by K B Jensen
No one else was in the park, near the pond. The whole place was deserted aside from the ducks. The shiny green head of the mallard caught his eye.
“Long distance is a killer. I’m not doing long distance,” she said simply.
It was like they had entered contract negotiations, he thought. It wasn’t so simple. There were restrictions. He was there as a student not a permanent resident. Would the government even allow him to work there, to stay? And what about her in the United States? Which country would welcome them with open arms, if either would?
“How do you choose between two countries?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “How do you choose between two families? Two sets of friends?”
She leaned her head against his shoulder. He could smell the shampoo. The reddish blond tendrils glowed in the light, like copper mixed with gold.
“You are my family,” he said. “You are my friend. Do we need anyone else? Why do you have to give me an ultimatum?”
He wished he could stay drenched in the Danish sun with her holding his arm forever. They walked around the pond for a while. The green water shone brightly, specks of white flashing on its surface.
“Haven’t you ever belonged to a place?” she said. She stopped to hold the rail. She leaned her stomach against it. The white dress fluttered behind her in a soft wind.
“Maybe I belong to you,” he said. “But I don’t belong to a place.
“What about the winter?” he added. “The darkness.”
“There’s no darkness with you,” she said. “Was it so bad last winter? We’ll light candles.”
They had been in the darkness under the streetlights. The two of them had met under a thin coating of ice and drizzle, waiting for the bus in the black. In a city where no one looked you in the eye, she had been so friendly. It hadn’t been so bad last winter, he thought, drinking wine and burrowing under a down comforter that floated above them like a cloud.
It was hard to remember that darkness now that there was so much sun. The pond was glittering under its rays. They walked to her studio and she fumbled with her keys. They stood in an empty hallway surrounded by white walls.
“Here we are,” she said.
She swung open the door and the room was drenched in white. The curtains were still up. It still felt like day at night. Her photos hung across the ceiling from a crisscross of wire. Some were black and white. Some were color. She was the best photographer he had ever met.
He hadn’t seen these shots yet. She was the only one he knew who still printed out her photos and displayed them. There were a hundred of him hanging overhead. Their whole six-month history hung in midair. There he was walking next to the water, laughing and looking down. There he was sleeping, with his black hair crushed against the white pillow.
There they were dancing and drinking wine. There he was walking through Tivoli Gardens, smelling the pink roses, with their shadows streaking the winding sidewalks. There he was cooking in the white kitchen, shirtless with a spatula in his hand. In another one, she had flour on her nose. He took that shot. Then the weekend vacation she had taken him on. There was a picture of him standing victoriously on the top of a giant sand dune, like he’d climbed Everest, looking out at the sea. Photos of them painting the apartment together, the light blue streak she swiped across his cheek. It took a lot of scrubbing to get that off. The paint was in his hair for weeks.
There was a photo of the tip of Jutland with the sand jutting out and the waves crashing together, where the North Sea and Baltic Sea come together. He pulled it off the wire and stared at it, the choppy dark blue waves smashing and glittering under the sun and crashing against the light blue ones, battering the jagged line like a bad border. They had gone swimming there. She had changed on the beach like her nakedness was nothing. Was he in the picture? He wondered.
“Two seas colliding,” she said, looking over his shoulder, her hot, minty breath on his neck. She’d been brushing her teeth.
“I know,” he said. “It’s choppy.”
“Just like us,” she said with a smile.
“How are we going to figure this out?” he asked.
“A fight to the death,” she waved her toothbrush like a sword. “Is that the right expression?”
“Rock paper scissors?” he joked.
“What’s that?” she smiled.
“Never mind,” he said. “I’d have an unfair advantage. Years of practice. We could move to neutral territory. How about Switzerland?”
She laughed. “How about a coin toss?”
She rummaged through her purse and handed him a Danish crown. It seemed like such a great idea at four a.m. He didn’t normally make decisions in the middle of the night but it looked like midday out the window.
“Tails for Denmark,” she said.
“Is this legally binding?” he asked.
She nodded. He flipped the coin high in the air, caught it and slapped it against his wrist. There she was, the queen, looking at him. He cupped his hand over the coin. He looked up at her. Half her face was covered in sunlight, drenched in it by the open window. Her hair had caught the rays of fire. One wide eye was a light blue, the other steely blue in shadow. Her mouth was pointed in an O.
“What is it?” she said.
Heads or tails, a declaration of love, he thought. He couldn’t do it to her.
“Tails,” he said. “Best two out of three?”
“No way,” she said.
“We have a lot to think about,” he said. “It’s just a coin, you know.”
“I know,” she said.
They crawled into bed. She inched up close to him, her head under his chin, her breath on his neck, her heartbeat crushed against his heart, like two pounding tides. They were like two seas rolling and crashing together, black and blue and shimmering under the Danish sun.
* * *
“They are gambling again,” Peter laughed. “They made a bet in your last story, too. Do all your characters gamble?”
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s hard to think of something original at 12:30 a.m. At least I took you somewhere warm and sunny.” She shuddered from the cold. It was starting to creep into her extremities, a constant reminder of the trouble they were in.
“I like it,” he said. “Isn’t all love a gamble? You never know how it’s going to turn out. The other person can change. In fact people have to change to stay together. You use spare change as a metaphor, don’t you?”
“Maybe,” she smiled. “Or maybe I don’t put that much thought into things, well consciously at least. A lot of it’s subliminal. I just tell the story as I imagine it. Why won’t you tell me your story, your real story?”
“I’m not supposed to,” he said, inhaling sharply though his nose.
“Why?” she said. “Is it classified information? Are you a secret agent?”
He laughed.
“I’m surprised you can laugh, considering how beat up you are,” Julie said.
“It’s part of the training,” he said. “After a lifetime of pain.” His features contorted. She touched his head, to feel if the blood had soaked through. The makeshift bandage seemed to be working, for now. Barely.
“How do you get through it?” She pressed herself against the warmth of his chest. She couldn’t help it. The chill was seeping through the sleeping bag. So was a distant worry. What if they died out here on this deserted county road? The thought flickered in and out of her mind.
“I’m an optimist,” he said. “I’m a glass half full kind of guy.”
“And yet you say we are gonna die at four a.m.?”
“Yeah, it’s hard to be an optimist and a psychic, I guess,” he said. “You always know how it’s going to end, with angels and demons and heaven and hell. Which do you like better?”
“Heaven, of course,” Julie said. It was an easy answer.
“Baby, on a good day, I could take you to heaven,” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“Oh
please,” she said, laughing and pulling back. Julie had gotten used to his smell. She had gotten used to his breath on her face. She wasn’t so afraid of him in this moment, just glad he was alive. She was too tired to be afraid and fear felt pointless now anyway. And he seemed so helpless, that was the thing. Wasn’t he helpless? How bad was the blow? No, she still couldn’t sleep.
He had one arm around her and it was oddly comfortable, like they had known each other for years, not hours. The cold had made them close companions. She was glad she wasn’t alone in the dark. She hated the dark.
“Your turn now,” she said. “You tell me another one.”
“Did I ever tell you I was a sailor?” he asked. “When I was young. I could tell you a story or two…”
No Exits
The halyards slap slap in a whipped frenzy of wire. I pull my head under the sleeping bag and try to drown out the noise. The waves crash against the side of the hull and I can hear the gurgle of the water tanks below my bed, settee, whatever the hell you want to call that three-inch piece of foam between my stomach and the tank below. The radio goes in and out, a mixture of fuzz, beeping and the music of one vessel hailing another.
“Get up,” Captain Kim calls. He has a gravelly voice that’s laced with a hard liquor hangover and a touch of Australia. “The clients are going to be up any moment.”
Tracy and Richard Wilson, our clients, rented the Virginia, a fifty-five-foot yacht with us as crew for their fifth anniversary. Why the hell would anyone with their kind of money want a romantic sailing expedition to Canada when they could go to the Bahamas? It’s a mystery to me, but hey, I’m glad because I get a paycheck and a chance to set sail.
I can feel the sweat building under my armpits, wet and sticky under a sleeping bag perfectly rated for summer in Canada. A negative-ten degree rating might seem like a bit too much insulation, but the last icebergs were sighted halfway through June. It is by no means a tropical paradise, but it certainly does have its charms, if you don’t factor in the insects the size of small birds.
Did I mention the North Shore of Lake Superior has mosquitos that suck the life out of your arms at sunset? I can hear one of them whining now, so I keep my head under the bag.
“Seriously, get the hell up.”
“We’ve been together seven years, and you still don’t know how to wake me up in the morning, honey?”
Kim chuckles. “Fuck you.”
“Food,” I moan, “I’ll get up if you fucking feed me.”
“I should really fire you,” he says. “You’re such a fucking princess.”
“Oh come on, love. When you’re at sea, you can’t be so picky, you know.”
“The clients might hear you,” he hisses.
“So what if they do,” I say. “It’s a free world, Kim. People are more accepting.”
“But we’re not even gay,” Captain Kim says.
“No, I don’t think we are,” I mutter as Tracy Wilson comes out of her cabin in a short bathrobe and darts into the head, the tiny compartment of a bathroom in case you didn’t know.
“Look at those pipes,” I say.
I scurry out of my sleeping bag, stuff it into a cubby behind the cushions and sit down at the fold-out table in the galley and eat some runny eggs Kim has set out for me on a paper plate. They taste like the frying pan, drenched in burnt butter that has solidified and congealed into ash. The yolk bursts against my tongue, and I swallow them as fast as I can so I won’t have to taste them a second time.
“You burnt them on purpose, you ass,” I say.
“They aren’t that bad,” he says.
“Don’t feed that to Tracy and Richard,” I say.
“They like yogurt and granola,” he says.
“Well, that’s fortunate,” I say.
It’s a good thing because the smell is nauseating as the cabin fills with a haze of smoke. Kim smells like eggs and whiskey and rum mixed with smoke and grease. I join him in the galley to help him with the dishes and feel his plump butt cheek brush against mine. I do not particularly enjoy this, but quarters are tight on the Virginia. I pick up the old sponge and it also has that scent, the scent of something that has gone bad.
Have things already started to go bad? I wonder. Tracy and Richard have been on board for a week and a half. Kim was happy to have the long-term booking, but here we are in the wilderness with two people we have nothing in common with. Two unpredictable human beings, strangers with a lot of money and a lot of expectations. Two people who regularly cuss each other out behind the teak door.
I heard him call her a bitch. I heard her call him a dumb fuck. The words were loud and muffled by the woodwork.
But then again, Kim and I regularly cuss each other out. And in our own ways, we love each other too. Who are we to judge and question the state of our clients’ matrimonial affairs?
Tracy comes to the galley in the same bathrobe after her shower with her long blond hair snaking against the white terry cloth caressing her shoulders. She has porcelain skin that makes you ache to touch it. Are her legs really that smooth?
Damn, Kim and I have been doing these sorts of gigs all summer. It’s a lonely life. You get paid to sail, but it’s a lonely life. And there she is drinking her coffee with her long fingers wrapped around the mug, her flushed red lips pressed against it, her eyes reaching up to mine in mock surprise. How could she not know everyone is looking at her? Isn’t she used to it by now? Of course she is. Isn’t every rich man’s wife?
She sits at the teak table, crosses her legs and dangles the top one back and forth in front of us in a bouncy motion. I try not to watch her leg move, but my pupils tend to jerk back and forth like a cat stalking its prey. When did I get so bad about discretion? This is the problem with long sails. You go back into town and no one wants to come close to you because of two things: You’ve lost your manners, and your clothes stink. Meanwhile, you are so desperate for conversation you’ve got this big, ridiculous grin on your face and a tendency to get too close. Another human being! Thank God! Now, talk to me, please, for the love of god. How many times can I talk about Sydney with Kim?
We sit at the teak table and Tracy asks us if either of us is married. I shake my head no.
“I was married,” Kim says. “To the original Virginia.”
“What happened?” she says with concern dripping from her soft voice.
“The second Virginia,” I say. “He’s really married to the boat.”
“True enough,” he says wiping a rag across the wooden table. “She didn’t like that I was gone sailing all the time.”
“Why didn’t she just come with you?” Tracy asks. I wonder if paying customers feel entitled to know everything about our personal lives.
“She got seasick,” Kim says.
“A lot of women get seasick,” she says. “From all the ups and downs.”
Is she being literal or metaphorical? Because to be honest I can’t tell. I furrow my eyebrows and look at her. Sometimes I think you need a college degree to understand a woman, but then I remember I’ve got a college degree from a past life tucked somewhere in a drawer on land, a place from another set of seasons.
“You know there are things you can do if you are seasick,” I say. “There are patches and tricks to help you through it. You just have to stare at the horizon.”
“Stare at the horizon,” she said. “Huh. Do you ever get seasick?”
“Only landsick,” I smirk but it’s true. You get used to the gentle rocking motion and then when you set foot on stationary land, it throws off your whole system.
Tracy walks into the V-berth cabin and comes out with a yellow sweater and a pair of white shorts. It’s the perfect combination for the Canada North Shore, with its schizophrenic weather, and I like the fact that I can still see her legs.
“Would you take me to shore for a bit?” she says. “Richard isn’t interested in coming. He wants to sleep in some more.”
We climb the steps into the cockpit an
d I swing open a locker, bending over to pull out two orange life jackets. I hand her one. Seagulls caw overhead and the flies crawl across the white fiberglass.
“I can’t quite get this,” she says, and I help her untangle the black straps. She clicks the buckles.
“Get in the boat.” I point down over the edge. She scampers down the ladder.
I get in the dinghy, and I pull the cord on the engine. It sputters and roars, and we get the hell away from the Virginia.
“I want to feel land,” she yells over the roar.
The nose of the rubber vessel hops over the waves, smacking on top of them, the spray cascading up. And I’m grinning and smiling as I feel the moisture on my face, like morning dew. And Tracy, well, she’s just holding on to the black rubber handles, her long legs splayed out, her tan leather boat shoes gripping the wooden floorboards.
I cut the engine, flip it up and the dinghy glides over the clear water, over the rocks and then I hop out and pull it to shore, over the sand, hoisting the rope up and tying it to a tree in a sheer act of paranoia. Because there isn’t much of a tide on Lake Superior, but I guess it’s just a habit from the other places I’ve sailed. But it’s always good to tie things down, isn’t it?
We get on shore, and I help her unbuckle her orange life vest, not that I have to, but I like being close to her, and she doesn’t seem to mind. We leave our shoes in the dinghy and walk across the reddish brown sand. It’s wet and cool under our bare feet.
Two children building a sandcastle stop and point excitedly at the Virginia off in the distance. I grin. I’m proud of her size.
“Wish that boat was mine, not Kim’s,” I mutter. “But then again, I know the kind of sacrifices you have to make for a boat. He’s poured his whole life into her.”
“Would you be willing to do that for the Virginia?” she asks. “If she were yours?”
“Hell yes,” I say.
It’s the sails that get you, the breath of life, breath of wind pushing you forward. The feeling of floating, flying, zipping by at an angle. The whole world tilts as you feel the roar of the wind. The waves break against the bow, the Virginia’s nose. They foam and curl and crush and pound. And she just keeps plowing forward.