“How do you like it here?” a salesman in a clothing store asked Damon while I was trying on a sweater.
“The sun is up for a really long time,” Damon replied, and the salesman nodded in resigned agreement.
We took a ferry ride and a nice old man asked us how long we were staying in town. A week, we said.
“Too long,” he responded. “I was born here, but forty years ago I moved to Sydney.”
“We have a dog,” I said. “We can’t do that.” The old guy looked at me as though something had been lost in translation. It hadn’t. I’m just incapable of rational thought around the subject of my dog.
We mostly just walked around quoting Trading Places, one of our favorite movies.
“I am Inga from Sveden.”
“But you’re wearing lederhosen.”
“Ya, for sure, from Sveden. Please to help me with my rucksack?”
On the third day, we decided to visit the Vasa Museum, the main attraction of which is an elaborately decorated seventeenth-century warship, the Vasa, that was so poorly engineered that it went ass over tea kettle and sank on its maiden voyage, right in the center of Stockholm Harbor. Three hundred years later, it was salvaged, reconstructed, and preserved in the museum, a feat Swedes seem very proud of. The museum, or museet, is actually a pretty enjoyable way to spend an hour and a half out of nineteen excruciatingly long hours of daylight.
Exhibitions throughout the museet have been designed to give you a taste of what life aboard the ship might have been like. For example, for 450 passengers, the vast majority being soldiers and sailors, there was one dentist, who was responsible for everything from tooth extractions to limb amputations. If a sailor was disrespectful to the admiral, he could be keelhauled. That’s when they tie you to a rope, throw you off one side of the ship and pull you out the other side, dragging you under the keel of the boat. In the middle of the ocean. For being disrespectful.
“Hey, Admiral, your father’s meatballs are huge and salty.”
“Under the boat with you, Sven!”
“What? I grew up next door to you. He’s a really good cook!”
And maybe even more incomprehensible: two toilets. For 450 men spending their days drinking beer and eating nonrefrigerated meat! Can you even imagine the line for those things after a meal of half-rotten caribou kebabs? I can’t. I’m the kind of guy who gags on an airplane when someone two rows ahead of me farts in his sleep.
Divers also recovered several skeletons of people who got trapped aboard the ship as it sank, some of whom were women. (Historians aren’t even sure what women were doing aboard the ship in the first place.) Based on mineral testing and X-rays of the bones, scientists determined that pretty much everyone had suffered from severe malnutrition as a child or walked with a limp because of injuries that had never healed properly.
In the darkest part of the museet, six heads glow from inside glass cases. They’re creations of forensic artists, facial reconstructions of six skulls found in the muddy wreckage. There’s a blatant honesty and exactness you might expect from a Swedish forensic artist, from the enlarged pores they added to broken capillaries to overgrown eyebrow hair. If this ship had sunk off the coast of, say, Barcelona, I’m sure the reconstruction would have gone much differently. All the dead people would look like Calvin Klein fragrance models on the receiving end of fellatio. But not these old Swedes. They are rough-and-tumble.
Except Beata, whose reconstructed face caught my eye. She was beautiful, in that profoundly dejected kind of way. Physically she was a mix of weak and strong features: pronounced cheekbones and a big nose that appeared to have been broken once or twice, small blue eyes, thin lips, and a ruddy complexion. Her blond hair was pulled back from her face, covered by something resembling a folded dish towel. I’ve done so many makeovers in my life that I’m almost embarrassed to admit my first thought was, With a little concealer and the right lipstick, I could make this chick look like Uma Thurman.
But I let that moment pass. I looked at Beata for a while, and she looked at me. Her expression was that of a woman who had been thoroughly beaten down. What were you doing aboard this ship full of men, Beata? I wondered. Were you a stowaway? Were you a whore? Was it your job to clean those two toilets? Was life so bad on land that the sea seemed like an escape? An adventure? And who broke your nose? Some guy you were shacking up with? Your father? Your mother?
I just could not even fathom a situation in which this woman’s life was anything but pure misery. Only thirty or so people died aboard the Vasa. Because it had barely left the dock, most passengers just swam to safety. But why did Beata die? Maybe she got pinned under a table or crate when the boat capsized. Or maybe she couldn’t swim. Or maybe going down with the ship was better than going back to shore.
Tell me, Beata. Tell me!
“Hey handsome.” Damon had walked up behind me. He whispered in my ear, “What are you thinking?”
“Oh, you know, just the usual nonsense,” I said. “How do you feel about picking up and going to Paris tomorrow?”
“I think that is a brilliant idea.”
The Internet service in Sweden is pretty fast, so we were able to book a flight to Paris and a hotel room in the First Arrondissement in less than fifteen minutes. It’s not that Sweden is unlovable, or unlivable, it just wasn’t our cup of gl?gg.
*
Paris, on the other hand, can make you feel like all is right with the world, that every cathedral deserves flying buttresses, every meal deserves dessert, and every pedestrian deserves painful but gorgeous shoes.
Damon and I were walking through the immaculately groomed gardens of the Tuileries when our phones started to blow up. It was June 26, 2015, and the US Supreme Court had just ruled that same-sex couples were entitled to all the benefits of marriage on a federal level. We both teared up. Our lives are nothing short of amazing, filled with people we love and who love us, but sometimes you don’t realize you’ve been a second-class citizen until you’ve received the right to be first-class.
We decided that to celebrate I should post our wedding picture on my Facebook fan page. It’s a candid shot of us taken in our backyard in Connecticut. We’re holding hands as we walk down the stone steps to our pond, where our friends and family were waiting for us. Neither of us is looking into the camera but we’re beaming with joy.
The post received 180,000 “likes” and more than 6,000 people stopped whatever they were doing that day to wish us love and congratulations.