Acts of Infidelity

by Lena Andersson

  They started seeing each other regularly and always for many hours, spending most of the night sitting in some pub. They talked and talked but they didn’t make it to bed even though that was where they seemed to be heading. Olof was holding on. And like any party-in-pursuit throughout history has responded to coquetry and ambiguous restraint, Ester assumed the answer was a ‘no’ only until it became a ‘yes’.

  On the eve of St Lucy’s Day they met again, also at Söderhallarna, where Olof bought a piece of beef from a counter just before the market hall closed. The meat was for the following night, when the wife would be back after the week’s work and another couple was coming over for dinner. At the counter, they ran into the director of a museum, and he and Olof chatted. The museum head asked after Ebba and her father’s retrospective. Olof said that the reception had been brilliant, they’d sold well and all in all Ebba and her siblings were very pleased. He added that Gustaf was a singular talent, not to mention unique.

  For Ester, who in a practised way was standing at a discreet distance so the acquaintance wouldn’t connect her with Olof, their conversation hurt as much as the impending couples’ soirée. When the museum director left, Olof didn’t comment on the encounter, he talked about the dish he was planning to make and how it would take up most of tomorrow afternoon. Upon noticing Ester’s dejection, Olof said he didn’t feel at all like having dinner guests and should really serve up something quick and simple, macaroni with frozen meatballs at best. The inclusive look he gave her and the sensitive deprecation of his dinner plans pleased her so much that the worry in her heart over how she would go on to free him from his marriage was temporarily mitigated.

  They stayed in the market hall a little longer, walking around, smelling and looking at all the delicious things laid out for Christmas. A St Lucy’s procession* passed by. Right in front of Olof and Ester – and to the other children’s delight – one of the star-bearers blew out a candle held by one of St Lucy’s attendants. Ester’s empathy was heightened by all that was straining and incomplete inside her, as well as the thought of the Sten–Silfverskölds’ upcoming meal. She said:

  ‘How nice it is to never have to be a child again.’

  ‘Maybe he has a crush on her.’

  ‘That’s a sorry way to show it.’

  ‘But isn’t that exactly how people show it?’

  They went down to Zum Franziskaner on Skeppsbron where they ate pyttipanna hash and drank beer. Ester had given up her usual diet, which had been mostly plant-based. The quantity of food you had to gnaw your way through each mealtime was too large, the consistency monotonous, and it led to social complications.

  Olof reached across the table and took her hands in order to warm them up and said:

  ‘We’re not in a relationship, you and I.’

  ‘No, we’re just sitting here.’

  ‘And it’s very nice.’

  ‘Because you’re in a relationship with another woman, we’re not in a relationship.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  They listened to their surroundings.

  ‘But aren’t we in the preliminary stages of a relationship?’ Ester asked. ‘Embryonic.’

  Olof laughed mildly. Ester said:

  ‘As we know, it can go one of two ways with an embryo.’

  ‘As you know, I’m married.’

  ‘When people have what you and I have, this potential, one doesn’t have the right to throw it away. One has an obligation to care for it.’

  He rubbed his thumb over Ester’s.

  ‘An obligation to whom?’

  ‘Life itself.’

  Ester was carefully balancing elation and reserve, but the situation and her eager love were making Olof puckish.

  ‘Can’t you just enjoy the fact that we’re sitting here?’

  ‘I am enjoying it. But I’m being left hanging, which means I’m enjoying it less.’

  ‘You always want clarity and definition. Life isn’t clear and defined. It’s blurry and chaotic, messy and confused. Can’t it be allowed to just be that?’

  Ester wanted to say that statements on ‘how life is’ don’t tell us anything about how to act, but didn’t want to seem finicky. It lay in the nature of having the upper hand to resist definition and justification, that much she knew, to neither argue nor account for. Greedily, he helped himself to the upper hand in love and offered her ambiguity in reply.

  She withdrew her hands and said:

  ‘I’ve figured out what our problem is, the root of our imbalance.’

  ‘We have a problem?’

  ‘Well, I do. We live in the worst of two worlds, hiding and keeping secrets even though we aren’t even doing anything.’

  ‘No, that’s the best of both worlds! Being the only one who knows, so no one else can meddle in what you’re feeling, thinking and doing is the most fantastic aspect of a person’s life, an indispensable construction.’

  Ester ignored this comment. She shouldn’t have. Of all that Olof would go on to say, this is the assertion she should have taken seriously. But she couldn’t believe that a person would seek obscurity while wanting to be close, for the two were irreconcilable.

  ‘If this was an innocent friendship,’ said Ester, ‘you’d tell your wife that you’re seeing me at the pub and going to the movies with me.’

  ‘We’ve only been to the movies once.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell her about it, did you? And if she calls you later to ask where you’ve been all night, you’re not going to say that you’ve been out with me.’

  ‘OK, so what do you think is our problem?’

  ‘You’re a fatalist and I’m an existentialist,’ Ester said. ‘That’s our problem.’

  ‘I’ve got to go home and look that up.’

  ‘Existentialists act as though will were free and choice defines a person. Fatalists let the world choose for them. Inaction is their action, not-choosing is their choice until they are swept away by others’ choices, others’ actions.’

  Olof straightened up in his seat and said:

  ‘Will is only as free as waves are free to decide when they roll in and out. There are higher powers at work.’

  ‘And this attitude of yours is what’s going to keep us from getting anywhere, ensuring nothing will happen in spite of your obvious interest.’

  ‘I’m not sure we are going anywhere,’ said Olof, though the lusty sparkle in his eyes contradicted his words.

  ‘The question of free will isn’t something we’re going to be able to clear up,’ Ester said, ‘but you get more done if you assume there is free will and choice is real. Free will is a metaphysical concept, sure, but one that to the highest degree impacts material fact and how a chain of events will unfold. If you live by the idea that will is free, you’re less passive than if you assume the opposite.’

  Olof listened carefully and Ester continued:

  ‘For us, it would’ve been much better if I was the fatalist and you the existentialist. Then you would’ve cut ties with your former life and we’d be spending all day in bed.’

  His laughter was tinged with a clucking rumble of pleasure.

  ‘I’m going home to look up what “fatalist” means.’

  ‘It means what I just said it did.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m going to go home to look up the neutral, objective definition.’

  Their plates were whisked away by a speedy waitress, and Olof ordered a glass of red, which to Ester’s delight meant they’d be there for a while. Ester ordered another beer. Olof took in the venue and said:

  ‘Has it occurred to you that this might be the case: I’m making a choice. But it’s not the one you want me to make.’

  Again, his harsh words were contradicted by the casual vanity at play in his face, the desire for the game and the hunt.

  ‘Why do you keep wanting to see me?’

  Olof squeezed her hand. He looked open and soft, winsome.

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘No. I do
n’t.’

  ‘Aren’t we having a good time?’

  ‘Yes, very.’

  ‘Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘So you can have twice as much and I get half? No thank you.’

  Olof’s next line was notable in that he either misspoke or was offering a sharp self-analysis. He reflected:

  ‘I’m probably quite a heterogeneous person.’

  ‘Heterogeneous?’

  ‘No. No, not heterogeneous. What’s it called?’

  ‘Monogamous?’

  ‘Monogamous, yes. Right.’

  Ester thought this was good. A monogamous person was exactly what she wanted, a person who would choose her and only her and be happy with that.

  It was three days before Christmas and Ester was lounging on her bed reading a recently published book on the relationship between post-structuralism and the sophists of antiquity. Bathed in the glow of a carefully chosen accent light that Olof had yet to see, she received a text message.

  Olof wrote: ‘Let’s lie low with the texting over the holidays, shall we?’

  The message came out of nowhere, neither an answer to something she had written or said, and they hadn’t been in touch for a couple of days. The expression ‘lie low’ made his request sound like a confession or an acknowledgement of their association. Ester could tell the break-up was just around the corner. After the holidays, he’d leave his wife. Being so open about deceiving his wife as to put words to the deception could only mean the wife was on her way out of the picture.

  Ester answered immediately, texting that over these Christmas weeks she intended to be the definition of lying low, becoming one with the silence, becoming its very synonym.

  Their familiarity struck her deeply and with this feeling impressed upon her, Ester lived through Christmas, the first with-Olof-without-Olof. Her flesh burned, her brain was in flames, her entire being was nigh on charred, but it was a happy charring. She went to Christmas parties and Boxing Day dinners, played party games and conversed, but she was only fully present in her daydreams. In the mornings she embraced Olof’s body in bed and caressed the contours of his silhouette. Soon he would be there with her, very soon, and life could begin. Only in longing was she alive – not in her everyday with its insignificant little goings-on.

  And yet the worry that it wouldn’t turn out as she hoped was constant. It crept and crawled in her, hollowing her out, resting, rising again. She feared something would happen over the holidays that would cause him to alter his plans for a new life. They were in a fragile state and there was a great risk that he, on New Year’s Eve when all resolutions are made, would decide to disengage from Ester before it was too late and before the gravest betrayal had yet to occur.

  New Year’s Eve was spent alone so she could yearn in peace. She took care preparing her dinner: prawn cocktail with fresh coriander as a starter, then entrecôte, potatoes au gratin, baked tomatoes and haricots verts, and a chocolate cake with cream and berries to finish. With this, she drank a glass of red wine and watched a rented movie.

  She both hoped and feared that Olof would send a New Year’s greeting at the stroke of midnight. A sign of life would have been wonderful, but it could also be read as a foreboding attempt at neutralization. On the other hand, not sending a message would suggest that what they had was so serious that it left no room for the banal.

  No message arrived. Something big was on its way. Olof’s break-up. Ester and Olof’s union.

  Three days into the new year, she decided ‘the holidays’ were over and sent a text message. ‘Am being c-c-c-onsumed by d-d-desire. We m-m-must m-m-meet up to stop my t-t-eeth from chatt-tt-ttering. /Est-t-t-ter’

  The reply came within five minutes:

  ‘Tom-m-m-orrow f-f-five o’c-c-clock?’

  A man who sent a reply like this couldn’t not be loved. Ester exploded with joy and channelled her surplus energy into thirty sets of press-ups.

  At five o’clock the next day they converged by the doors to Slussen’s metro station. He said he’d found a pub on Gåsgränd in Old Town that he wanted the two of them to try. They headed in that direction through an inky winter darkness broken only by the snowbanks that had escaped the new year’s thaw. The chairs at the Gåsgränd pub were rickety and the food bizarre, and the waiter bore a striking resemblance to a former culture editor at Svenska Dagbladet. When Ester enquired, he denied any relation. She told Olof that she’d asked a similar question once before in Vienna at a pub where the waiter looked like Robert de Niro. Unsmiling and with lightning speed – clearly he was used to the question – he’d replied: leider nicht, unfortunately not. Olof laughed out loud and then they ate. When they were finished with Gåsgränd, they wanted to keep going and found themselves at Gyldene Freden, where they stayed for a number of hours. They spoke generally and with not a word about what they’d done over Christmas or why they were where they were. And so it was a tad unexpected when Olof said:

  ‘I need you, Ester. I can talk to you about anything. Sports, literature, art, politics, ideas, theatre. With Ebba, it’s completely mute.’

  Ester grabbed the bar and held her breath.

  ‘I’m yours if you want me. I’m here and you know what I want.’

  His follow-up to the comment he’d just made seemed oddly misplaced to her. It was as though he’d got hold of two conflicting scripts and was cross-reading from them.

  ‘We have to be careful,’ he said. ‘You can’t call or text. Ebba’s keeping her eye on me.’

  Over Christmas, she’d even gone through his wallet, found a key and ‘made a scene and asked a lot of difficult questions’.

  Ester was trying to understand why they’d have to be careful when he was about to leave Ebba, which was reasonable to assume based on his words and actions.

  ‘What did Ebba think the key was for?’

  ‘Your place, I assume.’

  ‘My place?! Does she know we’re seeing each other?’

  ‘No. But after the premiere party in Västerås she asked me if I had a crush on you.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘She must’ve seen my eyes wandering every time you came near. Ebba is observant. She noticed a change in me right after the read-through.’

  Though many strange things were being said, this was nonetheless a significant disclosure.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘That you’re not my type.’

  ‘You said that?’

  ‘What was I supposed to say?’

  Olof took out his snus and tucked in a fresh portion, then he sucked the wine through the snus, as was his habit.

  ‘I should stop with the snus. Be healthier.’

  ‘Isn’t it just as well that Ebba finds out what’s going on sooner rather than later?’

  In the old dusky venue, its pleasing buzz meant there was little risk of overhearing other parties, Olof changed tack:

  ‘She could tell you were very interested in me.’

  The arrogant cruelty in this distancing wasn’t lost on Ester, the lash across the mouth that it was.

  ‘I was interested?’

  ‘Well, you were.’

  ‘But didn’t you just say that you had changed and your eyes were wandering when I was nearby?’

  She had experienced this before, this manoeuvring, the subtle shift that looked exactly the same each time. It was the kind of thing that made her wish she had a witness, someone who could hear what she hearing, thus rendering impossible any evasion or distortion of what had been said and done.

  ‘We have to be careful,’ Olof repeated. ‘Ebba’s keeping an eye on me.’

  ‘But you can’t live like that.’

  In the new year, Olof had started rehearsing a short play he’d been in the previous year and that was about to tour through Sweden. Until then they would continue to spend their evenings together at their usual pubs and bars. Ester went around in a fever of expectation conjured by their kisses and caresses. During the day she worked on a difficult
but interesting commission, the translation of a short book by the mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege. She was getting into the material and had ordered secondary literature.

  At the end of January when they’d met up in the evening and stayed together long into the night as usual, Olof suggested she visit him whilst he was on tour.

  ‘But that’ll be the end of it,’ he said, ‘if we start a sexual relationship, that’ll be end of it.’

  The end of what? Ester wondered to herself, hoping he meant his marriage, but certainty evaded her for this was yet another strange thing to say. If they began a sexual relationship, it was because it was already the end, not the other way around.

  Olof was to perform in Arvidsjaur one weekend in the middle of February. Taking out his diary, he suggested that she visit him there, so they could go cross-country skiing together, he said. He’d continue to refer to it like this: going skiing together one weekend. Clearly, he had to take baby steps in order to transport this big thing he was shouldering; not only did he have to displace their physical encounter, but also conceive of it as fitness. His conscience was counting kilometres and it was a long way to Arvidsjaur. Olof’s conscience was constantly counting everything, Ester would later think, but it also seemed broken.

  Having reached a decision about consummating their relationship – even if they were calling it ‘going skiing’ – made Ester shiver and quake. This was heading in the right direction, there was no turning back.

  Outside, the wind was harsh and the temperature had dropped to minus ten. Ester’s head was bare, the only reason being that she didn’t want her hair to get flat. Normally, she’d never leave the house without a hat if it was colder than five degrees, but tonight she wanted to at least try to maintain some sort of hairstyle. They walked towards Slussen. The decision had been made. Olof lifted his arms to warm her frozen head and said: