This Is Not Your City (7 page)

“So you're taking a whole cruise to buy cheap liquor?”

Jukka blushed. He seemed brushed by shame at the oddest moments. “There are other stores, too. You can buy candy and potato chips and shirts and things. There's a lot of perfume. If you wanted perfume. I'd really like for you to go.” Ursula had
never in her life been taken for a girl who might want to shop for perfume. It was flattering, she thought, but so unexpected she wondered what she looked like to Jukka, how impossibly addled his vision of her might be.

“Can I think about it?” Ursula asked.

“Of course,” Jukka said, grinning. His teeth were straight and even but yellow. Ursula thought it seemed a fair balance. “You don't really want to go to Estonia anyway. It's all babushkas and prostitutes and unpasteurized beer. The women there, they have it in for Finns. Friend of mine left a club, woke up in a bathtub full of ice with a kidney missing and a note in lipstick on the mirror.”

“That's an urban legend.”

“I swear to God. Lipstick on the mirror.”

“It never happened.”

“Have it your way. But if it did, Estonia's just the place it would. You're better off onboard. Trust me.”

In her apartment that night Ursula put her homework aside and wrote a letter to her parents. For the first time she mentioned her handsome neighbor, who slipped presents through her mail slot.
We've been out a few times,
she wrote, trying to sound nonchalant.
He's invited me for a cruise. We're going to Estonia.
Ursula thought of the boy from the bus ride south, his slow tongue and strange face and damaged brain, and wanted to laugh at him, to tell him that he had not been the unlucky charm she feared. She had no need now for his mindless love; already, she'd found something better.

 

It took two trams and a city bus to get to the harbor and the Silja Line terminal. As they waited in line to embark, Jukka told her he had good news and bad news: bad, that his friends had bailed and it would be only the two of them; good, that he had shelled out for a cabin. The communal sleeping room was good enough for him; he'd once traveled to Latvia sleeping in a stairwell. But Ursula, he said, deserved to have a cabin. On the ship he led her down long pink and turquoise halls, low-lit and empty. There was a mirror on the back wall of their room, and two long, green upholstered benches, with latches above that held the bunks folded to the wall. In the small bathroom Ursula took off her
woolly stockings and replaced her boots with heels. Her legs were pale and wobbly in the new shoes. When she folded the bathroom door along its runners, Jukka's face stayed tired. “I thought we'd get our shopping done first,” he said. “Then we can do what we want.”

The shopping mezzanine had long, glass windows that looked out on the Baltic Sea. Where ships passed, the ice was broken into plates, floating in dark canals that stretched through the sea like the damp-barked trunks of pine trees, the long dark legs of moose. Beyond the shipping lanes the sea was frozen white and flat and solid like tundra in every direction, west to the spray of islands of the Stockholm archipelago; and to the east, where the sea became the Neva as it swept into St. Petersburg. Ursula wanted to tell Jukka about the river she'd only read about, bound by bridges that could break their own backs, split to allow ships to pass. They were raised every night in rotation, trapping people in different quadrants of the city for hours at a time. Cars would race through the icy streets to make the last few minutes of a crossing: a city ruled by bridges.

They went to the liquor store first, where you could buy not only bottles but cases, and little luggage carts with bungee cords to wheel the cases away. Jukka took a cart and opened the duty-free shopping pamphlet, the maximum tax-free allowances illustrated with what looked like a child's drawings of adult sins, chunky red sketches of the possible permutations: Spirits + Wine OR Champagne + Cigarettes! Jukka put the pamphlet in his pocket and began hefting case after case, bottle after bottle, into the cart, breaking all the rules. Ursula was going to say something when he asked to have her boarding pass.

“I think I left it in the cabin. What do you need it for?”

His nose wrinkled like she was a smell he couldn't place. “You need to show your boarding pass at the register.”

“I wasn't going to buy anything,” she said. Then she looked from the full cart to his face, which was almost angry, and thought of all the floors she'd known that could actually swallow people up. Lake Inari in September or June. The Karasjoki river in November or April. The northern marshes that would drink you feet first in any season. The sea surrounding them now, the
shifting ice, the slits of black water. The floor of the cruise ship liquor store had not been one of them.

“You need the boarding pass to buy my tax-free allowance. Of course. You planned on buying up two people's allowances. Save hundreds of markka. I'm sorry. I'll run and get the pass.”

“It's back in the cabin?”

“On the bench, I think.”

“I'll get it. Watch the cart,” he said, and he was gone.

 

Once the liquor was stowed in the cabin, roped onto two separate hand trolleys and wedged under the benches, Jukka took her by the hand and led her back to the shopping mezzanine, into the cosmetics store. “Pick something out,” he said. “Anything you want.”

“I don't wear makeup. Or perfume.”

Jukka insisted and Ursula circled the glowing counters, calculating how much Jukka's guilt could cost him. At the back of the store there was a tiny basket filled with clearance tubes of lipstick, lichen reds and bruise purples. She picked the brightest and dropped it into Jukka's palm. It cost eight markka.

“You don't really want this,” he said.

“Sure I do.”

“I really am glad you came. I wanted you to come. I want you to have a good time. It wasn't just the duty-free stuff.”

“Please, just buy it and we can go back to the cabin.”

Jukka paid and explained that the restaurants on board were expensive, that they should load up on duty-free snack foods. In the cabin they sat on the floor and ate handfuls of potato chips and cheese curls, bars of chocolate clotted with nuts and dried fruit. Jukka took the clear plastic cups out of the bathroom and filled one with vodka and orange juice, the other with straight vodka. He raised his cup and toasted cheers. They ate and drank until they felt ill and then Jukka kissed her. He tasted like the rubbery buttons of
salmiakki
—black licorice crusted with salt. Ursula decided she didn't mind.

They were both drunk when Jukka decided he wanted to check out the dance clubs. They left the cabin and Ursula ran her fingers along the wall as they walked. She imagined she could
feel the enormous ship rocking, the cradled heaving of the Bay of Tallinn. The clubs, one floor down from the shopping mezzanine, were all playing the same EuroPop. Jukka kept drinking from a flask in his pocket, and Ursula kept closing her eyes to steady herself. When the strobe lights flickered she held her stomach. Jukka grabbed her wrist and listed, let his weight drag them onto the dance floor. He rested his arms on her shoulders and pressed his forehead down onto hers. Ursula told herself to make it to the end of the song, then, when Jukka pulled her closer, to make it to the end of one more. The songs all sounded the same, bright and thumping, and she lost track of how long they'd been there before she told Jukka she needed some air.

“I'm sorry,” she said, when Jukka frowned. “I'm not feeling very well.” She towed him out of the club, tripping through the plush carpet of the hallway. The glass doors to the deck strained against the wind, and Jukka had to help her shoulder them open. There were couples leaning against the railing, huddling together against the cold. Ursula walked past them toward the bow of the boat, the empty viewing area full of white observation chairs and sea spray. It was a new moon, pale and thin as an eyelash. The harbor lights glared in the dark. Farther out in the bay were freighters and another cruise ship, painted red and white and strung with lights. On land there were stacks of shipping containers like a child's game, towers of red and brown blocks. She could see the wind catch the thin layer of snow on the pavement and blow it into ripples, like sand.

When Tallinn had been part of the Soviet Union and Ursula had been a child, she had watched news reports of the city, filled with exotic exiles from Soviet territories. She would go there someday, she had dreamed, and meet a Mongolian in a long, red, felt coat lined with yak fur. They would fall in love and they would both be so clever they could learn each other's languages, and they would be finally so in love that they would not need languages at all. He would have his cousins in Ulaan Bator send her a matching coat and soft cashmere sweaters. They would move to the Black Sea and live in a dacha on the shore year round, and their children would only know what winter was like if she found the words to explain it. She thought about
telling Jukka all this, and then pushed the story back down her throat, held it in her lungs with the air so cold it burned.

The wind had picked up and caught the white plastic chairs, flinging them backward against the wall at the rear of the deck. Ursula and Jukka had to dodge them, the chairs turning end over end or sliding along upright, four legs to the ground, as if invisible people were still sitting in them. Jukka caught a chair mid-flight and sat down heavily, anchoring it in the middle of the deck. He pulled Ursula onto his lap and put his arms around her. “Let's go inside,” he said, and Ursula, out of breath, the wind freezing her chest, nodded yes.

They made it back to the room with Jukka's arm tightly around her, their feet colliding, hips joined as in a three-legged race. Jukka released the latches that held the bunk against the wall. It crashed down on top of the green sofa-bench, and Ursula heard the bag of cheese curls crunch. The bunk was already made up, tidy with sheets and a pillow. Jukka pushed her backward onto the bed, and she felt silly when she bounced on the mattress like a child's ball. “I like you,” he said. “Really.”

“Don't say that.”

“What? I like you.”

“I don't think you do,” Ursula said, but part of her thought that if she'd believed him this long, if she'd even pretended to, she should see the thing through. He wanted her enough to lie to her. Perhaps that was something.

While she puzzled at what she should do she did nothing, and then Jukka was between her legs, her skirt pushed up and her underwear gone, Jukka's pants down but not all the way off. She could feel the heavy denim bunched somewhere around his calves, crowding her ankles. She opened her legs wider, feeling for a moment that his jeans were the part of him she could not bear to touch.

“Goddammit,” he said, pressing against her. Ursula turned her head to the side. Jukka was still soft, even as he pushed at her, even as he grabbed at himself, his face red and his eyes unfocused. Ursula did not move to help him. “Drank too much. Drank too goddamn much,” he said, shoving against her helplessly. Finally he dropped his head against her chest and
apologized. Ursula reached her hand up and touched his cheek. “It's okay,” she said, and was relieved.

Jukka fell asleep and Ursula found her underwear, smoothed down her skirt. She got down on her knees to clean the food off the carpet, scraping broken cheese curls and splinters of chocolate into her palm. She found the tube of lipstick under a potato chip. Uncapping the tube, she stepped toward the mirrored back of the room until she was nose to nose with her reflection, chapped lips and pale skin and her funny dark eyebrows. She began writing with the lipstick on the upper-left corner, above her ear.

 

On the bed Jukka was asleep on his stomach, his breath a liquid snore. She pushed his shirt up and he didn't stir. She pressed one hand to the small of his back, wondering where his kidneys were, what they looked like. She drew an oval to the right of his spine and rubbed the blunted end of the lipstick with her index finger, drew the finger across her lips. She kissed Jukka's back in the center of the kidney. “I'm going to find the sleeping area. I'll get home just fine tomorrow. Don't worry about me,” she whispered, her mouth moving against his skin. She was embarrassed after saying it that she had imagined Jukka worrying about her, that his sleep might be troubled by her absence. “Goodnight,” she said, pulling a blanket from the other bunk to cover him.

Ursula found the sleeping room on an upper deck, a humid and windowless space lit by two red EXIT signs. Passengers cocooned in coats and jackets sprawled on benches and pressed into corners. Ursula waited for her eyes to adjust to the dimness, threaded her way through the sleeping bodies. She found a narrow patch of floor between two anonymous shapes, men or women, their faces turned away; she stretched herself out on her side with her backpack wedged under her cheek. The stranger
behind her jerked and flung a hand out, its fingers brushing the nape of her neck. Ursula lay still. She thought of her pretend Mongolian husband and of their little house on the Black Sea, where the summers were long and warm and lit and their breath would be invisible. She slowed her breathing to the quiet pace of the bodies around her, the warm animals curled in the darkness. She imagined the feel of her own vertebrae under the stranger's fingers, and found herself hoping that the hand wouldn't move until morning.

Principal Steckelberg was late. Eril brushed snow off the wooden steps of the administrative portable and sat to wait for him. Morningcroft Montessori Academy was made up only of portables, standing in a circle on concrete blocks. In her phone interview, the principal had told her that the portables were the same colors as the pie wedges in Trivial Pursuit. This, he had said, symbolized the value Morningcroft put on knowledge. When he arrived he unlocked Cerulean, where Eril would be teaching the third grade.