notable exception of a nice big bed. I was being thoroughly unrealistic. Perhaps everyone gets to be that way every thirteen years, just once. I encouraged Stephen when he kissed me—probably because I knew he’d never risk getting caught screwing another professor’s wife in a campus classroom. He was still, after all, ambitious. I encouraged him when he talked to me; I needed to hear his words. He sounded like a fairy godfather, offering me the dress and the coach and the ball. I did not say I loved him. I did say I’d go to bed with him, the first opportunity we had. “No one gets married anymore without sleeping together first,” I laughed. I asked him to please keep things normal, for a while, for my sake. I suppose I thought we were playing a game, one I needed to play, something light and refreshing, something without scorecards or goals. I suppose I wasn’t in my right mind. I didn’t realize how serious Stephen was. I didn’t want to think he was serious.
For the sake of normality he and Ellen and the kids went back to Nantucket for the summer and came home just a week before we left for Helsinki. There was never, in the rush of our packing and his gearing up for a new semester, an opportunity for us to make love. At a farewell dinner that Ellen cooked for us, we risked one drunken kiss in the kitchen; it made me feel nearly sick with guilt. Even so, it was quite a kiss. All I have to do now, sitting at my orange-and-white checked tablecloth in my dreary Helsinki kitchen, is to place my fingertips lightly to my lips and I feel that kiss again, with all its eagerness and promise, and tears spring to my eyes, and I jump up and pace the room.
Now he says he’s coming here.
I can’t believe he loves me. In spite of all he’s said. I have it all figured out: he’s handsome and charming and cool, and I am probably the only woman in his life who hasn’t hopped into bed with him on request. He doesn’t really want to marry me. He merely wants to make love to me, to satisfy his masculine vanity. If he comes here, I should sleep with him. Then he’ll go home and I won’t have any problems anymore.
I want to sleep with him, I really do. Perhaps it’s just because we’ve had rain for ten days straight now, so the children weren’t able to go to the Park Auntie’s and havestayed here in this small gray apartment chewing at my heels for entertainment. Perhaps it’s just because all the people we meet say, “Oh, Dr. Campbell, what an honor to meet you,” while I sit quietly beside him trying to look appropriately proud. Perhaps I’m just bored and jealous.
I wonder, how does one find out about hotels here? Shall I call the America Center across from the Rautatientori and ask them to recommend a nice, clean, reasonable hotel, reachable by bus from Kulosaari, a discreet hotel, for lovers to meet?
* * *
I have to stop daydreaming. I’ve wasted the whole morning. I haven’t written a letter or vacuumed my gray linoleum floor and its pitiful patches of greasy rugs with the cute little Hoover that came with the apartment. It is a short, squat creature, the European Hoover, resembling quite a bit R2-D2 in Star Wars , though it’s not nearly so helpful. I haven’t washed the clothes in the small Hoover 1200 washing machine that takes up so much space in the bathroom that we have to squeeze between it and the sink to brush our teeth or climb over it to get into the bathtub. I haven’t even made the cookies I started. I had poured flour and butter and molasses into a bowl and was looking among the spices which the former tenant had left for the vanilla. And found only vaniljan sokeri . I looked it up in my Fulbright list of foods—vanilla sugar is all that is available here. No real vanilla in Finland. I wonder why. Could it be because the Finns have an alcoholism problem and real vanilla has alcohol in it? It sounds ridiculous, but one quart of vodka costs around twenty dollars here, which might make it
For the sake of normality he and Ellen and the kids went back to Nantucket for the summer and came home just a week before we left for Helsinki. There was never, in the rush of our packing and his gearing up for a new semester, an opportunity for us to make love. At a farewell dinner that Ellen cooked for us, we risked one drunken kiss in the kitchen; it made me feel nearly sick with guilt. Even so, it was quite a kiss. All I have to do now, sitting at my orange-and-white checked tablecloth in my dreary Helsinki kitchen, is to place my fingertips lightly to my lips and I feel that kiss again, with all its eagerness and promise, and tears spring to my eyes, and I jump up and pace the room.
Now he says he’s coming here.
I can’t believe he loves me. In spite of all he’s said. I have it all figured out: he’s handsome and charming and cool, and I am probably the only woman in his life who hasn’t hopped into bed with him on request. He doesn’t really want to marry me. He merely wants to make love to me, to satisfy his masculine vanity. If he comes here, I should sleep with him. Then he’ll go home and I won’t have any problems anymore.
I want to sleep with him, I really do. Perhaps it’s just because we’ve had rain for ten days straight now, so the children weren’t able to go to the Park Auntie’s and havestayed here in this small gray apartment chewing at my heels for entertainment. Perhaps it’s just because all the people we meet say, “Oh, Dr. Campbell, what an honor to meet you,” while I sit quietly beside him trying to look appropriately proud. Perhaps I’m just bored and jealous.
I wonder, how does one find out about hotels here? Shall I call the America Center across from the Rautatientori and ask them to recommend a nice, clean, reasonable hotel, reachable by bus from Kulosaari, a discreet hotel, for lovers to meet?
* * *
I have to stop daydreaming. I’ve wasted the whole morning. I haven’t written a letter or vacuumed my gray linoleum floor and its pitiful patches of greasy rugs with the cute little Hoover that came with the apartment. It is a short, squat creature, the European Hoover, resembling quite a bit R2-D2 in Star Wars , though it’s not nearly so helpful. I haven’t washed the clothes in the small Hoover 1200 washing machine that takes up so much space in the bathroom that we have to squeeze between it and the sink to brush our teeth or climb over it to get into the bathtub. I haven’t even made the cookies I started. I had poured flour and butter and molasses into a bowl and was looking among the spices which the former tenant had left for the vanilla. And found only vaniljan sokeri . I looked it up in my Fulbright list of foods—vanilla sugar is all that is available here. No real vanilla in Finland. I wonder why. Could it be because the Finns have an alcoholism problem and real vanilla has alcohol in it? It sounds ridiculous, but one quart of vodka costs around twenty dollars here, which might make it
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