The Copenhagen Affair

by Amulya Malladi

  “Are you okay?” Alec asked as they watched a little boy standing with his mother, a chocolate ice cream in a waffle cone in one hand and his mother’s hand in the other. The mother was fashionably dressed in a white summer dress and a brown hobo Prada bag that Sanya recognized from Birgitte Green’s store. The mother wore big sunglasses and was chatting energetically with a man in a pair of jeans and a white polo shirt. They were all Danish. Blue eyes, blond hair, and light skin, still not kissed enough by the sun to be tanned.

  “I’m just in an uneasy place,” Sanya said to Alec, looking away from the boy when his precariously positioned ice cream scoop fell off the cone and he started to wail in earnest. The moment of harmony was lost. The man excused himself, and the woman with the Prada bag was left hopelessly consoling her child.

  “Are you still upset about Harry and Tara?” Alec asked.

  Sanya shook her head. “It’s just sex. It’s a bit of excitement—a respite from boredom, and god knows we all need respite from boredom. I understand marital jealousy—but it seems so useless. I mean, what do you do? You catch him with his pants around his ankles. You can leave him; that’s a choice, or you can say that you want him to end his relationship. He ends the relationship and tries to save his marriage. He’s miserable. Suddenly all the stuff he was getting from his affair—the excitement and the thrill—needs to come from his marriage. And if he was getting the excitement and the thrill from his marriage in the first place, he wouldn’t have had an affair. Now suddenly your marriage is under pressure because he got caught cheating, and now you both need to make the marriage work. It was working fine before—except after x amount of years it got a bit boring—but now it needs to become this fabulous thing that it never was.”

  Alec nodded appreciatively. “So if Harry was to be a good boy, you’d have to provide him what he’s getting from his affair, and that’s too much pressure?”

  “Exactly. And that either makes me the laziest wife in the world or the least loving one. But I can’t suddenly make this marriage something it’s not. I wouldn’t know how,” Sanya said.

  “But you still cut up the Hermès tie,” Alec pointed out.

  “I have a mean streak,” she said, and then sighed deeply. “I didn’t want him to have the tie. I guess that means that I’m not all okay with it, but I don’t know if I really care or if I even want to.”

  “When would you care?”

  She shrugged. “If he came home and said he’d fallen in love with someone else, if he shoved it in my face and showed me no consideration. Or maybe I’d be just fine if he did all those things because I don’t love him anymore and don’t want to be married to him. Or maybe I’m in love with him, and I’m also in love with Ravn. I’m in that place in life where I doubt everything.”

  “But do you even know what love means?” Alec asked. “Love means different things to different people. Love means something to you, and it might not mean the same thing to Harry.”

  Sanya looked at Alec and mulled over the word love. Poor bandied word. Everyone used it all the time. So easy to say.

  Over the phone: “I’ll buy milk on my way home. Love you.”

  Or as a husband kisses his wife, who’s in bed all the time, before leaving for work: “Have a nice day. Love you.”

  But what did that love mean? Did it mean I forsake all for you? Did it mean I can’t live without you? Did it mean I’ll die for you? What the hell did it mean . . . to Sanya?

  “I don’t know what love means to me,” Sanya declared.

  “Define that, and you define how you want to live with Harry . . . or without Harry,” Alec said.

  “For someone who’s single, you’re very smart about relationships,” she said.

  Alec grinned. “That’s why I’m so smart about relationships—because I’m single. If I was in a relationship, I’d be mired in the intricacies of one.”

  “You like being single because you’re selfish,” Sanya said.

  “All true,” Alec agreed. “What if Harry tells you he knows how you feel about Ravn and he wants it to stop?”

  “Stop feeling attraction? He can say don’t sleep with him, but he can’t say stop feeling attraction,” Sanya said. “I can’t stop feeling or start feeling anything by design. And if I have to sacrifice Ravn for my marriage with Harry . . .”

  “Then that puts pressure on Harry to start quoting Shelley or Byron,” Alec said, and smiled. “For someone as whacked out as you are, you sound pretty grounded.”

  She smiled back at him and downed the rest of her champagne. “Let’s go to Christiania.” She grabbed his hand and drew him to his feet. “I want to smoke some weed,” she said brightly.

  Alec pulled out some Danish kroner from his pocket and left it on the table and enfolded Sanya’s small hand in his big one.

  “Show me the way, fair maiden,” he said. “Is this Christiania the hippie place?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve never been, so this will be a first for both of us.”

  Chapter 24

  Rainy Day Woman

  The sign marking the entrance to Christiania said, YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE EU.

  The taxi driver dropped them off right at the entrance. The walls were covered with graffiti, a stark contrast from suave and über-clean Copenhagen. The taxi driver, a second-generation Dane as they were called in Denmark, and a Pakistani by ethnicity, was first disappointed that Sanya had not seen any Shah Rukh Khan movies (a Bollywood hero popular in all Hindi- and Urdu-speaking countries) and then appalled that their destination was Christiania.

  “I’m visiting from San Francisco,” Alec explained, “and I’ve heard so much about Christiania.”

  “Garbage place,” said the Pakistani taxi driver, whose license said his name was Hamud Ansari. “They should shut the place down. Do you know the people who live there don’t pay any taxes? Bastards.”

  “Danes pay an insane amount of money in taxes, like sixty-five percent top income tax,” Sanya told Alec after they were out of the taxi. They waited at the entrance, slightly intimidated. Were they walking into a haven of drugs and debauchery?

  “Brian, pas på,” a man called out to a toddler running ahead of him into Christiania. Following him was a woman with a pram and a soundly sleeping baby inside.

  “Apparently, this place is rated G,” Sanya said.

  “I don’t know whether to be disappointed or scandalized,” Alec wondered.

  A small pathway wound through the eighty-four acres of the self-proclaimed autonomous neighborhood.

  “How about coffee?” Sanya suggested, because the first stop close to the entrance was a café.

  The barista smiled at them when they ordered their nonfat lattes and then smiled even more broadly when Sanya asked him if this was the place to buy weed in Copenhagen.

  “Go down the pathway and past a square to Pusher Street,” the barista, a twenty-something Danish kid told them. “Are you tourists?”

  “I guess so,” Sanya said, looking at Alec. “I mean, am I a resident?”

  “Well,” Alec said, “maybe a short-term resident.”

  The barista did warn them before they left with their to-go coffees. “The police raids are escalating, so if you see people running, just run along with them. No point getting arrested.”

  “Arrested?” Sanya’s eyebrows shot up. “Why?”

  “It’s a crime to buy and sell weed,” the barista explained. “But it’s not a crime to smoke weed.”

  “Now that’s truly diabolical,” Alec said.

  The barista shrugged. “It’s to protect the pothead. Just like prostitution is legal in Denmark, but it’s not legal to buy sex.”

  “The crime is legal and to commit it is legal, yet the instigator is the criminal,” Alec said, his blue eyes glinting.

  “Isn’t the instigator always the criminal?” Sanya mused.

  As they walked down the wicked path they realized that the path wasn’t that wicked. There was art all along the pathway—pa
intings on stones, sculptures made of discarded metal, and stray car headlights that might have been just stray car headlights or some sort of art installation, they couldn’t tell. Musicians seemed to be scattered everywhere, and they hadn’t smelled any weed yet or seen a junkie shoot up, but they had listened to parts of the Violetta aria from La Traviata, “Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden, and even a strain of “. . . Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears—vintage stuff.

  The first square was devoid of weed. There were several stalls surrounding the square, and all were selling nearly the same nonsense as the souvenir shops on the tourist-heavy streets of Copenhagen. They went to one of the stalls where both Indian and Native American handicrafts sat next to one another, not quite authentic to either region, and probably made in China.

  “There’s a kindergarten here,” the woman at the stall told them and pointed to a yellow door that led into a shed that had a park next to it, populated with the colorful bits and bobs that children’s parks usually contain—slides and swings and merry-go-rounds. “That’s why we moved the weed guys.”

  The weed guys were less than a hundred meters away, and when Sanya pointed that out to the stall owner, she grinned and said, “Legally, they’re far enough.”

  At the weed square they walked up to the first stall, and a man in a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of worn jeans shorts smiled at them. “How can I help you?”

  They peered at his wares. Glass bottles with some waxy stuff stood in front of rolled joints in capped plastic tubes.

  The names were intriguing: Buddha’s Breath, Monk’s Deliverance, Blond Smoke, Crying Weed, Goblet of Jam, and Sanya’s favorite, Rainy Day Woman.

  “We want something strong but not too strong,” Sanya said confidently.

  The man nodded. “They’re arranged in order of intensity.”

  “How about Rainy Day Woman?” Sanya asked.

  “Medium to high strength,” he said, like he was talking about something as banal as chilies. This is the pimento, this is the jalapeno, and this is the Carolina Reaper. Eat at your own risk.

  “We’ll take three of the Rainy Day Woman,” Sanya said and then paused. “And one of the Monk’s Deliverance.”

  “That is very strong, so be careful,” the man warned as he put the four joints in plastic cases into a brown bag. “Hundred and fifty kroner.”

  “Where can we smoke this?” Alec asked.

  The man shrugged, “Wherever you want, dude. Best thing, take it home and enjoy the toke. Here, there could be a police raid.”

  Alec grabbed Sanya’s elbow and whispered, “Let’s get out of here. I really don’t want to get arrested in a foreign country.”

  They pulled two chairs over to one of the big windows in the living room that Harry used as a study and opened the window wide. Sanya assured Alec that even though the window was big enough for jumping out of, she wouldn’t attempt it.

  Alec peered down and said, “We’re only a floor up; you’ll just end up with broken limbs, so go for it, if you like.”

  Alec washed down his toke, Rainy Day Woman, with a glass of whiskey, and soon they both were high and happy.

  They heard the front door open, and Sanya turned to look at her husband.

  “Do you know what love means, Harry?” Sanya asked him as he walked up to them. He sniffed the air and then noticed that his wife had transformed one of their expensive Royal Copenhagen saucers into an ashtray.

  “She’s high,” Alec said in explanation.

  “So are you,” Sanya said, and giggled.

  “I can smell that,” Harry said, and pursed his lips.

  “We went to Christiania,” Sanya said proudly. “And between us we smoked almost . . . all of a joint of Rainy Day Woman.”

  “Right,” Harry said, trying to conceal his bewilderment. He looked at Alec for an explanation.

  “That’s a type of marijuana,” Alec offered helpfully.

  “I figured that,” Harry said, and put his computer bag on the floor against the wall next to where Sanya was sitting.

  “You didn’t answer my question, Harry,” Sanya said.

  “What was the question?” Harry asked.

  “One for the ages,” Sanya said, and a giggle escaped her again. “What does love mean to you? When you say, ‘I love you, Sanya,’ what do you really mean?”

  Harry looked at Sanya cautiously and then at Alec. “This was irresponsible,” he said to Alec.

  “I’m not her father,” Alec said. “And neither are you.”

  “You need to answer my question, Harry,” Sanya said.

  “Love is just love,” Harry said. “It means I care for you, a lot. And you’re my wife and my life. I think you’re the most beautiful woman in the world. And I can’t imagine my life without you. Happy?”

  “But love doesn’t mean fidelity to you, does it?” she asked. She didn’t mean to bring up his dalliance with Tara again, but it slipped out. Oops.

  Harry closed his eyes for a second, almost a blink but it was more than that; he was reining in the lies. “Are we back to the nonsense about me having an affair with Tara?”

  She smiled. “Love means that you can’t imagine life without me, but it doesn’t mean that you will forsake all others for me. Right?”

  “Sweetheart, I love you, but I have reasonable expectations of my marriage,” Harry said, and she could see he was becoming angry. “You can’t give me the professional satisfaction that I get from work. You can’t be a male friend to me. You can’t give me the pleasure I get when I watch a football game or go to the opera or see a piece of art. I can’t forsake the world for you. I have to live in this world.”

  “Very articulate,” Alec said, and held up his whiskey glass.

  “Whose side are you on anyway?” Sanya asked peevishly. “But can you forsake the others?”

  “Yes,” Harry said.

  “Have you?” she asked.

  Pause. “Yes,” Harry said quietly.

  “Right now, right here?”

  Harry’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Yes.”

  “Forever?”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Alec said in a singsong voice.

  “Stay the hell out of this,” Harry said to Alec, who smirked. “Yes, forever. From this moment on.”

  Harry and Sanya looked at each other, his eyes digging into hers, saying to her that he was open and being honest and demanding her to respond in kind. When she didn’t, he said tightly, “I can’t believe I’m trying to have a serious conversation with a woman who is high as a kite.”

  “This is turning into a bad theater play,” Sanya said, and looked at the ashes on the saucer. “Can we go out for dinner? I feel like a big burger . . . with fries.”

  That night as she lay in bed listening to the slow hum of Harry speaking on the phone with his office in California, she sent Ravn a text message. She’d not been in touch with him since she had gone through the IT Foundry financial documents and found out all the naughty things Ravn had done. But the temptation had been there all along, and now it overcame her.

  What does love mean to you?

  She wasn’t sure if he’d respond. Rainy Day Woman wasn’t playing havoc with her system anymore, especially after the burger, but she was still there, making Sanya reckless.

  After five minutes of no response, she put the phone down on Harry’s pillow and stared at it.

  Ping.

  Ravn’s opening salvo was philosophy.

  Love is the madness of the gods.

  And who said that?

  It’s an ancient Greek saying.

  Do you say “I love you” to your wife when you leave for work in the morning? she typed. He could respond and say none of your business, but he didn’t.

  Yes, he responded simply.

  What does that love mean?

  Nothing. Everything.

  Can you imagine your life without her?

  Yes. Easily. Can you imagine yours without him?

  Sanya didn’t know wh
at to say to that, so she put the phone down as if it was too warm to hold. Then after a moment she replied, I don’t know. What if she finds out about your affairs?

  She won’t.

  What if she does? What will she do? What will you do? Sanya typed.

  I don’t know.

  That’s honest. Will you lie?

  Did Harry lie?

  Outright.

  I would lie as well. Not out of malice. Out of respect.

  She got annoyed at this point and picked up the phone and called him. “Why not stop screwing around on your marriage out of respect?” she demanded.

  “Because one thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other,” he said.

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  Sanya hung up on him.

  I’m sorry. Let’s not fight.

  Do you want me? Rainy Day Woman asked.

  Yes.

  I went to Christiana with Alec and got high.

  Is Harry high, too?

  Never.

  Did you have sex with him after you got high?

  None of your business, she wrote with a surprising thrill running through her.

  This was what a new relationship felt like, an intoxicating mix of delirious emotions—love, jealousy, excitement—all blended together running through the bloodstream like pheromones.

  I have no rights, I know. I’m jealous, he wrote.

  How often do you have sex with your wife?

  Once a week. Sundays. We’re on a schedule.

  Schedule? That’s nuts.

  She doesn’t know that I know there’s a schedule. It’s how she feels connected to the marriage and me.

  Is the sex good?

  It’s okay.

  But you still have it.

  For men sex is like pizza. Even when it’s cold and a day old, it’s still okay.

  Harry and I have good sex, Sanya wrote on purpose, because she knew he wouldn’t like it.

  Don’t say such things.

  Do you think you and I will have good sex? She only asked because Rainy Day Woman was curious.

  Yes.

  How do you know for sure?

  Because love is a madness, not just of the gods, but us humans as well.