I confess that I’d heard the rumors about Iceland — a whispered account from a friend who once had a layover in Keflavik; a hushed conversation with a stranger in a smoky, dimly lit bar who had met Icelanders while traveling in Europe: The women of Iceland are the most preposterously beautiful girls in the world. Or so the stories go. But to me and to most of the men I know, that’s all they were — stories. Rumors, myths, unverifiable accounts of some sort of blonde promised land.
Well, the Grail exists. I spent last week in Reykjavik, and, to paraphrase George Will, you can’t swing a cat without hitting a woman who would give Lauren Bacall, or for that matter Helen of Troy, a run for her money. What’s more, the people of Iceland are quite aware of their women’s unearthly beauty.
The girls carry themselves with tremendous poise: They are flowing, stately, and jaunty all at once. They don’t wear a smidgen of make-up, and they dress, almost always, as if the purpose were to frame a great work of art: On the coldest night ever recorded in Reykjavik, the girls all wore either strapless dresses or tight, black, stretch-twill boot-cut pants.
To Icelandic males, the beauty surplus is something of a matter of national pride. More than a few men I met were quick to point out their ladies’ genetic superiority. “You like our girls, don’t you?” asked one fellow I talked with in a bar. I admitted that I did. He gave me a tremendous grin, slapped me on the back, and crowed, “They are the most beautiful in the world — much more beautiful than American women even.”
Now, I’m a patriot, and I don’t normally let affronts to my national dignity slide, but I also know when I’m beat. So after a few days of gawking and leering, I decided to try to join the fun and bask in Icelandic loveliness.
As luck would have it, a friend of a friend of mine has a friend who lives in Reykjavik. And this friend thrice-removed, by further good fortune, is a girl named Asta who is a contestant for the title of Miss Iceland. When I first met Asta in a small restaurant for lunch, I nearly choked on my cod cheeks. She was wonderfully angular, tall and slender with shoulders at once elegant and strong. Her large, icy blue eyes flashed from under wisps of blonde hair, and I could tell that her mouth, held in a cordial smile when we were introduced, had a capacity, possessed by all devastatingly beautiful women, for the sinister, mocking sneer.
I was shocked when she invited me to tag along for the night with some of her friends, all of whom are in the running for Miss Iceland. I met the quintet in a hotel lobby and was whisked off to the ShadowBar, Iceland’s most famous club, where another friend, Miss Reykjavik (I’m not kidding), was having a birthday party. Outside ShadowBar a long line of people were waiting to get in. I went to queue up, but Asta took me by the arm and led me around to the side of the building, where she knocked four times on a door, which immediately opened. We stepped inside, and when I turned to the bouncer to ask how much the cover charge was, he waved me off, saying, “No charge for you and the ladies.”
Walking through the club, I felt like a movie star. Both men and women gaped at us; crowds parted for us. As we sat enjoying a smoke and a drink, I caught people staring — and only then did I realize that everyday life is simply different for beautiful people, because we regular mortals place them on a higher plane.
Until that night, aside from a brief encounter with Jodie Foster, I’d never been in the presence of the type of beauty over which men would go to war. I would have expected to feel lust or desire, but instead I felt awe.
Later in the evening as I was talking with one of the ladies, AEta, I thought to myself, “I would marry this girl. Right here, tomorrow. I’ll just call work on Monday, tell them I’m taking some more time off, and then she flies back to the States with me.”
It was, of course, ridiculous. The point is that such extreme beauty is intoxicating because of what it represents. In the movie Beautiful Girls, Michael Rapaport says that a beautiful girl is “Promise. The Promise of a better day. The Promise of a greater hope. Promise of a new tomorrow.” We covet beautiful girls not because they represent sex, but because, as Rapaport says, they are “hope, dancing in stiletto heels.” And that is worth more than gold.
JONATHAN V. LAST
