The Cold Song (11 page)

But then he looked at his daughters and felt like crying.

He had messed everything up, hadn’t he?

JON RETURNED TO
his desk, but the image of the girls in the grass stayed with him. He thought of Alma, remembering
her
birthday. What was it, he wondered, about the Brodal women and their birthdays?

When Alma turned eleven, Siri and Jon invited all of the girls in her class to a party—and almost all of them said they would come. The day before the party Jon took Alma into town to buy her a birthday outfit. Alma was small and chubby and together they settled on a skirt and blouse in the same shimmery silver fabric. They also bought shoes. And had scones and cocoa at a coffee shop. Then they went to the hairdresser to have Alma’s short black hair trimmed.

“Maybe you could feather the edges around her face,” Jon whispered to the young female hairdresser. He studied his daughter in the salon mirror. “Soften it up around your face so you don’t look so gruff. Don’t you think?”

Jon smiled lamely, patted Alma’s cheek, and went off to sit by the door, where he found a woman’s magazine to hide behind.

Why wasn’t Siri doing this? Taking her daughter clothes shopping, getting her a hair cut? Because she was working, yes. Earning money. Paying the bills. And he wasn’t working.
His book, his volume number three, his grand finale, was no longer considered work.

He looked at his computer screen.

Today he had written the following:
Note to self: Must elaborate
.

When the girls from Alma’s class began to arrive for the party, Alma ran up to her room, got into her bed, and hid under her blanket. Jon followed her, sat on the edge of her bed, and told her, as gently as he could, that her guests had arrived, that they had brought presents, that Alma really did have to come down now. Reluctantly she followed her father downstairs to the living room where eleven girls were waiting for her.

The sound of high-pitched voices, giggling, and squeals of excitement had filled the house, but silence fell when Alma walked into the living room with Jon right behind her.

The eleven girls looked at Alma, Alma looked at the eleven girls.

Jon thought they looked like two armies facing each other across a plain, with Alma the only soldier in her regiment.

But then the silence was broken.

“Hi, Alma,” said one of the girls.

“Hi, Alma, happy birthday,” said a second.

“You’re hair’s really nice,” said a third.

“Aren’t you going to open your presents?” said a fourth.

“I like your silver skirt,” said a fifth.

The group of girls broke up and flocked together again—this time around Alma. They patted her, they hugged her;
suddenly, for a moment, she was their chosen one, their best beloved, they could not get enough of her. It reminded Jon of the day when he had gone to pick up Alma from school and had taken their puppy, Leopold, into the schoolyard and how he had been besieged on all sides by small, avid, affectionate, pleading little girls, all wanting to stroke the dog’s fluffy coat with their soft, eager little hands, he remembered the girlish mouths, so much tender skin at one time, a choir of piping voices:
Oh he’s so cute! Can I pet him, please? His ears are so soft!

All the girls in Alma’s class were at least a head taller than Alma, most of them had shoulder-length or long hair adorned with beads and clasps, and now here was Jon’s daughter, in the living room, surrounded by them, Alma with her pitch-black hair and shining eyes, engulfed by them.

She had deigned to be petted, had offered no resistance, had made no faces, she had opened her presents (four books, a board game, a hairdressing set, lip gloss, sparkly tights, a blue short-sleeved top, a glass-bead necklace, a bracelet) and given each and every girl a polite thank-you hug. Siri whispered to Jon, “I think Alma’s enjoying herself,” and Jon had nodded, but he could not tear himself away from his daughter’s eyes, burning.

After an hour the birthday girl and her guests took their seats at the long, festively decorated dining-room table to continue celebrating Alma’s special day with pizza, lemonade, and cake. Siri and Jon worked their way slowly around the table, pouring lemonade into paper cups and helping to lift slices of pizza onto paper plates. The girls were all babbling
and chattering, all except Alma, who sat quietly watching her guests.

They were now oblivious to her. She was no longer their best beloved. They no longer loved her shimmering silver skirt, or her short black hair with its new bangs, or her eyes, burning. The birthday party was almost over, after the pizza there might be some dancing and then everybody would be presented with a goody bag and home they would go. The guests had done what their parents had asked them to do: They had gone to Alma’s birthday party and they had been nice! It had gone well.

Yes, we had a great time
.

Yes, yes, we had pizza
.

And yes, Alma liked her present
.

But then Alma got up from her chair and put her arms in the air. Her cheeks were red, her eyes burning. All the girls stopped talking and stared at her.

“Look, Papa!” she cried. Her body was trembling, tears spilled from her eyes.

Siri dropped what she had in her hands (a slice of pizza, a yellow paper napkin) and started to run around the table, Jon got to her first and caught Alma in his arms as she collapsed onto the floor.

“Alma, darling. What’s wrong?”

Alma looked up at her father, eyes brimming with tears, and laughed. “I know everything’s going to be okay now. I’m so happy.”

Alma flung her arms around her father’s neck and he sat down on the floor with his daughter in his arms. Siri stood over them, but what was she supposed to do with her hands? There
was silence. Eleven speechless, big-eyed girls waited to be told what to do. Jon looked at Siri and saw his own despair reflected in her eyes. Alma clung tightly to her father, laughing loudly against his chest. Her laughter was full of light. Jon felt her breath on his skin, through the thin fabric of his shirt.

He nodded to Siri,
Straighten up, see to the girls, you have to say something. Say something, for God’s sake, Siri, do something, don’t just stand there!

Siri straightened up and looked at the girls—soft hair, soft skin, soft voices. She forced herself to smile, although Jon could see that all she really wanted to do was put her hands over her ears, as if she were just a little girl herself.

She looked at the girls.

“Alma …” she began helplessly, spreading her arms. “Alma isn’t feeling … well.”

The girls stared at Alma lying on the floor in her father’s lap.

Then one of them said, “But if Alma’s not feeling well, why is she laughing?”

AND AGAIN HE
looked at the screen.
Note to self: Must elaborate!

Fuck that!

Then he wrote:
I love my family. I am an asshole. I will never finish this book
.

He got up from his chair for the fiftieth time that morning. He was more restless than usual today, dreading the party. The large majority of the guests were old, many in their eighties, one or two past ninety. The thought of these very old people coming here to dance with cobwebs in their hair, and of Jenny there on the stairs, quite clearly drunk, of himself as a dead man in a swimming pool (not that there was a swimming pool in the garden at Mailund, but this is how he imagined his life at the moment), reminded him of
Sunset Boulevard
, which he had made up his mind to see again as soon as possible, and the thought of this cheered him up. He and Siri could watch it together.

Jon logged on to Amazon and ordered
Sunset Boulevard
to be sent express, it cost three hundred kroner extra, but that way he would have the film in just two days. He envisaged his wife, her asymmetric form, her slender bones, her white filmy dress, tablecloths billowing around her.

Did she know that Jenny was drinking in her room?

He didn’t have the heart to tell her. Or maybe he just couldn’t get up the courage. As far as this party was concerned, he had no fight left in him.

Leopold got up and put his paw in Jon’s lap. It was Siri who had wanted a dog. He hadn’t wanted a dog. But now they had a dog and he was the one who took care of it. And even as he felt his annoyance at this rising (he hadn’t wanted a dog, had put his foot down, had said “I think we should wait,” yet now the dog was his responsibility, no one else bothered with it, why was that?) a text message from Karoline chimed in on his cell phone:
What are you doing?

Without hesitation he replied:
Thinking of you
.

Which was not exactly true. He wasn’t thinking of Karoline at all. But that was probably what she wanted to hear.

He put down the phone and looked at the computer screen:
Must elaborate!

Then another message came in. He picked up the phone. It was her again:
That’s nice to know, and kind of wistful too
.

What the hell did that mean? What was nice and kind of wistful too? Jon clicked on
MESSAGES SENT
. There it was:
Thinking of you
.

Oh yes, right. He had written that he was thinking of her and she thought that was nice and kind of wistful.
Because they were both married? Because the world could never know about their romance?
Darling Karoline!
Wistful?
Really? He laughed. Leopold raised his head and looked at him.
What kind of a laugh was that?
Jon wasted no time in deleting his messages, both the messages in his
INBOX
and those under
MESSAGES SENT
, and he remembered to delete the ones in the
DELETED MESSAGES
box too. He knew that Siri read his e-mails and also the texts on his phone, so he never forgot to delete the
DELETED MESSAGES
, although it felt equally pointless every time.

The whole idea behind deleting a message was to actually delete it, no? Not to assign it to another box, or file, or whatever, called
DELETED MESSAGES
.

Because your message was not, in fact, deleted if you pressed
DELETE
. It was simply reassigned to
DELETED MESSAGES
. It was not deleted, effectively and decidedly deleted, as in
gone
, until you clicked on
DELETED MESSAGES
and answered the question:
Are you sure you want to delete this message?

Jon liked the idea that she, Karoline, had a summer house just down the road. He liked that they could run into each other at any time and that he could run his hand down the inside of her thigh whenever he felt like it and under anyone’s nose. He liked that he could take the dog for a walk or go to the store for some milk or bread and she’d be there. He could just send her a text. It was so easy. She was so close. Just down the street. Nobody had to know. It was right there in front of them—his wife, her husband—but nobody had to know. Difficult romances were overrated. To Jon, Karoline represented the thrill of convenience. She was always available and nobody had to find out.

Once—last winter—he had invited this woman to his house in Oslo; an arts journalist who had written an admiring piece on his books in
Dagbladet
. He had sent her an e-mail, thanking her for such an insightful and well-written critique. And so it began.

Some months later Siri flew down to Copenhagen for the day. She had a meeting with a talented new chef. Something like that. Or maybe it was something else. He didn’t remember exactly what had taken her to Copenhagen. The main thing was that she was going away and would be away for a whole twenty-four hours, and in another country at that. He could hardly wait. He made plans. He sent a text message to the arts journalist, inviting her to his house. He was going to fuck her right there in the middle of his and Siri’s drafty, heavily mortgaged house. Until then, he had underestimated the erotic power of the betrayal itself. That all-surpassing power of knowing what he could do, anywhere and anytime he pleased, there was so much pleasure in store for him if he just lighten up and let himself experience it.

He pictured her on the expensive gray couch in the living room, her legs splayed. Jon was not going to skulk around the edges any longer. What he wanted was to be able to destroy everything and still endure. Wrecked, sanguine, alert. He had been tired for a very long time. The taste of tired. The smell of tired. Irene was her name, the arts journalist, freelance and free for that entire day and he was going to have her—have her and have her and have her until she was all gone and he would rise up, finally awake.

She had rung the doorbell. Had parked a few blocks away. Taken care not to be seen by the neighbors. All of this they had agreed. The quick text messages full of anticipation. What they had not agreed, however, was that she would bring her dog. A stupid little mutt that stood in the hall and barked when it saw Leopold. Jon was all at once keenly
aware of where he was, of the things surrounding him, of the scene being played out: the clothes cupboard from IKEA, the colorful baskets full of scarves and mittens and woolly hats—one basket for him, one for Siri, one for Liv, and one for Alma—the dark hardwood floor, the shoes and boots and sneakers spread all over, which were supposed to be kept on the shoe rack but were never put on the shoe rack, a child’s begrimed drawing of a pink girl under a beaming yellow sun, signed LIV. And in the midst of all this, in Siri and Jon’s house, Irene the arts journalist’s stupid mutt, barking at Leopold and at Jon. As if
they
were the intruders.

“Why did you bring the dog?” Jon asked.

“Julius needed a walk,” said Irene. She tugged at the leash, trying to control the little creature. “I couldn’t leave him for the whole day,” she added.

“You’re not staying the whole day!” Jon snapped.

He tried to summon up the picture of this woman, Irene the arts journalist, with her legs splayed on the sofa. But she did not look as he remembered. They had met a few weeks earlier, briefly, at a café, and since then he had inundated her with text messages and e-mails.
All the things he was going to do to her
. During the week following that first brief meet at the café he had been all aflame. Yes, exactly that. All aflame. But the woman standing here now, in his and Siri’s house, was podgy and had a hint of a mustache.