The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

  The boathouse stood on pilings in the water, a short distance from the last rocks on the beach. A short and narrow walkway made of boards led out to it. It was a small red cottage on the edge of the sea, in a traditional style, not at all modern. But the best thing about it was the veranda next to the entrance. It was a terrace with a ladder going straight down into the ocean—and the terrace did not face anything else. You saw only the sea, nothing else.

  “Come in.” Eddie opened the door for him. “This is where I live. But watch your head. The ceiling is quite low.”

  It was just one room. Almost the entire floor space was taken up by a wide bed. Next to the bed there was a table and in front of the table there was a chair. It was the only furniture in the room. There were a few books on the bed, a notebook, a guitar.

  And then, she had dressed his wounds in there, and they had properly met. And while she was doing that she said something strange:

  “I saved your life. Maybe someday you’ll have the opportunity to do the same for me.”

  And after that they started hanging out together. Not together like a couple. Together like two people who spend a lot of time together, almost all the time they have.

  And the sun went down, the moon came up. A large harvest moon against the backdrop of sea and sky that blended in with the horizon. It grew dark, it became night.

  “I feel like we’re soul mates, Bengt,” said Eddie. “We belong together.”

  The conversations with Eddie.

  The Glass House. Shopping Mall Theory, America.

  If you’re going to San Francisco.

  Mom, they’ve destroyed my song.

  And the maps (he showed them to her).

  “Nobody knew my rose of the world but me. Tennessee Williams had a sister named Rose. When he left home to make it as a writer she became mentally ill. It had been just the two of them when they were children. The family moved around a lot, they had relied on each other.

  “When Tennessee Williams left home she was suddenly alone. So alone that she went crazy. He never forgave himself for that.

  “And Rosie became his cross to bear, his cross to bear in the world.

  “He would carry his rose, his sorrow, tattooed inside.”

  With Eddie on the Second Cape, with Eddie in the District. Eddie, white against the background of woods, water, all of the buildings. She fits, thought Bengt. And something else, which sounded ridiculous when you said it but was true in the atmosphere that ruled then: a mood that would prove impossible to recreate.

  He thought this mood was what everything was made for, everything new. The whole of the Second Cape. And then the amazing happened, his world became her world.

  When Eddie was gone all of this would be turned against him. Eddie’s mystique, the entire environment. It would be transformed into a dark, threatening force, one filled with questions. Nobody knew my rose of the world but me. But what did that mean?

  And he would be surrounded by a desertlike loneliness: Eddie cursed.

  And Bencku: something inside would turn against him. He would be defenseless in the face of the threatening and the inexplicable. What had existed? What had been real? What happened? Who was she, really?

  And what did he mean by that? He did not know, would not know. Knew enough to know that he did not know. And going deeper inside, starting to learn and investigate, without Eddie: it was the same thing as disappearing deep into real madness.

  Consequently, when Eddie was gone Bencku would remember very little of the conversations with her. What she said and he said, and so on. Likewise, words. When Eddie was gone there would be no words inside him for a while, none at all.

  “What happened?” Solveig would ask when he started talking again in the middle of everything.

  He would shrug his shoulders quite nonchalantly, say that he did not know.

  And in part it would really be true.

  But that nonchalance in him, that would be new. When he regained the ability to speak after the tragedy, it was as if he had become someone else, not an adult, but old enough.

  There would not be rhyme or reason for a long time after Eddie was gone.

  “I feel like we’re soul mates, Bengt. We belong together.”

  “I’m a strange bird. Are you too?”

  “Nobody knew my rose of the world but me.”

  And blah blah blah. Those sentences would be in his head like a pouring rain, rumble around in there like in a centrifuge. And no. It was impossible. He would not be in it anymore.

  And also, about Eddie: what did it matter what people thought or did not think about her, who she was and what she said, what was a lie and what was truth? Correct, incorrect, right and wrong? Some never got the chance to grow up and mature, or just live long enough so they would have a chance to excuse themselves, or then, explain.

  Give their point of view on the matter.

  Some people were forever sheathed in the mistakes of their youth.

  As the cousin’s mama used to say, in other situations, like a joke. Some grew and came into existence. One time, several times. Some came into existence again and again and again.

  Eddie became nothing. Obviously. She never got a chance.

  Eddie’s body in Bule Marsh. In the kind of raincoat she never used to use, too.

  “Would you save my life?”

  Yes. But obviously he had not been very good at it.

  “She drowned. She just sank and sank and sank. Like she was sucked up. Slurp. She disappeared.”

  But first, nuances, before everything happened. How it started, that which was the change. And after the beginning the end came very quickly.

  Sometimes Bencku waited for her in the boathouse if she was not there when he came. Maybe she was with the baroness in the Glass House, or out running errands. She did not say exactly what she was doing during the day, and Bencku had not asked. It was not important after all. The important thing was the boathouse, what existed when the two of them were there.

  One night he waited in the boathouse in vain. For hours. He even had time to doze off on her bed and when he woke up it was almost dark and still she was not there, that had not happened before. He strolled off, in the twilight. Not angry, but certainly disappointed. He walked back over the Second Cape, through the end of the woods to the cousin’s house, and he immediately noticed something was new and different.

  Two orange spots in the opening to the barn, low voices. Music in the background, Björn’s music. Bencku recognized it immediately but there was still something keeping him from walking up right away or calling to Björn from the dark.

  He remained standing at the edge of the woods and he had seen. And when he realized what he had seen, whom he had seen, he wished of course that he had hidden himself completely.

  “Who’s there? Bencku! We can see you. We know you’re there! Come here!”

  And he walked over to them where they were standing with their arms around each other, smoking their cigarettes, almost swaying with the music. Eddie tried to make eye contact with Bencku, her shirt was red, he would remember that, and when he cast a quick glance at her she did not look the slightest bit embarrassed or apologetic.

  Bencku sat at the desk and drew in the light of the desk lamp until late in the night. Björn finally came.

  “Are you still up? What are you doing?”

  “Drawing,” Bencku said without looking up.

  Björn dropped down on his bed.

  “Aren’t we going to turn the lights out?”

  “Yeah.” Bencku got up, carefully rolled up his map and placed it under the bed. Then he got undressed and put on his pajamas, crept under the covers and turned off the lamp on the desk next to his bed.

  Björn was just lying there, still dressed, in the light of the bed lamp staring at the ceiling.

  “Are we turning the lights out then?” Bengt asked.

  “Mmmm,” said Björn.

  And added, suddenly with a loud and important voice, in
a tone which, at the same time, was filled with both tenderness and amusement.

  “Now she’s here. The whore.”

  “What?” Bencku avoided looking in his direction.

  “Well. The woman,” Björn added. “In my life.”

  . . .

  Bengt had not even said, “She isn’t a whore,” before he attacked Björn. And they fought. For real. Bengt had the upper hand at first because Björn did not take him seriously, but then, when he understood that Bengt was not giving up he got angry for real. The cousin’s mama finally came up and separated them.

  The next day no one spoke about the fight.

  After the fight it was the three of them.

  Eddie, Björn, AND Bengt.

  And that was it.

  The conversations with Eddie. Eddie came to Bengt at the marsh. She laid her hand on his shoulder: “What’s happening to you?” And he felt how he was falling, literally. Into her, back inside. And they went back to the boathouse together.

  The conversations with Eddie. Bencku and Eddie walked over the cliffs on the Second Cape, there was a hard wind. The sea was gray and foamy, it was cold and Eddie shivered in her short-sleeved blouse. Her sweater, she had left it behind somewhere else. Bencku walked after her with his hands in his jacket pockets, she was talking. Her mouth was moving and even though he strained, even though he tried to understand he was not at all sure that he heard what she was saying.

  It was very windy, and it was difficult to understand in the wind. Eddie, she spoke so quickly and excitedly. She mixed in foreign words in her sentences, words that maybe he knew what they meant, but in some other time, in some other situation.

  But he wanted to scream STOP WAIT.

  STOP NOW!

  “Sometimes I think . . . that it’s so serious . . . I don’t know if I can.”

  And then her voice died out again. Drowned in waves, foam, water, wind that had splashed and washed washed over them.

  “One shouldn’t eavesdrop,” the cousin’s mama said to Doris Flinkenberg who at this time was not living in the cousin’s house in her own right yet. She was just the marsh kid from the distant marsh, she just was.

  It was Doris who had made her way to the barn where Eddie and Björn had been. It was Doris who had huddled in the darkness and heard some things without being discovered.

  “But I KNOW that they didn’t notice me!” Doris Flinkenberg insisted.

  “But you SHOULDN’T eavesdrop,” the cousin’s mama said decidedly and pulled Doris into the kitchen.

  “Come and let’s think about other things,” she said in a considerably kinder tone of voice. “Come. We’re behind closed doors now and we can do something fun together. Just the two of us. Should we do a crossword? Or put on the radio and listen to music?”

  And Doris immediately started thinking about other things.

  “Yes,” she said attentively. “Yes. To all of it. First we’ll do all of it once, then we’ll do everything again. And then again.”

  And Doris was so happy that the cousin’s mama’s heart almost burst. Doris had such a hard time.

  “Come now, Doris. Time to go home. I’ll walk you.”

  “Don’t want to!” Little Doris started crying.

  “It doesn’t help!” the cousin’s mama had said and taken Doris Flinkenberg in her arms partly by force. “WE HAVE TO.” She half carried, half dragged the hysterical Doris Flinkenberg up to the main country road on which you have to walk quite a few miles away from honor and integrity in order to get to the marsh hovel where Doris and her marsh mama and her marsh papa lived.

  “My heart breaks,” the cousin’s mama would lament when Doris was not there. “It’s so terrible.”

  The conversations with Eddie. They walked in silence. Along the path down to the boathouse. The last bit she took his hand in hers. Her hand was warm, almost hot and damp with sweat. Bencku cast a sideways glance at her. She was pale.

  Then the end came very quickly. It was the morning when everything happened—or, when everything had already happened. For Bengt, this is the moment when reason and logic split, and once it started, it lasted several weeks.

  It was early in the morning. Bencku had not slept at all. He was walking on the main road, the one that led up to the main country road or down to the Second Cape, depending on where you were headed. Bencku was on his way to the Second Cape, but he might as well have been heading in the opposite direction, toward the town center and the bus stop.

  The sound of a car engine suddenly could be heard in the middle of that early morning. It was a Jaguar, one of those antique models, very nice, and it was white. It came driving fast and everything happened in a moment, he became so surprised that he stepped down into the ditch.

  She was sitting in the backseat, her face pressed up against the window. He saw her, she saw him, it was going so quickly, but still. A moment. And presto it was gone. Presto the car had driven away and he was standing there alone. Alone in the District, alone in the ditch. Hand in the air—had he thought of it as a wave?

  But this he was sure of, he remembered it for real. She had looked crazy. She had not been herself, not at all. He could not explain in what way. But that expression she had, one she had never had before. Frightened out of her wits.

  And that was the last time he saw her.

  Then he never, never saw her again.

  But walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Bencku walked over the far meadow toward the outbuilding on the other side. How much time had actually passed between the one and the other, the side of the road and the outbuilding, was not clear.

  Slowly at first, but then he started running. Faster and faster. Over the fields until he got to where he was going.

  He stepped into the outbuilding. Saw right away what was in there. It was Björn.

  . . .

  And Bencku became completely mute.

  Now only he was left.

  “Nobody knew my rose of the world but me.”

  “Am I your rose now?”

  The District hates itself. He stopped going to the Second Cape. But he found himself on the outskirts of the woods more and more often, where he wandered around, far away from everything else.

  That was how he found the house in the darker part. That was how he discovered it, where it stood in all its impossibility: an alpine villa on the low-lying damp ground by a turbid marsh. The nameless marsh.

  The entire house was a staircase. A hundred steps leading up to the main entrance.

  A staircase leading to nothing.

  On the other side of the house, the one facing the marsh, there were panorama windows covering almost the entire basement wall. He looked in and made out a large, rectangular hole in the ground in the middle of the basement.

  A swimming pool?

  The future angel in the mud. This was reality.

  Nevertheless he did go back to the boathouse on the Second Cape one last time. The key was in the lock. It was empty in there, but in a new way. And he was not surprised. That was what he had expected. Empty in the normal way: as if no one had ever set foot there.

  Chair, table, bed. The same furniture. The same light blue bedspread. Some flowers in a vase on the small table. Large tropical flowers, disgusting. The vase was made of thick crystal, and the tablecloth laid under it was newly ironed.

  Eddie had hated that vase, used it as an ashtray out on the terrace.

  The guitar was hanging by a brown leather strap from a nail on the wall above the bed. It was new, both the nail and the strap from which the guitar was hanging. That was the way the baroness had wanted it.

  He lifted the bedspread and looked under the bed. Nothing there, but that was no surprise. He went out and closed the door. Turned the key in the lock. Then he left the boathouse and walked up to the house.

  “I came to get my maps.” It was with the baroness up there in the Glass House that Bencku started talking again. “So you have a tongue in your head after all,” said the baroness not sounding at all sur
prised, where she was standing there on the veranda, which she called her Winter Garden, and pruning her plants. She had planted them in pots that filled the entire veranda. The veranda was an extension of the glass façade, with its own roof, also made of glass. This was where she forced her strange plants to grow: frivolous flowers in different colors, lit by different types of lamps and heated with extra heaters. “Good that you came. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  She set the pruning shears down on a windowsill, slowly pulled off her yellow rubber gloves, came up to him holding out her hand. Only then, because he had to, did he dare to look at her.

  They stood there in the baroness’s Winter Garden and shook hands, he and she.

  But at the same time, it was as if she wanted to say something to him now, the baroness, something kind and comforting. Something that did not go together with her nature at all. This rough, square, straight-to-the-point style that matched her clothes so perfectly. Linen pants and a dark blue shirt, shimmering silver hair that shone against her brown face. Patinated. Maybe sixty years old, fifty-five.

  “Wait here.” She let go of his hand and disappeared into the house for a while, leaving him among the plants in the Winter Garden that smelled so strongly. But the door was ajar so it was not as suffocating as it could have been.

  “Beautiful.” The baroness had come back with his maps under her arm.

  “I took them from the boathouse. This is why you’re here, isn’t it?

  “Interesting,” the baroness continued. “Almost like works of art. You have an artistic talent, there’s no doubt about that. But a talent does not develop on its own. It demands work. Discipline. One cannot be . . . lazy.” It was as though she also had not opened her mouth for some time, and as if she was not very careful about what she let slip. Her thoughts were somewhere else entirely.

  “May I get you a cup of tea?”

  “No, thank you.” He shook his head, took the roll of maps, and left.

  She came looking for him that same evening, at the cousin’s house. She came to his room where he was lying on his bed next to the desk in front of the window and determined what he had already determined many times before: this was the room he could no longer be in. Then the baroness had suddenly been standing in the middle of the room and she spoke to him. Looked straight at him, as if she found everything else around her completely meaningless.