Before I have time to say anything, she starts laughing.
“I don’t mean we should kill her. I’m not crazy.”
She strokes my hair.
“I just need to work out what we should do. We could tell her that he’s cheating, for example. We could write a letter. Even if he denied it she would still be suspicious, she wouldn’t trust him for a long time. It would destroy something between them. Although of course it would make it more difficult for you to see him, because she wouldn’t let him out of her sight. He wouldn’t be able to come around to your place, he’d probably find it difficult even to text you. She’d check his phone. I want her to leave him. It’s not because of you, but I’m sure you know that.”
She looks at me with an expression of total honesty. I nod. I do know.
“I don’t care what happens afterward.” She fixes me with her gaze. “I don’t care if he decides he wants to be with you when she’s left him. I don’t even care if he’s happy with you. I just don’t want him to be happy with her. Or with those kids. I don’t want him to have that family.”
I nod again. I understand.
I understand even more clearly when he is in my apartment a few days later. I am so disgusted by the ring on his finger. It gleams in the half-light in my bed, and I can’t stop thinking that there is another woman’s name engraved inside it, that it symbolizes a promise he made to someone else, a promise that he breaks over and over again, and suddenly this is no longer cool, or sexy, or exciting, it is just grubby and sordid. When he runs the hand wearing the ring up my thigh I think it is going to burn me, as silver burns vampires in the old legends, it is going to leave a bright red welt of burnt skin behind it.
“Her name is Gabriella,” Alex says the next time we are sitting in the hotel bar, even though I haven’t asked for any information. I have deliberately avoided finding out what her name is in order to keep my mind calm, but this stirs me up. Gabriella. It is sophisticated and intelligent at the same time. Women called Gabriella make things happen, and they are beautiful while they are doing it.
“I suppose she’s beautiful?” I ask, it is stupid of me because I don’t really want to know. Alex nods.
“Very. Particularly for a woman in her forties. You’d never think she was that age.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” I mutter.
“My mom is beautiful too. And so are you. He only likes beautiful women. But that’s still not enough for him. He’s incapable of being faithful. He’s completely untrustworthy.”
I know she’s wrong. I can’t tell her that I think I know her father better than she does, but at the same time I am certain that I do: her perception of him is based on childhood memories and a betrayal, she hasn’t gotten to know him the way I have, as an adult. My perception of Carl is that he is the polar opposite of untrustworthy: he is reliable, considerate. On those occasions when he has upset me by saying he will come over, then canceling at short notice, there has always been an explanation, some practical matter that has come up in his life as a family man, I hate it and it makes me angry, I am crushed by it, but I know he doesn’t mean me any harm. I have never doubted that he really does want to see me, or that he really cares about me in the way that a married man cares about his mistress when he knows that he can talk to her more easily than to his wife: not with the whole of his heart, but with those parts he can spare once he has fulfilled all his obligations as a husband and father.
I have never thought of him as anything other than a good man. So good that I want him to be mine.
The weather turns mild and wet, all the snow melts away. To begin with, rain falls on the icy streets making them as slippery as glass, the people outside my window have to shuffle along, even though they are in a hurry to catch their buses and trains. I watch them over the baking parchment, it is like watching an aquarium, although I am inside the glass instead of them. Black ice, they say at the hospital, record numbers of broken bones. They plow and salt and grit, the little orange trucks drive around all day in the parking lots, scraping away the ice so that no one slips outside the main entrance.
Then comes the thaw, and days of slush, pools of water spreading everywhere: inside the revolving doors, inside the cafeteria, there is grit all over the place. Siv tells me to clean the floor, I grab a mop and bucket and set to work. I haven’t seen Carl at the hospital for a long time, he stays in his own department, but texts me several times a day. Alex texts me too, wanting to know what Carl has said. I feel like a communications center as I pass the information on to her with a feeling that is halfway between obligation and delight, I leave out anything I think is too private, exaggerate other things that I know will be perceived as being to my advantage. Then I notice Siv’s irritated expression as I reply to one of Alex’s messages, so I put my phone down next to the coffee machine and continue mopping. They will both have to wait until I’ve finished.
Norrköping in winter without snow, with no sign of spring yet apart from the longer afternoons. I get off the bus from the hospital up by the department stores and wander slowly around, out of one store and into the next. They have started displaying the spring fashions even though it feels like a long time before we will be able to wear those kinds of things, thin skirts and dresses, bright colors. I glance distractedly through a rack of items in every color of the rainbow, one section is red in a shade that really stands out: a chilly, strong red, like raspberry.
I take one of the red dresses into the fitting room. The lighting is kind, and my winter-pale body looks better in the dress than I had expected. I stand up straight, suck in my tummy and push out my breasts, twirl around in front of the mirror. It looks good. It doesn’t look like me, but it looks good. Perhaps this is the person I ought to be. A person who wears a sexy red dress in the middle of winter, who tosses her hair and hasn’t a care in the world.
I send the picture to both Carl and Alex. They answer right away, both of them. “Sexy, buy it!” from Carl, a longer message from Alex telling me that I am beautiful.
At first I am pleased, twirling around again in front of the mirror, perhaps I really am sexy. Or perhaps men always find women in red dresses sexy. Deep down inside I feel something that resembles defiance.
I don’t want to give them this. Good writers are good because they don’t lie, not to themselves or to anyone else. The same thing applies to good people. It’s just a dress, my brain says. The fact that they like it is great, isn’t it? But it doesn’t feel great. It feels false. I don’t want to be a person who tries to please others. Not the women’s tribunal, not Carl and Alex. I never wear red. Who am I trying to fool? Yourself, says a part of my brain. Then I think I look cheap. It’s a cheap dress, and the color is far too bright. It hurts my eyes. I quickly take it off, put it back where it came from.
You were both wrong, I think as I walk out of the store. People like you can be wrong too.
I have brought a book to the hotel bar and as I sit down in an armchair with a glass on the table beside me, I feel slightly ridiculous but proud at the same time: there is definitely something of the insufferable poseur about sitting in a bar with a book by Vilhelm Ekelund and a glass of red wine, but it’s typical of the kind of thing guys who want to write can get away with. So I sit up straight, underline a few sections in the book. I would like to underline virtually every word. Alex is late, she has texted to say that the project she is helping her graphic design tutor with is taking longer than expected.
A man is sitting on his own not far away, leafing through Industry Today, he doesn’t look like he’s from Norrköping. Sometimes it’s so obvious, those who come from this town and those who don’t. Or at least those who started out here and have changed while they’ve been away. Apart from the fact that his jacket fits perfectly and looks expensive, there is an air of assurance about his posture and the way he turns the pages, a lack of self-consciousness that gives him away. If he glances up and sees me I hope he will think the same of me, that I am not self-c
onscious. That I am sitting here with a glass of wine, reading my book, as if it is the most natural thing in the world.
When Alex is over half an hour late I text and ask her if she is on her way. She doesn’t reply. I do my best to drink my wine very slowly, but somehow my glass is suddenly empty and the bartender is there at once, topping it off. “The world is fire, become fire and you will have a place in the world,” Ekelund writes, I underline those words. I will become fire.
It doesn’t seem long before my second glass is almost empty and I realize I have been sitting alone in the bar for over an hour, and Alex still hasn’t replied. “Hi, is everything okay?” I text her, I wait a few minutes, ten, fifteen. When there is still no response my anxiety turns to anger, an all too familiar anger. “Hello???” I write, I wait a little longer. No reply.
I don’t feel in the least like fire now, I feel like nothing. Angry, and at the same time nothing. Just like when Carl doesn’t show up as he has promised. At least he lets me know. I knock back the last of my wine, beckon the bartender and pay, notice that the man with Industry Today has a plate of seafood pasta in front of him and is dining alone, he looks dignified. He must think I’m sad, whatever he thinks of me I must seem sad, either I was waiting for someone who didn’t show up or I don’t actually have anyone to wait for, I’m just the kind of person who goes to a bar and drinks two glasses of wine on her own.
Alex texts while I am making my way through the town center, heading down toward the harbor. “Forgive me but he offered me a glass of wine then we had sex” I realize it must have been written in haste, she always puts a period at the end of her sentences. If she had forgotten we had arranged to meet it would have been a different matter. That would have been acceptable. She has had a lot to think about, with an overlapping assignment and a project, plus the special project she has been helping her tutor with. But she didn’t forget, she just didn’t care that we had arranged to meet. Because she preferred to be with someone else.
I clench my fists so tightly that the nails dig into my palms, it is a good pain. They leave rows of half-moon-shaped, throbbing purple marks on my hands, I stare at them in the glow of a streetlamp, dissatisfied because it is not enough, what would be enough? I want to scream, hit someone, break something. Down in the harbor I kick one of the cable reels, that doesn’t help either. My cell phone vibrates with a new text: “You’re not mad at me are you”
“Don’t you even have time for a question mark???” That’s what I want to reply, or scream, yell it right in her face with all the anger that has accumulated in my body, it is like a battery of dammed-up energy, a dam that could run a power station.
“Yes,” I reply instead, then I switch the phone to Do Not Disturb so that no texts can be delivered. Let her wonder. Then I think she might not even do that, as she’s so preoccupied with her tutor and whatever they’re up to. She has shown me photos of him, he’s a good-looking guy, I picture him kissing her, they’re both good-looking, of course they want to kiss each other.
But my phone is full of a long series of apologies from Alex when I switch it on the following day. Eventually I agree to let her come over and she apologizes in person, speaks in her softest voice, gazes at me with her most pleading expression. I tell her she is forgiven, and she is so demonstratively meek that I am embarrassed. On the whole I was always alone.
She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a ring of keys, she dangles them in front of my face, proud and enthusiastic, as if they are a present.
“I’m watering their plants. They don’t want their fig tree to die, because then they might not be able to offer their very own home-grown figs with the chèvre at some dinner party in the summer, and that would be a real shame. They’re up in Åre.”
“I know.”
They go to Åre every year. Carl likes downhill skiing, the whole family enjoys it. They go with friends, a little gang of beautiful, successful people with children who can ski and know how to dine in restaurants, they stay in the same hotel and meet up for drinks at the end of each day’s skiing. When I think about it I realize how ridiculous it is to imagine that there could be a place for me in Carl’s life, I try to picture the scene if I went with him to Åre instead of his wife: I would have to attend the ski school, much to the amusement of his friends and their sporty wives, I skied once on a field trip in junior high, and I knew back then that it wasn’t for me. I would have to buy the right clothes, and when it came to the après ski they would ask me what I do. “I’m writing a collection of short stories,” I would answer. Or “I’m studying literature.” They would respond politely and with interest, but I would feel like a visitor in their world, someone who has come to take a look but won’t be staying long.
The jagged edge of the biggest key looks like the silhouette of a mountain chain, perhaps that’s what it looks like in Åre when Carl has taken the lift up to the top of the run and is gazing out toward the horizon.
Alex smiles.
“Shall we go over there? Right now?”
I have always found empty apartments a little creepy: it’s like walking into a place where life has stopped, the ruins of an everyday existence. The Malmberg family home is clean and tidy, but there are signs that it was a stressful morning — shoes in a heap just inside the door, hats and gloves on the elegant chest of drawers, unwashed dishes with the remains of dried-on breakfast cereal in the sink, they will be difficult to get clean, today’s Stockholm newspapers lying open on the kitchen table. I sit down and leaf through Svenska Dagbladet, Alex sits on the big sofa in the living room and puts her feet up on the coffee table.
“We could have a party here,” she says.
“No, we couldn’t,” I say.
She turns around and looks at me. “Why not?”
“They’d find out. People would break stuff, or steal something … it would be a disaster. They’d pull down the chandelier or drop a cigarette on the carpet and start a fire.”
“That’s exactly what the daughter who’s left behind at home while her daddy goes off on vacation with his new family would do,” she says, almost to herself. “Attention-seeking behavior, that’s what they’d say.”
She gives a little smile. “No …,” she goes on. “No, you’re right of course. You’re almost always right. Good job I’ve got you.”
Her voice is hovering somewhere between sincerity and irony, I don’t know what to think.
She gets up, pulls out one of the big gray boxes on the bottom shelf of the bookcase.
“Want to see some photos?”
The box is full of photo albums. She takes out the top one, brings it into the kitchen and opens it at the beginning.
“End of the school year,” she says. “That’s Mirjam at the end of … what do you think? First or second grade?”
She holds up the album to show me. A little girl in a pretty dress is smiling at the camera, squinting slightly; it is early summer. Standing behind her is a beautiful woman with blond hair and a pastel-colored dress, she too is smiling and squinting, she has a younger girl in her arms. It is a lovely picture. Gabriella and Matilda celebrating with Mirjam. Mother and daughters. Presumably Carl was the photographer. There is an intimacy about the whole thing that I cannot bear: they look at him, he says something funny to make them laugh, takes the picture. They are a family.
“I don’t want to see this,” I mumble.
Alex slams the album shut.
“No. No, you’re right again. Neither do I.”
She replaces the album, then comes back and finds a jar of olives and a piece of cheese in the refrigerator. She opens the jar and pops an olive in her mouth, chews it with a thoughtful look on her face.
“We need wine,” she decides.
“Isn’t it a bit early?”
It is just after four o’clock. Alex shrugs.
“After work?” she says. “It’s okay to start early if you’ve had a tough day at work. God knows my father wouldn’t hesitate to have a drink at this
time. In fact, that’s probably exactly what he’s doing right now.”
She stands on tiptoe to reach the bottles at the top of the wine rack, which is built into the space between two kitchen cabinets.
“What would you like to drink, darling?” she chirrups as she pulls out a bottle, examines the label. “Amarone?”
“Sure … But isn’t that really expensive?”
“He’s no cheapskate, but it doesn’t cost that much. He has good taste rather than expensive taste. Anyway, helping yourself to a little treat when you’re watering the plants is part of the deal. Let’s see …”
She opens a drawer and rummages around until she finds a corkscrew, she opens the bottle, then takes out two of the beautiful Finnish wineglasses. She fills both with slightly more than would be considered normal, then places one glass firmly on the table in front of me.
“Cheers, honey.”
She smiles and raises her glass. The wine is delicious, possibly the best I have ever tasted. Alex cuts a piece of cheese and passes it to me, it’s also delicious. Everything in this apartment is delicious and beautiful. I tell her what I’m thinking.
“They’ve got plenty of money and good taste,” she says. “This is what you get.”
“Can you imagine me in a place like this?” I ask her.
She looks at me.
“Yes. Yes, of course. You’d fit in here. Much better than where you live now.”
It has grown dark outside and it feels cozy in here, it is warm and snug. Alex walks around lighting candles in the small colored-glass lanterns that are dotted all over the living room, then she switches off the main light and takes the wine bottle over to the sofa.
“Come here,” she says and I do as I am told, as usual. She pours more wine into my glass, moves closer to me on the sofa, rests her head on my shoulder.
“I’ve thought so many times that I would have loved to grow up here with him,” she says. “In this apartment, with all these lovely things, and the view. That’s where they usually put the Christmas tree.”
The Other Woman Page 12