Far Afield

by Susanna Kaysen

  “People do change their lives. You said that to me, remember?”

  “I didn’t believe it anymore than you do right now.” Jonathan spoke sharply. Neither of them was a candidate for change; it took a character like Wooley’s to make external rearrangements.

  “Why did you say it, then?” She sounded hurt. “I did believe it. I thought about it often.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  She frowned. “No. You just appeared in my life for an evening and said that—it had a strong effect on me. You were a voice from another world.”

  “I’m sorry.” And he managed to sound apologetic. What he felt, though, was pleased: he’d made an impression on her.

  “You shouldn’t be sorry. You helped me.”

  Jonathan spoke before he could stop himself. “Helped you to change your life with another, more appealing American?”

  Daniela stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Wooley. I’m talking about Wooley—Jim, as you call him.” He shook his head. “You really didn’t have to come all the way over to Skopun to tell me about it.”

  “Oh,” said Daniela. “Oh.” She covered her mouth, but her laugh slipped out. “I would never—” The laugh broke through again.

  “You wouldn’t?” He reached for her arm and held it around the elbow.

  “No,” she said. She dropped her arm to the table, eluding Jonathan’s grip.

  It then occurred to him that she might be dismissing more than Wooley.

  If Daniela noticed Jonathan’s retreat behind a wall of politeness, she gave no sign. She was delighted by his ministrations—perfectly done halibut, a Belgian butter cookie with her coffee—and she was talkative, praising his cooking, exclaiming over the coziness of the kitchen as night fell, offering up tales of life in Saksun and asking if such things happened also in Skopun. Jonathan’s brief answers were accompanied by strained smiles. Each time she returned one of these—and she had a lovely smile, shy and a little lopsided—he marveled at her stupidity or her cruelty, he couldn’t tell which.

  But he knew she wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t saying cruel things, so after a while Jonathan had to conclude that he’d finally learned to sulk without being obvious. A poorly timed achievement: it would have been useful with Wooley; it was counterproductive tonight. Not only did he have to broach the topic of his dismissibility with no prompting from her, he had to plunge into it without the fanfare of a “mood,” which might at least have laid a groundwork for her sympathy.

  Well, then, nothing for it but to be bold. He took a deep breath, inflating himself for his next move. He wasn’t sure what it would be.

  “Is there more coffee?” Daniela asked. “I’m a little chilly.”

  “I could warm you up,” said Jonathan.

  In the total silence that followed, the clatter of the door was remarkably loud. Then two familiar bangs, as Heðin knocked his clogs off in the hall and strode into the kitchen.

  “So, so, so,” he said.

  “So, so, so,” said Jonathan.

  Heðin walked over to Daniela. “Heðin Dahl,” he announced, and extended his large, coarse hand.

  Daniela put her tiny, bitten-down fingers in his palm briefly.

  “Daniela,” Jonathan told Heðin. “Smith.”

  “What did you have for dinner?” Heðin asked, settling into a chair.

  This had been one of Eyvindur’s complaints—people wanting to know what you had for dinner. Jonathan glanced at Daniela to see if she remembered it too, but she was looking quizzically at Heðin. “We had halibut,” said Jonathan.

  “It was very good.” Daniela recited this as if it were a formula.

  Heðin nodded. “Yes, fish in the villages is very good.”

  Jonathan hoped Heðin wasn’t going to start on a Life in the Village routine.

  But that was just what Heðin had in mind. “You can’t get fish like that in Tórshavn anymore.”

  “Daniela said so herself,” Jonathan broke in. “Didn’t you?”

  Daniela nodded and looked, for a moment, at Jonathan.

  “My next-door neighbor,” he told her in English. “He comes over almost every night.”

  “Hah, you speak English together.” Heðin turned to Daniela. “You’ve lived in America?”

  “No.”

  “Hah,” said Heðin. He was playing his part to the hilt. He tipped his chair back and put his hands behind his head, frankly staring at Daniela. “So.” He let the chair bang down again and leaned on the table. “Where did you learn it then?”

  “Down There.” Daniela waved her fingers toward the south to indicate the low, loathsome kingdom of Denmark.

  “I’ve never been there.” Although Heðin spoke with pride, Jonathan heard a note of self-pity in his voice.

  “Don’t go,” said Daniela. She looked at Jonathan again.

  “Some coffee?” Jonathan figured it was time to move Heðin on to the next stage of his visit.

  “I have something better.” Heðin pulled a half bottle of aquavit out of his back pocket and placed it in front of Daniela. Then he flashed her one of his best wacky grins. “For you,” he said, flourishing his hand.

  Daniela blushed with what looked like pleasure, and Jonathan flushed with what he knew was jealousy—of Heðin’s forceful charm that came so easily and was so effective. But before he had time to get worked up, Heðin kicked his foot under the table and winked at him.

  “Now we’ll all get stinking drunk,” he said.

  Jonathan was touched. Heðin was trying to smooth the path of love for him. And though it was a crude method, it had probably worked well many times—with girls who weren’t Daniela. Jonathan leaned toward her and, in English, asked, “Do you want to get drunk?”

  She shrugged, “I’ll have a drink.”

  Jonathan took three glasses from the cupboard and gave them to Heðin, who poured rather modest shots and pushed them across the table. He raised his glass and declaimed, “To the Faroes!”

  So they all drank to the Faroes.

  “Now,” said Heðin, refilling the glasses, “we’ll drink to America.”

  “The land of the free,” said Jonathan. The aquavit had started burning in his veins already.

  “Why do you say that?” asked Heðin, a little combative. He downed his shot.

  “We call it that. It’s a tradition.”

  “We’re free here too,” Heðin objected. “We’ll drink to the Faroes again.” He poured a third round.

  As he raised his glass, Jonathan was moved to improve on the toast. “To the Faroes, the gem of the ocean.” This went over well. Both Daniela and Heðin smiled. Jonathan had a moment of uneasiness at stealing this line of praise from his country, but it seemed more fitting for an island nation. One could hardly call a landmass as big as North America a gem.

  “Now you make a toast,” Heðin told Daniela.

  Daniela looked into her glass. Then she looked at Jonathan. “To our host,” she said, in English.

  “What did she say?” Heðin listed toward Jonathan.

  “To me,” Jonathan answered, grinning. He drank; maybe all was not lost. He immediately refilled his glass and raised it to Daniela: “To our visitor.”

  “What did you say?” Heðin sounded irritated.

  “To her, we’re drinking to her now.”

  Heðin enthusiastically drank to Daniela.

  “You’re not mad at me?” Jonathan asked her.

  “What did you say?”

  Jonathan didn’t answer. Daniela shook her head.

  “No more toasts,” Heðin said.

  Jonathan was willing to go along with that. Five shots of aquavit in half an hour was a pace he couldn’t maintain. Heðin could, though; his arm snaked along the table in search of the bottle, which was beside him. “Where is it?” he mumbled.

  Daniela put it in his hand.

  “You are very kind and very beautiful,” he said, enunciating each word carefully. She began to giggle
.

  “Don’t laugh! It’s true. Isn’t it true, Jonathan?”

  Jonathan nodded. “Completely true,” he said, in English.

  Daniela stopped giggling.

  “What did you say?” Heðin refilled his glass. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, “I don’t need to know.” He spent a minute trying to screw the cap on the bottle, then gave up. “I don’t need to do that,” he told them.

  Jonathan realized he was staring at Daniela. He tried to shift his gaze, but there was nowhere else worth looking; his eyes kept snapping back to her face. “You are beautiful,” he heard himself say.

  She smiled at him.

  All the aquavit in Jonathan’s body rushed into his head at that smile, and his blood crashed in his ears.

  “Talking goddamned English,” Heðin muttered. He straightened his back. “Jonathan.”

  “Yes?” Jonathan slowly turned his head away from Daniela.

  “Who do you think discovered your goddamned country?” Without waiting for an answer, he said, “The Faroese, that’s who.”

  “Oh?” Though Jonathan knew this wasn’t true, he wasn’t surprised to hear Heðin say it.

  “Erik the Red.”

  “Heðin,” Jonathan protested, “Erik the Red wasn’t Faroese.”

  “It wasn’t him anyhow,” Heðin growled.

  “Leif Eriksson,” Daniela put in. “That’s who you mean.”

  “He wasn’t Faroese either.” Jonathan resumed staring at Daniela.

  “I happen to know that seventeen men on his crew were Faroese.”

  “Seventeen?” Jonathan was amused by this number.

  Heðin moved his glass around, then admitted, “Well, twelve, anyhow. We discovered Russia too,” he went on, but he didn’t sound as authoritative as before.

  Daniela spoke up. “Now really, you can’t say that.”

  “We went there! We went there!”

  “Why are we arguing?” Jonathan asked. “Vikings went everywhere.”

  “Vikings,” said Daniela, “but not Faroese.” She shook her head. “Faroese never went anywhere,” she said to Jonathan in their private language, English. “At least in Denmark they have Hans Christian Andersen to brag about. It’s sad.”

  “It’s not a fairy tale,” Heðin said. “We went there.” He was getting sulky.

  “She didn’t say it was a fairy tale,” Jonathan reassured him. He smiled at Daniela, but she didn’t smile back. She looked a bit sulky herself. Was it drink that made the Faroese sad and quarrelsome, or did drink just reveal their true nature—which was sad and quarrelsome to begin with? Drink tonight was making him elated, but that probably had to do with Daniela’s presence. He closed his eyes and imagined her in his arms, her slight, warm body breathing against him. He opened his eyes and looked at her again. Then he looked at Heðin and wondered when he was going home.

  “Have to finish this.” Heðin picked up the aquavit.

  “We don’t have to,” Jonathan said. “I don’t want any more.”

  “It’s not worth saving.” Heðin raised the bottle to his bloodshot eyes. It held more than an inch of liquor, enough to make all of them regret drinking it.

  “We always have to finish the bottle,” Daniela told Jonathan in English. “Haven’t you learned that yet?”

  Heðin slammed the bottle on the table. “No more English!” He poured himself and Daniela another shot. “When I come to visit you in America, Jonathan, then we’ll speak English.”

  Heðin in America was unimaginable. Jonathan tried to picture him strolling along brick sidewalks under maples and oaks in fiery autumn plumage, eating spaghetti and meatballs in an underfurnished graduate-student apartment: he failed. The little image of Heðin in these scenes kept floating away, rising off the ground or the chair and drifting into the ether, bound, presumably, for the Faroes.

  From this he concluded that Heðin would never come to America, and that therefore each sodden evening spent with him was precious. His crazy grin, his Norse chest-beating, his useful courting advice—if he managed somehow to transport them across the ocean, what good would they be there? Jonathan suddenly remembered how as a child in Maine he’d once found a rock where starfish lived: rosy ones, dark throbbing blue ones, striped and speckled ones glistening in the waves. Laboriously he’d peeled their fierce arms off the granite and taken them home. By sunset they had turned the color of bones on a beach and were stiff and smelly. He got sad thinking of it and, leaning toward Heðin, said, in unconscious imitation of Daniela, “Don’t come to visit.”

  Heðin glared at him. “You think I’ll embarrass you with your friends?”

  “No, no, no.” Jonathan grabbed Heðin’s hand, which lay open on the table: rough, hard skin, warm and strong, yet limp from drunkenness. “I think it would make you unhappy.”

  Heðin snorted. “Are you unhappy here?” His hand came to life and returned Jonathan’s grip. “Hah!” He lifted Jonathan’s hand up in the air. “You are happy here.”

  “It’s not the same,” said Daniela.

  “You haven’t been there,” Heðin said. He put Jonathan’s hand back on the table. “She hasn’t been there,” he repeated.

  “But she’s right. It’s easier to be happy in the Faroes.”

  Heðin’s expression softened; he looked like a man in love listening to someone praise his girl, and he nodded agreement with Jonathan. Then, with the quick and mysterious changes of mood aquavit can produce, he clenched his teeth and banged the table. “I get so sick of this place!” He closed his eyes. “I want to see the world.” He opened his eyes and said, with perfect sobriety, “I’ll never do it, I know that.”

  This made Jonathan sad again; in fact, he didn’t know which was sadder: Heðin denatured and confused in America, or Heðin trapped in the Faroes. And if he was sad, Daniela, he noticed, was miserable, brooding over her empty glass with tears in the corners of her eyes. “What is it?” he asked, putting his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t respond.

  Heðin stood up. “So, so, so.” He lost his balance and landed back in the chair. “Hmmm,” he said, and tried again. This time he succeeded. “I reckon so,” he mumbled. Without bothering to wait for Jonathan’s so, so, so, he lurched into the hall, put on his clogs, and smashed out the door and down the stairs. He was making a lot of noise, and when he reappeared in the kitchen after a minute, Jonathan figured he was too mixed up to know what he was doing.

  Heðin had something to say, though. “There’s a full moon,” he announced. He gave Jonathan a comically obvious wink and left for good.

  Was the moon going to assure him Daniela’s favors? Jonathan doubted whether anything could, at this point. She looked awfully glum. Maybe now that they were alone, she would tell him what was bothering her. The trouble was, he didn’t want to know. He also didn’t want to embark on the business of cajoling, listening, comforting—a kind of foreplay, but not the kind he was in the mood for. Couldn’t he just skip it? After all, he was drunk and so was she: they could dispense with the formalities.

  So Jonathan said, “Still cold?”

  “You know, I am more like him than I am like you.”

  This was a surprising response to a pass. He mulled it over and decided that she had moved the game back to square one: cajoling. He sighed. It was almost midnight. Would they arrive at comforting, with its promise of physical contact, before they both fell asleep? Not if they didn’t get going. “You are?”

  She nodded.

  They’d have to move faster than that. “What do you mean, exactly?”

  “I don’t know if it’s the weather or …” Daniela trailed off.

  “Or?” Jonathan prompted.

  “A racial trait.” She was still drifting.

  “I don’t understand.” He made his voice as stern as he could. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

  “It’s as if we’re ignoring the rest of the world. People stick to the old ways, but it’s”—she paused—“it’s conscious. It isn’t simple.
We know there’s another way to live, but we can’t change. And we can’t forget about it, either. And we don’t leave. So we’re all depressed and unsatisfied.” She looked worn out after what was, for her, a long speech.

  Jonathan found this irritating—mostly because it was such a slow seduction method, but also because everything she said struck at him as right and yet he had opposite feelings about the Faroes: it was the prospect of leaving that made him depressed and unsatisfied. “Daniela,” he said, “Have you ever considered that there might be good reasons for staying here?”

  “For you,” she said. “They wouldn’t be good reasons for me.”

  “What do you want?” He was exasperated. “Chinese restaurants? Department stores? Noise? Don’t you understand—all that is addictive. I can’t imagine living without it, not for my whole life. I need it. Why do you want to do that to yourself?”

  “You think I’m not like that?”

  He looked at her and knew that she wasn’t. “You’re toying with it, just the way I toy with staying here. I’m not going to stay and you’re not going to leave, and neither of us wants to admit it. We want to be romantic and thwarted. At least Heðin’s honest. And I think—” He had to stop for a minute, because he was actually going to say what he thought. “I think you’re getting a better deal.”

  “Of course you think that. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have the problem.”

  He was taken aback. She was not as drunk as he’d thought, or perhaps he was more drunk. “Good point,” he said. Now what?

  “What do you like so much about this place?”

  How could he answer? Why, for that matter, should he? There was no answer that didn’t reduce his experience to sentimentality or mystify things that, unspoken, were clear. Maybe not so clear to her. She was sitting at his elbow with her face turned toward him and her chin propped on her hand, waiting for clarification.

  Jonathan slid his hand under hers so that her cheek was in his palm. The whole curve of her jawbone fit into his hand, and he had the sensation of holding someone’s life. Her pulse beat under his index finger, swift and steady. His own pulse seemed to have stopped, and his breathing too, as if his body was shocked into stasis by contact with hers. Her eyes widened; before she could protest or even collect herself into any reaction, he kissed her.