Christian Jungersen - You Disappear

The day before yesterday, he went with Vibeke and Thorkild to a building supply outlet, where they bought some immense sheets of fiberboard. The two men cut them into pieces with Thorkild’s circular saw in Frederik’s office, which they’ve refurbished as a workshop. Since then, he’s been holed up in there by himself with his sketches, calculations, glue, and dowels.

Out by the car, the school lawyer asks, “Do you want to keep it?”

“We want to keep everything.”

“Yes, but what I mean is, we’re going to have to sell the house. But this here doesn’t look to be worth more than ninety thousand, max, so—”

“They can certainly afford to keep the car,” Bernard interposes, “and they’d like to keep it.”

“Fine. Good,” the lawyer says. “We’ll send an expert out to appraise it, but we won’t put it up for sale.”

Once we’ve gotten back to the house and I open the door for the men, the lawyer asks, “Is your husband home?”

“Yes, but he’s busy.”

“Just to be clear, our meeting today will determine how much money you will have, from now on through the rest of your lives. The things we decide here cannot be renegotiated.”

“I know that.”

“And your husband knows that too?”

“Yes, he does.”

The lawyer coughs slightly and tenses his broad chin, as if he’s making an effort to look away from me and not ask anything else.

I lead them into our living room. The anonymous-looking assessor sighs with relief and smiles, as if he wants to turn on the TV and sprawl out on my sofa with a beer. “You always get a good sense about whether a house is sellable by asking yourself, Could I imagine living here? ” he says. “With this one, I certainly could.”

The lawyer also appears pleased. “The location is ideal, isn’t it, considering that it isn’t any larger. I’d think that there are a lot of young couples who are looking for something charming—”

The assessor interrupts him, saying, “But there isn’t as much light as young people like these days.”

“Yes, we’ll have to remove some of the furniture before we have the pictures taken for the listing. That’ll create more of a feeling of light and space.”

The lawyer raises the small stainless-steel bowl from the coffee table, examining the hallmark on the bottom. I place myself in front of my costly sofa and stand there perfectly still, watching.

“You people sure live the life of Riley,” the assessor says.

The lawyer lets his thumb slide appreciatively over the leather on the backrest of my armchair. “Fantastic furniture. Is there any of it you want to keep?”

I glance hesitantly toward Bernard. “As much of it as we can,” I say.

I remember distinctly when I bought the armchair. I’d just guided a ninth-grade class through their final exams. It’d been the first time I’d been homeroom teacher for a graduating class, and it had gone swimmingly. They were so happy, their enthusiasm infectious. So this is how it’ll be , I thought, and I embraced my life and my calling and felt satisfied — felt in fact ready to resign myself to Frederik’s absence. And then in the online classifieds that week I found a worn old armchair that sounded promising. I drove the seventy-five miles to Korsør with the trailer to see it, and it was just as I’d hoped: it had been made in the late ’40s by a furniture designer from Funen who was essentially unknown, but whose style I’d already fallen in love with.

“This chair here,” the lawyer says. “Have you had it appraised?”

“No, but it’s not by a name designer.”

I glance up at the wall, where there’s a luminous suggestion of a rectangle next to the shelves with Frederik’s LPs. Until recently, a drawing hung there that Niklas had made in third grade. When he entered gymnasium, he insisted that it no longer hang there, and now all that remains is the light patch of wallpaper.

Where are we going to end up living? It’ll probably be an apartment building full of welfare recipients and mental patients — just like us. Far from Old Farum.

“My husband worked in the evenings and on weekends,” I explain. “So I had lots of time to deal in furniture. It was my hobby, mine alone. Buying and selling. He didn’t have anything to do with it. You’ll see that all the receipts are in my name.”

The lawyer positions himself on the exact spot where, less than a year and a half ago, Laust stood on a chair and raised a toast to Frederik at his birthday party.

“Yes,” he says. “Let’s talk then about how we’re going to divide this up. If your husband worked on those evenings and weekends, and the two of you were using his larger income for your daily expenses, then Saxtorph Private School also has the right to half of what you earned during those same working hours.”

Instantly I feel adrenaline pumping through my veins. I manage to speak calmly though I start gasping for breath. “But it’s furniture that I’ve traded my way up to, on my own. It’s taken me years.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that my client has right to one half — at least — if your husband was earning other money that you used.”

“But surely you can’t just—”

Bernard steps in front of the lawyer and says, very evenly, “Shouldn’t we wait and take this up later?”

And so the confrontation is postponed, apparently. Bernard smiles at me. I exhale noisily, ready to fight but no longer having an outlet for my belligerence.

The assessor sits down in each of the chairs, examines the tabletop, studies the books on the shelves, kneels and turns up the corner of a rug. The lawyer stands still, watching him; I stand and watch Bernard.

Is this what it feels like when someone looks out for you? When’s the last time someone looked out for me? The three years before Frederik’s seizure were peaceful — there wasn’t really anything he had to protect me from. Then there were our first years together, before Saxtorph swallowed him whole, back when I felt he wanted to take care of me. Before that I’d have to go all the way back to when I was twelve, in the years before my father moved out.

Bernard sticks his hands in the pockets of his jacket, then he takes them out, then he puts them back in. Two weeks ago, when I met him for the first time, I felt something wolfish in the combination of his evident solitude and his grey-haired physical presence.

But now I see everything differently. After nearly twenty years, it’s clear that he’s still besotted with his wife. More than any other man I’ve met. And now I can see that it’s not a wolf he resembles so much as a family dog who can’t find its way home. The prominent cheekbones, the intense eyes belong to a dog who restlessly roams the winter streets, hunting for the family and the warm hearth it once knew, while each day its bones grow more and more visible beneath its fur.

We all go up to the second floor and enter the bathroom. There’s no sawing or drilling noises from the workshop; Frederik must be marking cutting patterns on the fiberboard. I’ve been slowly finding traces of personality in the assessor’s features. He’s a bit more round-headed than most men; his lips are a bit thicker, his eyes a bit smaller. If I bump into him on the street in a couple of days and don’t acknowledge him, it’ll no longer be because I mix him up with all the others in my mind, but because I don’t want to.

Our bathroom’s too small, and it feels even more cramped because we don’t have anywhere else to put the stacked washer and dryer.

“Hmm; hmm. Well, this is disappointing,” the assessor says. “It could easily knock a couple hundred thousand off the price.”

“But we’ve just redone it!”