You Disappear: A Novel (15 page)

“I’d think it over again. A judge isn’t going to buy a story about a defendant being himself during the day and then at night being some brain-damaged gambler.”

“But that’s the way it was!”

“Then Frederik will go to prison for four years, and you’ll lose your house, your pensions, everything.”

He shoots Vibeke a quick sideways glance and then he says, “We have to go now.”

“How old were you when you first came here?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Did you meet a Danish girl, perhaps?”

He laughs. “Everyone knows that all the foreign men here immigrated because of Danish women.”

“No, but I didn’t think—”

“And you’re right! Lærke was an au pair for my parents in Paris. I followed her when she went back home, and it changed my life.”

Two weeks have passed since Frederik was arrested and released. I’ve taken the day off work, and Bernard and I are in the living room, waiting for the school’s new lawyer to show up with an assessor, who will appraise the sale value of our house, car, furnishings, pension savings, et cetera.

Bernard shows me a picture on his cell phone. “Here we are on vacation together.”

In the photo he looks much younger, but it must have been taken within the last ten years—around the time of the accident—because his twin boys look pretty big.

“She’s really lovely,” I say. And she is: she has big blond curls and a broad happy smile. Bernard was dark-haired then, lean without being quite as thin as he is now. They stand with their arms around the two boys in some southern European village, with peaks and forests in the background.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “I’ve aged a lot in the last eight years.”

“Was it on that vacation you had the accident?”

“No, that was two weeks later, back here on Lyngby Road. Fortunately, the boys weren’t with us in the car.”

I get goose bumps from looking at her; now she uses crutches and goes to a handicapped center all day because she’s mentally incapacitated. While he’s marooned in a foreign country, without the support of his family or boyhood friends. What’s prevented him from leaving her? How can he stand it?

“Her disability is general,” he says. “Bodily control, speech, thought, energy.”

I look into his dark eyes but he doesn’t return my gaze.

“The odd thing is that she’s still the same. She’s still my Lærke.” He almost looks proud when he says it.

I don’t understand him. I shudder to think of what his days and nights have been like for the last eight years. And yet the very moment I think that, my own spouse lies brain-damaged and our house is being taken from us.

It’s been one week since Bernard called and warned me about the assessor’s visit. “In accordance with Danish law, Frederik will have to pay back as much as he possibly can of what he embezzled—regardless of whether the court finds him criminally responsible for his acts or not. So the school will seize all of Frederik’s possessions—and half of what you own in common.”

“But why don’t they simply look at everything we own and take half?”

“No, we need to have receipts for everything. Whose name is on which receipt? Where did the money for each purchase come from? Did you receive any large gifts from Frederik that were paid for with embezzled funds—or with his income? Are there things that are in reality yours, even though his name’s on the receipt? Things like that.”

Phone in hand, I’d closed my eyes and let myself fall back in the armchair. There was a hollow under my right buttock and a nick in one arm; it was my chair. No doubt they would take it too.

Could he hear me fall?

“It’s awful, I know,” he said. “Really awful, but you’re going to have to do it.”

Around me stood the furniture I had bartered and haggled for and restored and pampered over the course of fifteen years, starting from
scratch. They’d probably take the coffee table that my feet rested upon. The carpet beneath the table, the lamp that lit it. Everything.
Every
thing.

I needed to clear my throat, but Bernard cleared his first.

“Mia, I know you can do it.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it isn’t as hard as supporting your sick husband—and you do an amazing job of that.”

When I spoke on the phone with Helena, she became quite insistent. “At the very least, you’ve got to hide the Wegner sofa at my place before they come. You need something you can count on.
Some
thing in your situation. Would anyone blame you if you hid a couple pieces of furniture?”

“Actually, I think a lot of people would.”

“Just let me come over and get something. The lamp! The Arne Jacobsen lamp, I can take it with me in the car.”

Again I had a desire to flop down in my armchair, land on the hollow under my right buttock, finger the nick in the arm. But I was sitting there already.

• • •

They are nothing if not precise. At the stroke of nine, Bernard and I receive two men out in the scorched front yard. The sofa and the lamp are still both in the living room, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m honest or because I’m tired. The school’s new lawyer is young and dark-haired, with a broad jaw and a shiny pink tie. He couldn’t be more different from the previous one, the chubby man whom I danced with for years at Saxtorph parties.

The assessor is someone I could run into on the street a couple of days from now and not recognize. His clothes, his features, his haircut—everything—run together in my mind with those of other men who don’t want to be noticed or remembered.
He probably picks up hookers
, I think as I proffer my hand. The papers always say that johns are completely ordinary men, and he’s so without character as to be almost striking.

“Is this your car?” It’s just about the first thing the lawyer says, extending his hand toward the blue Mercedes parked in front of our house. I can already see the delight in his eyes.

“No, ours is over there.” I point down the street.

We start walking over to our little orange-red Alfa Romeo. It’s sunk down to the asphalt, the tires flat and spreading out to the sides.

“What happened?” asks Bernard.

“Somebody slashed the tires.”

“Did you report it to the police?”

I don’t answer.

“You should report it,” he says. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“We’re married.”

“That’s no crime. You don’t deserve this.”

Perhaps I feel a fury somewhere inside myself. I think I do. And I wonder whether it’s kids who slashed the tires, or a teacher—maybe one of our former friends. But I observe the fury with an overwhelming exhaustion. Lazy and passive, as if I had one of the brain injuries I’ve read about, just a notch higher up behind my forehead than Frederik’s. The car’s stood this way for a week, and I haven’t done anything about it.

Frederik no longer cares about the car, despite the progress he’s been making. The interval between angry outbursts is getting longer, yet he still weeps a lot—and what makes him most unhappy is that he no longer derives any pleasure from music. The notes don’t add up to melodies for him; they’re simply sounds, without any glint of beauty.

Which is why he’s become obsessed with the principles of speaker construction and with building speakers that are better than the ones we have. I took him over to the neighbor’s so he could hear that the problem doesn’t lie in our stereo system. But he just ran their system down while they stood there and listened. Niklas also tried to play music for him on his computer headphones, but Frederik thought they sounded terrible too.

In the evenings, I enter the access code to our computer so he can visit online forums where they discuss optimal crossover frequencies and the control of impedance curves—and more generally, how to construct the ultimate speakers. Meanwhile I sit next to him and correct math assignments or fill out new forms from public agencies about his illness. In this way I can monitor him and make sure he doesn’t go onto sites where he can make investments or other kinds of trouble.

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.