They Know Not What They Do Read online

  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 f
urther.’

  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 she started to understand Joe’s mother, who kept Alina at a distance. The instant Alina rested her hands on the magnificent hump that was her belly, Joe’s mother would shift her stern gaze elsewhere. As she observed the wedding couple under the chuppah, the guests in their yarmulkes, Joe’s mother beaming as Joe stomped on the glass, the guests shouting Mazel tov!, as she watched the arms lift the newlyweds overhead in their chairs, as she listened to the words of the wistful songs, Alina felt like she gradually understood. Joe would never be able to give this to his mother, even if Alina converted, even if they arranged a similar ceremony, which was no longer possible, and even if they did everything else in life the same way, which was also no longer possible. The best she could be for Joe’s mother was a foreign, hard-working substitute.