“You look tired,” Siv says, quite rightly, as I am pouring water into the warming counter. She is piling little packs of butter in Duralex bowls that are so scratched the glass is milky white, she looks at me with a concern that surprises me.
I make a face. “Boyfriend troubles,” I mumble, the very fact of admitting that something is wrong makes tears sting my eyes: I have shut down any such admissions so far, I don’t know why I’m telling her now.
She is looking at me as if she really does understand me.
“You’re so cute,” she says. “I’m sure you’ll meet someone else very soon. Someone who won’t break your heart.”
My cell phone rings. When I am not cleaning up I keep it in my pocket, it vibrates against my thigh. “Carl,” the display says. It’s been a long time since he called me.
He doesn’t ask how I am.
“Are you at work?” he says as soon as I answer.
“Yes.”
“Are you working tomorrow?”
“No.”
“We’d like you to come over.”
“Who’s we?”
I don’t understand what he means. He clears his throat.
“Gabriella and I. We’d like you to come over tomorrow.”
This is my punishment, I think on my way there. This means he’s told his wife, and I can never see him again. And he doesn’t seem to care. Perhaps he doesn’t want to see me. He just seems keen to get back to normality.
I hear Emelie’s voice in my head: Watch out for married men. Stupid, wise, uptight, lovely Emelie. I should call her, tell her she was right about married men. Ask if she wants to meet for coffee. Suddenly I realize how much I miss her. What a blessing it is to have someone in your life who makes you feel secure, someone who is a little bit boring sometimes. Someone who is just ordinary. I should probably call her and apologize, but that goes against the grain, because I feel stupid, and because I know she couldn’t possibly understand anything about my life. I would be forced to defend myself, and I don’t want to do that.
The stairwell doesn’t look quite as impressive this time. In fact, the whole thing seems slightly ridiculous. Who lives like this? In Norrköping? Perhaps this isn’t what I want after all. When I think that I want my life to be in a different place, perhaps I don’t mean big apartments, I don’t care about status, about what other people think. People have such bad taste anyway, there’s no point in trying to impress anyone. I want a nice, pleasant life. I would still like it to be with Carl, but I realize that is impossible now. He greets me politely, without touching me. It is so strange not to be able to give him a hug, snuggle into him and pick up the smell of him, that warm, spicy scent that makes me feel safe and aroused at the same time — someone else has exclusive rights to that now. Suddenly she is standing in the hallway, Gabriella Malmberg. She is slightly shorter than me, with a beautiful, open face, lightly tanned, her blond hair cut in bangs that cover her forehead, a body that looks flexible and strong, it is obvious from her bare arms that she works out. I don’t have the strength to compare myself with her any longer. She can have him. If she’s the one he wants, there is nothing I can do.
She also greets me politely, shakes my hand, and says, “Gabriella. Would you like a coffee?” When I say yes, she goes on: “Espresso? Cappuccino? Latte?” as if she were a waitress in a café. Perhaps she is nervous, even though it doesn’t show, she seems calm, in control. I say a cappuccino would be very nice, Carl takes my jacket. I am wearing the dress he paid for, because it’s the only thing I own that feels worthy of their beautiful home, if only Gabriella knew, I think. Carl doesn’t even seem to register what I am wearing. I follow him into the living room. There is a big bunch of tulips in an asymmetrical vase on the table, there must be at least thirty tulips, they are stunning. It looks like a fucking interior design magazine. The whole thing is a facade. The marriage, the tulips. He looks sad. Or tormented, exhausted. His face is almost gray.
The children aren’t home, I expect they’re in school, it’s a perfectly ordinary Wednesday, perfectly ordinary for everyone else, all the people who haven’t fucked up their lives. Obviously Carl and Gabriella both have a day off, perhaps Carl has one of his days off in the middle of the week, and no doubt she can organize her time as she wishes, as long as she does what she’s supposed to do and shows up at her appointments, no one cares if she doesn’t come in until after lunch on a perfectly ordinary Wednesday, that’s the way it is when you have a good job. When I had to go to the bank back in the fall, I had to ask my boss for time off, clock out, catch the bus into town, stand in line at the bank, catch the bus back, and clock in again, it took hours and it cost me several hundred kronor, you never have to lose money like that when you’ve got a good job where you’re already well paid, it’s one of those injustices that eats away at me, like the fact that we have to pay two kronor for a cup of coffee in the main kitchen. I wonder if they have a jar full of one-krona coins for the coffee at the law practice, the thought makes me smile. Gabriella Malmberg looks at me when she comes back with a cappuccino from the expensive coffee machine in the kitchen, I wonder what each cup costs to make.
“I recognize you from the photographs,” she says when she has sat down next to Carl and opposite me.
I don’t know what to say. She recognizes me from the photographs in which I am wearing her daughter’s clothes and spreading my legs for the camera. Is she saying this to embarrass me? My first instinct is a wave of shame, but then I get angry. I would never have ended up lying in her bed wearing those clothes if her husband hadn’t cheated on her. It’s his fault. Judging by the way he looks, she has made that perfectly clear to him.
“I must apologize for this,” she says. “I realize it seems strange to you, but I hope you understand that it’s important to the family. I have to know that what Carl is saying is true.”
“And what is Carl saying?”
I couldn’t give a shit about his family. He and his family can go to hell.
“That he didn’t take those pictures. That it was Alexandra.”
Her gaze is steady. Carl is looking at me too, there is a desperation in his eyes that reminds me of his desperation when we lay in my bed, when he ran his hand over the cheap silky lingerie he had bought me and asked me to be his little girl. Although then it came from arousal.
The apartment is totally silent, the whole building is silent. Even the herring gulls are silent.
“Yes, it was Alex who took them,” I say. “When she came over to water your plants. I came with her, we had a couple of glasses of wine, and … well, you could say things got a little out of hand. That was when she took the pictures.”
There is no mistaking the relief that sweeps over Carl’s face. Gabriella also looks relieved, although she is better at controlling herself. She clears her throat.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay, so that’s what happened. We would appreciate it if …” She clears her throat again, reaches for a sheet of paper lying on the table, pushes it across to me. “If we could agree that you won’t tell anyone else about this. And that if there are copies of the pictures, or more pictures, you won’t show them to anyone; you will destroy them.”
I think she must be joking, but she looks perfectly serious. Businesslike.
“We were thinking of one hundred thousand kronor. Is that a sum you would find acceptable?”
“We were also thinking …” Carl glances at his wife before he goes on, she gives a slight nod. “We were thinking we could help you out if you wanted to move to Stockholm in the fall … I know you’ve mentioned the idea.”
“Help me out? What, drive a truck with my furniture or something?”
I laugh a little, more of a snort really, but Gabriella and Carl are not smiling.
“A friend of ours is living abroad, and won’t be back for at least another year,” Gabriella explains. “It’s a three-room apartment on Sankt Eriksplan. It won’t cost you a thing, and it’s available from early summer.”
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She pushes the sheet of paper even closer, it is a contract. I can hardly read what it says, my head is all over the place. They want to buy me. They want to pay me to keep quiet, then they want to send me away, just as serving girls were sent away in the old days when they fell pregnant by their lord and master, to give birth somewhere else and not cause any trouble. I feel disgusted. And cheap, as usual I feel cheap, and then it strikes me that a hundred thousand isn’t all that cheap. A hundred thousand to hold on to the happy family, the Christmas card family. The serving girls didn’t get paid, or not very much anyway. They kept on being serving girls. I wouldn’t have to do that. I could stop cleaning and I could move to Stockholm, I wouldn’t need a student loan, and maybe I could spend a few months just writing, maybe I could do that right now, over the summer: no more work, no more coming home with aching shoulders and feet and knees, I could just write, get up in the morning, sit down at my computer and write. It is a dizzying thought.
And suddenly I have exactly the same feeling as when I sat in the car with Carl, that evening when it was raining and he said my apartment looked cozy and I asked him if he wanted to come in: the feeling that I am holding my future in my hands in exactly the same way, that right now I can decide whether I want my life to change or not. I thought it was Carl who was going to change my life, and now he is doing just that, even if it’s a million miles from the way I imagined it would happen.
I look up, meet Gabriella’s eyes, then Carl’s.
“Okay,” I say. “That sounds good.”
Back out on the street I want to laugh. I have seen through them. You’re lying! I want to yell, like a crazy woman. You’re all lying! Your fantastic lives are nothing but lies, your marriage is a fraud, I’ve seen through it! I can see right through you!
I have to sit down on a bench in the park among the alcoholics and the young moms on maternity leave, I squint as I look into the spring sunshine and digest what has just happened.
“It might take a couple of days because we have different banks, but the money should be in your account by the day after tomorrow at the latest,” I hear Gabriella’s soft, well-modulated voice in my head. She has won. She had won right from the start, and now she has sealed her victory, not only can she get a man that other women want, but when someone threatens her family idyll she can buy off her rivals. She will always have everything.
I don’t understand how people who don’t feel alone can live.
What part of your souls have you hocked? How did you choose? What was the easiest thing to dump: your integrity, or the need to share your life with someone on the same intellectual level or someone with a sense of humor or someone who shares your view of the world? Do you miss it? Does it feel good to be a part of your particular club, so good that it was worth it? Do you just avoid thinking about it? Because that’s the easiest way, or because you don’t really need to think, because people who are happy are a little more stupid.
I am becoming bitter. It’s me and the man from underground against the world.
I want to open my window to the light spring evening and ask the people who are drifting past in groups on the way to parties or to a bar where they can sit outside, they will have to keep their jackets on and stay close to the infrared heaters, but this evening they will be able to drink their slightly too cold rosé wine outdoors.
I miss both Carl and Alex so much that it hurts. It really hurts in every part of my body but mostly in my stomach, it makes me feel sick, and my heart hurts, or my soul, I don’t really know what it is that is sitting in my chest screaming with pain, weighing down on my lungs and making it difficult to breathe. I had two people who were like me, and now I have no one. Perhaps order has been restored. I don’t need other people. I have always got by on my own, everything I have done I have achieved on my own. On the whole I was always alone. I will be alone forever now, that’s just the way it has to be.
As soon as I have reached that conclusion, my phone buzzes. A text from Emelie. I’m not sure whether to open it.
“Hi, it doesn’t feel right having a party without inviting you, I don’t know if you have other plans / if you even want to come, but we’re at Niklas’s place right now. I’d really like it if you came.”
I am touched, surprised that I feel that way, that I almost have tears in my eyes. Of course I don’t have other plans. It’s been a long time since I went to a party.
“Hi, great to hear from you, I’d love to come but I don’t have any wine?”
“We’ve got wine. Just bring yourself.”
The twilight lasts for ages and the sky above the chimneys of the industrial area looks unreal, like a watercolor painting, the buds on the trees and bushes swell with every shower of rain, the birches are already in leaf, soon the lilacs will blossom.
Niklas’s beautiful apartment is now Emelie’s beautiful apartment too, she has moved in with him, that’s why they’re having a party. The place looks better now that Emelie’s things are mixed with his, and they make an attractive couple, they both look happy and perhaps they really are happy, perhaps they think that the person they are standing beside as they greet their guests and offer them a glass of sparkling wine is the very best person they could imagine standing beside at a party, the very best person to be the other half of a couple. Presumably Niklas is exactly what Emelie has wanted all her life: a good-looking guy with plenty of money, who in a passive-aggressive, slightly bullying way is aware of injustices and power structures, and is able to lecture her on them while at the same time showing a certain level of humility about his own privileges as a white heterosexual middle-class male.
I thank him as he hands me a champagne flute and he smiles and says he’s glad I was able to come, maybe he really is glad, for Emelie’s sake at least, because Emelie will be pleased that I am here, because he loves her and wants her to be happy, but he looks fake as he says it, he always looks fake.
I have always found it impossible to go along with social games like this, with the kind of behavior that demands falseness. I feel dirty as soon as I say just one word that feels false in my mouth. It seems to me that it will jar, that people will stare at me, that they will know: does she really think we’re going to fall for that? And yet I find people who don’t dissemble difficult too, people who are determined to say exactly what they think at all costs, even if it makes the situation uncomfortable for others. Or those who have the attitude that everyone must take them as they are, and should value them precisely because they are honest and say what they think. People. There are not many who meet with my approval.
In the kitchen there are trays of canapés and bowls of chips, people are laughing and talking, the high spring sky outside makes them relaxed and noisy. It was at a party just like this when I spoke to Alex for the first time back in the fall, it’s only just over six months ago. It’s only just over six months since I met her and Carl, and thought they would make everything different.
I take a sip of wine, it’s good, better than the wine that’s usually on offer at this kind of party, in fact there isn’t usually any wine at all, because they’re all students and no one has any money. Suddenly Emelie is by my side, she looks happy.
“I really meant it when I said I was pleased you could come,” she says quietly.
“Me too.”
“How are you doing?”
How am I doing? I don’t know. Not great. I swallow.
“Do you really want to know?”
She nods. Behind her there is the sound of loud laughter from the living room.
“Can we go outside for a little while?” I say.
“Okay.” She sounds confused, then she seems to understand that I am serious. “Sure we can,” she adds.
We sit on the rack that’s used for beating rugs in the courtyard. It makes me feel like a teenager, so much so that I dig a crumpled packet of cigarettes out of my purse. For once Emelie wants one too, so we sit there smoking, in silence at first, and then I start to talk.
I tell her everything, from start to finish. I tell her about Carl and Alex and everything that happened before I found out he was her father and everything that happened afterward, about the accountant and the photographs, about the meeting with Carl and Gabriella, and the contract and the money and the apartment.
“Oh my God,” Emelie says when I finally stop talking. “Can I have another cigarette?”
I laugh, she laughs too. It’s like when we were in high school, sitting and smoking in a courtyard just like this, waiting for life to begin. And just like back then, I don’t feel the need to defend myself. Emelie simply listens.
“So what are you going to do now?” she asks.
I sigh. “I guess I’ll probably move. I can’t stay here. I don’t really know what I’m going to do, but … well, I’ll soon have somewhere to live in Stockholm.”
She nods.
“Forgive me for asking, but doesn’t it feel … doesn’t it feel kind of immoral? This business with the money?”
“Morals are for those who can afford them,” I say.
She gives me a wry smile. “Come on, this is me you’re talking to.”
“Okay, but what about this apartment?” I say, nodding up at the windows and the balcony door, open to the spring evening, the music drifting out into the twilight. “It must have cost a whole lot more than a hundred thousand. A million? Two? Have you earned enough money to buy a share of Niklas’s apartment?”
The Other Woman Page 15
