When the crime show’s over, Frederik reaches for the remote and resolutely presses the power button, as if he’s been waiting for a long time to do so.
“I’d like to see the news,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he takes our wineglasses from the table, handing me mine as he raises his own and gazes into my eyes.
“I’m a very lucky man,” he says, his voice calm and tender. “I’m married to a woman who made a tremendous effort on my behalf while I was sick. That’s something I’ll always remember. And as if that wasn’t enough, you’re just as beautiful and sexy as when I met you more than twenty years ago. I look around at other women and how they’ve changed, and believe me — I don’t take it for granted that you’ve gotten so much lovelier.”
“Is that really the best you can come up with?” I scoff. “How full of clichés can one man be?”
He smiles crookedly at me. “Cheers, darling.”
I feel compelled to raise my glass, but I can’t stand looking him in the eye and quickly focus on the rug again.
“I’ve been watching you when you go out on the balcony with the watering can, when you set your purse on the table like in the old days and let yourself fall back in the armchair — all the little things, the things that are you. I look at you, and though I don’t say anything, I have such a desire to touch you, to kiss you.”
I get up. It’s impossible for me to remain seated so close to him.
“Can you remember what I told you that time?” he continues. “How it’s impossible for us to live without each other — because we’re meant for each other?”
Right away I know the night he’s talking about. The dinner we had just after I was hospitalized.
I grab a cushion from the couch and swing it at him. “So you thought you’d mention the time I had my stomach pumped. Just something we ought to remember, eh? You think it’s a good thing to bring up? It won’t put me in a bad mood, not at all!”
The wine’s knocked out of his glass.
“All your powers of empathy, Frederik, could fit on the head of a pin!”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I just wanted—”
“You want this and you want that! I’m so tired of being married to a sick man who can’t help anything that he does!”
“But Mia, it was only because I was hoping that—”
“That’s enough! It’s simply beyond the pale! I can’t stand it!”
He doesn’t say another word, just gets up and goes to his room. He can’t even deal with it anymore; he’s gotten to be such a wuss.
I storm up and down the length of the room, waving the cushion in the air, and then I hurl it against the wall. It springs back and knocks his glass off the coffee table and shatters it. Shit!
What’s he doing in there? I go over to his room and throw open the door. “Now what? What?”
He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, doubled over, his head buried in his hands. “It’s true,” he mumbles. “And I understand. I do understand. How will you ever again be able to …? And Saxtorph, and Laust, Niklas and our house and—”
“Don’t start blubbering about suicide again!” I yell. “I won’t hear it! It’s not fair!”
I slam the door and go back to the living room, where I start pacing up and down again.
I go back to his room and fling open the door once more. “And how am I ever supposed to have any desire for you when you’re such a wimp?” I shout.
He hasn’t budged. He sits on the bed in the same curled-over position as before, hiding his face, not answering my question.
“The real Frederik wouldn’t act like this! You claim you’re healthy — then pull yourself together! Be a man, God damn it!”
I slam the door again and go back to the living room. I fling myself into the armchair, turn on the TV, watch it for maybe ten seconds, then turn it off.
Later he comes back out and positions himself across from me, standing with legs slightly spread and arms akimbo. He affects some sort of mechanical, military voice. “You have no right to speak to me in that manner. I was only trying to be friendly. I must ask you to govern your emotions the next time.”
In his stocking feet, he looks like Niklas and his friends would in the old days when they put on grown-up clothes and played theater. They thought they were saying adult things and spoke with great gravity and conviction, but that just made the performances all the more grotesque. This is the same thing; it isn’t Frederik’s real self, and I can’t control my laughter. “This is your idea of what a man’s like? This is your best effort? Ha-ha-ha! Really? You have no clue, do you. No clue at all!”
“I was just trying to say something nice to you before.”
“Yes, and you can bet that you did an excellent job of it.”
He continues with the same feigned briskness. “What we need now is for you to be constructive for a moment—”
“Ha-ha! You come across as even more ridiculous when you take yourself so seriously. But it’s a long mile from this circus to the real Frederik.”
For a moment his sergeant’s voice seems authentic; his anger animates it, and he actually sounds a bit like a man. “Mia, the reason you can’t work things out with me is that you’re sick in the head! You have Capgras syndrome!”
“You’re the one who’s sick in the head!”
He walks toward the wall.
“Watch out, Frederik. There’s broken glass there!”
But he doesn’t listen.
“Ouch! Damn it!”
“Oh Frederik!”
“And I didn’t say anything about suicide! I didn’t!” he whimpers as he hobbles out to the bathroom.
I follow him there, where he seats himself on the toilet lid and raises his wounded foot. I take hold of it to examine it — and he lets me. There’s just a small cut on the ball of his left foot, just a little dome of dark, thick blood. I find tweezers. And I grasp him gently by the heel, softly stroking his arch, the ball of his foot. There is a glass splinter there, and I remove it.
It’s the oddest thing to kneel on the bathroom floor with Frederik’s foot in my hand. His long, delicate, thin-skinned foot, with its prominent network of blood vessels on the upper side. A foot I know so well.
I put an adhesive bandage on it and look him in the eye, smiling at him. I run my finger across the bandage. For a few moments I am nice to him. Once I was that way to him for month after month, and in this moment I am like that again.
He alternates between looking at me inquiringly and looking shyly away. He tries to smile at me, yet I see the weeping there as well. His muscles lose their tension, they relax, but I also see how he gets a grip and pulls himself together. Everything in his face blurs together, like an ink-jet print in the rain, and I feel the same way. Our faces are sludge, both of them, the very same sludge.
I can’t help myself; I take care of him. And at the same time I can tell it’s been a long time since I’ve had the energy to.
• • •
I lie twisted on Thorkild and Vibeke’s wretched couch, alone in the half darkness, my torso slung against the stiff armrest, my eyes pressed to my forearm. The roof of my mouth hurts from yelling and crying. And I’m so tired; I can no longer shout, and my muscles are all achy and tender, as if I’d been marinating in my own bitter juices.
Maybe Frederik could come back and take me now … I don’t know. I might strike him much harder, this time without a cushion. Or maybe I would yield, and that might be the best thing that could happen for all of us — more than twenty years ago, meeting on the broad sand beach near the school camp, having Niklas … I don’t know.