Don’t fall in love, Emelie has said to me over and over again. I have told her that I won’t, that I will just be his mistress, I am happy with that. But it’s not going to work, I realized that at an early stage. As soon as he was lying in my arms after we had made love, with me stroking his cheek and him rendered harmless, that tall, slightly stern consultant from the cafeteria was suddenly mine, he was naked in my bed with his head resting on my breast, allowing me to caress him. He fell asleep almost immediately, and when he woke up he looked at me with confusion in his eyes for a second before it all came back to him, and then he smiled in a way that showed he was happy to be close to me, he told me I was beautiful. He sounded grateful, humble. It was an entirely new feeling: I had a kind of power over him. And that made me submissive, almost grateful in return because he had given me that power, because he had the courage to be small before me. There was such an intense intimacy in that moment that my eyes filled with tears, and he drew my face down to his and kissed me gently and held me so very close, and I knew it would be impossible not to fall in love.
Besides, he is a good person. A genuinely good man: there is something honest about his whole being, just as I thought the first time I noticed his laugh. He is decent, straightforward, simple without being banal.
I could live with him, I have thought that many times.
But how would it look if he got divorced? This is his second marriage. You have to think about that kind of thing when you’re an adult. You have to think about the children and your salary and what people would say.
“He’s not going to leave her,” Emelie says over coffee.
She has said it before, and it upset me, but now it seems to me that she just doesn’t understand, because she has never experienced anything like what I have with Carl, such an intimate relationship, such a perfect balance between attraction and respect and tenderness.
“He’s too old for you,” she adds.
“He’s not that old.”
“He’s nearly twice as old as you.”
“If we were in Hollywood he could be, like, seventy, and nobody would think it was weird.”
“But we’re not in Hollywood. We’re in Norrköping.”
She slurps her revolting coffee, which smells of hazelnuts. She could well be the only person left in the world who still likes those flavored syrups in her coffee, everybody else gave up after they’d tried them, or at least after they finished high school. She has bad taste, that’s all there is to it. I suddenly find her really annoying, everything about her gets on my nerves.
“I thought you approved of everything that goes against the norm?” I said.
“Sorry?”
She sounds defensive.
“Well, you’re always talking about how important that kind of thing is. The male norm and the hetero norm and the white Caucasian norm and all the other stuff you care about. But now I’m doing something that really does go against the norm, and that’s no good either, because it’s not the right norm, according to you.”
“I never said that.”
“Yes, you did. It just old-fashioned moralizing, because I’m in a relationship that doesn’t fit in with your list of approved norm-breaking relationships. If I’d gotten together with an older woman, I’m sure you would have thought that was fantastic and totally liberated; you’d have been sitting here encouraging me.”
She looks a little unsure of herself, as if at least some of what I have said has hit home, and that fires me up even more.
“What’s the actual point of everything you believe in?” I say. I can’t stop myself now, I have to get it all out. “Do you seriously believe that if you just talk about the feminist struggle at every party and keep going to your cheerleading group, something is going to change? Do you imagine everyone in the whole world is going to wake up one day and use their free will to want exactly what you think they ought to want? What’s best for them, purely from your point of view? You won’t be part of all that, of course, because you happen to want to live in a heterosexual relationship in a nice apartment in a way that is kind of radical anyway, because you’re aware that you are the norm … Does that give you the right to judge everyone else?”
“You’re not making any sense,” she said.
Personally I think I’ve never been clearer. I am filled with a sense of having seen through everything.
“Niklas says —” she goes on.
“Have you talked to Niklas about me?”
“Yes.” She looks surprised. “I talk to Niklas about everything.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“I’m sorry, but you can’t stop me,” she says in an unbearably arrogant tone of voice that is just too much for me. I have to go. I get to my feet and say exactly that. “I have to go,” and I leave: out on the street I feel like a stubborn child who wants to scream I can’t stand it! and I can’t stand it, I can’t cope with all that falseness. Suddenly Emelie seems to be the very incarnation of what I am talking about: people can become so obsessed with theories and structures that their whole life is nothing more than an attempt to navigate around them, they refuse to take off the blinkers, to understand that theories are theories, not truths, you can’t just use them randomly in reality, you can’t use the same tools in life as you would in feminist textual analysis or whatever it is that Emelie is into these days. You can’t live according to theories. It shows a complete lack of respect for life itself.
The thought makes me sad and angry at the same time: with all the freedom Emelie has when it comes to self-realization, a freedom many people would never even dare to dream of — I am thinking of my relatives, of the cooks in the main hospital kitchen — and with the wonderful opportunity to let her life become something bigger, she deliberately limits herself, ties herself up with fresh restrictions on what is and is not acceptable. How can she do that, what a waste, what a privilege for the spoiled middle classes, who have every opportunity open to them: she is willfully making her life poorer by living according to a few theories put forward in the books she is studying in college, following them as if they were commandments.
I feel drunk with rage. I knock back a glass of wine as soon as I get home, then I feel drunk for real. I pick up my cell phone and text Alex.
“Hi, how are you, what are you doing?”
She answers right away: “Having a beer with some of the guys from my class, bored out of my mind. Want to meet?”
You bet I do.
We arrange to meet at the new wine bar by the theater, but it’s closed, so we go to the Palace instead. As usual it’s quiet early in the evening, there is no one else at the bar. Alex lets me tell her all about my views on Emelie and what has made me so angry, then she talks animatedly about her graphic design tutor, she still hasn’t slept with him, but she’s convinced he’s flirting with her.
“I sit there at his lectures just feeling horny; I’m not learning anything. And now he’s asked if I’d like to help out with a project he’s working on, he’s setting up an exhibition for the Museum of Labor. It’s in the evenings, and it hasn’t really got anything to do with the university, but he thought I’d fit right in. I mean, it’s almost like saying he thinks I’m talented, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“By the way, I don’t think he listens to synth pop or rides a motorcycle, which means those leather pants are just weird.”
We order another drink and I feel drunk and happy now, unlike the way I felt just an hour ago, and I think Alex is wonderful, at last there is someone like her around, and then I see someone I recognize out of the corner of my eye, it’s the accountant.
I wave to him, it’s obvious he’s already noticed me but didn’t dare say hello, because his wave doesn’t look anywhere near as surprised as he probably thinks it does. He gets up and comes over. I am about to introduce him and Alex when I realize I’ve forgotten his name. He looks disappointed. He hasn’t forgotten my name.
We pull up a stool and h
e sits down between us, glancing from Alex to me and back again as if he can’t quite believe his luck. I catch him looking around the room from time to time, hoping that he will see someone he knows, someone who will be impressed by the company he is keeping. Alex and I are too attractive for this town, but to be fair the accountant deserves us: he is funny, he makes us laugh and he looks cute in his slightly crumpled shirt and jacket, he buys more wine when our glasses are empty, then he buys another round. Eventually all three of us are pretty far gone, and Alex suggests that we all go back to my place. The accountant looks slightly uneasy but nods: he thinks that’s a cool idea.
Outside it is bitterly cold, perhaps the dampness rising from the river is creeping along the streets, this is how I imagine London in the nineteenth century. Our breath vaporizes, Alex’s laughter bounces off the walls in the stairwell. The accountant is smoking a cigarette, he looks happy.
They sit down on my sofa while I fetch them some wine, I’m working tomorrow so I should stop drinking, but then again it’s not difficult to load dirty plates and containers into a dishwasher even if you have a hangover. I don’t have to make any decisions, take responsibility, achieve anything that requires concentration or even thought — in fact there is no incentive whatsoever to stop drinking, so I fill three glasses to the brim and when I walk back into the living room they are already kissing.
“Come here,” Alex says, and I do as I am told.
The dishwasher down in the main kitchen is a cubist whale made of aluminum, lying on its belly with its mouth wide open, filtering dishes and containers through a series of vibrating rubber strips, stroking them into position before it slowly swallows them, washing and rinsing deep down in its belly, then delivering them on the other side, sparkling and red hot. Sometimes it feels like my friend, or at least my pet. I am its caregiver, I clean it and take care of it when it has done its work for the day, when the last containers have passed through it and been blown dry and the room is like a warm, damp cave, where the air exhaled by the dishwasher has misted up the huge windows against the December darkness outside.
It is my job to make sure everything is clean and tidy at the end of the workday whenever I am sent down to the main kitchen so that it is ready for eight-thirty the next morning, when the breakfast containers come clattering in, sticky with porridge, but overnight it must be clean, there are rules and regulations on hygiene to prevent the spread of infection among the patients. No one has actually told me about these rules and regulations, but I expect they exist, which is why the boss is so particular about the red mold that spreads like rust in the wet patches that form in the indentations on top of the dishwasher; they never really dry out in the damp air overnight, but turn into little red pools. Earlier in the fall one of the other temporary assistants had to stand on a chair and spray the whole top of the machine with the jet wash. Kristina, who comes in on a training placement for a few days each week, helped to sluice the murky water down into the drains. She’s backward, or whatever it’s called, not exactly retarded, but slow, of low intelligence, it drives me crazy when I have to work with her, mainly because it takes her such a long time to send the dishes through the machine, or to stack them when she is on the drying section, I have to work slowly to prevent total chaos breaking out, or I have to run over to her end of the machine to grab a crate of lids or plates that could have ended up on the floor if she hadn’t caught it. It’s not so much the extra work that gets on my nerves as the realization that I am doing the same job as someone who is stupid, I don’t know how else to put it, and I don’t know how to put it so that it doesn’t sound unpleasant, because that’s exactly what it is.
There are days when I think I’m being silly, that I won’t be here for long, and that it’s only the washing up I really hate, I have nothing against working in the cafeteria, and if I were working in an ordinary restaurant I wouldn’t think the washing up was disgusting, I don’t even mind washing up in the cafeteria, but down here, in the main kitchen, I can’t help thinking about where the food containers have come from, which ward they have been on, which patients have eaten from them, what diseases those patients might have. Some of the smaller containers have been used by patients who can eat only pureed food. I don’t know what’s wrong with them, perhaps they can’t chew, or swallow, or maybe there’s something wrong with their digestive system. The kitchen serves tiny portions of different purees in the smallest containers, but they often come back completely untouched. I try not to breathe in the smell as I scrape the contents into the waste disposal: bright green pea puree, mashed carrots, something grayish brown that must be meat, turned into a mousse-like substance with a stick blender in the main kitchen’s special diets section.
But there are some days when I think nothing is ever going to change.
I will spend the rest of my life scraping cold food into a trough, stacking containers and lids with an intellectually challenged trainee, wearing this ugly uniform every working day forever.
In the corner where the cooks hang out there is a large table with a stainless steel surface, that’s where everyone gathers for meetings and breaks, there’s a can containing the coffee money — you’re supposed to put in two kronor for a cup of coffee, no exceptions, and there are sheets with recipes printed on them and a pile of well-thumbed magazines open at the crossword pages. The staff hunch over them during their breaks, or fill in the odd word while they’re waiting for something to cook. One afternoon they are all discussing the clue “Sound alike,” they turn it this way and that, count the squares, it can’t be “echo,” that’s too short, so they try to make it longer, “echo effect,” it still doesn’t fit. When they’ve gone back to their pots and pans I count the squares: twelve. O N O M A T O P O E I A. I don’t say it, because I know how they would react, looking at me and thinking it’s weird that I could come up with that word, their suspicions overshadowing the pleasure of filling in such a long word. I once tried to explain that you don’t have vacations when you’re in college, and one of the women who washes up said that her daughter has a Christmas vacation and the midwinter break in February and an Easter vacation, and she’s at Haga High School, and I said, “Well, yes, you get vacations in high school …,” and I realized she didn’t know the difference between high school and university.
“Please tell me I’ll get a different job someday,” I plead with Alex as I sprawl on the sofa in her red living room with a glass of box wine. It isn’t particularly good, but still it feels highly sophisticated, a real luxury, to drink a glass of wine, or two, or three, or sometimes four, on an ordinary weekday evening, Alex with her student budget and me with my low-paid casual work: we don’t drink to get drunk, at least not really drunk, just pleasantly tipsy, tipsy in a civilized way, as befits the two of us. Every time we meet up Alex nags me, telling me I should write more, if writing is what I really want to do, and because writing is what I really want to do, I have obeyed her. I have written some short stories, I know they’re not very good, not like Thomas Mann or Dostoevsky, but at least they’re as good as a lot of other stuff that is published by new writers my age. If I can just gather enough together, I will send them to a publisher.
“Of course you’ll get a different job,” Alex says. “But above all you’re going to write lots and lots of books.”
She raises her eyebrows, murmurs “Cheers,” and clinks her glass against mine before she takes a sip. She doesn’t really know what she wants to do in the future, something in the media perhaps. Or she might stay on at the university and hope to secure a research post eventually.
“Your lover ought to be able to keep you,” she says.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“Has he said anything about leaving his wife?”
I don’t like this topic of conversation, my stomach ties itself in knots whenever it comes up. I think about it all the time, to be honest, but I find it difficult to share my thoughts, even with Alex, although I know she won’t judg
e me. We don’t have to share everything, I often think. I have never felt comfortable talking about private matters, not to anyone.
“We haven’t actually discussed it,” I mumble.
“You ought to ask him what his plans are,” she says. “If you want to be more than his mistress, you’re going to have to push him.”
“I’m not exactly the kind of person who pushes things.”
“Then maybe you’re going to have to change.”
I make coffee after we have made love, it is afternoon, he is going to the hospital shortly. I don’t have a shift in the cafeteria so I thought I’d spend the day writing, even though I know it probably won’t go well, but if I sit at the computer with the document in front of me for long enough, then sooner or later I am bound to start writing out of sheer boredom.
We have our coffee at my little kitchen table, I really love having him here. It feels like we are a real couple, drinking coffee together before he goes off to work, and tonight we will do something nice, something perfectly ordinary but nice, maybe watch a movie, have a glass of wine, and I will fall asleep with my head on his lap on the sofa, thinking about it almost gives me a physical pain in my heart.
He clears his throat. “Are you doing anything special tomorrow night?” he asks.
I hardly ever do anything special. I shake my head.
“I was thinking …,” he begins. “I was thinking you might want to come out with me. To a private viewing.”
“For real?”
He laughs. “Yes, for real. My wife is away, and … well, I thought you might enjoy it. It’s at the Museum of Art.”
A wave of affection floods my whole body. I have to get up and give him a hug, I know how happy I look. He notices it too, he smiles back at me. He’s so gorgeous when he smiles.
“Is it an upscale exhibit?” I ask with my face pressed against his neck. “What should I wear?”
The Other Woman Page 9