“Tom wanted the car,” she finally said.
“Tommy Belotti? That greaseball?”
Was her dad the kind of guy who said things like that or did he just make out that he was a guy who said these things? She had never worked this out. He had started on the floor at Pabst but risen swiftly through the ranks to brewing supervisor. Before his twenty-fourth birthday, he was already head of logistics for the East Coast, Midwest, and Canada (as he had reminded Jane when she was the same age and had not yet completed her literature degree). For his entire adult life, he had lived in dense suburbs populated by sales people, small-time company directors, and middle-management types. His wife read Walt Whitman in bed and had once, in the seventies, collected a substantial sum in support of the new ballet theater in Milwaukee. His daughter had gone in for literature full-time, a choice he had not tried to talk her out of but had not encouraged either.
“Tommy Belotti has always been after you,” her father said.
“Just in junior high.”
He nodded, still unconvinced.
“How much is he paying you for the car?”
She knew what would come next. Her dad would bend over, seemingly to check the car’s chassis and meanwhile get worked up because she was giving away a car in perfectly reasonable condition. So she picked a sum at random.
“Five thousand.”
It was apparently too much. He started rocking on his heels.
“Hello, big spender. Smart move, Belotti.”
“I’m pretty sure Tom’s feelings for me had faded by eighth grade. When I got my braces. Thereabouts. At least by the time he was best man at my wedding.”
“Was he?” her father asked.
“Have you forgotten?”
6
THE ARRIVALS HALL with its furnishings of smooth, hygienic steel and aura of clinical severity had the atmosphere of a detention cell. She had either taken a wrong turn or purposely let herself be diverted through the duty-free shop. Ulf was waiting by the baggage carousel.
“You again,” he said cheerfully.
She stared at the cases that emerged one after the other from underground and then toppled over onto a new conveyor belt.
“You slept on my shoulder last night, I believe.”
It had to happen. And in the most straightforward way. If this had been Greg, he would surely have said something funny about dribble on his shirt. They would have laughed together. And gone to bed, and lived the rest of their lives together.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
She noticed him glancing at her again while they waited for their luggage. She considered her appearance from the point of view of a forty-something scientist. A large, straight nose. A rather more golden skin tone than her Scandinavian genes would have generated. Lips that were well-drawn examples of their kind. She would never, unlike most of Ulf’s recent conquests, end up with unkissable, bright-red lines surrounded by powder. Shoulder-length, nut-brown hair (clever coloring). Her behind filled out her mom jeans nicely but nobody would have classified it as fat, surely, or what was the definition of “fat”? And what about her breasts, were they for real? he would ask himself. What did they look like without a bra? He would imagine standing behind her in a clean and brightly lit Scandinavian hotel bathroom, watching her in the mirror while she brushed her teeth, and then putting his arms round her, full of a sense of possession, despite not really knowing her. This feeling sustained him and usually compensated him for not falling head over heels in love any more. She looked up at him and smiled compassionately. He misunderstood the smile.
“Look, I like you. And I think that you are… going through something.”
A glint from his massive diver’s watch as he pushed his hand through his hair where a boyish, almost-white tuft kept sticking straight up. He aroused the same emotions as the countless jocks in her past. She wanted to bite his arm.
“I know how lonely one can feel sometimes, believe you me. I’ve lived in a trapper cabin for ten months.”
She smiled sardonically but thought: he cannot have a clue how insensitive that comment is.
“What about a cup of coffee?”
“No.”
“Then why not make a note of my telephone number anyway? Then you’ll have a friend to contact here. Just in case.”
It seemed easier to do as he said. They stood silently side by side for several minutes, waiting for their luggage.
7
DR. RICE SAID that there had been no change in the grieving process. There should be a change in the grieving process after six to twelve months. It is a cause for concern if, after six to twelve months, there is no change in the grieving process. All this, according to Dr. Rice.
In other words, it is generally accepted that grief should show orderly progress.
“Now, what are your thoughts about this?”
“I don’t think about it. I haven’t set myself any goals.”
“I was under the impression that we had, together?”
“Maybe we did.”
“We have discussed the lifelong outcomes.”
Dr. Rice balanced the lifelong outcomes on the palm of his hand.
“That’s not, however, what I am talking about now,” he said, and reached out with his other hand. His movements were swift and unusually engaged for someone of his age. “I’m referring to not seeing any step change, however small, in the short term. I might also consider reducing your medication.”
“‘Also?’”
“That’s right.”
“Also… what?”
“Jane, I don’t weigh every word.”
His eyes were bright and quick, and surrounded by dry, wrinkly skin like a parrot’s. Sometimes, she felt she was there mostly to please him.
“For as long as your mind is dulled in various ways, it will be difficult for you to move on, all the way from denial to acceptance.”
“That’s the Kübler-Ross model again, right?”
Dr. Rice’s smile was that of a grandfather having to cope with a troublesome grandchild. She actually felt bad about tormenting him, but the discomfort it caused was as simple and unmistakable as holding one’s hand in scalding water. In her previous session with Dr. Rice, she had talked about the widespread and growing skepticism toward Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s theoretical stages of grieving, a paradigm that had dominated work with the bereaved for the last forty years. She had also referred to some of the critical articles that, a decade or so after Kübler-Ross’s death, described her as a New Age spiritualist and a charlatan whose theory was based on anecdotal observations.
“So good to hear that you find the energy to read, Jane,” Dr. Rice had replied, without sarcasm.
His office smelled of tear-stained paper tissues. His creaking leather chair allowed him to swing forward and back as he spoke. The room had a window, but looking into what could be another room, or a corridor, because one could sometimes see shadowy figures pass by on the other side of its milky glass. There were no diplomas on the wall above his dry, bald head, but instead framed children’s drawings. She had a feeling that during one of her early consultations, he had spoken about his voluntary work with Somalian refugee children, which included trauma management.
While he thought, Dr. Rice was breathing heavily and loudly through his nose. “It also seems true to say that the pills don’t help to prevent your functional episodes—is that right?”
The word functional made Jane think of space-saving wardrobe solutions.