Aftermath

by Carl Frode Tiller

  MARIA: So she made you feel you weren’t good enough?

  DAVID: I think it would be truer to say she didn’t accept me completely. Anything that smacked of the working class was somehow vulgar in her eyes. And this is the point I was trying to make when I said it wasn’t a classic midlife crisis that drove me to have an affair with May-Britt. It was as much a matter of … how can I put it … a longing for that part of me also to be understood and accepted. Because May-Britt comes, of course, from the same social class as me, right? She’s a hairdresser, her mother’s an auxiliary nurse, and her father’s a bricklayer, and she … she reminds me of the girls I grew up with, the girls from my neighborhood who didn’t go off to university or college but stayed on in Namsos, “ordinary people” … as the working class are called these days. [pause] But at the same time … well, I mean, it’s pretty complicated, not to say paradoxical, because to some extent it was because of my background that Ingrid fell for me.

  MARIA: Okay.

  DAVID: I’m not sure, but I think that in some way she saw her father in me.

  MARIA: So did he come from a similar background?

  DAVID: No, no. Far from it. Alfred was practicing as a plastic surgeon in New York when he met Rita and he moved to Norway with her sometime in the eighties. But as I say, he was a trailblazer. So is Ingrid, of course, but unlike Alfred she didn’t exactly start with nothing. Because, well … Alfred was a self-made man, right? As am I, in a way … I mean I’ve succeeded in becoming a published author, despite coming from a working-class home with not a book in the house. And I think this is more relevant than it may sound, because you see … where Ingrid comes from, being a self-made man trumps everything else. A self-made man is living proof that, ideologically speaking, there’s nothing to beat capitalism, right? To succeed against all the odds is proof that capitalism works, it’s as simple as that, which is why the capitalist admires anyone who has started out with nothing…. So for Ingrid, and indeed for Alfred and Rita, my life story was like a version of the American Dream, right? [pause, laughter] Oh, it’s so ridiculous.

  MARIA: What’s ridiculous?

  DAVID: That Ingrid fell in love with me because I reminded her of her father.

  MARIA: Why is that ridiculous?

  DAVID: I don’t know. But we’re always looking for original explanations for things, aren’t we? In art. Science. Or when we’re sitting chatting around a coffee table, for that matter. We all have a need to discover new, interesting, and amusing connections in life. But the truth is that there are obvious and ludicrous explanations for just about everything. Life is really pretty boring, we just don’t want to admit it. [laughter] She saw her father in me. Well, well. [pause] But when it began to dawn on Ingrid and her parents that being a writer was not necessarily the same as being a best-selling author and a celebrity, having a writer in the family lost some of its charm. [laughter] Their interest in art didn’t run very deep, you see. I mean, they liked to think of themselves as intellectuals, all three of them. Ingrid and Rita are the sort of people who measure the success of a holiday by the number of museums and galleries they’ve raced through and Alfred was only waiting for the guy from Dagens Næringsliv, Norway’s leading business newspaper, to call and ask what books he had on his bedside table, so he could mention some Hamsun classic, thus letting everyone know that he wasn’t just a cynical capitalist but a man of flesh and blood.

  MARIA: [chuckles] I see.

  DAVID: In other words, for them a love of art and culture was just a pose really. And a totally unknown and almost unread writer like me was, of course, no use for that. They had expected more of me, you might say. Well, at first they thought it was just that I wasn’t good enough at promoting myself and that was why I wasn’t number one in the best-seller lists or gracing the front pages of the tabloids.

  MARIA: Okay, now let me get this straight: Who exactly thought this? Ingrid or her parents or all three?

  DAVID: Well, I suppose it was Ingrid who thought it … or wanted to think it. And that was the story she told her parents.

  MARIA: And what happened when Ingrid realized that you were never going to be the writer she had hoped you would be?

  DAVID: She stopped asking to read what I’d written. She stopped boasting about me to everybody and their uncle, she stopped encouraging me and supporting me and eventually she started to … well, in short, she let me know she had lost faith in me as a writer. But what disappointed her most of all, you see, was not that her dream of being married to a rich and famous author had been shattered, the worst of it was that she had chosen a man who didn’t live up to Alfred’s expectations. She wouldn’t hear so much as a word about my writing when Alfred and Rita were present. She felt downright ashamed. And Alfred knew how to play on this, right? I don’t know if Ingrid realized it, but her father kept trying to make her feel even more ashamed than she already did. Things improved slightly after Henrik was born, but prior to that he was forever bringing the conversation around to subjects that would put me in a bad light. For example, he might say: “David, you like soccer, have you ever thought of being a sportswriter?” Thus making me and anyone else who happened to be there think that I was no use as a novelist so maybe I should find something else to do, right? Preferably, of course, I should just find myself another woman. What he was really trying to say, obviously, was that I wasn’t good enough for his little princess. [laughter] My princess … he still calls her that sometimes, you know. Christ almighty … Princess Ingrid!

  MARIA: And how did you respond to all of this?

  DAVID: Have you read Johan Harstad’s Buzz Aldrin?

  MARIA: No.

  DAVID: It’s a sort of salute to all those who’ve come in second. Buzz Aldrin was the astronaut who had to content himself with being the second man on the moon, right? Only moments after Neil Armstrong.

  MARIA: I know.

  DAVID: The point is that I began to act as though I wanted to be Buzz Aldrin, so to speak. I mean I would have loved to be rich and popular, obviously, as long as it didn’t mean sacrificing my artistic ideals, but I pretended to Ingrid and her family that this was of absolutely no interest to me, you know? If any of them asked what I was working on, for example, I would describe the current project, whatever it happened to be, as much more offbeat and niche than it actually was. On one occasion I lied and said that Dagbladet had asked to do an interview with me, but that I had turned them down because I couldn’t stand their smarmy tabloid focus on the private lives of their subjects. And as far as they were concerned, all of this was, how shall I put it … proof of my lack of ambition. And if there’s one thing that antagonizes people who’ve been fed the capitalist ideology with mother’s milk it’s a lack of drive and ambition. They never said it to my face, but they were outraged and felt that I had squandered my talent.

  MARIA: Have you lost your drive and your ambition?

  DAVID: No. On the contrary, I would describe myself as being more than averagely ambitious. And not just as a writer. In other ways too, actually … well, I say ambitious, but I do like things to be done properly. I never use processed foods, I always cook from scratch, and I spend a lot of time and money on getting hold of good raw ingredients. It’s the same with working out. I draw up a fitness schedule and keep a diary. So nothing’s left to chance, right? I want to maximize on the hours I spend working out. That sort of thing. [pause] And this goes back, of course, to my childhood.

  MARIA: What are you thinking of?

  DAVID: Mom, of course. The fact that she was never happy with me as I was. The fact that she could never praise me unreservedly. That she was forever finding fault with me and correcting me and if I did anything wrong she would fly off the handle completely, go way over the top. Especially at those times when she was sick. But at other times too, actually. All of this left me feeling that it wasn’t me she wanted, but someone else, you know. [clears throat, pauses] And … yeah … so I did everything I could to be the son she wanted me to be. The
more useless she made me feel, the more obsessed I became with proving that I was good enough. I pushed myself further and further in one area after another … I mean … I still have a pretty strong competitive instinct, but as a child and a teenager it was unhealthily so. I simply had to be the best at everything. At school, on the soccer field … oh, God, even as a nine- or ten-year-old I was the sort of kid who would freak out and shout and swear at the referee for a wrong call. I simply could not bear to lose. And the fact that I’ve become such a … what shall I say … such a nitpicker, a pedant who drives everyone around me crazy … that is, of course, part of the same thing. Everything I did had to be perfect and this has … oh, I don’t know, has somehow become ingrained in me. [pause] What?

  MARIA: No … nothing. Go on.

  DAVID: And all of this was, of course, exacerbated by my mom’s refusal to tell me who my father was.

  MARIA: Oh?

  DAVID: Well, for one thing, I was convinced that she wouldn’t tell me because he was a real no-goodnik and she wanted to spare me from knowing anything about him, right? But if you’ve got it into your head that you’re the son of a man who is so bad, well … unconsciously you also start to think that you’re no good either, you know … like father, like son and all that…. And for another … well, my father, whoever he was or is, had never made any attempt to get in touch with me and naturally that also made me feel that I couldn’t be worth very much. I tried, of course, to convince myself that he didn’t know I existed, because if he did he would surely have tracked me down, but … well, it wasn’t always easy to hold on to that thought.

  MARIA: I can understand that.

  DAVID: It was a bit like the time Mom tried to kill herself actually. That too left me feeling that I couldn’t be worth much, not enough to go on living for, you know. We talked about this a while back, right? And … it didn’t matter how hard I tried to believe Grandpa when he said that my mom loved me, but that she wasn’t well and that was why she tried to kill herself, I was never really convinced. Or at least … I knew she loved me, of course I did, but … it … I don’t know quite how to put this, but I felt there was a limit … that her love for me wasn’t unconditional, if you like. [pause] And all of this filled me, you see, with a feeling of shame that I did my utmost to combat. And not without some success either. I mean, due to this variation on the “good girl syndrome,” or whatever you want to call it, I excelled at school and on the soccer field, right? I was the youngest player ever to be picked for the Namsos A squad, for instance, I was only fifteen when I started training with the seniors.

  MARIA: I don’t know anything about soccer, but that does sound very young.

  DAVID: It was. Too young. At fifteen you’re not physically mature enough to train with grown men. Which is why I never had the soccer career I might have had. Training too much and too hard at such an early age, it’s as simple as that.

  MARIA: So you got sick of it?

  DAVID: I started to have problems with my knees and my ankles. My body wasn’t yet fully developed, you see. All that training had simply been too much for me.

  MARIA: I see.

  DAVID: But I wasn’t sick of it. Far from it. It’s no exaggeration to say that the day the doctor told me I would have to give up soccer was one of the worst days of my life. It’s branded on my memory … I can still remember what I was wearing … white tennis socks with red-and-blue striped tops and a pair of Levis full of holes and tears that I picked at as I sat there with Mom in the doctor’s surgery … and, not least, how appallingly lightly the doctor and my mom took the fact that I would have to stop playing. “There are lots of other ways of keeping fit,” the doctor said, I remember. And Mom just sat there smiling and totally agreeing with him. How about joining the rowing club, she said, their jetty was just down the road from our house so I wouldn’t have to bike all the way to Kleppen for training as I had to do for soccer. Do you see what I mean? They had absolutely no idea what soccer meant to me. They were both about forty I would guess and they saw everything from the point of view of a forty-year-old … to them soccer was just a way of staying slim and reasonably fit.

  MARIA: While you saw yourself having a career in soccer?

  DAVID: Yes. And it wasn’t just a pipe dream either, it was a real possibility. But my mom didn’t know anything about that, it wasn’t like today, you know? Kids were left to their own devices much more back then, for good and ill … so there was no way my mom could understand what a huge loss this was for me, she had never seen me play, so she had no idea how good I actually was.

  MARIA: Time flies.

  DAVID: It does. But I’ll see you Monday.

  MARIA: Yes, see you then.

  Trondheim, June 25th, 2006. Trouble with the lawnmower

  I HEAR THE CHINK OF PLATES KNOCKING TOGETHER, take my eyes off the TV screen, and glance toward the kitchen, yep, just as I thought, it’s Ingrid, she’s emptying the dishwasher. I open my mouth, about to say that I was going to do that, then think better of it. I merely shake my head and give a little sniff, look at the TV again, try to concentrate on the film, but I can’t, feel my annoyance from earlier in the day returning. Not only has she washed the bathroom and hallway floors even though I said I’d do it, and not only did she go to the supermarket herself even though I said I’d do that, now I’ll be damned if she isn’t filling the dishwasher. It’s so typical, she’s always so quick to do things she’s either asked me to do or thinks I ought to do, and it really pisses me off, she does everything she can to create the impression that I’m a lazy jerk and that she does just about everything around here. Well, if that were true I could have overlooked this gentle hint to me to get off my ass, but it isn’t true, there’s many a thing that could be said about me, but I am not fucking lazy.

  “God, I’m worn out already,” she mutters, as if to herself, but still loud enough for me to hear, wanting to make sure I know how much housework she’s done and how exhausted she is by it, I can tell. But I refuse to give her the attention she seeks, I just sit here, slumped on the sofa, staring at the screen and pretending to be too caught up in the film to be aware of anything she’s saying or doing. “Right, well that’s that done,” she mutters, not giving up, angling for me to ask what that is, but I don’t, and I won’t.

  Silence for a moment or two.

  “Hm,” I murmur, scratching my head, using the same tactic as her now, pretending to be talking to myself, but actually talking to her, emphasizing how engrossed I am, and she’s getting annoyed now, I know she is, not only has she done all the chores she asked me to do, but she can’t even make me feel bad about it and that infuriates her.

  Silence again. Then she goes over to the veranda door and stands there. I can see her out of the corner of my eye, she’s standing there looking out at the garden.

  “Gosh, the grass has fairly shot up over the past few days,” she says, supposedly still talking to herself, but this is actually her way of telling me that I could at least mow the lawn, I know it is. I don’t say anything, keep my eyes fixed on the TV, act as though I’m totally focused on what’s happening on the screen. “It’s looking really messy,” she adds.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I mutter, don’t really want to start anything, but it just comes out.

  “Sorry?”

  “Relax, I’ll mow the lawn,” I say.

  “Er … that’s not what I meant.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I say, not taking my eyes off the TV screen.

  Silence for a couple of seconds.

  “David … it wasn’t, honestly,” she says. “Just you finish watching your film.”

  “All right then, I will,” I say. I know very well that’s not what she means, but I take her at her word, smile at her as cheerfully as I can, then turn back to the TV and pretend to carry on watching, but now she’s really annoyed, I know she is, she’s furious with me for taking her at her word and acting as if I don’t know that she actually meant me to do the exact opposite. I sit up, pick up
my pen and notebook, and open it at the list of keywords I wrote down last time I saw Fight Club. I shut my eyes, purse my lips, and try to look as though I’m searching for the right word, sit like that for a moment, then do a little scribble to make her think I’m making a note of something important.

  “It’d be great, though, if you could at least do it before Mom and Dad get here,” she says.

  I put down the pen and the notebook and look at her.

  “At least?” I echo, grinning at her.

  “What?”

  “Ah, so what you were really trying to say was that I ought to switch off the film and go out and mow the lawn anyway.”

  She screws up her face the way she does when she’s eaten something she doesn’t like, I see the wrinkles appear as she narrows her eyes and turns up the corners of her mouth. She gives her head a little shake.

  “See … you’re doing it again … ,” she says.

  “Doing what,” I say, pick up the remote control, and press Pause.

  “What you always do when Mom and Dad come to see us. You’ve been like this all day.”