“Reality is hell,” he said.
Only Mai understood what he was saying toward the end, and at the very last not even she could make him out.
He said to her, “You alone could have eased my pain, Mai.”
Johan arrived in Göteborg before noon. It was pouring rain. He walked to the hotel, hoping she would still be in her room. He knew she wasn’t scheduled to give her lecture until two-thirty and guessed that she would spend the morning preparing. By the time he reached the hotel he was soaked through. His nose, his eyes, his eyebrows were streaming; he could lick the rain off his lips, and it dripped from his coat, the bottoms of his trousers, and his bag. His shoes squished, and his white shirt and his undershorts clung to his skin. He called Mai from a pay phone outside the hotel. The operator put him through, and she answered right away. She sounded happy to hear his voice. Where was he calling from? she asked. Was he at work? Had he slept all right without her beside him? But she didn’t give him a chance to answer, just kept talking, told him she was dreading her lecture, worried she’d leave out something important.
Eventually Johan did manage to get a word in. He asked what she was doing.
“Writing, of course,” she said. “I’m sitting here writing.”
“Yes, I know that. But just at the moment when I called, what were you doing then? I’d like to be able to picture you.”
She laughed softly. “At the moment you called, or just before you called, I got up and went into the bathroom to brush my hair.”
“A hundred times?”
“No, just a couple of times. I was trying to decide whether I should wear it up or leave it down for this afternoon.”
“Leave it down.”
“D’you think?”
“Yes.”
It felt good, he realized, to be standing like this outside her hotel with the rain drumming on the roof of the phone booth, to be standing in a puddle of water, holding on to the wet receiver, to her voice and the image of her in front of the mirror; the shining hair that he imagined he could see light up the whole of her dark room, the whole of the hotel, the whole of Göteborg.
“What are you wearing?” he asked.
“My stripy nightgown, glasses.”
“You mean you’re not dressed yet?”
“Well, I got dressed and went down for breakfast; then I came back up to my room and put on my nightgown again. I like working in it. It’s nice and loose and not too warm.”
“You’re warm enough, then,” he went on, “in just your nightgown? You’ve got the window closed so you don’t catch a cold?” He gazed up at the hotel and its rows of windows, behind one of which was Mai.
“No,” she said, seeming a little surprised by the question. “I’ve got the window open. The sun’s shining. It’s really like spring here, just a gentle breeze ruffling my hair. How’s the weather in Oslo?”
“It’s raining,” Johan said.
“Typical,” she said.
For a moment or two neither of them said anything.
“What’ll it be, then?” Johan asked finally.
“What?”
“Your hair. Up or down?”
“Down, I think.” She paused again, then added, “Or maybe up. I don’t know.”
“I love you,” Johan said.
“I love you too,” she replied. “Now I’d better hang up and get back to my writing.” She sighed. “I don’t know how you do it, Johan,” she blurted out. “Churning out articles day in, day out, I mean. This, to me, is sheer hell.”
“To me too,” said Johan, laughing at her. “Don’t despair. You’ll get there! And tonight you can celebrate.”
Then they hung up.
Johan stayed in Göteborg for the rest of the day. He kept an eye out for her, waiting behind a tree until at long last she left the hotel. It was almost two o’clock and still raining. Under her long scarlet raincoat she was wearing a green sweater, a tight-fitting blue skirt, and green rubber boots. Her indoor shoes were probably in the plastic bag she carried in one hand, and her typewritten lecture notes in the bag over her shoulder. She was also clutching a large yellow umbrella on the point of blowing away. Her fair hair hung loose.
He followed her to the convention center and watched as she was swallowed up by the crowd. He decided to wait until her lecture was over, and again he hid behind a tree. Hours went by. There was probably a lot of talk back and forth between her and the other pediatricians, he thought, maybe other lectures. Mai’s surely couldn’t be the only one. At last she emerged, with two other women. They walked in a huddle like the best of friends, hooting with laughter at the wind threatening to blow them over. Like Mai, the other two were carrying large yellow umbrellas, and it dawned on him that these were furnished by the organizers of the conference. Then he noticed the black lettering: NORDIC PEDIATRI-CIANS’ CONFERENCE 1985.
That evening Mai had dinner in the hotel restaurant with her colleagues. She didn’t see Johan, even though he actually stood in the doorway, scanning the restaurant until he located her table. It would never have occurred to her that he could have followed her, that he could actually be there in Göteborg, that he would come all that way. She was deep in conversation with the two women she had joined up with earlier in the day, and to all appearances she was having a terrific time.
When a man’s wife goes off to a seminar and then tells lies about it, chances are she’s having an affair. But when Johan’s wife goes off to a seminar and tells lies about it, she lies about the weather. Johan’s wife tells him that the sun is shining and that she is sitting writing by an open window, feeling the spring breeze ruffle her hair.
It crossed his mind that this lie might be a forewarning of a bigger lie, a more pernicious one. The moment Mai said that the sun was shining even as rain was coming down in buckets, he had thought, She’s in love with someone else! She’s betrayed me! But then he realized that there was no logical connection between the weather in G
ö
teborg and the likelihood of another man in Mai’s life. A woman, he concluded, is no less unfaithful in sunshine than in rain.
Johan never did come up with an explanation. It was such a scrappy lie. Neither the truth (that it was raining) nor the lie (that the sun was shining) was malicious, harmful, or even
relevant.
But the fact was, and still is, that Mai tells lies.
Her other lies, when first he became aware of them, were all of the same caliber, if a lie can be said to have a caliber. They were of no account. Johan might not even have noticed them, had it not been for Göteborg.
For instance: Johan and Mai would occasionally call each other at work. If Johan had left home before Mai, he would usually call to ask what she was wearing. It was a kind of a game. She knew he liked to be able to picture her. But more than once he discovered, always by chance, that she was actually wearing something quite different from what she had described over the phone. She might tell him that she was wearing a blue dress when in fact she was wearing red pants. That sort of thing.
But she didn’t always lie.
When Mai was thirty-eight, she announced to Johan that she was pregnant but that she’d made up her mind to have an abortion. She had had an amniocentesis, and the test had shown the fetus to be defective. Johan pleaded with her: she couldn’t make a decision like this on her own; they ought at least to discuss it, he said. Exactly how far along was she?
“Fourteen weeks,” she said, and turned away.
Months later in a bookshop, in the section called “Mother and Child,” he found a book with a week-by-week account of pregnancy. He opened it to week fourteen: “The baby’s heart pumps twenty-eight liters of blood a day,” it said.
Twenty-eight liters of blood.
He saw before him twenty-eight milk cartons.
He saw before him a heart.
But at this particular moment he was standing, staring, speechless, at Mai’s back.
“For God’s sake, Mai. You never said a word. I had no idea. In any case, it’s too late for an abortion. This is a
baby
you’re carrying.”
“It’s not too late.”
“It’s my baby too,” he ventured, and the words didn’t even sound hollow to him. I think that in a momentary burst of courage, which deserted him immediately afterward, Johan wanted that child. “You can’t just—”
“It’s my body,” she cut in. “And anyway, it’s deformed. We’ve created this deformed thing, Johan. I don’t want to have it. It’s a pity, but it’s out of the question.”
Johan looked at her.
“You’re cold, Mai.”
“I am
not
cold. Jesus, Johan!”
“What you want to do, it’s so . . . lax, morally lax. You can’t just—”
“Big words, Johan,” she hissed. “Big words. Let’s not make speeches about things we don’t understand.”
She started to cry. For a second she reminded him of Alice, who often resorted to tears in order to bring a discussion to an end.
“I can’t stand the thought of going through with this. I can’t stand it!” she sobbed. She flopped down onto the floor and ran a hand through her hair. And then she said, softly now, “You couldn’t even take care of a healthy child, Johan. You couldn’t even take proper care of Andreas. When Alice died he was left all alone in the world. I don’t want to bring a child into the world with you, not even a healthy one, and certainly not this sick one.”
This was an argument against which, for obvious reasons, he had no defense. A slightly contemptuous smile every time his only son said the word
Pappa.
Mai knew exactly what to say, which buttons to push. His courage deserted him, and he was dumbstruck.
In the middle of the night he would think,
She didn’t need
to tell me.
She could have said she had to go to the hospital because of some woman’s trouble, nothing to worry about, a routine procedure. She could have satisfied him with some such explanation, as easily as saying, The sun is shining; the window is open, there’s a spring breeze blowing. After all, she’d already made her decision. She wasn’t interested in his objections, his support, his opinion. She was quicker than he, and she had made up her mind.
After the abortion, he went to collect her from the hospital. He said nothing until they were in the car. Then she turned to him and breathed, “I don’t want to talk about it. As far as you and I are concerned, this subject is closed.”
Johan stared straight ahead and swung the car out onto the road. “Okay,” he said.
She kept her eyes fixed on him. He took the road to Majorstua. Would not look at her.
“Do you want to know what it was?” She spoke in little more than a whisper.
“I thought you said you didn’t want to talk about it.”
“I don’t. But do you want to know what it was? I asked, and they told me.”
“I’m not sure I want to know that, Mai.”
“A girl. It was a girl.”
The episode with the baby was never mentioned again. Not the beating heart, nor the twenty-eight liters of blood. And when Mai turned forty he gave her a splendid birthday: breakfast in bed, a picnic lunch in Frognerparken, and dinner in a restaurant. His presents to her were a puppy and a little silver cross she had had her eye on. Johan was not a religious man, but Mai always said that it didn’t hurt to believe in something—although she never seemed inclined to expand this vague statement. She wore a long blue cotton dress, and in her hair, which was still fair, she had pinned a yellow rose. She looked like a young girl. The waiter in the restaurant took her for Johan’s daughter.
It was only after her hair turned gray—almost overnight, a few years before she turned fifty—that strangers stopped assuming she was Johan’s daughter. Johan, on the other hand, looked older than his years.
While sitting in the doctor’s waiting room that day, still unaware that his test results were alarming, he made the acquaintance of a little tousle-headed girl. She too was waiting to see the doctor, sitting there with her mother. How old would she have been: five? six? four?
Johan was hopeless at guessing children’s ages; he could never even remember how old Andreas was (although he never lost count of how many years it had been since they’d last spoken to each other). The tousle-headed little girl strode across the waiting room, clambered up onto a chair next to him, and in a voice bordering on a shout said, “I hope I never get as old and wrinkly as you.”
Her mother looked up from her magazine, chided her daughter, and apologized profusely to Johan, who dismissed the mother’s apologies with a shake of the head. He smiled and asked the little girl, “How old do you think I am?”
The child cocked her head and squinted to show that she was giving the matter serious consideration. She sat that way for a while, staring at Johan until he began to feel uncomfortable. Then she put out her hand, splayed her stubby fingers, their nails adorned by flaking pink polish, and stroked his cheek.
“You’re older than my grandpa,” the child said, causing her mother to raise her eyes from her magazine, shush her, and apologize again.
“And how old is your grandpa?” Johan asked.
“Eighty-four,” she said, “and sharp as a tack. Are you?”
“Am I what?” Johan asked.
“Sharp as a tack?”
“Why, I should say so,” Johan replied, speaking a little louder than necessary, “and if you must know, I’m only sixty-nine. Which makes me fifteen years younger than your grandpa!”
He knew he was overreacting, but he was, after all, waiting to see the doctor, who had called and asked him to come right away—which was in itself ominous—and then along comes this tousle-headed child with her decrepit grandpa. Johan was upset, and not only by the little girl’s outspokenness and the mother’s repeated apologies. At the same time, he wanted to show the mother that he took the child’s teasing in good fun. Never let it be said that he couldn’t laugh at himself or at a clever little child.
That same evening as he lay in bed, waiting for Mai to finish brushing her hair, he was searching for the right words. He didn’t know how to put it, but he thought, She’ll help me. I’m sick, but she’ll help me. My life has never been the picture of dignity.