You Disappear: A Novel (32 page)

A white dab of cheesecake is sticking to Frederik’s upper lip. I point discreetly to my own lip with my pinky. But he doesn’t notice. I do it again. Still no reaction.

“Frederik!” I say. And then I point to my upper lip.

He glances at me for a moment and goes on talking.

In the end I’m forced to be explicit. “Frederik, you have something sitting on your upper lip.”

He finally scrapes it off, with a quick, somewhat casual movement—and without making the least bit of eye contact. His lecture is unstoppable.

We don’t manage to talk to the two boys very much before, stuffed with cheesecake, they clear out.

How often have I suffered through this at some dinner, with half- or completely drunk men on either side of me? Sitting surrounded by men who look at me and talk to me, while at the same time I feel strangely ignored beneath their aggressive gazes—and strangely desirous of going home and watching TV by myself.

But Helena and I simply refuse to put up with it. We’ll set the tone here. I ask the table about back when we were all living in cheap apartments in poor neighborhoods: wasn’t there also something nice about it? Was it only because we were twenty-one and the world still seemed wide open?

I haven’t managed to finish what I’m saying when Henning interrupts me to talk about how he plans to earn enough money to get out of construction and sail around the world in his own boat. The first ten or fifteen times I heard him talk about this fantasy, I found it charming, but for years now I’ve had the desire to shout in his ear,
So sail away, God damn it, or shut your trap! Stop interrupting others to talk about it for twenty years in a row!
And I know Helena’s other friends feel the same way.

Henning seems to feel more at home here than he usually does. He also seems to feel more affection for Frederik than he ever has before, but maybe that’s because he’s drinking more. Or perhaps he’s drinking more because he feels more at home.

He reaches out and takes more than half of the cheesecake that remains. With the big slice on the cake server halfway between platter and plate, he suddenly hesitates. He looks over at me.

“You folks are good, right? Okay if I take this?”

“You should just make yourself at home,” I say in a voice that, in the old days, would have made Frederik, in any case, put the piece back.

Henning sets the slice on his plate, stuffs a generous bite in his mouth, and then plunges into a joke about a woman who does yoga in the nude. One day when she’s doing the splits, her crotch gets stuck to the floor like a suction cup so that she can’t get up again.

In the old days after a dinner with Helena and Henning, Frederik and I would load the dishwasher together. And as we buzzed around the kitchen, synchronized and efficient, we’d express shock at how crude Henning would get when he’d had something to drink. After we both ran him down for a while, I’d say,
But he’s good for her
. I’d say that not because I actually knew it to be true; it was more that I’d begin to have a bad conscience about vilifying our guests just a few minutes after they’d left.

But now …

Henning goes on with his joke. The woman’s husband fetches a neighbor who’s a bricklayer, and together the men attempt to pry the woman loose from the quarry tile she’s sticking to. But it’s as if she’s glued fast to the floor. In the end the bricklayer says, “We’re going to have to break the tile in pieces.” The husband says, “Are you out of your gourd? These tiles cost five hundred crowns apiece!” “Well, what you should do then is make her good and horny until she gets all wet. Then we can slide her along the floor and out into the kitchen.” “You think that’ll get her loose?” “No. But the kitchen tiles only cost five crowns.”

Henning doubles up with laughter, and only at the last instant do I manage to move his glass from the path of his elbow, while Frederik guffaws with glee. The two men pound each other on the back, tears in their eyes.

I find myself compelled to turn away. It’s just too depressing to remember everything that Frederik used to be. Everything he no longer is.

Helena catches my eye and I see the gentleness of her look; she feels for me. At least I have her, I think.

She grasps my hand and says, “It’s so good to see Frederik well again.”

“
Well!
What do you mean
well
?”

“Yes, to see him healthy again. It’s much more important than that you have to move.”

I can hear the hardness in my voice. “He’s not well at all. He’s a far cry from well.”

Does my best friend really not know Frederik any better? Can’t she see that he’s become a foolish, vulgar shadow of himself?

She grows nervous, and she should be. In this moment, it feels as if I can never see her again; she hasn’t understood a thing about my life.

The men of course notice nothing. Henning is droning on again about circumnavigating the globe. He completely drowns out Frederik’s lecture on his half-finished speakers, and I know it’s going to end badly, even before Frederik brings his fist down on the table and yells, “Shut your mouth already about sailing around the world! Everyone thinks it’s totally ridiculous!”

“What?”

“It’ll never happen. I’ve talked to Mia about it a hundred times!”

“It
will
happen, whatever you say! Helena and I are going to sail—”

“I told you to shut up about it!”

“First we’ll start in the Caribbean, then we’ll head south and—”

“No one here wants to hear another word about it! In any case not Mia or me.”

I try to calm him down but can’t talk over Henning, who’s shot up from his seat. “Don’t fucking speak to me like that!”

Now what—is it going to come to blows? Are they stupid enough for that? Henning could whip all of us at the same time, but Frederik shows no fear. “Go and shit in your ocean!”

“What?”

“Yeah, just sail over and do it!”

I say, “Frederik!”

Helena says, “Henning!”

They’re two big dumb dogs we’ve brought to the park who don’t know what’s best for them. We ought to have kept them on much shorter leads. We pull and pull at them, but now it’s too late.

Niklas stands in the doorway. Has he come to protect me? Incredible how quickly he always shows up.

How can I live with Frederik for even one more week? How’s Helena been able to stand twenty years with Henning?

Without any warning, Henning’s mood changes. The next moment he’s laughing loudly and has his arm around Frederik. “You should have another glass of wine! Ha-ha-ha!”

Frederik hugs Henning back. “You should too. Ha-ha-ha!”

“I certainly will. But you first.”

I break in. “I’m not so sure it’s a good idea for Frederik to drink any more right now.”

Frederik looks at me, irritated. The run-up to a brawl a few seconds ago has already blown clean out of his head. “Oh, come off it. I’ve hardly had anything.”

“Frederik, you’re sick!”

“Well, in that case I really
should
have something.”

“I’m simply going to have to put my foot—”

“Our guest wants some company,” he says laughing. “You can’t say no to our guest! Especially since I’ve offended him so terribly!”

And Henning adds, chortling, “Yes! You can’t refuse me when your husband’s just offended me! You really can’t. He’s offended me
dreadfully
. Ha-ha-ha!”

Frederik’s already on his way out to the kitchen. “I’ll find the wine myself.”

Henning places a big paw on his shoulder. “I’ll join you.”

Helena and I remain sitting behind by ourselves; Niklas has left again too. I take a slow deep breath, and so does Helena.

Then she says, “Why exactly is it that both our husbands have had leadership positions, and not us?”

I try to laugh along with her, though I still have the sense that I’m completely alone in my new life.

There’s no way we can resolve our conflict with the preschool rapidity of the men, but we make an effort. And meanwhile I think about a brain-damaged man I once read about. He’d always been rude with customers in his small corner grocery, but he acted that way with warmth and a twinkle in his eye, so they patronized the shop in fact
because
of him. After he suffered a minor stroke, he still thought he could kid his customers affectionately, but he’d lost the fine motor skills he needed to
be disarming—the brief hint of a smile at precisely the right moment, the way he turned his head and looked down after speaking. The customers grew annoyed. His wife kept telling him that he’d have to act like a normal boring shopkeeper, but that just made him furious. And the shop went bankrupt.

Which makes me wonder: why has Henning’s contracting business been running in the red these last few years? They’ve said it’s the financial crisis, but is that true?

I try to sound friendly and conversational when I ask. “Was Henning always so glad to go to dinner parties back when you first met?”

But Helena’s quick as lightning. “I know
exactly
what’s going through your head right now. But just because you force everyone else into that box doesn’t mean you can do it to Henning and me.”

“Of course not. I’ll make sure I—”

“That’s just the way men are.”

I object. “Not
all
men.”

She answers with a glint in her eye that’s supposed to indicate a joke, but it doesn’t come out very funny. “You must not know men very well.”

“But before Frederik got sick, he certainly wasn’t like that.”

We fall silent. The men are still shouting out in the kitchen.

Helena leans toward me. “Mia, I don’t know how to tell you this …”

“What?”

“Maybe Frederik wasn’t always the perfect man you remember.”

There’s no way I can have this discussion with her tonight. “But Bernard’s not that way either—and that’s not something I remember. That’s right now.”

“Oh, of course! I’d forgotten Bernard. Bernard, the great shining exception to everything in the whole world!”

I’ve got to be careful about what I say. One wrong word, one wrong pause or facial expression and she’ll know that Bernard’s a source of more than just legal deliverance.

“But other than the supernaturally magnificent Bernard,” she says, “that’s just the way men are.” She takes a large gulp from her wineglass. “Get used to it. Or be single.”

In the kitchen now, the men are laughing uproariously as they argue over which male politician in Denmark has the biggest nose. And it
sounds to me as if there are
three
men’s voices in there. Has another guest shown up?

I get up, and Helena follows.

In the cold light of the kitchen, we can see Niklas sitting on the counter between Henning and Frederik. His large hairy hands upon the counter-top. He doesn’t look like my Niklas anymore.

His new deep voice roars with laughter. “Have you guys seen the schnozz on Bertel Haarder? Ha-ha-ha!”

I’m kissing Bernard in our new kitchen, which is both larger and better equipped than the one in our old place.

Farum Midtpunkt is a strange ghetto—and not just because, as an architectural experiment, the façades of its apartment blocks were fabricated from great plates of rusted iron. The Midtpunkt apartments are modern, with luxurious private patios and outdoor common areas that are green and well maintained. But the rent’s so high that the people who can afford it bought houses of their own long ago. Most of those left behind have all or most of their rent subsidized by the municipality: people on disability, immigrants, and single parents.

In the flat suburban idyll that is Farum, constructed from bike paths, yellow bricks, and thousands of lawns, the Midtpunkt complex towers over everything else. To judge from the crime stories and letters to the editor in the local paper, its apartment blocks are the tarry smoker’s lungs that make our young blond suburb gasp for air. I know from my job, though, that that’s not the whole story; lots of Midtpunkt kids come from well-functioning homes, and lots of parents are happy to live here. Their only problem with the place is that friends are nervous about visiting them at night.

Bernard presses his groin against mine, and I can feel his erection through his clothes. I prop myself against the counter with one hand, next to a high stack of dishes.

The front door opens. Niklas’s and Frederik’s footfalls move slowly toward the living room; they’re carrying something heavy.

Bernard and I release each other, and I step into the hall. “Super,” I say. “Wasn’t that hard to get up the stairs?”

“That’s why it took us so long,” Frederik says. “What have you two been doing?”

“We’ve been getting the kitchen sorted. It’s going to be nice.”

Niklas doesn’t say anything. I asked him if he could get some of his friends to help us move, but he didn’t want to.

Frederik is too sick to see through us; his suspicions come only in flashes. It’s not too bad, and I can generally maneuver him back into the naïve thought that Bernard’s our new friend who’s lending a hand to get things organized.

But does Niklas notice anything? Teenagers are so unpredictable; sometimes they see everything, other times it’s amazing how oblivious they are—especially when it comes to their parents’ love lives, right?

Besides Bernard, Andrea from the support group helped us pack things up two days ago, and Helena and Henning were here yesterday with a couple of other friends who haven’t defected yet. And then of course my in-laws have been here a lot.

Bernard and I have to pass each other in these unfurnished rooms without giving ourselves away. But if he raises his hand someplace in back of me, I notice; if he takes a step toward the bookcase, I sense it. I know when he’s about to take a breath before he lifts a moving box or calls out to my husband or son.

Back in the kitchen I tell him, “I was thinking we should put the globe glasses on this shelf.”

He leans back slightly, to counterbalance the box of plates and glasses he’s bearing. A cord of muscle bulges from the top of his forearm as he stands there holding it. “Do you use them more than the tall glasses?”

“Not really.”