‘That one’s stunning. Are you at your father’s grave?’
‘Yes. For the first time since he died. How did you know?’
Ester thought he might be preparing for a separation without knowing it and that’s why he was at his father’s grave – a separation from his wife who, presumably, held power over him by moving between hot and cold as he’d often described his father had. Now he was in the cemetery, bidding farewell to his father, that is to say his wife. She was filled with hope.
‘We were supposed to meet up,’ she said, ‘isn’t that what we said?’
‘I suppose we did.’
‘Can’t we go for a beer? Just drop out together. I want to get drunk today. With you.’
‘No. I’ll stick to coffee.’
When Olof Sten refused alcohol, there was a good reason.
‘I’m going for dinner with a friend at some point tonight,’ he said.
Ester looked out over Stora Nygatan. The city’s pavements were for the most part closed because of the risk of falling icicles, so people were walking in the middle of the street. The drainpipes were flooding and sheets of slush were sliding down the roofs.
‘I thought we’d decided to see each other today.’
‘Well in that case, I have to go home and change. I’m sweaty.’
‘Weren’t we going to see each other properly? Not just for a spell before dinner with your friend.’
‘Don’t try to make me feel guilty.’
I’m not allowed to guilt-trip you, thought Ester, but you’re allowed to disappoint me in whichever way you like. With Olof, everything was loose, up in the air. It was a sort of virtue for him, his version of freedom, and the second Ester tried to fix it in place she was guilt-tripping him.
‘But we said.’
‘You’re pressuring me. I haven’t seen my friend in ages. He wanted to have dinner with me today.’
Ester’s words ebbed away. There were none at her disposal. It went quiet.
‘I guess I’ll come and see you all sweaty, then. But don’t complain if I stink.’
‘I like the way you stink.’
He laughed his mildest laugh. Within ten minutes they were at Sundberg’s bakery on Järntorget. The cafe was mostly filled with pushchairs and new mothers. They sat in a corner as far from them as possible. As luck would have it, that corner was next to the toilet, which received a steady stream of visitors.
Ester told him about the newspaper article that was due tomorrow, and Olof listened attentively and asked questions about the theme: how group behaviour could be mapped onto individual personality types, and how relationships between different groups were structured in the same way as they were between people. In short, nature was mathematical and always followed set patterns, one simply had to identify them correctly.
‘How many hours do you write a day?’
‘As few as possible. I’m having a hard time working right now.’
‘I see. Yeah. Such is life.’
He looked away and didn’t want to hear the reasons why. And then he rubbed his chilled hands together and said that he and Ebba had gone to see a Harold Pinter play at the City Theatre two days ago. He relayed his impressions and mentioned that Ebba was quite taken with one of the male actors. With what sounded like resentment, he pointed out that Ebba would never allow him to say the same thing about another woman without triggering intense jealousy.
He appeared to be asking Ester to explain what he understood to be a characteristic, one of many, common to the female sex. Ester could offer no explanation. She was thinking that the way Olof was talking about his life didn’t suggest a break-up.
He seemed completely unaware that Ester was wondering why he and the wife had gone to the theatre together when they were supposed to be in the middle of a divorce, and he seemed to believe that he could offer poor Ester knowledge of a minor rift between the spouses as consolation for the time he’d spent with his wife. But that rift was for nothing. To Ester, the rift was already clear as day considering what they’d been doing together. She wanted to know why that rift didn’t have any consequences. Why did people tolerate their abysmal rifts when there was something that could be done about them?
‘How’s it going with you?’ Olof asked.
‘Not great, actually.’
They drank their coffees. Around them, the mothers were nursing in groups.
‘And you?’ Ester asked.
‘Me? I’m good.’
He said this casually, almost with frivolity. This is precisely what happens when your life is a lie, Ester thought. You lose your bearings for meaning, as well as what’s appropriate to say, how and when.
‘You got sad last time,’ he said.
Last time? Ester wondered, what happened last time? Aren’t I always sad?
‘Yes, I suppose I did.’
‘I can’t leave Ebba.’
A short pause.
‘I don’t want to.’
A short pause.
‘I can’t hurt her like that.’
A final pause.
Ester noted the shift from ‘can’t’ to ‘want’ and the retreat to ‘can’t’. But who could say whether it was ‘can’t’ or ‘want’ that mattered. She felt poisoned, as though her body had flooded with some sort of toxic waste. She’d been wrong about Olof; he didn’t despise the definite and worship vagueness and apathy. When this unfixed state needed protection, he became active and clear. Once putrefaction and murkiness had been secured, he went back to being indolent.
Yet again she noted Olof’s relief when he’d finished making a difficult statement, the point of which was to get rid of Ester’s taxing expectations but not Ester herself. It was the same each time. He cancelled his dinner plans because he decided he’d rather eat with Ester.
Like so often before, she should have left, but she wasn’t one for power play. Especially if it was meant to conceal a great inner need, which it usually was. The day she managed to decline an evening invitation from Olof was the day she would become indifferent to him.
So they ate dinner on this night too and came closer to each other than ever before. Ester told him about her life, mostly about her unhappy romances, and Olof about his, mostly about how people had consistently failed him. His father hit him and his mother favoured his sister and early on he’d been tricked by a woman into fathering a child. He was a hard-done-by person, not an active subject in his life, but Ester didn’t think so, because her heart had been made porous by the bitter melancholy of losing Olof and even more porous by nonetheless being here with him, receiving his raw confidences. She understood that his suppressed rage came from a lifetime of humiliation. She saw the world through the lens of his wrongs and wanted to throw herself in harm’s way and take the bullet that was meant for him, protect him from all evil, fight everyone who threatened him. Something in the way he talked to her and looked at her made her want to do anything for him in the belief that she was dear to him.
The whole night was like one long exhalation. Now that they’d hit bottom and expectations had been checked, they returned to a state of emergency, the no man’s land where other rules applied and everything started from zero, where vitality increased of itself and the riches of the soul were concentrated. Olof was a state-of-emergency man but wanted to make it par for the course. Impossible by definition, and so it was his life’s paradox and grandest dilemma.
After having sat for so long in one of their regular haunts, Olof wanted to move on, so they went down to the wine bar by the Katarina Lift. There they sat on a sofa, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh. The room was a warm orange-red, and a plethora of bottles stood behind the bar. The sounds around them were muffled, the other patrons were solitary newspaper-readers and chatting couples. By the window was a man who, judging by how he kept glancing at his wristwatch and the displeasure set in the small muscles around his eyes, was waiting for someone who hadn’t turned up. The hour was neither late, nor early. They drank the dry, full
-bodied wine. Ester was tired of drinking so much wine but drank nonetheless. More out of resignation than out of curiosity, she said:
‘So we’re never sleeping together again. Even now that we’ve finally got things going. It’s intolerable.’
Olof watched the man waiting by the window and said:
‘I guess it’s inevitable.’
The wine bottles held their breath and Ester didn’t dare turn her head, only her eyes. When everything was at risk, reserve and subtlety were essential.
‘What’s inevitable?’
‘That we’ll sleep together again.’
Her attention was so heightened that the words and the moment in which they were spoken were to her memory what a hot poker is to wood.
‘We’ll just have to wait and see,’ said Olof. ‘Wait and see.’
He looked out of the dark windows with something troubled about his expression, that concave nose, the round high forehead and those funny coin-slot eyes of his. He was at once light and heavy, imposing and frail.
‘What do you mean?’ Ester asked. ‘What are you saying?’
He withheld his reply, gazed across the water at Skeppsholmen Island, velvet-black with gold and silver points of shining light. Then he said:
‘I don’t know what I want. That’s my problem. I don’t know what I want.’
He turned to Ester.
‘Maybe you could be my therapist?’
‘That’s probably not such a good idea.’
‘No, probably not. But I don’t know what I want.’
The lights in the bar flicked on and off, last orders.
‘How can you not know?’ Ester said. ‘You just have to let your feelings guide you.’
Olof raised his glass of red and pointed to it; the waiter nodded.
‘If I gave in to my feelings, my life would be chaos. And it has been for the most part,’ he said.
The wine arrived and he swigged half of it down.
‘What you’re really saying,’ said Ester, ‘is that you know what you want but you don’t trust that it’s the right thing to do?’
‘Yes. Precisely.’
‘What you’re saying is that you want to be with me, but you don’t think it’s morally correct according to a measuring stick that isn’t yours but that you’re still guided by?’
‘I suppose that’s what I’m saying, yes. The consequences of breaking up are too big. I can’t do that to Ebba.’
He smoothed his eyebrows.
‘If she didn’t exist, there’d be no problem,’ he said.
‘But she exists.’
They paid and got up.
‘We’ll just have to wait and see,’ he repeated.
Olof was headed for Katarinavägen and Ester the subway. She didn’t think that what she’d heard was anything but true: he was willing but not able. Ester had a hard time imagining a psyche that held nothing to be true or false, but only concerned itself with primal strategies against its own abandonment. That psyche, which went by the name Olof Sten, had perceived how Ester would now glide away from him because he’d declared that he was choosing his wife, which he’d done so that he wouldn’t be annihilated by not choosing the wife. In doing so, he was risking being annihilated by not choosing his mistress, and thus his reptile brain had to come up with something to keep the rejected party from disappearing. The reptile brain lived in the present and on impulse. It understood that abandonment was unpleasant, but not the steps that had got him there and its logical consistency and reason. To avoid abandonment there was a set of phrases that Olof’s reptile brain sent to his mouth. Ester didn’t know that a person could function in this manner without at least trying to resist it by reasoning, or indeed by making up for it the next day. She didn’t yet sense that this was how language could be emptied of content and substance.
It was almost midnight when Ester was waiting for the subway on the platform at Slussen. More than anything else she wanted to stop having these nights out that always ended in farewell.
If they could only go home together tonight, if only everything was different.
Wasn’t it to escape the dejection that followed these constant nights out with built-in farewells that so many people throughout history had felt one person short when they were single, but that three was a crowd? Ester wondered.
As she thought this through, it became increasingly clear that she and Olof had not got closer that night, but rather, he’d clarified his intention of never getting divorced. This was what she needed to keep in mind, and not the chink he’d also left open. He’d announced who he belonged to and that person was not Ester. He’d thought about it and had made a decision. That decision was the takeaway from this ambiguous evening and the only factor that should sway her. She forced herself to believe that he’d said no, even though the rest of the evening had looked and sounded like half a yes and definitely a maybe.
The train to Hässelby rolled into the station. As she was climbing aboard, a text arrived from Olof. He couldn’t have got far up Katarinavägen before he’d written it. It read: ‘Really lovely seeing you tonight.’
Ester didn’t reply because the message was absurd and absurdity called for sarcasm in response.
Yet again Olof had put the brakes on just as their relationship was getting going. She contemplated this soberly on her way home. Back at her apartment, she burst into tears over her awful life and her poor choices. The tears wouldn’t stop – so insistent and strident that her eyes swelled and her nose stuffed up. The following day she succumbed to a high temperature and was bedridden for seven days. Her temperature was nearly thirty-nine degrees. She cancelled her scheduled assignments and gave up all attempts at industry. When she wasn’t sleeping she was half in torpor, and speculated on a loop:
One: If Olof’s wife was so important to him that he couldn’t leave her, why was he betraying her?
Two: Since he was already betraying her physically and mentally, how could she persist in being so important that he had to stay with her?
Three: If neither the wife nor Ester were important to him, was he just sticking with the option that caused no trouble, risk or embarrassment in his social circle? But why was he with either of them if they weren’t important?
Thoughts one and two implied that she didn’t understand him. Three suggested that Olof was spiritually indolent, deeply careless and cruel, and that once again Ester was in love with a negligent and shallow person she didn’t understand. That couldn’t be right. Therefore the premise must be false and was leading her to false conclusions. There was likely a fourth possibility, unknown to her, that would straighten it all out. She just had to work out what it was.
Days passed. The fever held and a stomach upset set in. She threw up the little she had managed to consume during this hungerless spell.
In her more lucid moments she read a book by Simenon, bought on impulse at an antiquarian bookseller: Maigret Takes the Water. It offered relief amidst the misery, the style was precise and light, direct and unadorned but sensual enough to avoid being spartan, that enticing hazard of literary asceticism. It gladdened her that black letters on white paper could be so reassuring.
Spring came and went. The buds broke open and the sap rose, but in Ester it sank. Twice, once in March and once in April when she was on her way out, she caught a glimpse of Olof across the street from her front door, half-hidden by a tree. On a third occasion she saw him in the distance at the Fridhemsgatan crossing. He seemed to be searching for something while wanting to hide. On another occasion she saw him wandering through the Västermalm mall. He seemed to be passing through her neighbourhood on a near daily basis. What did he want? Well, he’d said it at the wine bar: he didn’t know.
Vera said it was a mirage and Ester was seeing what she wanted to see. But if there was one thing Ester knew about herself it was that she could differentiate between reality and fantasy. Vera didn’t know her very well, she realized. Ester wasn’t in the least interested in believing the un
likely or erecting a facade of herself for herself. If she believed something it was because she’d determined that there were good reasons for it to be true. And however she looked at the matter and Olof’s behaviour over the past half year or so that they’d known each other, there had been good reason to suppose that he was harbouring romantic plans for the two of them.
And now this sneaking around in her neighbourhood.
Six weeks after Olof broke it off, he sent a blank text message.
‘A blank text message is the definition of not enough,’ Elin, Fatima, Vera and Lotta chimed in chorus. ‘He sent a blank text so that you could fill it with content for him. No, that’s insufficient. His actions have to be clearer for them to be worth anything.’
Ester didn’t send a reply. Another two weeks passed. Then Olof called and asked if he’d forgotten a pair of gloves at hers. She looked on the hat rack and said she couldn’t see them. Did he mean the brown ones that were scuffed on the right index finger?
‘Those are the ones!’ he said.
The next day they met over sausages and sauerkraut at Löwenbräu on Fridhemsplan. Ester had bought him a new pair of gloves, and after they’d eaten gave them to him, blushing. They spoke searchingly and with care about what had happened to them since their last conversation. The wife was never once mentioned. On his suggestion they went back to her place, just as it was his suggestion they meet near her place, all so she wouldn’t have to travel far. Clearly he thought he owed her. As they neared her door, his voice had an odd vibrato that Ester didn’t recognize:
‘I’m not often in this area.’
Ester understood he was trying to tell her he hadn’t been sneaking around her building and gazing up at her window, in case she thought she’d seen him there. But nothing is as neon-bright as a denial no one was asking for.
They sat a while in her kitchen. Because she hadn’t been expecting company she didn’t have anything to drink at home other than a splash of cognac that had been there for years. Lust steamed the air but Ester couldn’t quite sense it because she was too tense – she felt unclear about what he was doing here. Hotly, he rubbed his thumb against hers but then got up to leave with a nervous suddenness. As they hugged goodbye he bent like a pocket knife so she wouldn’t be able to feel his physical response.
Acts of Infidelity Page 6