“You know full well that you’re so much better than she is!”
It’s true, so there’s nothing he can say.
“Frederik’s going to jail because you didn’t want us. People will keep on blaming us for everything, they still won’t talk to us. And Frederik will simply shatter in there. He’ll get even sicker.”
“I’d like to help you as much as I possibly can,” he says. “I really feel terrible about this. I’ll have Louise send me a copy of the psychiatric report, then I can give you some suggestions over the phone. And I’ll have a long talk with Louise.”
“But that won’t change a thing.” Now I’m sobbing into the receiver.
“But I think we’ll both regret it if I take on this case again.”
Now Frederik is standing next to the bed, looking at me with eyes wide. I avoid his gaze as I say, “If Frederik can’t get the best lawyer, he runs a greater risk of going to jail. He does!”
Bernard pauses. A pause is a good sign; I keep my mouth shut.
He clears his throat, and then he asks, “Don’t you think you should think this over?”
“No.”
“Hmm.”
Another pause; longer this time. I’m no longer crying, just listening in silence. I want to hear his breathing over the phone, but my own breath is still making too much noise.
“Okay,” he says at last. “But remember that I’m Frederik’s lawyer—not yours.”
“I understand.”
“Frederik’s the one I’ll meet with. If he’s amenable to it, you may come along on occasion. But it will be he and I. You and I will not be having any meetings alone together.”
“Of course. Of course. That’s the way to do it.”
“Okay. Good.”
Again a pause. Now I think I can faintly hear the background noise where he is. The cars on the street outside his office; perhaps his breath.
“Thank you so very, very much, Bernard,” I say. “Thank you. It means the world to us.”
“Okay … Yes. Okay. Frederik will naturally want to know as much as possible about the consequences of the new report, and as quickly as possible.”
“Yes.”
“If he could be here in forty-five minutes, I’ll see what I can do.”
“I can’t thank you enough, Bernard. It’ll make all the difference. I’m so glad to have you back.”
His tone becomes formal again. “You mean glad that Frederik has me back.”
“Yes. Of course.” I try laughing, but he doesn’t laugh with me, and then I can’t either.
After we hang up, I get up out of bed. It would be natural for me to give Frederik a hug now. But I can’t anymore; I just look at him.
“Now we still have a chance, anyway,” I say.
I put on some clothes and reapply my makeup, while Frederik goes down to make some sandwiches to take in the car — ham, cheese, and tomato, since he no longer eats only jam sandwiches.
I drive fast, staring straight in front of me at the freeway. Neither of us is hungry after all, so he sits with the lunch box in his lap. He says, “I’ve started to think about some of the things I remember from after the operation. Some strange things. Did they really happen?”
“Yes,” I say, “it was a strange time.”
“But I’m thinking — did you use to call Bernard up at night while I lay next to you in bed?”
Figure 23.2. Test for perseveration.
The subject has been asked to draw a circle.
22
If Frederik is going to go to jail because I couldn’t control myself around his lawyer, I’ll never forgive myself, and it simply sucks to be having this conversation right now, heading down the freeway at eighty miles an hour.
But he keeps interrogating me.
“Stop it! God damn it, Frederik, it’s your fault I’m even in a support group. I talk to all of them.”
“But you don’t talk to the others in the middle of the night, do you?”
“Yeah, actually I do.”
“No you don’t.”
“Stop it!”
“So which of the others do you call? Do you call up Andrea at two in the morning?”
“Frederik! You’re going to end up in jail and will never get another job if our meeting with Bernard goes down in flames.”
“But what’s all this about Bernard not wanting my case, and then you call him up and he takes it on anyway?”
“Frederik, stop! You’re perseverating!”
That gets him to shut up. He sits there grumbling, staring at the airbag panel in front of him.
• • •
Bernard’s office is situated in an old half-timbered building on Great King Street. The reception area is small, but modernly furnished and bright. I’ve been here a couple of times and know that all the rooms are like this.
Before we kissed at the apartment viewing, Bernard often alluded to his first year after the car accident, a watershed year when he had to figure out how to deal with everything being different. Till then he’d had a brilliant career in one of Copenhagen’s largest law firms, but if his eight-year-old boys were to have a healthy parent in their everyday lives, and if Lærke were to have the support he wanted to give her, he had to sacrifice his future with the firm.
For a while he tried using a nursing aide and an au pair to help him balance his work and home life. He also got permission to cut back on his hours at the firm, though otherwise he would have soon made partner. But it couldn’t be avoided; he had to make a choice. He chose to quit and join forces with an old classmate to start a small firm that would bring in a lot less money. During law school the friend, Alex, had kept to the periphery of parties and student life; for a few months each year he’d be away paragliding or visiting tropical islands no one had heard of. Yet even though most students seldom saw him, Alex made an impression, for he did surprisingly well whenever he finally showed up for exams with his long sun-bleached hair.
Now Alex lives with four kids and wife number two in Amager, where they share a large rambling house with another family. He still has lots of friends in Africa, and he spends long hours each week doing pro bono work for a fair-trade organization.
As I understand it, they became the subject of intense speculation by old acquaintances when they started the firm seven years ago. Hadn’t the industrious Bernard always been Alex’s opposite? Or were they, beneath the surface, really cut from the same cloth? Some lawyers maintained that they’d always thought Bernard and Alex ought to start something together.
It’s the end of the working day when we arrive, and both the receptionist and secretary have gone home, so Bernard comes out and lets us in.
He shakes hands with Frederik, and afterward with me. Everything in his expression and body language is polite and serious. I wish I could look so composed, but I doubt I do.
Frederik looks at him, then back at me, and then again at Bernard.
Perhaps he sees something that surprises him — but if so, he doesn’t know how to process it. It’s still a novelty for him to be interested in other people at all, or to think of them as having lives when he doesn’t see them.
Bernard leads us down a short hallway to a conference room with expensive but bland furnishings, where he starts reading through the psychiatric report.
The room grows quiet. I can still feel the way his hand clasped mine a short while ago. A large hand, a dry hand — a bit like Frederik’s, but younger and warmer. I can also feel my buttocks and thighs against the seat of this skinny little Arne Jacobsen chair. Hand, ass, the hand between my legs; the lingering sense-memory of him inside me. Almost as if he’s still there, and I let out a small gasp that he must be able to hear. A brief twitch crosses his face, but he doesn’t lift his eyes from the report.