She grasps my hand and says, “It’s so good to see Frederik well again.”
“Well! What do you mean well?”
“Yes, to see him healthy again. It’s much more important than that you have to move.”
I can hear the hardness in my voice. “He’s not well at all. He’s a far cry from well.”
Does my best friend really not know Frederik any better? Can’t she see that he’s become a foolish, vulgar shadow of himself?
She grows nervous, and she should be. In this moment, it feels as if I can never see her again; she hasn’t understood a thing about my life.
The men of course notice nothing. Henning is droning on again about circumnavigating the globe. He completely drowns out Frederik’s lecture on his half-finished speakers, and I know it’s going to end badly, even before Frederik brings his fist down on the table and yells, “Shut your mouth already about sailing around the world! Everyone thinks it’s totally ridiculous!”
“What?”
“It’ll never happen. I’ve talked to Mia about it a hundred times!”
“It will happen, whatever you say! Helena and I are going to sail—”
“I told you to shut up about it!”
“First we’ll start in the Caribbean, then we’ll head south and—”
“No one here wants to hear another word about it! In any case not Mia or me.”
I try to calm him down but can’t talk over Henning, who’s shot up from his seat. “Don’t fucking speak to me like that!”
Now what — is it going to come to blows? Are they stupid enough for that? Henning could whip all of us at the same time, but Frederik shows no fear. “Go and shit in your ocean!”
“What?”
“Yeah, just sail over and do it!”
I say, “Frederik!”
Helena says, “Henning!”
They’re two big dumb dogs we’ve brought to the park who don’t know what’s best for them. We ought to have kept them on much shorter leads. We pull and pull at them, but now it’s too late.
Niklas stands in the doorway. Has he come to protect me? Incredible how quickly he always shows up.
How can I live with Frederik for even one more week? How’s Helena been able to stand twenty years with Henning?
Without any warning, Henning’s mood changes. The next moment he’s laughing loudly and has his arm around Frederik. “You should have another glass of wine! Ha-ha-ha!”
Frederik hugs Henning back. “You should too. Ha-ha-ha!”
“I certainly will. But you first.”
I break in. “I’m not so sure it’s a good idea for Frederik to drink any more right now.”
Frederik looks at me, irritated. The run-up to a brawl a few seconds ago has already blown clean out of his head. “Oh, come off it. I’ve hardly had anything.”
“Frederik, you’re sick!”
“Well, in that case I really should have something.”
“I’m simply going to have to put my foot—”
“Our guest wants some company,” he says laughing. “You can’t say no to our guest! Especially since I’ve offended him so terribly!”
And Henning adds, chortling, “Yes! You can’t refuse me when your husband’s just offended me! You really can’t. He’s offended me dreadfully. Ha-ha-ha!”
Frederik’s already on his way out to the kitchen. “I’ll find the wine myself.”
Henning places a big paw on his shoulder. “I’ll join you.”
Helena and I remain sitting behind by ourselves; Niklas has left again too. I take a slow deep breath, and so does Helena.
Then she says, “Why exactly is it that both our husbands have had leadership positions, and not us?”
I try to laugh along with her, though I still have the sense that I’m completely alone in my new life.
There’s no way we can resolve our conflict with the preschool rapidity of the men, but we make an effort. And meanwhile I think about a brain-damaged man I once read about. He’d always been rude with customers in his small corner grocery, but he acted that way with warmth and a twinkle in his eye, so they patronized the shop in fact because of him. After he suffered a minor stroke, he still thought he could kid his customers affectionately, but he’d lost the fine motor skills he needed to be disarming — the brief hint of a smile at precisely the right moment, the way he turned his head and looked down after speaking. The customers grew annoyed. His wife kept telling him that he’d have to act like a normal boring shopkeeper, but that just made him furious. And the shop went bankrupt.
Which makes me wonder: why has Henning’s contracting business been running in the red these last few years? They’ve said it’s the financial crisis, but is that true?
I try to sound friendly and conversational when I ask. “Was Henning always so glad to go to dinner parties back when you first met?”
But Helena’s quick as lightning. “I know exactly what’s going through your head right now. But just because you force everyone else into that box doesn’t mean you can do it to Henning and me.”
“Of course not. I’ll make sure I—”
“That’s just the way men are.”
I object. “Not all men.”
She answers with a glint in her eye that’s supposed to indicate a joke, but it doesn’t come out very funny. “You must not know men very well.”
“But before Frederik got sick, he certainly wasn’t like that.”
We fall silent. The men are still shouting out in the kitchen.
Helena leans toward me. “Mia, I don’t know how to tell you this …”
“What?”
“Maybe Frederik wasn’t always the perfect man you remember.”
There’s no way I can have this discussion with her tonight. “But Bernard’s not that way either — and that’s not something I remember. That’s right now.”
“Oh, of course! I’d forgotten Bernard. Bernard, the great shining exception to everything in the whole world!”
I’ve got to be careful about what I say. One wrong word, one wrong pause or facial expression and she’ll know that Bernard’s a source of more than just legal deliverance.
“But other than the supernaturally magnificent Bernard,” she says, “that’s just the way men are.” She takes a large gulp from her wineglass. “Get used to it. Or be single.”
In the kitchen now, the men are laughing uproariously as they argue over which male politician in Denmark has the biggest nose. And it sounds to me as if there are three men’s voices in there. Has another guest shown up?
I get up, and Helena follows.
In the cold light of the kitchen, we can see Niklas sitting on the counter between Henning and Frederik. His large hairy hands upon the counter-top. He doesn’t look like my Niklas anymore.
His new deep voice roars with laughter. “Have you guys seen the schnozz on Bertel Haarder? Ha-ha-ha!”
24
I’m kissing Bernard in our new kitchen, which is both larger and better equipped than the one in our old place.
Farum Midtpunkt is a strange ghetto — and not just because, as an architectural experiment, the façades of its apartment blocks were fabricated from great plates of rusted iron. The Midtpunkt apartments are modern, with luxurious private patios and outdoor common areas that are green and well maintained. But the rent’s so high that the people who can afford it bought houses of their own long ago. Most of those left behind have all or most of their rent subsidized by the municipality: people on disability, immigrants, and single parents.
In the flat suburban idyll that is Farum, constructed from bike paths, yellow bricks, and thousands of lawns, the Midtpunkt complex towers over everything else. To judge from the crime stories and letters to the editor in the local paper, its apartment blocks are the tarry smoker’s lungs that make our young blond suburb gasp for air. I know from my job, though, that that’s not the whole story; lots of Midtpunkt kids come from well-functioning homes, and lots of parents are happy to live here. Their only problem with the place is that friends are nervous about visiting them at night.