And keeps on yelling. About marital violence, about the school, about how we’re all shitheads.
“Shut up!” I shout. “Shut up!”
Laust manages to crawl out from under Frederik. I twist Frederik’s arm even harder, up toward his neck. Another scream. His brain, his poor sick brain: all that fat and blood in there, and furrows and fissures and something that’s growing — the fetuses I lost, so that we never had any more children.
I glance up at Niklas, his long blond hair against the concrete ceiling of the parking garage. He’s bowed slightly forward, ready to fight, my pale boy, albeit with eyes confused. Whom should he fight?
“Lie still, damn it,” I say.
But Frederik continues to thrash whenever I’m not pressing on his arm and back. Vibeke squats down in front of his face.
“Frederik,” she says, in a tone she might use to talk to a puppy that’s been mischievous. “Frederik, how could you?”
Laust’s nose is bleeding and he has abrasions on one cheek. He sees my inquiring look.
“I’ll be okay,” he says.
The sound of his voice makes Frederik start to struggle again. “You want to shut me out of the school! From my school! My school!”
I grip the hair on the back of his head and let my weight press his skull down against the concrete, but I let go as quickly as if I’d been shocked — I don’t want to press on the tumor.
“Is this what it’s like?” asks Laust. “Is he really like this?”
“We haven’t had any physical fights before,” I say, panting.
The only one who keeps a cool head is my father-in-law. He gently lays a hand on Laust’s arm.
“You know it’s not Frederik who’s doing this,” he says. “You know that. It’s the tumor.”
“Yes.”
“There are police everywhere out here, and they may have a hard time understanding that. I trust you won’t mention this to them.”
“No, of course not.” Laust looks almost alarmed by the suggestion.
Thorkild’s mild voice and confidential tone are exactly like the voice Frederik uses in crisis situations. It’s so familiar. Even Frederik seems to grow less tense beneath me.
“Perhaps you should go,” Thorkild says quietly to Laust. “Then I think he’ll become himself again more quickly.”
Laust nods. He takes leave of us silently, walks over to his car, and drives away. Once he’s gone, I want to release my tight grip on Frederik, but I don’t know if it’s too soon.
“What do we do now?” I ask.
Vibeke speaks from her position by Frederik’s face. “Not to tell you what to do, Mia, but aren’t you being a little rough in the way you’re handling him? I think you’re hurting him.”
• • •
Until three years ago, Frederik got up every day at five thirty to answer e-mails in his home office. Then we ate breakfast, he left, and the next time I saw him would be late at night. He would be tired and we seldom had sex. Then a new day would begin. On weekends too, he often spent most of the day in the home office, and all too many Sunday evenings passed with me grousing.
One day when I was complaining to Helena, she said, “A lack of love would drive anyone crazy.”
“Crazy?”
“Yes. Not that you’re crazy, of course. But it’s not strange that you react the way you do.”
When we’d been married eight years, I found in his bag a note to a female English teacher. The note looked like all the little love notes he’d left in my mailbox in the teachers’ lounge, during the months after we came back from the school camp in Sweden. The note said that he was eager to see her that evening.
I arranged for Niklas to sleep at Thorkild and Vibeke’s and took the train into Copenhagen, where I used his spare key to let myself in a back door. Frederik was alone in his office, and he denied everything. But as I was on my way out of the office, the English teacher came walking down the hall.
I was ready to do anything — and not just for my sake, but for Niklas’s too. I made a humongous scene, screaming that if she didn’t get a job at another school, I’d contact the parents of all her students and bring her affair with Frederik before the school board and make her life miserable any way I could.
She quit, and Frederik promised once again to change. And so began another week when I stayed with him, and when I hoped he would show a little interest in Niklas and me, the following weekend perhaps or the next vacation or the vacation after that.
Three years ago it happened again. This time it was a woman on the board I discovered him with, and this time I threw him out. First he stayed a week in a spare room in Laust and Anja’s big apartment in Copenhagen, and then he moved into a one-bedroom sublet fifty yards from the school.
The first week was tough for both Niklas and me. But after that I was ecstatic. I wanted to start to paint, and I wanted to have a real husband, one who wanted to share a life with me. For years I’d dreamt about having the courage to make this leap. Now I wouldn’t be so damn lonely; now I’d no longer overwhelm Niklas with my attention. And from the moment it got out that I was single, lots of men began to approach me, both married and unmarried, men who’d apparently been holding back only on account of Frederik.
For the first time in many years I was free, I was exultant, and everything was slated to begin, everything was looking up.
I still can’t comprehend what happened then: Niklas found me unconscious on the kitchen floor with an empty tequila bottle. What was that about? It was so far from who I was. Where did it come from? I couldn’t remember anything, only waking up in the emergency room with Frederik and Niklas looking at me in my hospital bed.
I’ll never forgive myself for letting my son see me that way. Did I go insane for one night? Had freedom come to me too suddenly? Was it impossible for me to live without Frederik?
After that he moved back in — maybe to take care of Niklas, maybe to take care of me. And I let him, because I didn’t know what was wrong with me.
I distinctly remember one of the first dinners Frederik and I had together when we were both back home. Niklas was at a friend’s, and Frederik had brought me a large bouquet of flowers. He set the table with the cloth napkins we never used, and with candles that we did use, but only when I set them out. From the kitchen I could hear him uncork a bottle of red wine, even though his mother thought I should stop drinking.
As soon as we sat down, he said, “Isn’t there something we can do to make this romantic?”
“Candles, wine?”
“No, not that.”
His lips touched the edge of his glass; they were dry despite the fact that he had just drunk. He went on.
“There are two lovers and one almost dies, and so they learn that deserting each other will never be an option. That’s how it goes in the best love stories. Aren’t we in the middle of a story like that?”
I wanted to shout It was only me who was about to die. You were out screwing! Maybe you know some love stories where the woman would have drunk herself to death if her son hadn’t found her on the floor! But I said nothing.
He was looking at me with unwonted intensity.
“Can’t we learn from this how impossible it’d be for either of us to live without the other? That has to be the most romantic thing in the world, Mia! We’re meant for each other, with all our failings. That’s the essence of love, is it not? You and me.”
I deeply admire Frederik’s ability to find something positive in even the direst situations. And he was right, of course — though I was furious with disappointment, though he’d kept me out of his life year in and year out, though our relationship had become something radically different from the one I’d first known. Despite all that, he was right. The two of us were meant to be. We were meant to be, from the moment we first met on that beach in Sweden — to when I forced his first lover to quit her job, to when I nearly drank myself to death, to this dinner and on till we die.