Timmy and Gunnar kiss. Their mouths suck tight to each other. His arms wrap around her, he draws her to him, his hands travel over her back, her hips, her waist, up to one shoulder, where her sweater has slipped down allowing him to touch bare skin. With his other hand he grabs her hip and pulls her closer, their office chairs bump a little disruptively into each other, he tries to get her to move across, to sit on his lap, but she doesn’t want to, not yet. He has different clothes on today, a checkered shirt with an undershirt underneath. She has placed her hands on his back, one far up, just below his shoulder blade, the other lower on the small of his back. She feels his skin under his shirt, lets her fingertips drift up his spine, an unreal moment, the first time she’s felt his bare skin under her own bare hands. She doesn’t think of it until afterward. A kiss that lasts an hour, a month, that could have lasted a lifetime. She breathes through her nose and answers him with her tongue, she can’t stop herself from moaning, groaning, the sounds a body makes to welcome another. It makes him more confident, or more eager, he shoves his hand down the back of her waistband, he pushes his hand down a little further and drags her to him—
But enough now, the rest is inaccessible to her, and thereby inaccessible to me.
She draws a black curtain over what happens in the office that night. She lets it happen without seeing herself from the outside, and afterward she forces herself not to think about it. Though of course she thinks about it anyway, there is a light coming from her, from within, it shines through her skin like a lantern in a far-off tent on an open plain. She has set forth on her journey now, she has walked away from her old life, left it behind her, and whatever happens to her now will permeate everything she does and says in the coming days. But she forces herself not to formulate the thought, to put it into words or sentences. She looks flushed and feverish and flurried. She loses things, forgets what she was going to say. She seeks solitude at every opportunity, sits gazing into thin air and smiling to herself.
* * *
—
She comes home late that night, later even than usual. She lets herself in quietly, pulls off her boots and hangs up her coat. The rooms are in semi-darkness and tidy, the kitchen tops attendant with their gleaming surfaces: the toaster stands alone, the coffee machine’s tiny steadfast eye blinks, the slender bottles of certified olive oil and balsamic vinegar maintain their dignity, the soft lighting over the polished glass cooker top shines safe and harmonious, only a half-slice of mango sits on a plate with its black-speckled dark green back turned up. She carefully opens the doors to the kids’ rooms to look at them. First the youngest, then the oldest. They are both asleep, their breath filled with sweetness. They are children, even the one who is so sure he isn’t. He knows nothing now of what she knows. He sleeps on his back, his mouth half open, like the little boy he was, not so very long ago.
She goes into the bathroom, she tries to avoid her own gaze in the mirror, but has to look. Quickly, just a hurried, searching look into her own eyes: What have I done, impossible to regret, such a rush of feelings, can’t resist, how will it go, with what, with everything, who knows, I’ll meet him tomorrow.
She takes a shower, reluctantly, she doesn’t want to wash him away, but it doesn’t seem right to lie next to me without taking one first. She is washing him away so as to have him to herself in peace, she thinks to herself, so I won’t come into contact with what she has of him with her. She brushes her teeth and moisturizes herself, caressing her body with the lotion, thinking of his hands, and how he. Thinking of her own hands, and how she. And how they. No, she finishes in the bathroom quickly. All she wants is to sleep and to rest. And then she enters the darkness of our bedroom where I lie sleeping on one side of the bed. It’s easier than you’d think to slip through the gaps, to go from one life to another. She has returned now for a fleeting moment to what was once her entire existence.
She lies down carefully on her side of the bed. As she sneaks in under the double duvet, she notices that I’m sleeping in a T-shirt and pants, she’s pleased, it’s just one more sign that our relationship has entered its final phase, even for me. We will no longer sleep naked together. She can barely hear me breathe. Imagine if I was dead now? Just like that? I might have had a stroke or heart attack, something fatal. Middle-aged men often die suddenly, and if I died now, she’d have no trouble mourning me. She could have been the quietly resigned widow, and simultaneously been joyously and ecstatically in love. It’s a surprising thought; she understands now how someone might want to kill the person they live with, how they might suddenly see no other way out than to mix a poison or take a rifle and shoot them in the head, or strangle them with their bare hands, strangle this person with whom they were in bed, naked and relatively happy, just a few days prior. Because there is no other way to free oneself. The other must die in you, be defeated, erased. She must free herself from me, and she has already done so. In her interior life, which has become the only real life, I have already perished, I am vanquished. I fell away quite peacefully, I suddenly became unimportant, I drifted to the furthest edges of her life without knowing it.
But the hardest thing is that I do know. I have more than a passing suspicion. I follow her every move, register each inner change as it occurs in her, independently of anything she says. I have grown psychic. I find signs everywhere. That’s the way jealousy works. It enables me to see everything, long before it happens. That’s how it feels. And if I hadn’t believed that I already knew everything about the two of them, she’d have been able to let the days pass and hope things might quietly resolve themselves.
She falls asleep alone, on her back, with one hand crossed over the other, as though she were ill. But she’s not ill, she is healthier than before, she feels protected by what has happened, by what is to come. Everything that happens to her now is good, any changes are of the good sort.
* * *
—
Next morning she is friendly but remote, and manages to keep me at a distance. It’s a Saturday, she tells me she needs to work with him again today, they have a deadline and there’s something they must complete. Her tone is relaxed and direct, she only just manages to resist the temptation to hint at what she’s really talking about. She says she hopes it’s okay by me. She moves from room to room as she talks, making sure to avoid my gaze, expresses her needs without giving me a chance to interrupt. She detects resistance, reluctance, disappointment, whatever it is, but doesn’t let it touch her, it is after all no longer relevant, now that she’s living in another world, with somebody else.
She leaves and stays out all day, an agreed return time of three is moved to five, then seven, it’s taking so much time and then to nine, sorry, we’re nearly finished! She gets back home at nine thirty. She is with the children until they go to bed, and then she wants to go to bed too. She needs peace, to close her eyes, to return to her hyper-reality, to take strength from all that’s new and life-changing. But she doesn’t escape me, I’m lying in bed, on my side, fully clothed. For a moment she hopes I’ve fallen asleep. But then she notices that I’m crying, or that I have been crying, and lies down beside me. She strokes my face. She speaks to me softly, saying my name, she tries to soothe me, manages to soothe me, so that I stop sobbing. We lie there for a long time, side by side. She sleeps a little, wakes and realizes that I get restless if she lies still for too long, and continues to stroke me. It feels safe, beautiful, intimate, even she thinks so. She is relieved that she didn’t need to say anything. All in all, it is an advantage that I’d imagined this would happen long before it actually did. This way we can calmly and lovingly finish our relationship and help each other extricate ourselves with some dignity.
But then I turn toward her. I haven’t fallen asleep, after all. I take her hand in mine, stroke the back of it, then her fingers. Once, a long time ago, I used to run my thumb and forefinger down the length of her fingers, one by one, from the base of e
ach finger to its tip, as if I were pulling off a piece of fabric, as if I were undressing her hand, finger by finger. I start to do that now. I take her thumb first, then her index finger, and work my way to her little finger, first one hand and then the other. She used to like it, she used to ask me to do it, now she just waits for me to finish.
I say that she has beautiful hands, that I like to look at them, that I like to think of what she can do with them. She pictures what she’s done with them, and waits for me to say it, that I’ve understood what has happened. But I say
—Think of all the things your hands have done with me. Some day you might do the same things with another man. I’d have liked to see that.
She watches me roll onto my back, pull my underpants down my thighs, I want her to touch me, or I want to touch myself while she looks on. She pushes herself away from me slightly. She thought we were finished with each other in that way, she thought I knew what had happened yesterday and today, she’d been certain that I would have noticed the change in her. All we could do now was to find a way to leave each other, quietly and in a civilized manner and with a sort of tender affection. Henceforth, we would be like brother and sister.
But I feel secure again now, because she is lying beside me, or because she has been lying here stroking my face with her hand. Or maybe because I can’t really imagine that it could ever happen, this thing that has happened, the fact that she is no longer my love and lover—she cannot be, since I am not that for her.
Just a few days earlier I had said: Shouldn’t we, the two of us, be able to get through this? Shouldn’t I be able, I had said, to endure her falling in love with another? Who else could endure it, if not me? Who else, if not her, could fall head over heels in love outside marriage? Shouldn’t our love survive this? Hadn’t we always talked about everything that we found sweet or attractive or tempting? I had said all this, and she remembers how my voice came with my breath, erratic and intimate and loving words that slapped her in the face. We stood and held each other before she left home, kissing intermittently as I spoke, and in the end she asked if I thought she looked nice. She had put on some makeup, I teased her, saying she’d put it on for him. Afterward she turned at the gate and waved. Our marriage was, she thought, unlike any other marriage she knew, but she is no longer sure what she meant by that.
She sits up, she wants to go out of the room, out of the house, she doesn’t know what to say to me. A moment ago she thought how she would have liked to share it with me, this thing that has happened—this great joy, this burning passion. She hasn’t been in love with anyone else since the time she fell in love with me, nearly twenty years ago. In truth she has never been so in love before, she concludes with an intensity close to rage. She wants to tell me, to tell me that she’s never experienced anything like this, not even with me. Imagine, the woman who never believed she could fall in love with anyone else! Or perhaps, she’s been waiting for this all along, perhaps she’s been preparing herself for it in secret? In the future it will be impossible to believe otherwise. Another life has opened up. She wants to share it with me, because I am the obvious person to share it with. In fact it ought to be possible, she thinks, for us to talk calmly about it together, and possible even that I could share her great joy. I should be happy for her and share it with her, at a respectful distance.
But of course I haven’t understood what was happening, even after everything I’ve said, everything I’ve fantasized about. I believed I could see right into her, and she almost believed it too. But now, when she returns home and has become another, or has finally become herself, I don’t see it. Her cheeks have been scratched by another man’s stubble, but I don’t see it. Her hands have done everything I could imagine, everywhere on his body, but I neither smell it nor feel it. She thinks she must tell me, she can’t keep it to herself. And then she hears me say it again:
—I want you to do it with him. I know it’s going to happen some day. And I want you to come home and tell me about it afterward.
I am saying it, once more, and it seems unreal to her, disturbing, almost distasteful. She had never thought it could happen, that she could listen to me talk and see me naked and feel such repulsion. I’ve pulled the duvet aside for her to look at me. I want her to say what she wants to do with him. And she can’t tell me what has happened, not now, not while I lie there in the belief that everything that means something to her still involves me, that it is linked to me, to my life. She can’t tell me about him, about what they have done. And she suddenly realizes that she will never again tell me the most intimate things, this is her hereafter, she must take care of it, it can never be mine.
But I am lying beside her, naked now from the waist down. I move onto my side and touch myself. She sees me hold my penis, just like any other man holding himself. She looks at me, she cannot look away. I ask her to tell me more, about what she wants to do with him. And she can’t. She can’t bring herself to say anything, instead she lies next to me in the bed and listens as I do the talking. It’s a kind of story, a fantasy that resembles all my previous fantasies. He arrives at our house, suddenly he’s standing there, he has come to visit her. And she hears me say how she leads him into the bedroom, how I am left to stand outside the door listening to her, listening to the sounds she makes while she is naked with another. I seem particularly preoccupied over certain details, that I hear the door being locked, that I hear her shout when she lies under him. And that they start whispering to each other, afterward, that I can’t make out the words, I can only hear the tenderness in their voices.
She has heard all this countless times. Now she listens to me once more, and she watches me masturbate, while I talk about how I’ll be made superfluous, how I’ll melt into nothing, just watching and listening to what she does with other men. How I shall cease to exist. I am holding my penis, the thought occurs to her that she is seeing this for the last time, it goes white then red then white then red again, I pull the foreskin back and forth, slowly at first and then faster, rhythmically, in a movement somehow disconnected from any other in the world. Soon I’m just a man she has known, one that she lived intimately with, once in an earlier life. She looks at my hand as it moves, fast, fast, up and down, in that unique way that resembles nothing else. Well, yes, it resembles a body itching, a dog scratching behind its ear, its tail slapping rhythmically against the floor. And that’s it precisely, she thinks. I’m having a scratch, it’ll soon be over, I’m trying to rid myself of a dreadful itch. I’m simply trying to make life a little easier for myself.
With the other hand I pull my T-shirt up over my belly. I want to make myself even more naked for her, or for myself. Besides, I know I’m about to come and I don’t want to spoil my clothes. I’m wearing a reasonably new T-shirt, with a print on the front, a glittering blue orange. It doesn’t really suit me, my face is too pale for the color, but I bought it myself, she doesn’t buy clothes for me anymore. She puts her arm around my shoulder, perhaps to give me some sort of support, a last loving gesture. Perhaps so I’ll know that I’m not as alone as I haven’t yet realized I actually am, she doesn’t quite know herself, she hears me shout with relief. She sees me quiver, and a concentrated spurt of bodily fluid lands white and sticky over my hand, a foul discharge with no purpose flows down the bony back of my hand. An orgasm is like a spontaneous chemical reaction. From a distance it appears small and insignificant, but for the person experiencing the pleasure, it can spread and fill their entire being in a matter of seconds. She watches as my face collapses. My mouth opens, my eyes close, my hand falls powerless onto the sheet. I lie as though I’m dead for a moment, then I come to and tug at the duvet. She helps me to pull it up over my body, and covers me. Watches as I curl up into a ball beneath it. I bring my hands to my face and howl—a desperate, hollow sobbing noise. I am not the man she once knew, I don’t even sound like a human being. She lies behind me, her hand still resting on my shoulder. She
reminds herself that this will pass, all of it. These are just feelings. Strong feelings, to be sure, violent and bewildering for us both, feelings of total annihilation, so powerful a whole world could go under because of them. And yet sooner or later they will recede, cease to be valid and slowly lose their grip.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GEIR GULLIKSEN is a Norwegian writer and publishing editor. His work debuted in 1986, and he has written poems, essays, plays, novels, and children’s books.
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The Story of a Marriage Page 14