The pregnant woman who hadn’t yet spoken said: “What a depressing story! I don’t know why they make movies like that.” She turned and walked away—probably she was going to the women’s locker room. The most pregnant-looking woman waddled after her. Jack was left alone with the aerobics instructor.
“You didn’t say you were doing a little research for a movie, did you?” she asked him.
“No, I didn’t,” he admitted. “This research isn’t for a movie.”
“Maybe you need a guide,” she said. She was at least seven months pregnant, probably eight. Her belly button had popped; like an erect nipple, it poked out against the spandex fabric of her leotard. “I meant to say a date.”
“I’ve never had a pregnant date,” Jack told her.
“I’m not married—I don’t even have a boyfriend,” she explained. “This baby is kind of an experiment.”
“Something you managed all by yourself?” he asked.
“I went to a sperm bank,” she answered. “I had an anonymous sperm donor. I kind of forget the insemination part.”
From flat on his back on the ab machine, Jack made one of those too-hasty decisions that had characterized his sexually active life. Because he’d imagined that he wanted to be with someone who was pregnant, Jack chose to be with the pregnant aerobics instructor at the Motivus gym—this instead of even trying to make a dinner date with Hannele and Ritva, the lesbian couple who were the reason for his coming to Helsinki in the first place.
Jack rationalized that what he might learn from the organist and cellist, who were a couple when his mother and father knew them—and they were still a couple—was in all likelihood something he already knew or could guess. Jack’s mother had somehow misrepresented them to him; they had slept with her, not his dad. Of course there would be other revelations of that kind, but nothing that couldn’t be said over coffee or tea—nothing so complicated that it would require a dinner date to reveal.
Jack decided to go to the Church in the Rock about the time Hannele and Ritva would be finishing their rehearsal. He would suggest that they go somewhere for a little chat; surely that would suffice. Jack thought there was no reason not to spend his last night in Helsinki with a pregnant aerobics instructor. As it would turn out, there was a reason, but Jack was responding to an overriding instinct familiar to far too many men—namely, the desire to be with a certain kind of woman precluded any reasonable examination or in-depth consideration of the aerobics instructor herself, whose name was Marja-Liisa.
They made a date, which was awkward because they had to get a pen and some paper from the reception desk; other people were watching them. Marja-Liisa wrote out her name and cell-phone number for him. She was clearly puzzled by what Jack wrote out for her—Jimmy Stronach, Hotel Torni—until he explained the business of always registering under the name of the character he plays in his next movie.
When Jack left the gym and returned to the Torni, he went first to that porn shop where he’d seen the unlikely but alluring Schwangere Girls in the window. He took the magazine back to his hotel room—just to look at the pictures, which were both disturbing and arousing.
When Jack left the hotel for the Church in the Rock, he threw the disgusting magazine away—not in his hotel room but in a wastebasket in the hall opposite the elevator. Not that you can really throw pictures like those away—not for years, maybe not ever. What those pregnant women were doing in those photographs would abide with Jack Burns in his grave—or in Hell, where, according to Ingrid, you were deaf but you could see everyone you ever knowingly hurt. You just couldn’t hear what they were saying about you.
Since that afternoon in Helsinki, Jack could imagine what Hell might be like for him. For eternity, he would watch those pregnant women having uncomfortable-looking sex. They would be talking about him, but he couldn’t hear them. For eternity, Jack could only guess what they were saying.
To Jack, the dome of Temppeliaukio Church looked like a giant overturned wok. The rocks, which covered all but the dome, had a pagan simplicity; it was as if the dome were a living egg, emerging from the crater of a meteor. The apartment buildings surrounding the Church in the Rock had an austere sameness about them. (Middle-class housing from the 1930s.)
There were more rocks inside the church. The organist sat in view of those people on the left side of the congregation. The empty, rounded benches—for the choir—occupied a center-stage position. Choirs were important here. The copper organ pipes were very modern-looking against the darker and lighter woods. The pulpit was surrounded by stone; Jack thought it looked like a drinking fountain.
In the early afternoon, he sat and listened to Hannele and Ritva—Ritva in profile to him, on the organ bench, Hannele facing him with her legs wide apart, straddling her cello. A small audience quietly came and went while the two women practiced. Jack could tell that Hannele had recognized him as soon as he sat down; she must have been expecting him, because she merely smiled and nodded in his direction. Ritva turned once to look at Jack; she smiled and nodded, too. (The lady he’d spoken to at Sibelius Academy must have forewarned Hannele and Ritva that Jack Burns was looking for them.)
It wasn’t all church music—at least not the usual church music. As a former Canadian, Jack recognized Leonard Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will”—not that he was used to hearing it played on organ and cello. As an American, Jack also recognized Van Morrison’s “Whenever God Shines His Light on Me.” Hannele and Ritva were very good; even Jack could tell that their playing together had become second nature. Of course he was predisposed to like them. Jack gave them a lot of credit in advance, just for surviving whatever assault his mom might have made on them as a couple.
Jack also listened to them rehearse two traditional pieces—“Come, Sing the Praise of Jesus” and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” The latter was an Advent hymn, and both hymns were better known in Scotland than in Finland, Hannele and Ritva told Jack later. But the hymns, they said, had been particular favorites of his father’s.
“William taught us those two,” Ritva said. “We don’t care that it isn’t the month before Christmas.”
They were having tea in Hannele and Ritva’s surprisingly beautiful and spacious apartment in one of those gray, somber buildings encircling the Church in the Rock. Hannele and Ritva had combined two apartments overlooking the dome of Temppeliaukio Church. Like the church, their apartment was very modern-looking—sparsely furnished, with nothing but steel-framed, black-and-white photographs on the walls. The two women, now in their late forties, were good-humored and very friendly. Naturally, they were not as physically intimidating as they’d seemed to Jack at four.
“You were the first woman I ever saw with unshaven armpits,” he told Hannele. The astonishing hair in Hannele’s armpits had been a darker blond than the hair on her head, although Jack didn’t mention this detail—nor the birthmark over Hannele’s navel, like a crumpled top hat the color of a wine stain, the shape of Florida.
Hannele laughed. “Most people remember my birthmark, not my armpits, Jack.”
“I remember the birthmark, too,” he told her.
Ritva was enduringly short and plump, with long hair and a pretty face. She still dressed all in black, like a drama student. “I remember how you fell asleep, Jack—how hard you were trying not to!” Ritva told him.
He explained that he’d thought, at the time, they had come for their half-a-heart tattoos because they’d both slept with his father.