At home in bed, I’ve tried to explain to myself that he can’t really look as handsome as I remember. But he does. Silver-grey, lean, smiling broadly. And already he’s able to look at me, cheerful and energetic, as if there’s nothing between us. The others can’t possibly notice anything. I’m not sure how sincere his charm seems to me, though it convinces the others; these last few months I’ve gotten to know his facial expressions better. Tonight he inhabits the expressions in turn and then, as if he wants to withdraw into some solitary reverie, abandons them. But the others don’t see it.
We discuss differences in municipalities and how much rehab they’ll subsidize for people with brain injuries and physical handicaps. Gerda’s animated. The hair on Bernard’s hands isn’t as grey as on his head, and I wonder, Is all his body hair dark? I can see the vaulted musculature beneath his shirt. I think of rowers, tennis players, and hundred-meter sprinters — their shoulders, their arms, their chests. That’s how they look; and they’re not old.
Ulla talks about her doubts. “The more years we spend supporting our husbands and wives,” she says, “and the more we learn about how to do it really well, the longer the road back to what we wanted to do with our lives. Aren’t we really just helping each other veer farther off course, down some dead end?”
The fine creases in the corners of his eyes form patterns in constant motion. Kirsten tells us more about her husband’s admission to the hospital and cries. The corners of Bernard’s eyes are trees, a forest, the two of us, the hands, the slender fingers. Now Ulla’s crying too, and he drapes an arm around her. The creases become bushes in the mist, a light on the far side of a cliff.
And then the meeting’s over.
We all crowd into Andrea’s small entryway. We hug each other and look Ulla and Kirsten in the eye, and a couple of minutes later I’m sitting in my car in the dark, not turning the key in the ignition. Kirsten drives past, Anton drives past, Ulla drives past.
Bernard’s car is parked farther up a ways. It doesn’t start up either, and I can faintly make his silhouette out through the window.
I think of how Lærke was kind to me. She trusts me; and the marriage they have is a lovely one. I don’t owe Frederik anything, because I’ve already given him more than anyone could expect. But Lærke — I have to look out for Lærke. I will give Bernard energy, so he can stay with that poor sick woman even longer. I must promise myself to stop if I ever start detracting from her life instead of contributing to it.
I get out of my car and walk toward his. He remains seated. The streetlamps are intensely orange — more so than the lights in Farum or Copenhagen — and they make the outlines of the handicapped vehicles light up against the black hedges and the smooth bright pavement.
Bernard gets out of his car. I don’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything. The orange light. I raise my mouth and kiss him. He collapses a bit — like when he saw me in Andrea’s living room — and his hands gather up my hips. Now we’re alone, with the cherry blossoms in the dark tree-tops above us and scattered upon the asphalt beneath our feet.
We kiss for a long time while his hands find their way under my shirt and mine find their way under his. His fingers stroke my lower back and run along the inside of my waistband; I shiver a little. His lips sink down to my throat, and I want to press him against me while I still feel the hovering touch of his lips and fingers. In the wrinkles that extend from the corners of his eyes I see once more the trees, the forest, his hands and slender fingers. He sees something in my eyes too — what? what? I want to possess it, to know what makes him smile as he slowly undoes the button of my pants and fingers the upper part of my zipper.
“Mia, Mia,” he says.
With my pants off, I sit down on the hood of the lime-colored car parked behind his. I feel the chilled automotive paint and the fallen petals from the cherry tree against the skin of my buttocks.
The streetlamp swings overhead, and its reflection bobs in the paint beneath us — or does it? And all the little yellow-brick houses of the disabled bob around us.
I look up into the light as I draw him in. The trees now a dark jungle, an elephant that stamps and trumpets to drive its enemies off.
Branches before my face. The bellowing grows harsher and quicker and still fiercer and the elephant attacks, it comes blowing toward me, trampling tree trunks and huts, villages, fences, all things in its path as if they were twigs.
And then I hear more stomping: another elephant. It likewise bellows and thunders this way. The sounds of both pounding equally loud in my ears and eyes, through my lips and my fingertips.
For a moment I feel Bernard slide out of me and the sounds vanish, I don’t have time to think.
“No!” I shriek, much too loudly.
He’s already inside again. The elephants stomping toward me again from their respective sides of the forest, the rhythmic booming, the shattered trees, and at last the all-embracing flutter as they crash down over us on the gleaming hood of the handicapped vehicle. Shards of shining ivory and splintered skulls in the moonlight.
21
Am I absentminded as I stand before my sixth graders the next morning, with a tender crotch and a chin abraded pink by Bernard’s stubble? Decidedly, and in high spirits. I don’t have a clue what my students are asking me.
No one complains; but then again, I’ve been absentminded for months, and at least today my distraction is cheerful.
“Yes, Molly.”
“Why’s negative times negative positive?”
“That’s because … because …”
The beam from the orange streetlamp falls upon us, lighting up the outline of his hair as he leans in over me and I gaze into his features, colossal and blurry, rubbing my face around in his and smearing him over me so he can’t be washed off.
A boy in the back row closes one eye, raises his left arm slowly, and with a quick flip of his right launches a metal lunch box that whizzes a couple of inches past my head, smashing into the wall and tumbling to the floor.
Silence.
I look at him.
“It wasn’t on purpose,” he says hastily, looking confused and a little fearful. “I didn’t know it would go that far.”
The eyes of the class: the girls waiting for him to be chewed out, the boys more inscrutable, as usual.
But I smile at him. “I know why you did it.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Do you know why you did it?”
“It went too far. I didn’t realize it would fly so far. I’m sorry.”
“Yes. But do you know why you threw it?”
“I just wanted to try—” He stops.
I’d recognized the movement, right down to the closed left eye. “You saw Iron Man on TV two days ago, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
It’s copycat behavior, it’s so obviously copycat behavior. That’s the way Robert Downey Jr. throws in the film, and now Mark’s done the same thing without being able to explain why.
Anna raises her hand. “Aren’t you going to scold him?”
“Mark and I will talk after class. Won’t we, Mark?”
“Yeah.”
In some respects I’ve become a poorer teacher since Frederik became ill — not as well prepared, and often distracted during class by thoughts of my miserable home life. Yet in other ways I’ve gotten better.
So much of what kids do and say takes on new meaning when you know a little neurology — for instance, that teenagers’ ability to control their impulses isn’t fully developed yet, which inevitably leads to brief episodes of mild copycat behavior, when they unthinkingly act out something they’ve seen. A watered-down version of the genuinely pathological cases of echolalia and echopraxia.