The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

by Jo Nesbo

  Would Charles Dickens’s writing have been better – or let’s say even better – had he kept to the straight and narrow path of art?

  Odd Rimmen had read David Copperfield and thought at the time he could have made a better job of it himself. Not a lot better, but better. But was that still the case? Or had his pen, his claws and his teeth lost the edge needed to create an art for posterity as a result of his submission to this circus? And if that were indeed the case, was there any way back?

  Yes, he told himself. Because the new novel he was working was exactly that, wasn’t it?

  Nevertheless, here he was, with seconds to go before he was due onstage, about to bask in the admiring gazes, and the spotlights, milking the applause as he mechanically delivered his truisms; in a word, get his shot for the evening.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been waiting for him, and now here he is…’

  Just do it. Not only was this the best slogan ever for trainers – or for any other product – it was also the answer he always gave whenever young people asked for his advice on how to start writing. That there was no reason to postpone it, no preparations needed, it was just about putting pen to paper, and not metaphorically but quite literally. He told them they should start writing that evening. Anything, anything at all, but it had to be now, that very evening.

  It had been like that with Aurora, when he finally managed to leave her, after the endless rounds of discussions, tears and reunions that always ended with him back at Start. It had been about just doing it. Physically walking out the door and never returning. So simple, and yet so difficult. When you’re addicted you can’t just cut down on it and take a little heroin. Odd had seen his own brother try that, with fatal results. There was only one way out, and that was to go cold turkey. This evening. Now. Because it won’t be better or easier tomorrow. It’ll be harder. Postpone things and you end up standing even deeper in shit. What difference is it going to make to put things off for another day?

  From the wings Odd Rimmen stared into the blinding backlight out there. He couldn’t see the audience, just a wall of blackness. Maybe they weren’t there. Maybe they didn’t exist. And for all they knew, maybe he didn’t exist either.

  And there it was. The liberating, redemptive thought. His horse. It was standing there in front of him. All he had to do was put one foot in the stirrup and mount up. Just do it. The other option was not to do it. These were in fact his only alternatives. Or alternative, if he was going to be grammatically strict about it. And from now on he would be. Strict. Truthful. Uncompromising.

  Odd Rimmen turned and walked away. He removed the microphone and transmitter from around his neck and handed them to a technician who looked up in bewilderment as he walked past him. He went down the stairs to the dressing room where he, the interviewer Esther Abbot and the publisher’s PR had gone through some of the questions. Now the room was empty, and the only sound was Esther’s voice from up there, a wordless, hollow booming that echoed through the ceiling. He grabbed the jacket he had left hanging over the chair, an apple from the fruit bowl, and headed out towards the performers’ exit. Pushed it open and breathed in the London air of the narrow alleyway, a combination of exhaust fumes, burnt metal and cheese from the restaurant’s extractor fan. Odd Rimmen had never smelled freer, fresher air.

  Odd Rimmen had nowhere to go.

  Odd Rimmen had everywhere to go.

  * * *

  —

  One could say that it all began with Odd Rimmen leaving the Charles Dickens Theatre just seconds before he was due onstage to talk about his most recent publication, The Hill.

  Or that it began with the Guardian writing about it, and saying he had let the paying public down, the arrangers of the Camden Literature Festival and Esther Abbot, the young journalist who had arranged the interview and said how much she had been looking forward to it. Or you could claim it started when the New Yorker contacted Rimmen’s publisher and asked for an interview. When the publisher’s press office told them that, unfortunately, Odd Rimmen didn’t do interviews any more, the magazine had asked for his telephone number, hoping to try to get him to change his mind, only to learn that he no longer had a telephone. Indeed, that the publishing house didn’t actually know where Rimmen was. No one had heard from him after he left the Charles Dickens Theatre that evening.

  This was only partly true, but the New Yorker wrote an article about Odd Rimmen in absentia in which other writers, literary critics and cultural personalities spoke of their attitude to the author in general and to The Hill in particular. Living at his parents’ summer place in France, Odd Rimmen could only react with astonishment at the list of famous names who suddenly seemed not only to have read him but to know him personally. That they should lie about their knowledge of his output in order to see their names in the pages of the prestigious New Yorker was perhaps no great surprise. And with a couple of days’ warning they had naturally had time to glance through a couple of the books in order to get the feel of them, or skim the outlines on some website aimed at students. But that they should also express themselves on his enigmatic personality and his very special charisma was more surprising, since he could just about remember having met these people in a professional setting – at festivals, book fairs, prize-givings – and exchanged professional courtesies in a business in which courtesy borders on paranoia. (Odd Rimmen’s theory was that writers are terrified of offending other writers because better than anyone else they know that a sensitive mind armed with a pen is like a child equipped with an Uzi.)

  But in the light of the promise Odd Rimmen had made to himself to be ascetic and pure and to refrain from anything that might be construed as (correction: that might be) selling out, intellectual swindle or self-aggrandisement, he had denied himself the right to correct the impression readers of the New Yorker might form of him as a kind of literary cult figure.

  Regardless of where it began, it continued. And that was what his editor told him when she called him at his remote village home.

  ‘Something’s happened, Odd. And it’s not stopping, it’s just getting bigger.’

  Sophie Hall was referring not just to the sales figures but to all the requests for interviews, the invitations to festivals, the pleas from foreign publishers that he visit them for the launch of The Hill.

  ‘It’s just crazy,’ she said. ‘After that thing in the New Yorker –’

  ‘It’ll blow over,’ he said. ‘One piece in a magazine doesn’t change the world.’

  ‘You’ve cut yourself off so you don’t know what’s happening. Everyone’s talking about you, Odd. Everyone.’

  ‘Oh really? And what are they saying?’

  ‘That you…’ She gave a little laugh. ‘That you’re slightly crazy.’

  ‘Crazy? In a good way?’

  ‘In a very good way.’

  He knew exactly what she meant. They had talked about it. That the writers who fascinate us are the ones who describe a world that is easy enough to recognise but one viewed through glasses that are very slightly different from the ones we wear. Or they wear, thought Odd Rimmen, since what his editor was telling him was that he had now been promoted to the league for those who see things differently, the intellectually eccentric. But did he belong there? Had he always done so? Or was he a bluff, a conventional wannabe who acted weird just for effect? As he listened to his editor describing the interest in Odd Rimmen, could he not also hear a greater respect in her voice? As though not even she, who had followed him so closely, from sentence to sentence so to speak, was immune to this sudden change of mood, all brought on by a single event: that, almost on impulse, he had run out on an interview just before he was due onstage. Now she was telling him she had just reread The Hill and been struck by how good the book they had worked on together really was. And even though Odd Rimmen suspected she had merely read the book in another light – the light of the admirat
ion of others – he said nothing.

  ‘What is this about, Sophie?’ he asked when she paused for breath.

  ‘Warner Brothers have been in touch,’ she said. ‘They want to buy an option on The Hill.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘They want to get Terrence Malick or Paul Thomas Anderson to direct.’

  ‘They want to?’

  ‘They’re wondering if you’d be happy with either of them.’

  Would I be happy with Malick or Anderson? thought Odd Rimmen? Thin Red Line. Magnolia. Here were two top-quality directors who had managed the almost impossible feat of getting the public at large to go to art films.

  ‘What do you say?’ Sophie’s voice had the whining overtones of a fourteen-year-old, as though she herself could hardly believe what she was telling him.

  ‘I would’ve been very happy with either of them,’ he said.

  ‘Great, I’ll call Warner Brothers and –’ She stopped. She had probably heard it.

  Conditional sentence, type 2. Would’ve been. Which, as she had once pointed out to him, was actually a verbal contraction of I would have been, but one which the copy editor had let pass. Nevertheless, the Conditional. Something that would have happened, had certain conditions been fulfilled. And now she was wondering what the conditions might be. So he told her.

  ‘If I’d’ve wanted to sell the film rights.’

  ‘You…you don’t want to?’ The whining overtone was gone. Now she definitely sounded as though she couldn’t believe what she herself was saying.

  ‘I like The Hill fine just the way it is,’ he said. ‘As a book. As you said yourself, just lately the book seems to have turned out to be really quite good.’

  He didn’t know if she registered the irony in what he had just said. Normally she would have done. Sophie had a good ear, but right now she was so shaken by everything that was happening that he wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Have you thought this through properly, Odd?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. That was the strangest thing. Less than a minute ago he’d been told that one of the biggest film companies in the world wanted to ask two of the world’s best directors to direct The Hill and make a film, something that would boost not just this book but every book with Odd Rimmen’s name on it, past and present, and turn him into a global superstar. But he had thought through the possibility of getting a really big film offer. Daydreamed about it would be a more accurate description. Because apart from the aforementioned sex scenes there was nothing filmatic about Odd Rimmen’s novels. Rather the opposite, in fact. They were largely interior monologues with few external events and little conventional dramaturgical structure. And yet still he had thought it through. Only as a hypothetical possibility, naturally, a thought experiment, in which he weighed the arguments against each other while gazing out over the Bay of Biscay. Charles Dickens wouldn’t just have yelled out a jubilant Yes! The old ham would have insisted on playing at least one of the main characters himself.

  The old, pre-Charles Dickens Theatre Odd Rimmen would have said yes as well but it would have left a bad taste in his mouth. He would have justified himself by saying that in an ideal world he would have said no thanks and kept his book pure. Reserved it for the patient reader, the reader who did not accept simplifications, who would take each sentence at his own pace, guided by the speed of the eye, the maturing of contemplation. But in world ruled by money and vacuous entertainment he could not say no to the kind of attention his type of book (serious, literary) was being offered here, since he was under an obligation to spread the (literary) word, not just to himself, but to everyone who was actually trying to say something in their writing.

  Yes, that’s what he would have said, and in secret savoured all the attention garnered by the film, the book, and by his own apparent dilemma.

  But the new Odd Rimmen rejected that type of hypocrisy. And because he had thought it through, and reality was turning out not to be all that different from the daydream, he was specific about it to his incredulous editor.

  ‘I’ve thought it through, Sophie, and the answer’s no, I’m not going to let The Hill get cut down to a two-hour synopsis.’

  ‘But it’s so short anyway. Have you seen No Country For Old Men?’

  Naturally Odd Rimmen had seen this, and naturally she would mention it, he thought. Sophie knew that he loved Cormac McCarthy, knew that he knew that the Coen brothers had managed to film that short novel in a one-to-one correlation unlike any other film he could think of. And Sophie also knew that Odd Rimmen also knew what that film had meant for the spread of the books of a writer who had until then been a literary cult figure – and without doing (too) much apparent damage to his reputation among the literary elite.

  ‘Cormac wrote it first time around as a screenplay,’ he said. ‘The Coen brothers themselves said that when they were writing the screenplay one of them held the book open while the other copied from it. That won’t work with The Hill. Anyway, I’m in the middle of something in the new book, I’m going to have to hang up now and get back to the writing.’

  ‘What? Odd, don’t…’

  * * *

  —

  Odd Rimmen was standing in the queue outside the Louvre in Paris when he saw her coming out. Esther Abbot looked as though she wanted to pretend she hadn’t seen him but must have known that her surprised expression gave her away.

  ‘So, we meet again,’ she said. She was walking arm in arm with a man whom she pulled in closer, as though the mere sight of Odd Rimmen was a reminder that men could disappear at any moment unless she kept a close eye on them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Odd Rimmen. ‘I never got the chance to apologise.’

  ‘Never? Was there someone or something preventing you?’

  ‘No, not really. I apologise.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have saved it for all those people who turned up to hear you.’

  ‘Absolutely. You’re right.’

  He thought she looked good. Better than he remembered her from the theatre. He thought that perhaps then she had been concentrating too much on the job. Too ingratiating for her to have aroused the seducer in him, the way prey will play dead until the predator loses interest. But standing here now, with a summer tan, slightly angry, with the wind in her hair and a man on her arm, she was quite simply attractive. So attractive that it seemed strange to Rimmen that she had automatically drawn the man she was with closer to her as soon as she saw him. It should really have been the other way round, with the male discreetly marking his territory when confronted by another male of about his own age, and one of a presumably higher social status now, following that article in the New Yorker.

  ‘Could I buy you both a glass of wine to show that I mean it?’ asked Odd Rimmen. He looked enquiringly at the man, who seemed to be looking for a polite way to decline the offer when Esther Abbot said she thought that sounded nice.

  Her companion smiled like a man with a drawing pin in his shoe.

  ‘Some other time, perhaps,’ he said. ‘You’re on your way in, and the Louvre is so big.’

  Odd Rimmen studied the ill-matched couple; her bright and light with the sun in her eyes, him as dark and heavy as a trough of low pressure. How could such an attractive woman fall for something as charmless as that? Had she no idea of her own market value? Indeed she did. He could see that, and it struck him that Esther had pulled her boyfriend/husband/lover closer to show him that this Rimmen wasn’t something he had to consider a threat. And why did her man need this kind of reassurance? Did she have a history of promiscuity, of being unfaithful? Or had they talked about him, this unpredictable author? Had Esther somehow indicated to the man at her side that he had reason to fear competition from Odd Rimmen? Was that what lay behind the expression of mingled hatred and fear he saw in the other man’s gaze?

  ‘I often go to the Louvre, I’ve seen most of
what’s worth seeing,’ said Odd, responding to the gaze with a friendly calm. ‘Come on, I know a place where they serve a good burgundy.’

  ‘Perfect,’ said Esther.

  They found the restaurant and even before the first glass had arrived Esther had started to ask questions that Odd suspected were left over from the interview that had never been. Where did Odd get his inspiration from? How far were the main characters based on himself? Were the sex scenes based on personal experience or were they fantasies? At this last question Odd saw the man’s face twitch. (His name turned out to be Ryan and he worked at the Embassy in Paris). Odd replied but made no attempt to improvise or be amusing as he usually did (often successfully) when ‘performing’. When he did perform. But in due course he turned the conversation around to Esther and Ryan.

  Ryan seemed to make a point of not revealing what his job at the Embassy actually involved and in doing so clearly hinted that it was something secret and important. Instead he spoke of how the techniques of international diplomacy had been influenced by research done by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman on ‘priming’ – the idea that by using simple means you can place a thought or an idea in a competitor’s head without their being aware of it. That if you show people a poster with the letters E A T and then S O _ P and asked them to fill in the blank, far more of them will write SOUP rather than SOAP by comparison with those in a research group who have not been previously shown E A T.