“Wonderful,” I say. “Ingrid will be so pleased.”
He smiles anxiously, nods hesitantly, and turns back to the lawnmower.
Then Ingrid returns.
“Do you hear that, Ingrid?” I say, looking at her as she hands Halvorsen a screwdriver with a black-and-yellow plastic handle, giving her the same bright, cool smile. “Mr. Halvorsen has just offered to fix the kitchen tap for us.”
She doesn’t answer immediately, merely stands there looking rather flummoxed, clearly not sure what to make of this turn of events.
“Oh, right,” she says, then pauses. “Well, that’s great,” she finishes, trying to smile but still looking a little confused.
“Yeah, isn’t it?” I say. I put the beer can to my lips and take another swig, look her straight in the eye, still smiling. “I’m going to sit down in the office and work for a while. I presume you’ll pay him for his time,” I say. I see Ingrid’s face change color as soon as I say it, she knows what I’m implying, and her cheeks have gone bright red. “Awfully hot today, isn’t it?” I say, smiling innocently and taking another swig of my beer.
Therapy session
Date: October 9th, 2006
Place: Fjordgata 69d, Trondheim
Present: Dr. Maria Hjuul Wendelboe, psychotherapist; David Forberg, patient
MARIA: What have you done to yourself?
DAVID: Done to myself?
MARIA: Your hands?
DAVID: Oh. Nothing. I’m just a bit stiff. I’ve been spending too much time at the computer lately.
MARIA: And how’s the novel coming along?
DAVID: Fine.
[pause]
DAVID: [laughing] I don’t really like talking to other people about what I’m working on, you know? Not even my editor. I need the publisher to help me with proofreading and the jacket design and so on. But I have to keep the actual text to myself for as long as possible.
MARIA: Why is that, do you think?
DAVID: Because if I show it to anyone else too soon, it no longer feels like mine. I think most real authors … and artists generally, in fact, feel the same. They want to play God in the universe they create … I know it sounds idealistic, but for me this is absolutely vital. I’ve never understood people who go on writing courses or to creative-writing schools, for example. I could never dream of doing that. Even though I’m sure I could learn a lot in terms of technique. And all of this can be traced back, of course, to things that happened in my childhood. You see, as a boy, well … in daydreams and in my imagination I could be whoever I wanted to be and not who Mom wanted me to be, so to speak. As I’ve said before, she let me know that I wasn’t good enough, that I ought to change, become a different person, and my imagination provided a refuge from that, you know, a place where I could escape from all demands and pressure. And not just escape them … it’s a kind of twofold thing, this, you see … because my imagination was also a place where I could invent a new persona for myself, one every bit as great as I thought Mom wanted me to be, a place where I could compensate for my failings.
MARIA: Mm.
DAVID: So I gradually developed a tremendous need for and a pretty good gift for fantasy and invention.
MARIA: And you see a connection between this and the fact that you grew up to be a writer?
DAVID: Certainly. Or at least … I think I became a writer more by chance, really. It’s not like I decided as a child that I was going to be a writer. I wasn’t one of those four-eyes who wrote poems in secret, if you know what I mean. And I was no bookworm either. I’ve never been in any doubt that I wanted to do something creative, but I could just as easily have been a musician or a film or theater director, or a teacher come to that, doing something creative in my spare time. But at university I wrote a short story for a student literary magazine … and a guy from this publishing house happened to read it and liked it. And he called to ask if I had anything else he could read so I wrote another short story. Which he also liked … so he decided to include it in an anthology showcasing new writers. And one thing led to another, right? I began to feel a little more confident about my writing, so instead of doing a degree in social work I signed up for an introductory course in literature. And this introduced me to a milieu where writing and dreaming about being a full-time writer were more the rule than the exception, you might say, and then … yeah, then I started writing more and after years of trial and error a publisher expressed an interest in one of my manuscripts, and well … here I am. Thanks, in other words, to a great need to express myself, a modicum of talent, and a series of happy accidents.
MARIA: How many books have you actually published?
DAVID: Just the one novel. And another one out soon.
MARIA: It’s not an awful lot.
DAVID: No, it’s not.
MARIA: And yet you seem … how shall I put it … pretty secure in your role as a writer.
DAVID: How do you mean?
MARIA: Well, you refer to yourself as a writer as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
DAVID: I suppose that’s because I consider quality more important than quantity. And as far as quality is concerned, I’m pretty sure I can legitimately call myself a writer. [pauses] He said modestly.
[They both laugh. Pause.]
DAVID: [gasping] Oh dear, oh dear. Sorry.
MARIA: Are you still having trouble sleeping?
DAVID: Yes.
MARIA: Have you done what we agreed you should do?
DAVID: Well, I’ve tried. I’ve been working out and going for walks, I’ve cut out supper. I go to bed at a set time … I probably lie too long in the mornings, it’s hard to get up at seven when you’ve hardly slept all night.
MARIA: I’m sure it is.
DAVID: Maybe you could prescribe some other sleeping pills for me. Something a bit stronger.
MARIA: I’d like to see you work a little more on your sleep-wake cycle before I would consider doing that. If you can force yourself to get up early, it goes without saying that it will be easier for you to fall asleep at night.
DAVID: Okay.
[brief pause]
MARIA: And the nightmares?
DAVID: I dreamed about the killing at the weekend. The same dream I’ve had a hundred times before. The look in his eyes just before he keels over. The surprise and the horror in his eyes. The gurgling sounds. Yeah, you know … that was the first time in a while, though…. But I keep having the other dreams. The night before last it started with me playing for the Namsos boys’ team. We were competing in the Scandia Cup here in Trondheim and we were staying the night in a classroom in some school and … we had all got into our sleeping bags and the coach reminded us that we were going to be playing at eight o’clock the next morning so it was time for lights-out … eliciting howls of protest, of course, from the boys who were lying around playing poker and blackjack…. It all seemed so real, you know? But suddenly I realized that I had turned into a snake. I … at first I didn’t want to admit it. I told myself it was the sleeping bag that made me look like a snake. But when I went to pull down the zip, I found that there wasn’t any zip. Then I noticed that my arms were gone … so I really was a snake.
MARIA: Mm.
DAVID: All the other boys were terrified, of course. It was utter chaos, with everyone shouting and screaming. And I was just as terrified, if not more. So I tried to get away … I shot off across the floor … wriggling and squirming … around carryalls and sleeping bags, mats, soccer uniforms, and empty soda bottles, and, yeah … with the coach in hot pursuit, trying to stamp me to death. But then … it was so surreal … suddenly I realized that my snake body was both a sleeping bag and a snake body, so to speak … so I crawled into the sleeping bag, down and down, deeper and deeper, until I couldn’t go any farther …
[pause]
DAVID: And it was so warm and damp in there. The sides were kind of sticky. And right at the bottom there was a placenta for me to feed on. [laughs] Oh, Maria, honestly.
MARIA: What?
DAVID: I can read you like a book.
MARIA: Oh?
DAVID: But it was just a sleeping bag. From Norrøna, if my memory serves me right. And yes, it was a body too, but it was a snake body. Christ.
MARIA: Is this a ploy to avoid talking about your mother?
DAVID: A what … ?
MARIA: You’re suggesting that I interpret your dream as a sign that you miss your mother. Then you go on to mock this way of interpreting your dream. You smile, to let me know what a Freudian cliché that is, right? And you’re hoping this will make me feel so stupid that I won’t pursue the matter.
DAVID: Oh, come on. I’ve just been sitting here going on about Mom. I’ve talked about her in almost every one of our sessions. Why should I balk at talking about her now?
MARIA: Yes, but your dream may not be about your mother, per se. It might be more about the mother figure and what that represents. Maybe that’s what you’d rather not talk about.
DAVID: And what about the dreams I have in which I turn into other animals? How do those fit with your theory?
MARIA: David. Not many psychotherapists today believe that dreams have any particular significance. Not in Norway anyway. So I’m not really so interested in what your dreams mean. I do, however, find the way in which you interpret and feel about your dreams extremely interesting.
[pause]
MARIA: What are you thinking about?
DAVID: What you said. About what the mother figure represents. That it might make sense, after all. It’s strange … you know … how that age-old distrust of priests persists. It’s so deeply ingrained in people. I mean, when I was a teenager everyone around me saw Arvid as Namsos’s answer to the bishop and stepfather in Fanny and Alexander and Mom as the somewhat pathetic mother. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little but still … they thought Arvid was very strict and domineering and wouldn’t let me do anything and that Mom just stood by and let him boss me around … either because she thought he knew best or because she didn’t dare to speak up. In fact, though, it was the other way around. Or no, that’s going too far. But … Mom was certainly the more controlling of the two. She may have seemed like a very liberal mother, at least in my early teens when she gave me both freedom and responsibility, but as I got older and she found it harder to control me the way she had when I was little, she began to exercise power over me by playing on my emotions … usually by making a martyr of herself. She would try to make me feel bad if I didn’t talk or behave as she wanted me to … she had a million different ways of doing this. And … at the time I didn’t really know what was going on, you know. I just felt so guilty and so ashamed, but I didn’t know why … or at least, I had a suspicion, of course, that it had something to do with Mom. Well, I usually did. But … I didn’t know I was being manipulated. I remember one time … I must have been about fourteen, maybe fifteen, and I had opted out of a trip to Östersund in Sweden with Mom and Arvid in order to go to a festival in Mossjøen with a bunch of older pals instead. I was all packed and ready to go and then Mom looked at me with eyes that were almost swimming with disappointment, right? It was all she could do to whisper bye-bye. Anyway, the upshot was that I … well, I picked up my backpack and off I went, but then as I was getting into my pal’s car I suddenly burst into tears … I wept and wept, I couldn’t stop … and neither I nor my pals had any idea why. And it … it may be hard for anyone else to understand … I mean, a disappointed glance, a strangled “bye-bye” … it sounds so innocuous and yet that was all it took to demolish me completely.
MARIA: I don’t think it’s hard to understand at all.
DAVID: No, but … it was all so undramatic, you know. Although that’s what’s so effective about this way of controlling people, of course. Because with something as insidious, as subtle as this, although you may sense that you’re being manipulated, you don’t know for sure and that makes it impossible to challenge the person who’s manipulating you, right? And often you think there must be something wrong with you. I mean, how crazy can you be … going to pieces just because your mother looks at you in a certain way.
MARIA: Mm.
DAVID: And … [clearing his throat] it’s odd, really, but only now, as a grown man, do I see the link between Mom’s emotional manipulation and the way I was in my teens. [clears his throat again] Because, well … I had to stand up for myself, you know? Otherwise, not to put too fine a point on it, I would have ceased to exist as an independent human being. And my way of defending myself was to shut off my emotions, as it were. Quite unconsciously I began to disconnect the instrument Mom played on. My conscience. My sympathy. I refused to be controlled by my feelings. So I eventually came to be regarded as a cold, hard young man. A cynic. I ran with a gang of petty criminals for a while, for example. I stole. Drank heavily. Got into fights … I did exactly as I pleased without any thought for the harm I did or the trouble I caused. Or no … I did think about it a bit. I felt bad about most of the stuff I was mixed up in, in fact. But I would never have acknowledged those feelings, I considered them a sign of weakness, and, as I say, I couldn’t allow myself to be weak, if I did that I would be lost. This idea … or philosophy had become ingrained in me. And later, as I became more and more interested in art and literature, it also manifested itself in a deep loathing of any and all forms of sentimentality. Grand passion. Grand rhetoric. Bombast. Romance. I was allergic to it all. And still am, really. Anyway … I was reminded of this when you said a moment ago that it wasn’t my mother, per se, that I was trying to avoid talking about. It could be that this profound contempt for frailty prevents me from admitting that I do actually need the protection and comfort that the mother figure represents. Maybe that’s why I was so keen to distance myself from such an old-fashioned Freudian approach to interpreting dreams … because such an interpretation made me feel small and weak … do you see what I’m getting at?
MARIA: Mm-hmm.
DAVID: And maybe this was also partly what attracted me to May-Britt.
MARIA: How do you mean?
DAVID: That same contempt for frailty … for my own frailty … May-Britt is fifteen years younger than me and there’s no doubt as to who is the dominant partner in our relationship, if I can put it like that. And hence it’s easier for me to feel strong when I’m with her. While with Ingrid in many ways the opposite was the case: with her I was frequently confronted with my own inadequacy … and weakness. Because we were on a more equal footing, right? Same age, same experience, both university graduates, and so on and so forth. Well, actually, of the two of us she was in many ways the more powerful. You see … when I met Ingrid I had nothing. I had published one book, which sold about seven or eight hundred copies. So I was broke … and I was sick of being broke, I was worn out, drinking heavily. I longed for the nice, comfortable middle-class life I had spent years and so much time and energy on despising. You know: wife, kids, nice house, and a new Volvo in the garage. So when I met Ingrid, that was it, I was sold. Because she offered all of this, you might say. Not only did she want the same things as me, but the fact that Alfred was so wealthy obviously made it easier for us to get what we wanted. It took a while for Ingrid’s business to build up to a point where she could draw a decent salary from it and I was earning next to nothing … so Alfred paid for a lot of the things we needed, you know … car, household appliances … and he gave us a cheap loan. And at first, yeah … I was happy, I really was. I felt as though I had reached my destination after a very long, hard journey. [laughs] I even admired Ingrid’s rather haughty, snobbish, and slightly prim manner … I actually found it attractive, it seemed to emphasize the gap between us, made her seem unapproachable, almost unattainable and the fact that I had been able to win someone who was essentially unattainable made me stand taller, so to speak. It actually turned me on, that side of her, I remember. That she had hardly tried anything other than the missionary position and that she felt almost duty bound, if you like, to look appalled ev
ery time I suggested that we might do something a little more … how shall I put it … more daring. It made me even hornier. That she protested and was shocked, but still allowed herself to be talked into giving anal sex a go, for example, that little performance wasn’t just a turn-on, it made me feel attractive and powerful somehow. That changed, though, to put it mildly. By the end, nothing annoyed me more than her prudishness. I … many a time I fucked her out of sheer anger.
MARIA: Against her will?
DAVID: No, of course not. She … I don’t think she realized I was angry, she thought I was just really turned on. Which I was, obviously. But there was an element of punishment in it that … hadn’t been there earlier in our relationship. The same went for the way I kept pushing her to go further and further, of course.
MARIA: Go further and further, in what way?
DAVID: Okay, well … sometimes when we fucked we would fantasize that Ingrid was having sex with other men.
MARIA: It’s a common fantasy.
DAVID: Yeah, I know. But I wanted her to put the fantasy into action. I encouraged her … no, more, I would actually find myself pestering her to sleep with another man. I insisted. And I did this, of course, because I knew that Ingrid didn’t want to be unfaithful to me, she was far too proper for that. And her propriety annoyed me so much that I always had the urge to provoke it, throw it in her face, test it.
MARIA: You touched on something similar when you were describing the difference between the world Ingrid came from and the one you came from … the contempt each class feels for the other.
DAVID: Ah, yes. [pause] And you? Where do you come from?
MARIA: David.
DAVID: Maria Hjuul Wendelboe. It reeks of the Conservative Party, the Masons, and the leafy suburbs. Wine with Sunday dinner and all that.
MARIA: [laughing] We’re here to talk about you, not me.
DAVID: Aw, come on. I sit here session after session, sharing my innermost thoughts with you. Surely it wouldn’t hurt you to let me know a little bit about you too.
Aftermath Page 34