Nicolai Houm - The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland

“Jane, right now I’m going to make dinner.”

“So, you intend to carry on exposing Camilla to the gym sessions?” Jane had taken her coat off and realized she was fussing, trying to hang it up on the back of a chair.

“Whatever I do, I won’t discuss it with you.” There was a long pause before Eva finally added, lowering her voice, “To be absolutely frank, I’m not quite clear why you’re here at all.”

Jane’s hands went to her belly as if she had been knifed. Eva was still turned away from her, standing at the counter cutting up broccoli.

“You bitch,” Jane exclaimed.

She had lost control over what she said, just like her coat, still a bundle in her hands. And that first transgression brought on more.

“I’ve noticed how you talk to Lars Christian sometimes, and to shop assistants and waiters as well. That prodding look of yours. “‘But, Lars Christian, I thought we had agreed that…’” She imitated Eva’s singsong tone of voice with its note of restrained aggression. To playact was liberating. “‘Oh, yes. I have got it all, husband and kids, and I know just precisely how I want it. I go jogging and then go jogging some more. And keep everyone in order and fetch and carry and drink a glass of red wine every evening. Never more than one, God forbid.’”

Eva had turned around now, her eyes shiny with disbelief. Jane asked herself if this was the time to put all her cards on the table. Hers was an unbeatable hand. She might choose to have a breakdown right here in the kitchen and melt into a sympathy-provoking mess. But she could not make herself do it.

Her body was quaking as she rushed into the hall, put on her sneakers and pushed the door open with her shoulder while struggling with one sleeve of her coat. Polish Eva and her partner stood smoking outside under the recessed all-weather lamps lighting the porch. They stood where it was hard to pass them. Anyway, Jane had no idea where she wanted to go. She found a packet of cigarettes and a lighter in her coat pocket, and, with darting movements, lit a cigarette and put it between her lips.

“Brr, it’s getting cold.” Jane made it sound as if her trembling voice was just mimicry.

Neither replied. She smiled with, as she well knew, a wild look in her eyes.

“Isn’t it cold in that trailer of yours?”

“No,” Eva said.

Presumably, if one traveled farther into Europe, one would eventually find a place where people communicated exclusively in tiny hand gestures to exchange goods and services, or to mate.

Later, after Jane had sneaked back upstairs to the guest room, she discovered the trap she was caught in. She had been fooled by the blister pack, as usual, pressed out what she needed for weeks while the treacherous silver foil had kept its shape and tricked her into thinking she had several intact rows left. She straightened up and, with her hand pressed against her neck, looked out over the dark garden. She had been thinking about alcohol roughly every five minutes since she had driven Camilla to the gym and this, in turn, had triggered her need to check the stocks in her Valium cache.

Lars Christian was home now. She could hear his and Eva’s voices from downstairs and a childish sensation came back: having to put up with adults talking about you, hearing them through walls and floor, using indistinguishable words; the child praying for forgiveness but mixing the words of the prayer with a mantra of impotent hatred. I hope they die. I hope they die.

Behind her closed eyes, she had a vision of a scorched landscape, gray and smoking as if after a firestorm. Over there, the ruins of the university where she had worked; and not far away, the remains of their house in Madison—nothing much left except the chimney, a charred writing desk, and—as if it had been TV reportage—a child’s soft toy lying in the ashes; then, the sooty foundations of her parents’ apartment by Lake Michigan—Robert and Dorothy using their hands to search the ashes. This was the America she had left behind. What had been ahead for her, on the other side of the ocean, was not necessarily a much greener place or, on the whole, faceless, but at least it did not burn.

A cautious knock on the door. She hoped it would be Camilla but it was Lars Christian’s narrow face that appeared around the edge of the door.

“May I come in, Jane?”

It was a toothless question. He was obviously trying hard to be conciliatory. She had been told of the importance of “coziness” in this country.

She felt like saying: it’s your home.

He made for the chair next to the bed and she had to move a small pile of underwear into the suitcase on the floor.

Lars Christian was smiling as his tired eyes fixed on her.

“She was upset that you, both of you rather, became a little hostile.”

Jane, for the first time, uttered a Norwegian-style uhum .

“She felt it really wasn’t for you to be involved in… this. Your relationship with us still isn’t… that close, even though it’s very exciting from the point of view of our family history.”

Jane sat on the edge of the bed and made herself small. She was sorry for Lars Christian, whose role as messenger or negotiator seemed to be robbing him of more vestiges of masculinity. What was left disappeared swiftly with the words he had been charged to pass on. Jane noted that he didn’t speak of Eva but of she .

“She has gone to bed now but in the morning…”

“First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll apologize, Lars Christian. As soon as I see her.”

“That’s good.”

She looked up at him with a question on the tip of her tongue but he got in first.

“I never felt this rhythm gymnastics thing was right for Camilla.” He spread his arms. “But for as long as she enjoys it…”

For a moment, it occurred to her that she might be charmed by Lars Christian. In another life. Say, if he had been Camilla’s sole carer. A compelling if fleeting thought came and went: bend forward, put your hand on his thigh, high up, do it now.

Lars Christian stood, ready to leave her room.

“You…” she said.

He stopped with his hand on the door handle.

“Lars Christian, if I need to consult a doctor here, how do I go about it?”

“I hope you’re not unwell?”

“No, no. Or, to be precise…”

The information on the back of the box was mostly for epileptics, not people with conditions like hers.

“I’m an epileptic. It’s not bad and usually well controlled. But I’ve run out of medicine.”

“I see.” Lars Christian slowly pushed the door handle down, then let it click back up again. “I promise to call our doctor tomorrow morning. He will surely write out a prescription straight away. As long as you know exactly what you need.”

“Valium. Ten-milligram pills.”

Lars Christian repeated this.

“I’ll get in touch with him as soon as I get into work tomorrow morning.”

During the night, the dream came back for the first time in weeks. As always, she dreamed that she had gone to Chicago for the Newberry seminar on American literary history and was in a hotel room when there was a knock on the door. With only small modifications, the dream dealt in real events as they had unfolded that morning in Chicago. It was more like a retelling of the past, without the nightmare’s delirious lack of any logic or predictability, where rooms can change into other places. She had been sitting in an armchair with its back to the window. One curtain had been pulled back and the crisp light of dawn fell on a hotel writing pad in her lap. She had made a few last notes on the presentation she was to give later that morning on John Updike’s literary legacy.

In the dream, as in reality, she assumed that a cleaner was waiting outside the door and it made her look for anything embarrassing left lying around. She had checked in late and had hardly had time to do more than take a few steps across the carpet. That morning, she had already tidied the bed a little, and she didn’t need more towels.