And she flew home. Then she walked from Central Station to Kungsholmen, the boot digging into her Achilles tendon. In Stockholm, all the snow had melted. It was dark outside and dark inside. She felt the desolation and latent despair, started making calls; no one but Fatima answered, though she’d left calling her till last. She was the most principled and least accommodating. A few years before Fatima had had a drawn-out relationship with a married man in which she’d been tossed between euphoria and misery. Now she was married and had two small children who were allowed to endlessly insist on her attention when she was on the phone, something Ester endured with equanimity, aware as she was that she took up too much of people’s valuable time and energy. Fatima told Ester that once people got physical, expectations could develop. From this point forward, Ester had rights. Ester knew her other girlfriends would have given more tactical advice, but just then she thought there was really something to this notion of rights.
Spurred by the charge to make demands, if only as an excuse to speak to Olof and tell him that she already missed him, she called him that very night. He was watching TV with the volume on high, was dull-voiced, and didn’t lower the sound.
‘Am I interrupting?’ she asked.
‘I’m watching the news.’
‘I understand.’
She fell silent, waiting for insight to strike him.
‘Do you want to keep watching the news?’
‘I can watch while we talk. Was it nice to get home?’
‘No, of course not. It was awful.’
‘Really? Aha. Yeah.’
He sounded self-conscious yet distant, or as one does when one wishes to keep a certain someone and her menacing intimacies at bay.
‘Are you in another hotel room now?’
‘Yes. It’s nice. Good TV.’
‘I can hear that.’
A few times in conjunction with the production in Västerås the previous autumn, Ester had seen Olof and his wife interact. Each time she’d noticed his wife’s sarcasm. Everyone who knew the couple could testify to the noxious verbal discharges Ebba Silfversköld directed at her husband, and at others. Ester had taken this as a sign of her spiritual hollowness and how bad they had it. Malice and sarcasm couldn’t co-exist with a loving disposition; they were the antechambers of dead relationships, they were contempt shirking from the light, cowardice piggybacking on aggression.
Or they were the final defence of the disappointed and hurt against unjust indifference. Now, during this stifling conversation, Ester understood Olof’s wife’s sarcasm. She sensed in herself a corrosive contagion, heard it hissing in her words.
‘I’m going to bed soon,’ Olof said.
‘Will you sleep well?’
‘Like a rock.’
‘I won’t.’
Olof didn’t enquire, said nothing, kept watching the news.
‘Have you eaten dinner?’ Ester asked.
‘The whole gang went to a pizzeria.’
When she didn’t ask a question, the conversation came to a halt.
‘What kind of pizza did you have?’
‘Calzone.’
‘Folded over?’
‘Yeah. One of those rolls with oozing cheese.’
‘With flakes of oregano on top?’
‘I didn’t notice. Maybe.
Silence.
‘Was it good?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you have a nice time?’
‘Yes. They’re a nice bunch to travel with.’
‘Did any of them ask about us? About you and me.’
‘No.’
‘So no one commented on my visit?’
‘I can’t say that they did.’
‘Strange.’
‘Why would we talk about it?’
‘Indeed. Why.’
‘It’s nobody else’s business.’
‘Well it certainly is somebody else’s business, but perhaps not your touring theatre company’s, no.’
Olof’s irritation rose, stood at attention.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Ester.
‘Ugh.’
‘Of course you can take it like that.’
‘Something unpleasant is coming.’
Ester refrained from saying anything until she regained her self-control.
‘Maybe you want to turn the volume down?’
She readied herself. She knew she shouldn’t say what she was going to say but thought it had to be said, and remembered her rights.
‘I’ve been the mistress before. I have no intention of being one again.’
And after a pause, to avoid any misunderstanding:
‘I want to be with you in a real way.’
The TV could no longer be heard, but Olof’s breathing was louder.
‘You have to choose,’ said Ester.
The words echoed and clattered. She knew she wasn’t ready to back them up by desisting, which rendered them worthless.
Olof’s rage arrived quickly as rage does.
‘So I’m supposed to end things with Ebba right away or what?! Tonight? Or when the fuck do you mean? You want me to call her right now? Huh?’
He made the thought sound absurd. For Ester, it was absurd that the thought was absurd. She said that Olof had had six months to think about it.
‘What do you mean, six months? Think about what?’
She felt ice cold, and when she was cold, he was hot.
Regretting the outburst, Olof wished her a good night. She would not have one, but the sentiment itself was enough to keep her hooked.
Three days went by, three days of slush outside and dejection within. Ester sat with the Gottlob Frege but couldn’t work. On the Wednesday evening she went to the cinema with an acquaintance. They rarely met up but Ester still talked about Olof and her consuming worry over him not seeming to think their weekend away was a turning point. Ester’s acquaintance listened and offered a quick diagnosis. Olof had been after casual sex and Ester should leave him. Ester found this analysis shallow, conventional and moreover wrong because the sex had been the hardest thing to get him on board with. She changed the subject and resisted the impulse to offer a justification.
The film they saw was being shown at the Grand on Sveavägen and was about a woman who fell in love with a Stasi agent who didn’t like what he was doing but was stuck in the system and fraught with self-loathing. During the screening, Ester sneaked her phone out of her bag several times and lit up the cinema. The third time she did this, Olof had called. She wanted to leave right away, in the middle of the film, run to him and throw herself into his arms. But she was stuck in the middle of a row and besides she had her acquaintance to consider.
After the film, she listened to the message surreptitiously, making sure to do so while her acquaintance was in the ladies’ because Ester understood her unspoken criticism as clearly as if she had come right out with it.
She heard how Olof was trying to sound light and breezy in spite of his irritation at having been the one to call her and not the other way around; he even asked if she was out of the country. Ester smiled to herself. Was she to have fled out of disappointment? Or did Olof think that she would only be out of touch if she was out of the country?
There was another, far worse explanation: this was one of those acts of performative speech Olof so expertly commanded. If this was the case, then he was conveying that regardless of what had transpired between them last weekend, Ester was free to travel abroad without telling him because they weren’t close. The purpose of this statement was to communicate this distance in spite of the closeness implied in calling her.
To Ester it was incomprehensible that they might not be close, so she didn’t even acknowledge this explanation.
When the acquaintance, now back from the toilet, noticed that Ester was more interested in calling Olof than the rest of their evening together, she said she wanted to go home. She was hurt; Ester tried to make up for it, but it was too late.
They
took Sveavägen south to the subway and talked about the film. The acquaintance noted how typical it was for the woman to die in the end so that the man can be redeemed. Ester suggested it could just as well be interpreted that many men felt women were important as romantic partners and they quite simply despaired upon watching their beloveds die.
‘You’re too individualist and too romantic.’
‘Love can be important in a person’s life whatever the normative ideas on the subject.’
‘You’re not talking about love. You’re talking about heterosexual coupledom.’
‘I’m talking about love, erotic and intellectual. Coupledom is just a symptom of the closeness implied in loving.
‘As I said, un individu romantique.’
Ester’s acquaintance was more than nettled. Ester may have been too, because she impertinently pointed out that in the film, half of all of those who died in the end were men. It was hard to say that the women’s death toll was related to their being women; you couldn’t have different and pre-determined models of explanation that varied according to gender, right? That would imply you’re using what you hope to discover as a starting point and seeking evidence that supports a theory, rather than trying to uncover a truth about reality.
‘The very point of observation is to support a theory,’ said the acquaintance, ‘because the theory is true.’
‘So what do you do when something contradicts it?’
The acquaintance replied that the theory was there to identify and describe a real structure.
But then, haven’t you assumed what you were meant to prove? Ester wondered while she thought about Olof’s call; maybe their future was bright after all.
‘You should read up on this,’ said the acquaintance. ‘If you did, you’d also have the tools to understand what that man is doing to you and with you.’
The distance between the two night-strollers increased by a few centimetres as they continued down the pavement.
‘In films women die in order to redeem men. And in reality women think they can help men be redeemed,’ said the acquaintance.
‘But if you already know why certain things happen to various types of people, then you don’t need data,’ said Ester, ‘neither in the form of films nor reality, because data will never influence your interpretation of reality; on the contrary, it’s adapted to keep the model intact and unassailable. Isn’t that approach questionable? There could be many other and more complex explanations for what you’re describing.’
‘Your view of knowledge is antiquated.’
‘Yes. It’s as old as this street. But how do you interpret the death of men in the film?’
‘I’m not interested in how men have it, but surely there’s a theory if only you’d study the literature. Call that lover of yours who’s using you. I’m getting on the subway here.’
And with that the acquaintance disappeared into the entrance at Hötorget at the corner of Kungsgatan and Sveavägen.
Ester wasn’t interested how men have it either, but she did have an especial interest in how one particular man had it, who she called while standing at the doors of the Kungshallen food hall with Hötorget and Filmstaden as a backdrop and Kungsgatan stretching like a black rope underfoot.
The phone rang at least ten times. He didn’t answer. Dissatisfied, she hurried home on foot. She was thinking volatile thoughts about herself, about Olof and his reasons for not answering, about her view of knowledge and about her acquaintance’s view of knowledge. Right then she couldn’t bear the idea that she shared her acquaintance’s epistemology of Olof Sten and his love life. All the sense data transmitted to her was being used to support the theory that he harboured the same romantic interest for Ester Nilsson as she did for him, and that only external and internal hurdles were stopping him, hurdles that time and her good influence would clear. It seemed no data could alter this thesis, and she presupposed a fixed structure of love and a universal human being as postulate and axiom, impervious to each refractory piece of empirical evidence; instead it was reshaped to better fit her theory.
The whole walk home she hoped he’d call her back. She kept the phone in her hand so she wouldn’t miss him. Now wasn’t the time to get desperate and call him once a minute, she thought. After twenty minutes, she was home and calling him from her landline. No answer. She called again five minutes later.
The sound of his voice sped her pulse. He said he was at the pub with his nephew. Ester wished he’d been at the pub with her instead now that they knew each other carnally, but thought it was nice that he cared about his nephew.
Olof suggested a date the next day, sounding decisive, as if there were something he wanted to talk to her about. She tried to set a time and place but he didn’t want to. Firm commitments are to protect the weaker party, for the stronger one wants to keep everything open in case he’s struck by a whim. Weak is the party who wants too much, strong is the one for whom it doesn’t really matter.
‘I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon to confirm a time and place,’ said Olof, and she would have to be satisfied with that.
Those unlucky in love and of a certain temperament are compelled to talk about it, all the time and with anyone. Speaking eases the pain. When Ester Nilsson was content, she didn’t air her private matters. She didn’t need to. In suffering, she became loose-lipped and careless with herself and very one-sided. She searched everywhere and anywhere for something, a word, a phrase, an observation that could help her see the connections and move forward. Hope was all she wanted, not wise words on the art of resignation. Thus she displayed her misery for all to see. When she was out of earshot, she knew people talked and offered diagnoses, that the adjectives flowed. And yet she continued to open herself up like a wound in an inopportune place – each time hoping to be offered something propitious that was also likely, but instead, as with all wounds that keep opening up, only fresh bacteria from the exhausted audience were introduced.
The next day, before she was to meet Olof, Ester had lunch with her old supervisor at the Royal Institute of Technology. They met up on occasion to talk about things that only they enjoyed, namely their subject, which was also all they had in common. The supervisor was a pleasant woman who had been pleasantly married for twenty-five years and had two pleasant children who studied at the RIT and they too were following paths to lives filled with pleasantries. When she had listened to Ester’s story, the woman offered a number of comments, all of which were in fact for her own benefit:
‘How nice not to have to deal with all of that.’
And:
‘That sounds awful. Can’t you just forget about him?’
And:
‘God, we used to run around like that as teenagers!’
Ester felt flattened but quite sure this woman hadn’t ‘run around like that’ even as a teenager, but already then had prized her ability to differentiate between what was important and what was not.
‘Oh, how nice not to have to deal with that,’ she repeated.
Ester chastised herself for prattling, but she understood that what she’d just heard was a defence against a far too intimate confession coming from someone to whom you didn’t feel close and didn’t want to get that close to. The hostile comments themselves were a way of staving off intimacy and the draughty meagreness of one’s own life. Ester wished she could rescind her confessions. This other woman was smart. The situation hadn’t been equal to Ester’s intelligence, and she did not want her former supervisor’s life. She cautioned herself to choose who she spoke to more wisely. Slamming on the brakes twice in less than one day was taking a toll on her.
The former supervisor was warning Ester about the age difference, which Ester had barely given a thought to, much less considered relevant. She explained that Olof might be frail and infirm one day and then it might not be as fun. The supervisor and her husband were born in the same year and month, only ten days apart.
Ester nodded; there was no point with some people. Tr
ue passion, fire in the blood, couldn’t be communicated to those who were cast in stone. They didn’t understand it. If you could resist something because at some point, one day it might cause pain, it was something you could live without altogether. But Ester could not live without this certain something.
At two o’clock they finished their lunch at Grill near Strindberg’s Blue Tower on Drottninggatan.
‘Is he a good thinker?’ the supervisor asked as they walked downhill towards the Central Bath House and Hurtig’s Bakery, as though sensing she hadn’t said the right things.
‘He’s a good sport. That’s the important part. And a good listener.’
‘That’s not enough for you, Ester. This is beyond me.’
Ester refrained from saying any of the awful things she could have said in reply. They parted at T-Centralen and she continued along Drottninggatan towards Old Town. On Stora Nygatan she took a seat in a coffee shop and waited. When Olof called she wanted to be close to Södermalm and City, the better to rush to wherever he was.
It was slushy and damp and there was a rawness to the air. She wondered why he didn’t call. They were supposed to be in touch ‘in the afternoon’ and that meant any moment now. Ester sat in a corner and took her laptop out of her bag to finish writing an essay that needed to be submitted to her newspaper editor the following morning. She had to make it work even if she was feeling scattered.
It was quarter past three; she reworked a few sentences. Twenty past three; deleted an adjective, missed it and put it back. Read through the text; it was a bit too long. Three twenty-five; deleted an entire paragraph at the beginning and got the text to the right word count, but now it lacked structure and direction. Well, in that sense, it mirrored life itself. Three thirty; she considered changing careers, and spent a moment reading. Thirty-five past the hour; the telephone lay mute on the table.
Twenty to four, she decided to call him, and when she heard the warmth on the other end of the line, life was worth living again.
‘I was just about to call you. I’ve been walking all around Söder.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘Now I’m at the Katarina Cemetery.’
Acts of Infidelity Page 5