She let him in and stood with her back against the kitchen alcove, waiting for him to tell her if it was all over or not by the place he chose to sit down. Would he sit on her bed? Or at the low, crescent-shaped kitchen table he could barely fit his knees under? That was the place a visitor would choose. But he remained standing in the middle of the room. A week earlier, it had been her undisputed right to stick her spoon into his ice cream or snatch a can of Coke from his hand and drink from it. She could have gone to him and put her hand on his crotch. As exceptional and unaccustomed as that contract between them had felt at first, as extraordinary was its possible cancellation just now.
“Jane, I’ve done some thinking. Actually, quite a lot,” Greg said.
She looked fixedly at her feet on the linoleum flooring.
“I no longer believe that I will be a writer,” he continued.
Her relief that he had perhaps not come to end it all made her shoulders less tense. She had to focus not to sound thrilled by what he had just told her.
“Greg, listen,” she said. “That’s not the point.”
How hollow it sounded. But whatever he became made not the slightest difference. She cared for only one thing: Would they still be together?
Even so, she had to carry on.
“It’s not the same as becoming a plumber or a dentist. It’s not about a straight choice. It’s about taking a step at a time.”
He took his cap off and slapped it against his thigh as if he had been out on a dusty country road.
“You must work out if writing is for you. If you enjoy it. Not if you want to be a writer.”
“Sure. So, I’ve decided I won’t write.”
Cautiously, she walked up to him, stopped at arm’s length, and, standing on tiptoe, pulled her fingers through his hair. It was sticky where the cap had been.
“I’m sweating. It’s a killer heat out there.”
“But why are you thinking like this?”
“Your voice tells me you know why,” he replied, but didn’t sound as if he blamed her.
She was about to start crying and had to look away. “Because of what I said?”
“Because you were right in what you said. My teachers have told me roughly the same. So have some people in class. But you’re the only one among them who can’t possibly have an ulterior motive.”
“Greg, come here.” She led him to the bed and they sat down together.
“Whatever happens, we will need one decent income,” he went on. “One of us should go for a steady job. Stands to reason who it should be.”
His hands were still on the bedspread. He was looking into the future.
“But, I’d like to be… well, connected to literature. I mean, professionally, somehow. Oh, I don’t know.”
“Like, say, a librarian?”
“Maybe.”
He took her hand.
“Jane, you mustn’t cry.”
“I’m not crying. I love you.”
“I know.”
“Are you sure it isn’t worth trying to write a little more?” She turned away from him to dry her tears. He pulled out a cigarette from his breast pocket with his free hand and left it dangling between his lips. She reached out for matches and lit it for him.
“There are two kinds of people in this world…” Greg began.
“Those who say there’re two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t?” Jane suggested.
“Listen.” He inhaled, then exhaled, and the smoke swirled lazily across the floor. “There are those who deliver and those who receive. I mean it. Consider yourself. You read a third of what I read. You hardly ever talk about books. You’re critical of practically all forms of culture, TV shows, films, whatever. Even baseball games. I think you don’t experience such things the same way I do. You don’t get taken in. You sit there, thinking of how differently you’d have gone about it. If you had cared to try in the first place, that is. Constant analysis. For example, think about our trip.”
“The thought of losing you had left me nearly comatose.”
“I know, but before that. Not finding Updike’s house wouldn’t have bothered you at all. I know you think that any damn thing can be turned into narrative. So, you had no need to see that house, or any other. For inspiration, or anything like that. I’m sure you had gathered enough material for three short stories before we crossed the Pennsylvanian border.”
So, he had understood how the creative part of her mind worked.
“But, I… I’m not like you,” he said. “I’m almost the opposite. And I’m fine with that for as long as I can see that you succeed.”
So dearly did he love her.
Jane dedicated her first book to Greg. The launch date was March 16th, 2000. It was impossible to forget the date. Three years later, on that same day, their daughter Julie was born.
14
SHE WALKED UP the brick steps to the sports complex with the seizure lingering in her body like a muscular hum. She smiled at the woman who came down the steps with a couple of Hula-Hoops in her hand and used her coat sleeve to wipe off a dribble of spit. It had begun after the usual signs: the smell of sun-warmed gravel, and hair that should have been washed, the sight of autumn leaves in a sandbox.
Once inside, she followed the sounds of the authoritative voices of coaches shouting above the beat of Eurodisco. She opened a door to a huge gym with a hangar-like, domed roof that made her head swim once more. Stepping over boots, water bottles, and Hello Kitty bags, she went to sit on a low wooden bench along a wall covered with wooden bars. Camilla was on the exercise mat, dancing and doing cartwheels with a candy-colored ball. Her face was red, as if she had been crying. Then the beat of the music changed and, at the same time, there was a piercingly nasal call from a female coach. Camilla went up on her toes holding the ball in her hands before sinking to her knees and arching the upper part for her body backwards in a move with echoes of adult sensuality. She stayed in position, her bottom against her heels, rolling the ball across her chest between the palms of her hands.
Jane nodded to the mothers sitting next to her on the bench. Every one of them wore tall rubber boots laced at the top. Their faces had obviously been attended to with much care. She was glad to have escaped twitching with cramps on the floor in front of these people, in front of anyone. That hadn’t happened since the day she dropped in to deliver her car to Tom. Her place of choice was a toilet, preferably one for the disabled—she could deal with the bouts of shivering on her own by seeing the joins between the tiles as vanishing lines in a perspective. Afterward she would feel stiff and sore, as if she had been walking for too long in ill-fitting shoes. The intense sense of awareness that each one of us stands alone on this Earth usually persisted for a couple of hours.
There were at least forty girls on the floor, all of them beautiful. Their concentration made them turn all their attention inward, into an inner hall of mirrors, shiny and glittering, with a flawless floor. And then she made a discovery: some of these girls danced and turned with the bloodless precision of small steel devices covered in stretch Lycra. It made her shiver again, like an aftershock of the shaking that had sent her into the bathroom.
Three of the coaches were from Eastern Europe. Jane wasn’t sure that she could hear the difference between native Norwegian and, say, Polish Norwegian, but she observed their Slavic features and their hard makeup, which fleetingly made her think: “prostitutes.” The older lady who was supervising Camilla looked like a native, though. She had parked herself at the edge of the mat, next to the chair with the CD player, and was shouting. Every time Camilla let the ball slip and stood still, hesitating while the music continued, her coach emitted a loud snorting noise from deep inside her sinuses. The girl smiled apologetically and carried on. Jane watched as the young body grew steadily more self-conscious, its movements more forced. She sensed rather than saw a faint shoulder tremor. At one point, the coach ran up to the girl and slapped her thigh. Jane just stopped herself from crying out.