The Story of a Marriage

by Geir Gulliksen

  I wrote that I was thinking about her, and thinking about what we’d done a few hours earlier. She’d forgotten, but now she pictured it, she’d been down on all fours, supporting herself on her elbows while I took her hard from behind, the way she liked. I’d held her hips, then moments later she’d felt my hand on the nape of her neck, as I shoved her face down into the bed. She remembered her own voice now, yelling into the pillow. She liked to hear herself scream. I took her, she let herself be taken, she screamed. She liked to think of it like that, of being taken. We had looked at ourselves in the mirror, two bodies, one on top of the other, one doing something to the other, the other allowing itself to be done to. And as she pictured it now she felt it between her legs, a dull ache.

  She sent a reply, brief, affectionate and in much the same spirit as I’d written to her. That was how we always wrote to each other. She looked out over the kindergarten, one of the little figures turned in her direction, peering up toward the sky perhaps, although it felt as though its gaze was searching for her window. I had said that I wouldn’t mind more children. She didn’t want more, absolutely not, we’d gone past that phase long ago. We already had two children together, as well as my daughter from my first marriage, that would have to be enough. She wanted to work more. She wanted to do more sports, to run and cycle, to learn how to climb. She wanted to take advantage of everything on offer to a mature person who no longer had young children to look after.

  Her other emails included a notification of a forthcoming meeting, and some contributions to a discussion about the Department of Health website. She considered sending a response to the last, but decided instead to delete it. The joy of eradicating little problems. She sent an email to Kjersti asking, in the humorous tone they usually adopted in their communications, whether she could be an angel and help her go through the tables in that pesky report. She had worked on it for so long now that the report had developed a personality. An awkward individual that refused to take shape as she wanted, there was always something wrong with it. She’d talked about it so much that I often inquired about it: How’s the report doing these days?

  We often talked about work, especially hers. She’d grown used to sharing everything with me. Almost everything: conflicts, negotiations, minor irritations, and also, of course, anything she found interesting or amusing or inspiring. Always a positive soul, she was consciously so, she wanted to be that positive person, and it came easily.

  She checked the news, informing herself lightly, without any real commitment. Then another email arrived. She opened it. She didn’t recognize the sender immediately, not before she’d begun reading. He thanked her, and was warm and complimentary about her talk, she could almost hear his voice, the friendly tone, the interest, the charm, or whatever it was. Yet there must have been something conditional behind this charm, behind all the praise and positive words, she sensed something else: he wasn’t giving himself away. She picked up on a certain reserve, a slightly aggressive tension. And it triggered something in her. Or, perhaps he was just self-obsessed, he wrote mostly about what he thought, and obviously felt sure it would be of interest to her. He went on to suggest they might collaborate, that there was a project in the offing in his division which he’d like her to be involved in. She was, against her will, flattered by that too, even though she had neither the time nor desire to participate in any more projects. Finally he said, by the by, that they lived very near each other. He’d recognized her when she was up on the podium, but hadn’t known where he knew her from. But this must be why, they were practically neighbors. Perhaps she was a jogger too, like himself? He was almost certain she must be, he wrote. He was quite certain he’d seen her out jogging.

  So, he had googled her to find out where she lived, perhaps at the very moment she’d considered googling him. He had found her address, but that wasn’t all. He must have seen her before, seen her out running. Could he see from her body that she often went running?

  He’d used the word jogger—who used that nowadays? It was so nineties, so eighties, almost awkward. It reminded her of his glasses, their brown-tinted lenses. She did a search on his name, and was surprised to find he was older than she’d thought. He didn’t live far from us, she knew exactly which house it was, she’d often run past it. She tried to remember if she’d ever seen him before. She looked at the pictures of him and recognized something in them that had made an impression on her earlier. A look of vulnerability. A self-confidence, which nonetheless seemed somehow brittle. She found more pictures, one on the department’s home page, another from an interview with a professional journal. And then more on the website of a sports club.

  He was a ski instructor.

  She sat, staring into space and thinking she wouldn’t mind doing that herself.

  She got a fright when Kjersti suddenly came up behind her, she’d not heard her come in.

  —What a face!

  She wanted to close the page, but it would look too conspicuous, as though she had something to hide. Instead she swung her chair round and fixed Kjersti’s gaze, forcing her attention away from the screen and onto herself.

  —You terrify me when you come up so quietly.

  —Martin always says I stomp about like a horse.

  —That’s nice of him.

  —Well, we’ve got so many stairs at home, you see. And he says I breathe like a whale.

  —I’m sure he loves you anyway.

  —I don’t really think he does. He’s just holding out and waiting for something to happen. Every time I go to the doctor, he hopes it’ll be something serious. He’s so vain he’d rather be a widower than get a divorce. But you’ve got a husband who loves you, that’s obvious. And yet, you’re looking at that man?

  —He wants me to work on a project that’s being led by Health and Social Care.

  —Aha, a project! Is that what they call it these days?

  —It’s totally innocent, Kjersti. Strictly professional.

  —And you believe that?

  —Kjersti, I need your help.

  —Is that report of yours still bugging you?

  —I think there are a few errors in those tables.

  —Can’t you just send them back to whoever created them?

  —I’m responsible for the report. I’m wondering if the basic premise is faulty.

  —Show me these errors then.

  Kjersti pulled the visitor’s chair up to the screen. They often sat side by side, working together. Timmy often talked about Kjersti to me, about her sailboat, about her marriage, about the awful jokes, the nitpicking, the way she got hung up on details. And she talked to Kjersti about me too. She must have, I’m not sure what about exactly, but I always assumed she talked about her wonderful marriage. And very likely she did. We were proud of our marriage, both of us, like parents pushing their newborns out in their prams, parading them for all the world to see, as though nobody else had ever experienced such joy.

  She closed the websites she’d visited, she closed her email account and brought the report up again. For the rest of the day she sat and worked with Kjersti. She left the office a bit later than planned. She knew I’d be at home, but she texted me to say she was on her way. And that she loved me. She must have said that—didn’t we always? She can’t quite remember now. The person she was then, when she was with me, no longer exists. The person I was with her no longer exists. A “we” once existed, we lived together, but that life is now over and she has forgotten who we were. She is beyond the reach of what happened, as am I. Nobody knows any more how the two of us, she and I, once spoke with each other. Who was she, when she was with me? She remembers how my gaze would follow her. How when she walked through a room, I would sit and watch her. She would sometimes sit and watch me too, but never for so long or so often. But she remembers how our eyes would meet, without anything in particular happening, without anything being s
aid. What did our glances say? That we were happy with our lives, with each other, that things had worked out pretty well? We’d found each other, we’d built a life together, and she liked who she was with me.

  She looked upon me with familiarity and almost dreadful tenderness. Though it didn’t seem dreadful to me, or even to her, not back then. It was only later that she came to see our exchange of tenderness as precisely that: a mode of exchange, something we traded with one another, in payment for one another’s closeness.

  There he was, this man who was her husband, in this house, in these rooms, following her with his eyes whenever she walked past. She no longer remembers my face, she can’t picture it, apart from when we meet accidentally. She can’t recall how my face always turned to hers, how steadfast and open that gaze was. She knows it must have been so, that she was watched over, with kindness, openness, admiration, adoration. But she has no recollection of what it was like to live under that gaze, that face.

  * * *

  —

  She cycled home in the late-afternoon traffic. Usually she cycled as fast as she could, partly for the exercise, and partly because she hated to be overtaken. But also because she looked forward to getting home. But not today. She looked at her hands, there on the handlebars, at her feet on the pedals, at the blotched asphalt beneath her wheels. She was in no hurry. She arrived home, got off her bike and wheeled it through the gate, put it away and locked it up, then walked slowly across the gravel. Something, something was pulling her back. The large courier bag in her hand was stuffed with papers including a printout of the report which she planned to go through tonight, to keep the work that she and Kjersti had done fresh in her mind for the next day. She passed by the kitchen window and saw me standing at the worktop. She could hear that the children were home too, further back in the room. She could smell that the dinner was ready, there was music on the radio, all the doors and windows were open.

  Something was holding her back, but she pushed it aside. She can’t remember what she wore. She can’t remember if she was wearing a dress, the short-sleeved dress perhaps, because summer was on its way, or the thin dress with red and green spots. Or perhaps it was the denim one that I’d bought for her. Or the one with dark blue and light blue stripes. Or the red and green dress, with a collar and a thin belt that tied at the waist. Or the plain red one that was cut too low at the neck, surely she wouldn’t have worn that when she was giving a talk? She was wearing a suit, the pastel skirt that reached just above the knee, together with a blouse. One of her white blouses, or the brown one, the one that shimmered, with an embroidered collar. It was rather tight, that one, the fabric stretched between the buttons, revealing her pale skin beneath. A bit risqué, she often thought, but she sometimes wore it anyway. She may, of course, have worn trousers and a T-shirt; her linen trousers with the lilac T-shirt, the one with a floral print. She bought more expensive clothes these days, always knew exactly which shop every garment came from, and whether she’d bought it herself or been given it, although she wasn’t thinking about that now. She may have been wearing her short-sleeved dress, the pale one that looked like a blouse on top, with a stiff collar, the one with pleats below, that came out quite wide round the knees, like a skirt. The advantage of this dress was that it went so well with the gray jacket she liked so much, the one Kjersti called her power jacket.

  But that’s enough of that.

  She came home, walked in to me and the kids, we’d been waiting for her, as we so often did. We liked it better when she was at home, seeing her made us happy, each in our own ways. I was standing at the kitchen worktop, I turned to her, she could see that I went soft at the sight of her, that I was moved, hazy with tenderness. I walked over to her and put my arms round her, she reciprocated my embrace, lightly, feeling no more than an easy, numb sense of pleasure. The attentive devotion that greeted her, many would have craved, many were obliged to live without. She had lived with that tenderness and care for so long, she was accustomed to it, some might say she was spoiled. Or perhaps she was just beginning to get bored. She was about to move on, out of our world, the one we had together, and into something else. But she didn’t know that yet, nor that I could not reach her. Oh, what a waste, she would throw it away, everything.

  We were here, in these rooms. Our voices could be heard, our bodies sat on chairs, lay on beds, our hands reached out and adjusted the thermostat, picked up telephones, carried cups and saucers. She dozed on the sofa, then woke again. I sat reading. One of us helped the youngest boy with his homework. She watched TV, I read more or wrote, she leafed through her paperwork, we sat side by side on the sofa talking in clear, sincere voices. She told me what had happened at work, an argument in management. Then she told me about the man she’d met. I asked, she answered, it was light and fun, I laughed at her description of him, the stiff shirt, with the wide, loudly patterned tie, she talked about it all so amusingly, without putting him down. She knew, as she talked, that she was portraying him in a charming light, and that it was kind of exciting—it was exciting that she’d never known anything about this man, and that he was suddenly there, so close to us, with his wide tie and white shirt, and that he wanted something to do with her.

  A little later she went into another room and talked on the phone, it was her sister. She was interrupted by our youngest, she called out to me, called my name, the way she always did. And she said to him ask Daddy and resumed her conversation. Something had happened, her sister was in the middle of getting divorced. We had both been rather upset by it, and we might have felt threatened, but didn’t. We weren’t there yet, we thought we were safe in our life together. The kitchen had been tidied, the lights had been gradually lit as darkness fell. They would soon be turned off again, one by one.

  We headed for bed, stood side by side in the bathroom brushing our teeth, she put her hand on my shoulder, companionably, smiled at me in the mirror. We lay in bed naked. She turned toward me, I turned toward her. A hand on a thigh, a cheek on a shoulder, a hand at the nape of a neck, fingers through hair. One mouth opened toward the other mouth, one body lay on the other. One of us let out a scream, soon the other joined it. Our voices in that little room triumphed over loneliness, or so it seemed. And yet, when she remembered those voices later, yelling at the ceiling in the dark, they seemed plaintive, searching and alone. As though we each shouted out our own distress.

  * * *

  —

  The next day she shoves her feet into her trainers, ties her laces, calls out to tell me or the kids that she’ll be away for an hour. And she closes the door behind her. It can’t have been the next day, some days must have passed, but those days have been erased from her mind. Like most of our life together: totally erased. She no longer remembers it. All she remembers is that first meeting with him, and then the second, and the third. And then she remembers how everything fell apart around her.

  It was late in the afternoon, the sun was low, she’d changed into her running gear and now she crossed the gravel path full of anticipation. She had a habit of expecting the best. And everything had gone her way. She closed the gate behind her and started to run, gently at first, along the road where we lived. Reaching the end of the road, she slipped like a child through a gap in the fence that led into the forest. She’d be able to run more freely. Initially she was met by walkers and children, and had to stop or go around them, but as she went further into the forest she could gather pace.

  The forest path was soft and spongy underfoot. She could hear her own breath, her pulse throbbed in her temples, her shoulder ached. All of this would give way as soon as she was warm, she knew that, longed for it, looked forward to running without thinking about running. She took the footpath that skirted the residential area. She often went deeper into the forest, where the houses vanished from view, where the forest floor broke into an intricate web of tiny paths, but today she wanted to be out in the open, because—she
told herself—the light was so beautiful here.

  And so, as though in a dream in which everything went to a plan, a plan she didn’t recognize as such until afterward, she ran past the little villas with their gardens overlooking the forest. The man who had emailed her lived in one of them, and she recognized it instantly. A small 1960s house, not very well maintained, but with a neat stack of logs in the carport. An old hammock in the garden, and a snow shovel that hadn’t been taken in after the winter. They hadn’t lived here long, two or so years perhaps, and they’d moved straight in without doing anything to the house, he wasn’t concerned with such things, she had realized.

  And there, outside the house, just as she had imagined, she saw him. She hadn’t known that she was hoping for this, but realized it now; this was exactly how he should stand, as though waiting for her. He’d been out for a run too, and now he was stretching. He was focused, serious and sure of himself, not looking to the left or right. But still he spotted her. They saw each other from afar, and he recognized her and lifted a hand to wave. As though he’d been waiting for her. His hand in the air, she’d remember that, and his face as she approached him. His eyes went narrow and more slanted whenever he smiled, she noticed that.

  He leapt over the stone wall and waited for her on the road. Straight to it. As usual, she thought, even though she didn’t know him yet. But she already knew what was typical of him, recognizing it the instant she saw it, and he said:

  —Going far?

  She was friendly but to the point, she wanted to be sporty and down-to-earth, and it came easily to her, it felt somehow right to her, and she sensed that it felt right to him too. The two of them were already starting to build a rapport. She named a place. It would take barely an hour to run there and back, but he’d just been out for a run, so she didn’t expect him to join her. She asked anyway, and he said: