Stella Descending

by Linn Ullmann

  “Then, one evening—the second-to-last show of the summer—El Jabali took his bow without his wife. The audience didn’t give it much thought. After all, he was the magician. His wife was only the lady who disappeared, the lady he magicked away. The audience didn’t know she was a star in her own right, a trapeze artist, a diva by the age of nine, when she was the top of a pyramid consisting of her grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, five brothers, two sisters, three boy cousins, and one girl cousin. But Darling’s father, the ringmaster, knew, and he did notice that El Jabali took his bow alone, and he feared his daughter might have gone off in a huff. So after the show, he took a walk around to look for her. He asked the musicians, Have you seen my daughter? And the musicians shook their heads and said no, the last time they saw her was in the ring with El Jabali. So the ringmaster walked on until he came to Star and Moon, the tightrope walkers. He asked the tightrope walkers, Have you seen my daughter? and Star and Moon shook their heads and said no, the last time they saw her was in the ring with El Jabali. So the ringmaster walked on until he came to the lion tamer (who, in fact, only tamed dogs, horses, and a singing ostrich, because they no longer had any lions at the Circus Bravado). And he asked the lion tamer, Have you seen my daughter? The lion tamer shook his head and said no, not since she was in the ring with El Jabali. And then the ringmaster (who just then remembered that he really never did like that son-in-law of his) asked, Where is El Jabali? In a voice like thunder he roared: Where is El Jabali? Yes, where is El Jabali? they all asked themselves. Because El Jabali was nowhere to be found. Darling, his wife, the ringmaster’s daughter, was nowhere to be found either. Darling had vanished. El Jabali had vanished.

  “Soon, however, El Jabali was found. He was sitting on a tree stump outside his caravan, drinking apple juice and eating a sandwich. The ringmaster came dashing up to him, the musicians, the tightrope walkers, the lion tamer, the bookkeeper, the contortionist, the clown, the dogs, and the ostrich hard on his heels, grabbed him by the shoulders, shook him, and demanded to know where his daughter was, demanded to know why his daughter did not take her bow. El Jabali said he didn’t know. ‘I haven’t seen her since I magicked her away.’ And weird as it is, this was his story and he stuck to it. The police were called in. On the face of it, there was good reason to suspect that a crime had been committed. I arrived at the scene. I spoke to those present. I spoke to El Jabali. I spoke to everyone who was at the circus the night Darling was magicked away, but none of them could tell me any more than what they believed they had seen with their own eyes: that Darling was magicked away, that she disappeared, melted, and turned to nothing in front of hundreds of witnesses.”

  “And El Jabali?” Martin asked.

  “He disappeared too.”

  “You never saw him again?”

  “Oh, there are times when I think I see him. Unsolved cases tend to haunt me,” I said. “He must be an old man by now, if he’s still alive.”

  “Now I’ll tell you a story,” Martin announced.

  “That was the deal,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you about the avocado-green sofa,” he said.

  “You’re not going to tell me it’s magic, are you?” I asked. “Because I know that already.”

  “No, not that,” he said. And this is the story Martin told me.

  Long ago, before Martin met Stella, he had a girlfriend whose name was Penelope Lund. And one day Penelope told Martin that he was a spineless, shiftless, spoiled, self-centered layabout who didn’t deserve the love of a good woman. Martin couldn’t argue with that. On the contrary, he had to admit that Penelope was right on all counts. This did not mean he stopped going out with women, by no means. He simply stopped going out with Penelope Lund, for a while at any rate. Instead, he embarked on a long and intoxicating succession of affairs with many different women.

  His job as a furniture salesman made it possible for him to expand his romantic repertoire ad infinitum. It is no secret that most furniture is bought by women. No secret, either, that a woman’s heart starts to flutter the minute she becomes aware that she’s near a store full of beautiful things for her house. So there came a day when the young furniture salesman decided to take advantage of those fluttering hearts and bed every woman (and when I say every woman, Martin stressed, I mean every woman) who bought the avocado-green sofa, the one on display near the shop’s busy café, the one flanked by a lamp with a white shade like a Victorian lady’s bonnet. The very sofa that would in due course bring him to Stella, into Stella’s life, into Stella’s bed, without a clue that ten years later he would have to explain why Stella should suddenly fall to her death from a roof on an August evening.

  The whole point, he explained, was that his choice of women would not, in fact, be his choice. He was in no position to choose for himself, and he didn’t want to anyway. Martin decided to have no will of his own. Martin did not intend to make up his own mind about anything, to make any decisions based on his own needs, desires, wishes, urges. Martin intended to take life as it came, a life suspended between heaven and earth, here and there, night and day. But in order to do this, without ending up dead—which would actually be more natural—Martin devised a system, a scheme, a rigid code of conduct. He made up a set of rules for eating and drinking, a set of rules for going to the bathroom, a set of rules for earning and spending money, and a set of rules for meeting women. With these he felt he had covered the necessities. The urges to fill himself, void himself, support himself, and reproduce himself might have led another man to make choices the consequences of which said man would have to live with, knowing full well that these had been his choices, knowing full well that he was responsible for his own downfall. Martin had always been convinced that his downfall was just around the corner, but he preferred not to take responsibility for it. So when it came to women, he might just as well let the sofa choose: Sooner or later, every woman who bought the avocado-green sofa would receive a visit from Martin Vold, sooner or later every one of them would undress for Martin Vold, and sooner or later every one of them would be well and truly and most memorably fucked by Martin Vold. Whether they were ugly or pretty, fat or thin, young or old, bitchy or sweet, it made no difference. He would sleep with all of them.

  At this point in the story I couldn’t help but interrupt. “But surely there can’t be that many women who buy avocado-green sofas?”

  “You’ve no idea,” he replied. “It was like a mania with that sofa. Everybody wanted one.”

  I hesitated slightly before asking my next question. I asked him to forgive me for sounding naive, but didn’t it ever happen that some women had their husbands or boyfriends with them when they came to look at furniture, and wouldn’t that make it difficult—I glanced at my notes—wouldn’t that make it difficult “well and truly and most memorably” to fuck them? “I mean,” I said, groping for the words, “what did you do with the man?”

  He sighed. “I arranged to deliver the sofa when he wasn’t home.”

  “Did any woman ever say no?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “No.”

  “Have you read Henry Miller?”

  “No.”

  I paused and looked at the ceiling.

  “Why?” he asked, uncertainly.

  “He wrote somewhere that the male Australian kangaroo has a double penis, one for weekdays and one for holidays. I was wondering if the same applied to you.”

  He made no answer. He was wondering whether I was making fun of him. Possibly out of curiosity, possibly because we had the whole night ahead of us, I finally asked him to tell me about the women.

  “I’d prowl around the store,” he said, “spying on them, holding my breath when they went anywhere near the sofa. I took them in—hair, face, breasts, thighs—hoping that this one would sit down on it or that another would walk away. It’s a beautiful sofa. It caught the eye of a lot of women. They ran their hands over the soft green fabric, imagining how a sofa
like this would look in their own living rooms. Occasionally I might try to influence a customer. Although it was against my rules, if I saw a beautiful girl who, having walked around the sofa, round and round, again and again, finally sat down on it with a rapturous little ‘Oohhh, yes!’ it wasn’t out of the question for me to sidle up to her, shake her hand, and say, ‘I think this sofa would look just right in your living room!’

  “And the girl would laugh and say, ‘But you’ve no idea how my living room looks, have you?’

  “And then I would say that that was exactly what I intended to find out in six to eight weeks, that being Galileo’s estimated delivery time.”

  “Galileo?” I interjected, checking my notes.

  “That’s the name of the furniture store,” Martin explained.

  “Of course!”

  “We supply tables, chairs, carpets, beds, blinds, lamps, chaise longues, shelving units, closets, benches, writing desks, and pouffes, and we serve the best espresso and arugula salad in town.”

  “Go on, please.”

  Martin took a deep breath.

  “But if a really ugly woman dumped herself on the sofa and indicated that she was interested in it, I would come over, shake my head, and point to another model on display, also Italian. I’d do my best to persuade this woman that the other sofa was a much more attractive piece of furniture, and much cheaper and she ought to go for it instead. I didn’t always manage to persuade her. Sometimes the ugly woman had her heart set on the avocado-green sofa, no matter what I said, and then, according to my rules, I had no choice but to serve her, both one way and the other.”

  “Okay, but come on, it’s not as if anyone were forcing you to go through with this,” I pointed out. “Least of all these supposedly ugly women—”

  “I had a system,” he said, butting in, “and I wouldn’t give in until—” (He eyed me up and down.) “It’s like building a house of cards. To begin with it’s just a bit of fun and it doesn’t matter if the cards come tumbling down. You merely start again from scratch. But then, after a while, you’re getting somewhere. Soon you’ve got one floor on top of another, and then one more on top of that, and your house is still standing! And then all at once it becomes so fucking vital that it shouldn’t fall down—do you know what I mean?—that you should manage to use up all fiftytwo cards. That’s what it was like. It started as a bet, with a guy at work, maybe, or a friend, that I could seduce the first woman to buy that avocado-green sofa, no matter who she was. And it was the easiest thing in the world. Then the next one, right? Just as easy. And the next, and the next, and the next. And the house was still standing! And with every woman the tension grew that much greater. What if one of them said no? But none of them said no. Not one of them said no. And it never occurred to me that I might back down, that I might deliberately bring down the house of cards myself, just because I didn’t feel attracted to this woman or that.”

  Once, he told me, a woman came into the shop, walked straight over to the green sofa, and sat down on it. She was small and thin and pale, with a mousy perm curling around a face that did not arouse the slightest feeling in him: dry skin, thin lips, button nose, and small, listless green eyes. “She wasn’t at all attractive, but she wasn’t downright ugly either. I preferred the really ugly ones,” he says, “the spectacularly weird-looking or grossly overweight.” (He gave me a look, eyeing my body. I gave him to understand, also by a look, that he couldn’t faze me.) This woman, neither attractive nor ugly, bought the avocado-green sofa and received Martin at her apartment eight weeks later. What was to happen next had already been agreed between them, so after she had helped him put the sofa in its place in the living room, next door to the kitchen, she proceeded to undress. She did not look at him. Not even when she lay back on the green cushions did she look at him. He undid his fly and considered the possibility of stroking her cheek, a caress, a word at least, but he dropped the idea, climbed on top of her, and stuck his dick inside her. She might as well have been dead from the waist down, he said; I felt nothing, nothing. But then the woman fixed her gaze on him, forcing him to look into her eyes, eyes filled with tears of joy, the eyes of a happy woman, and he stared at her, entranced by that look, until it dawned on him that he could close his eyes, and so he closed his eyes.

  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 fiftytwo 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 o
nto 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?”