Sometimes they threw dinner parties, and she got off a stop early and walked across the park and picked up something from the deli on Chamberlayne Road on her way home—a big glass-fronted kind of chalet or hut, with antique wagons full of organic vegetables parked under the awning. Behind it, on the access road to another station, buses lingered and the pavement was lined with a fried chicken outlet, a low-budget estate agent (cheap rentals) and a betting shop. That’s the kind of neighborhood it was. Gentrification had happened so rapidly that everywhere you felt and saw and heard the clash and contrast of extremes. Boutique wine shops stood next to pound stores. Semi-homeless men hung out on the public benches with cans of high-alcohol lager while young City types in their skinny suits got drunk even on cold evenings sitting around the picnic tables outside The Chamberlayne—once a pub, now a chophouse—so they could smoke. The walk between residential streets to their apartment, on the top half of a bay-windowed Victorian on Buchanan Gardens, wasn’t always totally scare-free; but she was used to that by now, and most of the time she walked home with Henrik.
On Friday nights, Euston station filled with long-haul commuters. There were trains leaving for Newcastle and Glasgow and even their own small branch line trundled past Kensal Green to places with names like Hatch End and Headstone Lane. She could indulge in the usual thoughts of the middle-class Londoner facing the homeward journey at the end of a long week. Should we move to the country? Should we just get away?
Although as the year wore on Henrik’s kids began to stay over, and their Saturdays were taken up with homework and trips to swimming pools. Something else she felt guilty about, nervous, clumsily on edge, but also secretly … not secretly … but with her deeper emotions very near the surface, ready to do their duty, the work that you have them for. Emotions like love and fear, expressed among other things in trying to remember your seventh-grade math. She had to figure out what they liked to eat, and to learn how to cook it so that they didn’t complain. Like every other second wife—part of what you realize is how many there are around. It’s like buying a car, you begin to spot them everywhere: at the Tesco Express, and on the bus, and outside the school gate, picking up the kids with a purse full of crisps and chocolate. Even this was part of being alive, and belonging to a demographic, or whatever you want to call it. One of the types.
Not that she was quite yet a second wife. Also, you never stop forgetting, these aren’t my kids. Part of the guilt is that you sometimes think, this isn’t my problem, and then on Sunday night, after you hand them over, it isn’t anymore.
The first time she saw Monica after the … they didn’t have a word for it, the announcement, after Henrik had told his wife what was going on, she was sitting in a Zipcar van outside their house in Acton. (When he first moved out, all he took with him was a duffel bag full of clothes and shoes, and a backpack with his laptop and a couple of books.) Henrik had an office in the house, with an exercise bike and a bench press—his response to middle age, as he put it, was low-key but traditional. Anyway, Monica wanted them gone. She needed the room for a lodger, a friend of hers, who could also help with the kids. “I don’t care what you do with them,” she said. “Just get rid of them.”
“This is expensive equipment. I have nowhere … at least not yet,” he began to say.
“Get them out! Get them out! Get them out!’
Jean heard about it all later. And now she sat in the van, in the driver’s seat, not quite daring to go in. You’re a coward, she told herself. You’re a bad human being. But still she didn’t move.
Their house had four or five steps to the front door; the ground floor was slightly raised up, with the kitchen in the basement, and Jean could see the entrance hall and Henrik backing out with the exercise bike in his hands. It was a heavy machine; he couldn’t carry it himself, and Monica had taken the other end. Jean immediately got out of the van and moved quickly, that half-scuttle, to indicate hurry. But since Henrik was first, she started to take the weight off his hands, until Monica said, “I need a little help here, I need to put it down.” So they put it down—Jean squeezed past (the front garden was narrow and unevenly paved; she had to push against the recycling and garbage bins) and reached out awkwardly to grab a pedal, but by that point the work was mostly done. Monica stood up to arch her back and rub the blood back into her hands. Jean, half-crouching, stood up, too; they looked at each other.
“I think you can take it the rest of the way,” Monica said.
They had known each other a little, inevitably; Monica had always been friendly to her, if slightly condescending. She used to try to set her up with dates, and sometimes called her up last minute if they were having a dinner party and needed an extra woman. Monica liked to complain about Henrik to her—not complain exactly, but to include Jean in her wifely frustrations. “He always says yes yes I’ll do it and he never does it, he isn’t even listening …” That kind of thing, as if Jean would know what she meant. Jean used to resent these appeals, slightly; she didn’t like being lumped in with the sisterhood of female patience. Although Monica herself was a busy and competent woman—she worked in PR for a film distribution company.
“I can get the other stuff, too,” Jean said.
“That’s fine,” Monica told her, un-angrily. “I don’t want you in the house.” And then, matter-of-factly: “I don’t want the kids seeing you.”
She had passed Waco (in the dark) and was coming up to the turnoff for 35E. Many of the streetlights seemed to be out of action. Even thinking about that … interaction … made the blood concentrate in her face … why did she get so mad when that guy—poor Dana, and the thought of Cal, shuttling between … Sometimes you find yourself taking sides and you don’t exactly like the side you happen to be on. Driving through the dark like this … up at five, with Bill on the way to his sister, and now tonight … She wouldn’t be back until one in the morning, at the earliest. All of this looked even now like a kind of penance. The road at night went inward, too, and the landscape you were traveling through looked a lot like … nothing much … a few gas stations … a few half-built developments … tractors or cement mixers or some kind of paving machine, standing on dirt, with those bright rolls of temporary fencing, curled over and lying on the ground. And the cars kept coming at you. From time to time, you had to get out of the middle lane, move around a truck or to let someone pass. What did she want to say to Nathan about all this? What was she trying to prove? She could talk about Henrik’s kids but even the thought of them, of telling Nathan about the way she had learned to … brought out in her own mind a tone of voice, the tone she would use, and which she wouldn’t like. Anyway, he doesn’t care, that’s not what he cares about.
Henrik had surgery the week before Thanksgiving. Even by then Monica had relented a little. Henrik wanted the kids to visit him, he wanted Jean’s company, he wanted “all of this to start now.” He meant, an acceptance of the new arrangement. He also thought, I can make use of my weakened condition, and everybody’s sympathy, to force them to get along. For Emil’s sake, he pretended to be a monster. He was hooked up to all these wires, there was a stent in the veins above his wrist, he looked very white. Ooh ooh he said, lifting his arms, like a zombie—and the graphs on his readout flared. You could see the tangle of wires, running through his sleeve and from around his waist to the monitor, which was connected to the wall by a mechanical arm. Emil said, “Stop it, I don’t like it.” Sasha, the oldest, politely laughed.
They took out his testicle and used keyhole surgery to remove the lesions on his lungs. For the next two months he went in for weekly chemo sessions, followed by a six-week recovery, which was followed by two more months of chemo, another recovery period, and then another round of chemo, which brought them roughly into summer, into the school holidays. He lost his hair but he didn’t have much hair to begin with and there were times, when one of the kids had a cold, for example, that he wasn’t supposed to be in contact, and even on his weekends to see them, th
ey didn’t come. This kind of thing had to be worked out with Monica—Jean often ended up being responsible for the arrangements.
On the whole, Henrik was a good patient. He was relatively unafraid of dying (it’s hard to measure these things, as he said himself) and he had a high tolerance for physical discomfort. Boredom upset him; he didn’t like not working, and Jean, when she could, made it possible for him to work at home, doing what could be usefully done by computer. During his recovery periods, and at the beginning of each treatment cycle, he also went into the office, although Jean worried a lot about what he might pick up on the train. Part of what sustained him, what sustained both of them, was that this period of his life also coincided with the open and honest committed beginning of their relationship. They were living together, playing house, could meet friends and go to the movies (when he was up for it) without any pretense or surge of guilt, and it turned out that the pleasure of living naturally more than made up for the excitement of what they had been doing before.
Henrik also got to see Jean at her best—competent, loving, and selfless. And he got to see her with his kids.
Her relationship with Emil was the simplest, he was an easy boy, very like his father, square-jawed, silent, he did what he wanted but generally didn’t cause much trouble because he wanted harmless things. He played with LEGO for hours. They set up a corner in their new kitchen where the box of LEGO lived, so they could cook and talk and eat while he was occupied. And he could also be suddenly and surprisingly physically affectionate. Sometimes, when Jean was standing with her back to him, or sitting on the sofa, watching TV, he would throw himself at her—holding on to what he could, her neck if she was sitting down, her waist, and not let go. The fact that she had taken his father away didn’t mean much to him; he was still too small. And also, as the youngest child, he seemed to have been born with an assurance that everybody loved him … one more person didn’t matter.
And Sasha, the oldest, seemed to like her, too. There was a kind of pleasure she took in having this extremely adult relationship with a woman who was not her mother. She had just started secondary school at Henrietta Barnett, a grammar in north London, which meant getting a train and then a bus every morning by herself—over an hour each way. She was still at the stage where independence pleased her; you could almost see her consciously adopting what she considered to be adult poses and attitudes. Of course she was also sometimes very tired and stressed, and Jean tried to imagine her real thoughts, the thoughts of a twelve-year-old girl, getting on a train and then a bus with everyone else, the other commuters, keeping to herself, clutching her backpack on her lap if she could find a seat, and taking the same journey back at the end of the day to a home radically altered from the home she had been living in just a few months before. That’s a lot of adulthood at once, Jean said to Henrik, and she made a point of reading some of the books that Sasha was reading, not just John Greene, but The Lord of the Flies and The Canterbury Tales, which is what they were studying at school. So they could talk about them on the weekends.
Only Freya was difficult, resentful and misbehaving. If a kid wants to act up, there really isn’t much you can do about it. You can threaten and you can plead, but game theory isn’t on your side (as Nathan put it to her, when she complained to him over the phone), especially for someone in your position. “What do you mean, my position?” she said, but she knew what he meant. She just wanted to hear how he was going to put it. Well, you’re in a setup where what the kid actually wants is a breakdown of law and order. She didn’t eat Jean’s cooking. Jean could ask her, what do you want to eat tonight, what’s your favorite thing, and she would make it, and Freya would suddenly pretend not to be hungry. If you pushed her, she’d explain, almost sweetly, I don’t like it the way you make it, which was maybe even true. Well, what do you want to eat then, and the whole thing began again. She made a mess at the table, picking the middle out of a baguette, for example, rolling it around between her fingers into a ball, and flicking it at Sasha, until Sasha complained. If you told her to clean up after herself, she looked at you like, make me. And you couldn’t make her. Henrik sometimes lost his temper, which made everything worse. “I hate coming here, I don’t want to come …” and so on. All of which Jean sympathized with.
In spite of all this, it gave Jean pleasure to be in the middle of a family again, in the middle of all that, the way she used to be as a kid—caught in all the webs of intimacy even if in her case she was the least involved and could remove herself when she wanted to. But she was good at family life, too. She had spent eighteen years at the firm of Essinger & Co. training for it, and then, when they kick you out and send you to college, and later expect you to make a life on your own, all of these skills have nothing to do. And she was using them again. The density of her life had increased. And she also felt a new proximity to the big beasts, the monsters of childhood, which loom so large and seem so vivid and terrifying, until you hit your twenties and turn everything into a kind of domesticated pet, a job a love-life somewhere to live, these are the things you think about, and not death, and what it means to an eight-year-old girl to find out that your father isn’t your father anymore, but somebody else, who sleeps in a bed with somebody you don’t know.
By this point, she had merged onto the north fork of I-35 and was counting the exit signs for the turnoff to 121. There were actual neighborhoods, with trees and front yards and quiet streets, peeling away below her—she had entered again into conurbation, and could see the skyline of Fort Worth ahead of her, something to shoot for. Waves of sleepiness had been coming and going for the past half hour, but paying attention was good for her, and she felt like she’d emerged again, come up from under, and now lay beached and dry … not rested exactly, but out of danger. An incident in the road meant a buildup of yellow lights, the towtruck was just arriving as she passed by, but at this time of night, two days before Christmas, the slowdown in the remaining lanes was just a case of rubbernecking: a Mazda hatchback and some kind of throwback pickup sat parked or slewed at awkward angles to each other. There was glass in the road, glinting in the headlamps, and the weird wobbly but silent rotation of the sirens, which fattened and thinned out like a swinging water balloon. Everybody looked okay though; a woman in a man’s coat sat on the barrier talking on her cell phone, she looked like she’d been there a while, and Jean kept going (the traffic flowed again) away from other people’s problems.
Part of what you want to prove, part of what you want to show people (people like Nathan), is that this is now something you know how to do—to look after kids. Only she didn’t have the kids around to show it with. She missed them, especially Emil, who had started climbing into their bed with a book on Sunday mornings. Jean, even if she didn’t feel like it, would sit up and read to him, though her audience, as she knew full well, was also Henrik, who lay with his face in the pillow and left her to it. Sometimes you can read without even really waking up. She needed to concentrate now; there were signs for the airport, among dozens of other signs, and the highways were starting to metastasize as they approached the city, entangling and disentangling, it wasn’t always clear what lane to be in. Cars thickened around her, and she felt the mass of people, like a kind of contraction, after driving at night through the empty country; this was different and you felt it in your head. Joining a line for the toll, she opened her window—and the cold December air came in, flavored by exhaust, the wide continuous noise of cars, like a fact of life, and she had to shift her butt to get her wallet out and find the change. Even two nights before Christmas it was somebody’s job to sit in a booth and take her money. On an eight-hour shift how many cars went by? Then you drive home.
Right from the first his doctors were optimistic. One of them said to him, “This is a good time to get this kind of cancer. Even five years ago, you’d be looking at a very different set of outcomes.” And Henrik believed in professional expertise. If the people you paid to be good at something told you something,
you believed them, that’s what you paid them for. Jean was more skeptical, she spent too much time online. It’s like I’m having an affair with his worst-case scenarios, she said to Paul. I can’t tell him about it, but this is what I do when he’s not around. Henrik went through ups and downs, but they were mostly physical. When your white blood-cell count declines, you feel small, you shrink, and in fact he also lost a lot of weight; your presence changes, people around you change, but even at his lowest ebb he assumed this phase would pass, and wanted to make plans for when it did.
About the divorce, for example: if possible he hoped to arrange things so that Monica could keep the house. Really so the kids could keep their childhood home. But he also needed to get some money out of it, if they were ever going to buy a place themselves. Jean had always made it a point of pride to get by without her parents’ money—except for flights home. “You have to pay to see me,” she told Liesel. But the money was there, and Henrik wanted to have a reasonable conversation about what kind of apartment they could afford.
By the end of the summer, when his final round of chemo ended, he looked almost like a different person. The shape of his face had changed; he looked almost younger. He had always been a square, strong, competent Danish-sailor type, with a little fat on him, but not too much—a solid citizen. And now even the way he moved in his clothes seemed to suggest a kind of nervous energy or restlessness, you could see the shape of his skull, his face looked naked, the egg of his bald head looked like it would crack if you tapped it with a spoon. But he was very happy; they were very happy together, and the habit of the past six months had made him feel dependent and affectionate, he wanted to sit next to Jean at parties, he smiled more, and the fact was, the roles in which they had gotten to know each other, when he was married and her boss, had shifted, too.
Christmas in Austin Page 16
