Acts of Infidelity

by Lena Andersson

  ‘The rehearsals of your play are going well. A test audience came in yesterday and it went like a house on fire. The premiere will go ahead as planned. And I . . . (an artificial pause) . . . hope that you . . . (another pause, more hesitant) . . . won’t . . . show up for it.’

  Down to the slightest modulation, it had sounded like he wanted to say that he hoped she would come, but stopped at the last second and added a ‘won’t’ because that was what the scene and his life required.

  And Ester wished he’d asked her to come. Her amputated hope was having phantom pains even though she knew it was irrational. Nourished by old memories (ignoring others), against her will and contrary to counsel, it was extrapolating future prognoses using a unique bliss algorithm.

  ‘Of course I won’t come,’ she said, hung up and walked into the hot pub, chilled to the marrow because she’d left her coat inside. She was shaken and didn’t feel hungry, but ordered spaghetti vongole. Her party, perusing the dessert menu, asked if everything was all right. Ester said it was just her brother, calling with some minor emergency from abroad.

  The premiere of Ester Nilsson’s play Disunited Trinity, Nicaea 325 took place one rainy Friday in March at the same little theatre on Västmannagatan where Cog was staged the year before. Fatima was Ester’s scout, sent to observe the performance, the atmosphere, the status of the married couple and report back. Ester was waiting for her on Odenplan. They took the subway to crêperie Fyra Knop, situated on one of Götgatsbacken’s cross-streets, where they each had a savoury galette and a sweet crêpe. They went there sometimes during the dark months when the stores of company, hearty food and rigorous problem-solving needed to be replenished. After they’d placed their orders, Fatima looked at Ester’s face, hungry for news and observations, and said:

  ‘You’re going to be disappointed in me, but I’m not sure if Ebba was there. I mean, I’m not sure it was her that I saw.’

  ‘What do you mean “unsure”?’

  ‘I saw her in profile and have only seen her in a photo before. On the homepage of the Borlänge general hospital. But I think it was her.’

  ‘Were they sitting together?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That doesn’t have to mean they’re separated. Olof probably wanted to sit on his own so he could concentrate on the performance.’

  ‘He didn’t seem to be concentrating that hard. Actually he seemed quite absent. And Ebba laughed the loudest and most of all.’

  ‘Ebba laughed?’

  ‘Heartily. If that was her.’

  ‘At my dialogue?’

  ‘It was one of the gayest laughs I’ve ever heard.’

  ‘Forced gaiety?’

  ‘That’s how I took it, yes.’

  ‘Did she laugh at the lines or with them?’

  ‘I can’t say. Her laughter was just too loud. It sounded like she might break into tears at any moment. But that could be post-facto rationalization because I happen to know she has more reason to cry than to laugh.’

  ‘And Olof?’

  ‘He laughed once. And chuckled twice.’

  ‘How did he look?’

  Fatima hesitated, looked at Ester and then at the buckwheat pancake with chèvre the waitress had placed in front of her.

  ‘Run down. Really awful. Ten years older than at last year’s premiere. Unshaven and dirty, wearing a wrinkled flannel shirt, saggy jeans and a pair of clunky yellow boots that aren’t at all suitable for a premiere. Last year he wore a blazer and a starched shirt, I want to say, nice leather shoes, looked freshly washed and clean-shaven. This time he looked wan and like he didn’t have any self-respect.’

  They ate their galettes and talked about consistency and flavour combinations while Ester mulled over Fatima’s observations.

  The restaurant, inspired by Brittany, was built like a ship’s cabin. They sat at the back where there was no phone reception, so after about an hour when Ester went to the toilet, she saw that she had two voicemails even though the phone hadn’t rung. She knew who’d called and wanted nothing more than to rush out of the restaurant and call him. She sat back down. When they were out on the street, she listened to the messages. They were both the same. Movement could be heard, a breath, a person who seemed to be hesitating before speaking and then thought better of it. Ebba and Olof must have gone to the premiere as a married couple to keep up appearances, but after his wife took off, he’d called Ester. Or they’d fought tooth and nail when the perfidious air went out of them because the premiere was over and the facade could finally fall.

  She fretted over having missed his call.

  ‘He’ll call back if it’s important,’ said Fatima.

  Ester didn’t think so, but held her tongue. Certain things were important in the moment and so you called, only for insight and dread to catch up with you later. Sensory states came and went. You could call on a whim and there was no guarantee that the whim would return. But an entire life could be changed by one phone call made on such a whim at the exact right, or wrong, moment.

  Ester wanted to go home to Sankt Göransgatan, be on her own and call Olof, but Fatima made it clear that doing so would be insensible and disloyal. Ester stopped and tried to cool her thoughts. She was convinced that Olof wouldn’t call again, just as she’d been convinced for the duration of her romantic life that she had to do all the work for anything to happen.

  But with Olof Sten she no longer had to worry, the time of him being out of touch was behind them. Now he kept trying until he reached her. They had their sights on a bar on Österlånggatan and had made it to Järntorget when his ringtone sounded. Ester answered with all the warmth she couldn’t manage to dispel, that lingered in her core, as in a volcano. Olof delivered his first harangue. It was like running towards someone and throwing yourself into their arms only to find that their clothes are made of razor blades.

  ‘You told the ensemble that you and I were in a relationship!’ he shouted.

  ‘Because you slandered me to them. Of course I’m going to assert my humanity when you attack it. But that was two months ago. Why are you dredging up this ancient history, tonight of all nights?’

  ‘You’re spreading lies about us having had a relationship!’

  ‘But we have had a relationship. Why can’t you understand that? Are you still trying to convince yourself otherwise?’

  ‘You’re a fucking psychopath.’

  ‘And you’re out of your fucking mind.’

  She hung up and put her phone in her bag. Shakily, she walked with Fatima to the bar they’d decided to go to. Fatima was filled with horror and disbelief. They spent the night talking about what had happened. They parted at one. Ester took the subway home. As the doors shut behind her, a text arrived from Olof. It said, ‘Good premiere.’

  Ester thought there might actually be something wrong with Olof’s brain, that he really did have a screw loose. Maybe he was missing something essential that made him incapable of understanding the inherent trajectory of events and their moral essence. Might there even be a nameable syndrome for people who can’t see their role in a course of events? A sense of self so fragile it was inappropriate to talk about personal responsibility, because it presupposed the existence of a person?

  Ester typed a reply but felt spent and indifferent. She wrote it out of courtesy and a sort of unflagging consideration:

  ‘Glad to hear you’re pleased, but you don’t have to work yourself up to contact me. In spite of everything, we can still be civilized.’

  Twenty minutes later she was home, brushing her teeth and on her way to bed when the reply came: ‘You’ve destroyed my life. We have nothing to say to each other.’

  It registered on the seismograph of her memory, but only in passing. Before she fell asleep she deleted Olof’s number and all of his texts from the past three and a half years, the ones that when they’d arrived had been the most precious of pearls.

  March went by and
then disappeared, the melting snow thudding from the roofs. April arrived with its crisp air and bracing nights. Ester Nilsson felt mute. Sometimes a day would pass without her thinking about Olof, but for the most part she continued to brood over why and how. The analysis had gone on for so long that there were no more pieces to be added to the puzzle and the pieces she had didn’t fit together. Upon examination, she found that it had become an automated thought process. She understood what there was to understand, but wouldn’t accept that a person could operate that way, there must be an error, one final missing piece.

  In April it came to her attention via a number of channels that Olof had decided on a new and more specific version of events. He’d gone beyond total disavowal and was now saying that he’d succumbed to Ester one single time after a long period of manipulative entanglement and clinginess on her part. Using her cunning, she’d poured alcohol down his throat and seduced him. One single time, one measly time, that was all.

  This new version was in line with Olof’s programme for dealings between the sexes and their discrete characteristics. His little mistake slipped right in friction-free, fitted into the programme and turned him into a man. Because a man has urges that require his full stoic and rational powers to shut down, and a woman has her age-old ability to trick men into impregnating her while being irrationally unreliable, once was as good as never. Faithful wives accepted the order of things, and could therefore forgive one slip, but not two.

  This is how he explained his troubles to those who knew or sensed that the ground beneath his feet had shaken.

  For that reason, Olof Sten also called Zoran, the actor who had played his son in Death of a Salesman and who he knew was Ester’s friend. Olof wanted to tell Zoran what ‘really’ went on, regardless of what he’d heard from Ester Nilsson who, in case Zoran didn’t know, was extremely unstable and not exactly known for her normal or healthy history with men, and was surrounded by embarrassing rumours. Regarding Olof, Ester had made up everything Zoran had heard. She had been living in her twisted dreamworld, always knowing where Olof was performing and where he was touring, and pretended to be there with him. In case Zoran had heard details about specific places, this explained it. Moreover, Ebba and Olof ‘were in agreement’ that Ester was ‘psychotic’.

  When Zoran called Ester to apprise her and ask what happened, he sounded shaken and scared. But she also heard that a hint of doubt had crept in and nestled inside him.

  At the time, Ester was in Kalmar for a lecture and a reading. When Zoran called, she was out walking but had to find a bench and sit, it got too heavy to breathe. She asked several times: is that what Olof said? Had he called Zoran expressly to tell him this?

  What she heard brought with it a special type of inner chill, a chill that would linger like frostbite, a place that could never be warmed again. She hadn’t known this about people. Olof having written and said things out of panic and fear just as she’d detonated the bomb in January was more understandable than this elaborate lie he was dishing up months later. This suggested grievous recklessness.

  That no calumny was too harsh or no tactic too heinous when it came to saving your own skin and position and to staving off shame stunned Ester.

  Before they hung up, she grilled him one last time about the details and the words Olof used to tell his story and how his voice had sounded.

  When the shock had subsided she got up from the bench and walked to the centre of town. It was a blustery day and thick dark grey clouds hung over the Öland Bridge where seagulls sailed in the winds and the eiders were flocking north. To avoid the coming rain, she went into an anti-quarian bookseller’s on Kaggensgatan right by the hotel. The bell jingled pleasantly whereupon the proprietor, a middle-aged man with an absent-minded, placid countenance, nodded in greeting and went back to his accounts at the far end of the cosy disarray.

  Ester spent an hour browsing. It did her well, for ages antiquarian bookshops had been her place of meditation. She paid and went her way with the unabridged edition of The Count of Monte Cristo. She hadn’t read it since childhood, and then in its abridged form. She looked forward to getting to the hotel and delving in. Hunched against a stubborn rain, she hurried away.

  The month of May came and went with its fragrances and ever-surprising beauty, light late at night and pastures in bloom. The lilacs arrived with the splendour of those who know not to hope for tomorrow, but live nonetheless. Ester had trouble sleeping on account of the light.

  Midsummer rolled around this year, too. Three days after Midsummer’s Eve she was at home working. Soon she would eat lunch and then work a little more, and then take her long walk through the city. To keep sane, she stuck to routines and habits.

  Inside, she was a desert devoid of sun – a stinging emptiness where once her feelings for Olof and the venture of their relationship had been. It wasn’t unlike when she dedicated herself to orienteering in her youth or to learning how to think and make the world intelligible. The risk of failure had been inherent to each of these ventures.

  And once again, Olof called her three days after Midsummer, but in all likelihood, with a different motive. But what was it? Did he want to rekindle the flame inside her?

  They hadn’t been in touch since the phone call after the theatre premiere in early March. After Zoran’s call, Ester had written a brief email to Olof and his wife in which she had strongly urged them to stop spreading nonsense and slander.

  Ester was on the landline with Lotta when the call came. She recognized Olof’s number and felt afraid. If one goes without water for long enough, a person might even quench their thirst with a poisoned drink, and she didn’t trust herself, not even now.

  ‘What should I do?’ she gasped, throat tight.

  ‘Answer and see what he wants,’ said Lotta.

  ‘Will you stay on the line? I need a witness.’

  ‘I will.’

  Her ‘hello’ was subdued.

  ‘Hi Ester. It’s Olof.’

  It was the embarrassed, gingerly accommodating Olof on the line, he who believed work needed to be done to compensate for and rebuild what had been destroyed, who knew the account had not only been drained but closed and the bank had gone bankrupt, but who, deep down, knew another account could always be opened.

  ‘Why did you harass Ebba?’ he asked with an amicable curiosity that belied the question’s content.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hurting Ebba in this way . . .’

  Ester waited for an explanation for his call and the introduction.

  ‘Writing to tell her that we were in a relationship and all the rest. During the winter. And then again a month or so ago.’

  As so often before, his statements were mostly noise, what he was saying was obviously not the content of the words, and by the softness in his voice Ester could tell that he was not averse to beginning anew, in the same way, an endless danse macabre, the whole performance again from the top in a senseless encore, where she’d beg and he’d pretend to resist.

  From the conversation, it could also be discerned that the awfulness from the past winter, the blow to his marriage, had registered but hadn’t been incorporated into his psyche and being. It was more like reading a bulletin about a natural disaster; you’re moved but only for a moment, and after a while you have to actively think about it in order to feel anything at all.

  Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that Olof seemed to have been touched by his own disaster like a character in a play is moved by the text’s calamities and forgets them as soon as the curtain drops?

  ‘Was there something you wanted to tell me or was it just this old chestnut?’

  ‘Ebba was really sad.’

  Ester noticed her stale, aching breaths, noticed them flowing in and out, in and out before taking a deep breath. Remembering that Lotta was listening, she readied herself and said:

  ‘Why do you keep calling me?’

  She could sense the stunned pause that he hadn’t managed t
o stifle with blitheness.

  ‘To ask you to stop harassing my wife.’

  ‘No, that’s not why you’re calling and you know it, like you know that I’ve never harassed your wife. And you should really think hard, not least for your beloved wife’s sake, about why you keep calling me, what it is that you can’t be without, what fire inside you refuses to die and why. And think about who destroyed whose life over the past years. Then do as I do, put us behind you and stop contacting me. Stop contacting me!’

  Yet another silence followed, this time not stunned but full of shame for being found out. Ester sensed how it was rolling through him in sticky swells, wave after wave. For the last time, she felt his mind as clearly as if it were her own. What was moving through him wasn’t performed; it was authentic. The curtain had fallen on his play.

  Olof Sten hung up without a word.

  Epilogue

  Two years passed in Ester Nilsson’s life. Her ravaged trust hadn’t healed. There were certain words and sentences she couldn’t bear to hear, and she had averted her gaze and walked the other way the few times she felt a flutter in her chest. Hers was an existence of active renunciation and forced asceticism. It was like a dead person’s ECG. She would eventually invite intoxication and play into her life again, but it was still too soon.

  She continued decoding existence, the existence she so long ago had decided to understand, but it went more slowly now that she wasn’t spurred on by love’s narcotic enthusiasm. With each passing week, she understood a little more of some intellectual problem that needed to be clarified. She had placed the Olof Sten conundrum in the file that contained the Hugo Rask conundrum, a special archive for unsolved puzzles.