Nicolai Houm - The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland

Greg arrived while they were unlocking the tool shed to get the spade. When he pointed out that it wouldn’t be in the shed but was leaning against the wall near the patio door—as always—she snarled at him.

“So why have a fucking shed, then?”

It was so typical of Greg to turn up on the scene once the hardest part was over. Now all they had to do was conduct a small burial ceremony for a dead squirrel.

Later, when a hole had been dug under the copper beech in the back garden and all three of them were standing by the graveside, she felt that Greg was being infuriating on purpose.

“You give the oration since you’re the writer.”

Greg knew very well how much it annoyed her when people assumed that writers would be thrilled to deliver a spontaneous speech and, anyway, were especially gifted in something like that.

Julie held the plant pot tight and looked from Greg to Jane and then back again. Greg sighed a little.

“All right,” he said and then, of course, spoke beautifully about the squirrel’s brief life and its tiny squirrel heart, adding light touches of irony and sweet references to familiar critters like Chip ’n’ Dale, all done with such subtlety that Julie kept nodding in agreement. So easy for him, who hadn’t seen the silly little beast flapping on its ruined limbs.

After dinner, Greg pulled on his jacket and said he was going over to Tom’s. They were going to watch a film about Alaska.

“But I’m leaving early tomorrow morning, remember?”

“We’ll meet up in the morning before you leave.”

“Before four-thirty?”

“Then we’d better say goodbye now.”

He leaned over her to kiss her and she turned her cheek to him.

The whole squirrel performance had left her irritated and anxious, feelings that stayed with her all evening as she prepared for her talk at the Newberry Seminar, packed her suitcase, and went through a bundle of school handouts that Julie had kindly remembered to pull out of her schoolbag at a quarter past nine. When Julie—forty-five minutes later and still not in her pajamas—followed her into the bathroom and stood behind her insisting that she needed help painting her nails because tomorrow, in the social studies lesson, she was part of a presentation on women’s suffrage, Jane was too fed up to mention the flawed logic of this—or to say no. She snatched the nail polish from Julie’s hand and pushed her against the washstand. When she had done the nails on Julie’s left hand, she said between her teeth:

“Next.”

But Julie was staring absently into the mirror.

“Julie!”

“Sure.”

She gripped the girl’s right wrist hard and started on the thumbnail. Her movements grew brisker, and more determined. When she was ready to start on the ring finger, Julie cautiously freed her hand and said in a small voice that it was enough. It was fine like that.

DURING THE ENTIREthird day in the mountains, Jane had nothing to look at except Ulf’s rucksack and muscular legs. He walked through the mist guided by a compass. She was a three-year-old trailing after an annoyed grown-up.

They put up the tent in streaming rain. She held the sheets down against the gusts of wind while Ulf attached the guys to the tent pegs. He had made no new attempts to get close to her and barely uttered a word or two all day. Then, inside the tent, he suddenly said something nice.

“Jane, we’re quite different people, you and I. But we share this: we are in the middle of a windy wasteland far from people. In a figurative sense as well.”

Then he produced a plastic bottle from somewhere and poured liquid from it into two small, metal cups.

“I remember from the plane that you like whiskey,” he said.

“If I had known what we had to look forward to, I would’ve walked faster.”

She had trudged along behind Ulf and popped pills as if they were off to a wilderness rave party. Valium didn’t seem to do much for her anymore.

“Jane,” he said without looking at her, and then shook his head slowly. Now he was either about to explain or admit something.

“Ulf,” she said in the same tone of voice.

He put the cup down on the groundsheet but kept holding on to it.

“You realize, don’t you, that you must face up to things? That you can’t go on like this in the long run?”

She held out her cup.

“With this cold…” He hesitated while he poured her more whiskey, so she completed his sentence.

“…somehow resigned approach to life.”

“That’s exactly what I was going to say.”

The wind tore at the top sheet and made the layers of the tent slap against each other.

“Do you refuse to let yourself think about them?”

“No,” she replied. “I refuse to let myself begin to forget them.”

It was getting dark quickly now. Ulf’s face, full of shadows, looked handsome. Ulf was not so bad. She had met only a few people who were actually evil. People were like characters in novels, beautiful in their fragile inadequacy. Using whatever weapons at hand, they fought to join history for a while without screwing things up too much, and always failed somehow.

“But you mustn’t forget yourself.”

That, too, was a fine thing to say.

It made her think of their first day up the mountain, when they had crossed a sunken area where the low, sage-like shrubs grew so densely that their leaves formed a smooth surface of matte silver. Ulf was up to his waist after taking just one step off the path. She stood still and followed him with her eyes as he moved about through the undergrowth like an animal. The sun was warming the moisture on the leaves, creating a sphere of whispering light around him. He clambered back onto the path, sniffing at something he held in his hand and then handed over to her. It was a tuft of wool, light and soft. She could just sense its presence on the palm of her hand. Three or four black hairs were mixed with the wool. The hairs were so thick she could roll them between her thumb and index finger.

“Guard hairs,” Ulf told her. “The white down is the inner layer. Musk oxen let the shrubs pull some of it off in the spring so they don’t die of overheating in the summer. Isn’t that great?”

His eyes had been shining with naked, childish enthusiasm but she had just shrugged.

Ulf drank a last slug of whisky and started to look around the tent.

“I guess we’d better have something to eat,” he said.

She slowly raised her hand, placed it on his. She had a vision of disappearing into somewhere strange, to force a feeling to emerge, a sensation powerful enough to put a damper on all others. Like self-harm. He turned her hand over, squeezed it, began to stroke her palm with his index finger.

When Jane had decided to screw Ray Dechamps for the first time, they had been in the basement room in his parents’ place and David Lee Roth, played at max volume, was coming through from upstairs where Ray’s brother was partying with his friends. It had dawned on her just how tricky it would be to do this with her critical mind engaged, rather than abandoning all thought and clawing Ray’s back while he banged away for roughly as long as the guitar solo.

Afterward, when they were lying together on top of the sleeping bags in the dense darkness, Ulf’s breathing sounded exaggerated, too heavy, as if after some sporting feat. She was cold but her clothes had ended up on the far side of Ulf. She felt like an envelope that had once contained an important document but had been reused for some other, insignificant purpose.

Ulf turned over and put his arm on her breasts. As she was lying on her back they had flattened, so he had to grapple to get a good handful.