Stella Descending (9 page)

“The organ grinder raises both hands in the air and gives a little flourish, that’s all he does, a flourish, and the beautiful young woman starts to disappear. She dissolves, dematerializes, melts away, right then and there before hundreds of eyes, and it hurts. You can tell from the look on her face. It hurts to disappear like that, against your will, in the middle of the dance; it hurts to be touched out, erased, vaporized, turned to nothing in the presence of all these witnesses.

“She doubles up in pain. And then, like a bubble bursting— before you can so much as blink—she is gone.

“That’s pretty much how it went,” I concluded.

“And the audience was just as amazed every evening?” Martin asked.

“The audience was just as amazed every evening,” I said. “In Kristiansand, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim, and Bodø. Well, after all, how did he do it? Conjure up a woman and then magic her away again? It has to be something to do with the barrel organ, somebody says. It has to be something to do with that. But the woman wasn’t anywhere near the barrel organ, say others. And yet they saw her with their own eyes, crumbling in the pool of light, turning to dust. All he does is give a little flourish. It has nothing to do with the barrel organ. So the conversation went every evening after the show—and in every town in Norway people flocked to the Circus Bravado to see El Jabali and his incredible disappearing act.

“The tour ended up in Oslo. Nine shows, all sold out. According to witnesses, El Jabali and his wife, Darling, were thrilled and delighted to be such a huge success, not least El Jabali, who was greeted by shouts of
Bravo! Bravo!
every evening when he and Darling ran into the ring to take their bow.

“Then, one evening—the second-to-last show of the summer—El Jabali took his bow without his wife. The audience didn’t give it much thought. After all, he was the magician. His wife was only the lady who disappeared, the lady he magicked away. The audience didn’t know she was a star in her own right, a trapeze artist, a diva by the age of nine, when she was the top of a pyramid consisting of her grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, five brothers, two sisters, three boy cousins, and one girl cousin. But Darling’s father, the ringmaster, knew, and he
did
notice that El Jabali took his bow alone, and he feared his daughter might have gone off in a huff. So after the show, he took a walk around to look for her. He asked the musicians, Have you seen my daughter? And the musicians shook their heads and said no, the last time they saw her was in the ring with El Jabali. So the ringmaster walked on until he came to Star and Moon, the tightrope walkers. He asked the tightrope walkers, Have you seen my daughter? and Star and Moon shook their heads and said no, the last time they saw her was in the ring with El Jabali. So the ringmaster walked on until he came to the lion tamer (who, in fact, only tamed dogs, horses, and a singing ostrich, because they no longer had any lions at the Circus Bravado). And he asked the lion tamer, Have you seen my daughter? The lion tamer shook his head and said no, not since she was in the ring with El Jabali. And then the ringmaster (who just then remembered that he really never did like that son-in-law of his) asked, Where is El Jabali? In a voice like thunder he roared:
Where is El Jabali?
Yes, where is El Jabali? they all asked themselves. Because El Jabali was nowhere to be found. Darling, his wife, the ringmaster’s daughter, was nowhere to be found either. Darling had vanished. El Jabali had vanished.

“Soon, however, El Jabali was found. He was sitting on a tree stump outside his caravan, drinking apple juice and eating a sandwich. The ringmaster came dashing up to him, the musicians, the tightrope walkers, the lion tamer, the bookkeeper, the contortionist, the clown, the dogs, and the ostrich hard on his heels, grabbed him by the shoulders, shook him, and demanded to know where his daughter was, demanded to know why his daughter did not take her bow. El Jabali said he didn’t know. ‘I haven’t seen her since I magicked her away.’ And weird as it is, this was his story and he stuck to it. The police were called in. On the face of it, there was good reason to suspect that a crime had been committed. I arrived at the scene. I spoke to those present. I spoke to El Jabali. I spoke to everyone who was at the circus the night Darling was magicked away, but none of them could tell me any more than what they believed they had seen with their own eyes: that Darling was magicked away, that she disappeared, melted, and turned to nothing in front of hundreds of witnesses.”

“And El Jabali?” Martin asked.

“He disappeared too.”

“You never saw him again?”

“Oh, there are times when I think I see him. Unsolved cases tend to haunt me,” I said. “He must be an old man by now, if he’s still alive.”

“Now I’ll tell you a story,” Martin announced.

“That was the deal,” I said.

“I’ll tell you about the avocado-green sofa,” he said.

“You’re not going to tell me it’s magic, are you?” I asked. “Because I know that already.”

“No, not that,” he said. And this is the story Martin told me.

Long ago, before Martin met Stella, he had a girlfriend whose name was Penelope Lund. And one day Penelope told Martin that he was a spineless, shiftless, spoiled, self-centered layabout who didn’t deserve the love of a good woman. Martin couldn’t argue with that. On the contrary, he had to admit that Penelope was right on all counts. This did not mean he stopped going out with women, by no means. He simply stopped going out with Penelope Lund, for a while at any rate. Instead, he embarked on a long and intoxicating succession of affairs with many different women.

His job as a furniture salesman made it possible for him to expand his romantic repertoire ad infinitum. It is no secret that most furniture is bought by women. No secret, either, that a woman’s heart starts to flutter the minute she becomes aware that she’s near a store full of beautiful things for her house. So there came a day when the young furniture salesman decided to take advantage of those fluttering hearts and bed every woman (and when I say every woman, Martin stressed, I mean
every
woman
) who bought the avocado-green sofa, the one on display near the shop’s busy café, the one flanked by a lamp with a white shade like a Victorian lady’s bonnet. The very sofa that would in due course bring him to Stella, into Stella’s life, into Stella’s bed, without a clue that ten years later he would have to explain why Stella should suddenly fall to her death from a roof on an August evening.

The whole point, he explained, was that his choice of women would not, in fact, be his choice. He was in no position to choose for himself, and he didn’t want to anyway. Martin decided to have no will of his own. Martin did not intend to make up his own mind about anything, to make any decisions based on his own needs, desires, wishes, urges. Martin intended to take life as it came, a life suspended between heaven and earth, here and there, night and day. But in order to do this, without ending up dead—which would actually be more natural—Martin devised a system, a scheme, a rigid code of conduct. He made up a set of rules for eating and drinking, a set of rules for going to the bathroom, a set of rules for earning and spending money, and a set of rules for meeting women. With these he felt he had covered the necessities. The urges to fill himself, void himself, support himself, and reproduce himself might have led another man to make choices the consequences of which said man would have to live with, knowing full well that these had been his choices, knowing full well that he was responsible for his own downfall. Martin had always been convinced that his downfall was just around the corner, but he preferred not to take responsibility for it. So when it came to women, he might just as well let the sofa choose: Sooner or later, every woman who bought the avocado-green sofa would receive a visit from Martin Vold, sooner or later every one of them would undress for Martin Vold, and sooner or later every one of them would be well and truly and most memorably fucked by Martin Vold. Whether they were ugly or pretty, fat or thin, young or old, bitchy or sweet, it made no difference. He would sleep with all of them.

At this point in the story I couldn’t help but interrupt. “But surely there can’t be that many women who buy avocado-green sofas?”

“You’ve no idea,” he replied. “It was like a mania with that sofa. Everybody wanted one.”

I hesitated slightly before asking my next question. I asked him to forgive me for sounding naive, but didn’t it ever happen that some women had their husbands or boyfriends with them when they came to look at furniture, and wouldn’t that make it difficult—I glanced at my notes—wouldn’t that make it difficult “well and truly and most memorably” to fuck them? “I mean,” I said, groping for the words, “what did you do with the man?”

He sighed. “I arranged to deliver the sofa when he wasn’t home.”

“Did any woman ever say no?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“Have you read Henry Miller?”

“No.”

I paused and looked at the ceiling.

“Why?” he asked, uncertainly.

“He wrote somewhere that the male Australian kangaroo has a double penis, one for weekdays and one for holidays. I was wondering if the same applied to you.”

He made no answer. He was wondering whether I was making fun of him. Possibly out of curiosity, possibly because we had the whole night ahead of us, I finally asked him to tell me about the women.

“I’d prowl around the store,” he said, “spying on them, holding my breath when they went anywhere near the sofa. I took them in—hair, face, breasts, thighs—hoping that this one would sit down on it or that another would walk away. It’s a beautiful sofa. It caught the eye of a lot of women. They ran their hands over the soft green fabric, imagining how a sofa like this would look in their own living rooms. Occasionally I might try to influence a customer. Although it was against my rules, if I saw a beautiful girl who, having walked around the sofa, round and round, again and again, finally sat down on it with a rapturous little ‘Oohhh, yes!’ it wasn’t out of the question for me to sidle up to her, shake her hand, and say, ‘I think this sofa would look just right in your living room!’

“And the girl would laugh and say, ‘But you’ve no idea how my living room looks, have you?’

“And then I would say that that was exactly what I intended to find out in six to eight weeks, that being Galileo’s estimated delivery time.”

“Galileo?” I interjected, checking my notes.

“That’s the name of the furniture store,” Martin explained.

“Of course!”

“We supply tables, chairs, carpets, beds, blinds, lamps, chaise longues, shelving units, closets, benches, writing desks, and pouffes,
and
we serve the best espresso and arugula salad in town.”

“Go on, please.”

Martin took a deep breath.

“But if a really ugly woman dumped herself on the sofa and indicated that she was interested in it, I would come over, shake my head, and point to another model on display, also Italian. I’d do my best to persuade this woman that the other sofa was a much more attractive piece of furniture, and much cheaper and she ought to go for it instead. I didn’t always manage to persuade her. Sometimes the ugly woman had her heart set on the avocado-green sofa, no matter what I said, and then, according to my rules, I had no choice but to serve her, both one way and the other.”

“Okay, but come on, it’s not as if anyone were forcing you to go through with this,” I pointed out. “Least of all these supposedly ugly women—”

“I had a system,” he said, butting in, “and I wouldn’t give in until—” (He eyed me up and down.) “It’s like building a house of cards. To begin with it’s just a bit of fun and it doesn’t matter if the cards come tumbling down. You merely start again from scratch. But then, after a while, you’re getting somewhere. Soon you’ve got one floor on top of another, and then one more on top of that, and your house is still standing! And then all at once it becomes so fucking vital that it shouldn’t fall down—do you know what I mean?—that you should manage to use up all fiftytwo cards. That’s what it was like. It started as a bet, with a guy at work, maybe, or a friend, that I could seduce the first woman to buy that avocado-green sofa, no matter who she was. And it was the easiest thing in the world. Then the next one, right? Just as easy. And the next, and the next, and the next. And the house was still standing! And with every woman the tension grew that much greater. What if one of them said no? But none of them said no. Not
one
of them said no. And it never occurred to me that
I
might back down, that I might deliberately bring down the house of cards myself, just because I didn’t feel attracted to this woman or that.”

Once, he told me, a woman came into the shop, walked straight over to the green sofa, and sat down on it. She was small and thin and pale, with a mousy perm curling around a face that did not arouse the slightest feeling in him: dry skin, thin lips, button nose, and small, listless green eyes. “She wasn’t at all attractive, but she wasn’t downright ugly either. I preferred the really ugly ones,” he says, “the spectacularly weird-looking or grossly overweight.” (He gave me a look, eyeing my body. I gave him to understand, also by a look, that he couldn’t faze me.) This woman, neither attractive nor ugly, bought the avocado-green sofa and received Martin at her apartment eight weeks later. What was to happen next had already been agreed between them, so after she had helped him put the sofa in its place in the living room, next door to the kitchen, she proceeded to undress. She did not look at him. Not even when she lay back on the green cushions did she look at him. He undid his fly and considered the possibility of stroking her cheek, a caress, a word at least, but he dropped the idea, climbed on top of her, and stuck his dick inside her. She might as well have been dead from the waist down, he said; I felt nothing, nothing. But then the woman fixed her gaze on him, forcing him to look into her eyes, eyes filled with tears of joy, the eyes of a happy woman, and he stared at her, entranced by that look, until it dawned on him that he could close his eyes, and so he closed his eyes.