Ester had finished a verse cycle about famous characters from novels who’d fled their authors to become sovereign and speak for themselves. It had been submitted and accepted. Days passed and no mention was made about when she should travel down to see Olof in Linköping. She worried he was having regrets. She worried that she hadn’t received his suggestion with enough enthusiasm and had made him change his mind.
A couple of weeks after their last encounter, she woke at seven and decided to tackle the matter herself. Her life had been on hold for too long. She cancelled two meetings that same afternoon and called Olof. By then she’d made it to the more sociable hour of nine.
‘I can come see you today. Like we talked about. I’ll get to Linköping by lunch; we can eat and then spend the day together.’
There was a pause. Not a good pause. A pause filled with aversion.
‘No. That won’t work.’
His voice was like a pistol shot and as devastating.
‘But I’m supposed to come to see your show.’
‘Not today you’re not. I’m going to the library and then I’m going swimming.’
Her unplanned visit seemed to strike fear into him.
Ester empathized with this fear of forced companionship and being robbed of independence. She would have had the same reaction, but only with a person she wasn’t keen on meeting. That was the crux. If only she understood why he was asking her to come if he felt this aversion.
Why suggest seeing his plays two hundred kilometres away? Why take her arm as they strolled through town? Why call her when they’d been out of touch for a while, why sleep with her, if but briefly and interrupted? She was just as reluctant when faced with spending time with most other people, but she didn’t enter into intimacies with them. What was this an expression of, this wavering, which psychic disposition was causing Olof’s inscrutability?
‘Weak ego,’ said Vera.
‘Weak ego,’ said Elin.
‘Weak ego,’ said Fatima.
‘No idea,’ said Lotta. ‘What’s a weak ego?’
‘I don’t really know,’ said Ester, ‘but maybe it’s this: you don’t know who you are or what you want. You lack a core.’
‘But how can you possibly love a man like that?’
‘Because we don’t love people for their perfections. We love them for what they radiate and what we want to partake in. I’ve seen that he’s capable of being otherwise, I’ve seen him focus his love on me, and I don’t think he doesn’t know who he is or what he wants. He knows full well. He’s just being lazy and making excuses so he doesn’t have to make a decision.’
Against better judgement, against the knowledge that Olof always, without exception, dialectically determined, became soft when Ester was hard and vice versa, she didn’t hang up, but said:
‘We can go to the library together. And to the pool.’
‘That won’t work. I need advance warning for this sort of thing.’
There was violence in his expression. Some might call it integrity. Perhaps she provoked this violence in him by invading him, she pondered during the following week. In that case, he was acting in self-defence.
‘Maybe we can find another day?’ he said. ‘I’m not up for it today.’
‘I hear you. Because you’re going to the library and the pool.’
‘It’s really fun seeing you, but I need more time to prepare.’
She tried to end the conversation but he kept her on. Olof Sten was not blind to the obvious, that a person in love can weather many blows but not an endless amount. A bridge and the camel’s back can only take so much pressure. There’s a breaking point that can be measured down to the last gram. It’s precise and predictable but only visible after the fact with things that resist quantification. Carelessness comes last. Then the one who rejects can become the rejected.
People aren’t loved for their stalwart character and rarely are they hated for their cruelty. Ester wasn’t drawn to Olof’s cruelty, but to the glimpse of what glimmered in the mud, waiting for her to set it free. She didn’t love Olof because he treated her like rubbish but because of how exquisite it was when he didn’t. This was the explosive contrast. But unfortunately Olof might have been treating her like rubbish because she loved him.
When they’d hung up and Ester had had a moment to think, she made a decision. These hot and cold spells were taking their toll. She had to leave him.
Could she never contact him again? asked Elin, who Ester was calling for good advice. It would be necessary if she took this step. Could she do it?
‘Don’t know, but I can’t stand this any more, that’s for sure.’
‘It’s time. I can hear it in your voice. Call me later and tell me how it went.’
She wrote Olof a text saying she never wanted to see him again and wished him a good life on his leash.
Then she went on a long walk, leaving her phone behind, and felt Riddarfjärden’s winds of liberation nip as she walked over the Västerbron Bridge. She continued down to Tantolunden Park, along Årstaviken Bay over to the Eriksdal swimming centre, up the hill to Skanstull, took Götgatan all the way to Slussen, through Old Town along Stora Nygatan, the Strömbron Bridge to Tegelbacken and Hantverkargatan all the way to Fridhemsplan. The walk took almost two hours.
This must be how it felt to kick an addiction, she thought, to throw away the needles and leave the bad crowd behind. Clarity and gratitude in the first hours. Then the shakes. This wasn’t poetic language or an analogy, these two things were the same. The mental processes were identical because the physical processes in the brain were the same. Love and drugs: the brain couldn’t tell the difference. It just kept working and processing. The sophisticated, dialectical mind knew the difference but not the ungainly, blunt brain. For the brain, the same neurotransmitters were being processed, the same receptors receiving, the same reward, the same joy and anxiety that made you want to go back again and again, seeking the source of ecstasy even though you knew its costs. When love was imbalanced, the doses spun out of control, but now Ester had begun her purge. This time, she would weather abstinence.
At home, the first thing she did was check her mobile phone. It read: ‘I don’t understand anything.’
She wasn’t about to explain herself.
For two weeks, she felt free. Then longing began to invade her conviction. Her determination wore thin.
The raw chill sat between the walls and however she dressed, it was too cold.
If Olof had wanted to get rid of her, he would have sent a different reply, she started to think. ‘Yes, it’s probably for the best not to be in contact any more,’ he could have written. Or: ‘You’re right. This isn’t working.’
But that’s not how he’d replied, because he didn’t want to sever ties. And in that moment her entire abstinence hinged on an impossible self-discipline because she believed something else to be true and correct, namely that one day he would realize to whom he belonged. On that day she had to be available and the threshold to reach her had to be low.
Around this time Ester Nilsson travelled to Oslo to launch the Norwegian edition of a book on the philosophy of language she’d written a couple of years earlier. She travelled joylessly and with indifference, said what needed to be said, did what she was supposed to do, but cared neither about what she was doing nor about the philosophy of language. It only interested her insofar as it was a tool she could use to interpret Olof Sten’s language.
She thought that anxiety was a movement of troops in the brain’s civil war, a strategic manoeuvre to get the conscious mind to make a decision that would end the pain, anything to stop the suffering.
She stayed at the Hotel Continental in the centre of Oslo in a large room with thick curtains and a fluffy bed that was far too large for how lonely she was. It rained non-stop. The trip was two days long. Olof was gone, and she’d done away with him. It would have been easier if he’d done away with her, then there wouldn’t have been much to discuss, bu
t he’d written ‘I don’t understand anything’ as if he did not in fact want to lose her. Maybe he hadn’t made up his mind after all. Olof was a part of her life in the same way that an inoperable cancerous tumour became a part of the brain. Remove what was running amok and you’d take something vital along with it.
During the train journey to the airport on the way home from Oslo she felt a little better, the spaces opened a crack. Her thoughts had started to circle around the issue: how to go about re-establishing contact with someone you said you never want to see again. The brain and body had made a pact and forced the conscious mind to decide, for neither of them could stand the self-imposed situation any more. Freedom had become unfree, purity turned to asceticism. To make a decision about abstinence was a relief, living with it was to live in shackles. And in these shackles, a new decision about freedom was made: take the drug again. The packet of cigarettes tossed in the bin at midnight was plucked out the next day and this act was just as wonderful as the act of throwing them away.
Ester Nilsson flew back to Stockholm much lighter than when she had left. A few days later she’d devised a plan. If it didn’t go well, she would give up for good, this she promised herself. The plan went like this: in the name of research she would see A Doll’s House which was playing at the Stockholm City Theatre and then, also in the name of research, she would compare it to the play that Olof was currently in, the contemporary deconstruction of A Doll’s House. In order to complete this research, she would have to travel to Linköping.
She booked tickets and informed Olof via a brief and formal text that she intended to see his play a week from Thursday with the idea of writing something about how it related to A Doll’s House.
His reply was immediate, and this in itself was answer enough.
‘Didn’t Miss Nilsson request that I go to hell?’
After having conducted a textual analysis of him for a year and a half, she knew how propitious this reply was. Olof Sten was in possession of a set number of mental states. They found their expression in a set number of verbal representations that moved between rejection, neutrality and inducement. Ester was well acquainted with the combinations, which feelings they reflected and which actions usually followed which turn of phrase. One of the variables was the number of minutes that passed between her text and his reply. Another was stressing her gender and civil status, in implicit contrast to his.
Heart swelling, she read and reread what he’d written. He was playing hurt but not so much so that she’d be scared off. And she played along. This was their game:
‘And Miss Nilsson had good reason for doing so. But it was ever so tedious without you. I beg of you, return from the flames.’
He wrote:
‘If you happen to be going to Stockholm after, I’d gladly tag along to Norrköping.’
She wrote:
‘I intend to proceed to Stockholm thereafter.’
He wrote:
‘If you’re nice you can borrow the guest room.’
She wrote:
‘I’m always nice. Except when you’re not.’
He wrote:
‘Niceness is overrated, unproductive.’
They were making mental love again. She felt reanimated. No twinge of pain remained. She was as new.
Alone on a Friday night, Ester went to see A Doll’s House at the City Theatre. She didn’t want company so she could feel closer to Olof and not be bothered by the demand to converse and formulate ‘her thoughts’ immediately after the performance. Here she was again, at a zero-balance where having a little was better than having nothing at all, and there was no such thing as insufficient. That can only arise from lack and end with lack, as soon as the assets are released, expectations rise and a little is worse than nothing and everything is insufficient.
The following Thursday, she was zipping through those 200 kilometres to Linköping southbound on the E4. February was more than halfway through. The air was bracing and the afternoons were getting noticeably longer with each passing day. She arrived shortly before six in her shiny Twingo. She had washed it near the entrance of town because she wanted to drive him around in a clean car.
Olof’s performance started at seven. She parked by the theatre and ate in a pub by the main square. As she sat with her plank steak in front her, Olof texted and asked if she’d arrived and suggested she park by the stage door. She couldn’t recall him showing such eagerness and helpfulness before. But now was not the time for conjecture, this time she would show restraint, she wouldn’t get ahead of her herself and make assumptions, wouldn’t risk rejection. The one who held their tongue was passive and could never be pushed away, neither could they be accused of being difficult. The passive risked nothing. Doing nothing took an enormous effort on Ester Nilsson’s part, it was one of the most difficult things she knew, but now she’d make an effort.
She bought a bouquet of flowers in which she tucked her card, a note from Henrik Ibsen that said the contemporary author whose play Olof was in and who profaned A Doll’s House was rubbish, rot and poppycock, and an actor as skilled as Olof should not waste his considerable talents on graphomaniac ladies who believe the world’s time is better spent on their maternal lives and uterine catarrhs than on appreciating a man who supported their liberation.
The performance, though interesting in parts, was formulaic and quite dull. Olof played a minor role. Ester couldn’t wait for the clock to strike ten.
At that hour, she was standing outside a theatre’s stage door yet again, waiting. If you persist, something is bound to change. Olof came out with Ester’s bouquet in hand and a smile on his face, neither contemptuous nor nonchalant, but egalitarian and warm. Their eyes met, and Ester’s entire body registered the moment; it was electric.
‘Ibsen sent me flowers,’ said Olof.
‘You don’t say. What did he need to get off his chest?’
‘He seems irascible. Doesn’t like having his circles disturbed. No men do.’
Olof’s clucking laughter. Ester knew this reference meant that the evening would go well. When he wanted to get closer, he pointed out these minor gender differences, when he wanted to alienate himself he insisted she was ‘one of the boys’.
‘May I accompany you to Norrköping?’ he asked.
Ester opened the passenger door, bowed and made the sweeping gesture of a dignified servant.
‘Thank you, driver,’ said Olof and climbed in.
Their affinity was like the crook in the corner of a person’s mouth who is used to smirking. It was just there, always accessible, always ready.
The evening chill had left snow crystals on the car windows. Ester scraped them off and then they were on their way. After barely ten pitch-dark kilometres, Olof asked why she’d been so angry and cut off contact with that terrible text message three weeks earlier. Ester had no need to articulate what she was thinking, saying and feeling at the time, not now that the distance was gone, but said something evasive about how his skittishness was hard to handle.
Then he said something sensational:
‘You’re going to have to learn to handle it.’
She gasped soundlessly. He was planning a future with her! A future where she needed to be able to handle his traits. The comment left no room for question.
‘You know I’m not at my best in the mornings,’ he continued. ‘You’ve seen me in the morning.’
Another powerful mark of affinity. This was going remarkably well.
‘And what did you mean by me being on a leash?’
‘Nothing in particular. I was just upset.’
‘But what did you mean? You’re never angry enough to not mean what you write or why you wrote it.’
Ester concentrated on driving. The sky and forest were indistinguishable, so dense was the darkness and so clear and crisp the air.
‘Did you mean that I live with a master who keeps me on a leash?’
‘Something like that, maybe.’
She refused to
meet his eye.
‘That I’m Ebba’s dog? I don’t have my own will? She makes my decisions for me?’
‘I can’t recall.’
He didn’t seem offended, more interested and probing, as if he actually wanted to understand.
‘That’s what I thought you meant.’
They drove to where he was staying and parked. In silence, they went up in the lift. She remembered how she felt the last time she’d been here, one unhappy morning in November that weighed on her like a black ton. That was three months ago. Now there would be another nocturnal sitting at the same kitchen table with a different Olof, careful, appreciative and grateful to have her there. He stressed how fun it was that she’d come to see his performance, how highly he esteemed her opinion and how exciting it was to discuss it with her. This praise seemed to lack the calculation of flattery. He wanted her to detail her thoughts on the play, so she offered an analysis of what she’d seen. He listened closely and asked how it compared to Ibsen’s; personally he had his doubts about its merits. Ester said the two writers had such different agendas that a meaningful comparison couldn’t be made. The one was about reality and the other discourse. The one about what the author saw and heard in real life, the other about what the author saw and heard when discussing real life.
‘Isn’t the discussion of real life part of real life?’ Olof asked.
‘Well, yes, but on another level. Meta.’
‘Isn’t everything actually on that level? If we’re honest about it. Isn’t everything theatre?’
‘If you’re a discourse analyst, yes. Then all of existence is text and theatre.’
‘I don’t know what discourse is. But I think everything people do is theatre. Outside of the theatre, they’re playing at not playing. Because it’s honest about its games and masks, theatre is the only thing that is genuine and true. It doesn’t pretend to be authentic.’
Ester didn’t reply. She was keeping her distance, her cool, her inner resolve, all so as not to lose herself – or what she perceived to be herself, the true Ester with a recognizable essence of thoughts and behaviours that she felt comfortable with – and crash right into old follies. She was acting, if you will.
Acts of Infidelity Page 11