The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

81 Pen Pals 2009

Aldon the Aussie is writing to tell me he’s furious. He’d been under the impression that he and Linda were headed for the altar, but now shares the bad news that Bod has dropped out of the Melbourne tournament. He has taken the mention of a lover really badly and is now organising a trip to London. ‘We need to talk.’ The two buddies, Bod and Aldon, beg Linda to meet them at the May Fair Hotel earlier than planned. ‘You can’t do this to us. Bod is up to eighteen eggs in the morning and twelve in the evening.’ I guess he’ll end up with ovaries in his scrotum.

Then I get other e-mails personally addressed to me. I’m in touch with all kinds of people around the globe. Whiles the time away.

Susan Sommersworth is a sunshine lady from the West Coast of the US, one of those women who is in a relationship with her own hair and attends to it with the same dedication other people reserve for their pets or a sick partner. She’s a pretty tedious pen pal, but I can’t help answering her after, on a trip to Buenos Aires, she made a detour for me to the Chacarita Cemetery, tracked down a tiny grave, and laid down a flower. She’s ever so chirpy and nauseatingly positive and wants to know everything about Iceland, sends me whole armies of sunny yellow smileys, and will no doubt be buried with a smirk stuck to her face. I don’t know where the Yanks get all this cheerfulness from, but I guess Smilism beats defunct Stalinism. My Bob developed squinty eyes from all that Yankee smiling, laughed at everything I said, and always pointed his finger at me as if to emphasise that it was me and no one else but me that was being clever and funny. Oh, he was great, Bob was.

Now that we have the net, I can look him up. Robert McIntyre. I can’t find him on Facebook but good old Yahoo! gives me sixteen thousand results. They mostly turn out to be about his namesake, a Scottish motorcycling champ born in 1928, but there are a few things here and there. My Bobby set up a film company sometime around 1970, then published a book, On the B-Side of Life: My Years in Beijing, Brussels, Berlin and Buenos Aires. Might there be some mention of me in those pages? Here I can see that someone has found it in the middle of the Amazon jungle and read it. Gives the book one star. I can just picture my wrinkled Bob getting all excited about that; he embraced everything with enthusiasm, even when I called him a taxi. It would be nice to be able to send him a line, if he remembers his Ice Lady. He ought to; we were practically glued together every day for nine months.

Yes, I remember it so well. We were sitting together in an Irish pub close to the Plaza de Mayo, me and my masturbation coach Heidi, when he blew in all squinty-eyed with zit scars on his cheeks: ‘Where are you from, girls?’

‘We’re from Dykeland,’ I answered, thinking that would be enough to get rid of him. But he was quick on the uptake.

‘Yeah? I’ve been there! Beautiful country but a bitch of a language.’

He said he wanted to import jazz to Argentina, tango was dead, asked us if we wanted to come to a concert the next day. I was going through the most difficult weeks in my life, but Heidi managed to drag me along. Three weeks later I’d go to New York with Bob. He was pretty well off. Although his father was a professor of literature, his mother descended from money, the daughter of some inventor of Italian origin. I was charmed by his energy and enthusiasm and so badly needed it, having mourned my child for so many months, but I always awaited that moment of seriousness an Icelandic girl believed lay at the core of every love. But it never came, and we kept on circling around it on a plane.

I had probably experienced true love only once, love at a thousand degrees. It lasted for only one night. And many people got less than that. Years later, another kind of love came along, which lasted a bit longer. It was the love of a lifetime that didn’t survive death, however.

The time has come to tell that story.