THIS IS THE GLYPTOTEK, or Glyptoteket, the leading antiquities museum in the Nordics. There is a bright atrium here, with indoor palms, sculptures of Roman generals, stone noses missing, statues of Greek goddesses, their legs and arms broken off. There is a gift shop with art deco journals and at the cafe, you can get a delicious chicken salad on a croissant and fresh orange juice. This is where I spend my days admiring Baumann’s painting of Mother Denmark.
It was here that my old school chum Thwaits arrived with his Lebanese wife Carla. Thwaits had gone gray in the years since I’d last seen him. He was wearing sunglasses. Carla had never really spoken to me, though I had known her most of my life. She was always apart, in a different circle. They had twin girls, both of them still infants, but they both looked Japanese. Japanese twins. Maybe it was some recessive gene? Had the ancient Phoenicians been trading with the Okinawans? Maybe Lebanese looked like Japanese as children? They were swaddled for the autumn in fluffy wool coats. But how to get to the second floor? I had forgotten about these things, the logistics of transporting children. I offered to assist. I took one of the twins.
We went up.
At the same time, on the top floor of the Helsinki Central Station my daughter and her professor were waiting for me to arrive. I was supposed to interview the professor. He was reviewing his notes in his office, a warmly lit, comfortable space. My daughter was taking notes. The professor had gray hair, so gray it almost had a purple tinge to it. He looked like Björn Ulvaeus. He was dictating notes to my daughter. She was wearing a woolen sweater and writing as the scientist dictated. I was helping my friend with his children in the Glyptotek.
As we climbed the steps, we began to pass other old schoolmates. Mike Masterson came down with his family entourage. Small girls in white dresses, his wife by his side. And MacDougal was there too. He was also wearing sunglasses. Why was half of the Class of ’98 in the Glyptotek? Were sunglasses the mark of the embittered middle-aged man? “Did you see MacDougal?” I asked Thwaits. “Oh, yeah, I saw him in the lobby,” he said. There was a tiredness in his voice. It’s tiring to be a father, especially when you are getting started in your forties and you have Japanese twins with a Lebanese woman. Thwaits had been carrying one of the girls all this time. When we reached the second floor, I handed the other twin over to Thwaits and Carla said, “Come with me, I want to show you something.” What could it be? Was it the impressionist paintings of Gauguin? He had lived in Copenhagen with his wife Mette Gad.
“Here,” said Carla. She pulled my hand and placed it within her black blouse. She continued walking, her chunky black hair bobbing about. “But we can’t,” I told her. “You’re with Thwaits.” It was awfully tender and soft and smooth underneath that black blouse of hers. I felt myself relax, I felt myself give in to touch. Give in, give in, a voice said. Remember Christmases in Copenhagen? And the sounds of brass bands playing Christmas songs on the Strøget? And Christmas lights dangling? She just kept walking. In Helsinki Central Station, Professor Ulvaeus was still dictating. My daughter was there wondering where her father was. Where was he?
I FIRST MET KAISA KUSLAPUU in my yard one summer. She was standing outside a neighbor’s apartment and wearing a red sweatshirt with a picture of Mickey Mouse on it. I had no idea who she was, and for a while I didn’t even know she was a musician. She was just the “girl with the Mickey Mouse sweatshirt.” Later I learned that these women who were hanging out in the yard were 6hunesseq, and I was invited to a concert. This took place at the Jaani kirik, or Saint John’s Church. The four singers performed from the choir loft, so that we could never see them during the performance. Only when it was over did they emerge, peering down. The loft reminded me of the deck of a ship. I thought they resembled ship captains.
Kaisa was one of the captains.
During this time, my youngest daughter began living with her mother in Võru, a town in the southeast corner of Estonia. Upstairs lived a very energetic older woman — I later learned she was 90 — who spent her days tending to the house’s gardens in spring, shovelling snow in winter, or raking the grass spotless in the autumn. There was something odd about the way she spoke Estonian to me when we passed each other in the stairwell. She would say kuis muudu instead of mis moodi — “what way” — or mine õkva instead of mine otse, “go straight.”
I was sure my Estonian was terrible, but then I learned she was speaking the Võro language. To understand the Võro language, I had to open my ears more. I had to listen and be patient.
It wound up preparing me for Kaisa’s new album vaŕo because Kaisa is from Võru and she decided to make an album in the local language. You have to step back here and appreciate how rare this is. On one hand, we have a very versatile musician and composer, with an incredible singing voice, and on the other hand, she is combining with her finesse for writing jazz and classical influenced pop with a language that is spoken by about 75,000 people.
In this way, vaŕo is already a goldmine for linguists and musicologists.
But the achievements of this album are not just conceptual. When searching for a metaphor, I kept seeing a toy box. Each time you pull one of these songs out of this “toy box,” you discover something new about it. You hold it up, inspect it from different angles. Kaisa’s songs are like that. They are dynamic, they are multidimensional, they are creative. Each one is its own world. You can get lost in these songs, move around in them a bit, and allow your mind to explore. The styles are diverse. Some are more like ballads, others have runosong cadences. Some really swing, some (like “Viktor Viktooria”) have an almost punk-like edginess to them.
Most are on the soft side. Kaisa evem calls her style, “võrosoft.” She told me in an interview that for this project, she wanted to do something for herself, and something in the Võru language, a language she heard all around her as a child. To assemble the songs, she wrote her own lyrics or set the words of writers like Raimond Kolk and Kauksi Ülle to her own music. She also discovered a kind of intimacy in singing in Võru, one that felt different from Estonian.
“The Võro language is in my DNA,” she told me. “My ancestors spoke it.”
For me, as a listener, it was interesting to hear familiar words and phrases in songs. These were the same words the old granny in the stairwell might shout at me — Kuis muudu? Mine õkva! — but now rendered in a lyrical way, against a gently unfolding musical musicscape. The songs drift through you, weaving meditatively, dredging up memories and country melancholy.
The album is collaborative. Eleven different musicians were involved. You can hear Katariina Tirmaste’s flute or Naomi McCarroll-Butler’s clarinet and whistle. There were some Canadians involved in the recording of vaŕo, too, most notably multi-instrumentalist Sam Gleason and bassist Alan Mackie. Some of the tracks were recorded in Tartu; others in Toronto. The guitar leans indie — is that Johnny Marr I hear in there? — the bass is deep, supple, and supportive.
Each has surprises, like the sprawling “Huug,” which runs for 7 minutes and 24 seconds, and takes the listeners through different experiences to the backing sound of an organ, as if they were wandering through a village at night. My personal favorite became “Inglikuur” (“Angel’s Choir”), set to lyrics by Raimond Kolk, and this was the first song Kaisa played during her concert at Heino Elleri Muusikakool in Tartu on 5 November. It was a very black and cool Saturday night, and the evening seemed to sparkle with the promise of something. There she was, accompanied by Gleason on guitar and Mackie on bass, and Marti Tärn on percussion. Seated next to me, was a representative from the Võro Instituut, who was wearing a green pin. “Võru is not a dialect,” she told me. “It is its own language.” I told her about the old Võru woman shouting õkva and how I first came to meet “the girl in the Mickey Mouse sweatshirt.”
I had wondered, sitting in the front row there, before Kaisa went on, if she could pull off these songs live. The recordings were so rich, that I didn’t know if a four-piece band could do justice to them. But they did, and they made it look easy. Afterward, Kaisa emerged wearing her cloak and beads, and people hugged her, brought her flowers, and had her autograph new LPs. I thought, “This is how new music reaches people: just like this, with a concert and a hug after.”
Kaisa Kuslapuu on stage with guitarist Sam Gleason, bassist Alan Mackie, and drummer Marti Tärn in Võru in early November. Photo by Aap-Eerik Lai.
THE OLD MAN had been working on the plane for months. It was his own design. He spent hours sanding its wings in a brick building on the North Fork the locals called the airplane factory. He was like a Newfoundland shipbuilder of old, constructing his own flying machine in that prodigious, determined manner that is common throughout Yankeedom. To test the new aircraft, he had selected me and a red-haired woman, who were to fly it over the Long Island Sound up through Connecticut and Massachusetts and up into Maine. Of course, I said yes. There was nothing better to do.
But why Maine? The old man didn’t say. He was actually a mechanic during the working hours, of solid build, hands like metal dustpans. One day, it was ready. I bought protective outerwear at the local marine supplies store, I made sure to bring my phone charger, some snacks, a good book to read for when we landed. If we landed. It was a misty day, and I wondered how we would even be able to find Maine if we couldn’t see it. And how were we supposed to land? In some farmer’s cornfield? “Don’t worry,” said the red-headed woman. “Leave that part to me.”
She was wearing her flight jacket and a leather cap with goggles. She looked like Lucky Lindbergh. But who would sit in front and who would sit in back? That part was never decided. Who was the pilot of this wooden aircraft, cut from planks of beech and pine? She sat upfront; the wind was puffing her red hair about. We were set to start from the top of Radio Flyer Hill in New Suffolk. And like that, the plane rolled down the hill and smoothly transitioned to the air, gliding swiftly over the whitecapped waves of the sound. The wind took us higher and higher, and soon I could see the dark pines of New England, standing around like old farmers.
The old man sat by his radio, waiting eagerly for our radio transmission from Maine, sipping a celebratory glass of scotch whiskey. What would we do when we landed in Maine, me and the red-headed pilot? Where would we go? We had no place to sleep; no one was waiting for us there. Maybe we could find a barn nearby and dream off the thrill of flight in a warm hayloft.
A TROPICAL BUNGALOW. Somewhere with rocky coves, sun-bleached white churches, palm trees, chattering lizards. Klaudia stands opposite me in a spare room. Dark wooden floors, a high ceiling with a fan spinning round lazily as if the electricity was just turned off. Another power outage. Light splashes through the windows, catching on her tufts of gold hair, like strands of water reeds. She is illuminated, her blue eyes are smarting as if she has been told the secret of the universe, too vast to even comprehend. “It’s just,” she whispers. “It’s just …”
We kiss. “I have something for you,” I tell her. From my pocket, I pull out a banana. She falls to her knees immediately, slowly peeling back its yellow skin, pulling its pink fruit into her mouth. “I love bananas,” she says. “And this one is so sweet and ripe.” “I picked it fresh this morning,” I tell her. “Just for you.” “Delicious,” she says, devouring it. A pearl of a tear rolls down her cheek.
For whatever reason, she is wearing a tan-colored business jacket. A short skirt of a light pink color. Later, I escort her to a seat on the balcony. I push her gently into a seat. I say, “You really need to relax, Miss De la Gardie.” With that, I remove the pink skirt. “Wait,” she says, pressing a finger to my lips. “I also have something for you.” From a nearby cooler, she pulls out a strawberry ice cream. She holds it between her legs, and I begin to taste it. It’s the best ice cream I have ever had, even better than the gourmet flødeis I had in Skagen so long ago, when I watched the North Sea flow into the Kattegat, and the faint smell of smoked fish was in the air everywhere, even in the ice cream, just like the one that was melting now on my tongue.
*
After the strawberry banana exchange, we relaxed by watching television at her home. My daughter was there and so was her mother. Was this Eurolaul? Klaudia was curled up on a couch like a fat and content cat, dreaming of bananas and strawberries. At that moment, there was a knock at the door. In walked the Estonian police in their blue uniforms. Her ex-boyfriend was led in. “It’s time for your daily assessment,” one of the policemen said. Then they handcuffed him to two hooks on the wall and began to draw blood. They scanned him with instruments I had never seen before. He was silent as they went through these procedures.
“Toshiro Makimura,” the police said. “You are under court order to remain still while we collect evidence in your ongoing case.”
Her ex blinked at the police and muttered a few curses under his breath. A yakuza. Why had she fallen for a Japanese yakuza? Klaudia had a good head on her shoulders and a good heart in her breast, but she was continuously drawn to these sinister, underworld characters. “He reminded me of my stepdad,” she once told me. “Well,” I announced, “I think I need to get some fresh air.” I stepped outside the house; the sun was setting in Estonia. There was a lovely orange and purple streak across the horizon. It fell among the EU-mandated recycling bins and new, EU-funded streets. A faded poster of Kaja Kallas was peeling from a cement garage.
At that moment, a silver car roared up. It was a 1970s Lincoln Continental, or some model that looked just like one. The car nearly mowed me down but stopped a few centimeters from my legs. My back was pressed up against the Kallas garage. A Japanese man with his hair dyed orange stuck his head out the window. He said, “Don’t fuck with Japanese,” and then roared into the falling sun. This was my new lot, the dangerous life of sex with a yakuza woman. Inside, Klaudia sat carefree on the sofa, watching Eurolaul. Her yakuza ex was still being probed and bled by the Estonian police. My daughter sat at a table, assembling puzzle pieces. Klaudia stretched and yawned a big cat yawn.
‘I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU,’ my father said, ‘but I could really go for some burgers and fries.’ Together, we rounded up the troops: me, my three daughters, and a small toy poodle named Frodo, and began our walk into town. It was a cool, shadowy evening in America; the sidewalks were paved all the way down to the major intersection that doubled as the town center.
In reality, there was an old Presbyterian church, the Apple Bank, the new and improved firehouse and some commercial buildings. Starbucks, the true epicenter, was a way off in another shopping center. That was where others gathered to mingle and report on whose kid got into what Ivy League and thus was assured a swift pathway to financial success and class prestige.
When we reached the Long Island Burger Kiosk, we could see a pre-election pep rally was taking place. How had we not heard about this? How had we wandered in here? It was a vast hall; all its seats were full. On stage, there sat a line of recently fired generals. Admonishing them was the Secretary of War Pete Kegbreath, his silver pompadour glistening in the lights, his face sparkling with sweat.
He was saying, “To all of you, I would ask, ‘Cui bono?’ Who is benefitting from woke transgenderism? I’ll tell you who, the plastic surgeons who cut off men’s dicks and call it ‘gender affirmation surgery.’ The hormone makers, who sell you estrogen!”
With that, he unsheathed his own syringe. “And that’s why we have decided to come up with our own war serum, to counter the effects of transgender wokery. It’s laden with testosterone and other minerals and compounds that every warfighter needs to fight wars.”
He approached one of the generals and injected him with the serum. The old general began to shiver in his seat but otherwise was indifferent to what was happening. In his soul, he had already given up.
When the president came onto the stage, there were cheers and boos. Rory Lapp, the bestselling Estonian writer and poet, was in the middle of the melee. I saw him stand atop a chair, with his pink dinner party sweater tied around his waist, and thrust his middle finger into the air.
Then Rory began to shout, with an Estonian accent, “Fuck you!” Others began to join him. “Fuck you!” From the middle of the crowd, a dreadlocked Rastafarian baker from the small Estonian town of Viljandi stood. He shouted out, “Hail Satan!” The crowds began to shout after him, “Hail Satan! Hail Satan! Hail Satan!” Secretary of War Kegbreath nodded. He injected another general, who began to convulse under the blinding lights on the flag-draped stage.
In the corner, the president was quietly dancing.
The funny thing is, we just watched this go on the whole time, transfixed by the spectacle. Even the little toy poodle watched curiously. Soon our orders of burgers and fries were ready. Crisp East End potato fries, seasoned with sea salt. Is there anything better in this world?
THERE’S SOMETHINGTO BE SAID for public pools, especially ones like these that are way out in the open, drawing in the rays of the sun. Even the faint smell of chlorinated water is pleasant, as are the bath-warm waters that spread around you. How had we arrived here, and who were these people? There were several tour buses that picked us up at the road stop. I stood in one of them, clinging to a greasy metal pole. The others were newer vehicles; this one was a vintage double-decker, the kind Michael Caine rode in Alfie. What’s it all about, Alfie?
It was standing room only. I held on tight. And then here we were, at this retreat in the countryside. I was lying on my back in a pool. From the surface of the water, I could see a house at the top of a green hill. Just a plain country house. Was this Shrublands from Thunderball? She arrived next, dressed in her brown jacket. “There you are!” she said. She unzipped it and came into the pool in a polka-dot one-piece swimsuit. She was grinning at me the whole time, as if she had at last discovered El Dorado. I was terrified. Remember that night? Remember how you had to think of other women to get through that night? And here she was.
She was coming.
She began to swim my way; on impulse I went to the other side of the pool. I hoisted myself out. She kept swimming my way, with that half-maniacal, half-happy look on her face. “It’s you!” Swimming, swimming. Why wouldn’t she just let me swim in peace, alone? Remember that night? Headache, nausea. Somewhere, The Who were playing “I’m Free.” I’m waiting for you to follow me. No! The rough sound of Pete Townshend’s guitar. Where was it cutting in from? A poolside stereo? The silver eagle moon? And freedom tastes of reality. Run, run, run!
I SAW MARCOS at a party in the Old Town. I was standing at the top of the steps, and he was coming up. We saw each other just for a moment, but I recognized him right away. He looked just as he did in college. He looked just as he did in his obituary. “Marcos,” I said. “Is that you?”
Before I saw Marcos, I had been kissing a TalTech postdoc from Nigeria named Omolola, or “Lola” for short. She was a woman who knew her pipettes. She spent most of her days in laboratories. There was a clean, cool, clinical edge to Lola. She wore her braids up in a colorful headscarf. She had been showing me some photos on her phone when we began to kiss, just like that. Why it happened, I don’t know. She was my friend Stig’s latest girlfriend, but there was a high level of attrition in his romantic life. Was she a rebound, or was he rebounding from a rebound? She was just one in a series of basketballs being dribbled across some stuffy court.
Lola was an excellent kisser. I wondered how often these spur-of-the-moment make-out sessions happened. Maybe they were going on all the time. The second you left the bank, that young financial advisor was kissing that grizzled old man. Bolt drivers turned to suck face with their latest fare. Flight attendants from Finnair reached over to deliver a cup of blueberry juice and then … There is something about surrendering up to someone, freely, on a whim. One minute, you are at a party, the next you are locking lips with your friend’s girlfriend. Until you see your dead college friend walk by, as if you were in some turn-of-the-century cafeteria.
“Marcos? Marcos? Is that really you?” Marcos and I had been in the same left-wing student group in college. We were card-carrying Young Socialists. He was the son of a Latin American economic policy advisor. After college, he had become more deeply left-wing. Some said he was stockpiling weapons. For an eventual battle royale with the federal government. But when he was about 40, he died. Nobody knew why. Nobody said. We only saw the obituary online, with that smile of his. He looked just like he did now, at a party in the Old Town. “Marcos!” I called to him. “Where are you going? Why are you here?” The Marcos-looking man shook his head, as if he didn’t know who I was. Maybe it wasn’t Marcos at all. No, it probably wasn’t him.
THAT WAS A DAY. It was the seventh of May. It was gray, mildly humid, the exhausted underbelly of a spring that had otherwise been pined after all winter. I know the date because I sent a letter on May 7. It read, “I’m sitting here in Tartu at her cafe, it has been completely redone.” There was more on top, but some of it is too incriminating to go into, even in this kind of story.
How had I even arrived at the place? My path was certain, to cut across one street, then another. In Tartu, the streets are wide and obvious. Follow them down to the bus station. If you have time to spare, wander through the market and along the river, take a picture, mind your own business. But while my mind was minding its own business, my feet carried me in another direction, here.
Why did I come here? She probably drank coffee in this cafe every day. Multiple times, in fact.
“I once sat right here with Fred Jüssi,” I wrote to my friend. “Just like this. And he took me aside, and said, ‘All of the things you think are so important in this life actually aren’t.’ Or something like that.” The old naturalist had told me other things, like how he knew when to initiate love and when to break it. “When it’s time to burn it all!” I wondered why Jüssi had told me those things.
But this was a love that didn’t seem burnable. It outlasted others. She was the woman you think about when you are in the arms of other women. You stare at the ceiling, her name on your lips.
I had gone to the cafe because I knew she worked there. There was thus a chance I might see her. “Admittedly stalkerish,” I wrote. “At the same time, I just wanted to cross paths with her, or more like put myself in her path, just to see what happens. I am curious.” This was my reasoning.
I wasn’t really dangerous, anyway, I thought. I was just sitting there drinking carbonated water.
Someone decided to play the Bee Gees at that moment, as if the whole pathetic scene couldn’t get any more weird and ridiculous. It was “More Than a Woman.” “But she is more than a woman,” I typed. I imagined her appearing in slow-motion, her hair glistening like the cosmos.
“She is young, but she knows that I like her and seems unfazed by it,” I wrote away in the cafe. “And I specifically like her for that reason. No need to discuss anything. It’s been understood.”
Or so I imagined, because she wasn’t there that day, and I didn’t have the nerve to seek her out.
I left the cafe thinking about that scene in Tender is the Night where Dick follows Rosemary to the set of her latest film and calls her from a phone booth from around the corner. Where every sane, sober-thinking man would have said no, he said yes, on total impulse. I knew that story was true, at least at heart, and was really about F. Scott Fitzgerald and the actress Lois Moran. “I went there because I knew Fitzgerald would do exactly that,” I later confided in my friend. “Because Fitzgerald wasn’t always a good person, but at least he was alive. Fitzgerald would have gone.”
*
When did life become literature? Or had it always been this way? I remember when she first emerged into view, lurking at first on the periphery, just another cafe girl. But slowly, she took shape, the eyes, the lips, the fingers with their silver rings. I could sense her when she brought me my drinks. I didn’t even have to look up, and sometimes when I did, her cheeks were rosy. I measured my affection for her in the reams of sentences these moments produced. My notebook served as a kind of romantic barometer; the better the writing, the deeper the feeling. Fitzgerald would have approved, I thought. Somewhere he was looking down at me, or up at me. Scott. Somewhere he was scribbling into his notebooks about some lovely young woman just like this.
And then one day, while marching back into town, I stepped into the cafe and demanded to know her name. Sometimes I wonder where that impulse came from. She told me her name, of course. This was a name I learned to take very good care of. I would never say it. I kept it hidden away.
Scott Fitzgerald emerged into my world in a similar way. First he was a wispy apparition, later he took full form. The Great Gatsby was compulsory reading in any high school literature course. There, in the halls of a brick high school, deep in the Nineties, our teacher, Mr. O’Connor, who refused to retire, taught us about Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Lost Generation. But I know these faces, I thought. These are people like us. When I looked around the room, I could see them sitting there. It wasn’t hard to imagine Hemingway as the brooding student to my left, with the smart answers. It wasn’t hard to imagine Fitzgerald by the door, a well-dressed preppie, always ready with a poetic line. I knew Fitzgerald before I knew him. He had just been waiting.
After Mr. O’Connor’s heart attack, we had a succession of substitute teachers. One of them, a gray-haired woman who wore a red turtleneck, started to call me “F. Scott” because of my style. I took it as the greatest compliment. To be a proper F. Scott, one needed a Zelda, a lifelong muse. Wasn’t it Scott Fitzgerald who taught me that people were material? That experiences were to be transformed into story? Scott shamelessly stole from his wife’s diary, sometimes word for word. There’s the “beautiful little fool” line that he smuggled into The Great Gatsby. But supposedly whole sections of 1922’s The Beautiful and Damned were lifted from Zelda Fitzgerald’s diary.
Scott was outraged when Zelda published her own book, Save Me the Waltz in 1932. She had used up all the material that he had been harvesting for his novel in progress Tender is the Night.
As Zelda, who provided counterpoint to Scott’s story arc, wrote, “Plagiarism begins at home.”
One day, as I was passing the cafe in autumn, I saw her in the window. When she looked up, there was a kind of oceanic shift in all the big waters around me. Sometimes I would write all day there by the window, and she would work too. “Well,” I would say, “hakkab jälle pihta.” “Jõudu tööle,” she would whisper and float off. Sometimes I would see her wandering around town, wearing sunglasses, listening to music. She would disappear around a corner, and I would watch her reflection in the windows she passed, until she vanished completely. But I was happy.
*
Then there was that day on the bus, the bus day, which happened at the end of August one summer when we were both heading to Tartu. I had disavowed any hopes of pursuing her, or anyone for that matter, but there she was. She sat across from me. I was too nervous to move. I wouldn’t even move my head. But other than greeting her, I felt her presence the entire way. I heard her munch on her damned juusturoll, acquired from a supermarket bakery (I often saw her in supermarkets) and the crumpling of the greasy paper in her hands as she took another bite. I could almost taste the crumbs as she did. I could make out just at the periphery of my vision, the whiteness of her shoes. She always wore those shoes. So many Estonians had shoes like those.
She was so ordinary in every way, and I would see women from behind everywhere who looked just like her. But none of them were her. She was sitting right there and all I could do was hide in my notebook, writing about her. What do you say to a woman who inspires you to write? Do you give her your messy first drafts? When we exited into the city, loud with traffic and the clanging of drills and jackhammers, we walked a while in the sun. She was going her way, I was going mine. She had exams. I had a conference. “Cool,” she said, blinking up at me. “Not really,” I said. She was just a young woman. What did I expect? Ecstasy? Euphoria? More poetry? I didn’t even know. All of this mythmaking was getting a bit too mythological for its own good. I did feel elated though. I felt a little like Fitzgerald. Later, I told the driver as I watched her once again recede into the streets of the city, “Can you believe I love that girl? I barely know who she is.”
The driver glanced in the rear view mirror. He said nothing back, but he must have understood.
There are only a few recordings of Scott Fitzgerald’s voice, by the way. Some were recorded in California in 1940, the last year of his short life. His voice is just as you would imagine it to be. A breathy tenor that lingers melodiously on the vowels. The voice of an old and dear friend. There is also a film of Fitzgerald in 1922, when he was just 26, the wunderkind of This Side of Paradise, writing at a desk in a garden, the sun against his features, at the height of his powers. Fitzgerald wrote and rewrote. This was his method. He pressed on, no matter the challenge.
Or so I like to think. For this is another myth of Fitzgerald that haunts me, along with his famous drunken antics, such as the time he and Zelda asked guests at a swanky Hollywood party in 1927 to hand over their watches for a magic trick and then went to the kitchen and boiled them in the tomato sauce. That when Fitzgerald awakened from another spree, he put on his tie and sat at his typewriter. Even when Zelda was institutionalized, and Fitzgerald’s career was dead, and he was in debt and living in dollar-a-night hotels in the South, he was still typing. Maybe it isn’t true, but, at his nadir, Fitzgerald did write “Crazy Sunday,” “Babylon Revisited,” and “The Crack-Up.”
*
I don’t believe a muse has to remain one though. She’s never just a heroine, a source of material. No, I think a muse must remain a person. A real person, a flesh-and-blood human being, with weepy moods, highs and lows, career highlights, dreams, traumas, and memories. A person to be cared for, despite all the words that are written about her. For as much as Scott was helping himself to Zelda’s diary for his literary projects, he did love her. When he arrived in California again in 1937, looking for work, and people remarked how his intense eyes appeared as if he was viewing the very openings of hell, I think it was the agony of seeing Zelda institutionalized that made them appear that way. I believe Scott did love Sheilah Graham, the English columnist with a colorful past and with whom he spent the last few years of his life in Hollywood. Scott turned Sheilah Graham into the main character in the novel he was working on, The Last Tycoon. Because to write about someone is to love them too. In a writerly, Scott Fitzgerald kind of way.
Scott died a few days before Christmas in 1940, a chain-smoker who guzzled Coca Cola and had been suffering from alcoholism for years. He stood up in Sheilah Graham’s apartment and dropped dead on the floor, a tragic figure. In the terms of the obtuse Estonian media, the man had what could be called an ootamatu terviserike.
*
One cold winter evening, I found myself on a lonely train platform, surrounded by forest, when a southbound train pulled up for a stop. There she sat. I could see her through the window, totally alone, staring out into the black darkness. How strange, I thought at that moment. To have her delivered to me, at this moment, like this.
First, I went and hid in another wagon on the train. But then I gave myself a little pep talk as the train rattled through the night and she sat there in her seat. “You can only keep running away from yourself for so long,” I lectured myself. “Something put her on this train. Go talk to her.”
Which I did. I wonder what we looked like, the sight of this enormous man seated across from a young woman who was half his size and half his age. The writer, denuded of his pens and notebooks, was forced to make conversation with his muse. She was all there. Her fox-like eyes, her silver rings. She was staring out the windows of wintertime Estonia, lost in her own story. Maybe she was writing poetry in her heart about another young man. Maybe I was some minor character. When we arrived at the station, it was flurrying, frost had formed on the platform. It occurred to me that this was like the scene of a novel. Such a scene demanded good dialogue.
“You know,” I said, affecting my most romantic posturing. “I do happen to like you very much.”
The young woman looked up curiously at the big man in the jacket beside her and said nothing.
“But do you want to know why I like you?”
The young woman shrugged a bit, as if to say, mul pole õrna aimugi. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“I like to watch you when you listen to music,” I said. “You seem to be lost in another world.”
“That’s because music lifts us up,” she whispered. “Music can take us into other dimensions.”
The young woman put on her headphones again after that, tightened her coat, and walked home. I stood there for a while as the snow swept down. My hands were shaking then, both from the cold air and because I had been so bold to live out such a wonderful scene. Fitzgerald himself couldn’t have written it better on a $1,000-a-week screenwriter’s salary. It was just too perfect.
*
The Estonian version of this piece appears in the autumn 2026 edition of Edasi magazine. Special thanks to Robert Westbrook, the son of Sheilah Graham and author of Infinite Lies, who helped me with this story.
I DIDN’T NOTICE her presence until after the execution. Her father had died well, as well as any man could have died that way. At the after-party for the execution, there were representatives from the various ministries present. They were all well-coiffed and well attired. These executions were turning out to be networking opportunities for the politically ambitious. The wine was poured. The flesh was pressed. You might have forgotten that the guillotine’s blade had once again fallen on a poor man’s shaven neck. What even was his crime?
And there she was, standing off to the side, quietly munching on something. Dulcinea, the daughter of a disgraced ex-aristocrat. “I’m sorry about your father,” I told her. She said nothing. For even in this time of mourning, Dulcinea would still not speak to me. Not a word. Not for years. When I expressed my condolences, Dulcinea stared out into space, as if she was vaguely aware of a far-off vibration. She wore a close-fitting linen dress with a gold sash. Her straw-colored hair was done simply but perfectly in the modern fashion. She was sad though.
Later, when I got on the bus back to Tallinn, I noticed her in the back seat, with her brother slumped over sleeping in her lap. He was only eight or nine years old. She stroked his hair and he slept. It was an awful fate. All of their belongings were spread around in bags and boxes.
Again, I said hello, but she said nothing. I began to suspect that I no longer existed on this plane. It was as if I had died too and not yet become aware of it. The day had a cool gray pallor to it as the bus rolled into Kassisaba. Such a grim and dull day. I could see all the houses along the streets. Life moved briskly forward. People had to go to work. People had to live their lives.
At the next stop, Dulcinea, still in her linen dress, woke up her brother and they disembarked. She realized then, in her glacial silence, that she was unable to carry their things. With panic in her blue eyes, she turned to me and said, “Are you coming with us or not?” I was shocked to hear her voice. It was as if I had fallen through the space-time continuum. Naturally, I said yes.
I HID MYSELF at the top of the stairs in a white lookout tower in Porquerolles. I stood at the top of the metal steps, alive in the humidity, not really knowing what would become of me, or how long I’d remain up there. Good thing Linus and Simone came to talk me down. Linus had the appearance of an Irish saint. Simone arrived with her children. Her hair was long and brown and beautiful and she said, “We love you. Everybody loves you. Please come down.” “There’s no sense hiding in a tower in France,” said Linus. “We all have our bouts, but come on.”
I came down the steps, but when I stepped off the last step, I found myself buckled into a seat in the seventh or eighth row of an airplane. We had just landed somewhere. When I looked out the window, I could see it was some place warm, tropical, with palms. It must have been early evening. I could see the sun setting. Celeste came down the aisle with her daughters. She was dressed in her black dress, her curls bobbled everywhere. She instructed them in her calm motherly voice to watch their step as they disembarked. Could she not see me? We had known each other for years. When had I become invisible? Did I have to pretend I didn’t know her, even when we left Estonia? How long would the invisibility spell last? Until the end of time?
Until the end of time. There was a spark of light and the match lit. Out of a vivid darkness I watched the light as it ignited a candle. Then the woman blew the match out, placed it on the bookshelf, and resumed reading her book. The book was Edgar Allan Poe’s. Was it Annabel Lee? She read out the words in the dark library. The shelves of the library were piled high with ancient volumes. I didn’t know who the woman was, but she looked familiar. She was maybe five years older. There was a touch of the young Grace Slick in her, crossed with Françoise Hardy. She wore a red knit sweater dress that ended above her knees. It was embroidered in gold, with strange, zigzagging designs. Her dark, luscious Wonder Woman hair was half up.
“But our love it was stronger by far than the love of those who were older than we,” she read. She stood, book in one hand, candle in the other. I sat beside her looking up. Then I wrapped my arm around her hips and began to caress her. And so I slipped into delicious happiness.
