The Other Woman

by Therese Bohman

  ON THE WHOLE I was always alone, on the whole I will continue to be alone. Perhaps it is a childish insight, this realization of the incurable loneliness of the soul, this realization that we can never know another person completely. It should have come to me earlier, in my teenage years. But instead it comes when I understand that Alex is not like me at all. It is childish even to imagine that someone would be. I am so childish. I am going to stop being that way.

  She calls me for several days and I don’t answer, but then I think I might as well let her explain. I want to hear what she has to say. For the first time she is the one who sounds unsure of herself, not me.

  “I didn’t know at first,” she says. “How could I have known? I thought you seemed cool, and you were. The rest was a coincidence. A sick coincidence, but now I think maybe that means something too.”

  “Nothing means anything,” I say. My voice sounds so sarcastic that I hardly recognize it. “Was it fate that brought us together?”

  I hear her swallow.

  “No, but … you projected a whole lot of stuff onto me. You wanted to believe I was exotic, exciting, so that you would feel exotic and exciting.”

  I protest half-heartedly, because I realize she is right. That makes me feel childish again, caught out. She never told me anything about her father, the image I had of him was one I had created all by myself: I thought he was something different from a good-looking and successful doctor. Perhaps he was poor, an alcoholic, dead — anything that would have caused her pain. Then it occurs to me that that is exactly what he has done.

  “But he talked about you,” I say. “He told me you were studying political science at Lund, and that it was bound to lead to a trainee post with the UN at the very least.”

  She snorts, or laughs, a brief, bitter little laugh.

  “Didn’t he tell you I dropped out? That I hated it? Or how much we argued about it, that he kept saying I should go and study abroad for a year because he wanted to get rid of me, he offered to pay for everything, did he tell you that?”

  “That sounds terrible, someone offering to pay for you to study abroad,” I say sarcastically.

  “I felt so alone,” she says as her voice breaks and she begins to cry. “I wanted to come back here because I felt so alone, I wanted to live in the same town as him at least, and he wasn’t happy because he has his new family, but now I’m here and he hardly ever has time to see me, and I feel so alone, do you know what I mean?”

  I nod even though she can’t see me.

  “I know what you mean,” I say quietly.

  She takes a deep breath to stop herself crying.

  “Can’t you come over?” she says. “I’ll fix us something to eat.”

  We are lying side by side on her bed watching the smoke from our cigarettes rise toward the ceiling light, the white porcelain globe shines above us like a full moon through mist, soft and milky white. A jazz record hisses and crackles on the turntable, as warm as a real fire. You go to my head, and you linger like a haunting refrain. I’ve never known anyone who listens to jazz. The filter on Alex’s cigarette is dark red from her lipstick.

  “The thing is,” she says, turning her head so that I feel her warm, wine-heavy breath on my cheek, “the thing is, he’s evil.”

  She speaks calmly, as if she is merely stating the obvious. I wish I could say things that way. I wish I had the courage to believe that the strong opinion I hold about something is equally valid outside my own brain, that it is worth putting out there so that it can take its place in the world.

  I know she is wrong, Carl is not evil. He is the opposite of evil, even if he does things that hurt other people. Alex and me. I’m sure he never really wanted to hurt either of us. She is drunk, so am I. She gave me red wine and beet soup in the kitchen and coffee and more red wine in the living room, which is also red, the floor is covered in Persian rugs. Then she offered me a cigarette in the bedroom. It’s okay to smoke anywhere in Alex’s apartment.

  She looks at me, wanting me to agree with her.

  “He destroys everything he touches,” she goes on. “He destroys people’s lives. He always has. He destroyed my mother’s life, and mine. Now he’s destroying yours, and he’s destroying his wife’s by sleeping with you. Before long he will probably cheat on both of you with someone else.” Alex shakes her head. “He’s such a bastard.”

  I stub out what remains of my cigarette in the big ashtray lying between us on the quilt, then I clear my throat.

  “But I’m in love with him.”

  Alex’s tone softens.

  “I know you are. They all fall in love with him. That’s how he operates. But he only cares about himself. He’s never cared about anyone except himself. You can see that really.”

  She places her hand on mine.

  “We have to stick together,” she says.

  And even though I know she is wrong, I allow her hand to remain where it is.

  It has been cold for a long time, the inlet to the harbor has frozen solid and the icebreakers have been plying back and forth, the noise echoing across the water all the way to the docks. It calms me to know that someone is making sure it is still possible to leave this town by that route. The open water in the harbor is steaming, a few swans glide along as if they are surrounded by mist, as if they are setting the scene for a ballet. A sailor standing on the deck of a ship that is unloading timber is watching them too. He is smoking, he looks frozen. Then he glances up and meets my eyes on the other side of the harbor, I think he is smiling at me. I hold his gaze, smile back. We stand there looking at each other. I wonder what his name is. There are Russian letters on the side of the ship. Ivan, Nikolai. Andrei. I settle on Andrei. He has dark, cropped hair and big hands, the cigarette looks tiny in his hands. All the things we could do in life, but don’t do; just imagine if I went over to him. Across the harbor bridge to the other side, I could wave to him from the quayside, start chatting. We wouldn’t have much to say to each other, but that wouldn’t matter. His big hands would feel cold on my body at first, the sensation would make me shudder, but not with displeasure.

  He looks away, now I can clearly see that he is smiling. Imagine if he is thinking the same as me. Perhaps that’s how he passes the time in foreign ports, he gazes at the first woman who comes along and smiles. Suddenly my life seems hopelessly pathetic. It is focused on a few people in a small town, as if I still lived in a seventeenth-century farming community, and everything relating to liberation and self-realization and city life still lay generations in the future for someone like me. At least Andrei gets to see something of the world. In comparison I am a dork, someone who hasn’t lived. My whole body itches as I think about it, I feel a sense of frustration, of mounting panic, my head is buzzing, I want to scream, rake my nails down my face, hurt myself. That’s the kind of thing that crazy people do, people in films trussed up in straitjackets. I try to walk away from the feeling, scurrying along the avenue. The claw marks of the tramlines on the street. They are full of snow right now, they must have a special vehicle that plows the tracks.

  Nothing frightens me more than the thought that it will always be like this; I am a nonperson living a nonexistence in this nonlife. It’s just a phase, I think, as if I were the parent of a small child, tired of the hopeless child that is actually me, it is just a period in my life. Soon things will be different.

  Can Carl taste the fear when he kisses me? I imagine it tastes metallic, like rust and blood, like iron. It is the fear of being trapped. It is the fear that almost paralyzes me on certain days, I travel to the hospital in a kind of trance: the walk to the central station, the bus journey, the corridors, the changing room, I see everything through a blurred filter, I am locked inside myself as I pour water into the serving counters, open the cans of pickled vegetables, blink because of the vinegar fumes; it is too late, I think, I am too late. Everyone else has already made up their mind. They are already on their way. It is only me who is waiting. I am waiting for some
thing that never arrives.

  On other days the fear makes me straighten my back, fills me with a kind of pride, the knowledge that I hold my fate in my hands and it is up to me to determine what happens. This is just a phase, I repeat as I print out forms, call university administrators, fill in applications. I too could be one of those people who continue their studies. If I don’t write a collection of short stories and then several novels, I could write a dissertation. It’s not just people like Alex who can do that kind of thing, people who come from families where everyone has been to university and got good jobs and fine titles, for that very reason I ought to do it too. The fear picks me up by the scruff of the neck: I will walk the university corridors with my head held high and my shoulders back, I will never think that I don’t have as much right as anyone else to be there.

  I picture the fear as gall, its blackness running through my system, seeping out through my pores, making me dirty. It could end here, the progress I have imagined ever since I was little when I stood at the window watching my parents go off to work just after six o’clock in the morning. Way back then I thought that I didn’t want that, I didn’t want a job where you had to clock in before seven, a job that was exactly the same every single day, a job you hated and regarded as a waste of time, a pointless job you did just for the money, a job that made your body ache with weariness and exhausted your mind, your eyes fixed on Friday from first thing on Monday morning, your belly full of anxiety on Sunday night. Every choice I have made has been an effort to move away from all that, and it could end right here, right now, and if that happens I am trapped and no one will come and rescue me.

  And I feel angry at the knowledge that no one will come and rescue me, that I have no one but myself and never have had. That’s the kind of thing that makes you strong, if it doesn’t break you. Or it makes you bitter. Perhaps I am already bitter.

  The worst thing is when he has said he will come by my place, and he doesn’t show up. When I spend hours getting ready, wash my hair even though it doesn’t need it just so it will smell good, take off my chipped nail polish and apply fresh, paint my toenails too. Then I sit and wait for him, with my freshly bathed, perfumed body and my soft skin, wearing his favorite lingerie under my dress, and he doesn’t show up. Eventually my cell phone buzzes with a brief text message: sorry but he can’t come tonight, he has to pick up his younger daughter.

  My whole body burns with a feeling I can’t quite define: anger, jealousy, the sense of being left out. The knowledge that I never come first.

  I go out walking every time it happens. After I have hurled my basque or stockings into the back of the closet as if they were some disgusting animal I can’t bear to have in the same room, a creature that must be locked away and forgotten, and after I have put on my perfectly ordinary clothes, in which I think I look perfectly ordinary — Carl would be disappointed if I turned up looking like this because he has made it clear that he appreciates effort, and that this is something he appreciates about me in general terms: the fact that I make an effort, he has even noticed it in the cafeteria, he has noticed that I wear makeup and that the lace on my bra shows through my ugly uniform, after I have eliminated every single thing he could possibly appreciate, I go out walking.

  This anger is of a very particular kind, it is more private than normal anger. It is impossible to explain it to anyone else, it sounds childish or bitter, I can even hear it myself as the same phrases churn around in my brain, over and over again. Don’t I deserve to come first sometimes? it says, and then Depends what you mean by deserve, why don’t you just end it with him if you don’t like it? and then His children come first, you wouldn’t come first even if he left his wife. I walk past Strömsholmen, the little island in the middle of the Motala, Norrköping’s Île de la Cité, where they could have built a cathedral but chose to open a dance hall. I try to think about that instead, they put white wooden panels on the sides to make the island look like a steamboat, then they danced through the summer nights in the middle of the rushing water, that was back in the thirties, it was a popular place, I can just picture it: lanterns lighting up the late summer evenings as the twilight draws in a little earlier each day, the dark August foliage, the moths dancing around, the lights reflected in the water as it races past on its way out to sea as a jazz band plays, it must have been like dancing on the Titanic. Then the dance hall burned down and the place was left to fall apart. That’s just typical of Norrköping. The prettiest spot in the whole town has been abandoned since the thirties, no one is allowed to set foot there, it is accessible only to the random inventive homeless person or to drunken teenagers who force the iron gate and somehow make their way across the closed-off bridge to the island.

  I cross Hamnbron. There is a gigantic anchor embedded in a traffic island, it must have come from one of the big ships that sailed from here long ago, when the harbor flourished, when strong men carried bales of cloth from the looms in town, ready to be shipped to other lands and sold. I walk past the first of the harbor stores, big metal sheds, nowadays they sell cane furniture and freshly baked bread, but just a few years ago there were swingers’ clubs and gay clubs and underground clubs here. I don’t know where they are today, if they still exist. I’ve been told that there were underground clubs all over the industrial zone, in the same buildings that now house high-tech companies and advertising agencies and cafés and university departments: the whole area was fenced off back then, I remember sheets of plywood and a thick black chain running across the main gateway of Holmentornet, the impressive entrance to the heart of town, the place was desolate in those days, but down in the cellars people danced all night. I missed it all, soul music could have been invented in this hopeless industrial town and I would have missed that too. I was sitting indoors, reading a book.

  I sit down on one of the big cable reels on the quayside and light a cigarette. I hardly ever smoke when I’m alone, except when I’m upset. I shouldn’t be alone. Someone who came first with another person wouldn’t be sitting in the harbor at this time of night. I take out my phone and text Alex.

  “What are you doing?”

  She answers immediately.

  “Nothing. How about you?”

  “I’m out walking. Feeling angry with Carl.”

  “Want to come over?”

  “Yes.”

  She opens the door, gives me a hug, and puts a glass of wine in my hand before I’ve even taken off my shoes.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I undo my laces and kick off my shoes, one of them hits the wall.

  “I just feel like an idiot, sitting there in my sexy clothes when he texts me to say he’s not coming. There’s nothing that makes me feel more stupid.”

  I follow her into the living room, which is as red as blood in the subdued lighting, the thick upholstery mutes every sound. It is like being inside a body, a womb. It makes me feel utterly calm and safe. She sits down beside me on the sofa and asks me to tell her everything, so I do. I tell her exactly how I feel. How horribly lonely I feel when I think I’m going to see him and he can’t make it, he has someone else and I have no one at all. Afterward he always says how sorry he is when we can’t get together, but there is really no comparison, because he always has something else. A wife, a family. The tears are scalding my eyes. My whole being is a pent-up lake of tears, I am the tears that have been building up ever since I saw him for the first time, since the very first spark of hope that things could be different with him, that I could be different, that my life could change. Since the first time I felt tenderness toward him and thought that I wanted him to be mine. It sweeps through my body like a tsunami after a few glasses of wine, and for the first time I let it all out. So far I haven’t cried a single tear over Carl, instead with every disappointment something has hardened inside me, like a sickness born of bitterness and pride forming a shield around my heart, and now it breaks. Alex puts her arms around me and holds me tight as I
weep, I feel like I will never stop. I weep until I am tired, the way I used to as a child, although then it was over silly things, but there is the same sensation of inconsolable emptiness, and eventually I cannot cry anymore. Alex strokes my hair, her sweater is soaked through with my tears. Then she gently caresses my cheek, and my last few tears come from exhaustion and gratitude, I am so grateful that she is being kind to me, that I feel safe when she holds me. And then she kisses me on the cheek, her lips are soft. She runs her tongue around them.

  “You taste like salt,” she says quietly.

  Her face is very close to mine. I smile, out of gratitude more than happiness, my whole body feels weary. She kisses my cheek again, I close my eyes. It isn’t far from cheek to mouth, her lips tentatively find their way and they feel even softer as they touch my lips, but only at first, then they are hungry, she presses herself against me, the hand that caressed my cheek slides down over my throat and keeps on going.

  When I wake up it is morning and she is lying beside me, looking at me. I have slept on her arm, and I turn over so that my face is next to her throat, she smells good there, the soft scent of warm skin. She smiles at me, brushes a few strands of hair off my forehead.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she says quietly, as if she is sharing a secret, even though there is no one who could hear her, “and it seems to me that we ought to focus on his wife.”

  For a moment I don’t know what she’s talking about, then I realize it’s Carl. He has no place here, in this totally new intimacy between us. For the first time I have a no-go zone as far as he is concerned, a secret of my own, something that is mine and mine alone, just as most of his life is his alone. There is a balance now.

  “What do you mean, focus on his wife?”

  Alex gives a little smile.

  “I don’t know … but you often say you wish she was dead.”