I take out the box, pull the shiny ribbon to undo the bow, lift the lid. There is tissue paper inside in exactly the same shade of pink, and when I peek underneath there is even more pink: pink fabric, pink lace. It is a short camisole and a pair of panties, both made of the same almost sheer pink fabric, which feels a bit like nylon. They are kind of weird, they look childish and cheap at the same time, certainly not something I would have chosen for myself. Carl is looking at me, obviously waiting for a reaction.
“Very nice,” I say.
“I think you’d look lovely in them,” he says again.
“Do you want me to put them on now?” I ask, and he nods.
I take the box into the bathroom, get undressed, put on the pink lingerie. The fabric is stiff and slightly abrasive, the panties are very low cut, when I look in the mirror I can practically see right through them.
Carl gasps when I walk back into the living room. He is sitting in my red armchair, but immediately gets to his feet. I switch off the overhead light, it is embarrassing standing in front of him in my underwear in such a bright light.
“No, switch it back on,” he says.
I switch the light back on. Carl moves to stand in front of me, very close, gazing at me.
“I knew they’d suit you,” he says.
“Thanks,” I mumble.
“Turn around.”
I shake my head. “No …”
“Turn around,” he says again, his tone is sharper this time. I do as he says even though I don’t like feeling scrutinized, I think he’s bound to notice that there’s something wrong with me, that I am defective in some way, that he will realize this is a mistake, that I am ugly. Slowly I turn around, he nods.
Then he starts to undress. He unbuttons his shirt and takes it off, unzips his pants and steps out of them, removes his socks. He keeps his eyes on me the whole time, then he walks over to the bed, turns back the covers.
“Come here,” he says.
I slip in next to him, he puts his arm around me, draws me close. I inhale his scent, nestle closer, gently kiss his chest, lay my cheek against it. I can hear his heart beating, I feel safe and secure, it is warm under the covers.
He caresses my hair.
“You’re so lovely,” he says.
His voice is soft and thick, he keeps on stroking my hair, allows his hand to slide downward, over my breasts, outside the camisole.
“You look so wonderful in these clothes,” he says. “Beautiful.”
He leans toward me, kisses me softly.
“You look like a little girl,” he says. He looks at me searchingly. “Are you my little girl?”
I glance up at him. His expression is different, softer, almost pleading.
“Are you my little girl?” he says again, speaking more quietly this time, he is almost whispering.
I nod. “Yes,” I mumble.
He moans, presses himself against my body. I can feel his hardness against my thigh. He kisses me again, my cheeks, my forehead, more passionately now.
“My little girl,” he murmurs with his mouth close to my ear as his hand moves downward once more, over my breasts, my belly, my panties. Now I am the one who is moaning. Of course I am his little girl. I am whatever he wants me to be.
When I attempt to rationalize it to myself, I decide that I am doing it so that I will have something to write about. That I am exposing myself to life in the same way as those writers I admire, that I go along with everything he asks me to do because it might make a good story. Then I think that what makes them good writers is the fact that they don’t lie, not to themselves or to anyone else: I’m actually doing it because it feels nice, because it’s nicer than anything anyone else has ever done to me. I am doing it because I would do whatever he asked me to do.
Everything about him turns me on, but perhaps the most exciting thing is that he’s older than me, that he’s a real man, an adult. I read somewhere that men who have daughters are better than other men at undressing women, when I read it I thought it sounded sick and perverted, but it’s true of Carl. He is usually eager to get my clothes off, but occasionally he deliberately undresses me very slowly, just to turn me on even more, but he always does it in a way that is both firm and tender, and he makes me feel totally safe.
He has ruined me. I will never be able to settle for lesser men, for incompetent men. With clumsy hands.
It is Wednesday but Carl and I can’t see each other because it is his daughter’s birthday. She is his eldest daughter from his first marriage, Sandra Malmberg, and she is twenty-four today. I am only a few years older, it’s not that long since I turned twenty-four. I remember a birthday cake in the living room at my parents’ house, a vase of lilacs, an envelope containing hundred-kronor notes.
Carl and the rest of his family are going out for dinner with Sandra, he has told me what usually happens: she is allowed to choose the restaurant, and they are going to one of the few really good places in Norrköping. I can picture the scene, a big table reserved in Carl’s name, the family arriving in a big, well-dressed group. Sandra has been eating out since she was little, and knows how to behave in a restaurant, she is able to make relaxed small talk with the waiters because she feels at home in an upscale environment. I know that she is in college in Lund, sometimes he comes out with things without thinking, even though I’ve said I don’t want to know anything about his family. Apparently she is studying political science, something to do with international politics, I know nothing about that kind of thing. I’m sure she’s one of those people who will end up with a fantastic job in the Foreign Office or the United Nations or the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency after several years studying abroad and a series of highly desirable placements, something amazing and important, she will speak several languages fluently and she will never feel nervous when it comes to ordering in a restaurant. I’m sure he’s proud of her. I want him to be proud of me too. I want to find ways of making him proud.
He won’t text me, he never does on evenings like this. They will drink expensive wine with the meal, perhaps Cognac with their coffee, the bill will run to thousands, but that’s just a small part of her present, I try to imagine what Sandra Malmberg will want for her birthday. Clothes, maybe, or a designer purse. Carl has probably been involved in choosing her present, he likes doing that kind of thing, he’s unusually interested in fashion for a man in his fifties. I picture him handing her a beautifully wrapped, costly gift that he has picked out himself, and he has chosen exactly the right thing, he has bought a fabulous item of clothing which will attract compliments from all her friends, who also receive expensive birthday presents from their daddies.
I have fantasized about his wife dying. It happens in brief moments before my brain realizes what it is doing, and I immediately feel ashamed of myself and have to try to cleanse it, wash away the terrible thought with a flood of I didn’t mean it!, just in case fate or God happens to be there, reading my mind. It is wrong to wish another person dead, I tell myself sternly, but still the thought comes back to me. It would be enough if she left him, actually. If she met someone else on one of her vacations. But it’s hard to imagine that any woman would leave Carl, that anyone else could seem better in comparison with him. An accident would be best. Instantaneous death, even in my darkest fantasies I don’t want her to suffer, I just want her to disappear. The worst thing would be if she got sick, because then he would have to take care of her. I hope she will stay healthy until the day she forgets to look both ways before she steps off the sidewalk. It is wrong to wish another person dead. A car traveling too fast, she hits her head, there isn’t even any blood. It is wrong to wish another person dead. Death is instantaneous. It is wrong to … Then she is gone.
Sometimes at night I picture them going to bed together. She is wearing a negligee, something silky trimmed with pretty lace, she slips in beside him, lies down close to his body, her head resting on his chest, just the way I do. She is in my place. She t
ouches him the way I do, just like me she knows how he loves to be caressed. She kisses him, he kisses her back. He touches her, running his hand over her pretty, silky negligee. He thinks her body feels nice.
Revulsion grows inside me until I feel like I am going to explode, I feel empty yet at the same time I am filled with darkness, eating away at me like acid. The thought of his hands on her body keeps coming back to me, like a stake being driven into my heart. How can you do something like that when you have such an intimate relationship with another person? Never before have I known an intimacy like the feeling that exists between Carl and me. Everything is so perfect, so self-evident.
Then it’s as though Emelie is sitting in my living room, a knowing look on her face. You’re mixing up love and lust, she says sharply to me. What does she know about it? She can’t possibly be right.
I pour myself a glass of wine, quickly knock back half of it, look at myself in the mirror. My hair is a mess and my makeup almost nonexistent after a day at work, it disappears in the steam from the food and the hot water and the dishwashers, my face is pale and shiny. I am not even pretty. I am nothing. It seems so obvious sometimes, the inadequacy that is my inheritance.
I could have had the same kind of life that the other kids on the street where I grew up have today, an undemanding life, I too could have had a secure, easy job, I could have been married and pregnant and bought a house and saved up for vacations, I could have been one of the junior nurses at the hospital, then at least I would have a job, security, I curse the fact that I am incapable of living such a life, I curse my longing for life to be more than that. “Perhaps a normal person has to be stupid,” thought Dostoevsky’s man from underground, perhaps that’s true, at least if you are going to find happiness in that normality, put up with it, be satisfied. I wish I could be satisfied, yet at the same time I despise those who are. I enjoy thinking, At least I’m not like you, even though the only result is that I continue to be lonely.
And then there are all those who manage to have the other kind of life: those who graduate from university and prepare their résumés and make use of their contacts and buy property, my body throbs with anger when I think about them, when I think about their self-confidence, the confidence with which they make the world their own, it seems to be imprinted in their DNA that the world is made for people like them, all they have to do is help themselves.
I have seventy-five credits in university courses that are completely useless in real life, the life where it is necessary to earn money every month to pay the interest on a loan no one will be willing to give me, I wear cheap clothes, I have a revolting job. I will always have to wear cheap clothes. I will always feel cheap.
I look at myself in the mirror again. I tame my hair with a product that has a synthetic smell of watermelon, I wipe the eyeliner from around my eyes and reapply it, I dust powder and blush over my cheeks, paint my lips dark red. I put on a black dress that isn’t really clean but isn’t dirty either, spray perfume at the base of my throat, that’s the best I can do, but I’ve realized that men aren’t all that choosy.
The Palace nightclub, glittering like a ferry that has drifted ashore at the bend of the Motala River, is almost empty at this early hour, I sit down at the bar, order a glass of wine. After a little while a man comes and sits not far away, when he looks at me I smile at him, he smiles back, picks up his glass of beer and comes to sit beside me.
“Are you waiting for someone?” he asks.
His Norrköping accent makes him sound pleasant, but slightly stupid.
“No, I’m on my own.”
He nods. This is not the kind of place you come to on your own, this is the kind of place you head for with a whole gang of giggling girlfriends, dressed to the nines, after a long session of pre-gaming at home, this is the kind of place you come to with your work colleagues after a conference dinner when you don’t feel like going home yet. Or if you don’t feel like going home alone.
His name is Anders, he looks as if he’s just under forty. He’s an accountant. I have never met an accountant before. He looks like a typical guy from Norrköping, his clothes are nice but somehow boring, he’s nothing like Carl, he doesn’t have Carl’s stylish elegance, he is more charming than handsome, he looks at bit crumpled and untidy, but the overall impression is pleasant. He’s had a difficult week, he tells me. He works too hard, he doesn’t have a ring on his finger. Perhaps he feels lonely going home to an empty apartment, perhaps he would rather go out and have a few beers and chat with whoever is around just to escape the silence in his empty apartment, I have no problem understanding that. I enjoy talking to him, he is slightly cynical in a way that appeals to me, he makes me laugh. When he goes out for a smoke I go with him, accept a cigarette so that he won’t have to smoke alone. We stand side by side under the projecting roof outside the Palace where the ground looks like a Byzantine mosaic made up of cigarette butts and maple leaves in different shades of gold, we are both slightly drunk. We have to stand very close together right by the wall so that the fine rain in the air won’t blow in on us, I am aware of his scent, he smells good, some kind of simple cologne, everything about him is ordinary, I have never found ordinariness attractive before, but right now it feels like exactly what I am longing for.
He is a perfectly ordinary lover too. After I have asked him if he wants to come back to my place, and we have stood outside my door drunkenly searching for topics of conversation to fill the time between both of us thinking that we want to kiss each other and actually doing so, and we have kissed our way through the hallway and into bed, he makes love to me in a way that is kind of functional: considerate and correct, but not particularly passionate. He is not like Carl.
Afterward I feel utterly safe, I cuddle up to him, he is warm. I always cuddle up to Carl’s back when we have made love, burying my face in the back of his neck and inhaling his smell. I have murmured “I love you” a few times, and he has murmured the same words back to me, half asleep, in the trancelike state that follows when I have done everything that lovers do, it feels the same right now. The accountant is also warm and he smells good as I nestle closer to him. “I love you,” I murmur. It’s like a reflex, the words follow automatically from the feeling of security that comes from being next to another body, I whisper them quietly into the back of his neck as I do with Carl, sometimes so quietly that he doesn’t hear, sometimes he has already fallen asleep.
But the accountant has not fallen asleep. He turns over immediately, staring at me with a mixture of horror and revulsion in his eyes. As if I were crazy. Maybe I am.
“What did you say?”
I look away. “Nothing. I don’t know. I made a mistake.”
I turn my back on him in bed. I hear him sit up, sigh. Then he gets up, walks around the room gathering up his clothes, which are scattered all over the floor. He sits down on the bed, buttoning his shirt.
“I have to go,” he says.
“Okay,” I mumble.
I am drawn to the harbor in the evenings. I prefer to go at twilight, but the days are so short now, it is already dark in the afternoons when I am still sitting with Siv and Magdalena on our break, gazing out over the hospital parking lot as a truck carrying a huge Christmas tree pulls up outside the entrance. Siv thinks it’s a bit early, and I agree, it’s November, the clocks have only just gone back, perhaps there has been some kind of misunderstanding, but maybe those who are responsible for the hospital grounds think that anything that will light up the darkness in the ugly parking lot where the wind always howls is a good idea, that’s what I would have thought.
I stick to the southern side of the harbor. The northern side looks more like an industrial estate, with ugly buildings housing firms that dig holes and fix drains, mountains of coal, big piles of timber ready to be sent across the world, to be loaded onto ships and transported and used in a land far away from here.
On the southern side there are cranes fixed to the ground on rails, like tramline
s, they can move backward and forward along the quayside. A ship is moored next to a long row of containers full of gravel, in darkness, silent, waiting. Perhaps they are all asleep on board, the seamen from the other side of the world, or perhaps they have gone ashore and are sitting in some bar in town, or perhaps they are walking the same streets as me, looking for women who are walking the streets too.
If you walk past the cranes and the containers, past the storage depots and the sooty brick building that used to be the customhouse, farther and farther out, eventually you reach an abandoned ferry terminal. Back in the nineties ships were supposed to travel to the new Baltic, I don’t remember where, Tallinn or Riga. Nobody used the ferries, and the plans were canceled after just a few trips. Nobody from a dilapidated harbor town wants to sail across an ice-cold sea to another dilapidated harbor town, they should have been able to work that out. The terminal is still there, a low building made of metal and glass, with rows and rows of red plastic chairs, still virtually unused beneath a thick layer of dust, the same red as the shipping company’s logo, a deserted information desk and a ticket office. It has aged badly, the paintwork is flaking and faded, the metal rusty, the whole thing looks cheap.
The tower that led to the ferries is still there on the quayside, it looks like the tunnel you walk through when boarding a plane: a staircase leading up to a corridor leading nowhere. I have fantasized about this, watched it play out before my eyes like a film: I am walking up the stairs, along the swaying floor of the corridor, I am thinking that this is the route that will take me away from here, take me somewhere else, and then I take that last step straight out into nothingness, I begin to fall before I realize what has happened, I split the surface of the dark, ice-cold water, I am swallowed up by the water, which is heavy, sucking me down, dragging me down, and I sink.
The Other Woman Page 8