by Linn Ullmann
Ashley stares at her mother, horrified. Her eyes turn into two narrow slits. I can do exactly the same thing with my eyes.
“I don’t think I have time to go to gymnastics,” I say, now in fluent English, “I take ballet.”
“She takes ballet lessons in New York,” says one of the two Swedish babysitters, “three times a week we go back and forth on the train.”
“Well, there you go,” says Mrs. Lyndon, clapping her hands, “gymnastics with Ashley was not such a good idea then, was it?”
After that, not even Mrs. Lyndon knows what to say, and everything goes quiet around the coffee table.
I want another cracker. So far, I’ve counted to 234. I know I can wait till I reach 500. The crackers are salty and herby and emit a perfect crunch sound if you take care not to chew too hard or too soft.
We did eat before coming here, the Swedish babysitters made sandwiches for all three of us and we dressed up a little and they said it would be exciting to meet the neighbors and maybe I would make friends with the girl. It’s the salt—475, 476, 477. No way am I waiting till 500, but this time I get up resolutely and kneel down next to the coffee table. I slather another cracker with cheese, but wait to eat it until I’ve sat back down on the sofa again.
“Are you hungry, dear?” says Mrs. Lyndon. She smiles and points at the tray. “I can go get a bit more.”
Sometimes at night the boy with the bangs comes over, once in a while he brings a friend, usually he comes alone, he doesn’t want the spicy stew on the stovetop, so the babysitters make something else for him. A green salad. A grilled cheese sandwich. He smokes nonstop. One evening he offers me a drag. I know it’s pot.
“No, no,” says one of the two Swedish babysitters, “put that away, John, don’t do that.”
“Relax,” he says, “let her try it.” He sits on the edge of the sofa and queries me about Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her. When I say that I haven’t seen that one, only Breathless, we talk about Harakiri instead, because I’ve seen Harakiri twice, and he’s never met a kid before who’s seen Harakiri, he says.
Mamma lives in an apartment in the middle of Manhattan with a view of Central Park and is about to play the lead role in a Broadway musical about Mama, not my mamma, but a mama. The mama in the musical is also from Norway, she’s the backbone of her family, the Hansens, who live on Steiner Street in San Francisco at the beginning of the last century. The papa has lost his job, money is tight, but thanks to the mama’s quick-wittedness there’s nothing that can bring her or the papa or the children down. My mamma can neither sing nor dance, but she is a combination of endless variables and, when offered the part, she says yes right away. Why shouldn’t she sing and dance on Broadway? One of the variables is terrible clumsiness, another is sweetness, a third is bravery teetering on the brink of hubris, a fourth is vulnerability, a fifth is irresistibility, a sixth is a longing so great that it has neither beginning nor end. She has numerous solos and can’t hit a single note in a single song.
HAIR IN HER EYES, not pulled back tightly and gathered in a proper ballet bun, not a proper turnout, equally skinny as the talented ballet girls, but not as talented, skinny because she was born that way, not because she doesn’t eat or throws up what she eats, the girl eats all the time, just not stews with bones poking through the sauce, she’s always hungry, but remains skinny, skinny as a caterpillar—as skinny as the caterpillar in the book before it eats its way through the one red apple, the two pears, the three plums, the four strawberries, the five oranges, the chocolate cake, the ice-cream cone, a pickle, a slice of Swiss cheese, a slice of salami, a lollipop, a piece of cherry pie, a sausage, a cupcake, a slice of watermelon, and a green leaf, but one day she turns into a fucking butterfly, says the boy with the bangs who is sitting on the silk sofa in the yellow house smoking a joint and going on about Antonioni’s Blow-Up. The two Swedish babysitters laugh. The boy nods at the girl.
“Have you seen it?”
She shakes her head.
“Antonioni is better than your father, you know.”
“Okay.”
“Cares more about the world.”
“Okay.”
“More interesting.”
“Okay.”
“How about you and I go to the city one day and see Blow-Up?”
“Okay.”
But apart from him, no one says anything about the girl and butterflies, or invites her to go to the movies.
TWICE, THE FATHER STAGES productions of Gombrowicz’s Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy, a play about a bored prince, who, out of sheer desperation (because he is so very bored), marries the mute and ugly princess of Burgundy. The prince’s parents are shocked by this. The whole court is shocked. I don’t know what is most shocking, that the princess is ugly, or that she never speaks. In the end they kill her. I don’t think the girl’s father was happy with the Munich production, the reviews were bad, he didn’t quite pull it off, he had lost his touch, the critics wrote.
In Diary, Gombrowicz writes about the nature of beauty and how it manifests itself differently in women and men. A woman, he writes:
betrays herself all the time with her desire to please and so is not a queen, but a slave and instead of appearing like a goddess, worthy of desire, she appears as terrible clumsiness trying to conquer an inaccessible beauty.
The mother appears as anything but terrible clumsiness. I would sooner say she appears as a goddess worthy of desire trying to conceal her terrible clumsiness.
Appearances mattered to the mother. How she appeared. How the world around her appeared. She existed by appearing.
The mother is no goddess, but her beauty is of the sort that belongs to everyone and no one—like a national park. When the girl pictures her, she sees many different faces, one after the other or one on top of the other. She wonders whether the mother has a separate beauty—a separate face—just for the girl. How does the mother look (the girl wonders) when she looks at me without anyone looking at her looking at me?
THE NOBEL LAUREATE SAYS he has started to doubt everything.
The mother and her new suitor are eating spaghetti with meat sauce in a little Italian restaurant in New York City. The mother is wearing a long, dark-red dress pulled tightly over her breasts. Maybe he thinks: Not long ago she was one of the most beautiful women in the world.
The Nobel Laureate feels a kinship with the girl’s father in ways he can’t quite explain. The mother has had many suitors, one of whom was the girl’s father. The other suitors were usually curious about him, asking questions, feeling close to him when they were with her. The Nobel Laureate could have talked to the girl’s father about music, he thinks, and starts telling the girl’s mother about a childhood memory involving the conductor Fritz Reiner and Mozart’s Symphony no. 40, and then he wants to tell her about his little sister’s hands at the piano, but before he gets that far, the girl’s mother exclaims: “Oh, I love Mozart!”
The Nobel Laureate stops talking, looks away, and changes the subject.
The mother is often called the father’s muse. The father is never called the mother’s muse. He was the man, she was the girl, he was older, she was young, he was searching, she was discovered, he looked, she was looked at—to cut a long story short. He created, she inspired. The father had nine children, but none of these children, neither the boys nor the girls, were ever called muses, children got in the way of work, or so, at least, the children’s mothers and father seemed to believe, although the mothers would assume all responsibility for the children once the father was out of the picture—to cut another long story short. Almost all the mothers (there were five mothers with nine children between them, in addition to the father’s own mother, making it six altogether) have been described as muses. Ingrid, his last wife, was a practical woman and therefore he loved her the most. And mourned her when she died. Mourned her so deeply that he himself wanted to die. The father believed that a condition for lasting love is that practical matter
s are taken care of. One must never underestimate the importance of being practical. This rule applies to love, and also to work. The father did not call the women in his life muses. I don’t think he ever used the word “muse.” He called them Stradivariuses—violins—instruments—but never muses.
In Norwegian, “muse” is a somewhat amusing word since you can’t help associating it with the similar word musa (which can mean either “mouse” or “pussy”). In the early 1700s, the poet-priest Petter Dass wrote a number of letters to the poetess and hymnist Dorothe Engelbretsdatter, including the following lines:
Matron! How fare thee?
. . .
Howe’er be it fated
With Lady Minervæ affairs?
Her Joy all abdicated
To foster Days of Tears?
Is now Parnassus’ Praise
Laid waste and lifeless bled?
The Muse vexed by Malaise?
Do all the Nymphs lie dead?
Has every Poet’s friend, then
Her Writing Tools forsworn?
Are Paper, Ink and Quill Pen
Abandoned and forlorn?
Petter Dass waited in vain for a reply. He admired Dorothe immensely and never deemed to call her his muse, indeed, the rhyme makes it clear that he thought of her as his colleague, his equal, a true poet, and when she fails to answer his letter, he wonders whether her muse may be “vexed by malaise” and whether this might be the reason for her silence. Thus, by referring to a sick muse, he beat Baudelaire to the punch by 150 years. Baudelaire would famously write a poem about his ailing muse in 1857.
Unlike Dorothe, I would probably have answered Petter Dass’s letter, had it been addressed to me. If for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of replying to a letter, or, what’s more likely, an email in which the author didn’t open with a silly “Hi” followed by my first name (in which back alley did we end up on a first-name basis, may I ask?) and, God forbid, a smiley, but rather greeted me with a lovely “Matron! How fare thee?” I wouldn’t have thought twice about replying.
The father said that the mother was his Stradivarius. I have never heard her express displeasure at either the term “muse” or “Stradivarius.”
But did she really want to be a violin?
King Pierus had nine daughters and believed they were so beautiful as to outshine the nine muses, but he was wrong; hubris is always punished, and the nine daughters were turned into magpies.
There are worse fates: a muse’s raison d’être is to act as a mirror for the great artist. No artist, no muse. A magpie is no one’s mirror, it is visible all on its own, what’s more, the magpie actually recognizes its reflection in the mirror. Not many animals are capable of this, a few great apes, of course—the bonobo, for example—some dolphins and also a particular type of ant. In the case of the ant, it appears that it washes itself after having looked in a mirror and noticed a spot on its head, but refrains from doing so if there is no spot. Studies have also been carried out on elephants. Some elephants recognized themselves in the mirror, but not all. The studies with the elephants were complicated by the fact that the mirrors were not big enough.
Maybe she can be my muse as well as his, the Nobel Laureate thinks, and looks at the girl’s mother. Several years later, waiting for a friend who happens to be late for dinner, he takes up his napkin, and quickly, almost nonchalantly, outlines a theory about the nature of memory based on years and years of research. At that point his affair with the mother has long since ended, so perhaps he didn’t need a muse after all, or a magpie or a mirror, but only a tardy friend?
On the one hand, he wants the whole world to see that he can get a woman like her, on the other hand he has a sneaking suspicion that she isn’t what he wants. She is forty. She makes a fool of herself onstage (he doesn’t find the singing and dancing endearing, he finds it embarrassing). There is an arc spanning from pride to shame, and the Nobel Laureate is always uncertain about where and at which end of the arc he finds himself. This constant uncertainty is his greatest weakness.
He pictures his little sister’s fingers hovering over the keyboard, those tiny little hands. He opens his mouth to tell her about them, but restrains himself—Oh, I love Mozart still hangs in the room like a bad smell.
The mother tells the girl that the Nobel Laureate is trying to create a brain. One day the mother visits him at his laboratory. Two things register with her that day. One, all the rats scuttling around, and two, a palpable doubt about whether this relationship has any kind of future. She feels an overwhelming compassion for the rats, but she also thinks they’re disgusting.
The girl’s mother calls it love, but only for the first few weeks, many years later she will say that he was simply not a very nice man as far as she was concerned.
As a young boy he too had played the piano. In order to have some time to themselves, his parents used to install him and his little sister in a box at Carnegie Hall. Brother and sister sat quiet as mice as Fritz Reiner conducted Mozart. He could have told the girl’s mother about his sister’s white dress, her long black hair neatly drawn back into a braid and finished off with a bow, her little hand in his, but he doesn’t. Instead he raises his own hand and waves his index finger at her.
“We don’t even know exactly what part of the brain makes my finger wave at you,” he says.
The girl’s mother notices the manicured nail, the delicate, smooth hand. His nails are better cared for than hers.
She lifts her own index finger and waves back.
They sit like this for a while, waving at each other with their index fingers.
“I know for certain that I am not you,” he says, a bit abruptly, perhaps, and the mother is taken aback. She dreams of a love in which two people are so wrapped up in each other that they no longer know which of them is which. But the Nobel Laureate is not talking about love, he is talking about the difficulty of understanding precisely what inside the brain steers our motor functions, and that we are the sum of our movements.
“Nothing is static. Nothing is determined. Everything is movement.”
“Hmm,” says the mother, and wonders how long they have to sit like this and wave at each other.
He pulls back his hand.
He drinks a little wine. She is silent. And then he says: “Picture the cerebral cortex . . .”
She pictures the blue portrait of her father in his officer’s uniform, all the different shades of blue. She doesn’t want to interrupt, doesn’t want to say anything stupid, sometimes she feels stupid, but she has a special way of looking at men that makes them feel like geniuses. Even geniuses feel like geniuses when the mother looks at them.
“The complexity of little things,” he says.
“The complexity of little things,” the mother repeats, and feels a headache coming on. It’s not a migraine, she doesn’t get migraines. Her headache is like an itch, a discomfort more than a pain, like something sifting through her. Living brains are cotton-candy pink, not gray. It occurs to her to say that living brains are cotton-candy pink, not gray, but that he, who has seen so many brains, has probably only seen gray brain matter—since it turns gray when it dies—and he can’t very well cut into a living brain. But then it occurs to her that she shouldn’t say any of this, that it probably doesn’t have anything to do with what he’s talking about. There is a constant sifting inside her head when she feels like this. Frayed nerves. She drinks more wine, it usually helps, calms things down.
She wants to say that she likes it best when everything is very, very quiet.
Her red dress is tight and scratchy. She worries that he will notice the sweat under her arms.
When the Nobel Laureate visits the yellow house, he spends most of his time squirming on the silk sofa in the living room, whispering to the mother that he wants to leave.
On one occasion, he tells the girl to go to the kitchen, find a glass and some sugar, pour the sugar into the glass and then calculate the number of molecules in a gl
ass of sugar. Once she’s figured that out, she can come back in to the living room and tell him the answer. The complexity of little things. Possibly, also, the prospect of a reward, I don’t remember. The girl dashes off to the kitchen, can’t find the sugar, calls to her mother, Mamma, Mamma, where’s the sugar?, the mother sighs and comes into the kitchen—she certainly doesn’t know where the sugar is—and starts opening and closing cupboard doors. The two Swedish babysitters have the day off. They probably know where the sugar is, but are never around when you need them, and on top of that, they’re overpaid. The Nobel Laureate starts calling for the mother. He wants her in the living room with him. The whole point of this molecular game is to keep the bastard (which is what he calls the girl when he thinks she isn’t listening) occupied, so he can be alone with her mother. He has a wife and children and a big house and a Nobel Prize and a career and a limited amount of time to spend with his mistress. The bastard isn’t part of the plan. And now the whole thing is going down the drain. The girl finds a glass, but no sugar, the mother flutters between the yellow rooms complaining about the babysitters. The Nobel Laureate looks at his watch.
I eavesdrop on Mamma’s phone calls, sometimes she knows about it and then we talk about it afterward, how dumb some people are. The Nobel Laureate, for example. More and more it’s Mamma and me against him. There is a particular way of picking up the receiver when you want to listen in on the other end, you have to do it slowly and carefully and it mustn’t say click, if it says click, you’re caught.
“You are my woman!” says the Nobel Laureate on the phone.
He is very convincing. His voice is dark and hoarse. Mamma is the chosen one, the most beloved, she is seen by him and exists for him, and it all makes sense even when he behaves like an idiot.
