Christian Jungersen - You Disappear

For more than a decade, concrete has been DEAD! as a material for the serious DIYer .

Therefore, you can clearly see that you should give me more money. At least 20,000 crowns!

Love ,

Frederik

PS. Niklas got an A+ in his social studies project .

PPS. You CANNOT solve the problem by constructing the cabinet asymmetrically to avoid standing waves!

Standing waves are a problem inside the cabinet, and you can design your way out of it by being meticulous in your blueprints, but it doesn’t solve the problem with resonances that penetrate the cabinet walls .

Monotony is sometimes the only thing you want: the ball coming at you. The stroke, the exhale, the balance. Three quick steps to midcourt. And then the ball coming back. Stroke, exhale, balance.

Stroke, exhale, balance.

I’m playing with Helena. The stroke and the breath, the sweat on my face, the balance; the sun low in the sky, the crunch of crushed stone underfoot.

As I play I concentrate with everything I’ve got. And at the same time I dream. I dream about playing tennis: another game with Helena. We’re on the same court, the balls strike at other angles, the sun perching a bit lower in the sky. And in that game I dream of a third game. The sun even lower. The balls harder. The skid marks longer on the clay.

Stroke, exhale, our hour is up and I wipe my brow, gasp for air. This utter physical exhaustion is the closest I come to happiness. We saunter back to the dressing room and junior players run toward us in the passageway, some of whom I taught in PE. The passage rings with their shouts, we say hello, and Helena knows how much our playing means to me.

After showering, we sit on the club terrace, where we’re used to drinking our homemade smoothies. While Helena pulls out glasses, straws, and a thermos of banana-and-forest-berry smoothies from her bag, she tells me of her friend Clara, who for years has confided to Helena her deliberations about whether to leave her husband or not.

It’s only at Helena and Henning’s parties that I’ve met Clara and Poul, but over time I’ve heard quite a bit about them, and their marriage sounds infinitely better than what Helena and I have had to put up with over the years. Yet Clara doesn’t find that her sex life meets her expectations.

I’m sure I sound cranky, but it does seem out of proportion to me, her dissatisfaction with trivial problems. “Who splits up because the sex is subpar — at our age, after twenty years? Otherwise everybody’d get divorced.”

“But people do in fact. They really do.”

“Well okay, men do.”

“Not just.”

We watch the other players in silence awhile, and then Helena speaks up again.

“It sounds to me as if everything’s pretty normal for them. Clara’s only problem is that before she got married, she had this boyfriend who set an erotic standard that no one’s been able to meet.”

We squint over at the players sitting closest.

“So what did he do ?” I lean in across the table as I stir my smoothie with my straw.

“From what I understand, it never stopped being like the first couple months. He kissed and massaged and licked and stroked and was completely obsessed with her and … I don’t know. When she describes it to me, she gets all agitated just from talking about it, but it’s still hard to get a clear sense … Apparently he was quite playful too, but in a natural way — not that porno stuff.”

I nod as if I have some idea what she’s talking about. We laugh nervously.

Helena takes a sip of her smoothie. “Pretty good, huh?”

“Excellent.”

“I sweetened it with cranberry juice this time — and no yogurt … Anyway, it’s obvious that Clara’s never gotten over those early nights — even after having three kids with Poul. That’s where the real problem lies.”

“But it couldn’t have been just what they did in bed,” I say, feeling naïve. “He must also have been the love of her life, right?”

Helena shrugs.

It’s devolved into a rather pitiful tale, I think. “So why’d she break up with Superlover?”

“He found somebody else. One day it was just, J’en ai assez .”

“What?”

“Yeah, he was a Frenchman.”

“What was his name?”

“Hmm … Can’t remember.”

Silence.

“Really, I can’t.” She looks at me quizzically. “Why? Do you know any Frenchmen?”

“Nooo …”

She starts laughing a little and says, “Tell, tell!”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“But you’ve met some Frenchman, someplace or other. So what’s his name?”

“It’s just Frederik’s lawyer, the guy I’m going over to see later to talk about Niklas. His name’s Bernard.”

“Jesus! That was this fellow’s name too! Could be, he’s—”

“It is? Really? That’s just—”

“Ha-ha! You should see your face!”

Helena doubles up in her seat with laughter. Three teenagers at the far end of the terrace turn around and look at us with disapproval, though they can’t possibly hear what we’re talking about.

“I did say I couldn’t remember his name.”

We turn the conversation to other things. Only in the parking lot, when we’re about to take leave of each other, do I say, “You don’t recall hearing anything else about that Frenchman, do you?”

Helena no longer looks amused. She shakes her head as she studies my features a little too closely.

• • •

Bernard is no doubt a busy man, so I suggested we have our chat at his house. That way I’d take up as little of his time as possible.

“Sounds good — and then you can meet Lærke,” he said right away.

As I drive to Brede, I speculate about what his wife’s secret must be. A partially paralyzed, mentally handicapped woman who, eight years after their auto accident, still makes her husband dizzy with excitement. How does she do it?

Once I’ve parked, I check how I look in the rearview mirror. I gave it everything today, so that Helena wouldn’t beat me too badly — I’m not at all in shape after taking a couple of months’ break when Frederik got sick. My skin’s still flushed from the morning’s effort, and my pores still open, but my eyeliner sits okay. I’ve already opened the car door when I discover damp patches under my arms. I do happen to have, on the backseat, a white short-sleeved blouse that I picked up from the cleaners. Nobody’s on the street, so I do a quick change in the car.

Bernard’s low white house looks exactly as homey as I imagined, and the woods at the end of the street can’t be more than seventy-five yards away. I can smell dank soil and the Mølle River; everything seems so lush, even though here I’m closer to Copenhagen than when I’m home in Farum.

But it’s not Bernard who opens the door. Instead I find myself standing before a striking older woman with an upright bearing and impressively upswept grey hair.

“Hi. Bernard called to say that he’s been slightly delayed.”

“Oh, but that’s all right.”

I already know that she’s Lærke’s mother, Winnie, but we introduce ourselves anyway.

“Lærke’s in the yard,” she says. “Can I get you anything?”

“If you have any cold juice, that would be lovely.”

“You bet. Just go out to her and I’ll make up a pitcher.”

My eyes are drawn to a photo on the wall of the entry, the same holiday snap that Bernard showed me on his cell phone the other day: all that happiness, all those smiles. It’s odd that it stayed with me, for I only saw it briefly, yet I have the sense of having dreamt about it since.