So I saw nothing strange or awkward about calling you to ask if we should see each other again. My heart was in my mouth as I leafed through the phone book, looking for your number, not surprisingly, but only because this was such a new and unfamiliar situation for me and because there was a pretty good chance that you would say no. You had enjoyed yourself as much as I had, before, during, and after we had had sex, it wasn’t that, but I had been totally honest with you about the fact that I was living with someone and had a baby daughter and I knew if it had been the other way around, if I had been single and you were the one with a partner and a child, I would at least have thought twice about agreeing to see you again. But you didn’t. “I’m working from home tomorrow, why don’t you come over,” you said.
To begin with our relationship was purely sexual. Every Tuesday and Thursday when Malin was having her morning nap, I would push the baby carriage over to your apartment in Lademoen and park it outside your bedroom window. Then I would walk into the crooked old wooden building, knock on your door, and wait for you to let me in. The first few times not much was said, we exchanged no more than a few pleasantries. I might have made some comment about the weather, you might have apologized for the mess, and then, after a few shy smiles and tentative kisses, we would strip off and fall into bed. In other words we got right down to it, that was what was so wonderful about those encounters. It was just what I needed. Torkild was always so conscientious when it came to sex. He had a strong, wiry body honed by countless hours of rock and wall climbing, a body that turned me on and to which I could hardly believe that I, small and slightly chubby as I was, had more or less free access. But he was far too considerate in bed, so exasperatingly polite. He always asked me how I wanted it, what I would like. He kept asking if this or that was okay and whispering that he loved me more than anything in the world. He didn’t seem to realize that I wanted to be desired, he didn’t seem to realize that I wanted to feel like a woman who was so gorgeous that he couldn’t control himself. He thought I wanted love and romance and he didn’t understand why I didn’t come when he was so gentle and tender and loving and the whole situation was like something straight out of The Joy of Sex. He felt bad for coming when I didn’t, it left him feeling frustrated and dejected. He borrowed a book by a famous American sex therapist that he wanted us to read together and maybe pick up some tips, but that only made things worse, of course, since this sort of didactic approach to sex was part of the problem. It sounds as though I’m pinning all the blame for our less than perfect sex life on him, but that really isn’t my intention. It was just as much my fault that it wasn’t working—I had as little idea of what I wanted and needed as he did. Or no, that’s not entirely true. I think I did know what I wanted. The problem was probably more that I couldn’t admit what I wanted, to myself or to him. I secretly longed to do the things they did in the porn movies that I professed to abhor, I frequently fantasized about being ravished by a man who was more interested in his own desires than what he thought I would like, but I always felt dirty afterward. It was a bit like the feeling I had when I yielded to the temptation to watch my favorite soap opera. I felt as though I had betrayed the ideals Torkild and I had tacitly agreed we would always strive to attain.
But after I got to know you, much of this disappeared. I lost my inhibitions, all my feelings of guilt and shame, my shyness and the stiff, tense, awkward way I behaved before, during, and after sex. With you I didn’t have to prove anything. We had sex for its own sake, not to show how much we loved each other, and this meant I could relax. It meant I could give myself up to the moment in a way I never could with Torkild. He would probably have described what we did as “coupling.” I remember him using that expression once down at the Edgar Kafé during a discussion of porn before a film club screening of Deep Throat. He didn’t need to see people coupling, he said. Which was both untrue and hypocritical, of course, because whenever we were at a newsstand, his eye would always stray, with studied casualness, to the girlie mags and once, when we were staying at a hotel in Stavanger, he “accidentally” put on a soft-porn movie. He was still watching it when I came out of the shower fifteen minutes later and he didn’t exactly look as though he was averse to what he was seeing, if you know what I mean. Torkild was like me. He found it hard to acknowledge needs and desires that most people under retirement age had no great difficulty in admitting to, that was the problem. It appeared to be beneath his dignity to get turned on by something for which he felt no deeper emotional attachment. You, on the other hand, seemed to be blessedly unburdened by any such reservations. Although I think you were exaggerating slightly when you quoted Terence, saying “nothing human is alien to me,” you were certainly extremely broad-minded and not at all judgmental where your own and other people’s sexual desires, needs, and predilections were concerned. You were always keen to experiment and try new things. If you liked what we did, great, if you didn’t, no harm done. You would simply shrug and say: “Oh, well, now we know,” or even have a fit of the giggles, as you did when we decided to try a bit of role-playing and you dressed up as a workman but managed to cut yourself and draw blood before you got beyond the bedroom door. With Torkild, laughter and sex were mutually exclusive.
God, how I looked forward to those midmorning visits to your place. In order to cope with my disappointing sex life with Torkild I had tried to convince myself that it was what was on the inside that mattered and that the physical side wasn’t really that important. Now, though, I had no difficulty in admitting to myself that being screwed by you was one of the real high points of my week. To see your shining, avid eyes when you stood at the foot of the bed, gazing down on my naked body. To spread my legs and say “give it to me” or “I’m so horny” instead of whispering “slip it inside me” as I did when I was with Torkild. To be taken roughly from behind without being asked if I was okay made me feel hornier than ever before. And afterward I just felt happy and satisfied. Not even the thought of Malin sleeping outside the bedroom window could make me feel guilty. Quite the opposite to be honest. It only made the whole thing seem even more forbidden, even more thrilling, it enhanced the sense of being wild and crazy, of rebelling, it enhanced the schadenfreude I felt at cheating on Torkild. Because infidelity was obviously a way of punishing my own personal jailer. Okay, so I still didn’t say anything when Torkild rebuked and corrected and lectured me, but I would smile to myself and think, “Oh, if you only knew, I need another man to satisfy me, so you’re not as perfect as you think.”
As time went on, however, it wasn’t just the sex I looked forward to on my visits to you. I also looked forward to simply being with you, to lying in your bed, with my hair all disheveled, feeling decadent, listening to Beck, Tortoise, or Farmers Market and laughing at all the funny things you said and did; to sitting freshly showered at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and listening to you talk about your thesis and the little you would reveal about the novel you were working on alongside this; to telling you things about my own life and indeed to airing my innermost thoughts and feelings in a way I had never done before. For a long time I thought it was because we shared a secret that I found it so easy to confide in you. We were both terrified that our affair would be discovered and that Torkild would freak out, and this created a bond between us, trusting as we did that neither of us dared or had any interest in telling anyone else. I thought this was what emboldened me to tell you my most embarrassing secrets, such as how, when I masturbated, I sometimes fantasized that I was a cheap hooker, how I felt bad about not being as fond of my mom as I felt I should be, and how I had always been very jealous of May Lene and Mette because they were so much better looking than me. After a while, though, I began to see that it was because you were so easygoing that I felt able to open up to you. The way you never appeared to judge yourself or me or anyone else put to rest to all my fears and inhibitions. I was never afraid of making a fool of myself when I was with you, I didn’t try to seem more intelligent or know
ledgeable than I was. You were an avowed eclectic, much enamored of the nineties’ fusion of high art and pop culture and since you believed that every genre had something to offer, I didn’t have to hide the fact that I sometimes liked to relax by listening to pop music, reading crime novels, or watching American soaps (again, as you used to say: “Soap operas are the folktales of our time.”). When we had wine, I didn’t have to make a big show of rolling it around my tongue as if I’d be able to tell which grape it was made from; I didn’t try to fool you into thinking I was familiar with books or records I’d never heard of—not even when they were books and records I suspected I ought to have heard of—and when we discussed something—politics, for example—I gradually became better at saying what I thought rather than what I imagined I ought to think.
This last was possibly the most important. Strange as it may sound, considering that Torkild was so much the dominant partner in our relationship, I regarded myself as a woman who stood up for her rights and was never afraid to speak her mind. Years of involvement with student organizations and the experience gained from all of the attendant discussions and confrontations had possibly helped to foster this image of myself. But after I met you, I became increasingly aware that this was not a true picture, or not entirely so at any rate. Not only did I have a tendency to adopt and embellish Torkild’s opinions, I was also apt to argue on autopilot, so to speak. I had a definite idea of the kind of person I was and a definite idea of what such a person would think in this or that situation, so I simply presented these views—without giving any real thought to the opinions I was forever spouting. I was so politically correct. I had been accused of this countless times, but I had always responded by thanking my critics for the compliment. Being politically correct means not being afraid to say what one thinks even when lots of other people think exactly the same thing, I used to assert, it means you would rather be honest than make yourself seem interesting by acting controversial.
After I met you, however, I realized that I was wrong and that I was actually shockingly unliberated. Thanks to the lack of inhibition I felt when I was with you, I would suddenly find myself voicing ideas and opinions I didn’t even know I had and that I would surely have disagreed with if they had come from anyone else. I would, for example, catch myself expressing a view held by no one in the Norwegian political landscape except members of the Progress Party. Me, the student radical with the “Hands off my buddy” badge on her jacket, suddenly advocating a tougher immigration policy and stricter rules for people coming to our country. Me, the feminist who had taken part in a feminist assertiveness course and had just written an essay on Mary Wollstonecraft, suddenly not sure I was so convinced that prostitutes were, per definition, victims. All of this would have been inconceivable before I met you. Not because these were things I believed but would never have dared to actually say in front of my radical friends, but because, as I’ve said, I simply wasn’t aware that I had any leanings in that direction—the radical in me censored such lines of thought before I could think them through to their conclusion. I may occasionally have had a vague sense that I didn’t always entirely agree with all the views I expressed, I had done ever since I came home from my first Students’ Union meeting, but despite this I had never taken the trouble to reassess my ideas. I did now, though. Not to the extent that I changed my fundamental political convictions, of course, I called myself—and still call myself—a socialist and a feminist, I think I’ve been on every single May Day march since I was fifteen. But after I met you I became less predictable, more true to myself and less true to my political ideals, if you like.
But it wasn’t only your easygoing nature that inspired this change in me. Just as important was your way of gently deflating me: you thought it was hilarious to expose and send up my somewhat stilted rhetoric. When I used political jargon and spoke in long, involved sentences peppered with words and phrases that sounded extremely profound but were really nothing but platitudes, you called me Gro, after the Labor prime minister, and when I got all fired up and started spouting assertions all of which ultimately blamed “turbo-capitalism” and “the free market” for everything from the climate crisis and poverty to eating disorders among young people today, you would suddenly change the subject and turn to talking about the student uprisings of the 1970s. You did it so smoothly and so subtly, I remember, and it always took a while for me to realize that you were poking fun at me by playing devil’s advocate, which was incredibly annoying. “Shit, why do I never learn?” I would say and then burst out laughing.
All in all I laughed a lot when I was with you, often at things I wouldn’t have dared laugh at before and was still loath to laugh at when I was with other people. One day I told you, for example, about someone I knew who had prevented a rape when he was on his way home from a party. You listened gravely as I described the incident in detail and then told me that you had also prevented a rape once. “Oh?” I said and waited expectantly for you to go on. “Yes, I restrained myself,” you said with a totally straight face and then, after a brief pause while I tried to figure out what you had actually just said, we both fell about laughing.
Previously I would have jumped at this chance to wax indignant. Not because I thought it was so terribly offensive or provocative in itself, but in order to show what a dim view I took of violence against women; because I wanted to show everyone around me that I was a feminist and proud of it. I was exactly the same when it came to homophobia or racism. When I heard a joke about gay or black people I always overreacted. For me such situations were simply a chance to parade the values and norms that I held dear. “No, you know what, that’s not fucking funny,” I would say, even when I did actually think that whatever had been said was funny. In some cases this was both right and brave of me, but just as often, in fact more often than not, it was the self-centered and oh-so-smug Susanne who was talking. “Look at me, look what a decent, righteous, upright individual I am”—that was usually what I was trying to say when I reacted this way. But I couldn’t see it myself. Not until I met you.
You made jokes about women, gay people, and black people, but it never crossed my mind that you might be a male chauvinist, a homophobe, or a racist. Not at all. The way you joked about them proved that you regarded women, gay people, and black people as your equals. So when the music student upstairs from you moved out and an African guy moved in, you shook your new neighbor’s hand and said: “Hey, just what we needed—a token black man!” I could hardly believe my ears, I was sure he was going to headbutt you, but no, he shook with laughter. Not everyone would have reacted like that, so you were possibly rather lucky. Not only that, though. By making a joke like this as if it were the most natural thing in the world, you also came across as an open and inclusive individual. It showed that you didn’t regard this guy as essentially a victim. Instead you took it for granted that he was a grown man, secure enough in himself to cope with hearing something like that. There was also an ironic aspect to the way you spoke and behaved in such situations. It was as if you were playing a part in which you hammed it up just enough for most intelligent individuals to grasp that if anyone was being sent up here it was those who said such things and actually meant them.
Even back then this brand of humor raised eyebrows, and to someone as politically correct as I was, meeting you came as a shock. Or no, shock is the wrong word. It makes meeting you sound like something negative, and it wasn’t of course, far from it. Meeting you was, first and foremost, a liberating experience, liberating in all manner of ways: sexually, politically, culturally, personally. After I got to know you, I realized how uptight I was when I was with Torkild, constantly on tenterhooks, waiting for some sort of judgment to be pronounced, so to speak. I was quite simply a bag of nerves, but all that tension evaporated the moment I walked into your apartment. I know it’s a cliché, but I immediately felt physically lighter, it was like slipping off a heavy coat.
Is it any wonder that I looked forward to visitin
g you? Is it any wonder that I dreaded going home again or that I overstepped the mark and broke the rules I had set for myself? Because I did. To begin with I had, for instance, a rule that said Malin was never to enter your apartment. She was Torkild’s daughter, he loved her more than anything in the world, and bringing her inside with me would have been like taking her away from him, it would have been like giving her a second father and a second home. Not in practice, of course, but that was how I felt. As far as I was concerned, that would have been tantamount to driving a wedge between father and daughter and that was the last thing I wanted to do. So if Malin woke from her nap and wouldn’t go back to sleep, I always went home. Even if I had been with you for only five minutes and even though I ached to go back to you. But my boundaries did shift. At first I told myself it didn’t matter if Malin sat on the floor and played with pots and pans and wooden spoons while we had coffee, she didn’t understand a word of what we were saying anyway. Then I told myself it didn’t matter if you dandled her on your knee or got down on the floor to play with her while I went to the bathroom or took a shower to wash off your semen and your smell before going home. Malin was fine, and you made her laugh. And so it went on. Not only with Malin, but also in other ways. I came to see you more often than I had told myself I would, I stayed longer and became more and more careless. If I happened to see someone I knew near the house where you lived, I no longer took another turn around the block to save arousing their suspicion and when I wheeled the baby carriage around to the backyard, I no longer made sure to park it where it wouldn’t be seen from the street. But when your landlord stopped me and asked if I would like him to hang a gate across the entrance so that, come the summer, there would be no danger of Malin running out into the road and getting knocked down, I knew I had gone too far. He had simply assumed that you and I were a couple and that Malin and I had moved in, and this made me see that I not only had two men in my life, I had two lives. This couldn’t go on, I was going to have to leave Torkild and the sooner the better.
Aftermath Page 21