They Know Not What They Do

THE OTHER WOMAN

HELSINKI, FINLAND 1994

It was supposed to be temporary: everything would gradually return to normal.

According to the pamphlet from the maternity clinic, you couldn’t put an exact time frame on it – which it then, ignoring its own advice, proceeded to do: three months, give or take, for over fifty percent of couples. But you had to bear in mind that every couple was different; this was a tricky time.

You shouldn’t think there was anything wrong with either of you.

It had been a week since Alina left the pamphlet on the nightstand. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but when she saw it still lying there, untouched, she felt something inside her sink.

After the break had lasted another three months, Alina raised the issue.

Joe seemed surprised. ‘I thought it would still be too…’ He searched for the right word. ‘Complicated.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Really? Hmm.’ Then: ‘OK.’

They’d tried the first time three months after Samuel’s birth, and the experience had been an unexpected return to adolescence. It was like having to start all over again, concentrate on technique rather than content, guess how things would feel, what might work. Maybe this was what it was like, Alina reflected, for people with brain damage who had to learn how to walk again.

There were articles about it in the baby magazines at the library. Low estrogen levels meant it was natural if she didn’t feel like having sex.

Did she? Her entire body had started feeling foreign to her, fickle. They were going to have to try again, but would it go any more smoothly? Maybe it wouldn’t work this time either, which would raise the bar that much higher.

That evening, after Samuel was asleep, Joe climbed into bed in his flannel pajamas and picked up Masters of Chess. He read about the game’s world champions every night before turning off the light. Sometimes he would set out the chess things on his nightstand, move one of the pieces according to the diagrams in the book, and stare at the board, lips pursed, as if waiting for the pawns or knights to speak.

They used to kiss before turning in; sometimes it had led to sex, sometimes not.

She waited. Joe’s eyes skipped eagerly across the pages.

Eventually he became aware of her gaze. ‘What?’

‘I thought we… talked about—’

Joe’s eyes were blank.

‘Earlier today.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, looking like he still didn’t quite remember. ‘That’s right.’

He set aside the book. They cautiously turned towards each other and lay there, each waiting for a sign from the other, as if the situation and all that it entailed were completely foreign. Joe gingerly reached out and touched her side. As if afraid his touch would hurt, Alina thought.

Joe’s mouth was familiar and felt right, but there was something mechanical about the whole thing. Is this what sex would be like with someone you didn’t love? But then she felt Joe’s warm hand on her skin and allowed it to rove at will, and it instantly remembered the route, the familiar contours.

Then the hand paused, made a minute change of course, and continued, but in an unaccustomed way. Alina monitored Joe’s movements and felt something was missing. And she saw that Joe knew it, too.

‘Would you like me to…’ he said. She knew what Joe meant; it’s what she had been hoping for.

‘Mm-hm.’ She nodded, not opening her eyes. ‘Yes.’

Then she saw the girl: sitting on the edge of the bed, gazing at them blank-faced, as if she’d always been there.

Alina whimpered and pulled back.

‘Did I hurt you?’ Joe asked, concerned.

‘No, but… maybe it’s still too soon.’’

‘Hmm,’ Joe said. ‘OK.’

She thought she caught a hint of relief in his tone; they wouldn’t have to try after all.

They looked at each other. She had always liked Joe’s eyes. They were the eyes of a kind man. He stroked her hair. ‘It’s going to be fine.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Let’s not rush it.’

‘OK.’

They turned away from each other, and a little while later she could hear that he had fallen asleep.

The girl had started in the fall.

Alina had seen her staring at her computer screen in Joe’s office, next to the door where there didn’t used to be a desk. She was sitting with one leg folded under her. The position looked uncomfortable, as if she hadn’t been able to decide whether to slump into a normal office slouch or arch over her computer like a cat. She had bobbed coal-black hair and a forehead furrowed in concentration, her lips lightly parted.

As she waited for her to acknowledge the presence of a visitor, Alina’s eyes fixed on the fat silver bracelet on the girl’s slender wrist. You get to spend all day here, she thought, and then pop into cute boutiques after work to pick out jewelry.

‘Excuse me,’ Alina finally said. The girl turned languidly, as if she’d been aware of her presence the whole time.

‘I was supposed to.’ Alina began. ‘Joe and I…’

The girl raised an eyebrow as if in disbelief. Then she nodded towards the far wall. ‘That’s his desk over there.’

‘I know.’ Alina’s voice sounded more clipped than she’d meant.

‘He should be back soon.’

Alina wasn’t sure if the girl didn’t know where Joe was or if she didn’t want to say. She stood in the doorway with the stroller, and the girl kept sitting in her peculiar position in Alina’s husband’s tiny office.

‘If Joe comes back, tell him I went to the bathroom,’ Alina said, turning away.

She pushed the stroller back down the hallway, overly conscious of seeming like a frumpy housewife – probably because, she thought, that’s what I am – and of the girl’s direct view of her as she retreated. She would have dressed differently if she’d known about the girl… The thought immediately irked her, the need to impress a complete stranger.

But who did the girl think she was? Of course Alina knew which desk was Joe’s. Alina had first brought him here and shown him around, they’d been here for ages, she and Joe; the girl was the interloper, the one who should have been asking Alina for advice.

Samuel stirred in his sleep and made a little noise, and her coming here with her son in his stroller suddenly struck Alina as embarrassing. Distracted, she walked too fast, and the stroller bumped into the corner of a table in the hallway. She tried to hum cheerfully and stand up straighter, but her cheeks were on fire. Once she had the stroller moving again, she glanced back; the girl in Joe’s office was concentrating on her screen as if Alina and the child did not exist.

She had wanted to mention the girl to Joe. Just remark in passing that she’d noticed a new face at the department, someone who’d been assigned her own niche. In such a small unit, it made a difference who you bumped into in the hallways. Maybe they’d even see the girl socially at some point, say at the party they were going to throw?

The party, she thought: Joe had suggested it several times, but Alina was afraid of feeling like she was on display. People wandering around, inspecting their apartment, eyeing the food, Samuel and his clothes, toys, and crib, the record shelf, the living-room rug: so this is how Joe’s wife likes things.

When she looked around, she didn’t see much she liked or wanted. There was no light in the living room, because the switch on the lamp had been shorting out; Joe had promised to have it fixed and then forgotten. The switch and the wire were probably still traveling back and forth to the university every day in his satchel. She’d asked about it, but always at the wrong moment, and she didn’t want to make a big deal about something so trivial. The most prominent element of the décor was the drying rack filled with Samuel’s clothing: some of it from the maternity package given free to all expecting mothers in Finland, some hand-me-downs from Julia’s sister, yet others from the flea market. The very thought of people from the department in their home, surrounded by the smell of milk and heaps of food-stained laundry, was embarrassing.

‘It’s not very common to invite your coworkers over in Finland,’ she’d said, when Joe had asked again about hosting a party.

‘It is in the States.’

‘Yes. I’m just saying—’

‘I know, I know,’ Joe said and went to change into his squash gear, and Alina was never sure if he did know.

More than anything, she wanted to repaint the living room, correct her mistake. The walls had turned out too white. On the sample card the color had seemed fresh, but on a big surface it made other colors look harsh. The tiniest smudges stood out.

But Joe didn’t think it was a good idea to redecorate until things were clearer.

Alina’s heart skipped a beat.

‘What things?’

‘You know, like… where we’re going to settle down and…’

She waited for him to continue, and then realized that the sentence had come to its end. It wasn’t like they were going to live here for the rest of their lives, he finally said.

‘No, probably not for the rest of our lives. But for now,’ she said.

‘Couldn’t we just wait and see?’

‘See what?’

‘If we might find something…’ Joe said. ‘Maybe some opportunities back home.’

Back home. How easy it was to use the term in passing, home, its soft sounds, so natural and warm, as if it meant the same regardless of speaker or place. She stared at him, gulped and turned away.

‘Come on, Alina,’ Joe said, touching her arm, but she yanked it free.

He tried again: Come on, Alina. The way Joe pronounced her name, the stress fell on the second syllable and left the initial vowel silent: Leena. She’d liked it when they met; she’d wanted to be a person who needed a new, international version of her name.

‘We,’ she said. ‘Did you really say we?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Actually, I don’t.’

That evening, without being asked, Joe changed Samuel’s diaper, fed him his bedtime oatmeal, and put him in his pajamas, all without saying a word.

After breastfeeding Samuel, Alina lay quietly in bed, her back to Joe. She didn’t know if he could tell she was crying.

‘Were you thinking we’d live in Finland for the rest of our lives?’ he asked eventually.

Alina tried to think of the right question to ask back, equally obvious, supposedly neutral, but all she could feel was the tidal wave of unprocessed emotion crashing through her. A long time later, she heard him sigh, lower his glasses to the nightstand, and click off his reading lamp.

‘When were you planning on telling me?’ she said into the darkness.

‘We’ve talked about various options,’ he said.

Alina was dumbfounded. She was supposed to take that seriously? They’d played at making a list of all the countries they’d consider moving to; this had taken place in that little hotel room off Piccadilly Circus, before reality intervened. The list had included Poland and Ghana.

‘Is this because you didn’t get that job?’ she asked. ‘I thought you said you didn’t want it.’

Joe was instantly irritated. Alina’s stomach clenched; she wished she’d chosen her words more wisely.

‘Tell me,’ she said, caressing his cheek.

Joe looked at the ceiling, ignoring the brush of her hand. ‘I feel like I’m surrounded by an invisible wall.’

‘Socially or professionally?’

‘Both.’

Joe felt like Finns didn’t want to let strangers in. No one asked him out for coffee or invited him over. In their professional and personal lives, Finns seemed to close their social circles to outsiders. ‘Especially if you have no free evenings,’ he added.

Especially since I can’t spend evenings away from home. I’m not keeping you here, Alina thought. You should have said something if you didn’t want a baby.

Joe definitely didn’t want a second baby. Alina wanted three. They’d tried discussing the matter on a few occasions, but the conversation grew strained, and Alina felt like she was demanding something her husband was incapable of giving.

‘What are you thinking?’ he asked. ‘Say something.’

She thought about her father, who needed her help on a more or less weekly basis, dealing with the social security office or the bank. Dad hadn’t ever learned to use the bill payment terminals in the bank’s vestibule, although Alina had taken him there what seemed like a dozen times and held his hand through the process. How was she going to do that from the States? What if something happened to him? What if Dad got sick and needed help going to the store or reading the directions on his medication? Ever since Mom had died, Dad had become absent-minded and listless. It still seemed unreal to Alina that a woman who had radiated vigor and health could die a few months after the cancer diagnosis.

‘Have you felt this way the whole time?’ Alina said. ‘You should have said something.’

‘I didn’t want to worry you,’ Joe told her.

He stroked her hand and spoke in a low, steady voice. If anything came up, he explained, they could both think it over, decide then how they’d feel about a short stint in the States. What if Joe just kept an eye out on the off chance a suitable opportunity arose?

‘But only if it’s OK with you,’ he added.

Alina thought about her father, about who he would spend Christmas with, and felt a lump in her throat. She turned away. She didn’t want Joe to see her cry, she wasn’t sure why.

‘Does a short stint mean a short stint or a short stint that gradually turns into a long one?’ she finally said.

‘You can’t always plan out everything in advance,’ he said, and his tone made her feel like a petulant child.

‘We’re moving to the States,’ she told her friend Julia, as the babies crawled around on the carpet at their feet. The lights were bright in Julia’s living room, and the television was on low. They were eating cookies and mostly ignoring the movie playing on the VCR, where a single woman and single man refused to see they were meant for each other.

When? Julia wanted to know. Where? For good? Would Alina work there? What kind of school would Samuel attend?

‘I don’t know,’ Alina said, blushing when Julia looked at her. Every day she expected Joe to come home and announce something had turned up in San Diego or Austin or Santa Barbara or Albuquerque and needed a yes or a no. She dreaded the conversation that would ensue, the arguments required of her and the barrage of counterarguments Joe would rain down in response, the war of attrition, the bargaining that would define their marriage and their life, Samuel’s school years and language, how everything would take shape.

‘Everything’s still up in the air,’ Alina said, turning away. She was sure things would work out for the best, she added.

Julia nodded. Her son Jimi, a dead ringer for Alfred Hitchcock, was already on his third diaper-change of the movie. ‘Things always do.’

‘It all depends on Joe’s work, really.’

Julia said she admired Alina, about to fly off to a foreign country, game enough to start all over again. As she listened to Julia, Alina saw herself through her friend’s eyes and was suddenly pleased to be going, to be the adventurous woman living life on her own terms. Moving began to sound intriguing, even enviable, and when Julia didn’t seem to question it, Alina gradually managed to convince herself that this was the way things were now, and this was, if not optimal, then at least tolerable. This was her life, and she had chosen it, and there was a price to pay for every decision, as well as for not doing, not going and not agreeing to anything. And the price for that was often the highest.

It had been a challenge for Alina getting the stroller into the bathroom. After working it in through the narrow doorway, she stood in the fluorescent glare, unsure of what to do with herself, then washed her hands and waited. A little later, when she thought she heard the girl’s footsteps in the corridor, she laboriously maneuvered the stroller back out.

Joe was alone in his office. They embraced tentatively; Alina got the impression that he didn’t feel comfortable hugging in his professional persona, even with no one around to see. The building felt as deserted as a shuttered factory.

She looked around. Except for the girl’s side of the room, Joe’s office was exactly the same, which suddenly struck Alina as incomprehensible. Their home had undergone a complete transformation. The crib had taken over the bedroom’s lone unoccupied wall, their bed had moved from its former place, a diaper table had been drilled in where the second bathroom cabinet used to be. The basket of toys and baby bouncer formed an encampment – evidently a permanent one, although that hadn’t been the intention – in the middle of the living room. The girl had claimed half of Joe’s office and the baby half their home, but Joe’s desk, bulletin board, and bookshelf appeared untouched.

‘What are you looking at?’ he asked.

‘I just forgot what it looked like in here.’

Joe hitched his trousers and lined up the pens on his desk as if he found the slightest disorder disturbing. Alina was struck by the sensation that they were meeting to discuss some unavoidable but unpleasant arrangement.

She’d been a student here too once upon a time. It seemed hard to believe now. She tried to recall the material from her textbooks that had seemed so essential then, the minutiae that pretentious boys in ponytails had argued about in the cafeteria that had been of zero relevance since.

‘Well,’ she said, after they had sat in silence for some time. Joe looked at her and smiled.

‘Yes?’

‘Um… are we just going to stay here?’ Alina said, meaning his office.

‘Where would you like to go?’ Joe asked.

‘Go?’

Alina blinked. She’d imagined that he would want to show Samuel to his colleagues, some of whom she knew too, or at least had known. Hadn’t that been the point of the visit? Did Joe think she didn’t have anything better to do with her day than kill time in her husband’s office? Or was he waiting for Samuel to wake up? Alina started to wonder if she was perpetually leaving the most important part of what she wanted to convey unsaid.

Suddenly something indescribable and heavy washed over her and she had to sit down, but the only chair free was the girl’s.

‘What’s wrong?’ Joe asked.

‘I just feel a little dizzy.’

It’s probably dehydration on account of the breastfeeding, she was on the verge of saying, but then the office door opened.

The girl was standing by the open door. She was twirling an unlit cigarette between her forefinger and middle finger as if trying to signal something to Joe. Alina thought, Is she going to smoke in a room where there’s a baby?

‘Oh. I’m sorry,’ the girl said in English, and the twirling stopped. ‘I didn’t realize you were still here,’ she added to Alina in Finnish, somehow managing to avoid her gaze. ‘I was just heading out for a smoke,’ she said to Joe, and shot a quick glance at her cigarette, as if it had appeared there of its own accord.

The girl’s lips were red, freshly painted.

‘But you don’t smoke,’ Alina commented to her husband.

The girl raised her artfully plucked eyebrows at Joe: really? For a second, Alina thought she would burst out laughing.

‘To keep me company,’ the girl explained to Alina, in a mocking tone, it seemed.

‘I’m kind of busy today,’ Joe said in an unfamiliar, formal voice.

The girl raised her eyebrows again as if to say: let’s get back to this once that woman is gone, spun on her heel, and left.

Alina looked at Joe inquiringly.

‘I go along sometimes to stretch my legs,’ he said, and coughed. ‘If I have the time.’

‘You can smoke for all I care,’ she told him. ‘I’m just surprised.’

‘I don’t smoke.’

‘I meant that if you did, I wouldn’t mind.’ She tried to smile and lighten her voice. ‘What’s her name?’

Joe’s expression remained serious.

‘Aleksandra.’

Alina had only gone to Italy because she felt guilty. The memory of it, though, still set her heart hammering. She would let her thoughts wander back to the trip whenever she felt like she hadn’t experienced anything in life.

She had been so young. It had only been a year and a half ago, but still: she had been so young.

She hadn’t wanted anyone else to learn about her abominable master’s thesis, let alone give a presentation on it. But Wallenberg had implied it was part of the deal.

‘P. Wallenberg would be pleased to welcome you to his team,’ he had announced, which would mean her doing a dissertation. Even at his most casual, Wallenberg spoke in a formal register. It was an attempt at humor, which Alina found touching: a sixty-year-old professor, still so inept. There was no one else on Wallenberg’s team. The students knew that he tried to lure someone from every cohort into continuing his work, his unique line of research in danger of dying with him.

In a way, the trip was Alina’s apology for not having the nerve to say she had no interest in writing a dissertation or rescuing Wallenberg’s life’s work from extinction; for even implying she was still giving the matter serious consideration.

As hundreds of conference participants surged into the main exhibition hall to meander through the poster presentations, Alina stood alone in front of her poster, praying no one would stop. They could all tell she was a fraud. She was ashamed of her study, its results, and the last-minute way she’d thrown the thesis together. The poster’s dimensions had been specified by the organizers but struck her as brazen. She still found it hard to believe that the university press had printed the big, black-and-white announcement just for her, for this. It must have cost hundreds of marks.

She did her best to look preoccupied and lost in thought, and to her relief everyone stepped briskly past. The people around her were discussing their research; she melted into her bland poster and felt her pulse rate gradually normalize.

Only fifteen more minutes, Alina thought, trying not to glance at her watch. She could hear the Spanish girl at the next stand explain her research for the thirtieth time. She repeated her spiel word for word for every new listener, down to the jokes Alina now knew by heart. I can cover for you if you need a bathroom break, she thought as she looked over at the approachable girl people liked listening to, laughing politely at the appropriate moments.

Suddenly Alina envied the girl everything: her research design, less sophisticated than Alina’s; her conclusions, over-confident in light of the data; her English, clumsier than Alina’s; the ease with which she presented her work. An audience had gathered around her, and the men in particular looked as if they had been waiting their entire lives for this encounter.

Alina snapped out of it when she realized someone was studying her poster. A brown-eyed, friendly-looking, non-Finnish man had stopped and asked her to describe her research to him. Walk me through it, he said. There was something touching about the expression, and suddenly Alina felt exhausted and bored of being so repressed and uptight and taking her ridiculous thesis and everything else so seriously, and so she briefly reported what she’d done and what she thought about it, as if the impression the man formed of her and losing her final shot at academic credibility didn’t matter – and, astonishingly, at that moment they didn’t. To cut him off before he could point out all of the study’s flaws, which made it impossible to draw any conclusions from it, Alina wrapped up by insisting how poorly the whole thing had been done from start to finish.

But the man frowned in disagreement. But listen: those were the words he’d used. And just like that, the moment was the opposite of what she’d envisioned: she was critiquing her own study, while a credible – that is, real – researcher who was not from Finland was defending it, as though it made perfect sense.

The most important thing is to ask the right questions, the man said, sounding so convinced that Alina wanted to believe him. Behind them, a group of distinguished-looking middle-aged men in sport coats were laughing at the beautiful Spanish girl’s joke, the one Alina had heard thirty-one times now and the brown-eyed man twice, and they looked at each other and could tell that they’d both picked up on this. They suppressed smiles, and the man rolled his eyes up to the ceiling to indicate he thought the joke was lame, too, and Alina started hoping he wouldn’t leave just yet.

The man thanked her and continued on to the next person – a pudgy, wheezy kid so poorly dressed he must have been some sort of child prodigy – and once the man was gone, Alina realized she was standing in front of her poster in a different way than before. Now when someone walked past, she looked them in the eye and smiled, and people paused and scanned her poster, which meant more and more people paused, and Alina described her conclusions to all of them as if they were valid and she justifiably proud of them, and to her surprise none of the people who stopped questioned this. Interesting, they said, and: Thank you. And: Are you planning on publishing the results? Could you send me the paper? And Alina was annoyed that she didn’t have a one-sheeter, the kind everyone else was handing out and that people were suddenly asking her for. She caught herself hoping that the time allocated wasn’t about to run out because she was just getting started. For the first time, the idea of joining Wallenberg’s team seemed viable, and she found herself momentarily envisaging a new life for herself.

As the session ended and she removed the thumbtacks from the easel, she thought about the brown-eyed man and his friendly smile, remembered the words he’d used to describe her study: methodologically sound. She wondered if he’d meant what he said or if that was just the way Americans talked, saying something nice to everyone even when it wasn’t true. She thought about the man’s name, Joe, and that of the university where he worked in the United States, which Alina recognized from the newspapers and the movies. She tried to imagine what his life must be like, and felt a momentary sadness that she wouldn’t be starting a dissertation, or coming to conferences like these and meeting polite, intelligent foreign men like Joe, ever again.

She rolled up her poster, slid it back into the cardboard tube she’d bought at the art supply store, and tossed the strap over her shoulder. Then she saw the man walk back into the exhibition hall: he seemed disoriented, but a second later noticed her and looked pleased.

She never did find out if Joe had returned because of her or for some other reason, but when he asked her to dinner, she accepted gladly.

I have to bring it up again, she thought, two weeks after the previous attempt. Maybe things would go better this time. Regardless of what happened, they needed to try.

But in the evenings, when it crossed Alina’s mind and the moment was right, the girl would be lying in their bed, smoking a cigarette. She’d offer one to Joe, and he would set aside his Masters of Chess and take it, and then the girl would pull back the covers, lean languorously on her elbows, and offer herself.

Alina would close her eyes and try to sleep, but she couldn’t help hearing the silver bracelet bang rhythmically against the headboard with every moan. The girl was lying beneath Joe in a studio apartment where the tables weren’t covered in baby clothes but glossy interior design magazines; he was lifting the girl’s firm buttocks against the wall of a filthy service station bathroom, or an empty lecture hall late at night, after everyone else had left. The girl was sitting, bare-breasted, on Joe in a musty hotel room or their darkened office, and she moaned and moved in a way he had always hoped Alina would but had never asked her to: like a cat.

Occasionally the girl would show up in the middle of the day; one time, she arrived dressed in an evening gown. Open to the small of her back, it revealed a small, tasteful tattoo on the girl’s shoulder blade. Alina had never seen a tattoo on a young woman before, only on sailors and convicted criminals. The girl took a seat next to her while Samuel was napping and Alina was watching a television series set in a British hospital, where the doctors didn’t tend to patients but lovesick nurses. The girl glanced at the television screen and then at Alina. Good, you think? the scornful look said.

Joe and I have so much to talk about, the girl’s arrogant body language signaled. Her victorious eyes demonstrated that the deal was sealed; the practical arrangements were just lagging a little behind, the way they always did.

Alina felt a constriction in her heart.

The girl already viewed herself as Joe’s true partner, imagined she’d rescued him from cosmic loneliness. You could see it in her serene, sated bearing; I wonder if you fully grasp what you look like, the girl’s raised eyebrows had asked that time Alina visited the office. I’m the only one Joe can discuss his work with, her judgmental eyes had said, challenge himself with: share his life with.

That’s why he doesn’t want to leave Finland anymore, the girl’s quivering lashes had telegraphed, although Alina hadn’t been able to interpret this message correctly back then.

Things are going so well for us.

Before long, Alina started to see the girl outside the house, too, while walking down the street with Samuel in his stroller, at a trendy restaurant with another childless, carefree friend.

Why did the girl always have to show up and spoil things? Alina would have done anything to get rid of her, anything at all.

This is absurd, she thought, as she pushed the stroller into motion again and the girl waved to her cheerfully through the restaurant window, smiled with her perfect, plump lips, revealing flawless, beautiful teeth. I need help, Alina thought, psychoanalysis, the longest and most miserable kind.

Initially she’d held back. You were supposed to say no, at least at first. And that’s what she’d done, too, in her mind – up until the moment the waiter refilled their glasses and asked if they’d care for dessert. The longer they sat in the restaurant, the harder it became to resist the dim lighting, the wine’s warmth, Joe’s attentive questions that demonstrated how highly he thought of her.

In contrast to everything she’d imagined about herself, she mentally succumbed during the cab ride. She knew exactly what she was doing when, after that one last late-night glass of Calvados, she summoned up an innocent tone of voice and, heart pounding, asked Joe in the hotel hallway if he wanted to come to her room for a nightcap.

The next morning, when she told Julia over the phone, cheeks blazing, about the American and insisted there was no way she would ever do anything with him – only a few hours after the wine-mellowed early morning when she’d rolled a condom onto him with a surreal naturalness – Julia had said: everyone should have at least one vacation romance during their lifetime.

Alina had spent the last two nights of the conference in Joe’s bed. Italy in September had been so hot that they’d had to sleep with the windows open, the crickets’ chirping outside soft and foreign-sounding. Early in the morning, she’d scampered barefoot down the carpeted corridor, on the off chance Wallenberg knocked on her door before breakfast.

During the return flight, he had asked Alina if she was happy she’d come. Alina’s cheeks grew hot as she thought about what had happened, and that she was the one it had happened to; this time, she wasn’t the one hearing about it.

Alina had never had a one-night stand before, but she knew what was expected of her and was proud she’d been able to act appropriately. She knew she’d never see Joe again. You were supposed to let the other person go, disappear. That was part of the excitement, what men craved.

But when he suggested it, she’d agreed to a long weekend that fall in London, where he was attending another conference. ‘Again?’ Alina had blurted into the phone, and Joe had laughed heartily at the joke, although she had asked the question in all seriousness.

To pay for the trip, she had taken out her first and only student loan – and, to her surprise, without the slightest hesitation. Initially she didn’t even tell Julia, to whom she told everything, because her going would reveal who she’d always been, deep down inside: openly naïve, secretly slutty, or both. She was surprised, eventually, when on confessing she didn’t encounter the faintest trace of disapproval; instead, her friend’s voice echoed with surprised delight, like a mother whose toddler has finally dared to dip her toe in the water. For a fleeting moment Alina wondered if that’s the way things had always been, that you really could do whatever you wanted with your life. Her exhilaration was short-lived, however, stifled by the suspicion that Julia had, for as long as they’d been friends, seen Alina as repressing her womanhood.

But in London Joe was considerate and affectionate, and Alina envied herself, a woman who, without asking permission, flew off to London for four days to have sex with an American she barely knew because she felt like it. And the sex with Joe was bolder than with her ex-boyfriend, Joni Hakalainen. The things Joni had wanted in bed had made her feel uncomfortable and acutely aware of every unerotic detail the situation entailed, but somehow in London it felt possible to do many of these exact same things, even initiate them, and with Joe they didn’t feel awkward but lovely, which reinforced the growing impression that, without realizing it, she had spent her life to date driving down some peculiar side-road in too low a gear.

When Joe made vague murmurs about Finland she didn’t believe him, but as the automatic doors at Helsinki-Vantaa International Airport parted a few days before Christmas and Joe strode into the arrivals hall with his two suitcases to give her a long, possessive kiss, everything felt natural and as if they’d known exactly what they were doing all along. Natural was also how things felt as the snow fell in the darkness outside her studio apartment on those unhurried, lazy late-December afternoons when Samuel must have been conceived. The pregnancy came as a surprise, even to her. Could it be that easy? And although things hadn’t, perhaps, been thought all the way through on those December nights, and neither of them had envisioned that one unprotected, reckless weekend would lead to this, they had still done it together, and if this was the result, perhaps it was meant to be.

The long, lonely spring that followed Joe’s post-New Year’s return to the States didn’t bother Alina, either. She took pleasure in observing the changes in her body – her swelling breasts, the belly that felt like hers, yet unfamiliar. Never before had she stepped onto a tram, her entire body signaling look at me! Nor, oddly enough, did it feel the least bit wrong – even when Alina had always hated calling attention to herself. In a strange way, this wasn’t about her, but about something bigger, as if her body were radiating some infinite, transcendental truth. An essential element of the pleasure lay in the sensation of coming fulfillment, of the lovely summer with Joe that drew closer with every week. This allowed her to react with an amused tranquility to the maternity clinic staff’s concerned questions about her spouse, to their acquaintances’ pointed glances at her growing, unacknowledged belly, because she knew when Joe moved to Finland that summer things would be settled finally, permanently, and entirely.

Now Alina wished she could go back and change everything: the memories of Italy and London, the crickets, her poster and the Spanish girl’s accent, the hotel room near Piccadilly Circus, how it had all begun.

The hazy, unreal start, the things that sent her breath racing and made the moments electric and full, she didn’t want to think about them anymore. Remembering the hotel room and the crickets no longer set her heart hammering; it made her weak, as if she hadn’t eaten properly.

She was a woman who’d made love to a stranger her first night abroad, consented to everything, gotten involved in a long-distance relationship that had no guarantee of success. Worse, she’d gotten involved in a relationship that meant another relationship, somewhere far away, had fallen apart.

She wasn’t like that.

She wished she could change the past to correspond to who she was, and who he was, who they were: a married couple, a family. Sincere, trustworthy people with hearts and souls.

At night, as she soothed the crying Samuel in her arms, she’d look at Joe sleeping on his own side of the bed. Joe wasn’t the sort of man, she thought to herself, who would do something like that: go to bed with someone he’d just met, risk everything, leave his partner and turn his whole life upside down for a woman he knew nothing about. He wasn’t like that.

But that’s exactly what Joe was like.

How could Alina have known? Joe hadn’t said a word about the girlfriend before London. From a certain tone of voice, something inside her instantly replied. From the momentary silence when she’d asked about his previous relationships. And sure enough, she recalled a casualness in his courtship of her, a certain detachment she’d wanted to interpret as self-confidence but that someone else would have seen through in a heartbeat. Later, when she’d asked, Joe had finally, as if it were some trivial detail, remarked in passing that he’d been dating someone, been engaged, as a matter of fact, and the relationship hadn’t ended until after the trip to London.

The entire weekend, the whole time in that hotel room in London, someone named Hannah waiting in the United States had been engaged to Joe.

At the Vietnamese restaurant, following their first meeting, Joe had asked Alina which year she was in in her PhD program. She stammered before saying first, because she felt embarrassed to explain that she wasn’t a PhD student at all, just a master’s student, a gatecrasher at a conference for real academics.

She didn’t even know if their department had a PhD program the way they did at schools in other countries. People just did a thesis and vanished. There was a researcher who had an office along the same corridor as Wallenberg, but Alina had only seen him once. He carried tattered plastic bags and looked like he hadn’t bathed in months. Was Plastic Bag Man a doctoral student? She wasn’t sure.

‘First year?’ Joe looked at her in admiration. ‘You Europeans are light-years ahead of us. There’s no way our first-year students would be able to conduct an entire study on their own. None of them would be capable of doing what you just did. Not to mention the undergrads, in the States – they’re basically children.’

Alina was ashamed of having lied; now Joe was paying her compliments that didn’t have a shred of justification to them. Her cheeks flushed, and she had to excuse herself to go powder her nose. She was flattered by being thought of as European, as a forerunner. When she came back to the table, she had to concentrate so hard on her fat cao lau noodles it made her head ache; she’d never used chopsticks before, yet for some reason had claimed she knew how when Joe asked. But the fresh mint and some other herb she didn’t recognize, cinnamony, mingled tart and sweet in her mouth, and her heart leaped when she thought about where she was and with whom, how much life had to offer if you opened up to it.

Joe talked about the European mentality and how, since the 1950s, Americans had gradually been losing their souls. Alina listened and hoped it wouldn’t be obvious to him how little she knew about what he was saying. She made a mental note of the phrases he used so she wouldn’t embarrass herself if she needed them later: keep an eye on the job market, do a postdoc, do your undergrad.

Joe explained he used to think he’d like to do a postdoc in Europe if he didn’t get a job right away, it’s good to broaden your horizons. But when the postdoc at Harvard was offered, it had felt like too good an opportunity to turn down.

‘Idiot.’ He smiled to himself. Alina wasn’t sure why.

There wasn’t anything keeping him on the East Coast, Joe continued, especially now that he was probably going to have to move from Boston anyway. He could easily imagine himself living in Europe, at least for a while.

With some beautiful, intelligent woman, Alina thought, and was sad: Joe would pick some other, more attractive woman, move to a more interesting country, the Netherlands or Spain. Even Sweden.

Now his postdoc was coming to an end, and he was looking for a job. A job? Alina asked, and Joe looked perplexed. It took a while for Alina to realize that by ‘a job’, he meant a professorship. At the age of twenty-eight? There was clearly something about all this Alina wasn’t getting, but she was embarrassed to ask.

Joe told her that he’d looked at open positions all over the place. It gradually became clear to Alina that all over the place meant the United States, both East and West Coasts. Joe’s parents and almost all of his siblings lived in Boston or New York, he explained. It would be a long way from Europe at Thanksgiving.

‘But I guess I applied in California, too,’ he said. ‘It’s twenty-five hundred miles from Boston to LA. Helsinki’s not that much further.’

After moving to Finland, Joe lived in another time zone. For weeks he’d go to bed at four in the morning and get up at noon, boyishly enthusiastic about how light it had been outside all night. He wanted to get to work the instant he woke up. The leisurely morning cups of coffee Alina had been so looking forward to sharing with him never materialized, even on weekends, because he was always working.

In the evening, they’d walk down to the early-summer seashore, where the gulls guarded their nests – ‘What’s this river called?’ Joe asked – and when they got home they’d make love, and Alina would think: I have an American husband. She’d hold Joe’s hand as they walked around town, the baby contorting itself into absurd positions under her lightweight maternity dress, and she could see in Joe’s eyes how proud he was of the child that was on the way. People looked at them, and Alina could tell they saw she had a foreign spouse.

It wasn’t until later that she learned he had been offered a tenure-track position at UCLA. Joe listed the faculty members and told her their interests and at which conference he’d met them and where they’d done their doctoral work. This aroused a mystified admiration in Alina. She couldn’t have named more than a handful of researchers aside from Wallenberg, and those by last name only, from the bibliography of her thesis: she had no idea who they were, where they worked, or if they were even alive; she had never thought of the names in the studies she cited as real, living people with jobs and homes and relationships, not to mention that they could be her colleagues.

Alina asked Joe if he was disappointed he hadn’t taken the job. Summer had just begun, and Helsinki was lovely and warm; they sat at the hilltop café at Linnunlaulu, eating ice cream and enjoying the view across the bay. Lush swathes of nettles grew beyond the picket fence; sparrows hopped under the tables, ready to pounce on any stray crumbs.

Alina heard a tinge of something she’d never heard before in his voice and felt a painful pang above her big, new belly.

‘Argh,’ he said, waving dismissively. ‘Work is work.’

But later, she’d heard him on the phone, sounding agitated: How many offers like that do you get? And Alina remembered Joe’s brother David at the wedding, asking him in a low, serious voice, thinking she couldn’t hear: What are you doing?

Which meant: making a big, fat mistake.

After that phone call, Joe had looked pensive. Later, he asked in passing if Alina could imagine living in the United States.

‘I don’t know,’ she had said, and Joe had let the matter drop.

On Sunday evenings, he phoned the States. During those calls he laughed differently, used unfamiliar expressions, and mentioned about people she didn’t know. After the calls, he spoke more quickly, in a sharper, sterner tone.

‘Matt got an NIH grant.’

Or: ‘Jean-Marie got tenure at Northwestern.’

Or: ‘Maura Tumulty was asked to give a keynote at BU.’

And: ‘Danny had to settle for adjuncting.’

And she was supposed to understand the importance – or tragedy, in Danny’s case – of the event in question.

Alina had checked; Joe was wrong. It was much further from Helsinki to Boston than it was to Boston from Los Angeles: almost four thousand miles, over six thousand kilometers.

Joe had wanted to go into the department his very first morning in Finland. Alina admired his dedication. He wanted to start taking Finnish classes and asked if the departmental secretary spoke English. When they got to the university, he stopped to admire the marbled walls, asked questions about the buildings Alina didn’t have the faintest clue how to answer.

Everywhere they went, he said hello to people who had nothing to do with the department and looked back at him, flustered. When he was introduced to someone, he immediately parroted the name back to them. He would repeat the names to Alina later, check if he was remembering them correctly: Jah-koh? Hey-key? Su-zah-nah?

The secretary who was supposed to give Joe his keys didn’t show up all day; they waited in the dimly lit, deserted corridor.

‘Is today a holiday?’ he asked – and Alina suddenly realized that he had pictured the department and the entire university totally differently.

Even Wallenberg didn’t know where the office assigned to Joe was located. When, after some sleuthing, they found it the following week, it turned out to be a tiny cubbyhole with no desk or computer, on a different floor than the rest of the department. In the bright summer sun, the window looked like it had been rinsed with dirty dishwater. A layer of dust drifted in the corners, along with a sheaf of dirty photocopies, stamped with black footprints.

Joe needed to make revisions to a manuscript that had just been accepted for publication, but none of the three books the reviewers asked him to cite were available at the university library. One he had to order through the Academic Bookstore, pay a hundred marks in postage and wait two months for it to arrive from the United States. For the second, his friend at Princeton reviewed the most germane points and summarized them over the phone. Joe looked discouraged after the call. When Alina asked if everything was OK, he smiled as if having stomach cramps and said: ‘Yeah!’ Course. I just took up a lot of Bob’s time. It might not be something I want to do every week.’ And Alina felt his smile prick her belly like a thorn.

Joe was forced to leave the third required book uncited, which didn’t prevent the article from being published, but Alina could see he wasn’t used to making compromises, no matter how minor.

‘Things are always tough in the beginning,’ he said, and: ‘The work is the same, no matter where you do it.’

In the evenings, when Alina announced she was going to bed, Joe would cheerfully reply OK and return to his laptop. Alina realized she’d been expecting something she wasn’t getting. When the baby’s kicks woke her up, she’d hear the keyboard and see the blue glow of the screen in the living room late into the night.

Until she met Joe, she’d never known anyone her age who owned a laptop. Her father had had a Mikro-Mikko the size of a television, and she’d grown used to the green dot-matrix letters flashing across the screen. Luckily Joe didn’t have a mobile phone; that would have been mortifying.

She tried to ignore the impression that there was something pompous, something American, about Joe. A little like Alina’s high-school classmate Karri, whom she’d run into on the street. Karri had boasted that he’d founded a company that was going to start publishing internet guides – thick printed catalogs of internet addresses, like phone books. A few years from now the whole world was going to be using the internet, Karri raved, and when that happened, the catalogs would be a must-have, as necessary as a normal phone book. Maybe they could even be delivered automatically to every doorstep! Karri was going to be rich.

Alina hadn’t dared to say what she really thought. The idea of the catalog might have made some sense, if the internet itself were the slightest use to anyone. On a few occasions, she had heard the internet being talked about at the university in the hushed tones that technology-loving boys used to demonstrate their advanced degree of solitary superiority. When the department, in a fit of technological bravura, acquired a brand-new 386 computer that came equipped with the internet – apparently it was something you could buy from the computer store – she had asked a cute, fit tech boy to show her how it worked; initiating something with him had been the real impetus rather than the World Wide Web. Alina could still remember her own plunging sense of disappointment. The boy didn’t respond to her advances, and she didn’t get what anyone saw in this internet everyone was talking about. It was like a Potemkin village from a communist country, a deserted mud-puddle of artificial techno-hubris lacking any signs of life; you couldn’t get anyone to visit even if you forced them.

Email could have been a useful invention, in theory – if anyone ever used it. But the mailbox that the university’s over-eager computing department had, without asking, set up for her and everyone else was always empty, and she didn’t know anyone who would have emailed her in any case. She could have sent messages to her friends at school, but in order for them to realize they’d received anything, she’d have had to call each of them individually by phone and tell them to make the trek to campus to check their mail.

June had been warm and sunny that year. The air smelled of sand, the wind rustled in the pale-green birches. Joe oohed over Topelius Park and wanted to sit on café patios and eat smoked herring (‘if that’s what a Finn would order in a place like this’).

He found it amusing and admirable that whoever designed the toilet in Finland had included two flush buttons, to conserve water. He told all his friends about it, and his friends also found it amusing. During his Sunday evening phone calls, Joe listed facts about Europe to his mother: even the dingiest dive bars didn’t throw beer bottles in the trash. The university canteens had porcelain plates, for students! Baked salmon and salad for a couple of bucks. Imagine that, the state subsidized students’ meals! The climate wasn’t as bad as you’d think, either, surprisingly similar to New England. They even grew apples.

The apples in particular no one seemed to believe.

Alina hadn’t wanted to admit it at first, but something about Joe’s attitude bothered her. It took her a while to figure out it was his sales-pitch tone; when Joe talked about Finland, he sounded like a real estate agent. She grasped this at David and Marnie’s Long Island wedding, which, because of her big belly, she needed her doctor’s permission to fly to. Joe would tell his relatives about the public libraries that let you take home LPs, or even laser discs, and Alina thought: he has to sell each one of them on Finland individually.

Alina had hoped the wedding would be an opportunity to grow closer to her mother-in-law. But as she listened to the Hebrew ceremony, she felt like