Stella Descending

by Linn Ullmann

  I tell Martin, although I don’t yet know his name is Martin, that I have to collect Amanda from nursery school. I tell him I would like him to leave. He has delivered the sofa and been paid, and now he has to leave.

  “Are you sure I have to leave?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “The same way I came in, I suppose,” he says, pointing to the window.

  The crane, or hydraulic lift, or whatever it’s called, the thing that carried Martin up to me, is gone. I glance down at the street. The lift operator has driven off.

  “Fine by me,” I say.

  Martin gets up from the sofa, clambers up onto the windowsill, undoes the latches, and pushes the window wide open.

  “You’re sure about this?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  He sticks one leg out into the air and balances on the other.

  “Sure?”

  “Yes!” I say.

  So he gathers himself, bends his knees, hunches his back, stretches out his arms as if they were wings, and for a moment there I find myself thinking, He’s going to jump, he’s going to jump out of my window, a strange man is going to jump out of my window and smash himself to pieces, and how am I going to explain this to everyone, and I scream.

  “No!” I scream. “For Christ’s sake, don’t!”

  And I grab hold of him, and he laughs and jumps down to the floor and says, One–nothing, and I say, Go to hell, and he says, But you told me to do it, and I say, Get out, crazy strange man, out of my door, down the stairs, okay? and he kisses my cheek and strokes my hair and says, I’m not leaving, you know that, and I say, Yes you are. But by this time we both know he won’t be leaving.

  I HAVE A PATIENT, a woman in her thirties with cancer. She hasn’t long to live. She tells me she has begun to think of herself in the third person. She is more than one self, she says. She is more than just the here-and-now and a body that has broken down, more than this one breast that only serves as a reminder of the other breast, more than a voice that says I’m afraid, I’m afraid I can’t stand this anymore.

  And then she says, “I breathe and it hurts. I breathe and it hurts. I breathe and it hurts.”

  I moisten her tongue.

  “But sometimes,” she says, “it seems like I get up, walk over to the window, and turn around to look at the woman in the bed. I hear her breathe in, and it doesn’t hurt; I hear her breathe out, and it doesn’t hurt. She breathes in, breathes out. She is not hurting. She is not hurting anymore. She is somewhere else now.”

  HIS FINGERS FINDING their way into my panties, his hands parting my thighs, his cock driving into me, up inside me, I can’t wait, his teeth around one nipple. My pussy bleeding, my breast bleeding. I beg him, Don’t make me wait any longer. Sometimes, when Martin and I fuck, I lose my mind. I disappear, I’m done away with, I no longer exist. Split asunder. I am his breath, his fluids, his member, his blood.

  MAY BE A MONTH before Martin rides up to my window on a sofa and installs both it and himself in my apartment, I have a visit from a plumber.

  The pipes in the bathroom have started to act up: One day I get only cold water from the faucet, the next only hot. The bathroom is old and dingy, altogether pretty gross, but it has a nice big bathtub. I speak to the landlady, a tightfisted little woman in her sixties, crabby and pigheaded, and naturally she has no intention of helping me.

  “What do you expect?” she says. “You’re bound to have problems like that, with the rent as low as it is. You’re lucky to be living here at all, when there’s plenty of folks more in need of an apartment like yours.”

  This is how I come to look in the Yellow Pages under PLUMBERS and call a company that has only taken out a small ad. I have the idea that companies with small ads are cheaper.

  I explain my problem to the woman who answers the telephone: the office secretary, I presume. I tell her that one day I’m getting only cold water, and the next I’m getting only hot. She says she’ll arrange for a plumber to come out the following day at ten o’clock. At ten o’clock the next morning, the doorbell rings. At the door is this huge guy in his late twenties who tells me he’s the plumber and he’s been asked to check out my mixer tap. I show him to the bathroom and explain that one day I’m getting only cold water from the faucet, and the next I’m getting only hot. He lies down on the floor and proceeds to grope around under the bathtub, making strange grunting sounds as he does so. I leave him there and settle myself in the living room, on the floor; I have no furniture yet, only a mattress in the bedroom and a desk in the guest room. I sit on the floor listening to the sounds the plumber is making under my bathtub. Grunting sounds. Running water. More grunting. I sit there on the floor for a long while. Occasionally I run an eye around the room and think that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get myself a sofa. It’s at this point that I have the idea of a green sofa set in the middle of the room, a sofa green as an avocado. I sit on the floor a while longer. Eventually I become aware of silence in the apartment, something with which I am familiar, so I get up and go to the bathroom. The plumber is leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette.

  “Have you fixed it?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “I’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

  The next day he arrives early in the morning, eight o’clock, as arranged. I have to be at work by nine.

  “Just shut the door behind you when you leave,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says.

  And then he asks when I’ll be home.

  I turn and look at him and hesitate for a moment before replying that I’ll be on duty until four. “Ah-ha,” he says. “All right then, okay, fine.” And he lies down on the floor and gets to work.

  It’s closer to five when I get home, and he’s still there in my apartment. He’s standing against the wall, smoking a cigarette.

  “Are you still here?” I say.

  “Yeah,” says the plumber. “But I’m just leaving. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “Is that really necessary? I mean … it can’t be that big a job, surely, and it’s going to cost a fortune, you coming back here day after day.”

  “Yeah,” says the plumber.

  He looks at me. He is extremely tall, so tall that every time he looks at me he is also looking down on me—something I’m not used to, since I’m also kind of tall.

  “I’ve fixed things, more or less,” he says. “Instead of having cold water today, as you normally would, you’ll get hot water, and instead of having hot water tomorrow, again as you should have, you’ll get cold water.”

  He takes a puff of his cigarette.

  “But that doesn’t really solve your problem.”

  “No,” I say, “it doesn’t.”

  “So I’ll be back tomorrow. But I can’t get here before ten. Since you’ve got to get to work, maybe you should let me have a set of spare keys so I can let myself in.”

  “Oh, no. You must be joking,” I say, with a little laugh.

  He eyes me curiously.

  “No,” I say again. “I can’t just give you the keys to my apartment.”

  He shrugs and starts to pack away his plumbing tools.

  “Well, of course,” I falter, “of course if you feel you need an extra day, and that all this can be fixed?” I wave my arms in the direction of the bathtub and the shower.

  He shrugs again. Says nothing. I fumble in my pockets, find my key ring, unhook two keys, the spare for the main door downstairs and the spare for the door upstairs, and hand them over. He takes the keys, slips them onto his own loaded key ring, and goes on packing his things. Still he says nothing.

  “So you’ll be here tomorrow at ten, then?” I say, worried that I’ve offended him.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he mutters. He slings his bag over his shoulder and walks through the living room and out the door.

  I’m late getting home from the hospital the next evening. It must be around eight. The TV is on in the living room, and the plumber is in the bathtub. The
place is awash with water and foam. For some time I just stand in the doorway staring at him. It takes a while for him to notice me.

  “There you are,” he says, splashing his face with water and wiping it with the back of his hand.

  “And there you are,” I retort, pointing.

  He nods. “That’s that problem solved!” he says.

  “So I see,” I say.

  “Look!” he says, turning on one faucet and then the other. Water gushes out into a bathtub that is already brimful. There are suds in his hair. He splashes noisily. “Hot water, yeah! Cold water, yeah!”

  “I’m glad that’s sorted out,” I say. “How much is it going to cost me?”

  “Well, there’s sorted and sorted,” he says. “This was only the start of your problems. The pipes under the kitchen sink are rusty. They could snap at any minute and spring a leak, and that’s going to mean a lot of water damage both here and in the apartment downstairs—”

  “That’s not my problem,” I break in. “I only rent the place.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought,” the plumber says, getting out of the bath. When he stands up I am struck once again by how big he is. I try to keep my eyes fixed on anything other than his body, not his eyes, not his chest, not his arms, not his stomach, not his cock, not his thighs. I stare at his toes, stare doggedly at his big toe, which is bronzed and rather hairy, with a freshly clipped nail.

  “So I had a word with the landlady,” he goes on. “Funny woman, by the way—and she said this was your responsibility, because your rent is so low, but that she was prepared to chip in, if it really was that bad, so I said”—the plumber points to himself—“yes, it really was that bad.”

  He grabs a towel and wraps it around his waist. Then he goes into my bedroom, leaving huge wet footprints on the wooden floor, to fetch his jeans and T-shirt. The T-shirt is neon red with TREAT YOURSELF TO A PLUMBER printed in big letters across the front.

  One night a few months later, Martin and I are lying in bed, talking. The plumber is in the room next door. He has moved in, although I can’t quite explain how that came about.

  “Can’t you tell him?” I whisper, turning to Martin in bed. “Tell him he has to move out, move out right now, find a place of his own. I can’t bring myself to do it. And you’re living here too, now. We don’t really need the little he pays us in rent.”

  I count on my fingers.

  “His plumbing bills are actually bigger than what he pays in rent,” I say.

  Martin looks at me. Our eyes have grown accustomed to the darkness of the room. He squeezes my hand and says, sure, he can talk to the plumber, that’s not a problem, but he doesn’t think there’s any hurry. He doesn’t see the point in throwing the man out on his ear at a moment’s notice.

  “Yes, tomorrow, at a moment’s notice,” I whisper. “Tomorrow morning early! Or what about now?”

  “No, Stella.” Martin is now whispering too. “I don’t want to fall out with the guy. I like him. He’s not in my way. This is your problem.” Martin lets go of me. I feel like crying, but I seldom cry for Martin to see.

  We had a fight once. I can’t remember what it was about. I only remember that it was the first fight we’d had and that I started to cry. He looked at me long and hard. Then he shouted “One–nothing!” at me and walked out the door.

  WHEN I WAS YOUNG, before we moved to the house with the big square windows, we lived for a while in the Sankthanshaugen district of Oslo. I had a friend there; Victoria Larsen was her name. Her father had been in Dachau during the war—he’d been helping Jews escape to Sweden, I think, and for that he was sent away. In Dachau he wheeled corpses from the gas chambers to the ovens. When I visited Victoria’s house, he would often be lying screaming in the bedroom.

  “Don’t pay attention,” Victoria would whisper. “He’s only dreaming.”

  One day we tiptoed into the bedroom, crept over to the bed, and stood by the headboard gazing expectantly at his face, each clutching a Popsicle, ready to view the next dream. But there was no dream that afternoon, and we had to tiptoe out again when the Popsicles began to melt.

  I remember wondering whether my hair might catch fire or something if he screamed and I was standing so close.

  I haven’t thought of Victoria Larsen’s father for years. He must be long dead; I really don’t know. And that’s not the kind of story you want to hear, is it? You don’t want to hear about war heroes who lie screaming in the night, do you? You’re not exactly a hero, are you, Axel?

  I can just see you tiptoeing through the war years, a man of shadows: gutless, jumpy, and faithless, but always with some cheap magic trick up your sleeve.

  MARTIN ASKS ME if I will go to Høylandet with him for his grandmother’s seventy-fifth birthday party. I’m afraid of flying, but he says it’ll be fine. His grandmother’s name is Harriet, and that’s what everybody calls her. It’s quite a gathering: relatives, neighbors, friends, and a funny old man they call Thorleif—her lover, I think. Harriet, old and sprightly, sits enthroned at the head of the table. There’s ostrich and kransekake on the menu. When Martin introduces me, I am eyed up and down in a way I’m not sure I like. Harriet informs me that she is half blind: She can see me perfectly with one eye and not at all with the other. She says it’s an advantage, seeing people like that. The one eye can tell the other eye things that a pair of normal eyes would never notice. She has the loveliest gray hair, gathered into a long braid that hangs down her back. Her mouth is thin and tight, an ugly mouth. I catch myself studying her mouth during dinner, trying to figure out who I know with that same thin tight mouth. To my horror I realize that the mouth it reminds me of is Martin’s. I look away.

  There are a lot of children at the dinner table, children of all ages, several of them hovering around Harriet. My eye is caught, in particular, by a boy of about six, delicate as a moth, with a black forelock that keeps falling in his eyes. There are so many new faces at this party that I find it impossible to keep track of who is related to whom, never mind remember all their names. In years to come, too, Martin’s family will always seem like strangers to me. We will see them socially, invariably at large parties like this, but they always seem to be enough in themselves, with no time for me. When I eventually start taking Amanda to their parties, and even Bee, Martin’s own daughter, I feel like an interloper. Or perhaps not even an interloper; it’s as if I don’t exist. To me they are like shadows on a wall, so maybe to them I too am a shadow. They have their rituals, organize their parties, tell their stories and their jokes, and it makes no difference to them whether I am there or not. Martin says I am imagining things, that they have welcomed me with open arms, showed me hospitality and warmth, and I’m the one with the problem, not them.

  The thin boy with the black forelock trots at Harriet’s heels when she leaves the table, tugs at her braid and at the skirt of her bunad, the folk costume favored for such occasions. She flicks him off like a fly, but he comes right back. I’ve been helping to clear the table and am on my way out to the kitchen with a pile of dirty dishes. I pull up short in the doorway and stand watching. Harriet is at the kitchen counter decorating a jelly mold (when are we supposed to eat that? I wonder, stuffed as I am with ostrich and cake). The boy is standing behind her, whispering, “Hey, hey, hey.” He tugs at her skirt. “Harriet,” he says. “Harriet!”

  For a long time she ignores him, goes on decorating the jelly; then all at once she whirls around and slaps the boy’s face so hard he falls to the floor. “For heaven’s sake!” I say, and run over to the boy. The woman with the one blind eye and the one seeing eye turns back to her jelly mold.

  “You hit him,” I hiss. “You hit this child!”

  The boy gets to his feet, puts a hand to his forelock, and brushes it back. “Uh-uh,” he says, looking at me. “Uh-uh,” he repeats, and hightails it, slender as a strip of film, out the kitchen door.

  I want to say, You can’t go around hitting children like that, I don’t care i
f it is your birthday or if you are an old lady, even if you are Martin’s grandmother. But I don’t say any of this. I say nothing. I stand stock-still, just staring—at her, at the linoleum floor on which the boy had sprawled only a moment before—and suddenly I’m not sure what I saw and what I didn’t see.

  “And who might you be?” she snaps.

  I start. “I’m Stella,” I say.

  She turns to face the counter. “Ah, yes, that’s right,” she says to herself, “Martin’s intended.” And then she sort of sings out my name letter by letter—“S-T-E-L-L-A”—and hands me the jelly mold. “Would you mind taking this to the table, please?”

  She glares at me with her good eye. The blind eye gazes into thin air—as if really it were listening to something.

  I know she’s said to have been the loveliest lass in all Høylandet, but I never could see it.

  Later that night, on the way home from the party, we spot a flock of screeching ostriches galloping across the frozen lake. They’ve escaped from the farm, and we have to call for help.

  Martin puts his arms around me and says that if I were to get pregnant tonight, and if the baby is a girl, we should call her Bea, after his Swedish great-grandmother, Beatrice. I don’t say anything about the boy with the black forelock who was knocked to the floor. I don’t mention that until years later.

  Then: “Harriet?” he says, thunderstruck. “Harriet hit a child? You’re crazy! You must’ve been imagining things, Stella!” WHEN I AM DEAD, Martin will cut out my heart and put it on a scale. In the other pan of the scale he will lay an ostrich feather. If my heart is lighter than the feather, I will live forever. If my heart is heavier, it will be devoured by Ammut the beast, part crocodile, part lion, and part hippopotamus.