Who are you? she typed.
My name is Kris, said the screen after a pause. I live in Norway in a little town north of the capital. Who are you?
I’m Cynthia. I’m training to be a doctor. I grew up in Chicago.
There was another delay and then: Chicago? I have been to Chicago several times to perform. I used to play the violin in the symphony in Oslo and we went on a number of tours in the United States.
What do you do now? Cynthia asked.
A few years ago, I left musical performance so that I could develop and run an organic farm. I thought: how hard can that be after learning to play Shostakovich? Serves me right! Farming is so much harder than I could ever have imagined when I started out. It took all my time! Finally, though, it is beginning to turn a profit and I have hired a manager to help me run it so that I can go back to the city almost every weekend. Which is good because I can see my kids more often.
You have children?
Two. A boy and a girl. They live with my ex.
That must be difficult.
Well, we are relatively lucky. She’s a wonderful parent and we get on well as friends, we just weren’t so good at living together in the end. We were too different. Perhaps you know how that can be. There was a blank on the screen, the cursor pulsing as it waited. Then Kris typed: But I’m sorry, I’ve talked a lot about myself. Please, tell me about you and your work. Being a doctor must be fascinating.
They continued chatting and when Cynthia finally glanced at the clock she had to excuse herself and go to bed because several hours had passed in what felt like much less time. She had been enjoying their conversation so much that she had not noticed. This pleasure was not only because they had so many interests in common, although that seemed to her remarkable enough: Cynthia felt like she was talking to someone who had taken up all the discarded threads of her own life — music, gardening, Kris even liked cycling — and made another life out of them. But there was also an ease between them, a shared sense of humor. When Kris made jokes, which were mostly gently self-mocking, she found herself laughing in spite of her exhaustion. She liked the slight formality of the way Kris wrote, the sign of someone who had learned English as a second language and knew its grammar too well to be a native speaker. Kris seemed to like her too, and before they signed off at last asked if they could meet again the following evening. Cynthia checked her schedule and agreed and they set a time and said goodnight.
Away from the screen, she felt light and graceful as she got ready for bed that night as though someone she could not see was observing her benignly and approvingly.
The next night they met again and the conversation was just as interesting. She wrote about her decision not to pursue music and her work at the hospital. She told Kris things that she had told to no one else: how upset she’d been by her parents’ late divorce, how she felt she had to work twice as hard as other people to compensate for being shy and serious and awkward. Again the time flew by. For the next week they chatted every night, even when Cynthia got home very late, and their rapport grew flirtatious. They swapped photographs (she spent some time and effort choosing which one to send) and she was pleased with what she saw: a picture of a blond man with high cheekbones and a prominent nose and slightly craggy brows that she thought looked dignified and that kept his face from being too pretty, which she would not have liked. His skin was creased around the eyes and mouth; he looked in the picture both capable of laughter and capable of great seriousness and concentration. She printed out a small copy of the picture and put it in her wallet in the space with the clear plastic window where other people put pictures of their spouses or their kids. She would take it out and look at it whenever she wanted to feel a little burst of energy and pleasure.
All week she flew around as though the force of gravity had been temporarily diminished and she was lighter than she’d been the week before. Her work went particularly well and she was praised by the attending physician, who commended her in front of the other residents. She felt the two things must be connected: her late-night chats with Kris and her good performance at work. She thought she must work up the courage to ask whether a visit would be possible: she could go to Norway or Kris could come to Wisconsin. That night, on screen, she read: I would like to invite you to come and visit me here. Whenever it is convenient for you, I would love to meet you in person. You can come for as long as you like.
She typed back: You read my mind. I was just about to invite you to come and visit me.
They settled that Cynthia would come to Norway, since she had a short vacation coming up. Kris would come down to Oslo and meet her at the airport. They could spend a couple of days there and then go up to the farm if they wanted to. Kris bought the ticket that night and sent the itinerary to Cynthia. When she opened the message, she felt her heart leap, her pulse quicken. That night she had her first dream about Kris. It was not overtly sexual. They were sitting together on a mountainside, green and bare of trees. Kris reached out and laid both hands on her knee, and this was what she remembered when she woke: how beautiful those hands were, how distinct, with long fingers, strong and elegant, but not unscathed. She woke up with them still before her eyes, imagining what it would be like to be touched by them.
One evening of the following week, Cynthia was having dinner in a Chinese restaurant across the street from the hospital with a couple of the other residents after their shift. When it came time to pay, she opened her wallet to take out her debit card and left it lying unfolded on the table beside her while she looked over the check. The woman sitting beside her, whose name was Sonya, glanced over and said:
“Why do you have a picture of Amund Eilertsen in your wallet?”
“What?” Cynthia said, confused.
“Amund Eilertsen, the actor. That’s a picture of him.” And she pointed to the photograph behind the plastic window.
Cynthia felt her stomach plummet through the floor. She felt like she could hardly breathe. “Oh,” she managed to say. “It’s a joke. My sister gave it to me. I used to like him when I was younger and she’d tease me about it and so, you know. ” She trailed off and smiled in a way she hoped covered the turmoil inside her.
Sonya said: “He was always on TV when we would go to Sweden to visit my grandparents, but hardly anyone in this country has even seen anything he’s been in, since he hasn’t done many films. What did you see him in?”
“I can’t even remember. It was so long ago. ” The waiter was handing out the receipts and she took hers and absorbed herself in signing it, figuring the tip. She didn’t look at Sonya because she thought that if she did, she might start to cry. When the checks were brought back to the table, she said that she was feeling completely exhausted and excused herself to go. She was halfway down the block to her car when she heard someone call her name behind her. She turned around and saw Sonya coming after her holding Cynthia’s purse in her hand: she’d departed in such a hurry she had left it on the back of her chair.
When she arrived home it was nearly midnight, the hour when she usually spoke with Kris — or whoever that was, she thought. She understood suddenly, sickeningly, that the words on the screen could have come from anyone; she had no way to know whether the person with whom she had become so quickly and intensely involved even lived in Norway, had been a musician or a farmer or a parent. The shared interests had seemed genuine; Kris had known more than she about music and cultivating plants. The descriptions of journeys by bicycle they’d shared had been so detailed and the pleasure taken in them so similar that they couldn’t possibly be entirely made up. could they? Also the things they did not share: Kris’s manner of talking about being a parent was one of humor and affection, and the frustrations and triumphs of running a small business had seemed true. Last week on a whim she had looked up the brand of organic produce that was supposed to come from Kris’s farm and it was real enough, but of course anyone could have looked up that website, used its details. The fact that the farm was real proved nothing.