The Copenhagen Affair

by Amulya Malladi

  “Losing people I’m close to is the trigger for me,” Ravn said.

  “Is that why you’re not close to many people?”

  “Yes,” Ravn said.

  “Isn’t that lonely?”

  “It’s better than the dark place.”

  “Do you go down the slippery slope to the dark place often?” she asked.

  “You mean like the inside of a well?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, and tears started to form in her eyes. One damaged person was asking the other damaged person to show her his wounds so that they both would feel less alone.

  “It happens. It never goes away, Sanya. It’s always there. An abyss next to you. So you have to be careful, like you’re hiking on a narrow trail, or you will fall,” he said.

  “How careful?”

  “The everyday and the all the time kind of careful.”

  “Ravn, are you attracted to me because I had a nervous breakdown?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you attracted to me at all?”

  She felt him smile across the line. “Now that’s a feminine question if I’ve ever heard one. Yes, I’m attracted to you. And, no, it’s not just because you’re damaged like I am—maybe more so because you’ve survived like I have.”

  Chapter 15

  Imperfections Make Life Interesting

  “Why did Ravn take her out to lunch?” Harry asked Lucky as they sat huddled in a small meeting room in the offices of IT Foundry.

  “Penny and Mandy also took her to lunch; how is this any different?” Lucky asked. “We have way too many man hours already spent on this and more to come, so can you focus on the business at hand instead of your wife? We have J Yu, Tara, and Otto here.”

  As part of the acquisition project plan, the team of three people from California had arrived the day before to further delve into IT Foundry’s financial health.

  J Yu was twenty-nine and a wunderkind, with a bachelor’s in finance from Stanford, an MBA in finance from Yale, and a PhD in finance from Harvard.

  Tara Hansen, their legal counsel, was thirty-five and brilliant. She knew Scandinavian law well, as she had lived and worked in a Copenhagen law office for three years in her twenties and had met and married a Dane then. Now her husband took care of the kids while Tara went to work.

  Tara and Harry had had a sexual relationship, on and off, for years—conducted mostly when they were traveling. But after what happened with Sanya, Harry had put a stop to the on and off. Tara had not been resentful; she had a husband as well.

  Raymond Otto was their forensic accountant who was nearing fifty and had always, even in his twenties, had a Yoda-like attitude, wise and even-tempered. Otto was openly gay and in a long-term relationship with an artist, with whom he lived in the Haight in San Francisco, who sold his sculptures to Silicon Valley CEOs.

  “He took her to a goddamn museum,” Harry said, ignoring Lucky’s remark about getting back to work. “He canceled that meeting with us and took her to a museum for lunch. His favorite paintings are a Degas—ballet dancers in rehearsal or some shit like that—and a Monet landscape of some cliff on Brittany or Normandy, which now is apparently Sanya’s favorite painting as well.”

  A beep sounded from Lucky’s phone, and he browsed through it as he said, “What can I say, the man has big hairy ones.”

  “First his cousin propositions me, and then the son of a bitch takes my wife out to lunch,” Harry said. He stood up and started to pace the meeting room from one end to another. He was flustered.

  “You trust Sanya,” Lucky reminded him.

  “But it’s different now,” Harry said. He stopped pacing as he tried to explain the predicament he was in. “Don’t you see? Now she has an excuse. I can’t blame her for having a fling when she’s mentally unstable. If she slept with Ravn, I’d have to forgive her.”

  “She’s not going to sleep with Ravn,” Lucky said. “Ravn isn’t even good-looking. He’s got that scar and . . .”

  Harry got even more agitated. “That fucking scar.”

  He knew deep in his gut that it was the scar that appealed to her. She complained often enough about how perfect Harry was. When Old Sanya used to say it, he used to feel proud, but New Sanya, he suspected, liked defects.

  “If she was going to sleep with him, she wouldn’t have told you she had lunch with him,” Lucky said.

  “That’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? She’s telling me everything,” Harry said. “She’s being open. I think she’s attracted to him.”

  Harry had come home last evening and found her on the couch, reading. She had smiled at him, so he’d poured himself a beer and sat down on the couch with her. That was when she said, matter-of-factly, “Oh, I had lunch with Ravn today.”

  “With Ravn?” he had said almost stupidly.

  She had nodded. “He called me and asked me if I wanted to meet. I thought it was nice of him.”

  Harry drank his beer carefully, aware that what he wanted to say and what he should say were at odds with each other. “Very nice of him. Where did you go?”

  “The museum,” Sanya said, and Harry could have killed Ravn for making his wife this animated after the past months when nothing Harry had done had made her so much as get out of bed.

  She then proceeded to tell him about the paintings she had seen and the ones that were Ravn’s favorites. She might as well have been talking about a friend or her sister or her mother, but Harry knew she wasn’t. There was a gleam in her eyes. A new gleam in this altered Sanya’s eyes. One that wasn’t there before . . . ever. Since the nervous breakdown, he knew that Sanya was unstable, and that had led to him being slightly wobbly as well, and this meant that their marriage was also not on firm footing. And here came Ravn, swinging his dick and taking his wife to a museum. It was like watching a documentary about why married women cheat. Degas! Really? At least the son of a bitch was original. Harry would never think of taking a woman to a museum.

  “You’re turning into a paranoid lunatic. Ravn? Sanya? I don’t see it,” Lucky said. “She probably thinks he’s a mimbo, you know, a male bimbo, spoiled brat, child of fortune, that kind of thing. You do know your wife is an intellectual snob? As is that friend of hers, Alec. Stanford professor with a stick up his ass.”

  “Alec thinks I’m the mimbo. So . . . I don’t think she’s averse to that kind of man. Can’t you see? She’s attracted to Ravn,” Harry said, wringing his hands now. “Damn it, Lucky. I might lose her.”

  There was a knock on the door. Ravn stood outside looking calm.

  “Lunch, gentlemen?” he asked.

  Harry let a smile ease his expression. “I hear you took my wife to lunch yesterday. It’s very nice of you to make her feel at home in Copenhagen.”

  Ravn’s expression didn’t change. “It was my pleasure,” he said.

  Chapter 16

  Dinner at the Almanak

  Sanya knew. The minute she saw Tara Hansen, she knew. She’d heard her name before on occasion from Harry or when he was on the phone with her or in meetings, but this was the first time she met her, and as soon as she saw her, she knew.

  She told this to Arthur, the new therapist Lucky had found her and booked in record time. When they had first moved Sanya had thought that she would take a break from therapy, just for a while, but after she met Ravn she knew the break was over. She needed to sort through what it meant, this attraction to Ravn. Was this because of her depression, or would this have happened no matter what? And now she also needed to sort out how she felt about Tara and how she felt about Harry having an affair. Did it really not bother her? Did it bother her? It was so hard to peel back the layers of gray that clouded her mind, to understand how she felt.

  “Did you see them together? Did you see something happen between them?” Arthur asked when Sanya told him.

  “Not at all,” she said. “It’s just a feeling.” She had been sitting still while she had given Arthur her background and her new certainty about her husb
and’s infidelity. But now that the words were out, she relaxed and leaned back on the couch.

  She imagined Tara with her glowing long blond hair, naked, entwined with Harry, flesh meeting flesh, the sounds of sex, the gasping, the panting, and the orgasmic moment of release. She imagined it all. It was permission to imagine two other bodies naked and entwined. Hers and the man with the scar.

  “Have you suspected anything in the past?” Arthur asked.

  Sanya shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. Of course it has crossed my mind, but I’ve never dwelled on it. Now I’m certain.”

  “And how does this make you feel? This certainty you claim to have that he’s cheated on you?”

  “I’m not upset, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said without hesitation.

  “What you need to ask yourself is why you’re not upset. You should be indignant. It would be normal behavior. Instead you’re almost . . . relieved,” Arthur said. “Why are you relieved?”

  “Because it makes him imperfect. I didn’t, maybe, want to dwell on it earlier because I wanted him to continue to be perfect, so I could continue to be lucky to have him,” she said honestly. “Now it allows me to keep having this crush on Ravn without feeling guilty.”

  Arthur nodded. “Have you decided what you want to do with Ravn?”

  Yes, she had decided to not make a decision, because making a decision meant she had to think and feel, and she really didn’t want to do either—because looking inside herself was a lot of work, and she didn’t know if she was ready to take that upon herself yet.

  “Go with the flow,” she said uncertainly.

  Arthur shook his head. “People who haven’t had a mental collapse can go with the flow. People who’ve had one need to act with caution. So you need to make an active decision.”

  “I think maybe I already am having an affair. We haven’t consummated it, but the dance has begun,” she said. “Maybe I have made an unconscious choice.”

  “I think this—allowing choices to be made without your active participation—this is key,” Arthur said. “Let’s talk about that.”

  Sanya sighed. “Do we really have to?”

  Arthur nodded. “Let’s start with how you feel about your role in your marriage.”

  “I’m the wife,” Sanya said flippantly.

  “And . . . ?”

  Sanya shrugged. “I used to be the doormat. I used to be accommodating Sanya. Harry came first. I came last. But after the breakdown it was like I had permission to be selfish and not worry about anyone, including myself. There’s a payoff in just lying there in bed doing nothing. There’s a payoff in doing exactly what I feel like when I feel like it—almost like a belligerent teenager.”

  “And what is the role of this Sanya in your marriage?”

  Sanya let out a laugh. “I was hoping I’d find that out on your couch, because I have no fucking idea.”

  Harry borrowed Ravn’s sixty-foot boat, Amanda, to take his team and Sanya out for a sail in Øresund and then into the canal through Copenhagen. It was a warm June day, ideal for being at sea. The water was like a silk sari, rustling softly, and glossy under the gaze of the sun.

  Sanya could see that Harry loved the boat and was envious. He had always wanted to have a boat because he did like to sail. But he had never bought one because he knew he wouldn’t have time to use it.

  “This is nice,” Sanya heard him tell Tara as they stood next to each other at the helm while Harry steered the boat. “It’s a Gunboat 60, spacious, ideal for long-term, live-aboard cruising.”

  He continued to talk about Amanda’s hybrid propulsion system, which Sanya didn’t know anything about, and the four staterooms plus a crew cabin. The boat could easily accommodate up to ten people.

  Ravn’s boat even had customized features, Tara noticed. “Saloon seating, very nice. And it has an extra deep-freeze freezer so you can take her away for a long time.”

  “I wish I had more time to sail. It’s beautiful in the night, isn’t it?” Harry said, “When the moon is high, you can sail down the silver highway.”

  “Remember that time in Kiel?” Tara said.

  Sanya watched them like she would a movie that she didn’t have much of an opinion about. Or did she? It was difficult to assess her feelings. She had told Arthur she didn’t care, but what she was actually saying was that she didn’t know if she cared.

  “That was a great sailing trip,” Harry said, and then he looked at Sanya, who was watching them, and added as if to appease, “and a good business trip.”

  “My husband tells me you’re very bright,” Sanya said to J Yu, whom she was sitting next to on the deck.

  He wasn’t exactly shy, but there was a certain reticence about him. He was, Sanya realized, careful about what he said and whom he said it to. He was the weigh-and-speak kind of person.

  “I am very bright,” he said unabashedly.

  “Is this your first trip to Copenhagen?” she asked him. It was small talk, but she wanted a distraction from her husband’s perceived infidelities.

  “No, I’ve been here before,” J Yu said. “I did the whole Eurail thing right out of college. Three months, all of Europe, backpacking and hostels.”

  “I’ve never been anywhere,” she said. “I’ve been to Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and London, all for work. Once I was in Amsterdam for meetings and didn’t even come puffing distance to a coffee shop. I’ve never even been to Paris.”

  “Oh, but you have to. I fell in love with Paris,” J Yu said. “Paris is like an outdoor open-air museum. It’s breathtaking. Vienna is similar but with a different appeal, and German just doesn’t sound as good as French, which I don’t speak. I do speak Spanish and spent some time living in Barcelona and Córdoba.”

  “I only speak English,” Sanya said. “I can understand some Hindi because my mother made me watch Bollywood movies while I was growing up. But I think I can only understand it when people speak in movie language. If people spoke normal Hindi, I probably wouldn’t comprehend a word.”

  “Harry speaks French and German,” J Yu said.

  “And menu-ordering Italian,” she added. “He’s a superstar.”

  “He’s my idol,” J Yu said reverently. “I want to grow up to be like him.”

  Sanya wanted to snort, but it would have been rude so she didn’t. Instead she decided to pursue her investigation into what the hell was going on with IT Foundry.

  “Hey, J Yu, why are you all here?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

  J Yu was uncomfortable with the question. “Well . . . it’s just standard work for such a purchase.”

  Sanya didn’t correct him that it wasn’t. They had already done the bulk of the work even before Sanya and Harry had come to Copenhagen. She really had to talk to Harry about this.

  They sailed past Nyhavn, the “new harbor” (which wasn’t new, but over three hundred years old) for dinner and anchored the boat by the old customhouse building, which was now the Standard, home to three restaurants and a jazz club. The customhouse building had a lot of history, and after its time as a tollbooth for ships entering Copenhagen, it had become known for hosting restaurants.

  Sanya and her party dined on modern Danish food at the restaurant Almanak.

  Ravn couldn’t get them a table at the Michelin-starred Studio, even though he was good friends with the jazz musician Niels Lan Doky, part owner of the Standard, but he had managed the Almanak on short notice.

  They sat outside under infrared lamps, wrapped in blankets by the canal with a view of the Danish Architecture Centre, the world-famous restaurant Noma, and the opera house.

  Sanya sat next to Tara. It was not by design; it just happened. They were not sitting Danish style.

  “This is an exquisite boat,” Tara told Sanya as she sipped a glass of the mature and rounded 2005 Domaine des Baumard Savennières from the Loire Valley that was served with their first course, fried scallops in creamy hazelnut sauce, browned butter and onions from Søren Wiuff, a
Danish farmer famous for delivering fruit and vegetables to all the top restaurants in Copenhagen, including Noma.

  “I know nothing about boats,” Sanya said, and picked at her scallops. Despite the beautifully plated dish, she couldn’t muster the appetite to eat, not while she was sitting next to Harry’s lover.

  “I love to sail,” Tara gushed. “My husband is big on it. He even sailed across the Atlantic once. I love the water. I’m big on dolphins. Not the SeaWorld kind, mind you, because that’s disgusting, but my cause of choice is saving the dolphins and all sea life. If I could afford to leave this corporate career, I would work for the Safina Center, Greenpeace, or the Environmental Defense Fund . . . and maybe someday I will.”

  “I like the aquarium in Monterey,” Sanya said, and decided to forgo the scallops and stick to the wine. “We used to take Sara there when she was little . . . actually, I used to take Sara there. Harry was always working.”

  “So were you, I hear,” Tara said. “I’m lucky in many ways. My husband is the primary caregiver for the children in our house. But you did it all. You worked and raised your daughter.”

  “A lot of women do that,” Sanya said. “I don’t think it is medal worthy. And maybe my job was always less important than Harry’s. He’s a partner, and I was just a consultant even though they gave me that director title.”

  The waiters came then with the second course, a baked North Sea cod with cabbage from Kiselgården, another organic Danish farm, and blue mussels and dill sauce served with a 2013 Louis Latour Meursault Blanc, another round and rich white wine that the sommelier told them had aromas of apricot kernel and vanilla with a beautiful long finish. Sanya drank the wine and missed all of the nuances he had mentioned because everything tasted like ash in her current mental state.

  “Harry says that if you want to know about the financial inner workings of a company, you’re the man . . . woman to talk to,” Tara said as she attacked her cod and made appropriate sounds to convey her pleasure. “You have a knack, he says, of going into a company and seeing how they work and knowing how to fix it, not based on methodology or only methodology but your gut instinct. It’s a rare skill.”