I’d like to take a brief moment to toast and bid farewell to the house we’ve had so many good experiences in, but Frederik interrupts me. He wants to tell us more about the school, about his brilliant rescue plan, about the book on the history of European philosophy that he’s reading. In the beginning, what he says is clever and interesting, but after a while the rest of us lose interest without him registering it.
The first time I met someone with mild orbitofrontal damage in one of Frederik’s hospital wards, I didn’t realize she was ill. I listened to her attentively, despite a couple of minor angry outbursts and some oddly out-of-place jokes in her torrent of speech. But then she kept talking. And talking. And talking.
She wasn’t speaking in any way she hadn’t already spoken during our first minutes together, and yet the mere incessancy of her speech made it obvious that she wasn’t the lively, cheerful, somewhat whacky type I’d first taken her for. She was very ill. Listening to her at length would take the wind from anyone’s sails, and I was obliged to invent some excuse to escape.
When Frederik and I eat dinner, he pretty much talks the whole time, but now that Henning’s had a couple of glasses, our guest keeps right up with Frederik. Sometimes they talk at the same time, other times Henning forces Frederik to take a breather simply by raising his voice.
There’s nothing new about seeing Henning like this, and in fact Frederik and I have always had a hard time understanding how Helena can stand being married to him. Every time the four of us are together, he drinks too much and drowns out everyone else at the table.
When we’re nearly finished with the first round of lamb meatballs and Greek salad, Frederik pours some more red wine, first for us and then for himself.
I ask, “Are you sure you want more to drink, Frederik?”
He doesn’t reply, just avoids my gaze and finishes filling his glass.
The two boys disappear back upstairs to resume their shooting. I had Niklas promise to stay home until Severin has to go to bed, since Severin looks up to him and loves spending time with him so much.
Such a lot is happening in our lives right now — and not just Frederik’s and mine. Where are Henning and Helena going to move? What’ll Henning do now that he can no longer build and sell houses? I try asking him but have to give up. And Helena tries to engage Frederik in conversation, but she gives up too.
After listening to the men go on for a little too long, we lean toward each other in order to create our own little tête-à-tête of real talk on real matters. But we have to abandon that too, for when Henning and Frederik notice that they no longer have our undivided attention, they grow even more vociferous, until they’re once more in the center.
If it’s so important for them to have our attention, why can’t they pose a couple of questions and start a conversation that we can feel we’re also contributing to? But they couldn’t care less what we think or how we’re doing — just as they clearly have no clue what the boys are doing when not in the room, and just as they don’t offer to help collect the plates from the main course or serve dessert.
Dessert is my red-currant cheesecake. Helena calls the boys down from their computer game; since they know my cheesecake, for once we don’t have to shout several times before the roar of explosions from Niklas’s room dies out.
A white dab of cheesecake is sticking to Frederik’s upper lip. I point discreetly to my own lip with my pinky. But he doesn’t notice. I do it again. Still no reaction.
“Frederik!” I say. And then I point to my upper lip.
He glances at me for a moment and goes on talking.
In the end I’m forced to be explicit. “Frederik, you have something sitting on your upper lip.”
He finally scrapes it off, with a quick, somewhat casual movement — and without making the least bit of eye contact. His lecture is unstoppable.
We don’t manage to talk to the two boys very much before, stuffed with cheesecake, they clear out.
How often have I suffered through this at some dinner, with half- or completely drunk men on either side of me? Sitting surrounded by men who look at me and talk to me, while at the same time I feel strangely ignored beneath their aggressive gazes — and strangely desirous of going home and watching TV by myself.
But Helena and I simply refuse to put up with it. We’ll set the tone here. I ask the table about back when we were all living in cheap apartments in poor neighborhoods: wasn’t there also something nice about it? Was it only because we were twenty-one and the world still seemed wide open?
I haven’t managed to finish what I’m saying when Henning interrupts me to talk about how he plans to earn enough money to get out of construction and sail around the world in his own boat. The first ten or fifteen times I heard him talk about this fantasy, I found it charming, but for years now I’ve had the desire to shout in his ear, So sail away, God damn it, or shut your trap! Stop interrupting others to talk about it for twenty years in a row! And I know Helena’s other friends feel the same way.
Henning seems to feel more at home here than he usually does. He also seems to feel more affection for Frederik than he ever has before, but maybe that’s because he’s drinking more. Or perhaps he’s drinking more because he feels more at home.
He reaches out and takes more than half of the cheesecake that remains. With the big slice on the cake server halfway between platter and plate, he suddenly hesitates. He looks over at me.
“You folks are good, right? Okay if I take this?”
“You should just make yourself at home,” I say in a voice that, in the old days, would have made Frederik, in any case, put the piece back.
Henning sets the slice on his plate, stuffs a generous bite in his mouth, and then plunges into a joke about a woman who does yoga in the nude. One day when she’s doing the splits, her crotch gets stuck to the floor like a suction cup so that she can’t get up again.
In the old days after a dinner with Helena and Henning, Frederik and I would load the dishwasher together. And as we buzzed around the kitchen, synchronized and efficient, we’d express shock at how crude Henning would get when he’d had something to drink. After we both ran him down for a while, I’d say, But he’s good for her. I’d say that not because I actually knew it to be true; it was more that I’d begin to have a bad conscience about vilifying our guests just a few minutes after they’d left.
But now …
Henning goes on with his joke. The woman’s husband fetches a neighbor who’s a bricklayer, and together the men attempt to pry the woman loose from the quarry tile she’s sticking to. But it’s as if she’s glued fast to the floor. In the end the bricklayer says, “We’re going to have to break the tile in pieces.” The husband says, “Are you out of your gourd? These tiles cost five hundred crowns apiece!” “Well, what you should do then is make her good and horny until she gets all wet. Then we can slide her along the floor and out into the kitchen.” “You think that’ll get her loose?” “No. But the kitchen tiles only cost five crowns.”
Henning doubles up with laughter, and only at the last instant do I manage to move his glass from the path of his elbow, while Frederik guffaws with glee. The two men pound each other on the back, tears in their eyes.
I find myself compelled to turn away. It’s just too depressing to remember everything that Frederik used to be. Everything he no longer is.
Helena catches my eye and I see the gentleness of her look; she feels for me. At least I have her, I think.