Story XXI: Iceland — Part 2/3
A long weekend in Iceland, revisited.
THE BUBBLE ROOM
I had promised Northern Lights in a bubble, a “Snow Globe under the Stars,” but the “spectacular” bubble room of the website turned out to be a tiny space with a see-through plastic dome. I’d imagined glass, and it was inflatable plastic with an outside blower running day and night. The first two nights, fog completely blocked the view of the sky.
It wasn’t until after two that Isabella finally started to loosen up. She started a drinking game. Paolo and I had to remember to stand the Brennivin bottles next to each other or we’d be forced to take a shot. She wasn’t being clear about the rules, because there were no rules. It became a game of making me drink. I didn’t make a big thing of it, but eventually I asked not to play.
I hated the first nights. The two of them were as restless as each other. He waited like a well-trained dog, tracking her around the bubble, laughing on command. She would always ask me privately if I was “sure,” but to tell the truth would ruin the trip.
I’d gone to the bathroom to prepare myself mentally, and when I returned, she whispered, “You go there” to Paolo. Then she rubbed her hair into my neck like a kitten and directed me with her head. “And you go there,” she said.
It wasn’t even clear 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. The whole thing was bad acting, even the faces she made were unnatural.
Paolo urged me to join in with a private nod, like it wouldn’t be fun unless it was the two of us sharing my wife—which Isabella called our “dois,” our “two”—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 my wife.
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 in our kitchen, but it was clear he tested my limits every vacation. She’d taken to holding my hand when he got aggressive, which she said was for me. The position forced me to kneel on the bed with my hand on her back, petting my wife like a stray cat.
So, night one in Iceland, the drunk Peacemaker watched while condensation ran down the plastic, and some cheater with a tiny penis slept with his wife. I had that on him, and we all knew it.
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 almost 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.”
I’m ashamed of watching like I did. I’d ended up in an Embassy Suites living room 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 both watched me when I came that time. They each held my hand.
“It’s play,” Paolo said.
Isa called it “Abandono” 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.” When she would say these things, she’d start to believe herself.
“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.
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 were as tall as I was. “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. It was like she had signed a blood oath. I remember 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 our coats 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 to the car but didn’t say anything else, and of course she slept with Paolo alone that evening. Largely out of concern, I was tempted to watch them through the bubble.
THE BRIDGE BETWEEN CONTINENTS
The third morning, Isa wanted to change the itinerary for something she found on a brochure in the hotel lobby: The Bridge Between Continents. I’d already seen online that it was a nothing bridge. Its appeal is to stand with one foot in Europe and the other in North America. We were spending our daylight on Instagram.
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 dragging us through a hurricane. Her “hounds of hell,” she called us. The mother laughed to be polite. Then, while she was still holding me by my belt, she kissed Paolo on the mouth.
Paolo said something in Portuguese, and then clear as day, because she had a terrible Portuguese accent, 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. From the start, 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. Truth had been a precondition.
The rest of what happened at the bridge is almost a blur. 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. Isa looked right at me before she did, and shrugged like she was helpless. 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.”
I was mortified. My only thoughts were with the Canadian family and their children. I immediately walked out to their car to apologize, and maybe because I also needed to find one sane person, I told the mother Isa was my wife.
If you have a heart in your chest, you’ll understand why I burst into tears right there. The shame of what had happened made me dump this on a stranger, on two strangers.
Then 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. When Paolo and Isa got back to the car, he tried to hand me the keys, but I stayed 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.