He smells just as good as I expected. I lay my face against his neck and inhale the spicy scent of cinnamon, then he lets go of me to shrug off his coat, slide my jacket down over my shoulders, he kicks off his shoes before we move like one single clumsy entity toward my bed, we fall down with him on top of me, his body is warm and heavy, he slides his hand under my sweater and places it on my stomach, determinedly moving it upward.
It is still raining. I hear the rain in the distance somehow, hammering on the window as he slowly and deliberately makes love to me, or screws me, I don’t really know what to call it: it is completely different from the way things have been with guys my own age. There is nothing of their impatience, the sense that they feel as if they have gained access to something that will soon be taken away from them, so they have to be as quick as possible, exploit it to the max. They are like bulimics, I think, binge lovers, with their own pleasure uppermost in their minds.
Carl Malmberg talks to me, tells me I am beautiful, asks me to touch myself, and I do as he says in a state of arousal that is nothing like anything I have experienced before. His body enfolds me completely when he wraps his arms around me, I am lost in his embrace, he tells me to come and I obey.
After that the town seems different to me. It is full of possibilities, it is as though my whole existence has grown bigger, deepened, acquired both a greater darkness and a greater light. To think that things can be this way, that you can have a secret like a dark strand, a pulsating bass line beneath everyday life. It feels adult. I don’t know what else to call it, yet at the same time it is something I couldn’t have imagined in the past. When I was younger I could never have imagined that life as an adult would be like this, that other adults around me — parents, relatives, teachers — could have parts of their lives that weren’t open to everyone, that were something different from outward appearances, from the normal routine, work and leisure.
Secrets were what people had in films and on TV, I would never have believed that films and TV portrayed such things because that was reality. Perhaps it is thanks to my secure upbringing that I believe life consists of only one layer, I think, the layer I am part of, the layer that is suitable for children.
Suddenly I feel like a part of something bigger, a tacit agreement, a club for people who have realized that one aspect of life can be about something they don’t talk about. That nothing is what it seems to be. I think that maybe it’s natural, just as our taste buds demand bigger kicks as we get older, we suddenly crave sourness and bitterness and saltiness after the mild, nondescript tastes of childhood. Over and over again I wonder why I have never done something like this before.
I learn the rules of being a mistress so quickly that I feel I must have a particular aptitude for this role. Perhaps I have, perhaps a mistress is what I am meant to be. I toy with the idea of writing a guide for mistresses, containing practical advice. I can’t give any emotional advice yet, I will have to add that chapter at a later stage.
I learn never to adjust the passenger seat in his car. His wife is shorter than me, and the seat is as far forward as it will go, it would be more comfortable for me to push it back slightly, but I never do, in case I forget to readjust it and she starts wondering who has been in his car.
I wear very little perfume. On the days when she might want to use his car soon after I have got out, I am not allowed in the car at all, because the smell of me would linger. He has informed me that even my hair has its own scent of shampoo and conditioner and hairspray, he sounds pleased but there is warning in his tone. And my skin, even if I don’t wear any perfume at all, carries the scent of my shower gel. Sometimes he takes my arm and pushes up my sleeve and sniffs the inside of my forearm because he thinks I smell so good.
I never wear lipstick or lip gloss. I avoid pressing my face against him when he is dressed, because of the risk of getting makeup on his shirt.
I switch my cell to silent as soon as I am with him, in case she calls and my phone might ring while they are talking and she would wonder who he is with.
I check that there are none of my long, dark hairs on his sweater or jacket or coat before he leaves me. His wife is blond, I have seen her hairs in the car. No doubt she has lovely hair. No doubt she is beautiful. I have asked a few questions about her, even though I’m not sure I want to know the answers. I have a picture of her in my mind, maybe it would be better if I didn’t. I have read that horror films are more effective if we don’t see the monster, it is more frightening if it exists only in our heads, because nothing is as horrible as the things we can imagine. A wife that I could only imagine would have been worse. But then he told me she is nine years younger than him, it’s his second marriage, she works in corporate law, and I thought I shouldn’t have asked. It all sounds so attractive. It makes me wonder why he wants a mistress, especially why he wants someone like me, who spends her day in an ugly hospital uniform clearing away leftover food.
I picture his wife as incredibly beautiful and successful, cool and elegant with her perfectly styled blond hair and smart clothes that are both formal and businesslike, no doubt she is entirely professional in the way that has always frightened me. I have never felt comfortable around people who are very goal-oriented. I’m sure she is well respected at work and a good mother to their two children and has an active social life, she is interested in sports and cooking, they are both very sociable and often invite friends around, they are an attractive and popular couple with a lovely home, like in an American film, air-brushed to perfection.
That’s how I imagine it all. Sheer envy over her perfect life means that sometimes I think she deserves to be betrayed. You can’t have everything. Her life would still be better than most people’s, even if her husband is cheating on her. It almost seems fair.
Then I am ashamed of myself.
Then I wonder why I am ashamed of myself.
Then I see one of her blond hairs on his coat and it slices through me like a knife, stabs my heart like a cold, sharp icicle, and I think that because she wishes me ill, I wish her ill, it’s only fair.
Dostoevsky wrote that only beauty can save us, I used to think about that in my writing class, where I concluded that there was an unspoken suspicion of anything that was beautiful, from the fact that none of the girls at college seemed to wear makeup, and there was a fear of beautiful writing, beautiful scenes, beautiful language. It was beauty that got me interested in art and literature from the start, if they hadn’t been beautiful I wouldn’t have wanted to know about them. My need for culture began as a basis for dreams, ideas about how life could be in the very best-case scenario, a kind of springboard to greater heights. Are you really so spoiled? That’s what I sometimes used to wonder about my classmates. Do you have such an excess of beauty that you need to slum it a little bit, embrace what is ugly? I pictured their family dinners and vacations, beautiful apartments and views, made up conversations in my head. It was a kind of bourgeois cliché which probably didn’t match up with the reality at all, no doubt most of them didn’t come from the privileged upper class, but from the perfectly ordinary provincial middle class, with parents who were teachers and social workers and dental hygienists, but even then, I thought, there were books and summer cottages and people who could play the piano. And some of those sitting around the table in my writing class actually did have parents who were doctors and lawyers, I found it more difficult to get involved in their work, I just thought, how hard can life be when there’s always a safety net? When there’s always a parent who can pay the rent if things really go wrong, when you never have to feel like someone has pulled the rug from under your feet when you lose your job or your apartment, and you suddenly find yourself in the middle of nothing.
That sense of security must do something to people. That’s how I regard the cultivated well-to-do upper-middle class: so secure in all the fundamentals of life that they are able to devote themselves to other things, get involved in relationships, in their spiritual life,
see a therapist, fulfill their potential, argue over family dinners. I think it’s a kind of first-world problem, but perhaps the need for problems is a constant: if you don’t have problems, then you create them.
“Have you ever had a real job?” That’s what I want to ask everyone I meet, even if I know that almost all of them have had a real job, but a few days here and there in market research or a summer job as a care assistant doesn’t count, the only thing that counts is when it’s a matter of life and death, the jobs you do because there is no alternative, because they’re the only jobs you can get, and if you didn’t take them you wouldn’t be able to pay your rent, and there’s no one you can ask for help. The jobs that are the alternative to the abyss.
The only thing that counts is to have known the abyss.
But I don’t want to study social realism either. I don’t really like depictions of the working class at all, they are always depressing, people are alcoholics and it’s all ugliness and wretchedness and misery. I can’t relate to that either. I grew up with food on the table and an underlying sense of security, but with a lack of culture, a feeling that the world is small, that certain things are meant for other kinds of people. It annoys me when best-selling books about the working class describe social misery, it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a working class who live decent lives on very few resources, they work and do the right thing, they are clean and healthy and well brought up, but submissive when they have to deal with anyone who can be regarded as being in authority: teachers, doctors, official bodies, even restaurant staff on those few occasions when they eat out. They would never complain about a diagnosis or a grade or an unsatisfactory main course, they don’t want to be any trouble. No books are written about them, perhaps because their lives are without drama. I ought to write about them, but I don’t want to. And yet I miss them, both in the arts and in the general consciousness, and it irritates me that it is impossible to refer to the working class without evoking a fleeting response of disgust or pity in those who immediately think of domestic violence and misery and tramp stamps.
Sometimes I don’t know what I like. Nothing is good enough. It’s not a particularly attractive quality. I can hear Emelie’s voice inside my head: Not much meets with your approval, does it? She’s right. That’s why I think that art must raise itself above the ordinary, that it must resist demands for representation and realism, that it must be bigger than that.
Sometimes something is so beautiful that it feels like a religious experience. I have never had a religious experience, but I’m guessing that’s how it would feel. It can happen when I am reading a novel or a poem that completely swallows me up, or when I see a really, really good painting. It’s difficult to explain, it’s like a dizzy feeling, a sense that this particular piece of art puts its finger on something that is on a totally different plane, a higher plane, to my mind a truer plane. As if it has come close to an absolute truth.
That too makes me self-absorbed, believing that I alone have the ability to see which works in the history of art are the most true — because that is what I think, that I can recognize the best art, that I have a particular sensitivity which enables me to tell when something is true. This conviction often depresses me, all I have to do is read a page in the culture section of the newspaper, find out what is regarded as good in contemporary circles: all that miserable ugliness, that stupidity which is held up as important social criticism, allegedly showing the power and potential of culture.
My favorite is early Renaissance art. There is a purity in those paintings that is unlike anything else. They are not perfect, the perspective is skewed, but there is something else about them, a quality that flashes across the centuries like a bolt of lightning and enters my soul. All the pictures feature a God I don’t even believe in, but it doesn’t matter: when the angel comes to Mary with a lily in his hand and tells her that she will conceive and bring forth a son, I feel as if I am there in the room, feeling the seriousness of the moment beneath the chalky white arches.
That’s where you can talk about the power and potential of art, I think. But perhaps I am like a person who is convinced that she sees ghosts: far too preoccupied with something bordering on madness. None of my contemporaries seems to have any interest in quality or beauty, and I think that those who are like me, who seek for something greater, more beautiful and more true, look elsewhere rather than to art and literature, they turn to other contexts where they can find the same experience: to religion, or nature, where I have had the same dizzying sensation when faced with a particular view or landscape, an impression of beauty so strong and immediate that I believe it is an important part of the meaning of life.
And that’s how it is when I have sex with Carl. It is the same sensation, that my life is growing and shrinking at the same time, that everything that exists and is of any value is restricted to that moment, to our bodies, to the smell of him. When I feel him above me I am transported to a different state, something completely new, I am weightless, as if an anchor that was holding me fast, locking down my consciousness, has been removed: it strikes me that I have never felt less like myself, so much in my body rather than my soul, or perhaps it is the other way around: I have never felt so much in my soul rather than my body, it is as if I am in some kind of primeval state, I have never felt so much like a child, like an unborn fetus: vegetating, enclosed, primal, yet at the same time I have never felt so grown up as when I meet his gaze and he grips my wrist and presses his lips to mine.
I am in the kitchen behind the cafeteria preparing the salad buffet when my cell phone buzzes. I have been given the responsibility of the salad buffet on the days when I am working, and I like having a job which is mine and mine alone. I want it to be perfect, although I have to work within the available parameters, which are incredibly boring. The porter brings down fresh ingredients from the central kitchen, several containers every morning: huge crates of grated carrot, lettuce, sliced cucumber, winter-pale and rock-hard tomatoes. Canned and pickled vegetables are available in big tins in the larder. I don’t understand how anybody can come up with such an uninteresting salad buffet, I have tried to explain that nobody really likes canned vegetables, and that nobody eats lettuce these days, I can’t even remember when I last saw lettuce served anywhere. We could add a little fresh fruit, I suggest, perhaps put together a few combinations and pickles of our own, but no one seems interested, which annoys me, but at the same time I think maybe they’re right, what do I know about salad, or how to run a cafeteria, I’m only a student, as far as the kitchen staff are concerned I could just as easily be a creature from outer space.
So I work within the limitations, I serve up the pickled vegetables. The cans are opened with a gigantic opener fixed to one of the worktops, and the smell of vinegar pervades the entire kitchen. I have tipped out pickled gherkins and black olives and carrot and cauliflower and silverskin onions and beets when I hear my cell phone vibrating on the draining board. 1 message received. It is from Carl, he has started texting me during the day. His messages are usually about sex, what he’s going to do to me. Just seeing his name on the display turns me on. “Thinking about you. What are you doing?” it says. I reply, the phone buzzes again in seconds. “Can you come up here?” I tell him I have to work, he sends me the number of an examination room, a floor and a department. “Tell them you have to go and buy something from the pharmacy,” he writes. “Hurry up.”
It is only ten o’clock, there is no rush with the salad buffet. At any moment Siv and Magdalena will go and sit by the window with their coffee. It doesn’t matter if I miss my break. I throw the big empty cans in the garbage, tuck my phone in the pocket of my blouse. Siv is just making fresh coffee.
“I need to go and get something from the pharmacy,” I say. “I won’t be long.”
She merely nods, looking crossly at the coffee machine, which is old and has a thermostat that doesn’t work properly.
The corridor is deserted. It doesn’t tak
e me long to get to the department where Carl is. The room is more difficult to find, I end up in a little staff room with chairs made of birch wood, prints on the walls. Nearly all the art I have seen in the hospital is ugly and depressing, produced in the late 1980s, it consists almost entirely of prints in gaudy colors. There is a woman in charge of cultural activities within the hospital, she organizes guided tours where she talks about the art collection. I wonder if she actually likes this stuff, or if she just turns up and tries to do her job as well as possible within the prevailing parameters, as I do with the salad buffet.
Eventually I find the right examination room. I feel a little unsure of myself as I stand there, my knock sounds feeble in the empty corridor. Carl opens the door immediately. I smile at him but he doesn’t smile back. He is wearing his white coat and his name badge, CARL MALMBERG, SENIOR CONSULTANT, and his expression is serious, he closes the door behind me, presses a button so that the sign will light up, indicating that the room is occupied. There is an overwhelming smell of disinfectant, and something else: plastic, rubber, and the dryness of the paper covering the bed in one corner. On a small cart I see jars containing cotton swabs, compresses, bandages, the desk over by the wall is empty. There is a calendar hanging on the wall.
“How’s it going?” I say.
He doesn’t answer. The curtains are white with a pale, abstract pattern, the sun is shining today, a faint haze hangs in the air, it is almost like spring. Like a day when you screw up your eyes to look at the sun and see herring gulls drifting against a pale blue sky, you hear their screams and know that you are close to the open sea. Carl pulls out the desk chair, sits down. He nods over at the bed, indicating that I should sit down on it, so I do. The paper rustles and crumples around me, it is rough. Carl clears his throat.
“Thank you for coming,” he says. His tone is formal.
The Other Woman Page 6
