Adventures of Pebble Beach

by Berger, Barbara

  Pebble felt a myriad of emotions, colors and temperatures. Her tiredness disappeared. She was on a roll. This was life, no matter what it looked like in the morning. She drank another beer. It tasted good. Would she sleep with Franz? Everyone expected her to. And what if she did? Who would ever find out, back in wonderful Copenhagen? And what about Albert? Did she owe him her allegiance? Was she supposed to be faithful to a man she hardly knew? Now that she was divorced and finally free? What would Molly think if, God forbid, she ever guessed that she’d mothered a daughter with such lascivious desires as Pebble Beach? Was that why she’d come to Greenland? To be far enough away to take a good look at who she really was? Did she really need all that ice and snow to do it? The streets of Copenhagen offered everything the heart could desire. But that was home. That was where she lived, where she knew people, where people would recognize her, and where people had memories. Here she was scot-free, ageless and unknown. It was like having a second chance. She could try it all out if she wanted, taste it all, who’d ever tell? Even her children would never know.

  I must have drunk too much, thought Pebble as she stumbled back towards Franz’s trailer. His warm hand now buried deep in her pocket.

  * * *

  Once inside the door, he smothered her with kisses even before she took her coat off. It was nice. The hot air of the warm trailer helped her thaw. She liked Franz, but didn’t want to know him better. As he undressed her with an expert’s hand she realized that once he was inside her, he wouldn’t even know who she was. The perfectness of that impersonalness was suddenly wrong. She wished she’d been wiser and checked into the transit hotel. By now she’d have been sleeping like a baby, dreaming innocent dreams of Albert in Holsteinsborg. Feeling her warm pussy with her own hand and wanting Albert bad. Instead, another man was touching her. But it was too late to turn herself off, even if she felt like it. She knew enough about men to know that was too dangerous. You never knew what might happen. Women who did things like that in midstream were playing with fire; they might end up getting beaten up. Some men were jerks or psychopaths. It was wiser to investigate things first. But since she’d forgotten to scrutinize matters carefully this time, she let Franz continue.

  The next morning, the weather had cleared up. When Pebble woke, with an aching head, the sun was already shining brightly in the trailer’s windows. Franz was gone. He’d left a note on the little table by the bed. “Pebble, I have to fly up to Jakobshavn for a meeting. Be back tomorrow night. F.”

  Pebble was relieved.

  Maybe she could even forget their lovemaking the night before. But she doubted it. Franz had left nothing to the imagination.

  She wrapped herself in his bathrobe and looked around the trailer, hoping to find a shower. There was none. So she made do with the sink in the bathroom. At least the water was hot, but the pump made an awful racket. She peeped out the window. It was awesome. The entire expanse of Greenland’s majesty was out there waiting for her. Snow everywhere. Franz’s trailer, parked a short distance from the air terminal, was a tiny spot of warmed-up metal in a vast terrain. The sky was so blue that Pebble couldn’t remember ever having seen one like it. She wondered how cold it was outside and if her helicopter would fly to Holsteinsborg today. If Franz had gone to Jakobshavn, she could probably go, too.

  She felt cheerful, happy. Like a young girl starting a new life. No reason to dismay or think about who she’d made love with the night before. At least she’d managed to slip a condom on him before he entered her. So what harm could it have done? This is the very first day of the rest of my life, Pebble told herself, looking at her somewhat beautiful face in the somewhat foggy bathroom mirror. She liked herself immensely just then, with all her more than 40 years.

  Chapter 6

  The waiting Sikorsky S-6IN helicopter had Air Greenland painted on the side in white against a red background. The night before, Franz told Pebble that those in the know called Air Greenland “Imara Airways”. “Imara,” he’d told her, “means maybe in Eskimo language.” At that time, sitting comfortably on the Boeing 757, Pebble hadn’t understood what Franz was talking about. But now, walking through the snow outside the Søndre Strømfjord air terminal towards the helicopter, she did.

  Helicopters, Pebble realized, surprised at the thought, are sensitive birds, they can’t fly in just any old weather. And this bird looked more than sensitive, the sturdy helicopter – the legendary Sikorsky was the model the US used in Vietnam – was positively tiny, dwarfed by the giant snow-covered mountains surrounding the base’s single runway. At least today there were no hurricane winds, blizzards, sudden storms, fog or any other whims of nature afoot to delay Pebble. An Eskimo was loading the chopper, while Pebble and the 15 other Eskimos waited. For some reason, they weren’t boarding and Pebble wondered why. The cold was intense. Pebble’s big city cowboy boots weren’t warm enough and she stomped back and forth, cold and impatient.

  A grey, battered pick-up truck drove up in a hurry and screeched to a halt. Two Greenlanders jumped out and unloaded a long wooden man-sized box and carried it on board. It wasn’t until Pebble climbed into the chopper that she realized it was a coffin. The 15 Eskimos all sat towards the back, as far from the coffin as they could, leaving Pebble alone in the single seat right behind the cockpit and next to the coffin.

  I don’t belong here, thought Pebble. The coffin spooked her. She realized this was Indian country. The Eskimos of Greenland look just like American Indians. The chopper started to move. Jon and Adam would love this, she thought, thinking fondly of the two grown sons she’d somehow spawned in Denmark. Life was absurd. But Molly and Morris would die. Sometimes she actually liked being in the middle of her own life adventure, even though her attempts at living usually looked (and sounded) a whole lot more exciting in retrospect – when she’d had time to filter out the anxiety. Sometimes Pebble had good instincts, but not always. Her antenna told her the 15 other people in the chopper were as different from her as day was from night. Their world was populated by people and spirits she’d never met.

  The helicopter rose slowly and hovered in midair. When they were about 50 feet off the ground, Pebble, who’d never been in a chopper before, wondered if they were going to crash. She didn’t know that choppers just seem to hang in midair as if they were suspended before they really start to fly. And Pebble, whose nerves were already raw, saw her life ending, a red blotch on the white snowdrift below. Then the chopper’s nose tilted forward and head down, they flew away.

  In less than a minute, Søndre Strømfjord was completely gone. Vanished, without a trace, as if it had never existed. Peering out the window into the glaring sun, Pebble saw only snow. It seemed as if Greenland was one vast emptiness which stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction, and farther still. There wasn’t a house, or a tree, or a single sign of life anywhere. All Pebble saw was mountains, immense, twisted, snow-covered movements of earth, running here and there, massive and glittering gold in the morning sunlight. Greenland might be spectacular to look at, but it sure was frightening to contemplate. How could anyone live in such a place? There was nothing to burn or eat for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Still Eskimos had managed to live here for centuries; it was their country, long before Greenland became a Danish colony.

  The plain wood coffin bothered her – reminding her guiltily of the carnal passion that drove her so far north. Damn! Just her luck to be sitting next to a stiff when she was flying to meet her lover. God couldn’t have planned it better! What was He trying to tell her? Pebble sometimes believed in omens, especially when she was living on the edge.

  A pamphlet called “Survival in Arctic Regions” was stuck in the plastic pocket on the wall by her seat. She pulled it out, trying to forget her life, the coffin and how badly she wanted Albert. She studied the diagrams of people huddled in thermal suits – the suits were apparently stowed under the very seats they were sitting on – waiting to be rescued. But the pictures did little to comfort her. The
extreme vulnerability she felt, amongst natives who called this Arctic wonderland home, didn’t go away.

  Why doesn’t Albert work on a Greek Island? Pebble pouted, feeling the fool, when suddenly a tiny patch of snow-clad humanity appeared in the distance. Pebble Beach looked at her watch – they’d been flying about 45 minutes. Only 5,000 people lived in Sisimiut, as Holsteinsborg is called in Eskimo language, so Pebble wasn’t exactly expecting skyscrapers. But the village looked so tiny and forlorn! A blotch of insignificance in a sea of ice. Then as the helicopter hovered over the landing place, ready to descend, Pebble started tingling all over. Albert would be down there waiting for her! She saw him vividly in her mind’s eye. Black hair, the French mannerisms, the cigarettes he rolled himself, the masculine cowboy. The dream. In a few minutes, he wouldn’t be a dream anymore; he’d be flesh and blood. And she’d be with him, in real life. With all that implied. (He’d be someone she’d have to deal with, too.) Instead of thinking about that, she pictured herself wrapping her arms around him and her mind zoomed in on her sense of touch. Exquisite sensations pulsed through her body. The tingling stopped when she noticed a group of Eskimos comforting a wailing woman as the chopper neared the ground. She remembered her companion on that strange flight – the corpse. Maybe whoever it was wasn’t the only person on the chopper who was going to meet their destiny. Then she caught a glimpse of Albert, leaning up against the heliport, hands deep in the pockets of his battered pilot jacket. Her heart thumped as the helicopter thumped down on the pavement.

  How can I possibly lift my body out of this seat? thought Pebble, trembling all over. She wanted to remain locked in that moment forever. You see, Pebble was smart enough to know that she’d probably never feel happier in her life than she did just then. No matter what the future would bring, nothing would ever be able to surpass the intensity she was experiencing, sitting as if turned to stone next to her companion the corpse, peering out the window at Albert. He hadn’t spotted her yet, but she already knew that neither of them would be able to live up to the expectations that had brought her thousands of miles to this moment.

  * * *

  Albert, a French cowboy who’d discovered the wild beauty of Greenland years back, was from Chamonix, a small village in the French Alps. Early on he found he was too high-spirited for that strict, little ingrown Catholic community and had sought adventure as a forester in the wilds of Lapland. Now sitting with Pebble Beach in the living room of the tiny red, wooden house he rented on a cliff overlooking Holsteinsborg, he said, “We’ve got to stretch out this moment, Pebble.” He was drinking a beer and enjoying the lust in Pebble’s green eyes.

  Pebble was so happy that it didn’t matter if it was all wrong. She only saw how the muscles of his arms and shoulders moved underneath his faded red flannel shirt. He was so sun-burned, from endless hours on skis exploring the wilderness around Holsteinsborg that he almost looked like an Indian. Her panties were wet, and she hoped he wouldn’t know how badly she wanted him. But considering how far she’d come to be with him, it couldn’t be that much of a secret. She inched closer to him on the couch, wanting to feel the warmth he radiated. She gently moved a lock of hair away from his forehead, even though a moment earlier she’d vowed not to touch him first. He smiled as she studied his profile. The glass in his hand – she hadn’t counted how many he’d drunk – was empty.

  It made no difference that once his hair had been jet black, Pebble didn’t notice the grey creeping into his thick head of hair anyway. All she felt was the tingling that rushed through her loins every time she was with him. On some primitive level, her cells wanted his cells; that was how she explained it to herself. The few times she’d been with Albert, she felt trapped inside a magnetic field of enormous intensity. Energies and feelings circumvented her brain. She was all body. Pebble had never had a relationship like this before.

  “Darling,” he turned towards her, the energy full-blast now, kissing her lips. It was as if he was initiating some ancient ritual, the moment was that solemn. His hands sought her breasts. Pebble Beach felt herself be drawn into the circle of his power until an odd, uncomfortable thought set off warning bells in her mind. What if our lovemaking doesn’t live up to my expectations? She awoke momentarily from her trance as her mind screamed, What if our lovemaking doesn’t live up to his? And for a short moment, Pebble’s brain worked perfectly – just as it did when she was writing advertising copy – and she remembered all the palpitating pleasures she’d imagined, alone in her bed in Copenhagen. In her sizzling dream world, she’d been young as pliant springtime. And Albert was a master of carnal arts who was able to stretch time until she was begging for the ultimate pleasure. He’d lead her down pathways to a world of sensations she’d never experienced before. But now that he was actually going to touch her, her brain was sending off desperate signals she didn’t want to hear. She knew dreams had a way of evaporating, but she didn’t care. She ignored the warning bells (what could she have done anyway – ask Albert to undergo a personality check?) and slid comfortably back into the ancient ritual they were enacting.

  Maybe our heroine needed dreams more than reality anyway. What, in fact, was so great about the real life she lived before? Her marriage to Slim and all that? Was that great? The yearning of her cells drowned out the murmurings of her brain as she leaned tenderly into his body, letting herself go, flowing into his presence. So what if he was just a man? So what if she’d invented him? At least she could feel him now, touch him, enjoy her own invention. And what if this was the end of the garden path? She was ready to run the risk, accept the challenge – even if most of what she knew about Albert was a product of her own imagination. Did it really matter? Where did physical attraction like this come from anyway – if not from her mind? Was there anything in this entire universe powerful enough to set compasses spinning before the mind even knew the name, except the mind itself?

  If Pebble knew surprisingly little about the man who was now leading her to his bedroom, it was probably best that way. The taste of happiness is extremely hard to describe and Pebble Beach, after much failure in life (though well-camouflaged), couldn’t help but enjoy it, even if it was a pleasure she’d manufactured herself. And even if things were bound to change.

  * * *

  Choppy water always follows a calm golden sea. Pebble Beach learned that Albert was stubborn and hard as a rock, and drank more than he should. He took her skiing in the snow-covered mountains beyond Holsteinsborg. And the landscape was as empty and cold as the moon. There was nothing out there.

  “The Arctic dream, Pebble, this is the Arctic dream,” Albert shouted into the icy wind, a mad glint in his eyes. But Pebble didn’t see any dreams. All she saw was an environment so harsh and hostile that few human beings could survive there for long. She ached for the warmth of city lights and people and cafes. If there’d been a bus stop on the corner, Pebble would have hopped on the first bus and gone anywhere. That was how out of place she felt – trapped by Greenland’s enormous emptiness. She didn’t understand how Albert could stand it. Everywhere there was cold aching nothingness. It scared her.

  But who could she tell? Not Albert. He’d never understand. He’d climbed Mont Blanc when he was 17 and roamed the wilds for years, thriving on the wilderness. He was a loner. Pebble might not have wanted to admit it – but the barrenness of Greenland forced her to – Pebble and Albert had very little in common. When he talked, recounting his mad adventures, she couldn’t do much but listen. What could she tell him? About the thrill of having a brand new computer in her home office? About the glorious chaos of doing business with the best advertising agencies in Copenhagen? About WonderLift and the female revolution, or about Peter Cato? No, Pebble’s life had so little relevance up here it hardly made sense to her anymore. How would Albert understand?

  Albert was an engineer. He made his money building electrical plants at different locations around Greenland for Greenland’s Technical Organization. At the moment, due to a lull
in plant construction, he was teaching engineering to a select group of Eskimos at the small technical school in Holsteinsborg. Pebble didn’t think his life was exactly exciting either (what did the man really have besides the great outdoors?).

  Once the sumptuousness of that ancient ritual began to wear off a little, Pebble noticed how much he drank. She didn’t want to make this discovery, but the slur in his voice made it hard to ignore. That was when she’d panic and think, Here I am, thousands of miles away from home, stuck in some tiny outpost of civilization, getting my brains fucked out by an alcoholic I hardly know. It was enough to frighten the shit out of her. The same thing had happened every night since she arrived. She’d be curled up against him, trying to listen to whatever he was telling her, when it would hit her – goose bumps and all, and panic right in the pit of her stomach. Her insides would say, What am I doing here? And the wave of fear would follow. How did I get myself into this? Why can’t I go home? …I want to go home! I really do! Right now!! The more she thought about it the worse it got. But Pebble knew she couldn’t go home. The helicopters that Air Greenland sent out to these small Eskimo villages only picked up people from Holsteinsborg when the weather was good. At the moment, fierce storms raged all along the West Coast of Greenland. There hadn’t been a single helicopter since the day Pebble arrived. Nobody could leave. Not even Queen Margrethe herself could have gotten out. If you were going to take your leave from the planet earth, well you’d just have to do it in Holsteinsborg. There was just no way you could get on a train or plane and say Goodbye Charlie.

  * * *

  Two nights later, Pebble and Albert were invited to a little party at the home of one of Albert’s friends. Pebble decided she wasn’t going to worry or let any of her silly panicky feelings stand in the way of her and fun. After all, that was what she’d come for. Right? Fun – yeah, plain simple fun, and now she was there, right? Right in the middle of all this real-life fun, right? Well, maybe she was feeling anxious and maybe she was really stuck, but if she was, she figured she might as well enjoy it. What else was there to do? What else could anybody in their right mind hope for in a situation like this one – besides fun? If she was lucky, she’d be out of there in a week’s time anyway. (Besides, the thought of this romantic adventure dragging on for more than another week was probably more than anyone could bear – Albert and Pebble included.)