Story XXI: Iceland
A long weekend in Iceland, revisited.
REYKJAVIK
My one rule was “English Only” on our trips, but we weren’t out of the rental car lot when Isa started joking in Portuguese. After two semesters in Rio, Paolo had to translate my wife back into English simply to include me. Through the rear-view mirror, I saw her look at me, then at Paolo. She was nodding along with delight at his translation. The trip had begun; she was the center of attention.
“Your Isabella said Iceland is gloomy, but of all the gloomy countries we’ve visited, Iceland is gloomy in the most beautiful way. That’s the best I could understand her Portuguese.” Paolo laughed, clearly for my benefit. Laughing for my benefit was a rule, too. It was all politics.
She took mock offense and let out another burst of Portuguese.
Isa leaned forward from the back seat and cocked her fist like she was about to punch him on his arm until he said, “Go. Go. Go. Go. Hard as you can.” She touched him with the lightest possible tap. It was the first time she’d touched him since we’d met at baggage claim.
He caught her hand and laughed, looked over at me like he was asking for permission, then turned and stared out the passenger window. Paolo never touched Isa until she touched him first. We had nothing but unspoken rules.
Their “Iceland is dreary” and “Greykjavik” jokes wouldn’t die. Every time the sun peeked out between the clouds for a second, Isa announced in English how dreary, yet how beautiful it was. She used Paolo’s English accent. Eventually, neither of them had to say anything or even look at each other. Paolo would struggle to keep from chuckling until it embarrassed all of us.
I always knew the exact moment when she stopped being a wife on our trips and abandoned me. In Iceland it was when she punched his arm.
I had my own private laugh several times loudly enough that they would hear it. I swore “Greykjavik” would be our last trip together, and it was.
GOÐAFOSS
At Goðafoss, we pulled over to see the first of the three waterfalls I’d arranged, but by 4pm we’d already missed the daylight. So, we sat in the parking lot and listened. Somewhere out of sight, the waterfall roared in and out in waves. Paolo turned off the radio and rolled his window down. He started humming.
Snow blew in and melted on the dashboard. Isa leaned forward from the back seat and wiped it with her hand. While she did, she squeezed my shoulder. It was one of her secret message “just the two of us” connections Paolo wasn’t supposed to know about. For all I know, she was doing the same with Paolo. He would always joke this sort of thing was her “managing us.”
“In Iceland, it snows in the car.” Paolo said, holding his hand out and letting the snow settle on it. He couldn’t have been a man any further from poetry, but I knew him well enough to know that he probably did appreciate the waterfall. I must have let him know I was grateful for that.
If he did, then it was the single time on the Iceland trip either of them acknowledged what I’d spent a month planning. For the last two years, I could count these travel agent victories on one hand. Isa called my moments our “quatros.” This was long before she started using numbers about who slept with who in hotel beds.
“There are four different relationships in a threesome. Each pairing and then the last one is everyone together.”
Isabella must have heard the same travel agent victory I did, because she placed her hand over mine on the shifter like a peace offering. Paolo put his gloved hand on top and moved his hand over hers. “A hand sandwich,” he said, looking at me.
Paolo moved our hands around as a unit and muscled the stick shift from side to side, putting the car in and out of gear. Isabella was leaning in from the back seat. Their faces were now the closest they’d been the entire trip.
They hadn’t touched since a quick greeting at the airport. I wanted them to crack the seal and get it over with, not act like they were waiting for me to give permission, like it was my choice somehow.
“Our sandwich,” he said to me. That was enough. I pulled my fingers out from underneath, and Paolo laughed strangely and fussed with a heater vent.
Paolo turned back to Isa and rattled off something. I knew it was too fast for her.
Isa said, “No more Portuguese, and I don’t understand you anyway.”
“I said you’re being a sand crab, Philip, with your hand,” Paolo said. He made some kind of gesture with his glove like I was scuttling. Then he announced, “I can drive” and launched out of the car before I could disagree. I would have been accused of drama if I refused, so I got out and let him. We passed each other in the headlight snow, and I remember for a fact he didn’t look at me.
With that, Goðafoss at Twilight was officially a failure, which was apparently on me. I chose the travel arrangements and named the excursions. It still upsets me I used my own frequent flyer miles to keep the peace.
For another hour, I don’t think I said a single word. I didn’t even like to turn because they said my leather jacket squeaked, and so I avoided being targeted for that. But eventually, I turned all the way around in the passenger seat to see if she was asleep.
She wasn’t. It was like she’d been waiting for me to turn to her. She angled away from the rear-view mirror and pursed her lips as if we were cheating on Paolo.
Isa called our trips with Paolo “Our Abandono.” They were saving our sex life and, by implication, our marriage. This was almost year three of saving our marriage with abandon.
She held her hand out to me. I took it with my squeaking arm. For all the breezy encouragement, I felt her typical agitation to get the first night behind her.
KIRKJUBÆJARKLAUSTUR
About a half hour from the hotel, Paolo pulled over to a gas station in Kirkjubæjarklaustur. He went inside to buy Brennivin and tourist magnets. Isa and I had cheap gift shop magnets for each of these trips on our refrigerator. Paolo sent them after the trips and made a pretend show of purchasing them secretly.
When we got home and things got back to normal, Isa lined them up in a row. Paolo always wrote a note that mentioned the best things I’d planned. He would sort of name them with a word or two. Good luck with “Kirkjubæjarklaustur.”
“Reconhecimentos,” Paolo called them. “Acknowledgments.” I told Isa they looked like planes he had shot down. He probably had these on refrigerators across the world.
Then, of course, Paolo didn’t have money to pay for gas. Or he had the money, but not the credit cards, or whatever it was. I’d stopped listening after almost three years. Isa admitted at one point he had no “financial shame” or “financial dignity” although she walked that back.
Then he needed me to get out of the car to take pictures in front of the gas pump. I knew exactly what this was. We stood there, holding three Brennivin bottles like we were driving drunk and pretending to have a riot of a time. He forced me to put an arm around him, and I could feel he had put on even more weight.
He called these first night pictures the “My Best Friend” pictures. They were proof for his wife that he was visiting one of his closest buddies. This wife of his was his one great mystery. I know Isa didn’t like it.
I was “an American he knew from his one year at university”, although he hardly put it like that, I’m sure. Apparently, we’d grown much closer during his visits to the States. He didn’t have the imagination to create a fake story with me. He just swapped out Isa for me.
“Look at us,” he said, showing me the picture, waiting for his wife’s text back so he could close it off and move on. Because he couldn’t think of anything to actually say, he showed me our pictures. We’re under a gas pump reindeer ad for chocolate. He’d angled it to put the reindeer antlers over his head.
“I have one of you, too.” He showed me another photo where the antlers were over my head. Now I was wearing the horns.
The funny thing is, even standing on the gas island curb, I didn’t even care about the horns. All I could think was he was shorter than I was.
While we were driving away, his wife’s texts started to come in, a whole flurry of them. His wife sent a picture of her out with her friends. She was holding up two bottles, too. Of course, the obvious joke wasn’t lost on me.
Isa reached forward to snatch away his phone to read the texts, but Paolo said no. That was the end of it.
THE BUBBLE ROOM
With all the up front effort, the hotel was an avoidable disappointment.
I had promised northern lights in a bubble, a “Snow Globe under the Stars.” We were all tired, and the bubble was dramatically revealed to be a hotel room with a see-through plastic dome. I’d imagined glass and hadn’t counted on fog blocking a view. The bed was smaller than anything in the comments, and the room was freezing when we arrived, which I had read about and asked them to fix beforehand.
It wasn’t until after two, when Isabella finally started to loosen up. When she was finally drunk in a way that made me uncomfortable, she started clinking the Brennivin bottles against each other in different combinations, like she was testing them.
I hated the first nights.
Paolo began to look at me less. The two of them were as restless as each other. He waited like a well-trained dog to get at its food, tracking her around the bubble with his eyes. He had a way of not even moving his head when he did that.
I’d gone to the bathroom to prepare myself mentally, and when I returned, she whispered, “You go there” to Paolo so softly it made him smile. She kissed me deep into my neck and rubbed her hair into me like a kitten “and you go there.” The whole thing was absurd, even the faces she made.
I didn’t even know where she meant I was supposed to go, but she had her hand on the small of my back, and then she pulled away from me, drifting the length of my arm with her fingertips. She was letting me go like a balloon.
Paolo urged me to join in with a private nod like it wouldn’t be fun unless it was three, but he barely looked my way once he began tearing the wrapping off his Christmas present. The way he threw her socks across the room stays with me. I loved her.
By this last trip in Iceland, I’d begun to feel like a referee who should stop him if he got too rough. Isa insisted he never did to the point we fought about it when we got home, but it was clear he tested our limits every vacation. I found that she held my hand when he got aggressive, or I knelt with my hand on Isabella’s back, petting my wife like a stray cat.
So, night one, the drunk Peacemaker watched while condensation ran down the plastic, and some cheater flicked at Isa’s thighs, getting her into position for his little penis. I had that on him, and we all knew it. Isa didn’t like it when I told her that.
I would regret coming before he did. Isa said it was my body’s proof we were three. Paolo had learned not to say anything. I don’t think we ever made eye contact a single time. I still find it ironic that coming in front of my own wife embarrassed him.
That isn’t entirely true: there had been eye contact once at the very beginning.
Our very first night with Paolo — this was in Vancouver, when we first ran into him — Isabella turned me into an exhibitionist, then she turned me into a voyeur. Paolo was supposed to sit on the couch, but everything happened quickly.
“Paolo, come. It’s only play.”
The way she ordered him made it seem different.
I’m ashamed of watching like I did. We were in an Embassy Suites. I’d ended up in the living room area holding the back of some cheap brown furniture.
“You look like you are holding onto the swimming pool,” Paolo said. “Join us.” That “us” still jumps out at me.
“Please,” Isa said. They were both watching me when I came that time.
“It’s play,” Paolo said.
“Abandono,” she called it on the flight back. I remember she explained me to myself in the morning. “You don’t need to be ashamed. You let go. We’ll never see him again.”
She went on and on like she’d read a book about it. “Every man holds a woman differently.”
“He’s nobody,” she said. “A nobody. Never again if you don’t want to. If you can’t be free to be yourself with me, who can you be?”
And, eventually, I gave up and said, “It’s fine.”
When I weigh it all up, I think most about those two words.
“A nobody.”
DIAMOND BEACH
Online I’d read Diamond Beach was one of Iceland’s most spectacular destinations. Chunks of icebergs are thrown up on the beach with the tides. The woman at the desk said some stood as tall as men. The gods have sprinkled the beach with diamonds.” I’d hoped that Isa would love it.
When the three of us rounded the corner with the first sight of the beach, Isabella stopped short and looked out onto the icebergs. I could barely hear her over the wind.
“Take your gloves off,” she said, pulling at my hands, but then it became all three like she didn’t want to leave anyone out. “I want to feel you both.”
Isa took Paolo by the coat collar and said, “You know, Paolo, it was Philip who showed me snow for the first time. We were in Vermont. Philip is the love of my life. There is a mind, there is a heart and there is a body. I insist on all three. We all should.”
She squeezed me tighter and added in the third person, “Unless Philip ever says otherwise.’ She stared straight at me. More drama. She was wearing a woolen hat I’d purchased for her at the airport. That was the last thing I ever bought her.
Paolo headed out onto the beach alone.
Isa unbuttoned my coat, even in the rain. Then she unbuttoned hers. She reached in and hugged me. I remember everything flapping in the wind.
Further out on the beach, Paolo got to the largest of the icebergs. He looked back at us and yelled out with his arms up like he was a Viking. “It is a land of ice. It is the ice land. What shall we call it?”
Isabella tried not to, but she still smiled. I started to pull away from her so that she could feel it. She was fighting me back in.
“You know you want to be here, too, Philip.”
I said, “Please let go of me. Now.”
I might have even told her to get off me. I certainly wasn’t rough about it, but I was furious, and I did push her out of my coat. There’s not a person in the world who wouldn’t have understood why. Paolo meanwhile was still carrying on down the beach. I had the horrible feeling that if he’d seen, he wouldn’t have had the context.
Isa looked shocked, then she got mean.
“You were as hard as a diamond cutter last night,” she said. “We’re here as much for you as for me, probably more for you.”
I was mortified and turned to walk back to the car. She kept yelling behind me like a child trying to keep up.
“You know, Philip, your body is the only part of you that doesn’t tell itself lies.”
I wouldn’t have said anything like that to her in a million years. She followed me up after that but didn’t say anything else, and of course she slept with Paolo alone that evening. I was so tempted to watch them through the bubble.
THE BRIDGE BETWEEN CONTINENTS
The third morning, Isa wanted to change the itinerary for something on a brochure in the hotel lobby: The Bridge Between Continents. It’s a nothing bridge. It’s appeal is to stand with one foot in Europe and the other in North America. We were spending our daylight on Instagram. Isa still wanted to go.
A mother on the foot bridge came over with her daughter in a stroller. Isa asked if she would take a picture of the three of us together.
Isabella stood between Paolo and me and grabbed us by our belts and leaned forward like she was a superhero. Still holding me by my belt, she kissed Paolo on the mouth.
Paolo said something in Portuguese, and then clear as day, because her own Portuguese sounded like English, I heard her repeat something about “três continentes.” She took Paolo’s face in both hands and kissed him.
Of course, I understood immediately they’d been lying to me for almost three years. She’d denied over her mother’s grave that she slept with him in Brazil.
But they weren’t “friends of friends” who met in Vancouver. The whole thing had been a lie from the first time together.
The rest of what happened at the bridge is almost a blur now. The mother asked Isa if she wanted a picture of “you and your husband.” I would have caused a scene if I’d moved towards her for the picture, so Isabella and Paolo kissed again in front of me while I watched. I think she looked right at me before she did, just for a flash. I’ve never been so wounded.
The woman handed back Isa’s phone, but Isa kept on. She said something about taking a picture with her “other husband,” and I started to wonder if she had been drinking.
The father said, “No, we need to go.”
My only thoughts were with the Canadian family and their children. I immediately walked out to their car to apologize, and maybe because I needed to find one sane person, I told the mother Isa was my wife.
I burst into tears right there. The shame of what had happened made me dump this on a stranger, on two strangers. The husband said, “Hey, you. That’s enough. Leave my wife alone.” The horror was compounding.
While I was heading back to our car, I heard the Canadians skidding out of the parking area behind me, and that was the last straw. Paolo tried to hand me the keys, but I sat in the back and refused to drive until they gave up asking me.
Isa forgot I still had her phone, and I deleted the pictures of them. She was making me petty.
UM
That night in the bubble, the sky was finally clear. The condensation on the plastic was gone after three days of blasting the pathetic little Icelandic heater.
At dinner, I announced the night was going to be an “um,” a “one.” Then I insisted on it. I know it surprised them both. I’m almost positive I looked right at Paolo when I said it. I know he left the bubble immediately.
So, I showed Isa my Paolo, her husband’s Paolo. I knew it would be our last time. At the end of the day, I’ve always known that what she wanted was a Paolo. Two Paulos. All the Paolos in Brazil.
To be crystal clear, my “Paolo,” if you can even call it that, was no different than I’d seen. Far less. We all have a Paolo, was my point. Everyone can stand up for themselves. Even a cuckold with reindeer horns.
“What are you doing?” she asked me.
I looked straight at her and said, “Tres Continentes.”
I watched her add two and two.
“What are you saying, Philip? Get off.”
If I did stay in her after that, it was for no more than a single second to let her see my face. I needed to be seen for once. I barely moved an inch inside of her, but she was still saying, “Get off me, Philip.”
I said, “Abandono,” or maybe “That’s Abandono” as I spun my legs away from her and out of the bed. My heart was pounding from tearing the band-aid off the marriage.
“We were never quatro. You know what the word for zero is in Portuguese? It’s zero. I looked it up,” I told her. I had looked it up ages before, even before the trip. I had almost said it in Goðafoss.
In the bathroom, I cleaned myself off with one of Paolo’s towels that he’d thrown on the floor. Maybe that was one thing that was truly petty. There was a lot of emotion. I heard her through the bathroom door calling “Paolo.” We were going to have a scene.
When I came out, Paolo was standing in the entrance to the bubble in his Brazilian underwear, looking back and forth at the two of us. Obviously, he knew something happened, or at the very least that I’d had it and was leaving.
While I was packing, I looked over at the bed from time to time. She was sitting on the side, right next to the end table, making a point of not looking at me, staring at the Brennevin bottles on the night table.
She might have been making one of her “you hurt me” faces whenever she didn’t get her way. If it had been so terrible, I think she would have wrapped herself up.
Paolo just stood there, waiting for me to leave. I think I asked Isa if she had anything to say before I left, and she said, “How about ‘get off me, Philip?’”
I knew what she was implying. Years of drama when she didn’t get her way. Let her have her victory. Believe it or not, I didn’t care who won. There were no winners or losers.
Paolo didn’t look at me with an expression one way or the other, which was perfect. If anything he looked dizzy. I think he said, “You need to leave” or “it is time for you to go” or something. He looked pathetic. He wasn’t going to do anything.
What Isa had was no idea that all I could think was “finally.” Finally, it’s over. Finally, I’m free. One simple word.
For a few minutes after I left, I stood out of sight behind a shed for the bubble room blower.
I wanted to give them a minute. When I walked around to the front, I stopped outside to look in. I thought there was a fifty-fifty chance I’d see the two of them in bed.
I didn’t need to watch anymore, not like that. But he must have been off to line up his lotions in the bathroom. I may have waited too long.
It was just Isa alone on the bed.
She had stretched her arms right out in front of her and raised her hips up like a cat. It took me a minute before I realized what I was looking at. It was her yoga Child’s Pose.
I remember the snow crunching under my feet as I stood there. It was loud enough I wondered if she might look up and see me. I knew it was petty, but when I was walking out to the car, I thought how perfect it was that I had the car keys.
When I think back on it, if the aurora borealis had been shining on the plastic, the whole trip to Iceland would have been perfect.