Grace (7 page)

“I know you can hear me, and I just wanted to say that I’m grateful to you for doing as I asked, but that this is no small sacrifice. I want you to know that. My father’s a good man. It’s not that I don’t care about him. You said I didn’t care, but I do.”

Johan blew on the mirror. He saw his father’s face, the last glimpse of his father’s stricken face before his mother closed the door and the howling began.

He didn’t want to end up like that. He wanted to decide for himself when it was time, and he didn’t want to be a burden to anyone, least of all to Mai, any more than he already was. Mai was seventeen years younger, only fifty-three. And slim, stately, almost beautiful. He tried to summon up Mai’s face the way he had his father’s, but there was only mist. He could hear her out in the kitchen, humming and clattering dishes and cutlery. It was impossible to picture a face one knew so well. When he thought about it, he realized he seldom saw her face in his dreams. He could envision his mother’s face whenever he liked, and his father’s as he lay dying, before the blue door was closed, and Alice’s face, twisted with scolding, but not Mai’s face. If he shut his eyes and worked his way inside to that part of him that continued to burn, he could find the rapture Mai’s face awakened in him, not only when they first fell in love but to this day. It was like discovering a clearing in the forest where wild strawberries grew.

Very few who knew him would have described Johan Sletten as a man with an inner flame, but he was aware of a small unaccountable flicker deep inside all the same. At his funeral he was remembered as honest, amiable, witty, intelligent, able. His interest in books, the cinema, and music was mentioned but not overplayed. It would never have occurred to anyone to use the word
passion
in connection with Johan. Not even Mai—when, to many people’s surprise, she delivered her husband’s eulogy—gave the impression that their twenty-three-year-long marriage had been in any way passionate. Qualities such as friendship, thoughtfulness, understanding, and trust were named. Especially trust—she repeated the word several times.

Now that all this is said and done, it might seem as if Johan was the only one who knew he had an inner flame, a quietly resounding
yes.
Whether or not other people knew it was there, it was what he was prepared to fight for. He would fight as long as he could. It was not impossible to survive this. Johan had made a list of all the stories he had read or heard, about men and women, given much the same diagnosis as he, who had survived. He could be one of them. He wanted to be one of them.

But when he couldn’t fight any longer, if it came to that, then he wanted to die with dignity. Before they found him caked with his own shit. Before he became a burden to Mai. She must understand that it would be his choice, his last plea for help. Yes, he would fight, but if and when he found the battle going against him, he would ask for help.

Johan faced himself in the mirror. This thing about a dog, he thought, had left its mark on the day. He didn’t even want a dog. When Charley was put to sleep, he’d made up his mind never to have another dog. But a perfectly ordinary conversation between a husband and wife about getting a dog shouldn’t have to be so goddamned existential, a matter of life and death like everything else these days. Mai didn’t want a dog because she thought that Johan was about to make his exit—now there’s drama for you, thought Johan, making a face in the mirror; Mr. Johan Sletten makes his exit—and she didn’t want to take care of a dog on her own. Even the most ridiculous, banal conversation revolved around the fact that Johan was about to make his exit. (Although making one’s exit really suggests leaving a stage, and he was going to do more than that: he was going to kick the bucket, cash in his chips, pass away, shuffle off this mortal coil.) But talk about it . . . she never would. Not that he wanted to. But they hadn’t made plans as they usually did. Mai wouldn’t admit that she believed he was going to die, but she wouldn’t make plans either. She wouldn’t even pretend. That wasn’t her way.

The business about the dog had set him thinking, and now he wanted to talk to her. He had wandered around his little Swedish cottage garden, cursing the capricious weather (which he took personally, as a sign), thinking that it was time he took control of the situation. A voice, like another, deeper form of breathing inside him, said that it was high time to take control! And at that moment the sun peeked out from behind the clouds and shone down on him, shone with just a fraction of its enormous power on my spindly friend Johan Sletten.

He turned his face to the sky and let the sun warm him.

It was high time.

Johan did not have much of an appetite at dinner. Food, even good food, nauseated him. But he could still, on occasion, enjoy a glass or two of wine, as he did that evening. Sitting with him at the kitchen table under the blue lamp, Mai remarked, a bit absentmindedly, “Your boil’s looking a bit fiery. I’ll clean it for you.” She stood up.

“Sit down, Mai!”

Mai looked at him, taken aback. She sat down.

“Forget about my face! We need to talk.” They both winced at his tone. He took a deep breath. “And there will be no interruptions,” he added. He raised his hand to feel his cheek.

“For heaven’s sake!” Mai burst out laughing.

But Johan silenced her, saying, “I’ve . . . I’ve been thinking.”

“I see.”

“I want you to hear me out without interrupting. This is important. I need your help, Mai. I need you . . . more than ever.”

Mai nodded.

“I’m sick, but I’m going to fight it. You know I want to fight it. I may even recover completely . . . I
may
recover, you know . . . but if not—”

“Johan,” Mai interrupted gently, “why don’t you just take one day at a time? You’re feeling better now, aren’t you? Can’t we enjoy this time together without thinking too much about it?”

“I want to get certain things sorted out now,” Johan whispered. “So that I can live out the rest of my time with you in peace. That’s all I want, Mai, a bit of peace.”

“You’re not going to get any peace as long as you keep trying to predict the future,” Mai retorted. “I could have a heart attack tomorrow, right? Bye-bye, Mai! There’s no point looking too far ahead.”

“You have to listen to me,” Johan pleaded. “I
am
fighting. I don’t want to die. But I need you to help me if . . . if my illness should become a burden”—he struggled to find the right words—“a burden to us both.”

“You’re not a burden.”

“But if I become one—”

“I don’t think of you that way,” she snapped.

“I worry about the pain, Mai.”

“Pain can be eased. And I’ll be with you. I’ll always be right there with you.”

He looked at her with gratitude. He said, “I worry about the humiliation. I don’t want you to see me like that. I don’t want your last memory of me to be the
stink.
I remember when my father . . .” He couldn’t finish the sentence.

Mai looked at him and took a breath. “I understand what you’re saying, but . . .”

He waited for the rest, but nothing else came. He wanted to know what was supposed to follow that
but.
He wanted to know whether she was going to repeat
I’ll be with you,
maybe say
I’ll always be right there with you, no matter what.
But she said no more. She began clearing the table. He contemplated her hair, which she had put in a long gray braid, and her big hands with their short, clean nails, a narrow white crescent at the tip of each: a sign of good health, she had once told him. Alice’s nails had been flimsy and ragged, and she was always absentmindedly nibbling at them. Sometimes she would have them painted pink. She’d come home and flutter her hands, those teeny Chinese hands, in front of Johan’s face and ask him if he thought they were pretty.

He looked at his own unclipped fingernails: narrow white crescents at the tips. Once he had put his palm up to Mai’s and said, “We have similar hands, you and I.” But she had pulled her hand away, saying it was bad luck to compare them. Mai had promised that she’d be with him always. Hold his hand until it was over. Mai’s was the good hand he wanted to be the last thing he sensed in this life. She would take his hand in hers and lead him to the other side.

He had always thought of Mai’s hands in this way—as good hands, patient hands. She who was always so quick could suddenly draw her body very close to his. It was the way she stroked him, the lingering progress of her hand across his stomach and down, the fact that it was so slow, so easy and slow. Other women didn’t have hands. Only Mai had hands.

Before they went to bed that night, Mai lit a fire. The August summer smacked of fall; the wind was blowing hard, and—after months of long, light-filled evenings—darkness had fallen suddenly and unexpectedly. Johan and Mai sat in their chairs with their books. It might have been any ordinary evening, Johan thought, if not for the nausea, a gob of vomit in his gullet that would not go up or down. And the conversation with Mai that had concluded with the word
but.
Was she going to say that she would be right there with him whatever happened?

“Say it, Mai!” he whispered. “Talk to me!”

He looked at her sitting there in the firelight, her mouth half open over her book, like a little girl with her first detective novel. But Mai is a middle-aged woman, he thought with some satisfaction, even with that girlish aspect. She, too, is mortal, just like all little girls who think they will never die. But the worms will crawl through the locks of little girls too. He smiled and looked at her. It could end here, he thought. Two old friends, Johan and his wife, in their chairs, reading their books in front of the fire on a late-summer evening.

He studied her. The glossy gray braid had grown straggly in the course of the day, sprouting stray hairs in all directions. A pair of round reading glasses perched on her nose, and her face was warm and rosy. He reached out to stroke her cheek but checked himself, reluctant to disturb her.

It could end here. No pain, no howling or fear or degradation. Just this moment—Johan and Mai and the fire in the hearth—and then a long, black night.

Johan shut his eyes and thought of another woman.
Mamma.

From time to time before she died, they would meet at a coffee shop for muffins and hot chocolate. One day he asked her to tell him about his father. Usually they didn’t talk about anything in particular. She would tell him about her insufferable neighbor, the ladies at her bridge club, her long solo expeditions to the old department store downtown. When he asked about his father, she started to say something but stopped abruptly. She looked at him and whispered, “I can’t.”

Her small lined face turned to his, and her eyes glistened.

“You don’t understand. . . . Every time I try to picture Pappa, all that comes to mind are those last days. Pappa covered in . . . Pappa was suffering something terrible, Johan. And there was nothing I could do to help him. It’s as if these images have erased all the others, the good ones. There were so many good images. Pappa and I had a good marriage. He was a good man. But all I’m left with are these horrible memories. I can’t push them away. I can’t wipe them out. I try, but I can’t do it.”

Johan heard Mai yawning, and soon her book slid onto her lap. The fire had gone out. Neither of them spoke. They simply got on with doing the usual things a husband and wife do every night, without disturbing each other, without getting in the other’s way. Turn down the bedcovers. Brush teeth, go to the bathroom, wash hands. Kiss good night. Turn out the light.

But Johan knew he wouldn’t sleep that night. He rarely slept now, but he didn’t keep Mai awake complaining about it. He had a headache, a dull pain over his right eye, as if some irate little man had driven a fist into his forehead; not that it was unusual to have a headache when the weather was changing so fast. The nausea was worse—it just would not go away—and the comforter was too warm and smelled a little funny, and he couldn’t get comfortable. He tried to visualize all the healthy cells in his body smothering the unhealthy ones, the way a psychologist had advised him to do. But instead he found himself visualizing the opposite: death to the healthy cells. He cursed that psychologist, all the rotten psychologists and their rotten advice. He just lay there feeling worse and worse.

“Johan, are you all right?” Mai’s voice was soft. She wasn’t sleeping after all.

Johan said, “Give me your hand. I’m afraid.”

Mai gave him her hand. “Don’t be afraid. I love you.”

His voice broke. “Will you help me when I can’t take it anymore? When it gets to that point, will you help me?”

Mai lay still and gave his hand a squeeze. Neither of them said anything.

For a long time they lay like that, hand in hand in the dark. Johan shut his eyes. He was conscious of her hand and her breathing and her scent and her half sleep, and sleep for him soon seemed possible. His nausea abated, his headache too. Sleep was possible tonight, Johan thought, and he squeezed her hand. Sleep. Peace. You’re my best friend, Mai.

And just as sleep was enfolding him in its great black cloak, Mai sat up and switched on the lamp. Johan’s eyes snapped open. “What’s the matter?” he whispered. “I thought we were sleeping.”

“We’re not sleeping,” she said. “Anyway, I’m not.”

“What’s the matter, Mai?”

“Johan, what you’re asking me to do is against the law!”

“What?” Johan rubbed his eyes.

“What you’re asking me to do. What you’ve asked me several times to do.”

“Oh, that,” he whispered.

“It’s against the law.”

“What damn law?”

“Norwegian law. It’s against everything the Medical Association of this country stands for, don’t you see that?”

Johan was wide awake now. “And what about your own law, Mai?”

She thumped a fist on the comforter and looked at him. “My own law doesn’t count, dammit. Do you realize that you’re asking me to commit a crime?”