Harry remembered that Sanya had only twelve weeks of unpaid maternity leave after Sara was born. He had suggested that she become a stay-at-home mom, and he had expected her to accept the offer, but Sanya had rejected the idea outright. He had assumed that maternity leave was easy, even though Sanya behaved like it was a whole lot of work. It was just sitting around doing nothing. Little babies are not demanding; they just need to be fed and cleaned, not that he would know, because he’d never taken care of Sara when she was a baby or . . . actually ever on his own. Sanya was the one who’d driven Sara to soccer practice and AP classes and whatever it was Sara did. Wow, Harry thought, he had been a first-class asshole.
How come he hadn’t seen this before? Maybe it was the Danish lifestyle, he thought, this time away from work, this time away from the hustle and bustle, this quiet time that allowed him to ruminate, to ponder and see himself more clearly. It was as if once they moved to Copenhagen, time had slowed down; the twenty-four hours in a day seemed longer and more stretched out.
“It’s the weather here that gets to me,” Brady said as he finished his beer. “Some years we go from the endless gray winter to fall, missing spring and summer entirely. It’s not the cold; it’s the wind that bothers me. And the lack of sunshine. Do you know how much sunshine we had this January? Just seventeen hours.”
“Nice to know what to expect in a few months,” Harry said.
Brady laughed. “Do you know what Danes say when the weather sucks in the summer? They say, But we had a few good days in May. This is one of those days.”
Harry told Brady what he was doing in Copenhagen, and Brady said he had read about the impending sale of IT Foundry. He seemed impressed to be meeting with the acquirer of one of the famous and successful IT consultancy companies in Denmark.
“Do you miss America?” Harry asked.
“I do. But I was also burnt out. I was in the military. I worked for the CIA . . . I was into social media and big data long before it became mainstream, but I never listened to your phone calls or read your email,” he joked.
“Do you miss the excitement of working for the CIA?” Harry asked, fascinated because everyone wanted to be a spy, didn’t they? Did anyone think James Bond had a shitty job?
“Every day,” he said. “I was the SCUD expert tracking warheads in North Korea, which was code for doing absolutely nothing. But then came the Gulf War, and guess what Saddam was launching? Yeah. So here I was nineteen years old and being called into the Pentagon.”
The waiter came by, and they asked for refills. Harry didn’t check his phone and instead decided to enjoy this conversation with a fellow American. What else was there to do than go upstairs, work, and be ignored?
“At the Pentagon, we would look at satellite images and track missile launchers. Once there was a picture of a highway, and we could just see the nose of the launcher—next day there was a crater there because we blew it up. And then there would be an air raid in Baghdad, which would be reported in the news,” he said. “The press room was above us, and I walked by Wolf Blitzer all the time. It was . . . strange . . . it was exhilarating.”
Harry asked why he left if it was so great.
“Even now when I look at photos of our newest conflicts, I feel like I’m in the middle of it again. I had nightmares for months about air raids and about the mistakes we made. That I’d by mistake marked a school to be leveled instead of a missile launcher. So I left. I was just twenty-one. For six months my parents took care of me, and then I went to Russia to learn Russian so I could continue to work for the government. Maybe I should’ve gone to the Middle East instead and learned Arabic, would’ve come in handy. But . . . you know, I was depressed. Clinically. It took a long while and sometimes I still . . . you know . . . feel the slide.”
Fascinated because of Sanya, Harry asked, “How long ago was this?”
“Fifteen years ago,” Brady said, and when he looked at Harry’s shocked face, “Depression is tough. And it’s like being an alcoholic. You always have it there, waiting for you to slide. Some days are good and some are not. I just need to stay away from trigger points like . . . all the fucking news these days.”
“That must be tough,” Harry said. “Thanks, man, for your service. I hope you feel better.”
Harry wondered what Sanya’s trigger points were.
“I am better. The thing is that we all heal and we all get better. The hard part is that you are different after you get better, and the people around you, and you yourself, struggle to accept those changes,” Brady said. “But once you do, it works itself out. I have a baby, man, and a lovely wife. I’ve got six weeks of vacation. I see my friends in the United States, and they’re working all the time. I have a life. It’s great. And that helps keep the monsters at bay.”
They inevitably moved from depression to basketball and then to football, and Brady told Harry which bars showed the games.
The baby started to wake up then. Brady stood and left cash on the table. “You stay cool, Harry,” he said. “And welcome to Denmark.”
Once Brady left, Harry paid for the wine with his Dankort in a card reader the waiter brought out to him. A couple had just arrived and he heard the woman say in English to the man, “You know, we have some great days in May, and this is one of them, so we must take advantage of it.”
Chapter 7
They Leave Their Babies Outside
On the first day of June, the official start of summer, Sanya decided to leave the apartment on her own. The impetus to leave the apartment had been twofold. Her mother and sister had called together to discuss summer vacation plans in Provence but had segued into her mental health—which had not improved said health—and because, since she had met Anders Ravn a week ago, Sanya’s bed had lost some of its appeal.
She went to the Café Bopa just down the street. She took with her for company The Golden Notebook, a gift Sara had picked up at Shakespeare and Company in Paris the summer before, when she had gone on a European holiday before starting college.
Was it coming to Europe that had brought on her first crush? Sanya wondered. Had her implosion opened her mind? Or was it simpler than that—did she know that Harry would forgive this emotional indiscretion because she wasn’t emotionally stable and couldn’t be expected to behave sensibly in her condition?
Café Bopa was named after the Borgerlige Partisaner, referring to a group of resistance fighters who conspired against the Nazis during the Second World War. The treelined Bopa Square was also home to Café Pixie. The area in front of Café Bopa beyond the patio, where cozy tables covered in red-and-white-checkered tablecloths were surrounded by metal chairs, some rickety and some steady, was a pétanque court and a playground.
Sanya had just started to read Doris Lessing’s epic novel about women and independence while she waited for a server to find her when the cry of a baby drew her attention.
The server came to her and then cheerfully asked if she was ready to order.
“There’s a baby crying,” Sanya said.
The server turned his head to the entrance of the café, and that was when Sanya noticed the six prams, one of which was shaking.
“There’s a wailing baby inside that?” Sanya asked flabbergasted. “Where’s the mother?”
The server shrugged. “In the café, probably. What can I get you?”
“The mother is inside?” Sanya asked, and then absently added, “I’ll have a café latte.”
“Sure,” the waiter said. “Your latte will be thirty-five kroner. You can pay now, and I can get it for you.”
Her eyes trained on the pram, she paid in cash this time because Harry had left several colorful Danish kroner at home.
Five minutes later, a woman came out to collect the red-faced baby.
“They leave their babies outside,” a woman with short blond hair said with a British accent. “That’s how they do it here.” She looked up from her laptop, next to which was a copy of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bond
age, and smiled at Sanya.
“They just leave them outside?” she asked. “And nothing happens?”
“You mean no one takes the baby?” the woman asked and, when Sanya nodded, continued, “Denmark is very safe. Though one time in Østerbro, in the townhouse area near Svanemøllen, a rat got into a baby’s pram and bit the baby’s pinkie toe off.”
Sanya was horrified.
“True story,” the woman said. “I’m Chloe.”
Sanya introduced herself, and they exchanged how long they’d been in Denmark.
Chloe was married to a shipping executive at Mærsk Group and stayed home with her one-year-old daughter and was working on her first novel.
Madeline, Chloe’s friend who was an English literature professor at the University of Copenhagen, and who joined them shortly, was in her sixties and had purple hair. She was more hippie than university professor and spoke with authority about almost everything.
“We’re in a writers’ group,” Chloe told her. “Do you write?”
Sanya shook her head. Not really, she thought, not unless you counted reports and white papers on financial process optimization.
Madeline seemed to be a genuinely happy person with passions that ran deep. “Life is meant to be lived,” she said emphatically as she drank a glass of the house white wine. “My thirties were complete crap. Busy with my children and husband and all of that. Forties were better, but I still had to deal with that shit teenage phase with the girl, though the boy was easy. My fifties were delightful. I had many lovers.”
“Lovers?” Sanya asked. “Are you still married?”
“Of course,” she said. “I met my husband when I was twenty-one. Been married since then.”
“Does he know about your lovers?” Sanya asked, and when she nodded nonchalantly, Sanya asked, “What did he say?”
“‘Whatever makes you happy, my dear,’” Madeline said, and laughed. “He’s a darling. But in my sixties, sex is just not happening. And how about you, Chloe? You and Johan doing better in the sack?”
Chloe snorted at Madeline’s question. “Sex was never the problem for us except during that time after the baby,” she said smugly, and then snarled, “it’s this goddamn country that’s the problem.”
Ah sex, Sanya thought. How long had it been? Even before the breakdown it had become a once in a while thing after wine when they both felt that it had been too long and something needed to be done about it. After all, in a marriage if you were not having sex, it said something about the marriage, and it didn’t say anything good.
“Everyone needs to have good sex these days,” Alec said, when Sanya once asked him what he thought about a sexless marriage. “We brought sex out into the open, and the pressure to have it and for it to be fabulous is killing us. You watch television, and everyone is always having good sex. People rarely have bad sex on television.”
Alec also suggested that the point was not if Sanya wanted to still have sex; it was if she still wanted to have sex with Harry. Those two things could be mutually exclusive.
Sanya used to love sex.
When Harry and she met, she was obsessed with sex. She wanted it all the time. She never, of course, let Harry know that she wanted it all the time; she waited for him to make the suggestion and leaped at the chance. She never initiated sex in those early days. She waited and she never turned him down.
Then she had a baby, and the sex was still okay. Not as great as it used to be, but okay. Harry stopped initiating sex. She started to initiate sex. She was apprehensive about it because he didn’t always comply, and she wasn’t so sure about her body post-baby. There were times when he said he had an early morning or he was too tired. So she initiated less and less; and she started to become less and less interested in sex with Harry.
They moved from one excuse to another until they didn’t have to make excuses anymore because life got in the way and sex became a thing they did because they had to, not because they wanted to, not because it was an unquenchable desire that they needed to throw an orgasm onto.
They weren’t tearing each other’s clothes off and . . . it was the marriage cliché. They got married and they stopped having sex. They had children and they stopped having sex.
Sanya sighed. This marriage had many problems.
“You complain too much,” Madeline said to Chloe. “Denmark on the whole has issues, granted. Look at how they vote for Dansk Folkeparti. It’s a racist right-wing party, like your Tea Party,” she explained to Sanya. “But Copenhagen is wonderful. It’s full of diversity. Look at us, three women from three different age groups and places in life, and we meet here.”
Chloe wasn’t having any of it. “And none of us is Danish. How many Danish friends do you have?”
Madeline nodded in agreement. “Danes are not particularly friendly, I’ll give you that,” she said to Sanya. “They’re hard to get to know. It’s not just the language—it’s how they don’t seem to let people in. But I have now lived here for nearly three decades, and I have many Danish friends. I do. Have you met any Danes, Sanya?”
Sanya told them about Penny and Lilly. She didn’t tell them about Ravn.
“The Hellerup crowd,” Chloe said, shaking her head. “They are a different breed.”
Madeline laughed then. “And you should know. Chloe, you live in Charlottenlund. So don’t pretend that you’re not one of them.”
“I don’t shop at Netto in a fur coat,” Chloe protested. “In any case, Johan wanted to live there, not me. He’s the one who’s stuck on living in the right zip code so he can tell his colleagues about his villa. Like I care.”
In California, strangers did sometimes talk to you when you met them, but here it seemed commonplace for people to just stir up conversation. It was the expats, Madeline explained to her, because they were the open ones who invited people to their homes and easily made friends, because they had to, because they didn’t have old kindergarten or high school or handball team friends here.
“When we first moved to Copenhagen, I used to keep inviting Danes home, and they never invited us back. I thought they didn’t like us,” Chloe said. “But they kept coming over. I finally had to stop feeding people who never reciprocated. Now all our friends are like us, half Danish and half something else.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Madeline said. “You’ll find that Copenhagen has many delights. Denmark is an egalitarian society. Look at our government. We’ve actually had a female prime minister, and nearly half the parliament is women. The men are quite malleable here, and there is gender equality for the most part. Though in corporate Denmark, I’m told by friends, it’s not the case. But men will cook and clean and take care of their offspring. Until I met my husband, I didn’t know that men knew which side of the vacuum cleaner was up.”
“Johan is wonderful,” Chloe acknowledged. “I don’t know about the other men.”
Sanya felt so energized after meeting the women that in the evening when Harry came home, she suggested that they go out for dinner to Café Bopa. He was surprised at the invitation but nevertheless delighted that Sanya wanted to leave the house.
Sanya ordered a burger with all the works, even guacamole, and Harry did the same.
“The Danes leave their babies outside in prams,” she said, pointing to one of the two prams outside Café Pixie, which was next to Café Bopa.
“Are you sure there’s a live baby in there?” Harry asked.
“Yes,” Sanya said, feeling like an expert on Danish society. “Danes probably grow up to be more independent than American children because they’re not coddled. They learn to fend for themselves.” Madeline had told her that.
“It’s good to see you like this,” Harry said.
“Like what?” she asked, more sharply than she intended.
She was being difficult. She knew what he meant. There was a perverse pleasure in seeing him in agony because of her.
Oh, Sanya.
Is this what marriage had become? Sh
e wanted—no, needed her spouse to be in the same shit hole she was in? Terrifying how the mind worked.
She felt a frisson of panic slide up her spine as she wondered if she hated Harry. She controlled the waves of anxiety and panic brought along with it because she needed to think, so as to not give in to the chaos in her mind.
Of course she loved Harry. Didn’t she?
If one looked at marriage statistically, with number of years on the x-axis and affection on the y-axis, everyone started high, and then the curve went down and down and down as the years passed. Was there any other way for this graph to turn out? Who came up with the bright idea that once two people got to know each other really well, they’d love each other more?
The more you knew someone, the more you dug into their dirt, the more you saw and the less you loved. It was the mystery, wasn’t it, that we were fascinated with? Like a scar on someone’s cheek or a crack inside someone’s mind.
“It’s good to see you outside,” Harry said calmly as the waiter arrived with their drinks. Harry was getting used to Sanya’s shifting moods and was learning how to deal with them. A part of Sanya felt sympathy for Harry because she also had to learn to deal with her own shifting moods, from forcing herself to be happy consistently to not having any consistency at all. Sanya was drinking red wine, while Harry was drinking beer.
“Maybe we should have ordered champagne,” Harry said, obviously feeling celebratory at their impromptu date night.
“I’m fine with the wine,” Sanya said, not wanting Harry to celebrate quite yet.
They ate their burgers hungrily. Sanya realized she had not eaten all day except for the latte at Bopa in the afternoon. At this rate, maybe she would lose enough weight to attempt that bikini she and Ravn had discussed.
The Copenhagen Affair Page 6