Ingrid

Come now, friends, ‘tis not too late to seek a newer world

                                                                  -Tennyson, Ulysses

I heard her voice before I saw her, her sing song dancing the air of Casa de Paella in Barcelona. Something Scandinavian?

"Perhaps we could take a boat to Majorca tonight, Bertie. I've heard it's wonderful...the biggest of the Balearic Islands."

"Fine idea, Ingrid," a male voice answered.

I braced myself. Ingrid might be as old as forty talking to her even older husband, Bertie.

A second male, "If we go down to the harbor right now, we could get our tickets, have dinner, get drunk."

"I thought you were dee-runk already, Sammy," Bertie's voice said.

A night cruise to Majorca, I thought, the next chapter in my Homeric odyssey after four days on the French Riviera my unburdened by an itinerary.

"It's my last little summer of independence," I told my fiancee grandly. "After this, I'll be buckled into my seatbelt for the duration."

Diane and Mom wanted to track me, buckle me in from a distance. But I saw sympathy in Dad's eyes. Chained to his insurance agency for twenty-three years, he bore the hopeless look of a zoo lion.

The threesome behind me was about to leave. I summoned my courage and turned around. Ingrid smiled into my soul. Back then, I believed in the perfect woman theory. That there was, out there, some goddess who was ideal in every way, designed by God for me alone. Diane was okay. Lovely enough to win a part of my heart. But the woman before me was Aprodite.  

I had fallen for five women in five days, women I saw on the train or in restaurants or along the beach in Cannes. Now, I fell in love with Ingrid believing, in my arrow-pierced heart, that I would love her forever. She was one of the Sirens in my eighth grade copy of The Odyssey. I loosed my bonds and sailed toward the song of her voice.

"Excuse me. I happened to overhear you might go to Majorca tonight. I was planning to go there too," I lied. "May I join up with you?"

We were all about the same age. Europe in the '60s was jammed with young people wandering train stations, museums, beaches; crowding into the Caves in Paris to sway to the voices of Edith Piaf imitators. You picked up with someone who was headed the same way and broke off with them when they were going some place else.

"Sure, I'm Bertie from England. This is Ingrid Deceto. She's named after Ingrid Bergman," he laughed. "And the one with the pirate patch over his eye here is Sammy from Australia. The patch is genuine, the man is a fake."

I shook hands with my Cyclops.

"Hi, I'm Lance Bloom from New York - Manhattan." My name was Larry and I was from Rochester. "So you're from England," I said to Bertie, "and you're from Australia. Where are you. from, Ingrid?" I stammered into her beauty.

She wore her dark blond hair long. It was pulled together behind her neck by a sapphire ribbon that matched her eyes. She was prettier than the black and white Ingrid of Casablanca. Her face was all fine lines, full lips, high cheek bones. The Spanish sun had awakened freckles across the crests of her cheeks and along her bronzed arms.

"I'm from everywhere. Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, London. When I was nine, I was from Istanbul; when I was thirteen, Athens; when I was seventeen, London. That's where I'm from now, London. We live along the Thames. We always live near the water. My father is with the Danish Foreign Service. I'm from everywhere and nowhere."

We paid our check, headed for the harbor along rain-wetted streets, past little shops exhaling leather-coffee-roses and restaurants where paella bathed in large tubs, midnight blue wine rose from the center of each table in label-free bottles. The afternoon sun rode our shoulders as we reached the harbor. Along the pier, diesel fumes and fish smells mixed with the light stench of oil tankers. We booked deck passage on a ship called La Zanzibar bound for Palma, Majorca. It was part passenger-part cargo ship and carried boxes of bananas.

I was glad I wasn't engaged to Diane; glad I hadn't strapped on the seat belt yet. My freedom tasted like the 1959 Bordeaux I drank down to the dregs two nights before at a Cannes restaurant and sounded like the guitar I purhcased in Barcelona.

During our walk to the ship, I collected delicious facts about Ingrid. Since I now loved her, everything was delicious. She wore a sleeveless white blouse with a pocket over the left breast, cotton shorts the color of the sea, leather sandals with a single thong that separated her first two toes. Her nails were polish-free. Her face was its own cosmetic.

The scent of bananas straddled the mid-section of the ship as we boarded. We made our way to the bow, carved out a spot against a tarp covered load of lumber. I was careful to secure the spot on Ingrid's right so I would be free to drape my left arm around her shoulders leaving my right hand free.

Instinct informed me that my competitors would not challenge my Ulyssian power. Sammy was anti-power anyway. "I'm an anarchist. All rules are evil," he announced on the walk to the harbor as we passed a couple of Franco's policemen decked out in shiny black tri-corner hats and toting submachine guns. "Men who enforce rules are bloody devils."

Pale, sunken-chested Bertie was T.S.Eliot. In between tubercular-sounding coughs, he smoked oval Galois Disc Blue cigarettes stored in a brown leather cigarette case with gold trim.

"You seem chronically depressed, Bertie old man," Sammy teased.

"You don't understand me," Bertie grumbled, his arms crossed, a Galois stuck to his lower lip. "I own a dry sense of humor - too sophisticated for a goddamned Aussie."

Sammy laughed and gave Bertie a hug. Ingrid laughed too, the sound smiling up from deep in her throat.

Sammy withdrew a bottle of Chianti from the blue canvas bag looped over his shoulder. Bertie produced a wedge of Stilton from his bag. I shaved four slices with my pocket knife and handed them out. Someone broke into a case of the bananas and passed bunches to everyone. The four of us sat down on the wooden deck, leaned our backs against the canvas tarp, devoured the wine, cheese, bananas as the ship steamed away from the collapsing sun.

An hour later, I took out my guitar and sang, "Unchained Melody." Ingrid joined in. I took her singing of "I hunger for your touch," as a personal invitation.

By midnight, Sammy and Bertie were asleep and Ingrid and I were a couple. Beneath the stars, she slipped on a blue sweater adorned with snowflakes and mountains and trees. I was glad the sweater buttoned down the front as I wrapped her with my left arm.

I confessed as much of my life story to Ingrid as I could: my degree from Dartmouth with a major in English literature, my acceptance to Columbia Law School; how I was embarrassed by my rich family, how I admired JFK and thought it was time for me to start marching with Martin Luther King; my two nights in jail for drunk driving. I didn't tell her about Diane and how this was my last summer before I buckled up.

She listened with her eyes, her lips and the space between the buttons on her sweater. The breeze kept slapping a yellow forelock back and forth. Each time it flopped in front of her eyes, she would flick it back with her right hand. All the while, I studied her lips and tried to figure out how to kiss them.

"Just think," I said. "We'll both be parents some day."

"I don't know about me," she replied. "Children are a lot of responsibility."

"Well, I hear the process of conceiving them is lots of fun."

"You hear?" she laughed. "So are you telling me you have no first hand experience with the 'process'?"

"Certainly not!" I said, as if shocked. "How about you?"

She cast her head down. "My, what a question."

"Give me your answer."

"I've heard that it's quite dangerous for a young woman." She paused, pushed back from me. Her eyes turned dark. "Look, Lance. The most important things about me you can never know. I am completely different from you. I live a very strange life. A life you could never, possibly understand."

Bertie coughed. Sammy stirred and called out, "Nuclear nightmares ... bloody Reds'll kill us all unless we learn to fly through the air with the greatest of ease."

We laughed. "Leave me alone," Sammy grumbled from the mystery of his sleep talking, his shoulders twitching, his eyes sealed shut.

"Okay," I said. Sammy relaxed and resumed snoring.

It was only then that I noticed, as Ingrid's left hand slipped over the top of her thigh, that she was missing the little finger on that hand. In its place a tiny nub twitched.

She looked down at the hand. "It happened when we were living in Istanbul, a dog attacked me on the street. I was fourteen. Two men pulled the dog off of me but he took my little finger with him. I thought no boy would ever like me. My dad wanted to find the dog and kill him. I told him that wouldn't bring my little finger back." She tilted her head and smiled up at me. "Do you feel strange to have your arm around a cripple?"

"You aren't a cripple. You're the prettiest woman I ever saw."

"Thank you, Lance. I think you are very nice looking yourself."

"Ingrid. I know we just met, but I feel I know you so well, that we were meant to take this trip together - to be together."

She didn't answer. But amid the perfume of bananas and the double sheen of the moon smiling from sky and sea, she snuggled closer, didn't stop my hand as it slipped under her sweater.

I planned to stay awake all night sketching Ingrid with my fingers. Some girls know how to kiss and others don't. The bad kissers keep their lips thin and hard or relax them so completely they go all wobbly like the gunnels of an unlashed boat you're trying to board. Ingrid's lips were twin pillows, soft as spring rain. She murmured something in another tongue.

"What did you say?"

"The Danish is hard to translate, exactly."

"Then what did you say, approximately," I murmured.

"I said you have the gift of kissing."

"You have the gifts of a goddess, a Siren."

Soon after midnight, we both drifted into sleep.

I dreamt I was back in Rochester. Ingrid and I were sitting on the couch in my living room necking when Diane and my mom walked into the room. Diane was carrying a giant scimitar. She lifted the long curved blade above me. I tried to raise my arm to block the blow but I couldn't move. The sword came down between Ingrid and me, cutting off Ingrid's right arm and slicing into my left. Ingrid cried out at Diane, "You have crippled me." Then her detached arm floated across the room and slapped Diane so hard that Diane's head fell off.

For me, this is a typical nightmare. I awoke with numbness along my left side, shook my arm to life, gazed at a dawn soft as bath water. A few panels of sun trimmed the top of the single mast soaring above us.

"How did you sleep, old man?" Sammy asked a grouchy looking Bertie.

Bertie switched off his horn rimmed glasses and drew on a pair of sunglasses. The emerald disks made him a bored T.S. staring out at the wasteland of the world.

"Weird dreams," Bertie answered. "How 'bout you?"

"Sammy spent the night preaching about the evils of nuclear war," I interjected.

"Oh God, was I talking in my sleep again?"

"You were very entertaining," Ingrid said.

Sammy looked toward us, "Well, you two seem to be getting on well. A regular couple I'd say."

We gathered our few possessions, headed for the gangplank. The city of Palma snaked a vast sidewalk along its shoreline. Low, sand-colored buildings with rosy tile roofs and a few taller buildings slept amid the fronds of hundred of palms. Above it all, a 14th century cathedral reigned .

We found a café, ordered coffee, bread and cheese. I was more than Ulysses. I was Zeus, my goddess under my sway. The Mediterranean, all of Europe, was mine. I picked up the check and we wandered out to survey the town.

Sammy got a map. "Santanyi, that's the place!"

"Where is that?" Ingrid asked.

"Southwest of here. There's a nice new German resort down there. Very reasonable."

We took a bus along a road who's paving got more and more sparse until it gave way to plain dirt just beyond a town called Campos del Puerto. We jolted and jarred along, dust clouding through the open windows, until the driver dropped us off in the middle of nowhere.

We walked about a mile across desert like land. Bert and Sammy walked ahead while Ingrid and I straggled several yards back.

"I hope I haven't made Bert and Sammy jealous," I said.

"That's unlikely," Ingrid said.

"Now why is that? I would think any man would want to be with you and would be upset if any other man tried to get in his way."

"I guess you don't get it about Bert and Sammy.

I didn't.

"Lance, don't you understand? Bert and Sammy are boyfriends."

"You mean. they are homosexuals?"

"I mean they love each other. It's not such an unusual thing in Europe as it may be in the U.S. Europeans are more tolerant of what's different."

All of us were sweating by the time we found the hotel, rising white and new, miraging shifting shoulders of the sea. Sammy's arm wrapped Bertie's waist. He withdrew it as we arrived at the entrance to the hotel.

"Now why is it we want to stay in a German hotel on a Spanish island?" I asked.

"Because the damn Germans are always so clean and neat and orderly and I'm already sick of cheap Spanish hotels," Bertie grumbled.

Bertie was right. The place was clean and neat and orderly and stunning and rose like an ice castle above the little cove. Herr Gottfried said, "We have just opened and I am pleased to give you our best rate - six dollars per room."

We booked two rooms one would be for Ingrid and the other for the three men. For all I cared, Bertie and Sammy could sleep in the same bed while I slipped off to visit Ingrid.

The manager put some cheese, sliced apples and bread on a plate. We ate at an umbrella table set up on the edge of the sand. We drank two bottles of Chianti and by the end of the second one I was feeling very happy and very powerful.

"How about a swim?" I proposed.

"Yes. I'm still very hot," Ingrid said.

Bertie and Sammy exchanged glances. "Not us," Sammy said.

The hotel was mostly deserted and only one other couple, an older pair, perched on the sand in the bright sun. As Ingrid and I passed by I heard them conversing in German, wondered if the man was someone my dad had tried to kill just a couple decades earlier.

Ingrid wore a pink and white beach towel around her and let it fall to the sand when she got to me. Her bathing suit was a two piece. White. The sight of her in so little clothing took my breath away, her narrow waist, the handfuls of her breasts.

"You look...so...lovely," I stammered.

"Well, thank you."

She turned, dashed toward the water, her thighs jostling lightly, her shoulders swingingback and forth. She reached the water, paused a moment, then slid into the low surf. I followed. The water was warm, the air tender, the six o'clock sun angled orange.

Ingrid stroked toward a rock several hundred feet from shore. She was an astonishing swimmer and though I had been on the swim team in high school, it was all I could do to stay close. She reached the rock way ahead of me and shouted, I won, when she touched it.

"You had a head start," I complained.

"Okay. We'll have a second match." She pulled herself halfway up on the rock, took a breath, didn't seem tired. The blue hair ribbon was long gone and her locks hung to the tips of her shoulders in clumps, water dripping from each, tracing its way down her neck, across her shoulders, between her breasts.

"Let's swim for that rock," she shouted. "Ready. Set. Go."

The second rock was further out, sat at a sharp left diagonal from the shore. I swam next to her, smiling as I turned my face toward her, grabbing at her to hold her back a little. I reached the second rock just barely ahead. But I sensed she let me win.

"Well. I guess we're even now," I said.

"You cheated, of course, grabbing onto me. And here I am swimming with a disability," she said, holding up the hand with the nub. "

"You're very competitive for a girl."

"What makes you think I'm a girl?"

"Everything about you, especially now that I've gotten such a good look."

"Looks can be deceiving."

"There's nothing deceiving about that figure of yours. It's perfection."

Her top was tied in the back rather than hooked. She reached around and untied it. I thought she was going to take it off. Instead, she just tied it tighter. The two of us laid down on the rock like a pair of seals. It was barely large enough for two people and the Mediterranean licked our feet. I thought about sharks, couldn't for the life of me remember if any inhabited the Mediterranean. The second rock was isolated around a bend from the hotel cove. Ingrid and me, the wide cloudless sky, the delicate lips of the sea kissing our feet, surging around our thighs.

I was Zeus at rest, gentle, tender, at ease. I looked over at my companion. Nothing with Diane ever felt like this. Not even on New Year's Eve the year before when we almost went all the way in the back of her Dad's Cadillac. With Ingrid, I was at the top of a peak. Diane down in some valley out of sight, small, insignificant. 

"Ingrid. I think we were meant for each other."

"Is that so?"

"Yes. It is."

"Maybe or maybe not."

"There's no maybe about it, Ingrid. I know I love you."

She lifted her face from the smooth surface of the rock and studied me. "Yes. I do think you are in love with me."

"You say that like you are a doctor who has just diagnosed a condition."

"Perhaps that's true. Perhaps you have just a condition and it will pass. But remember what I told you. I have a condition of my own that will not pass. If your love is true, it will change me. If it's not, well."

"Look, Ingrid. My love is permanent. I am sure of it as I am that this." I looked around for the right analogy to prove my love. "As sure as this rock is solid."

At that moment, a larger wave washed over the rock and over both of us. We stood up, shaking like drenched dogs.

"Don't you think that's a bad sign?" Ingrid laughed.

"It's a good sign. The rock is still here in spite of the wave. We are standing on it. I think this must be our own island. I can't think of a better place for what I want to say. Ingrid, will you marry me?"

"Oh Lance, my strong sailor. You do love me. You're so sweet."

"Sweet, maybe. Serious, absolutely. Ingrid, I have lots of money or at least I will have. My father is very successful and my mother comes from big wealth and I'm the only child. You need to marry me and we need to have lots of children."

She smiled at me from Mt. Olympusl. I didn't feel like Zeus any more. I was a human in the hands of her celestial power. She leaned up, kissed me. I ran my hand up and down her naked back. I thought she would say yes as soon as our lips came apart. I thought how the two of us, embracing there on that pedestal of the sea, must look like some grand romantic statue, twin ornaments atop the crown of the vast silver Mediterranean.

Ingrid didn't answer. Instead, she wrapped a long sad gaze around me. A single tear escaped each eye. Then she turned and dove into the sea.

When she surfaced, she was laughing. She had removed her white top and flung it at me. She rose up in the water just far enough for me to gain a lovely look at her full, curved form. She flashed me her smile warm as noon, then plunged back down into the Mediterranean, a mermaid returning to the deep. I called to her. Then I saw the flick of her fishy tail, iridescent in the bright sun as she vanished beneath the waves.

I return every summer to Majorca with Diane and our three kids. Bertie and Sammy are still together and we all remain close. I give the pair free lodging at my hotel whenever they wish.

Bertie never believed my story about Ingrid. But Sammy did. Bertie thinks I killed her. Sammy knows I loved her.

"Why can't there be mermaids?" Sammy would say to Bertie. "Sailors have been seeing them for centuries. Maybe she's the Lorelei and she swam off her perch in Copenhagen down past the rock of Gibraltar to Spain and to us. Why not?"

Bertie would scoff and shake his head. One of them thinks I'm a murderer but he's never tried to turn me in. The other believes my love and my story.

I bought the hotel in Santanyi, renamed it The Lorelei. The statue of Ingrid I commissioned rises up from our little rock beyond the view of the cove. The likeness is good, right down to her high cheek bones and full lips. When I die, a statue of me will be mounted on the other half of the rock embracing my Ingrid. People can come to the hotel and hear the story of me and my mermaid and shake their heads like Bertie or believe like Sammy.

Some summer days, I swim out to our rock. When I arrive, I perform a little ritual. First, I pull myself up next to the statue and wrap my left arm around her bronze shoulder. Next, I cast my eyes out to sea watching for signs of my mermaid's return. After she fails to appear, I turn and kiss my statue full on the lips.

Then I swim back to my hotel. I still have the Germans manage it. Like Bertie says, they're so neat and clean and orderly.

Heel Marks

Mom told me the heel marks on the dining room table had been made by her two younger sisters and herself. Her little brother probably added a few as well. I knelt down and studied the scars in the century-old wood—ran my fingers over them, tried to feel the sounds above the table in the 1920s. Just chatter, I suppose. 

“May we take a ride in the Cadillac today, daddy?” my little-girl mom is saying to her dad.

“Can we drive down to the swings in the park and play?” my Aunt Jane is asking my grandfather.

“Yes to both questions, girls. First you must clean your plates.”

The Cadillac had sixteen cylinders, enough horses to power the engine of a small steamship. It was black and shiny and had a big white-walled spare tire that rested in a round boot just above the front right wheel. It also had a horn on the driver’s side, and my mom said her dad would let her squeeze it to show off to the neighbors.

Grandpa knew everything about birds and trees and walnuts and cigars and fine wine and the stock market. He was an expert at his building supply business, and by the late twenties, he was a millionaire. I wish I could have known my grandfather. He sounded like a peach of a guy.

I wondered what the conversation had been like in late October, 1929, after the stock market crashed and Grandpa lost everything, including the black Cadillac with its sixteen-cylinder power.

My grandfather was a jovial fellow. You can tell this from all the black-and-white photographs in which he was always laughing and smiling. You would know it as well if you talked to my mom.

“I remember the pistol range Papa had in the basement,” she told me once. “It was great fun to go down there and watch my father shoot the center out of the targets. He was a great shot.”

She doesn’t mention something I learned from my Aunt Jane shortly after my thirteenth birthday. My grandfather was very sad after the market crash—sad to see his money go, sad to release the servants and the butler and the chauffeur, sad to have to put the house up for sale, and sad to sell it for one-third of what he thought it was worth. My grandfather was sad about all of this—so sad that on December 20th, three days before his birthday and five days before Christmas, he went downstairs to his pistol range, picked up his favorite .45 caliber revolver, and fired a shot right through the center of his right temple.

There’s no accounting for a loss like that. One minute you have a wonderful jovial man who knows everything about nature and business and how to live the good life. The next minute he’s lying in a pool of blood on the gray basement floor across from old copies of the New York Times stacked up in the corner, Christmas decorations festooning the grandfather clock and the mantle in the living room above his corpse, his young children and his wife wondering if the noise was different from the sounds that usually floated up from the pistol range, not yet knowing that this time the target shot in the middle was my grandfather’s head.

I feel as though I know my grandpa even though he died a quarter-century before I was born. What confidence he must have had in 1927 and 1928, placing three new cigars in his left breast pocket each morning as he walked from the house to where the chauffeur waited in the cool morning light for his master to climb into the back of the 16-cylinder Cadillac.

“How are you today, Mr. Giles?” everyone must have said as he walked into his office every weekday morning. And they would have really wondered how he was, because he was their employer and his success was important to theirs. How lucky they were to have such a jolly fellow as their boss, who gave them hundred-dollar bonuses at Christmastime like happy Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Day, who kidded the secretaries and kissed them on the cheek as a way of showing them how much he loved everybody who worked for him.

His death must have left them all bereft. As if Santa Claus himself had suddenly been shot and killed and there would never be a Christmas again.

I have a keepsake of my grandfather’s which was passed down to me through my mother. It’s one of the pistols from his shooting range—not the one he used to kill himself, of course, but a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson made in 1926. I used to carry it around secretly when I was first in law practice. As a criminal lawyer, I was defending some pretty tough fellows in the sixties and seventies. In addition, I liked the idea of having my grandfather’s pistol with me—not as a weapon, but as a relic of his life—something of my grandfather’s that I could carry in a hidden pocket in my leather briefcase and know that a part of him was close to me.

I had a very successful law practice up through 1997. Grandpa would have been proud. I made a lot of money and was able to afford good cigars and fine wine and Ivy League educations for my two children. I also made an effort to learn about birds and trees and the qualities of a good walnut and an excellent single malt scotch. I didn’t become an ornithologist or an arborist, but I knew enough to distinguish a house finch from a sparrow and could recognize the different varieties of oak trees.

Fine living—that’s what I think my grandfather understood—the joy of puffing on a Cuban cigar and drinking a little brandy and putting your arm around your wife or any other pretty woman or good fellow who happened to be nearby. I sure wish I had known the old guy. I’ll bet he told really terrific jokes as he sat around the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house at Northwestern with his feet up on his desk and his thumbs hooked in his vest.

Not everything has gone well for me. My wife left me yesterday. We were married for thirty-five years and I thought we’d entered safe ground—that we would last forever—that she would look after me as I began to fade away—that the only question would be who died first, not who would walk out the door first, leaving the other one as bereft as my grandfather’s employees after he shot himself. Now I’m sixty-three, too old to marry again and not interested in doing that anyway.

I slip an anti-depressant capsule into my mouth and swallow it with a Seabreeze cocktail. If it weren’t for this pill, I probably would have shot myself already. My life is basically over. Maybe I lived too long. If I’d killed myself shortly after our thirty-fourth anniversary, I would have been honored and esteemed as a fine husband, loving father, and sweet grandfather. I’ve already lived much longer than my grandfather, who was fifty-one when he blew his brains out.

 It’s early summer and the sun is setting nice and late. There are a few more minutes of daylight before night sets in and the mockingbirds are the only ones left singing. The petunias are blooming beautifully. Their pungent purple horns cradle hope and their faces track the sun as reliably as the moon. I love petunias.

I’m going to have dinner alone tonight. I’m going to sit at my grandfather’s dining room table and run my hands over the scars left by my mother’s and aunt’s leather heels. I’m going to listen to their laughter as day fades and the darkness and the smoke from my cigar floods in around me.

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