Let me tell you about Copenhagen and my friend Gwyneth Paltrow
While inspired by real events and people, what follows below is fiction
On Copenhagen, Danes, and their Language
I.
Of course it’s quieter, cleaner, and whiter in Copenhagen than in Paris. I didn’t smell piss once, except when I was the one pissing. Copenhagen is one of those cities like Amsterdam and Bern that makes me feel short, ugly, and poor. Standing up straight when I walk to appear taller kind of city. A city that motivates me, I mean. By the time my weekend in Denmark is over, I’ll have created a notes app aimed towards self improvement, with three different subheadings: books to read (broken down into fiction and non-fiction), work goals to achieve by the new year, and several links to YouTube home workout videos, including a playlist of bio-hacking influencers with sleeper builds doing calisthenics, their bodies poetry in motion, and one deceptively challenging pilates video from a new age Reiki healer who seamlessly oscillates between various poses — only one of which (the rocking baby) I can replicate — in front of Sedona’s red rocks.
But Gwyneth — who I call Gwyn or Gwyn Paltrow or Miss Paltrow — says Copenhagen looks like it had been plucked out of the UK (derogatory). She means the short, squatting, dark-bricked apartments. She means the wide, quiet streets with the narrow sidewalks. The small square gated front yards littered with bicycles and children’s toys. She means the lack of monuments to orient yourself around. The skinny pale hooligans. The Arabs in track suits. The Indians delivering food on scooters. The late-night kebab shops.
Most of the time she is squinting, and yes, there’s the sun; it’s a clear blue August weekend after all, but she isn’t impressed either. As our trip goes on, her posture worsens.
This is the third country she’s visited in her life, if you don’t count England, which why would you, as going from Wales, where she lives and will one day die, to England is a bit like walking from the shower to the bathroom sink with a towel wrapped around your still-wet body. The first country she visited was South Korea, where we had met years ago during a heat wave. Can you imagine? From Menai Bridge, Wales, to Seoul, that’s travel, straight no chaser. We spotted each other across a bar full of Koreans, two buoys bobbing in the ocean. We could have been cousins or fraternal twins, same same but different, two variations of white under the hot Seoul sun, her skin the porcelain underbelly of a seashell, mine the splotched pink of a lobster boiled. If she takes anything away from this trip to Copenhagen, it’s that she didn’t miss much flying from Heathrow to Incheon Airport, and that whatever connection we once shared has eroded with time.
We’re staying in the Nørrebro neighborhood and neither of us knows what that means. Finding an Airbnb in Copenhagen was a game of raising the price threshold on the filter screen, little by little, painfully, until we found somewhere to stay. I had wanted to book a hostel, but Gwyn said absolutely not, which I thought might mean there was a chance at sex, to which Gwyn said absolutely not.
II.
There’s a Germanic quality to the Danes. A rigidity. A stiff upper lip behind their smiles. A constant winter chill bites at their core. Something is stuck inside of them, inserted and twisted. If you were to extract it, they’d unfurl, like pulling a toothpick out of a wrap.
For example, your tickets for the Rosenborg Castle are for 11:30, and you, you crazy tourist, tried getting in at 11:26, but you’re told to wait. There you are standing outside the entrance, wishing you smoked cigarettes, something to pass the time, instead you open and close the main apps on your phone and talk to Gwyn, who is squinting at the crowds, looking for a memory to take home with her.
More than once on this trip, a lady will point her finger at me, scolding sternly. The first time for something I said, the second time for something I did. I’ll make a joke about wanting to kill myself, and a Dane will ask me why I’d say such a thing, which in turn just furthers the motivation to jump in front of a bus, not in a depressed sort of way; there are just some conversations that one can’t get far enough away from.
I’ll learn that amongst the Scandinavians, the Danes are seen as the most fun, and isn’t that all you need to know about this part of the world? Traveling around Europe is like visiting extended family, great uncles, second cousins, once removed cousins, grandparents and great grandparents, those bound by blood, those bound by marriage, some of wildly different temperaments, people who you can’t believe you’re related to, people of questionable politics, that one relative who has a piece of nazi memorabilia buried alongside a chest of photo albums and a box pre-LED lightbulbs in the crawl space, the other one who displays their fascist propaganda proudly on the mantel, but sure enough, go back far enough, and there’s a connection, and sure enough, stick around them long enough, and you’ll see similarities. The patterns you spot depend on your starting point. I came to Copenhagen from Paris, which is a bit like going from the sassy aunt’s home — the one who kills a bottle of wine on a Tuesday and shares a cigarette with you on the terrace — to your more disciplined uncle’s house: up at 7 am, fiber supplements with breakfast, read the newspaper. But if I had gone, for example, from Germany to Denmark, it’d be like visiting two cousins who, while never really around each other except during summer vacation, somehow seem almost identical, mirrored versions of one another, the only difference being on which side they part their hair.
Gwyn Paltrow doesn’t notice much about the Danes or the other Scandinavians (we run into several Swedes, who are just over for the weekend, having taken the ferry from Malmö). She’s stuck in a self-destructive loop regarding an ex, a girl from Korea, feeling at times not enough for her and then too good for her. In Seoul, there is no extended family, not for people like us; it’s all new and unfamiliar. It’s hard, for example, to understand what her lover is doing to her, whether her cruelty is masking a deeper love and sincerity, or whether it’s the other way around.
III.
French is a liquid. The language can flow, pour, gush, or spew. Even when heavy and languorous, it rolls like lava down the side of a mountain. Its viscosity and fluidity are not dependent on fluency. At a bakery near our AirBnB, Gwyn — who had taken French in college — lectures me about turning the e sound into a diphthong when it isn’t a diphthong, but even if I was doing that (I wasn’t), that erroneous diphthong and all my other errors would still be fluid, not a seamless flow, but a sputtering of unfinished sentences dribbling down my chin, staining my shirt like the sporadic spots of a hesitant rain.
And if French is a liquid, then Danish is a solid. I’m sitting at Andersen & Maillard, drinking a thick flat white that made me understand how something could be velvety, and eating a cubed croissant that I had cracked in two with a spoon, pistachio cream oozing on my plate. We had waited in the queue for fifteen minutes, which wasn’t very long, the people in front of us had said. Gwyn is across from me, plucking lightly salted shredded chicken breast out of a plastic bag. Her breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She’s on a controlled diet, designed to reduce inflammation, not for any health reason, but to make her skin as beautiful as it can be. South Korea can really do a number on you if you’re not careful.
Danes are all around us. They’re easy to spot, even if they’re not speaking, especially the women, who are shorter than their Swedish and Norwegian counterparts, a little stockier, with rounded square faces with rosy-red cheeks. The style of the city is bulky, oversized blazers, basic white or black tank tops, and high-waisted, wide-legged jeans. For footwear, it’s either the cream-colored Adidas Sambas or thin thongs, mostly black but sometimes a striking color like lampshade red or Barbie pink. I can’t tell you how the men dress. I forgot to look.
But even if I couldn’t spot them with my eyes, I could still hear them slowly moving chunks of words out of their diaphragms, up their esophagi, into their mouths, where their words then proceed to plop down in front of them, like when I was finishing my coffee and coughed what I thought was a dry cough, but it turned out I was wrong, and I had this greenish-white sputum cupped in my hand and I didn’t know what to do with the phlegmy discharge, this solid, this half-formed word, so I took advantage of Gwyn Paltrow squinting off into the distance, and used the tablecloth to wipe it away.
Gwyneth Paltrow: an introduction
The last time I saw Gwyneth Paltrow was in January on a short weekend trip to Paris when she came to visit, not out of luxury but out of necessity, wanting to, in her words, “end it all,” but refusing to end it all, not out of some respect for the sanctity of life, but because she didn’t want her on-and-off again lover, who was the cause of the gloom that darkened all of our interactions on that cold, wet end-of-January trip, to “win.”
For Miss Paltrow, relationships have winners and losers— and through some silly miscalculations, she had found herself on the losing side. All things end, from the trivial to the significant, and any attempt to keep or safeguard or hold in stasis is doomed from the get-go. There’s no two ways about it. The losing side is the side that clings.
She had clung just twice before. First, see little Gwyn, backpacked and pig-tailed, refusing to take off her father’s prescription eyeglasses for weeks after his funeral. Second, there’s teenage Gwyn, Mohawk’d and clad in leather and denim, repeatedly calling up her first girlfriend of sorts, a much older, and much more married, woman, trying to fill the space growing between them with snotty-wet promises left on her answering machine. But being the clinger with Ji-soo — the South Korean, still-in-the-closet-to-her-friends-and-family lesbian, who made her want to end it all — hurt much more, in part because her neediness had caught her by surprise.
Ji-soo was supposed to have been a one-night stand, like several of the other one-night stands Gwyn had on one of her month-long, bi-annual excursions to Seoul. Gwyn took to Korea, its culture, and its women, the way other aging, childless millennials take to running clubs, bike-packing trips, chalked-up bouldering walls, ethical non-monogamous relationships, half-hearted bi-sexuality, bird-watching through second-hand binoculars, and pickleball. Though technically, she was not immune to the allure of birdcall. Sorting and tracking the birds of North Wales, along seaside hikes through coastal towns, soothed her anxious mind. She filled two college-ruled spiral notebooks with journal entries, detailing her encounters with yellow-eyed peregrine falcons, red kites, and oystercatchers. That tuxedo’d bird was her favorite, with its cat-like squeaks; a flock of them created an arrhythmic chorus of bickering along the ocean front. With birds, she had sketches to keep, uneven illustrations done messily with heavy ink pushed out of cheap BiC pens. With Koreans, she had to rely on screenshots of their Tinder profiles, and then, if she got lucky with one of them, candid photos — usually blurred, sometimes taken incognito — of their night together or the morning after. The photos (always live) were rarely pornographic if that’s what you’re thinking. One is of a lover brushing her teeth, wearing one of Gwyn’s baggy bedtime shirts, her face grimacing as bristles scrub against her sensitive gums. Another: Skinny, pale Busanic legs shift under the hotel bed sheets, a single foot sticking out, flat and wide from a childhood spent barefoot. Gwyn took these photos because — like when she spotted a black-velvet chough near South Stack — she couldn’t believe this was her life, that her life had evolved in such a way, and — like when she said she spotted the chough — people back home often didn’t believe her. Cheap masculine behavior, for sure; a high school football player pointing out the cheerleader who gave him a blowjob, but she didn’t care. She showed everyone she could. Progress isn’t progress if not viewed within the landscape of those you’ve left behind. A plane in the sky looks slow, stationary even, until it passes clouds.
After her first trip to Seoul, she enrolled in language lessons. Twice a week, she hunched over her monitor, listening to her tutor make animal sounds while she recited the corresponding Korean words for pig, cow, sheep, and so on. She filled up notebooks with “the easiest alphabet to learn.” So easy, the pitch goes, that it was made for peasant farmers to learn in a day. Well, not as bright as a Korean peasant, then. On Sunday nights, she practiced listening comprehension by watching Korean movies and dramas with her mother. There’s her mom now scooping popcorn into her mouth, cooing when the well-manicured, but clearly cuntish, leading actor comes on, while Gwyn sits criss-crossed, a college-ruled notebook in her lap, writing down phrases she can catch, which aren’t many, but you’ve never heard a more fluent Welsh whistle out: Hello! Goodbye! Where are the toilets? More Kimchi, please.
There was a drawback to learning the language. The more words and phrases she could decipher, the less attracted she was to the women she took to her place or to the club bathroom stall or in between bushes along Gyeongui Line Forest Park. When you don’t speak each other’s language, you fill up gaps of comprehension with the benefit of the doubt. Fluency reveals the canyons that exist between you. She was starting to get tired of it all, the one-night stands, the dumb conversations, the routines of a hook-up. She could turn off her brain and navigate the night, from bar to her hotel room and back down again, relying on muscle memory alone.
That was until Ji-soo. To be clear, there’s nothing special about Ji-soo, so I won’t try to make her out to be as such. She is, from all angles, an average woman, likely a sub-par person in the grand scheme of things, with a boring job, little to no savings, and some genuinely alarming habits (habitual lying and the ability to produce, before the clap of a snap, fake tears). She is neither funny nor clever, endearing nor memorable. In an ideal world, Ji-soo and Gwyn would have never gone on more than two or three dates before they realized their coupling would end in disaster. But in the world they occupied — where so many other people had let them down and where the people they had actually loved did not love them back — they saw their average chemistry, combined with the romance of meeting in foreign places, as life-affirming. Here is someone who doesn’t bore me; how many more chances will I get?
We can simplify it further: the reason Ji-soo stuck around longer than the other girls is that she stuck around. Gwyn was clear about this in the telling and the retelling: she never asked her to stay, she just did. And disrupted Gwyn’s routine in the process.
The morning after their first night together — which Gwyn would normally have spent looking over the photos of the night prior, choosing which ones to keep — Ji-soo ordered breakfast. She showered in the hotel’s shower, using Gwyn’s damp towel to dry herself, and then pulled some clothes out of Gwyn’s half-unpacked Samsonite suitcase. (“She looked better in my clothes than I did. That almost hurt me to be honest.”) They had coffee, then lunch, then dinner, and the whole cycle repeated itself. On the second day Gwyn had called down to reception for extra towels, Ji-soo whispering the Korean phrases into Gwyn’s ear, Gwyn’s lips fumbling with the nuances between ta’s and da’s and cha’s and ja’s which I can’t capture for you here phonetically, there is no counterpart, there is no extended family in the far reaches of our etymology. On the third day, Ji-soo went back to her place to get some clothes. Two weeks after Gwyn flew back to Wales — weeks spent glued to her phone texting Ji-soo, of arranging FaceTime dates, of becoming less of a presence in her hometown, the birds would have to spot themselves — she bought her new lover a ticket to come see her.
Gwyn’s mother had thrown a surprise welcome party, much to Gwyn’s embarrassment. Completely unoriented about that side of the world, her mother decorated their home with stuffed panda bears and dragon streamers and had even gone to the one Chinese shop in town and convinced them to let her take just a handful of chopsticks without buying anything to eat.
“She loved Wales, if you can believe it. All the green. She was wide-eyed. She said she could see being a mother here, raising a child. Korea is so depressing to locals; they don’t see it how we see it.”
Together, they walked the seaside hikes and spoke carefully of the future. Bit by bit, Ji-soo saw more of Gwyn: her messiness (a room covered in unfinished beers, open crisps, and hills of laundry), her mechanical, self-centered mind (cold, blunt answers, the inability to pretend to care, a lack of listening, a lack of awareness), and how she hid under faux masculinity. They shared Gwyn’s small childhood bed. Ji-soo had never seen a childhood bedroom without any posters, art, or pictures on the walls. Gwyn was taller, at least two and a half heads taller, but in bed, when they weren’t making love, she hunched down, putting her forehead up against Ji-soo’s chest. On the third day of their visit, Gwyn paid for a hotel room in the city centre, and the two of them had two nights together, always returning to Gwyn’s home to go to sleep.
Accounts will differ, but as Gwyn tells it, Ji-soo was the one to pull back first after she returned to Seoul. The time difference was difficult. Gwyn’s early mornings were Ji-soo’s late nights; when one was winding up, the other was winding down. They met in different moods, and these moods colored how they viewed each other’s behavior. Text messages became shorter, spread out over longer and longer delays. When they did text, Ji-soo quickly turned the conversation sexual, like she had reached out just for help in getting off.
Gwyn had turned into the kind of person she hates: checking her phone to make sure she hadn’t missed a message, adjusting her sleep schedule so she could be awake when Ji-soo was awake, but then refusing to make the first move. “She ought to want to text me as much as I want to text her, no, actually, she should want to text me more. She was making me the woman.”
There she was, taking an extra break in her shift to check her phone yet again. There she was, trying to piece together a night out on the other side of the world, spying through her alt account what Ji-soo’s friends were up to and if she could spot her lover in stories posted by the club they frequented together when she was in town.
And that’s not Gwyn. Gwyn is the one who demands and orders, not one who waits. The one who wears the strap on (always packing an assortment with her). The one who holds down. Out of all of her lovers, she had only let one Korean girl, whose name she can’t recall, who didn’t make it into her photo album, go down on her. The whole experience was uncomfortable, pushing her deeper into herself, not pulling her out. She wouldn’t even let Ji-soo go down on her after that, instead insisting that she just suck on her prosthetic phallus, a symbolic act which she found sexier.
So she did what she had to do. She deleted all their messages, their photos, and cancelled their future plans for visits. She changed the dates for her next trip to Korea and switched hotels. When Ji-soo texted and then called, confused and hurt, Gwyn didn’t respond. She was winning now, but the move had cost her her stability. Tears followed, but she didn’t show Ji-soo, just me. She took sad little photos of herself crying and sent them over. She wrote childish poetry that reminded me of the Tumblr era. She said she wanted to document everything, as who knew if she’d ever feel like this again, like how she drew and re-drew that pitch black, red-beaked chough she had spotted without even expecting to. She wanted to preserve every moment; she wanted to end things. In long WhatsApp messages, she told me that she had never felt worse, but she couldn’t take the chance of waking up in the afterlife with the clarity that her deceased body, clumped into the corner of her bathroom floor, would be laid out on the losing side. Ji-soo would think horribly untrue thoughts, such as “my dear Gwyn couldn’t bear to live without me,” when really what Gwyneth Paltrow, my dear troubled friend, couldn’t live with was that her ex would think such a thing at all.
Since she couldn’t kill herself, she went to Paris instead.
On that gloomy trip to the City of Lights, we stood long-faced in slow-moving queues to see paintings of random women and men, who, I’ll give them this, seemed happier than us. We shuffled together with hundreds of other tourists, in and out of metro stations, up and down piss-stained, spit-stained, stain-stained stairs, past beggars and hustlers, tourists who walk on the left side, tourists who walk on the right, locals who stop suddenly, smeared spots of dog shit from the spoiled and untrained COVID dogs. Only in Paris can shit on the street be a sign of a city healing.
We drank long-faced at short, crowded bars, gulping down ten euro pints in the touristy parts of an already touristy city. I had spent so much money on stupid things: a side car tour of Paris, with Gwyn riding bitch while wearing a black beret, an old-timey photo of us taken in front of the Sacré-Cœur, a second black beret for Gwyn after she lost the first one, a macaron cooking session, a treat for her gluten free heart, which was pointless as we spent most mornings with her hunched over, inflamed and achy due to non-gluten-free shots we had ordered the night before.
And then there was the problem of the Asians. Busloads of them, seemingly following us from the Eiffel Tower to Notre Dame to Moulin Rouge to the Sacré-Cœur. They walked around in their berets, in their long, heavy black coats, holding up cameras, snapping photos, moving like schools of fish.
“Christ,” she had said, on our trip through Montmartre. “There are so many Koreans here. They all remind me of her.”
For the rest of her short visit, I pointed out Asian women, but only the ones that looked nothing like her ex: short, stocky, sun-beaten, wide-nosed. “Is that her?” The offenses we make against others to make a friend smile a bit.
But all of that is in the past. Things have changed, we assured each other leading up to the Copenhagen trip, our third, and though we didn’t know it at the time, final reunion.
I was the one who chose Copenhagen. I’m drawn to the northern, chilly (socially and climatically) countries of Europe the way others are drawn to the sun-warmed beaches of Bali. I feel most myself with a coat buttoned up to the collar. She had no opinion one way or the other. She simply wanted to meet, for me to see the new and improved her, to show me the new additions to her photo album of progress, to explain her five year plan of finally getting the life she wants, the one she deserves, a life that no one would abandon, for us to get drunk and crazy as we did back in those first days in Seoul, before all those life-changing things that could have happened to us happened.
A modern, fully-equipped apartment in Nørrebro
I.
Noah, the owner of the one-bedroom apartment at 18 Meinungsgade, which I’m renting for the weekend with Gwyn, met me at the front door as part of the check-in process. I’m used to self-check-ins, popping keys out of metal lockboxes planted somewhere discreet or creative, like the Airbnb I had stayed at in Florence, which I visited in the peak hot, crowded European summer for a friend’s wedding. That host had stuck a lockbox on the axle of a wheel-less bike wedged behind a dumpster and wished me a happy stay over Airbnb’s messaging service.
“I like to do check-ins in person,” Noah explained as he welcomed me into his home. “There’s a stigma in this neighborhood of turning apartments into Airbnbs. We don’t want to be like something in Barcelona where it’s Airbnbs all down the hall. You’ve seen the photos. Ugly lock boxes stacked on top of each other. In fact, if anyone asks who you are, you can just say you’re a friend of my sister’s.”
This wasn’t a secondary residence that Noah had bought to rent out. It was Noah’s home, where he lives with his infant son. The closet is full of their clothes and personal items. The walls are covered in vinyl records, books, and family photos. He is more comfortable with someone staying here after he’s met them person.
We took our shoes off at the door, both of us in thick, cozy grey socks. It’s cooler in Copenhagen than in Paris, which is one of the reasons why I chose this city for a weekend trip in August. I can’t stand Parisian summers. When the temperatures start to rise, I open up Airbnb and look for an escape I can afford. I’m already planning my summer 2026 escape out of the city, maybe up to Oslo, but also, if you go south enough, like Cape Town, you wind up in another country’s winter.
“I started renting out the apartment after my divorce,” Noah said, as he walked me through the kitchen and opened the overhead cabinets to show me his extensive spice collection, the espresso machine, the French press, and the induction stove, all of which were “free to use.”
Noah, as was the trend throughout Western and Northern Europe, married late in life, after checking off the must-dos he had assigned himself, the necessary steps to become a man ready to have a wife, start a family, which included:
Earning his master’s from ITU in Digital Design and Communication, though he really had his heart set on the Rhode Island School of Design.
Establishing his career in user design, first by working his way up at a respected brand, and then by becoming a freelancer who ran his own business.
Saving enough for a down payment on an apartment, putting 20% down, with the rest financed between a loan from his bank and a realkreditlån.
Having various and varied sexual and intimate relationships, experiences that stretched him, literally and figuratively he joked, so that when he looked someone in the eyes and told them he loved them, he knew exactly what he meant when by “I” and by “love.” (He forgot, even with his careful planning, to make sure he understood the “you.”)
He did all of these, and still, what a mess he had found himself in. House poor, raising a child half on his own, which he guessed is always the case, even when you’re married, half alone, or alone half the time, but he never wanted to be a dad who has to bundle up their child, bike them across town, and drop them off at the other half of the family.
After buying his ex-wife out of the apartment, he rents the place, every now and then, to help him with the mortgage, staying at a friend’s couch nearby as strangers occupy his home.
I felt like I was auditioning. He needed me to prove that I was respectable, that Gwyn, who wouldn’t arrive until much later, that is my friend who he would never meet, and so he could only judge her through me, through how I presented myself, thinking if he knew the man then he could know the type of people the man associated with, birds of a feather sort of thing, was also respectable. Upstanding. Clean.
“I’ve lived out of Airbnb’s in Seoul, Sofia, Vienna, Tbilisi, Annecy, Paris, and more,” I said. “Florence. Bucharest. Krakow. Bangkok.” You can trust me, I was saying.
I told him that several Airbnb’s hosts had messaged me privately and asked me to stay longer, which was only a little lie: just one host had asked as much, Manana in Tbilisi, who wanted me to keep renting the long corridor studio apartment on Giorgi Akhvlediani, next to a gay club, one of Tbilisi’s few, and a Russian bar, and a Russian cafe, and another Russian bar. I don’t like to dwell on regrets, though I’m proud to say I’ve lived enough to have a few, but one of my big ones is not taking dear Manana, who welcomed me into her Airbnb with a freshly cooked lunch, up on her offer, not staying where rent was only $550 a month, where I could walk down the street and get an Aperol Spritz to go for $5, where I was only five minutes from where Sasha lived. I’ve thought about returning, but of course, that itself is not really an option. My friends who have remained in Tbilisi say it’s changed, and not for the better. And Sasha, last I heard, was living somewhere in Morocco, married, if you can believe it.
When I stopped talking, I expected Noah to say either, yes, you’re respectable, you’re the perfect guest, you can stay here, sit and sleep on our furniture, use my body wash and tea-tree shampoo or I’m sorry, but you’re not worthy of my home. Instead, he simply nodded, and then showed me where the trash goes, the little notch he made on the shower faucet to signal when hot water turns to scalding, and then he shook my hand and walked to the door to put his shoes back on.
“You said you’ve stayed in Paris?” He asked me, bracing himself with one hand on the doorway.
“It’s where I live now.”
“My wife and I visited there years ago. I went back last year on my own. It’s changed, hasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. I’ve only lived there for a little over a year myself, but I could tell that Noah would not be able to return to the Paris he had once known.
II.
After arriving in a new city, I like to take a shower, whether it’s morning, afternoon, or night. A baptismal ritual to wash off where I came from, along with any and all interactions that I had made on the journey: from the bus to the metro to the tram to the plane, repeat.
Refreshed and pink-splotched, with one of Noah’s plush forest green towels wrapped around my waist, and a thinner, white towel draped over my shoulders, I wet-footed through the apartment, getting myself oriented and doing the most innocent of snooping.
In the kitchen, which was joined with the dining room, there were photos on the wall of him and his son. There were piss-poor drawings of rocket ships and a dinosaur (perhaps?) done in crayon, framed and centered on the most prominent wall like the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. There was a photo of him, his son, and his ex, hung on the pillar furthest from the room, partially hidden by a long-stemmed drooping plant hung from the ceiling. There was one of those mid-century modern wardrobes full of vinyl records. I went through some of the sleeves and sent photos to my dad back home, who I haven’t seen for nearly two years.
Here on the large kitchen table — more like an oblong conference table where meetings are held about the strategic vision of the project — Gwyn and I will play a version of Scattergories. On pieces of paper, creased and torn smoothly from my travel notebook, we will come up with a list of categories: movies before the 1980s, diseases, things you pack, European sports teams, things you fear, dog breeds. Here she’ll tell me about her five-year plan, to become fluent in Korean, to never be misunderstood again in that country, and to buy property in Wales that she can rent out, so she can travel as much as she wants, so she can bring back a woman and put her in a home of their own.
I moved to the living room, which was half living room, half play room, with a small little desk where Noah’s son can draw and take his lunch while his dad sits on the long, skinny couch against the back wall, and watches his tv, the same couch where Gwyn and I will sit on the last night of our trip, enough space between us for two people, exhausted by the city and each other, and watch a Danish film, no subtitles.
In the bedroom, there’s Noah’s small bed, which Gwyn and I will share, separated by individual duvets. Pushed directly up against the bed is a crib, wooden and tall. On Saturday, Gwyn will get piss-drunk on the Copenhagen Ultimate Pub Crawl, hosted by Esteban from Ecuador. I’ll leave early. We had first met years ago on a pub crawl in Seoul. That’s how I had met most of the friends I had made in my travels, though admittedly I talk to fewer and fewer of them these days, and soon I know I won’t talk to any. We never had much in common except for being strangers in a strangeland. That’s the problem with Gwyn and I in Copenhagen, it’s too familiar. We want to get away from each other. I’ll wake up that night to a sassy buzzer: long buzz, long buzz, three short buzzes, long buzz. In comes Gwyn, smiling like she had snuck in. “You have hairy legs,” she says to me, pointing at my hairy legs. She strips down to her underwear and tells me not to get any ideas, her left boob, the smaller one, poking out. “God, what a stupid night. Stupid people. All of them. Young kids. Did you know how young they are?” She’ll recount for me who made out with whom and who made it to the last bar. Her thinness is striking. Her chin, an unearthed fossil. Deep clavicles form hollowed ponds beneath her shoulders, a back arched and curved like some elongated alien birthed from a cramped pod. The only fat on her is her belly, a little pouch that is ballooning with all the alcohol she’s thrown back, a celiac girl processing gluten for the first time in months. “I’m such a fucking idiot,” she’ll say. “I blew everything. I want to text her. You know it’s day now in Seoul.” She’ll get in bed, hold onto her phone, then get out of it, pace back and forth, then get back in, then she’ll give me the phone. She’ll start laughing at herself and say she’s being a baby. “Look, here is where I belong,” she’ll say, throwing one leg over the crib and climbing in. “Look, look, take a photo.”
III.
I spend my last day in Copenhagen alone. Gwyn and I have nothing to say to each other; it’s not anger, it’s a lack of interest. She has her five-year plan, of which nothing in Copenhagen is helping with, except to illustrate the kind of life she does not want.
Me, I have Paris, who I’ve been thinking of leaving again. I had tried to leave her twice before. The first time, I got as far as Latvia, into the arms of a married woman, and then another married woman. How’s that for a sign? The next time only as far as Rouen, where I stayed celibate in a sort of self-appointed hermitage, reading the trial records of Jeanne d’Arc, then the Collected Letters of Flaubert, what a slut he was in the Orient, and learning how to moonwalk via a YouTube tutorial in my Airbnb, which was a stone’s throw away from the high-spired, chalk-white plastered Church of Saint-Maclou.
When I came back to Paris for the second time, I texted her to let her know I was in town, staying in the 13th. Chinatown. Pathetic. I wanted to make it sound like I had left for a reason. That I was exploring new areas. That these moves of mine were intentional. She said she was with someone, but I could come by later. I waited outside on the steps until they were done. Then she buzzed me in. I passed him on the stairwell, faceless, with a heavy, musky scent, whereas my cologne was always more floral and spring-like. She let me into her apartment and told me to make some coffee as she showered. I took my clothes off without being told; she has a rule about outside clothes, and slipped into a pair of pajamas she keeps in the hallway storage. She lives in a small studio on the 7th floor (by French reckoning) of a servants’ building in Montmartre. When she comes back out, fresh and clean, she looks tired. In the shadows, you could be forgiven for thinking she’s young, but under the overhead light, you’ll see. Strands of grey hair throughout. Yellowed teeth. A heaviness in her thighs, breasts, and neck. She asks me how long I’ll stay this time. She’s bored. The soles of her feet are rough. Her tongue tastes like cigarettes.
Perhaps I could leave Paris for Copenhagen. Wider, cleaner streets. I like the way people dress here. I like the beer. Their chunky words have weight. The pastries. You can have the best croissant of your life in Copenhagen, but it’ll cost you 6 euros and you’ll wait for fifteen minutes. Or you can have a good croissant in Paris, for 1.5, on the go. Which do you pick? I have photo after photo of the cyclists in Copenhagen. A parade of bicycles every morning, afternoon, and evening, like the traffic patterns of Arizona highways during rush hour. The city’s pulse. In the bike lane, you’ll see, side by side, an executive in a dark navy suit, a brown leather satchel strapped across his back, an Indian delivering Vinted packages and Amazon boxes, a little kid, backpack clasped tight, on his way to school. They move in such a rhythm, how do they even get started?