Stella Descending (10 page)

The woman screamed with desire, moving her body in a way that had nothing to do with Martin’s body. He tried to find her rhythm, but to no avail, because she didn’t care about him. In a flash it came to him: She gazed at him with joyous eyes, screamed with desire, and tossed from side to side, but she didn’t care about him. When she came she dug her nails into his back and her body became so taut that she all but pushed him out of her. Then she kissed him for the first time, clinging to him in such a way that he was forced, reluctantly, to bury his nose in that thin hair.

Once they were dressed, she put her arms around him again, flirtatiously now, playfully, like the young heroine of some Victorian novelette who has at long last surrendered to her wooer; she stroked his thigh coquettishly and said something to the effect that it was nice when two people could be together like this. He pulled away when her hand touched him.

“I felt like throwing up. Usually women turn me on; it turns me on to see exactly what will drive this one or that one wild. Sometimes I try to guess in advance, but more often than not I’m wrong. What fascinates me is the way that every woman is different.”

“But on this occasion you felt like throwing up. Why was that?”

“I don’t know. It was awful. To be honest, I felt like getting up, right in the middle of the act, and telling her I just couldn’t be bothered.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Out of politeness, I think.”

“So after that did you give up seducing women who bought the green sofa?”

“No.”

“You still did it?”

“I still did it. The comparison with the house of cards wasn’t carelessly made. That was how I saw it. It was like I was building a house of cards. When fifty-two women had bought the avocado-green sofa, when I’d finished building my house and that house stood firm, then I would stop.”

“And start again, with new rules?”

“Yes. New rules.”

“Seduce women who bought—what—recliners, maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“And Stella. You delivered the sofa and you stayed with her for ten years, until she fell off the roof.”

“Yes.”

“You delivered the sofa, and you stayed.”

“I stayed.”

Amanda

Bee’s asleep now. She’ll sleep until Martin knocks on the door and says it’s time to go. While the minister is talking in the chapel today I’m going to say
damn, cunt, cock, kill, shit, bloody,
cunt, fuck, screw.
Then I won’t have to hear what he says. And afterward Pappa will be there, so Martin says. Maybe he’ll be waiting outside the chapel for me. I don’t know how I feel about Pappa. I’ve only met him a few times. The first time was when I was three days old. I was asleep, curled up like a cat in the crook of his arm. That’s what Mamma told me. Then he went to Australia. I don’t know if I miss him; I don’t really know him. But Australia’s probably nice. Once, before Mamma met Martin, when I was four or maybe five, Pappa came to see us. That was when Mamma and I were living in the apartment on Frognerplass. He kept hugging me. I thought it was horrible. I don’t like people hugging me. But he’d brought a whole bag of candy, not one of those little paper bags, but a shopping bag, the kind you get at the supermarket, and the whole bag was full of candy. The shopping bag and the candy both came from Australia.

I used to pretend that the plumber was my father. But now I’d rather have him as my boyfriend. One time, not that long ago, I went up to his room in the attic and asked him if he would make love to me. He was in his bed, asleep. It was pretty late. Mamma and Martin were sleeping. The plumber opened his eyes and looked at me. He switched on his bedside lamp. The light shone straight onto my breasts. I was shivering. I wanted to climb into his bed, under the eiderdown, and curl up close to him. The warmth there. “I think you should go back to bed,” he said, very softly. “But I want to get into
your
bed,” I said. “No,” he said, “that’s not a good idea.”

Sometimes we play Nintendo, the plumber and I. He killed the beast in the forest and rounded the most difficult world of all. That’s what we call it when we complete a level. We round one world and move on to the next. I would never have managed to round that world on my own. And sometimes he does let me into his bed. Then we make love all night and his stuff’s pouring out of me all the next day. There was this one time in class when Marianne started giggling. I was going around the desks, handing out an English test. Marianne was giggling, then the girl sitting next to Marianne, whose name is Vigdis, she started giggling, and soon the whole class was giggling. I was wearing light-colored pants. I knew my panties were wet and sticky— they’d been like that all day—but I didn’t think it would show. Everyone said I’d wet myself or gotten my period. That wasn’t exactly it, as I told Marianne afterward at break.

By the way, I’m not in love with him. The plumber, I mean. I have other lovers, too.

Bee’s asleep. Bee is lying here next to me. She looks like a doll with her long dark hair and her red dress. She has a red raincoat, too, with a hood, and red rubber boots. Today the sun is shining, though. It could at least be raining, seeing as we’re going to bury Mamma. Maybe Bee’s dreaming about Mamma. Maybe she’s dreaming about Mamma’s long arms, arms that unfurl and wrap themselves around her and lift her up to heaven.

When I was little, before I learned how to kill the beast in the forest, I used to have dreams like that, too.

Corinne

I asked Martin, “You have two children?”

“Stella has two children,” he said. “I have one. Amanda isn’t mine. But as far as I know Bee is mine, yes.”

“As far as I know Bee is mine,” I echoed. “What makes you put it like that?”

Martin did not answer. We sat on either side of the dining table, and neither of us said a thing. I knew if I waited long enough he wouldn’t be able to stand the silence.

“I don’t know what it is with Bee,” he said, after a while.

“She was born less than a year after you moved in with Stella?”

“She was conceived at Høylandet,” he replied. “We were there just after we met, for Harriet’s—my grandmother’s— birthday party.”

“Were you happy when Stella told you she was pregnant?”

“I thought she grew more and more beautiful with each month that passed. Stella was exceptionally tall and now she was also exceptionally big. She was two and I was one. I looked at her and she was two. She was Bee and she was Stella, and with them I could find rest.”

“You already knew she was going to be called Bee?”

“Yes and no. We had decided to name her after my Swedish great-grandmother, Beatrice. We knew we were going to call her Bea—B-E-A—short for Beatrice. And we knew she had been conceived at Høylandet. At night I used to lie with my head on Stella’s stomach and tell the baby all the wonderful stories I could think of. I could picture her, almost walking out of her mother, a perfect little creature, a perfect little face. Sometimes we called her Bea. Sometimes we called her Herr Poppel.”

“But you said, ‘Yes and no?’ ”

“Yeah, well, you see, when it came to it she was never a Beatrice, or a Bea with a B-E-A, she was just Bee.”

Martin paused for a moment, seemingly deep in thought. He lit a cigarette. “Those were good times.”

“Good times for both of you? Stella was never unwell during her pregnancy?”

“No, she was never unwell.”

“And Stella’s other daughter, Amanda, how did she take all this? She must have been around five when Stella got pregnant.”

“Something like that, yes. I don’t know. Amanda and I have never been close. I’ll be honest with you. Amanda was—how shall I put it?—Amanda was in the way, Amanda was—”

“—never anyone’s favorite,” I murmured.

“Sorry?” Martin looked puzzled.

“I said, Amanda was never anyone’s favorite. I beg your pardon. It annoys the life out of the guys on the squad, too, my finishing other people’s sentences. Bad habit!”

Martin looked at me. Then he said, “Amanda had nothing to do with Stella and me. Now and then I might have acted as though I was fond of her. It was important for Stella that I should be fond of her. I would take her on my lap, but she always wriggled free. I couldn’t do it, this father thing, with Amanda. She annoyed me. She was in the way.”

“How exactly was she in the way?”

“We had a lot of fun together back then. Playing.”

“Playing? What do you mean? Who was playing?”

“Stella and I,” he replied. “We played games. We’d meet at supermarkets and pretend we didn’t know each other. We’d each take a basket and wander around the store, flirting with strangers, stealing a pack of spaghetti, juggling with apples, doing a little dance with the brooms, and so on, until one of us, usually Stella, burst out laughing. Which meant that I had won.”

“You had won.”

“I had won. One day I got into an argument with the checkout lady because she insisted that a cauliflower is a cauliflower.”

“I see. . . .”

“Stella was standing in line behind me. We acted as if we didn’t know each other. We’d made a deal beforehand that neither of us was allowed to use a basket or a cart. We’d collected as much as we could manage to carry in our arms, and then some. . . . Okay, so there she was in line right behind me, very pregnant, her arms laden with milk, bread, fish fingers, meat-balls, soap powder, potatoes, apples, oatmeal, and lightbulbs, her face getting redder and redder. I remember thinking that she looked close to collapse—and then I got into this discussion with the woman at the register as to whether a cauliflower really was a cauliflower.”

I asked Martin, “So in your eyes a cauliflower is not a cauliflower?”

“I maintained, for the sake of argument, that cauliflower was broccoli and broccoli was cauliflower,” he answered. “Just to annoy the people behind me in line—other people’s contempt is so easily aroused, other people’s aggression—and to see how long Stella could last behind me.”

“With her arms full.”

“With her arms full, right. So I was standing there, pointing at the receipt, which stated that I had purchased five heads of cauliflower, and insisting that I had purchased five heads of broccoli. The checkout lady sighed and said that, in any case, cauliflower—which was on special—cost the same as broccoli, so it really didn’t make any difference what you called it, at which I shook my head and said, ‘Makes no difference? Makes no difference? Fair’s fair! If I buy broccoli, then as far as I’m concerned, broccoli is what it should say right here, and if I buy cauliflower, then it should say cauliflower.’ The line was starting to get restless; I could hear muttering behind me and the odd groan. Stella butted me with her enormous belly, I could feel the tip of her navel against my back, as if to tell me
enough is enough,
and a man farther down the line yelled, ‘Come on, cut the crap!’ I pulled myself up to my full height and said again, ‘Fair’s fair. I refuse to accept a receipt that states I have purchased something I have not purchased.’ The checkout lady heaved another great sigh and pulled out a folder from under the register. It contained pictures of all the different vegetables in the world. Triumphantly she located the picture of cauliflower, with the word CAULIFLOWER written in block letters underneath it. I looked at the picture. I looked at the letters. A hush fell around me. I could feel Stella’s breath on the back of my neck. ‘Martin, give it up, please, the joke’s over.’

“ ‘No,’ I said at last. ‘Fair’s fair!’

“ ‘No?’ the checkout lady repeated, flabbergasted.

“ ‘No!’ I said firmly. ‘It’s wrong. The book’s wrong, you’re wrong, everybody’s wrong. This is a crazy, crazy world.’ I pulled a cauliflower out of my bag, held it up in front of me like a skull, and announced, ‘This is broccoli!’ ”

“And then what happened?”

“Well, then a lot of things happened at once,” Martin said. “First there was this almighty groan, a collective groan, the unmistakable sound of tempers snapping. A young man from the back of the line charged up to the front and made a dive at me with both fists clenched. The checkout lady broke into hysterical laughter. And Stella dropped her armful of shopping on the floor. When she did, a lady came running over to her, crying, ‘
Oh,
my dear . . . oh, look at you . . . here, let me
help you.’
Everyone went quiet. Stella was sitting on the floor, her legs stretched straight out, in a puddle of water, surrounded by groceries. Even the man who was about to lay into me had gone quiet, stopped in his tracks, his face turned to Stella, his fist still in midair. Stella’s eyes met mine. ‘It’s Bea,’ she whispered. ‘Bea’s on the way.’ She looked all around, meeting the eyes of the others in the line. ‘Look at the mess I’ve made . . . I’m sorry . . . water everywhere . . . Martin, can you get the car?’

“Then: ‘
Now
will you stop it?’ she pleaded. ‘This game, I mean?’

“ ‘Yes, of course.’ I dropped to the floor beside her, put my arms around her, and we both started to giggle. The other people in line didn’t know what to think. Some of them laughed, others shook their heads, and the nice woman who had come to Stella’s aid picked the groceries up off the floor and put them in a basket. I got to my feet and thanked her. A little man, over seventy if he was a day, with not a hair on his head or his face and with tiny gnarled hands, bent gingerly over Stella, who was still on the floor, and asked if she really did know me or whether she was just a bit confused, due to the circumstances. He pointed to the puddle of water. She said, yes, of course she knew me. ‘So you were standing right behind him in line while he was going on and on, insisting that cauliflower was broccoli, and you never said a single word?’ he asked. Yes, she said, she supposed she was. And then the man crouched down and whispered in her ear, ‘I hope, for your sake, that you know what you’re giving birth to today!’ The man pointed his right index finger at Stella’s stomach.
‘Wretched
little
thing,’
he said.
‘Wretched little
creature.’
Then he stood up and walked off.”

Martin removed another cigarette from his pack but did not light it. Instead, he sat there fiddling with it.

“That’s when Stella screamed,” he said at last.

“Stella screamed?” I said.

“Yes, she screamed. She was screaming at the old man, screaming that he was an evil old man, that he had no right to say things like that, that he should come back this minute and beg the unborn child’s forgiveness, that for all he knew she could be carrying an angel. But the man, who by this time was on his way out of the store, just shook his head and disappeared through the door with his shopping bag. I did my best to calm her down. The whole place was in an uproar. She was crying and screaming. Screaming at me to make that man come back here, screaming that he had to beg Bea’s forgiveness. But she had gone into labor. I couldn’t worry about him. We had to get to the hospital; there was no time to lose.”