Lit Riffs (16 page)

heidi julavits

E
lgar and I met in first class, on a Viking Air flight from New York to Helsinki. I was en route to an Emotional Rigidity Retreat at a Lapland ice hotel, a birthday present from my best friend, Pam. At first glance, Elgar appeared to be a businessman, a very, very tired one, or maybe
jaded
is a better word. He had clearly seen too much of something. He wore a navy flannel eye pillow, the elasticized leather straps winding around his cranium and pushing his hair upward into a pouf that shuddered under the direct blasts from his air vent.

I ordered red wine from a bald steward; I leafed through the literature Pam had given me about the retreat and half-watched the Scandinavian in-flight movie about a woman and a man with a pack of sled dogs. In the opening scene, the man and woman are waving good-bye to a village of indigenous Sami, who seem to find the man and woman very stupid. The man and the woman slalom through a graveyard where all the tombstones are covered in fur, or maybe it was a Scandinavian form of lichen, but it looked to me like fur. It is night. It is day. It is night again. Morning dawns, the sky is overcast with dismal fish-scale clouds. The woman cuts her finger on a sharp piece of jerky. The man has a cough. The dogs fight. That afternoon, as they’re crossing a lake, the ice cracks open. The dogs and the man drown. The woman cries inside her sealskin hood, and her tears freeze on her cheeks as she builds a pathetic snow crucifix beside the hole. The woman retraces her steps and returns to the Sami village. The women point at her and laugh as the fat chief leads her into his fornication hut. Without words, without the music, the scene was hardly more upsetting than a car commercial.

The bald steward paused the movie for the duty-free service, and my seatmate fumbled with his wallet. A business card dropped onto my tray table. I picked it up. It read, Elgar’s Disposables.

Elgar, I said. That’s a strange name.

Elgar pushed up his eye pillow, revealing a solitary, dumbstruck eye. He looked at me. He looked at me. He returned the pillow to its previous position.

Elgar was the name of a Swedish warrior, he said, who raped his way across the arctic tundra. Or so my mother told me.

You mother is Swedish? I asked.

No, but she was fondled once at a skating party.

I’m sorry to hear that, I said. My name is Helen.

Very pleased to meet you, Helen, Elgar said, and offered me a flask.

We got very drunk together and made fun of the woman in the movie, who was violated by every Sami male this side of the Gudvangen fjord. When Elgar stood to use the rest room, he left a doglegged sliver of white paper in his seat. It looked like a Chinese fortune. It read:
The woman who lies prone on the bed must have a reason, otherwise she is pathetic
.

I phoned Pam in New York from the baggage carousel, propellering Elgar’s business card between my first two fingers. Pam was back at home again after serving a ten-day sentence in a white-collar prison for hacking into her son’s school database and enhancing his Dante grade. Her computer skills made her an unparalleled friend and travel agent.

Sounds like your usual loser, Helen, Pam said. She was invested in my hating men as much as she did. She was forever sending me to retreats where the man-as-monster message was the subtext to every chanting session and massage.

He’s actually a bit of an unusual loser, I said.

What does he look like? Pam asked.

I described his eye pillow. I described his beard. There wasn’t really much else to describe.

I imagine having sex with him will feel lonely and anonymous but hurt a great deal, Pam said. I imagine he’ll have hairs on his penis like a cat, and that the hairs will reverse inside of you when he pulls out and draw blood. Where did he go to college?

I admitted I did not know.

Sounds like a Haverford man, she said with some wistfulness. Did you know Haverford is harder to get into than Brown?

Really? I said.

Really, Pam said.

She agreed, grudgingly, to book me on each of Elgar’s Viking Air flights.

I went to the Emotional Rigidity Retreat at the ice hotel. The retreaters, all nine of them, were rich American woman like myself with diamond rings on the wrong fingers and faces twitching full of that greedy hope you encounter at spas and PTA meetings and sample sales. We wore parkas with the hotel’s insignia on the hood, we practiced chanting in an igloo, and drank white wine that looked green against the igloo walls. We took turns confessing the story of our most recent failed romance. When a woman finished her confession, usually in tears, the retreat leader would point a finger at her and laugh uproariously. It seemed cruel initially, but by the end of the weekend we were all laughing and pointing fingers inside our mittens, and the woman we were laughing at would blush and bend her head, as though she were an unfunny person who’d inadvertently told a first-rate joke. I left the retreat with a draw-string chamois gift bag full of lip balm, antacid tablets, and a white pleather journal with the word
Resolve
embossed across the cover. Inside was an epigraph:
Nothing increases a woman’s resolve like repeated exposure to depravity
.

We first made love in Helsinki, after three gin drinks at a hotel bar where we were lorded over by three disconsolate elk heads and a team of straw-haired sales representatives from Swedish National Plastic. Elgar told me he was a businessman who dealt in disposable woods, the sort that is used for chopsticks, toothpicks, tongue depressors, shish-kebab spears, cut-rate coffins. Primarily, he sold wood to undertakers. He bragged about his extremely low IQ, the fact that he didn’t learn to read until he was nine, and long division remained beyond him at the age of thirty-five. He traveled with a single briefcase and a nylon backpack full of pills. He always wore the same suit, of charcoal gray wool. His grandfather had invented the massaging eye pillows that Elgar wore during the greater part of every day, that are available in every duty-free store across the Western world.

Our suite had a cold mink headboard that smelled of the eucalyptus toilet water the maids splashed around the room with impunity. Contrary to Pam’s predictions, Elgar was hairless below the chin, white and ill-defined. Making love to him was not unlike involving my whole body with an underdone breakfast pastry, yeasty and chilly and a tiny bit sour. We finished up and all I could see was a cooler full of mink headboards, stacked against each other like furry tombstones. I told him this as we lay against it, eating herring with our fingers from the zinc guest fridge.

You try to be appear morbid, he said, an eye pillow pushed up around his forehead goggle-style and lending the moment an après-ski feel. But I can see you’re just an aimless romantic.

Aimless romance can be morbid, I said.

In an ideal world, he said. Pass the herring, please.

In fact, I’ve never been in love before, I said. I’ve decided it is senseless to look.

Glad to hear it, Helen, he said. Love is a dull and predictable business. Perhaps you were molested as a child?

Not that I recall, I said.

Elgar shook his head. So you’ve always lacked ambition.

We made love again against the mink headboard, which felt colder than before, even though the room was full of tepid steam heat and the smell of pickled fish and my strange compulsion to adore him, for very little reason.

We established a routine. Elgar introduced me to his Chinese tailors, and they made me matching charcoal suits with derisive fortunes in the pockets
(You are no catch, madame)
. I dyed my blond hair white and parted it over my face so that one dark eye peered out. I’d read magazines in the hotel suite while Elgar went to lunch with undertakers and insisted on charging ludicrous prices for his cheap wood. When they refused to pay his price, he’d slam a bread roll onto the table, he’d toss wine in the face of the undertaker, or sometimes he’d simply break down weeping, his beard dragging through his coq au vin.

It was his idea to have me accompany him as his associate.

He presented me to the undertakers as Miss Winterbottom. Elgar and the undertaker would ignore me through the aperitifs, the
amuse bouches
.

Miss Winterbottom, Elgar would say after the waiter had served our first course, I see you’ve gained some weight.

I would squint a scornful teal eye at him between my white hair.

Honest to God, Miss Winterbottom, it could just be the light in here, but you’re looking a touch too portly for my tastes. Maybe I ought to start chasing you around the office a bit more vigorously.

The undertaker would cough into his linen napkin or busy himself with his turtle consommé.

This is what I hire her for, Elgar would say to the undertaker, patting him confidentially on the elbow and sending his half-lifted spoonful of consommé spattering over his thin shirt. She is my sexual associate. I pay to fondle her freely with no emotional attachments. If it’s part of the job description, there’s no chance of a harassment suit. Is there, Miss Winterbottom?

I would apply a coat of gray lipstick and remove a fountain pen from my charcoal suit. I’d unscrew the top and lick the quill. My tongue would turn black.

The undertaker would attempt to excuse himself, but Elgar would order a very, very expensive bottle of Lynch-Bages, and the undertaker would agree to stay for one more course. I’d put a hand on his knee and squeeze gently. By dessert, the undertaker would be drunk and leering at me with my white hair and my one eye. His eyes would soften and a sigh would escape between his lips, on which a dab of French butter lingered.

Don’t let her fool you, Elgar would admonish the undertaker. She’s a wicked little cur, aren’t you, Miss Winterbottom? The sad thing is, she cannot fall in love. That’s what happens when you sell yourself the way she has, your heart becomes encased in scar tissue with a trampoline-like consistency. You could stamp on her heart and you’d be launched into the sky or hit your head on the ceiling, depending on where you were at the time. She could help you see the stars or crush your silly skull. And did you bring the contracts, you senseless hussy?

I would produce a thick contract, stinking of eucalyptus, from my suit coat. I did not wear a blouse and allowed the undertaker to catch a glimpse of my white breast, my mauve nipple like a tiny bird giblet, beneath which my trampoline heart beat away. I left my lapel gaping open for the rest of the meal, not caring if the waiter saw, or the busboy, or the wine steward. Elgar would unfold the contract on the table before the undertaker, pinning the papers down with the salt well and a dirty salad fork. He’d run over the terms of the contract, lightning fast, contradicting himself numerous times and referring to various subsections and Roman numerals. The undertaker would nod and nod as I moved my hand north of his knee, crawling my fingers, spider-style, up his thigh while enacting an air of erotically charged ennui.

And so as you see here, Elgar would say, directing the undertaker’s wandering attention to the last page of the contract, I am quite up-front about the fact that my product is unreliable, of the poorest imaginable quality, and rarely ships when scheduled, that I do not accept returns, nor do I entertain complaints, written or tape-recorded, if the wood for which you’ve paid an exorbitant fee in full before seeing a single dry-rotted board fails to arrive at all. You’ll see here, the signature line, where I’d like you to draw a little picture of yourself.

Elgar would snap his fingers and I would surrender my fountain pen to the undertaker, who would, invariably, draw a pathetic little stick figure, often tipping over to one side, with a very long torso, stubby legs, a tiny blank head. Elgar would fold the contract into thirds and shove it into his coat pocket, making an excuse about a golf game or a sailing appointment, even though it was November and Scandinavia was entombed in ice. He would hustle me into my coat and the two of us would scuttle importantly through the dining room, pausing at the potted spruce flanking the host stand in order to thrust the contract deep into the green needles. Elgar would put his arm under my charcoal coat and wrap it tightly around my waist, grabbing me near to him so that we weren’t exactly hugging as we walked, we were more like one gangly creature that couldn’t quite get its balance, but which strode confidently through the coatroom and out the revolving door as though it had a purpose in the world, no matter how contrived and awkward.

In early December, Elgar began to grow bored of our Winterbottom ruse, even though I wore less and less clothing to our lunches, even though I let the undertakers pinch my exposed nipple as they drew their little stick figures.

Don’t you have somewhere you need to be? Elgar inquired over breakfast. We were eating in bed, and he pounded the cranium of his soft-boiled egg brutishly with a butter knife. The yoke spattered over the headboard, the brilliant yellow congealing on the fur.

No, I said.

Don’t you have a job? he asked.