Grace Read Online Free PDF Page B

two other women. They walked in a huddle like the best of friends, hooting with laughter at the wind threatening to blow them over. Like Mai, the other two were carrying large yellow umbrellas, and it dawned on him that these were furnished by the organizers of the conference. Then he noticed the black lettering: NORDIC PEDIATRI-CIANS’ CONFERENCE 1985.
    That evening Mai had dinner in the hotel restaurant with her colleagues. She didn’t see Johan, even though he actually stood in the doorway, scanning the restaurant until he located her table. It would never have occurred to her that he could have followed her, that he could actually be there in Göteborg, that he would come all that way. She was deep in conversation with the two women she had joined up with earlier in the day, and to all appearances she was having a terrific time.
    When a man’s wife goes off to a seminar and then tells lies about it, chances are she’s having an affair. But when Johan’s wife goes off to a seminar and tells lies about it, she lies about the weather. Johan’s wife tells him that the sun is shining and that she is sitting writing by an open window, feeling the spring breeze ruffle her hair.
    It crossed his mind that this lie might be a forewarning of a bigger lie, a more pernicious one. The moment Mai said that the sun was shining even as rain was coming down in buckets, he had thought, She’s in love with someone else! She’s betrayed me! But then he realized that there was no logical connection between the weather in G
ö
teborg and the likelihood of another man in Mai’s life. A woman, he concluded, is no less unfaithful in sunshine than in rain.
    Johan never did come up with an explanation. It was such a scrappy lie. Neither the truth (that it was raining) nor the lie (that the sun was shining) was malicious, harmful, or even
relevant.
But the fact was, and still is, that Mai tells lies.
    Her other lies, when first he became aware of them, were all of the same caliber, if a lie can be said to have a caliber. They were of no account. Johan might not even have noticed them, had it not been for Göteborg.
    For instance: Johan and Mai would occasionally call each other at work. If Johan had left home before Mai, he would usually call to ask what she was wearing. It was a kind of a game. She knew he liked to be able to picture her. But more than once he discovered, always by chance, that she was actually wearing something quite different from what she had described over the phone. She might tell him that she was wearing a blue dress when in fact she was wearing red pants. That sort of thing.
    But she didn’t always lie.
    When Mai was thirty-eight, she announced to Johan that she was pregnant but that she’d made up her mind to have an abortion. She had had an amniocentesis, and the test had shown the fetus to be defective. Johan pleaded with her: she couldn’t make a decision like this on her own; they ought at least to discuss it, he said. Exactly how far along was she?
    “Fourteen weeks,” she said, and turned away.
    Months later in a bookshop, in the section called “Mother and Child,” he found a book with a week-by-week account of pregnancy. He opened it to week fourteen: “The baby’s heart pumps twenty-eight liters of blood a day,” it said.
    Twenty-eight liters of blood.
    He saw before him twenty-eight milk cartons.
    He saw before him a heart.
    But at this particular moment he was standing, staring, speechless, at Mai’s back.
    “For God’s sake, Mai. You never said a word. I had no idea. In any case, it’s too late for an abortion. This is a
baby
you’re carrying.”
    “It’s not too late.”
    “It’s my baby too,” he ventured, and the words didn’t even sound hollow to him. I think that in a momentary burst of courage, which deserted him immediately afterward, Johan wanted that child. “You can’t just—”
    “It’s my body,” she cut in. “And anyway, it’s deformed. We’ve created this