Jensen Beach - Swallowed by the Cold - Stories

A group of tourists were pointing and taking photographs of the building with the stone sculpture of a vulva carved into the acanthus leaf cornice above the entryway. Lennart watched this. He smelled the brackish water and the sharp sting of diesel coming at him in the wind off the bay. It was the first Tuesday in July, a week after his father died, and the city was crowded with tourists and locals off work for summer vacation. The sun was out and the day was warm.

At Slussen, he put three ten-kronor coins in a graffiti-covered vending machine for a copy of DN , and sat on a bench, warmed by the sun, near the center of the square. It was summer and the news was slow. He scanned headlines about outbreaks of stomach viruses on cruise ships, and the wedding of a Scottish footballer who’d briefly played in Sweden. Light, inconsequential stuff, all of it. He read half an article about rats. The mild winter had allowed an infestation to develop in some government buildings.

He was late for a meeting with his father’s lawyer. Matilda, his younger sister, was probably already there, as were Ulrika and Magnus, his older siblings. Matilda lived in the city, but the other two had come from abroad to be in Stockholm for the meeting. Lennart had started to go, but the thought of sitting around a conference room table in a cramped office, listening to his father’s stern lawyer list assets and properties and tax liabilities, dug into him and his head hurt. The office walls were crowded with cheap prints of bad artwork, idyllic Nordic landscapes made claustrophobic and menacing behind dusty plastic frames. And the furniture was too bland, bureaucratic for the austere old-town space the office occupied. The place always made Lennart a little sad.

Someone at the lawyer’s office called twice. Soon after the second call, his sister started calling. Each time, he watched her name flash on the screen until it stopped. From the bench, he had a clear view of the bay. Steam rose from the stacks of one of the Silja Line cruise ships. It had been years since he’d been on one of the Baltic cruises. Once, when he was young, not more than ten as he remembered it, he and his father had gone to Finland for a couple of days, just the two of them. His father had some business in Helsinki. On the return trip, Lennart had been allowed to play one of the electronic slot machines. Even at ten, he knew he wasn’t supposed to do this. The machine his father picked was tucked away from the sight of the casino attendant, partially blocking a small window completely blackened with the night. Rolf had stood close behind, obscuring any view of Lennart pressing the buttons on the screen. Lennart fed a hundred-kronor bill into the machine and watched as the screen came to life with a brightly colored set of images of fruit and gold coins and treasure chests, all connected by a complicated web of blinking lines. On his second spin, the machine hit the jackpot, and a happy-sounding but deafening bell rang out. His father clapped him cheerfully on the back and quickly took Lennart down from the stool he’d been perched on. Rolf had had to walk into the casino to fetch someone to arrange for the payout and left Lennart at the machine, the bell still sounding and the word winner flashing on the screen. He sat transfixed by this and by his own fear of being found out, of his father getting in some kind of trouble.

Finally, his father returned with an attendant, a rough-looking guy with bursts of red veins flowering out across his cheeks from too much drinking. He looked at Lennart, messed his hair. “Good luck charm,” the attendant said in a thick Finnish accent. Then he gave Rolf a slip with the amount of their winnings. They’d only won five hundred kronor but his father had let him keep the money, a small kindness that Lennart often returned to much later when he and his father had had an argument, something that happened frequently even into Lennart’s adulthood.

His sister called again. Again he ignored the call. He decided he’d like to have a drink. There were plenty of bars along Götgatan but Lennart passed each of them on his way to the terrace at Mosebacke, the bar behind the Söder Theater. He wanted to sit outside, and the bar was a large outdoor terrace high up on a cliff overlooking the water, picnic tables arranged along the edges of the terrace and foosball and Ping-Pong tables in the center. All the seating at Mosebacke was full. He circled the terrace looking for a group that might soon be done. On his second pass, a woman sitting near the edge of the terrace smiled at him. “You’re welcome to join me,” she said in English. She was holding a Stockholm tour book and waved it at him. “I was just reading.” She laughed and smiled at him. There was a good view of the water from the table.

Lennart thanked her and sat down. She pointed to his drink. “I didn’t know you had to go to the bar to be served. I sat here for ages waiting.” She laughed and shook her head at this. Lennart couldn’t place her accent exactly, but it was American.

“It’s a lovely city,” the woman said. The umbrella in the center of the table was closed. Its crisp shadow reached across the table and onto the woman’s chest and face. She sounded affected in a way he thought she meant to indicate she was the sort of person who traveled, had been places. He often met such people when he lived in North Carolina. Doctors and university professors who had visited France once and pronounced the names of each village they’d visited in exaggerated ways. “Everywhere I’ve been has been so crowded. Yesterday I followed a Chinese tour group around the modern museum for an hour. I didn’t learn anything but the art was lovely. An artist named Mamma Andersson. I bought a poster. Do you know her work?”

Lennart’s phone rang.

The woman raised her book. “Oh, sorry,” she mouthed. “Go ahead.”

It was his sister again. He rejected the call, and put the phone on top of the newspaper in front of him, waiting to see what the woman might say next. “Are you enjoying your stay?” he asked after she didn’t say anything for a little while. He immediately regretted the simplicity of the question.

“It’s so beautiful here,” the woman said. “The Venice of the north. Is that what people call it or just the tour books? It seems like a fair comparison. I’ve never been to Venice, though.”

“It’s the water,” he said. “Islands and so on.” He had the feeling that a conversation with the woman could take any turn at all, and he liked this, the possibilities it presented. He was also attracted to her. She was pretty, if plain, but more than that, he was drawn to where the afternoon might end if he let it. His phone buzzed. On the screen, a message indicating that he had a voicemail flashed brightly. He deleted the message.

“You’re busy,” the woman said, touching her chest, below her neck, where the skin was freckled, “and I just keep going on and on.” She returned to her book, quickly thumbing through the pages. He watched her read. Soon he was distracted by all the movement below in the bay. There were dozens of boats and ferries. A roller coaster at the Gröna Lund amusement park crested the top of its track. He looked from this back to the woman. He sipped his beer. She wasn’t the sort of woman he normally found attractive. She was older than he was, or at least looked older than he was, and though he was of course only speculating about it, she seemed to have a sadness about her that was far more complicated than he was interested in sharing or even tolerating — a messy divorce, a dead kid, recovering drug addict, something like that. But still, there it was, this attraction, undeniable, present in spite of his attempts to ignore it. He wanted to reach out and take her hand.