Grace by Linn Ullmann Page A

the pale, sagging belly, like a kid’s white backpack; the legs that had always been spindly. “Hideous cadaver,” Johan said out loud. “Hideous, shitty old cadaver,” he said, shocked to find himself using the word
shitty.
Such a refined old man! He leaned in closer to the mirror and studied the boil: a fiery red today. It was surely grinning at him.
    “Shit! Shit!”
    The boil was still grinning. Johan grinned back.
    “Shit! Fuck! Cunt! Cock!”
    He must have been louder than he realized, because Mai called from the kitchen, “Johan? Is everything okay in there?”
    He muttered something in reply.
    The voice from the kitchen: “I just popped outside for a moment—”
    He cut her off. “Everything’s fine, Mai. I’m just cutting my fingernails.” He waved his hands about in front of the mirror. “Cutting my fingernails! Cutting my fingernails!”
    He could still smell her sex on his fingers. She had tenderly and efficiently slid them back and forth inside herself earlier that morning.
    Strictly speaking, thought Johan, death had no business bothering him. He had done all the right things, made his arrangements, struck his bargains, and said his prayers. Other people died, not Johan, although he would never admit to thinking such a thing. He didn’t smoke or drink or drive too fast or brag about this clean living, he wasn’t the sort to take comfort in other people’s funerals, and he wasn’t the sort to say, “It won’t happen to me.” He knew it was exactly this sort of statement that could strike a man down when he least expected it. He took great care never to evince the slightest sign of hubris; the last thing he wanted was to tempt fate. In his relationship with Death, a relationship he had come to regard as a friendship of sorts (not a friendship between equals, to be sure, but a friendship nonetheless), he had been humble, one might even say ingratiating.
    “I know it could happen to me. I know you’re greater than I. But I’m being good, look at me, I’m being good, and I would be so very, very grateful if you would leave me alone.”
    When Ole Torjussen returned to Norway after being kicked out of New York by his brown-eyed mistress, his wife forgave him without much of a fuss. Four years later he got sick and died.
    “This is what I get for thinking I could find happiness,” Torjussen whispered to Johan. “Hubris, that was my downfall.”
    “Nonsense,” Johan told him. But the thought had occurred to him too, and he was relieved to think that he himself had never tempted fate by being untrue to anyone, not even his wife number one, whom he hadn’t liked. And he never forgot to give thanks for Mai. Not a single day with Mai was taken for granted.
    After Ole Torjussen’s funeral, his mourners talked not about his life, nor about his having once “tempted fate” by chasing happiness across the Atlantic. No, what people remarked upon was the deceased’s success at dying graciously, peacefully, and speedily. His wife made particular mention of this. The family had gathered around his deathbed, candles had been lit, and Ole Torjussen had professed his love for them all, most especially for his wife. Then he’d squeezed her hand and asked her, yet again, to forgive him.
    “For what, my darling?” she had whispered, wishing to hear him grovel one more time.
    In his mind’s eye Ole Torjussen saw a pair of beautiful brown eyes, an apartment on West 73rd Street in New York, a man giving directions to a stranger who had lost his way.
    “For everything!” he whispered, and closed his eyes.
    He closed his eyes, thought Johan (who had heard the story of Torjussen’s death several times), partly because he was dying and partly to see those beautiful brown eyes one last time.
    “He closed his eyes and died with a smile on his face,” his wife sniffed.
    Johan was just a little boy the first time he appealed to Death. It was on his mother’s behalf. She had a cold and a fever, and the boy