“Cindy, you have the most excellent chef,” Mandy said, diverting attention from her errant husband. “When you leave I’m going to steal him.”
“No, no, I have dibs,” Penny said.
Sanya looked at Harry. These people could afford chefs. These people were not like them. They were out of Harry’s league, but Sanya could see how much he wanted to fit in. Poor Harry, she thought. He must be scared shitless that she was going to fall apart right here at the dinner table and embarrass him.
“We’re not leaving yet,” Cindy said. “Another two years, and after that we’ll see. Y’all better start being nice to me now if you want my Antoine. I did suggest to him that he could come back to Atlanta with us, but his children are here. Another love slave. Do you know what a love slave is, sugar?” she asked Sanya, who tried to avoid the deer caught in headlights expression because she was surprised to be addressed and just shook her head blandly.
Before Cindy could explain, another guest interjected.
“Man meets Danish hottie at some holiday on some beach and then follows her to Denmark. They marry or cohabit, whichever. They have children. They get divorced. They always get divorced. The father has to stay in this dejlige lille land, ‘delightful little land,’ for the children,” Mark Barrett, a Brit and Penny’s husband, said as he drank beer from a glass. Everyone else was drinking wine.
“And the reverse is true as well; a lot of women end up staying in Denmark with their Danish husbands,” Penny said. “Mandy, what do you say, are you a love slave? Or maybe you’d like to be.”
Mandy waved her hand at Penny as if she’d said something naughty.
“Oh, Mark, all y’all Brits are just too funny,” Cindy said, and let out a laugh.
Christ, who were these people? The men had careers. The women dabbled in fashion and chefs. None of the women, including Sanya, worked. Except for Penny. She was apparently a designer and had her own clothing line that she’d started after she’d retired from modeling for the big fashion houses. She actually said that to Harry: “I walked for all the big houses.”
And the former model was peddling her clothes actively.
“Mandy, you have to come to the store, because I have this one-of-a-kind turquoise-and-cream dress that will look divine on you.”
“Cindy, you loved my leather jacket, the black one with the purple lining that I wore for the Elle Denmark gala? I have another one just like it but with a scarlet lining and it was made for you.”
Harry liked women with careers, corporate ones, and Penny was an expert at the art of the pitch. No wonder Harry was all eyes and ears when he talked to her. Anya, the big-busted Ukrainian with the sex-kitten French accent, wasn’t getting anywhere with Harry. Still, Sanya had noticed, and god knows who else had, that she rubbed her ample bosom against his sleeve each time she leaned over to tell him something.
During the break between the first and second courses, Mark claimed the empty chair next to Sanya, beer in hand.
“How are you doing?” he asked. “I introduced Lilly to Lucky, and I wanted to make sure everything went well on the housing front.”
“Oh. How do you know Lilly?” Sanya asked.
“I’m a real estate investor,” he said.
“It’s a very nice apartment,” Sanya said. She didn’t tell him that she had just seen Lilly. She didn’t want to prolong the conversation.
“And I hear that Lilly took you shopping today,” he added.
Faster than jungle drums!
“She’s very nice,” Sanya replied.
Mark laughed. “She’s a barracuda. Bloody good at what she does, and she knows her shopping. You look wonderful in that dress. But maybe next time you should go to Penny’s boutique. It’s in the center of the city.”
Next time? Sanya turned away from Mark and looked blindly at the tablecloth.
“The man was caught with his pants at his ankles and the woman between his legs,” Mister Ambassador from Ukraine was saying. “He paid through his nose for the divorce. I’m telling you, divorces have become so expensive it’s better to put up with the wife than to get rid of her.”
“Or have a tight prenuptial agreement,” Penny added. “In our case it was just sensible, you know. I’m sure you have one, too, right, Harry? It’s very popular in the United States, isn’t it?”
Harry said something about how when they married there was no need for a pre-nup, a repeat of what he had just said to Sanya over the phone in the morning. Sanya felt a twinge of hysteria rise inside her.
“Oh, this is such a crass discussion,” Mandy said. “So, Sanya, what did you do back in California?”
Everyone turned to look at Sanya.
Harry tensed. “Sanya was a consultant,” he said.
Gallant Harry!
“A financial consultant,” he added.
The women nodded politely. Sanya, who hated that Harry had to save her, spoke calmly, decelerating her heartbeat from galloping horses to strolling Victorian ladies. “I worked as a financial consultant, specializing in corporate financial procedures,” she said, and saw the blank look on everyone’s face. They were not expecting this from Sanya.
“How . . . nice,” Mandy said.
“I went to companies and cleaned up their financial processes, you know, how they recorded revenue, gave out payroll and bonuses, how they spent money,” she added.
Sanya decided that she sounded articulate and felt her spine straighten with a little pride.
“I can’t wait for this acquisition to be done with,” Mandy said. “I’m trying to convince my husband that we should buy an orange orchard in Spain and live there happily ever after. But he’s not interested. He wants to start something new. Once a businessman, always a businessman.”
“Orange orchards are business,” someone said.
“But not that much money these days, which I’m sure Ravn knows,” Mark said as he walked back to his chair.
“Again all this talk about money,” Mandy said. “I miss the days when money was simply not discussed.”
“We’re not talking about money; we’re talking about your husband’s ambitions, luv,” Mark said.
“I have only humble ambitions,” a voice that didn’t belong to anyone at the table said.
“Oh, Anders,” Mandy cried, her voice dripping with affection.
Sanya looked up, curious to see this Anders Ravn. It was the man with the scar on his cheek. She was mesmerized. She watched him walk around the table, hugging and air-kissing and shaking hands. He came to her last as he took his place next to her.
“Anders Ravn,” he said, and held out his hand. Sanya took it.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you again,” Ravn said.
The room fell silent at the word again and waited for Ravn to elaborate. He didn’t. The tension built in the room, so vivid that Sanya had to once again control her breathing and let the weight inside her dissolve just as she had learned in therapy.
“I met Sanya earlier today as well,” Mandy declared to thwart the unbearable silence. “At Emmerys.”
“How funny. Me, too,” Penny said.
All Ravn had to do was say him, too, but he didn’t. So Sanya didn’t, either. Harry looked at his wife quizzically just for a moment but then let it pass and wore the mask of insouciance.
“Cindy, I’m sorry for being late,” Ravn said. “But the loss, I believe, is mine, because I missed the appetizer.”
The conversation flowed again, and the man with the scar and Sanya sat in their assigned seats in resolute silence.
Finally, he whispered to her, “Was the appetizer any good?”
She shook her head. “Did you know who I was this afternoon?”
“Yes,” he said.
She didn’t ask how he knew.
“I used to have a mole,” she told him. “Right here.” She pointed to the right side of her neck. “It was small, but I kept obsessing about it.”
“Why?” he asked, looking at her neck.
“It protruded like a witch’s mole,” she explained. “My parents are both doctors, and they said if it wasn’t life threatening, then it didn’t need to be removed.”
“But you wanted it gone,” Ravn said.
Could he be as interested in her mole as she was in his scar?
“Absolutely. I was horrified with it, and I was scared that any day a hair would emerge out of it and make me look like a witch. So one day I took a scalpel from my mother’s medical kit, and I cut it off,” Sanya told him.
“There is no visible scar,” Ravn said. “You did a good job.”
Sanya laughed, and almost immediately she felt the heat of Harry’s glance. She ignored it.
“No, I botched it. There was a lot of blood. My white bathroom was red. My mother sewed it up. She’s an OB-GYN. Lots of delicate C-sections, you know, so that mommies can still wear bikinis after they have babies.”
“I have two children,” Ravn said. “Twins. A girl and a boy. They’re both nineteen.”
“I have a daughter. She’s eighteen, and I’ve never worn a bikini,” Sanya said.
“Why?”
She ruminated on that for a moment. “I’m too Indian to wear a bikini. But maybe it’s just an excuse, because I’m not Indian except for the ethnicity. I don’t like to show my body with all its lumps and bumps.”
“Bikini or not, clothing only covers, it doesn’t change,” Ravn said.
“But it hides.”
“If you have courage, you don’t have to hide.”
“And what if you don’t have courage?” Sanya wanted to know.
“Then you lie down.”
Sanya shook her head. “No. No. Then you find the courage.”
Ravn smiled and then turned to the server and asked for a glass of burgundy. He didn’t like California Chardonnay, he told Sanya, though he was perfectly okay with other California wines, even their red blends.
On their way home, Sanya decided to not be perverse and told Harry how she met Ravn at Emmerys that afternoon, but she hadn’t known he was Ravn. She caught his sigh of relief behind his practiced nonchalance.
Harry was the competitive type, and he’d clearly taken note of Ravn’s power and his fortune (Anya had let it slip at dinner that money had been in his family for generations). And then there was the scar.
Did Harry know her well enough, Sanya wondered, to know that the imperfection of the scar was attractive to her? Did he also realize that Harry’s straight and neat lines, the ones that used to give her pleasure, had somewhere over the years become less attractive, less interesting? It wasn’t Harry’s fault, of course, it was just that Sanya had changed—she had started to crave jagged lines and disorder. She wanted edges rather than curves. She wanted to say the unsaid things. She wanted to feel everything at a time when she felt nothing.
Did he suspect that she not only didn’t mind disorder, she wanted it, because she liked it? And did that scare him shitless like it did her?
He didn’t say it out loud, but, watching him drive home in silence, Sanya could almost hear him think and wish, Can’t Old Sanya, the happy one, the organized one, the normal one, please come the hell back?
The truth was that put-together Sanya might be gone forever. And though that should have scared her, this not knowing who she was anymore, this lostness, amazingly, it did not. This was the new normal—though normal was probably the wrong word under the circumstances.
Sanya smiled at the thought, tracing her finger along her face, over where Ravn’s scar would be. Harry interrupted her not-so-private fantasy with a sideways glance, and she pulled her hand away.
Chapter 6
A Few Good Days in May
The day after the ambassador’s dinner, Harry came back home early, and he was about to go up the stairs to the apartment when he wondered what was the point. She would be in bed or sitting on the couch watching television and ignoring him. The irony was not lost upon him. He had spent a large part of their marriage ignoring her, and now it was her turn. It didn’t make it any easier to swallow.
Marriage, he had always envisioned it as a convenience. Sanya called it a pooling of resources, emotional and financial; it was the bulwark of her life, she used to say. She didn’t say it now. She didn’t say much to him now.
Instead of going up to the apartment, Harry decided to get a drink in the restaurant on the ground floor, the famous Le Saint Jacques. A small French brasserie that was an Østerbro staple, it was famously decorated like a cathedral, with genuine Russian icons and altar candles. Named after Saint James of Compostela, the restaurant was known for its coquilles Saint-Jacques, Saint James’s scallops.
It was the end of May, and the official start of summer was looming large. The days had already started to stretch, with the sun rising at five in the morning and setting at nine at night. By the end of June, the sun would rise at three in the morning and set at midnight. It wasn’t quite the midnight sun of the Arctic Circle, but it was close.
This is as different as it gets from life in Los Gatos, Harry thought. There, he never came home at four in the afternoon, but in Copenhagen, it appeared, when the weather was good, people left the office early. They called it work-life balance. And what the heck was that?
In the four weeks since they had moved to Denmark, this was the first day that showed promise of warmth; there was a smell of heat in the air, and Harry was reminded of California, of sitting on their patio with laptops, working. On weekends—there was no such thing as vacation—Harry would open a bottle of rosé, and they would drink barely a glass between conference calls, emails, and work.
But on this day, Harry sat outside Le Saint Jacques under one of the large green umbrellas, no laptop in hand. His phone was tucked in the inside pocket of his suit, and he had no desire to look at it.
Harry was not feeling at the top of the world.
There were several aspects of his life that were contributing to his melancholy.
The first was obviously his wife. She had gone from being able, capable, positive, and happy to this . . . what was this? Who was this?
The second was IT Foundry. Harry wasn’t certain, but he was starting to wonder as they perused the books of the company whether maybe it was not such a good buy as they had thought. He had moved countries to bring his wife better health and himself better wealth, and it looked like none of it was going to pan out.
However, last night his wife certainly had been in a good mood, and not because of him, but because of that odious man, Anders Ravn, who was everything Harry wanted to be. Ravn had grown up wealthy; he had that polish of easy and old money. The very thing that Harry had had to cultivate, Ravn had had from birth. Fucking silver spoon.
When the waiter approached him, Harry ordered a glass of 2014 Clos Labade, one of the rosés served at Le Saint Jacques. And when the server prodded if he’d like something to eat, Harry glanced up at their apartment and then agreed that yes, as the server suggested, the dry-cured Provençal olives would go very nicely with the rosé.
Harry had never lived in a big city. He had visited on business nearly all the big ones, New York, Tokyo, New Delhi, Brussels, Sydney, London, Paris—you name it. But he had never lived in a capital city. And in Copenhagen the city was right at your doorstep. The sounds of traffic, the lights, the people. Not many sirens here, though, unlike the other big cities he had experienced.
He sipped his wine and watched the efficient citizens of Copenhagen. Some were on bicycles. Others walked past him, purposefully carrying shopping bags, speaking animatedly on their phones. There were mothers with prams. The sun was shining and the sky was blue, and it was as if the city had come alive and its denizens were stepping out of hibernation to wander out and smell the sunlit air.
One of them was a tall man with a military-style haircut. He pushed a stroller toward the outdoor seating area of the restaurant where Harry was sitting as he continued to talk on his cell phone.
“Who the F cares, Elsa? I don’t,” he s
aid in English.
American, Harry thought.
“William will go to the vuggestue next month, and that’s that,” he continued.
He delivered some banal pleasantries in an angry voice, ended the call, and took a seat. The man ordered from the waiter in Danish.
He then peeked into the stroller, and, convinced the child was asleep, addressed Harry.
“Dejlig sommer dag,” he said in Danish.
“Excuse me?” Harry asked in English.
The man smiled as if he had found one of his tribe. “You’re American.”
“Yes,” Harry said and drank a long sip of his wine.
“I’m Brady, from Fort Myers, Florida,” the man said as he leaned, extending his hand. Harry shook it.
“Harry, from Los Gatos, California,” he said.
The server came by again and Brady ordered a Kronenbourg, a French beer.
“I’ve been here ten years. How about you?”
“A few weeks,” Harry said.
“My wife’s Danish. We just had him,” he said, and looked at the stroller. “William. He’s eight months old. I’m on paternity leave, taking care of him. Elsa, my wife, she works at Widex, the hearing aid company, and she went back to work after eight of her twelve months of maternity leave.”
Paternity leave? Maybe Bernie Sanders was right, this place was utopia. America didn’t even have maternity leave, only a gratuitous twelve unpaid weeks offered by the largest companies. Even Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, took just a month or so off after she gave birth. Harry wouldn’t dream of taking paternity leave—it would be the death of his career.
“Do you like being on paternity leave?” Harry asked.
Brady shrugged and then nodded. “I get to spend time with William, you know, but I want to cut my leave short by four weeks. The Danes are all family, family, but William has a spot in daycare, and I need to have a life, too.”
His candor disarmed Harry, and when Brady moved from his own table to Harry’s, Harry didn’t mind; instead Harry pushed the olives between them as an invitation.
“It’s a good life in Denmark for families,” Brady said. “Daycare is subsidized, really cheap. We get days off for being sick and days off when our kid is sick. I just feel the longer I stay away from my work—I’m a marketing manager at a medical device company—the greater the risk they forget me. My wife thinks that’s an American way of looking at things.”
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