She and Corinne and I went hiking through the woods along the river shore. I took her hand to help her over the rocky places. It was a perfect summer day, old friends, all of us curious about the others. Jack was there, Christine, Elaine, Thatcher. We had all settled into adulthood. Thatcher, a lawyer in Oshkosh, and Corinne an economics professor out East. Ulla, a social worker in a state employment office. Me, a writer. Ulla and I stood in the kitchen, doing dishes, talking. We were back in old times, I was Gary to her, not Garrison. We were our young selves. We never mentioned our teenage children, since we were teenagers ourselves. Ulla and I stood close together and Corinne noticed and whispered to me, “Ulla always attracted the boys.” And when I drove back to St. Paul, I was looking forward to seeing her again. I’d been working hard for a couple years, writing stories, and a romance with an old friend seemed like the perfect reward. I needed to get caught up in a good story of my own. And so, without looking, I leaped.
When I think back to that August afternoon, I see the man drive up the long dirt driveway under the poplar trees. He is 43, an odd loner in the Class of 1960, now unaccountably a public figure, and being a Minnesotan he is embarrassed by the attention. He pulls his red Mustang onto the grass and climbs out. I wait to see if the woman will still run across the lawn and throw her arms around him or maybe she is engrossed with Corinne and Christine so he will have a drink with Hilmer and hear about the plumbing business—but no, the red-haired woman keeps running out of the house and he keeps tumbling into a love story with her.
She was in town for only one week, so I had to step lively. I found an album of Danish songs and memorized one about lost love phonetically, and the next evening, at the Guntzels’ for dinner, washing dishes at the sink, when she picked up a dishtowel to dry them, I casually sang it to her, as if it were something I’d always known.
Jeg fik en sorg saa stor
I mine ungdoms dage,
den aldrig fra mig gaar
saa lange som jeg leve.
Den største sorg forvist
at man kan overgaa,
det er at elske en
som man kan aldrig faa.
I found a great sorrow in my youth that I will never get over as long as I live, the greatest sorrow that one can endure, which is to love a person whom one can never have. (It’s better in Danish.) Corinne saw what was up. She tried to caution me. “It’s none of my business what you do,” she said, “but I have to tell you, as an old friend, that Ulla had a big romance with a classmate of ours and she came to America, thinking she might marry him, and she decided it wouldn’t work, that America was too different.” I thanked her for the advice, but it was a golden summer, I was in love with a love story and I didn’t care to hear a second opinion.
It was a mistake, born of a best-selling novel that earned enough money to finance a fairy tale that wound around the magical forest and across the sea and ended on the stone pavement of cold reality. He had stuck to business, building an odd little traveling show made of reinvented parts of antique shows, and it was intoxicating to be recklessly in love. It felt destined.
I marched forward on a nonstop book tour, flying around doing readings nightly to big auditoriums packed with hushed crowds. The publisher sent a footman and coat-holder along to ease my way. People lined up around the block night after night, sometimes two blocks, and I walked along the line apologizing for the wait, which only made the wait longer. Book signings went five and six hours. Bookstores hired security men. I adopted, for convenience, a policy of indomitable agreeableness, a smile, no request denied—Personalize sixty copies? Certainly. Sign photographs? No problem. I bought dozens of roller-ball pens, black. A tailor came to the hotel in Seattle and fitted me for three suits, I had lost twenty pounds. Local TV news crews at every reading: Reporters rode with me in limos: “How does it feel?” I was ever cheerful and charming. I was moving so fast, my front didn’t know where my back was. I took so many flights, the C Concourse at MSP felt like my own backyard. There were specific urinals where I thought, “Hey, I peed here a week ago.”
I did Studs Terkel’s interview show in Chicago, and he took me to a two-martini lunch at his favorite bar where his friends, ipso facto, became my friends on the spot. I called Ulla every night and wrote her a letter every day. I proposed marriage like you’d propose a weekend at the lake. I was a Midwesterner, bred for caution, and I threw caution aside. It was impossible, I was wedded to my work, the weekly routine, the Selectric typewriter at the rolltop desk, the congenial staff that made the good life possible. Why the sudden wrongheaded detour? It was just as the Brethren had taught: success is perilous. The rich man built his house upon the sand. Good fortune was my downfall. If the Times had assigned the book to a vicious critic who’d dismissed it as a shapeless goulash of refried nostalgia, if Time had ignored me and put Nancy Reagan on the cover instead, the book would’ve sunk into the remainder bin, I’d have waved goodbye to Ulla and gone back to my needlework. Beware of what you wish for. Those whom God loves, He chastises. Because what is the alternative? Stupidity.
I flew to Copenhagen in October and landed early in the morning at Kastrup Airport and rode a taxi alongside a stream of bicyclists in brightly colored rain gear, past gold stucco houses with red tile roofs and a green and gold church steeple with intertwined crocodiles on it. I landed at her apartment, we flung ourselves into bed, I awoke hours later, jet-lagged on a golden autumn afternoon. She lived with her daughter, Malene, fifteen, whose name I liked to pronounce, Ma-LEAN-e(r), and her cat, Pjok, in a two-bedroom apartment on Jagtvej, up the street from the big cemetery where H. C. Andersen is buried. The cat was able to cross two busy streets and make her way to the cemetery where she could wander freely. The girl attended gymnasium and studied hard and arose at 4:30 a.m. Saturday and Sunday to work at a nearby bakery. I was exhausted from book touring, but we three went out to dinner at a pavilion by a lake. We walked through town, down avenues of five-story brick houses shoulder to shoulder, along the walking street, Strøget, passersby speaking their sweet, chirpy language. It was a dreamy few days in a handsome storybook city, a city of socialists fond of royalist grandeur, a world apart from what I knew. We ate herring on rye bread with a shot of aquavit, a salad, a slice of roast pork with a glass of beer, a slice of blue cheese, and coffee, and the next day in her kitchen, we talked about marriage, not about whether but when: two 43-year-old teenagers. I met her teenage sons, Morten and Mattias, her friends Jens and Lis, and her mother, Elly. We had dinner at the home of my Danish translator, Mogens Boisen, and there on his walls were enormous photographs of a naked woman, every part of her, who turned out to be the woman sitting across from me at dinner, his wife. Nobody remarked on this. Mr. Boisen explained that his translation of my book was considerably shorter than the original because Danish readers are not so interested in rural America and also, the pay for translation is so meager, he couldn’t afford to spend more time on it. I thanked him for his forthrightness.
The romance got in the papers, a sweet story: AUTHOR COURTS HIS FOREIGN EXCHANGE STUDENT SWEETHEART.
I wrote her a poem.
I believe in impulse, in all that is green,
Believe in the foolish vision that comes true,
Believe that all that is essential is unseen,
And for this lifetime I believe in you.
Love that shines in every star
Love reflected in the silver moon.
It is not here, but it’s not far.
Not yet, but it will be here soon.
“I believe in impulse, in all that is green” is a nice thought but “all that is essential is unseen”?? What exactly does that mean? “Not yet but it will be here soon”? There was nothing tangible, it was all perfume and candy wrappers. But it was a lovely time. We both craved intimacy, and we didn’t know each other at all, and it didn’t matter. It was liberation from common sense, a crazy story we could make up as we went along.
In November, she flew to Minneapolis
and we boarded a bus with the show people and did a live broadcast from a Lutheran church in western Minnesota in the midst of genuine blizzard. The next day she and I walked through deep drifts to look at a big red-brick manse with a walled backyard in St. Paul and bought it on the spot for the asking price. Flagrant spendthrift behavior. The book was selling like crazy. In December, we bought a flat in Copenhagen, on Trondhjemsgade, a big echoey flat with majestic fourteen-foot ceilings and elaborate plaster molding that made you feel you were about to sign the Treaty of Ghent. I went to Copenhagen for Christmas and met her former husband, Paul-Verner, a theologian. It was impressive, so civil, so Danish, friendship between the ex and his successor, celebrating Jul together. I liked him immediately. He and I had come from righteous fundamentalists—we sympathized. He knew about the Rapture, the Tribulation, the Last Judgment, all of that. Ulla had come from Danish humanists, Lutheran on paper but secular at heart. He and I were brothers, brought up on the literal Word. When you feel a bond with your lover’s ex-husband that you don’t feel with her, this should tell you something. But I was not in the mood for doubt, I was in love.
Ulla and I married on December 28 in Copenhagen, in a snowstorm, our four teenage kids as witnesses, the boys in tuxedos, Malene in a blue dress like her mother’s. A dark time in Denmark: the sun rises during the first coffee break and sets soon after lunch, but we were a festive bunch. A formal dinner afterward, at which eleven Danes stood one by one and gave speeches in excellent English, graceful, humorous, written speeches, each about three minutes long consisting of a witty opening, a telling anecdote, and an affectionate toast, and my brother Philip stood up and spoke off the cuff about his happy marriage to a Swede. We packed up. Malene would come with us to America, and she gave her beloved Pjok to two children and said goodbye to her classmates who came to the airport to wave goodbye, along with Ulla’s mother, who wept as we went up the escalator.
In St. Paul, I invited old friends over for dinner and they were charmed by Malene, who was eager to see America, having been fascinated by it since childhood, her parents both exchange students in America, so Malene grew up fond of Levi jeans, Coke, MTV, Little House on the Prairie, Michael Jackson, Madonna, and old Hollywood movies. She worked late into the night on homework, enjoyed parties though she understood only fragments of what was said to her. She plied us with questions about Midwestern manners, the frequent use of “Excuse me” and what should you say when someone asks, “How are you?” Tell the truth? No, we said. Unless you are bleeding from an open wound and need medical attention, you say, “Fine. How are you?”
She adopted America enthusiastically, and Ulla wrote long letters home about how sad and provincial life in St. Paul was. She felt out of place among women talking about their children rather than politics. There was poverty in America, inequality, poor education, so clearly evident: why did people not talk about this rather than their child’s basketball team? Minnesotans seemed fearful of disagreement and tried to keep conversation focused on trivialities, whereas Danes loved a good debate. American women deferred to men: why? She met women who spent their days volunteering, a frivolity of aristocracy. She missed her job. Then, voilà, she found a job in a Jewish agency as a social worker among Russian émigrés, which she liked; she could empathize with them, appreciate how mysterious America was, how hard it was to get their feet on the ground. But then she felt trapped by the job: in Denmark, you get five weeks of vacation a year; this job provided one week, not enough time to get back to Trondhjemsgade and keep in touch with friends. So she quit. “I have never wept so much as I have the past six months,” she told me that spring. I was baffled. When school let out, we got on a plane and flew to Copenhagen. We lived well, we were passionate with each other, so why was she so mournful?
She told me the old story
Of the mermaid from the sea
Who comes ashore to wed her love
And suffers cruelly,
And this became our story,
We couldn’t be as one.
I had found my happiness
Whose pain had just begun.
It was a hard winter, and then a worse spring. We were in love and we were miserable. St. Paul was provincial, American furniture clunky, the women oppressed. I was happy at a computer in a 15 x 15 room with a woodstove, snow falling in the yard, the kitchen nearby, a show to write, work to do, Ulla was not. She tried to hold me to regular work hours, close up shop at 5 p.m. but I was not an assembly-line worker. Work was my calling, and inspiration did not go by the clock, but to her, a man who worked until 5:30 showed callous disregard for his family. We never got this worked out between us.
She could not abide my reading the morning paper at the breakfast table. A lifelong ritual for me, and to her a personal insult. Promptness was for her a prime virtue: to keep someone waiting even five minutes was to say they didn’t matter. To me, a person unable to amuse herself for five minutes is lacking imagination. But Danes are a compliant race: they wait for the green light even when the streets are deserted. They don’t like to jaywalk. And then there was the issue of planning: Danes plan their summer vacations two and three years in advance. I live by improvisation. Marriage to a Dane involved many footnotes. Why do Americans work so many hours a week? Why don’t more people ride bicycles? Why is Johnny Carson considered funny? I took her to a Twins game, and after I had explained baseball for twenty minutes, we agreed not to talk about it anymore. I took Danish lessons twice a week: acquired a good accent, modest vocabulary, could manage simple declarative sentences but couldn’t understand Danish spoken to me. I was like an eight-year-old deaf child.
Corinne came to visit in February. She’d been hit hard by asthma, was ashen, looked unwell, spoke with hesitation. She was on a powerful steroid, she said, that made her feel weird. She was not teaching this semester. She said, “I feel like my life is a cruel joke.” She had been happy a year ago, working to establish the Women’s Rights National Park in Seneca Falls, site of the 1848 convention where Elizabeth Cady Stanton read her declaration that “all men and women are created equal.” The chapel where they met had become a laundromat, and Corinne and her cohorts had raised money to save the building. Now she felt adrift. She felt like a failure as an economist, wanted to quit teaching and come live with her parents for a year and write a book about the family plumbing business that her father was about to sell. She said, “Theory makes no sense to me anymore. Time to write about microeconomics. Individual enterprise. You had the guts to leave academia and write your homely little stories about Anoka. I should write the story of Guntzel Plumbing.”
What I should’ve done, wish I had done, and didn’t do was tell her it was a great idea. Come home. You can live with us. I’ll be your editor. When it comes right down to it, it’s all about plumbing. People can skip church, not vote, turn off the TV, but they do not give up water or sewer. The fact that we don’t have to shit outdoors is a basic part of human dignity. Let’s write that book.
I didn’t say it. I was flummoxed by her anguished manic talk, it was so un-Corinne of her. She was a debater, adept at rebuttal: you told her what you thought and she took it apart and handed it back to you, rearranged. She being an articulate intellectual, I assumed she was rational. It was befuddling to find her feeling defeated by invisible dark forces.
I felt terrible for her. I felt guilty. My show was booming along, my book on the best-seller list, Ulla and I ensconced in a lively household with her daughter and my son Jason, both 15; meanwhile my old friend was scraping bottom. The next night Ulla and I went to the Guntzel house where we’d met in August, where I had sung her the song in Danish. We sat in the lofty living room, the tropical fish drifting around the bubbler in the big tank, the picture window overlooking the frozen Mississippi, the piano where Corinne used to play “On the Road to Mandalay,” and we watched her, manic, opening a bottle of wine and fixing hors d’oeuvres, chattering, trying to be upbeat, though her mom was in the hospital for dialysis and her dad
was dazed and confused. Hilmer, standing in the middle of the room, lost control of his bladder and stood, stock still, in alarm, as a pool of liquid spread around his feet, and Corinne, talking a mile a minute about the book she’d write about Guntzel Plumbing, tossed a bath towel on the floor and tried to mop up the urine with her left foot, smiling at me as if nothing odd were happening. She put the best china and crystal on the table, set up a tape recorder to record, she said, our “witty repartee” for her mom to enjoy later, which pretty well killed the conversation. She scorched a pot roast and potatoes, put out a salad, served blueberry pie and ice cream, kept pouring wine. It was an eerie dinner. We left as soon as we could. I owed it to my old pal to break through this craziness and wrap her up and take her into our custody. I did not know how to do it, but that is no excuse. The way to do it is to do it and keep doing it until it’s done.
And two months later I was back in this living room, listening to Hilmer weeping, making funeral arrangements, telling someone on the phone, “My daughter committed suicide out in New York, and her body is being flown back here on Friday.” Helen sat in a big chair and murmured, “We were lucky to have her as long as we did.” Two stoics in mute grief, facing their own deaths approaching, their old neighbor boy the famous radio host and magazine cover boy standing helpless nearby. Corinne had left a note for them. She begged their forgiveness, said she loved them dearly, said she couldn’t go on another week in such despair. Hilmer looked at me, tears in his eyes, and said, “Why? Why? We had no idea. We loved her.” Then he choked up and went in the bathroom and shut the door.
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