I let it lie on one side of my tongue and tried hard not to chew on it while he showed me around. The house was beautifully renovated and furnished in the modernist style; not a single object lay awry. I kept looking for a place to throw the gum away, but there was none. We sat down, the editor served coffee and I discreetly removed the gum from my mouth and hid it in the palm of my hand, my index finger and thumb gripping the handle of the thin porcelain antique coffee cup, the other three fingers curled around the gum. We talked about literature. The editor told me about the two books he was working on. The gum at first adhered only lightly to my skin, but as the protective layer of saliva dried, it became clear that the gum would require some visible effort to remove. I thought the editor would probably shake my hand when I took my leave of him, so I gathered my courage.

‘‘Do you have anywhere I can put this?’’ I asked finally.

‘‘The gum?’’ he said.

His whole bearing in the seconds that followed — his expression of surprise and reproval, and maybe also of contempt — is still engraved in my mind. Then the moment passed, and my wad of gum became the most natural thing in the world. He tore off a piece of paper and handed it to me. ‘‘There is a wastepaper basket beside the writing desk,’’ he said. Almost any other failing would have been met with indulgence, for I was there in my capacity as an author, therefore an artist, therefore someone who might cut off his own ear, someone who might spew out obscenities, someone who might be drunk, maybe even shoot up some hero­in in his bathroom; if substance abuse is foolish and infantile, it is also formidable, at least in the case of the artist, whose spirit rebels against conformity. But chewing gum was only transgressive when we were 7 or 8, when chewing a small piece of gum with your mouth open was cool and having your mouth full provided a certain status.

I used to save mine, I recall. One stick could last several weeks back then. The taste would be gone after a few hours, but not the texture. That is no longer so. Since most gum now is sugar-free, its taste disappears after only a few minutes, and the consistency becomes loose and grainy, negating its elastic quality entirely. With one exception: Juicy Fruit. In all the places I have lived and written, in Volda and Bergen, in Stockholm and Malmo, I have known which shops stocked Juicy Fruit. There are fewer and fewer of them, and I am beginning to hoard the yellow packets. Even now my writing desk is full of old wads of Juicy Fruit, which with their gray hemispheri­cal shape and many little indentations resemble shrunken brains. I can’t write without them, and I don’t discard them until the grainy phase eventually sets in. Of the fortunate fact that I am not alone in suffering from this vice, unworthy in all its insignificance, I am reminded every time I’m in town, where the streets and sidewalks outside the places where people gather are full of white spots, distributed as randomly as the stars in the sky, and in the dark, lit up by street lamps and shimmering faintly against the black asphalt, what the gum-flecked pavement most resembles is indeed a starry sky.