Christian Jungersen - You Disappear

“Frederik!” I say. And then I point to my upper lip.

He glances at me for a moment and goes on talking.

In the end I’m forced to be explicit. “Frederik, you have something sitting on your upper lip.”

He finally scrapes it off, with a quick, somewhat casual movement — and without making the least bit of eye contact. His lecture is unstoppable.

We don’t manage to talk to the two boys very much before, stuffed with cheesecake, they clear out.

How often have I suffered through this at some dinner, with half- or completely drunk men on either side of me? Sitting surrounded by men who look at me and talk to me, while at the same time I feel strangely ignored beneath their aggressive gazes — and strangely desirous of going home and watching TV by myself.

But Helena and I simply refuse to put up with it. We’ll set the tone here. I ask the table about back when we were all living in cheap apartments in poor neighborhoods: wasn’t there also something nice about it? Was it only because we were twenty-one and the world still seemed wide open?

I haven’t managed to finish what I’m saying when Henning interrupts me to talk about how he plans to earn enough money to get out of construction and sail around the world in his own boat. The first ten or fifteen times I heard him talk about this fantasy, I found it charming, but for years now I’ve had the desire to shout in his ear, So sail away, God damn it, or shut your trap! Stop interrupting others to talk about it for twenty years in a row! And I know Helena’s other friends feel the same way.

Henning seems to feel more at home here than he usually does. He also seems to feel more affection for Frederik than he ever has before, but maybe that’s because he’s drinking more. Or perhaps he’s drinking more because he feels more at home.

He reaches out and takes more than half of the cheesecake that remains. With the big slice on the cake server halfway between platter and plate, he suddenly hesitates. He looks over at me.

“You folks are good, right? Okay if I take this?”

“You should just make yourself at home,” I say in a voice that, in the old days, would have made Frederik, in any case, put the piece back.

Henning sets the slice on his plate, stuffs a generous bite in his mouth, and then plunges into a joke about a woman who does yoga in the nude. One day when she’s doing the splits, her crotch gets stuck to the floor like a suction cup so that she can’t get up again.

In the old days after a dinner with Helena and Henning, Frederik and I would load the dishwasher together. And as we buzzed around the kitchen, synchronized and efficient, we’d express shock at how crude Henning would get when he’d had something to drink. After we both ran him down for a while, I’d say, But he’s good for her . I’d say that not because I actually knew it to be true; it was more that I’d begin to have a bad conscience about vilifying our guests just a few minutes after they’d left.

But now …

Henning goes on with his joke. The woman’s husband fetches a neighbor who’s a bricklayer, and together the men attempt to pry the woman loose from the quarry tile she’s sticking to. But it’s as if she’s glued fast to the floor. In the end the bricklayer says, “We’re going to have to break the tile in pieces.” The husband says, “Are you out of your gourd? These tiles cost five hundred crowns apiece!” “Well, what you should do then is make her good and horny until she gets all wet. Then we can slide her along the floor and out into the kitchen.” “You think that’ll get her loose?” “No. But the kitchen tiles only cost five crowns.”

Henning doubles up with laughter, and only at the last instant do I manage to move his glass from the path of his elbow, while Frederik guffaws with glee. The two men pound each other on the back, tears in their eyes.

I find myself compelled to turn away. It’s just too depressing to remember everything that Frederik used to be. Everything he no longer is.

Helena catches my eye and I see the gentleness of her look; she feels for me. At least I have her, I think.

She grasps my hand and says, “It’s so good to see Frederik well again.”

“ Well! What do you mean well ?”

“Yes, to see him healthy again. It’s much more important than that you have to move.”

I can hear the hardness in my voice. “He’s not well at all. He’s a far cry from well.”

Does my best friend really not know Frederik any better? Can’t she see that he’s become a foolish, vulgar shadow of himself?

She grows nervous, and she should be. In this moment, it feels as if I can never see her again; she hasn’t understood a thing about my life.

The men of course notice nothing. Henning is droning on again about circumnavigating the globe. He completely drowns out Frederik’s lecture on his half-finished speakers, and I know it’s going to end badly, even before Frederik brings his fist down on the table and yells, “Shut your mouth already about sailing around the world! Everyone thinks it’s totally ridiculous!”

“What?”

“It’ll never happen. I’ve talked to Mia about it a hundred times!”

“It will happen, whatever you say! Helena and I are going to sail—”

“I told you to shut up about it!”

“First we’ll start in the Caribbean, then we’ll head south and—”

“No one here wants to hear another word about it! In any case not Mia or me.”

I try to calm him down but can’t talk over Henning, who’s shot up from his seat. “Don’t fucking speak to me like that!”

Now what — is it going to come to blows? Are they stupid enough for that? Henning could whip all of us at the same time, but Frederik shows no fear. “Go and shit in your ocean!”

“What?”

“Yeah, just sail over and do it!”

I say, “Frederik!”

Helena says, “Henning!”

They’re two big dumb dogs we’ve brought to the park who don’t know what’s best for them. We ought to have kept them on much shorter leads. We pull and pull at them, but now it’s too late.

Niklas stands in the doorway. Has he come to protect me? Incredible how quickly he always shows up.

How can I live with Frederik for even one more week? How’s Helena been able to stand twenty years with Henning?

Without any warning, Henning’s mood changes. The next moment he’s laughing loudly and has his arm around Frederik. “You should have another glass of wine! Ha-ha-ha!”

Frederik hugs Henning back. “You should too. Ha-ha-ha!”

“I certainly will. But you first.”

I break in. “I’m not so sure it’s a good idea for Frederik to drink any more right now.”

Frederik looks at me, irritated. The run-up to a brawl a few seconds ago has already blown clean out of his head. “Oh, come off it. I’ve hardly had anything.”

“Frederik, you’re sick!”

“Well, in that case I really should have something.”

“I’m simply going to have to put my foot—”

“Our guest wants some company,” he says laughing. “You can’t say no to our guest! Especially since I’ve offended him so terribly!”

And Henning adds, chortling, “Yes! You can’t refuse me when your husband’s just offended me! You really can’t. He’s offended me dreadfully . Ha-ha-ha!”

Frederik’s already on his way out to the kitchen. “I’ll find the wine myself.”

Henning places a big paw on his shoulder. “I’ll join you.”

Helena and I remain sitting behind by ourselves; Niklas has left again too. I take a slow deep breath, and so does Helena.

Then she says, “Why exactly is it that both our husbands have had leadership positions, and not us?”