hall, with a jazz band, which made it difficult for them to have a conversation, he found that he couldn’t look away from her. No other woman had had this effect on him. There was something about Sanya, something about them together that had created, no, demanded instant intimacy. She was vivacious, a happy person who exuded contagious, positive energy. She made him happy by just being there.

  Harry’s parents had divorced when he was eight. His brother had been fifteen. Too old for Harry to have a relationship with. Harry had been shuttled between his parents, but after a while his father moved and Harry stayed with his mother and her new family: her new husband and his two college-aged daughters. He thought of them as her family because he didn’t feel included. It wasn’t like he had a horrible childhood. He wasn’t exactly neglected. No one beat him. He was always well fed. He had the freedom to do what he wanted. There were no hysterical scenes or fighting when he was a teenager. When he left for college, his mother moved with her husband to the East Coast—they all just drifted apart physically as they had emotionally.

  He had been an independent child, and he had grown to be a self-confident and independent man. But he had been alone all his life. He’d had relationships, but none of them had made him feel like he belonged. That changed when he met Sanya. She was warm and loving and embraced him. Sanya became his family. She was there for him. She was on his team. Those early days he hungered for the intimacy they had and made love to her whenever he could. It wasn’t just that the sex was good; it was the closeness. He loved feeling close to her. She was his. And his alone.

  In the beginning, it hadn’t been love. It had been security for Harry, and he knew it had been his physical appeal for Sanya. He had found that out when they were on their way to Boston, where he was going to meet her parents for the first time.

  “I know it’s shallow, and you’re so much more than that, but god, Harry, you look like you walked out of a fashion magazine,” Sanya had told him.

  Harry hadn’t been surprised. He knew how he looked. He had eyes. And he had ears, so he had heard it before. A blond Paul Newman, one girlfriend’s mother had said of him.

  “It’s not shallow,” Harry had said, and flicked her pearl earrings. “You look like an Indian princess. My Indian princess.”

  She was his Indian princess, and he was her cross between Prince Charming and Barbie’s Ken.

  “My parents always assumed that I’d marry an Indian,” Sanya had told him. “You’re going to be a rude shock.” And that’s how he found out that she was dropping him into a sea of Indians, without warning her family about his whiteness or their closeness, at her parents’ annual Diwali party where all their friends would be.

  Harry should’ve been terrified, but he had felt immensely proud of Sanya. He had noticed how she always deferred to her parents over the phone, seemed to be in some ways living like she was still their child and not a grown woman. Many sentences started with “My mother will just lose it if she finds out . . .” No, this Sanya who was taking him to meet the entire Walpole Indian community during the festival of lights, she was rebelling against her family for him.

  And when he heard Mira’s whispered, “God, he’s very handsome. What does he see in you?” he had understood Sanya’s need to show him off.

  Beneath surface attractions, Harry and Sanya found common ground. Plenty of it. Good food. Good wine. Workaholism. Business acumen.

  For Harry, Sanya was the perfect wife. She never turned him down for sex, even after they were married, even after they had Sara, and even . . . she just never did. She didn’t nag about his travel when he started working all hours of the day. She didn’t complain when he started an executive MBA at Haas—commonly called a divorce education because it was like having a second and a third job atop the first job he already had.

  His career had thrived, thanks to the fact that Sanya was completely undemanding and wholly responsible for running the home and family parts of their lives. It didn’t go unnoticed by Harry that Sanya’s career, which had started out with a lot of promise, stopped flourishing around the same time Sara was born. But that was what happened to women, he had rationalized. And he made more money than Sanya, so he had to keep pushing. He had also noticed, and then ignored, the fact that Sanya had fallen back into the old routine of being the pleaser; her one act of rebellion, which was marrying Harry, had faded, but that was part of growing up, wasn’t it?

  His passion for Sanya had been that mad-for-you, can’t-live-without-you kind. The type that people look back upon years later and wonder, Where did it go? Because now, twenty years later, the passion was tenuous. Love had become comfort, had become commonplace, and had shrunk to nothingness. They had been moving apart for so long that there was a giant abyss between them.

  Harry didn’t even acknowledge it existed until Sanya’s mental collapse. After some joint therapy sessions he started to see her life, torn at the seams as it was, and because he didn’t know how to deal with it or even where to start to fix any of it, he did nothing when she hid under the covers in her bed.

  It had taken a while for Harry to become serious about Sanya’s condition, even after the nervous breakdown. Part of it was that he wanted to be in denial. A month after the incident at the office, one morning he had kissed her cheek as he always did, and she had opened her eyes to look into his. She was lying on her stomach, not an elegant pinup sexy position, but a bedraggled I-own-this-whole-bed position.

  “Hey,” he said. “You’re awake.”

  This was the first time in a month Sanya was awake in the morning, and it made everything inside him squeeze. Yes, he thought, she’s going to jump out of bed and say, “Of course I’m awake, and I’m going to go ahead and have a great day.”

  But that was Old Sanya. The one who wanted to make everyone around her happy—and he worried that she’d done such a good job of it that all the happiness had drained away from her, and she was left with nothing. And it was his fault because he had stopped paying attention to her, to them.

  “No,” Sanya whispered, “I’m still sleeping.”

  She looked so helpless that he had looked at her with disgust; he hadn’t been able to stop himself. And that was when tears started to stream down her face. Harry had stood up in shock at his own insensitivity, but unable to say anything to fix the situation, he had said a hasty good-bye before leaving. He hadn’t been able to stay, hadn’t been able to face Sanya’s tears, and she hadn’t been able to stop crying. He did what he always did when things didn’t work his way: he pretended everything was normal because he didn’t know how to handle the abnormal situation they were in.

  The next day he went away on a business trip and was gone for a full three days.

  He didn’t call her. He never called when he was on business trips, so why should he now? Nothing was d
ifferent. He didn’t want to accept that there was a new Sanya in his life, a woman he didn’t understand very well. And then there was the fear that he had never understood his wife, not because she had hidden something from him, but because he was lacking in intellect to know her inner workings.

  Naina, Sanya’s mother, called him on day three.

  “I called and she mumbled something, and now she won’t pick up the phone. It goes straight to voice mail,” she told him. “Do something.”

  “I’m in Houston. What do you want me to do?” Harry had snapped.

  “Get her help,” Naina had yelled at him. “She’s your wife. So pull up your pants and be a man.”

  Harry got four calls—one from Sanya’s mother, one from her father, one from Mira, and one from Vinay. Everyone was worried.

  Harry hadn’t known what to do and called Alec. He never liked Alec—mostly because he knew Alec didn’t like him. He looked down upon Harry. Alec was the intellectual, and Harry was the corporate whore.

  Alec went to see Sanya after his call with Harry and told him later that he had had to ring the doorbell for a good fifteen minutes before she opened and that he had been close to calling 911, worried that she’d hit her head or worse.

  “How the fuck do you leave your wife when she’s just had a nervous breakdown?” Alec had demanded when Harry had called him to check on Sanya. “She could hurt herself.”

  Harry had panicked then and called his assistant to change his flight. He had to get home ASAP.

  He got a text message from Alec as he made his way to the airport.

  She’s unwashed, starved, and sick. Looks like shit. Managed to get her into the shower. Get your ass back home. Taking her to therapist.