The Cold Song

by Linn Ullmann

  During the weeks and months and years after Siri had read the letter, Paula was everywhere. Siri googled her and learned that she was thirty-four years old, younger than me, worked in an art gallery, and lived on Oslo’s trendy east side. She had 567 friends on Facebook. Her profile picture was indistinct, slightly out of focus in an interesting sort of way, she had a teasing look in her eye and long fair hair. Paula’s picture said: I’m beautiful in an interesting kind of way, my picture is not like all the other pictures, I have a teasing look and long fair hair. Oh, all those beautiful women, and even women who weren’t quite so beautiful but whom Siri imagined could be Jon’s type, were everywhere. The long fair hair, the slender shoulders, the small breasts, the teasing look in the eye. Everywhere. In every café, in every shop, on every street corner, at the gym dancing and spinning and lifting weights and taking their clothes off in locker rooms, and in the pool where she occasionally went swimming. And each one was the one and only, and Siri a body among other bodies. And Siri let her gaze pass over their faces and their bodies, at first shattered (betrayed, tricked, supplanted, painted out, debarred), and then curious (if he can look at them, so can I), and eventually greedy.

  And if she had said anything to Jon, she might have said, “I want to see what you see, unearth whatever it is that you unearth, I want to understand that thing that makes them special. I want to share them with you, undress them, rend them apart, make love to them, and hear them say my name, and I think of everything you are and everything you can show me and all the things I want to do with you, see them fall, feel what you feel when they look at you, you look at them, look at me.”

  But she didn’t say anything to Jon. She let it go, because she chose to. These were acts of tenderness. But now, with Milla, it all came crashing back.

  AND IF HE were to think about it, something he preferred not to do, he couldn’t pinpoint exactly when he and Siri had started sleeping apart. She in the bedroom and he in whatever attic was available. When did the unraveling of their marriage begin? It was long before Milla. But when? It had been years now.

  They said to each other: “Oh it’s been months, we should go away somewhere and be together.” But the fact was that it had been years.

  These were all things he preferred not to think about, so instead he thought and did other things. Drank cheap wine, which tasted better than expensive wine, and texted whoever was up, listened to music, and talked with the dog. They told each other it was because of the children—which, to some extent, it was. Alma still came to their room every night, she had done so for years, and when he was still sleeping in the master bedroom, she climbed into their bed next to him. Hold me! Stroke my hair!

  “We can’t rule out the possibility,” Jon remembered saying, “that the reason I’m not writing is that I’m not getting any sleep now that Alma’s in our bed every night.”

  Siri turned to him and said, “She doesn’t just keep you awake, Jon! Last night she nearly pushed me out of bed and you snored.”

  Her voice was shrill.

  “Oh, just listen to yourself,” he said.

  “No, you listen, you bastard! Have you given any thought to the fact that of the two of us I’m the one working and earning money so that you can write that bloody book of yours? Or rather, not write it.”

  And so they went on.

  There was a time she couldn’t even consider falling asleep unless he was right next to her, holding her hand, telling her stories.

  Not long after Liv had learned to walk, she too started coming into their bed at night. She wandered through in the dark, climbed over Siri and Alma and Jon, and stretched out across the mattress, shoving everyone else over to one side. She didn’t ask for permission and she didn’t want to be held or stroked. She just wanted to sleep, but she took up more room in the bed than anyone else. And so their nights went. Everyone—apart from Liv, who slept undisturbed—waking and sleeping and waking and sleeping. Jon detached Alma’s arm, laid it down along her side, and she promptly snuggled into him again and put her arm around his neck, and Siri put Liv’s head on the pillow, gently shifted her legs until they were pointing straight down to the foot of the bed, but she merely drew them up again, squirmed, and stretched out across the bed as before.

  On those few occasions when they had the bed to themselves, those miraculous nights when the children slept in their own beds, he tried to hold Siri, but his arms weren’t long enough and she didn’t budge and so they lay there, each teetering on their own edge of the bed. And Siri said, “I really need to sleep. Please, just leave me alone.”

  They reminded each other on a regular basis that sleeping apart was merely a temporary solution, and they often talked about when they would sleep in the same bed again.

  “I’ve so much to do,” he remembered her saying. “I feel so inadequate, on all fronts.”

  In the beginning, when this arrangement of sleeping in separate rooms began, as a very temporary thing, she would carry his blanket to him in the attic and make up his bed for him on the mattress on the floor, then Jon would carry the blanket downstairs the following morning and put it back on the double bed. After a while, though, she stopped making up his bed for him and merely laid his blanket on the stairs so that he could carry it to the attic himself.

  And now it was April. Nine months gone. Siri and Jon had started sending text messages to each other at night. She in the bedroom, he up there in the attic. Not about what might have happened to Milla or what had happened to their marriage or what had happened to Alma. Just little things.

  Thinking of you.

  I miss you.

  Don’t leave me.

  Sweet dreams.

  Kisses.

  And one evening she took a picture of the water glass on her bedside table and sent the photo to him.

  It was a very long time since Jon had touched his wife, and he sent her a picture of a corner of his pillowcase. The following evening she sent him a picture of a detail from a child’s drawing (Alma’s? Liv’s?) that was lying in the drawer of her bedside table, and then he sent her a picture of the knot at the end of the cord for adjusting the blinds in the attic. Siri sent him a picture of Liv’s flaxen curls on her Peter Rabbit pillow, and then he sent her a photograph of the two of them when they were young and in love. She was wearing her corn-yellow boots and he was Giacometti thin and had big curly hair. She sent him a picture of her left hand without her wedding ring—at some point during the evening she always took her wedding ring off and would spend the next morning trying to find it. He snapped a picture of her wedding ring, lying next to his on a stack of books by his mattress. She sent him a picture of the rusty window hinges, he sent her a picture of a wine cork, she didn’t know that he had opened the evening’s second bottle of Barolo, she didn’t know that she wasn’t the only one he sent text messages to at night, she didn’t know that he had to keep a firm grip on himself the next morning, so as not to scream at her, scream at the children, thus arousing the suspicion that he was drinking too much, the hangovers were the worst, she didn’t even know that it was a picture of a wine cork, it could have been anything, and during the short month of April when they were sending each other pictures at night certain unspoken rules evolved, one being that they should not ask what the pictures actually depicted.

  And Siri sent him a picture of a tiny brown spot, no bigger than a pinprick, surrounded by what might have been skin. At first he thought the brown spot was a freckle and this made him happy. Siri had freckles on her shoulders, or at least she used to have freckles on her shoulders and he had always loved that about her. He looked at the picture. Something brown. Something that looked like skin. Maybe a freckle.

  And Jon sent her a picture of the cover of the VHS of Manhattan with a picture of the silhouettes of Diane Keaton and Woody Allen against the New York skyline. There were stacks of VHS tapes in the attic. They couldn’t bring themselves to get rid of them, even after DVDs came along, even after they started downloading al
l their films off the Internet, they had been proud of their collection, and Jon had once suggested that they could make a huge library in the basement at Mailund and fill it with only ghostly things—all their LPs and VHSs and DVDs and letters and books and actual photo albums.

  Siri sent him a picture of her right hand, she sometimes fretted about her hands, over the fact that they were dry and bluish, that her cuticles were split and tender and that they hurt. On her bedside table she kept a jar of expensive, fragrant hand cream that she rubbed into her hands every evening. He sometimes missed the scent of her hands in the evening, and one night she sent him a picture of the jar of hand cream.

  And Jon took a picture of his own face and sent her the picture and under it he wrote: Can I come and lie next to you?

  I miss you.

  I can tell you stories.

  BUT THERE WAS no response. After waiting awhile and drinking some more whiskey—Jon had switched to whiskey, red wine gave him a headache—after searching for and finding Klaus Nomi on YouTube and watching Klaus Nomi do his weird and shattering rendition of Purcell’s aria from King Arthur and after drinking still more whiskey, Jon picked up his phone and sent another text.

  Hey, answer, why don’t you? I want to be with you. I don’t want to lie here in the attic anymore.

  He stared at the ceiling. No reply. Fuck her. Why couldn’t it just be simple? Why did he have to lie here in the attic, banished? Why couldn’t they just lie in the same bed and have sex? Was it so unreasonable to want a little normal, everyday physical contact? Why did the conversation have to be about everything but sex, everything that had to happen before sex, when they talked about sex? Housework, for example. Responsibility. He had to take more responsibility. Feelings. He lacked empathy. She couldn’t trust him. He didn’t see the bigger picture. Children. They wore her out. Work. She was worked off her feet. Money. He was never going to get that book finished. They couldn’t live on her income alone. He would have to find a real job. Only the other day she had actually said, “We need to work toward an even distribution of chores and privileges.”

  “Okay,” he had replied, and then he had started yelling: “How much is a fuck with you worth? Tell me and I’ll pay. Do you want me to vacuum the whole house? Cook dinner every day? Get a nine-to-five job? Write a best seller? Separate the trash? Vote Labour? Just say! How much to fuck you?”

  He looked at his phone. No reply. Damn her. He wrote another text. To Karoline this time.

  I’m going away for a few days, to write, have borrowed a house in Sandefjord. Can you come? I want to see you.

  The response was swift.

  When?

  He hadn’t actually been planning on going anywhere to write, not right now, after Easter sometime, maybe, and he certainly hadn’t been planning on taking Karoline with him, she was humorless, she bored him, he had been planning to end the whole thing, it had been going on for years and he was fed up, and it wasn’t entirely unproblematic that Karoline was married to Kurt and that all four of them—the Dreyer-Brodals and the Mandls—were friends.

  What he had thought when he was offered the chance to borrow a house in Sandefjord was that it would be good to be on his own, that he needed some time on his own. To shut himself away. With no interruptions. And enough whiskey. Alone. No wife. No children. No dog. Or maybe the dog. He took a swig of whiskey and wrote: In two weeks. Can you get away?

  She replied right away. They all did. (Apart from Siri, who shut him out.) He pictured an entire city of lonely, sleepless women sitting up at night with their cell phones, writing to him. The thought was amusing and at the same time depressing. His cell chirruped.

  Kurt going to U.S. in two wks so shld be possible. Will check with my mother if Gunnar can stay with her … Kisses Jon looked at Karoline’s message. How old was this woman? He counted on his fingers. Two years younger than him. Forty-nine? So what the hell was going on with the little smiley faces? Did she think of herself as a little girl having her first love affair? A little Lolita. A little dish. He laughed out loud. How awful. A smiley face. She wasn’t just humorless, she was stupid too. And just the mention of that son of hers. Gunnar.

  I don’t want us to be with these people, Dad.

  Alma is weird … She’s a freak, you know.

  He wrote: I don’t ever want to go anywhere with you or talk to you again or hear about your son. You’re humorless, pathetic, ridiculous, ugly, and boring, I hate fucking you, I hate your shriveled-up cunt, you stink, you remind me of everything that’s despicable about myself and the whole fucking world. Jon

  He read it over. Yes, that was it, exactly! Then he pressed DELETE. What difference did it make, anyway? Why not go to Sandefjord with Karoline? He might just as well go to Sandefjord with Karoline as not go. Karoline would at least want to fuck. His phone chirruped again. He read the text.

  Jon—has it ever occurred to you that everything you do has consequences. Always.

  Jon started. What the hell? Had he sent that shriveled-cunt message to Karoline after all? He eyed the whiskey bottle. What the hell had he done now? He broke out in a sweat. He checked DELETED MESSAGES—and there it was. He hadn’t sent it. He deleted it again. He looked at the message he had just received.

  Jon—has it ever occurred to you that everything you do has consequences. Always.

  He looked at the number from which the message had been sent. He didn’t recognize it. Was Siri sending him messages from a secret phone? Was this a new kind of game? Had she found out about the other women? He felt the whiskey coming back on him and had to put his hand to his mouth to keep from being sick. He took a deep breath. It was all right. He wasn’t going to be sick. He wasn’t going to die. This was nothing. There was nothing to worry about. He was here in his own home. Everything was all right.

  But could Siri have somehow hacked into the night’s exchange of text messages and sent him a message from a cell phone he didn’t know about—and why did she have a cell phone he didn’t know about? Jon keyed in the number for directory inquiries but drew a blank there. And then came another message, repeating the words from the last one.

  Everything you do has consequences. Always.

  He poured another drink and wrote: Who are you?

  He did not have long to wait.

  You haven’t told all you know about why she disappeared. Then came another message.

  I’m Amanda, Milla’s mother, but you knew that, didn’t you?

  IN THE SUMMER of 2009 Jon and Siri and the children spent precisely four days at Mailund before packing up all their stuff and heading back to Oslo. Jenny and Irma had sat up every night drinking Cabernet and wanted nothing to do with the rest of the family, and when Liv wouldn’t stop crying after having run into her grandmother drunk in the kitchen early one morning at the end of June, Siri announced that she wasn’t staying there another minute. And there was nothing for it but to leave.

  And anyway, the whole house was a reminder of Milla. Siri imagined finding strands of dark hair along the baseboards and around the doorframes, in the annex, in the meadow behind the house, in the vegetable plot, under the maple tree, and in her white flower bed.

  That white peony in your hair—that’s from one of my beds. You wreck things.

  Siri left the running of Gloucester in the hands of one of her young and talented chefs and hurried back to Oslo.

  Amanda’s voice was everywhere.

  But surely, you must know something? You can’t just stand there and not know. It’s not good enough! Please! She lived in your house! You were supposed to watch over her! Where is she? Where is she goddamn it? Tell me where she is!

  It would soon be July and then she would have been gone a year.

  A few weeks earlier that summer, Jon had had an excellent meeting with his editor, Gerda, and Julian, the publisher. They had split a bottle of wine. Everyone had agreed that the third part of the trilogy should be published in mid-November, which meant that he would have to deliver the manuscrip
t by mid-August at the latest.

  “Writer’s block or no writer’s block, this book will be published,” Jon had said with a loud laugh. Much louder than Gerda’s and Julian’s. He had wanted to show them that he could actually joke about this whole awkward situation that had arisen over the past few years, namely that he 1) owed the publishing house a lot of money, and 2) had never produced a manuscript.

  It so happened, though, that the writing had been coming easier over the past couple of months. He’d had two good weeks in Sandefjord in April and May, except during that first weekend, when Karoline joined him and was all set on “defining their relationship.” She thought it might be better if she just told her husband, to which Jon had replied that he really didn’t think she should. Jon had Siri and Karoline had Kurt and they were all good friends and she mustn’t go messing things up or muddling things up or whatever the right expression was. “Let’s think about the kids, Karoline,” Jon said. “And besides, what good would it do telling Kurt about us?” And when she didn’t answer, he repeated: “Let’s think about the kids.”

  Really, he just wanted to end the whole thing, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  And the text messages from Milla’s mother kept on coming, sometimes with weeks in between them, sometimes days. More often than not they came just when he had managed to put the whole thing to the back of his mind.

  Her birthday today. She’s twenty. Walking around the flat searching for her. A.

  We find it almost impossible to talk about her. A.

  Is there something you’re not telling, Jon? Is there something you and Siri aren’t telling? A.

  July 15. She’s been gone a year. These are the anniversaries we will be observing from now on. A.

  On one occasion (when she had written “we find it almost impossible to talk about her”) he replied, asking if they should meet for coffee, and was relieved when he didn’t hear back from her.

  Jon had imagined finishing the book at Mailund, Alma could watch Liv for a few hours outside while he wrote, but when, typically, Siri changed all their plans and moved everyone back to Oslo, he realized there would be nothing written this summer either. Siri immersed herself in work at the Oslo restaurant and it was up to him to figure out what to do all day with the children in the city.