by Linn Ullmann
Later, Johan went over Mai’s list. He had asked for six words; she had given him seven. One word had to be deleted.
Strong-willed and professional? Yes. She always got her way; she was a reputable and well-respected doctor. The wall of her office was covered with colorful children’s drawings. She was forever receiving cards from grateful parents. But she never took her work home with her, as they say. She once told him that she could not remember the names of the children she had treated, not even the ones who had died. Johan found this surprising.
It was a matter of will, she said. She didn’t want to remember their names. If she had to carry all those names about in her head, the ones who got well and the ones who didn’t, she’d never get any peace.
Ugly? No, not ugly. But when Mai used the word she uttered it with something like pride, well knowing that she was magnificent precisely by virtue of her ugliness: her long gray hair, her child’s face, and her fabulous big nose. Had she been the slightest bit prettier she would have been far less attractive.
Steadfast? Yes, unfailingly. Mai kept all promises and honored all agreements. It would never occur to her to break a promise, come what may. On one occasion, for instance, she had promised him that they would have dinner at a new restaurant in Oslo that had been getting rave reviews in the press. When they arrived at the restaurant, the maître d’ couldn’t find their name in his ledger.
“But I reserved a table,” Mai told him.
“I’m sorry,” the maître d’ said, “but I don’t have your name. Another evening, perhaps?”
“No,” Mai said. “We’re dining here this evening.”
“But—”
Mai cut him off. “The minute a table becomes available, you let us know!”
Johan and Mai sat down at the bar. It was eight o’clock. When ten o’clock came and they still hadn’t been seated, and the maître d’ gave no sign that it would soon be their turn, Johan said he’d rather go home and pick up a hot dog on the way.
“No,” Mai said.
“What do you mean, ‘No’?” Johan said.
“No,” Mai said. “We had an agreement, you and I. We agreed to have dinner here tonight. I promised you.”
Johan shook his head and sat for another ten minutes. Then he got to his feet and said, “That’s it, I’ve had enough.”
Mai remained where she was, staring straight ahead. “I’m waiting here,” she said. “I’m waiting right here. I’m having dinner here tonight, no matter what.”
So Johan left. Later, Mai told him that she did eventually get a table, close to midnight, and to the chagrin of the staff (the restaurant was getting ready to close) she proceeded to order a four-course dinner, which, to the staff’s relief, was nonetheless consumed in record time.
Childless? Yes, but by her own choice. Johan raised his eyes from the sheet of paper. Sometimes, in the bathroom in the morning, after a hot shower, he would breathe softly on the mirror. And a face would reveal itself on the glass, not his face yet one akin to his own. A face he carried with him always. Johan bowed his head over the list once more.
Content, she had written. Definitely, thought Johan. Mai’s natural state was quiet, inexplicable, and unassailable contentment. She had a capacity for enjoying what she called “the littlest things in life”: a lovely dinner, a glass of chilled white wine, a walk in the forest, Johan’s hands, Johan’s kisses. Years before, in the first flush of their romance, it used to surprise him how much pleasure she took in his body. She was hungry, passionate, curious, and always eager to make love. As the years went on he realized that all this passion had nothing to do with him. Or, rather, it had less to do with him and more to do with her: her mouth, her throat, her hands, her breasts, and her sex. It all came down to Mai’s pleasure in her own body and what her body could achieve when it came into contact with other bodies, what delights were possible.
The last word on Mai’s list was honest, and Johan knew that this was the word that had to go.
Mai wasn’t honest at all. Quite the contrary: she told lies. Pointless little lies that didn’t matter, lies never mentioned between them—or, rather, Johan never let on to her that he knew she was lying. Mai was proud, and proud people mustn’t be made to see that one has spotted their weaknesses. It’s upsetting, like stones thrown at a peacock that, in a moment of great ease, treats you to a display of beautiful feathers.
Letting a coward know that she is, indeed, cowardly can, on the other hand, be very satisfying. Alice, his wife number one, was a coward. “Alice and I were two of a kind,” Johan was wont to say. “We tormented each other.”
As for Mai’s lies: they were of no account. Simply not important.
One evening many years ago, Mai set off on the last train to Göteborg. She had been invited to speak on colic in newborn infants at a conference of Nordic pediatricians. Three days without Mai, Johan thought. The truth was, he couldn’t bear being parted from her for so long. When the door slammed behind her, he sat in their apartment in Jacob Aals Gate, rolling a spool of thread around the dining table. It was a Friday evening, and he toyed with the idea of taking himself off to the summer cottage they had bought across the Swedish border in Värmland. Better to be alone in the country than here in town. At least there he had the trees to talk to. He went on fiddling with the spool.
Then he said out loud, to himself, “Mai can sew.” And then he said, even louder, “Alice couldn’t sew. Alice couldn’t do anything but nag me. And count the pennies. That she could do!”
He cast an eye around the empty apartment. He thought he heard laughter from one corner.
“Alice, is that you?” he hissed. “Come back to haunt me, have you?”
He heard the laughter again.
“Bitch!” he muttered.
It was late in the evening. Johan knew that when he started speaking his first wife’s name and, worse, when he started talking to her, then desperation lay just around the corner. So he promptly decided that he wouldn’t go to the country cottage in Värmland. No. First thing next morning he would travel to Göteborg and surprise Mai.
Surprises are, of course, never a good idea. Johan was against surprises of any sort on principle, and one’s principles ought to be taken seriously. It was not a good idea to travel to Göteborg to surprise Mai. For one thing, they never even saw each other and she never found out that he had been there. Never. Not even after he was dead. And like as not she has forgotten all about that seminar. If, on his deathbed, he had asked her, Mai, do you remember seventeen years ago when you took the train to Göteborg to give a lecture on colic in newborn infants? she would have frowned and shaken her head. Mai’s memory has never been very good. The best that can be said of Mai’s memory is that it is selective. She remembers what she chooses to remember and forgets the rest. Johan believed this was one reason why she seemed so content and secure and why he, an insecure individual, could find peace with her. She simply forgets everything that she does not consider worth remembering.
Johan did not forget. Johan forgot nothing. There were times when he thought that the boil on his face, the bedsores, the bloody incisions, all those things that seeped and ached and throbbed, all those things that were turning his body into a dense swamp, were memories of life lived. That only now, at the end, through pain, had he become a reality.
“Reality is hell,” he said.
Only Mai understood what he was saying toward the end, and at the very last not even she could make him out.
He said to her, “You alone could have eased my pain, Mai.”
Johan arrived in Göteborg before noon. It was pouring rain. He walked to the hotel, hoping she would still be in her room. He knew she wasn’t scheduled to give her lecture until two-thirty and guessed that she would spend the morning preparing. By the time he reached the hotel he was soaked through. His nose, his eyes, his eyebrows were streaming; he could lick the rain off his lips, and it dripped from his coat, the bottoms of his trousers, and his bag. His shoes sq
uished, and his white shirt and his undershorts clung to his skin. He called Mai from a pay phone outside the hotel. The operator put him through, and she answered right away. She sounded happy to hear his voice. Where was he calling from? she asked. Was he at work? Had he slept all right without her beside him? But she didn’t give him a chance to answer, just kept talking, told him she was dreading her lecture, worried she’d leave out something important.
Eventually Johan did manage to get a word in. He asked what she was doing.
“Writing, of course,” she said. “I’m sitting here writing.”
“Yes, I know that. But just at the moment when I called, what were you doing then? I’d like to be able to picture you.”
She laughed softly. “At the moment you called, or just before you called, I got up and went into the bathroom to brush my hair.”
“A hundred times?”
“No, just a couple of times. I was trying to decide whether I should wear it up or leave it down for this afternoon.”
“Leave it down.”
“D’you think?”
“Yes.”
It felt good, he realized, to be standing like this outside her hotel with the rain drumming on the roof of the phone booth, to be standing in a puddle of water, holding on to the wet receiver, to her voice and the image of her in front of the mirror; the shining hair that he imagined he could see light up the whole of her dark room, the whole of the hotel, the whole of Göteborg.
“What are you wearing?” he asked.
“My stripy nightgown, glasses.”
“You mean you’re not dressed yet?”
“Well, I got dressed and went down for breakfast; then I came back up to my room and put on my nightgown again. I like working in it. It’s nice and loose and not too warm.”
“You’re warm enough, then,” he went on, “in just your nightgown? You’ve got the window closed so you don’t catch a cold?” He gazed up at the hotel and its rows of windows, behind one of which was Mai.
“No,” she said, seeming a little surprised by the question. “I’ve got the window open. The sun’s shining. It’s really like spring here, just a gentle breeze ruffling my hair. How’s the weather in Oslo?”
“It’s raining,” Johan said.
“Typical,” she said.
For a moment or two neither of them said anything.
“What’ll it be, then?” Johan asked finally.
“What?”
“Your hair. Up or down?”
“Down, I think.” She paused again, then added, “Or maybe up. I don’t know.”
“I love you,” Johan said.
“I love you too,” she replied. “Now I’d better hang up and get back to my writing.” She sighed. “I don’t know how you do it, Johan,” she blurted out. “Churning out articles day in, day out, I mean. This, to me, is sheer hell.”
“To me too,” said Johan, laughing at her. “Don’t despair. You’ll get there! And tonight you can celebrate.”
Then they hung up.
Johan stayed in Göteborg for the rest of the day. He kept an eye out for her, waiting behind a tree until at long last she left the hotel. It was almost two o’clock and still raining. Under her long scarlet raincoat she was wearing a green sweater, a tight-fitting blue skirt, and green rubber boots. Her indoor shoes were probably in the plastic bag she carried in one hand, and her typewritten lecture notes in the bag over her shoulder. She was also clutching a large yellow umbrella on the point of blowing away. Her fair hair hung loose.
He followed her to the convention center and watched as she was swallowed up by the crowd. He decided to wait until her lecture was over, and again he hid behind a tree. Hours went by. There was probably a lot of talk back and forth between her and the other pediatricians, he thought, maybe other lectures. Mai’s surely couldn’t be the only one. At last she emerged, with two other women. They walked in a huddle like the best of friends, hooting with laughter at the wind threatening to blow them over. Like Mai, the other two were carrying large yellow umbrellas, and it dawned on him that these were furnished by the organizers of the conference. Then he noticed the black lettering: NORDIC PEDIATRICIANS’ CONFERENCE 1985.
That evening Mai had dinner in the hotel restaurant with her colleagues. She didn’t see Johan, even though he actually stood in the doorway, scanning the restaurant until he located her table. It would never have occurred to her that he could have followed her, that he could actually be there in Göteborg, that he would come all that way. She was deep in conversation with the two women she had joined up with earlier in the day, and to all appearances she was having a terrific time.
When a man’s wife goes off to a seminar and then tells lies about it, chances are she’s having an affair. But when Johan’s wife goes off to a seminar and tells lies about it, she lies about the weather. Johan’s wife tells him that the sun is shining and that she is sitting writing by an open window, feeling the spring breeze ruffle her hair.
It crossed his mind that this lie might be a forewarning of a bigger lie, a more pernicious one. The moment Mai said that the sun was shining even as rain was coming down in buckets, he had thought, She’s in love with someone else! She’s betrayed me! But then he realized that there was no logical connection between the weather in Göteborg and the likelihood of another man in Mai’s life. A woman, he concluded, is no less unfaithful in sunshine than in rain.
Johan never did come up with an explanation. It was such a scrappy lie. Neither the truth (that it was raining) nor the lie (that the sun was shining) was malicious, harmful, or even relevant. But the fact was, and still is, that Mai tells lies.
Her other lies, when first he became aware of them, were all of the same caliber, if a lie can be said to have a caliber. They were of no account. Johan might not even have noticed them, had it not been for Göteborg.
For instance: Johan and Mai would occasionally call each other at work. If Johan had left home before Mai, he would usually call to ask what she was wearing. It was a kind of a game. She knew he liked to be able to picture her. But more than once he discovered, always by chance, that she was actually wearing something quite different from what she had described over the phone. She might tell him that she was wearing a blue dress when in fact she was wearing red pants. That sort of thing.
But she didn’t always lie.
When Mai was thirty-eight, she announced to Johan that she was pregnant but that she’d made up her mind to have an abortion. She had had an amniocentesis, and the test had shown the fetus to be defective. Johan pleaded with her: she couldn’t make a decision like this on her own; they ought at least to discuss it, he said. Exactly how far along was she?
“Fourteen weeks,” she said, and turned away.
Months later in a bookshop, in the section called “Mother and Child,” he found a book with a week-by-week account of pregnancy. He opened it to week fourteen: “The baby’s heart pumps twenty-eight liters of blood a day,” it said.
Twenty-eight liters of blood.
He saw before him twenty-eight milk cartons.
He saw before him a heart.
But at this particular moment he was standing, staring, speechless, at Mai’s back.
“For God’s sake, Mai. You never said a word. I had no idea. In any case, it’s too late for an abortion. This is a baby you’re carrying.”
“It’s not too late.”
“It’s my baby too,” he ventured, and the words didn’t even sound hollow to him. I think that in a momentary burst of courage, which deserted him immediately afterward, Johan wanted that child. “You can’t just—”
“It’s my body,” she cut in. “And anyway, it’s deformed. We’ve created this deformed thing, Johan. I don’t want to have it. It’s a pity, but it’s out of the question.”
Johan looked at her.
“You’re cold, Mai.”
“I am not cold. Jesus, Johan!”
“What you want to do, it’s so … lax, morally lax. You can’t jus
t—”
“Big words, Johan,” she hissed. “Big words. Let’s not make speeches about things we don’t understand.”
She started to cry. For a second she reminded him of Alice, who often resorted to tears in order to bring a discussion to an end.
“I can’t stand the thought of going through with this. I can’t stand it!” she sobbed. She flopped down onto the floor and ran a hand through her hair. And then she said, softly now, “You couldn’t even take care of a healthy child, Johan. You couldn’t even take proper care of Andreas. When Alice died he was left all alone in the world. I don’t want to bring a child into the world with you, not even a healthy one, and certainly not this sick one.”
This was an argument against which, for obvious reasons, he had no defense. A slightly contemptuous smile every time his only son said the word Pappa. Mai knew exactly what to say, which buttons to push. His courage deserted him, and he was dumbstruck.
In the middle of the night he would think, She didn’t need to tell me. She could have said she had to go to the hospital because of some woman’s trouble, nothing to worry about, a routine procedure. She could have satisfied him with some such explanation, as easily as saying, The sun is shining; the window is open, there’s a spring breeze blowing. After all, she’d already made her decision. She wasn’t interested in his objections, his support, his opinion. She was quicker than he, and she had made up her mind.
After the abortion, he went to collect her from the hospital. He said nothing until they were in the car. Then she turned to him and breathed, “I don’t want to talk about it. As far as you and I are concerned, this subject is closed.”
Johan stared straight ahead and swung the car out onto the road. “Okay,” he said.
She kept her eyes fixed on him. He took the road to Majorstua. Would not look at her.
“Do you want to know what it was?” She spoke in little more than a whisper.
“I thought you said you didn’t want to talk about it.”
