Skipper turned to Mr. Lake.
“Marvelous to see you again, Mr. Lake. Send our love to Daphne,” she said, emphasizing the word Daphne to a comical extent, a name so categorically unlike our own mothers’—Cecelias, Camillas, Charlottes.
Dickie snorted out loud. I held my breath, waiting to see what Gerry’s father would say. Skipper sounded so insincere, so astonishingly fake, I couldn’t believe she could get away with it.
“Oh, right,” said Mr. Lake, unaware he was the subject of a joke. “Yes, will do.”
Gerry, however, was clearly livid. She stood completely still, one hand on her waist, her hip thrust out, a foot on pointe, the stance of a skater postroutine when they come to an abrupt stop on the ice, her back arching, head tilting back, staring at Skipper.
“I’ll leave you girls to it,” Mr. Lake said. “Bye, love. Have fun.”
He hugged his daughter briefly and was off down the corridor, dragging her empty bag behind him like a sled.
Skipper turned and grinned at Gerry and me.
Her arm curled snugly beneath Dickie Balfour’s elbow, their hips pressed together. I felt a knife slipping between my ribs.
“Bonne nuit, Geraldine,” Dickie said, wiggling her fingers.
Gerry’s face reddened.
“Go fuck ya mum.”
Skipper let out a snort of delight.
“Fuck your mum,” she repeated slowly. Impressed.
Within days the catchphrase caught on like wildfire. The trick, I remember, was to pronounce it just like Gerry.
“Fuck ya mum.”
10
In our first year of marriage Jürgen and I grow increasingly nomadic. First London, then Amsterdam, then Brighton and briefly Berlin, rooming with people we know, or subletting underheated industrial buildings, which double as Jürgen’s studio. Unsurprising, given that when we first met for the magazine interview he was still living in a tent. We move so often we never buy any furniture, our clothes and my laptop spread across the floor. I adapt to this kind of low-level sparseness with surprising ease. While Jürgen sketches, I work on my knees or I type up my stories on my belly, squirming around on dusty wood. The nights we spend at home, which are rare since, despite three years of compulsory home economics lessons at St. John’s, I can’t cook, we sit in bed and eat cereal from two steel bowls Jürgen found in a Chinese supermarket in Charlottenburg. I’ve never been happier. Come laundry day I hang my damp knickers along the handles of his various bikes. Subletting as we do, our bills are always in someone else’s name, we are up and out at the drop of a hat, switching homes, it occurs to me, as frequently as I once moved dorms. Our newlywed tiff has been reduced to a joke, a silly anecdote we bring up at supper parties to amuse our friends. How a crazy woman spat in my face on our honeymoon and called me a cunt.
In America a bellhop wheels our life’s possessions into our hotel room on a brass trolley. We sit on the windowsill, robed, feeding each other grapes like Romans. Far down at street level cars reshuffle themselves along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Work is going surprisingly well for both of us. Jürgen, out of nowhere, has an impressive new commission, a large installation in a public garden, and I have been offered a feature by a Sunday supplement—an interview with a gymnast, one of several victims who have recently spoken out about their coach—a story that could make the cover.
In the morning Jürgen consults a doorman wearing white gloves and a cap who points us in the direction of Millennium Park.
“What’s at the park?” I ask Jürgen.
“Wait and see,” he says.
We crunch through the snow holding hands and staring up at the high-rises. We feel golden, laughing loudly at the yellow signs that announce the Damoclean possibility of falling ice shards. We stroll along the banks of Lake Michigan with the dog walkers and joggers with their foggy breath. Jürgen, standing sideways to the shoreline, tosses a handful of stones across the semifrozen water, the arctic surface creaking and groaning, pebbles skittering across the crusty snow and plopping into the dark polynya beyond. His cheeks are red from cold.
He is so handsome that my cunt aches with desire for him; it actually throbs.
I tug him back in the direction of our hotel bed but Jürgen is insistent.
“Cover your eyes,” he says.
He leads me across the park towards fairground music, my eyes blinkered.
“Surprise.”
He peels back his gloved fingers from my eyes.
Jürgen looks delighted.
“Oh,” I say.
An ice rink.
We drink gluhwein from matching porcelain boots and watch the skaters. Couples in rented boots shuffle on stiff legs, clinging to the edge. Hockey boys bump shoulders, trying to bowl their frat brothers over. Fathers tow long chains of children in padded ski suits and mittens. The pros cruise effortlessly in between, twisting and leaping. In the center a girl in a purple leotard spins on one foot.
I wave as Jürgen steps onto the ice.
He beckons me over to the side.
“Come on, this is your day. I’ll teach you,” he yodels, “you’ll love it.”
I shake my head. I won’t do it, not even for him.
He tries to take my hand and tug me onto the ice.
“No.”
I go rigid.
I tell myself that this has nothing to do with Gerry Lake, that I have never liked the sensation of the earth slipping underfoot. I have a vision of falling and the skate blade slicing like a cheese knife through my fingers.
Jürgen pretends to be downcast.
“Go,” I say, trying to make light of my nerves, “have fun. Go, go, go.”
He waits for a chink in the crowd and pushes off seamlessly, his hands behind his back, rocking smoothly from foot to foot, one boot crossing the other, leaning into the curve. He is a natural of course. His blond hair smoothed to one side, a gentlemanly gait, sweeping gracefully around the more nervous skaters. When the young girl in a purple leotard falls, he holds out his hand and, skating backwards, tows her out of harm’s way. She blushes. He bows and swims back into the shoal.
I watch the purple leotard make her way to the gate and stomp unhappily across the rubber carpet to where I am sitting. She unlaces her boots and slides a guard across each blade, zipping them into a padded case. Her hips are speckled with rhinestones. She must be twelve or thirteen, I guess, only a few years younger than Gerry Lake had been at the time of the scandal.
“You’re very talented,” I say.
The girl shrugs. She slides one arm then the next into her padded winter jacket. Sniffing.
“I fell.”
“I saw. I’m sorry. Are you hurt?”
She shakes her head. Jürgen sweeps past, clowning, waving at me, blowing kisses. The girl goes red. I know exactly how she feels; I can’t believe he’s mine. She wipes her nose with her sleeve, pushes her tiny feet into fleece boots.
“Is he your boyfriend?”
“Husband.”
Her eyes follow Jürgen as he glides easily through the mass of skaters.
“He’s good.”
“Yes.” I nod, hugging myself to keep warm.
“You don’t want to skate?” she asks.
“No.”
The girl shrugs, pulls a pair of gloves out of her pocket, red welts on her fingers like Gerry Lake, from years of tying bootlaces.