So mostly it’s my smile. It’s revealing. It reveals everything if you think about it.
My smile, which is like Niklas’s, like Bernard’s. The only one who isn’t in love is Frederik — and he’s clueless.
• • •
In someone else’s house, the party is over.
It’s three thirty a.m., and the last exhausted guests hang about the empty rooms, unable to move, ghosts who can find neither rest nor life. Light sifts slowly through the windows and exposes the dust where people once danced, the empty spaces where furniture stood before being moved out of the way.
That’s how it looks at twilight in our old rooms on Station Road, though it’s not three thirty in the morning but ten in the evening. Bernard has long since driven off, Niklas has gone over to Emilie’s, and Frederik and I walk around the house and stare at the naked walls and the traces on the wallpaper of where a picture once hung or a bookcase once stood. The light doesn’t sift into the rooms, it recedes. In the trunk of the car are a broom, a vacuum cleaner, and a couple of small items. Our last night here.
I walk out into the garden, which is about to lose all color to the incipient dark. I take a farewell tour, stopping before each of the plants I’ve nourished, cultivated for years. Will the new owners let the yard sink back to wilderness?
I start when I feel a hand on my shoulder. It’s Frederik, who’s followed me outside.
I say, “There’s no need for you to pretend you understand.”
“But I do understand.”
“Haven’t you finally gotten well enough to recognize that both your empathy and your emotions are impaired?”
“I’m trying to—”
“Frederik, your brain makes it so that you can’t really be here.”
“I really am here!”
“That’s what you say, of course.”
“I am!”
“The inability to acknowledge one’s illness, Frederik.”
“But I am here.”
“You’re perseverating.”
And then I watch his face disintegrate. How these crying jags wear me out, how they’re rammed down my throat! Far beyond what any human being could tolerate. In a second he’s going to dissolve into bestial sobs and make me feel even more isolated.
Quickly, I usher him into the empty living room and close the door behind us. He collapses blubbering on the floor by the wall farthest from the window.
I have absolutely no desire to hold him; absolutely no desire to comfort him. But I try to stroke his back as best I can, simply because I am, after all, his wife — or in any case, I was married to the man he used to be. I don’t know how to, but I strive to be for him what he can’t be for me.
The room grows dark. Almost all the lamps are in the new apartment now, but a pair of wall sconces we don’t need are still mounted in the hallway. I go and turn them on, leaving the door ajar so that the living-room floor is lit indirectly.
“Why don’t you just become Bernard’s girlfriend?” Frederik asks, weeping. “Then the two of you can be happy, and I can just kill myself. Then everyone can be happy.”
I take a deep breath. Here we go again. I hesitate perhaps a fraction of a second too long. “You mustn’t say such things!”
“You’re well matched. I can see that. The two of you suit each other remarkably well.”
“Stop saying that!” It feels weird to say this while at the same time feeling I already need to talk to Bernard again, and planning how to best steal away and call him.
Later, when Frederik’s crying has abated, he says, “I really understand if you don’t feel you can ever sleep with me again.”
“Well, let’s just see how—”
“What I did that night was awful. And then Niklas coming in … I don’t know how I could have. I can remember it, but I’ll never be able to explain it to you.”
“No, you won’t. I know.”
“It was terrible. Just like what I did to Saxtorph. That was so awful, wasn’t it.”
We’ve talked a lot about his embezzlement, but this is the first time we’ve talked about the night I had to lock myself in the bathroom.
And it’s the first time he says, “We have no future. We don’t, do we, Mia? The things I’ve done. To you in bed. And the money. And soon I’ll probably go to prison. I just want to die.”
His eyes are huge as he gazes into mine.
“You’ve got to leave me! I’m dragging you down.”
“We’ll talk about it later,” I say.
“ ‘We’ll talk about it later’!” he shouts. “You say, ‘We’ll talk about it later’! But then you have decided to leave, haven’t you! You’re doing it, you’re getting ready to leave me!”
“No, no — I’m not!”
He rolls over on his stomach and hides his face from me. As if he’s only talking to himself, he mutters, “You have to leave me. It’s the only right thing to do. And I can just die.”
“But I don’t want you to die.”
“It couldn’t be any worse than this.”
“Yes it could. You can have a good life. A very good life.”
While I try to dissuade Frederik from killing himself, a fantasy begins to run through my head about what Vibeke will say when he’s well enough for me to leave him. In the fantasy we argue, and she shouts that I’m a self-obsessed egomaniac; that that’s what I’ve been our entire marriage.
No doubt Frederik noticed that I said You can have a good life and not We can have a good life. But he acts as if he didn’t, and I tell him again and again that I’ll stay with him, until maybe he can believe there’s a small chance that that’s what’ll happen.
“You’re right, we should talk about it later,” he says at last. “Now isn’t a good time. Not tonight when we’re moving. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize.”
“I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, Mia. Sorry!”
“You couldn’t help it.”
“No, I couldn’t help it.”
We lie there in the darkness, in a spot where once there was a rug, and on top of it a floor lamp and a coffee table.
Many suffer hidden brain damage
One out of every eight people over 45 has a brain injury without realizing it, according to a Dutch study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine. Two thousand healthy subjects took part in the study, in which researchers from Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam scanned their brains. The researchers found a surprisingly high number of undetected brain lesions.
The most common form of lesion was what is known as a brain infarct — dead tissue arising from an insufficient supply of blood to the brain cells. Other abnormalities included aneurysms, minor cerebral hemorrhages, and benign tumors.
However, the researchers do not recommend that healthy persons be scanned at the present time. The procedure is quite costly, and doctors cannot treat most of the injuries anyway. (MLJ)
25
I’m back in our home on Station Road. The colors in the kitchen sparkle like a Christmas tree: the glint of the cabinet handles, the golden stain of the wood shelves, the red and light blue of the plastic bowls. I’m setting the dishes we’ve eaten from back in their places, and the sugar bowl we inherited from Frederik’s grandmother catches my eye, with its chased silver and its blue glass so dark, it’s impossible to see through.
And then suddenly it’s late evening and Niklas is still up, unloading the dishwasher with Frederik and me. We’ve been putting things away and washing the serving dishes and glassware after a dinner with Laust and Anja and some of the others from Saxtorph. The three of us joking around and enjoying ourselves after the guests have left.