‘It wouldn’t be strange if we did run into each other.’ He sounded besieged, under threat.
‘It’s a bit strange. Uncomfortable, if nothing else.’
‘For whom?’ hissed Olof.
A heavy sigh escaped Ester. This perpetual uphill battle.
‘For you and for me. And probably for your wife.’
‘She doesn’t know anything.’
‘About what?’
‘We don’t have a relationship, you and me.’
‘No. So what is it that she doesn’t know anything about?’
‘Don’t try to catch me out by splitting hairs!’
‘We don’t have a relationship and have never had one. So what is it that she doesn’t know about us?’
‘We’re in a car together, that is all. And I see now that this was a bad call, too.’
‘And in the winter? All our visits to the pub. Night-time kisses in passages and alleys. Arvidsjaur?’
‘Once! One single time! And it was a mistake.’
Her knuckles turned white as she gripped the wheel, she had been accelerating with each sentence and now was doing 130. Calling their encounter in Arvidsjaur a ‘mistake’ shocked her speechless. The road ahead was straight and wide, and she kept going faster; it was the only available release. Spreading out above them was an idyllic night sky, golden with pink daubs and wisps. When they had driven ten kilometres in icy silence, she slowly and carefully said:
‘Your impudence is grotesque. Once? It was a weekend. An entire weekend. A lovers’ getaway planned in detail by you and staged by us; not to mention, preceded by a large number of long dinners held in great secrecy in the pub, eyes and hands meeting in the candlelight and all that. And during our three-day weekend in Arvidsjaur, that you invited me to, and that you insisted on, it didn’t happen once, but seven, eight, ten times, if you’re sitting there tallying instances of genital penetration in order to determine your level of guilt.’
To this irrefutable enumeration, Ester added a plea of wounded sentimentality, even though she knew it would weaken her argument:
‘And since then – during this spring – you’ve shown me furtive devotion and restrained physical desire on several occasions.’
Olof saw an opening and slipped in so as to avoid the irrefutable.
‘I have not.’
‘Yes, in fact you have.’
‘Where’s your proof?’
She was helpless in the face of his view of existence. Why was Olof here with her if all he wanted was to deny that they’d been seeing each other? Why didn’t he decline her offers and invitations if he was so intent on defending himself against them? What was his aim with all of this?
‘You can’t prove restrained physical desire and furtive devotion. It’s in the very nature of the furtive and the restrained.’
She should have sent that pinch of snus for testing at SNFC after all.
‘You interpret everything to fit your hopes and intentions,’ said Olof.
‘Yes. Restrained physical desire and furtive devotion are interpretations, only you can know for sure. But I don’t have “proof” for what we did in Arvidsjaur either, even though I know what we did and I know it’s true. A plane ticket and a receipt for thirty kronor for two packets of cotton reels don’t prove what we did in bed any more than they prove what it meant to you. But we’re not taking this to court, Olof. We have no use for proof and evidence.’
He sat with his palms pressed to his thighs and fingers spread as if he was in deep concentration. He said:
‘It was nice, but it was one time. What happened was wrong.’
‘The only thing that’s wrong here is that you’re afraid to take the leap even though you want to free yourself from that strait-jacket you’re spending your life in.’
‘I don’t want to take any leap.’
‘Why do you keep meeting up with me when you know I’m only meeting you in hopes that you’re going to take that leap?’
‘Don’t ask me to travel with you if you’re going to use it for extortion.’
He started packing up his things.
‘I suppose I’ll have to get out in the next town and take the train.’
Then he realized that the next town was Jönköping, which wasn’t on the main line, and screamed that now he’d have to check into a hotel too and Ester had cost him a whole day. To her surprise, she realized that Olof thought she wanted to get rid of him, throw him out of her car. He really didn’t get the unconditional part of her love. However much they fought, the last thing she wanted was for him to leave the space they were sharing.
The mood in the car was so thick you could dice it: cubes of horror, alienation and rage. After driving another few dozen kilometres, Ester commented on something trivial that popped into her field of vision. Olof was so relieved, he took a breath and grabbed hold of her arm, grateful that she wasn’t angry any more.
Ester saw his agony – like that of an abused child faced with its parents’ rage, the relief when it dissipated – and thought that one must show great understanding towards the broken. He pre-empted disappointment by disappointing. One must endure and be patient with those who have been damaged by their environment. Each time she had this thought, she could endure a little longer. She believed she could help him dare to love.
In Jönköping where the road ran along Lake Vättern she swerved sharply out of the way for a family of ducks walking all in a row. Olof yelled that you should never swerve to save animals, it could cause an accident.
‘But nothing happened,’ she said and touched his bare forearm. ‘We didn’t get into an accident.’
The very act of touching him increased her lust. He squeezed her hand and held it for a moment before carefully guiding it back to the wheel.
There are temptresses and there are wives. The temptress, better known as the mistress, is iconic. Wrapped in a kimono, she smokes cigarillos and drinks liqueur among bric-a-brac and souvenirs from foreign lands. She is well-travelled, blasé, self-centred, quick-witted and light on her feet. Despair is not hers to know, sorrow is alien, an impenetrable fortress is she. She will toy with a man, using him to pass the time, but love him she will not. For the mistress/temptress does not love, just like the girls at the bordello don’t love, and if she does love, with all the pain that it ushers in, it’s called ‘hysteria’, not love. She liberates the husband from tristesse and the mutual vulnerability of coupledom, while destroying the marriage – enemy of the wife and divider of womankind.
This version of the mistress/temptress exists perhaps in a few rare examples, but first and foremost she is an idea. Part of this idea is the notion that a man’s biology can be cleverly exploited by woman’s psychology, for he is at the mercy of his male urges, a weakness that she with her feminine wiles knows how to exploit.
To Olof Sten, the mistress was an idea he so eagerly embraced that he never stopped to question that the traditional ‘mistress’ might not in fact exist. Instead, he zealously embraced the idea as reality. No matter what Ester Nilsson did or said, with however much desperation she loved and pleaded, always far less artful than him, she was relegated to the category of the wily, artful temptress as and when it suited him. This was possible because the category existed and flourished in the eternal interplay between the reality and the idea. When the idea didn’t quite fit – the mistress should not yearn for the entwining of two egalitarian souls – Olof Sten remade her in his thoughts so that the idea would not be sullied.
The dichotomies that help perpetuate the arrangement are many and well demarcated. Wife – lover. Love – passion. Life partner – temptress. Mother – courtesan. Chaste – lusty. Virtuous – mercenary. Madonna – whore. Faithful – fleeting. Caring – egoistic. Lucid – mad.
The self-loathing that arises from being unable to abstain from that which makes man weak, his urges, is redirected to the mistress because she reveals the lover’s weakness to himself and the world. The mistress as an idea constitutes
a third counterpoint between the complementary woman/man. Her anatomy is woman’s but her autonomy is man’s. She is a third, the most frightening and most alluring, that which in the end must be pushed out of life’s bid for dualistic order. At the same time, she is the archetype of woman, the bearer of all traits; the wild girl who needs to be tamed by her own biology in order to be rendered harmless and complete her process of maturation through the child she will give birth to, nourish, care for and subordinate herself to.
The mistress/temptress as a reality and person is of a more varied kind, for she doesn’t view herself from the outside or as part of a stubborn structure in which she has replaced the harlot, but without the financial compensation. For her, the fellowship she shares with a soon-to-be-divorced man is something out of the ordinary, and she is the one who understands him best. She is the one who came along too late, who sits at home and waits without the subject of her thoughts wondering how she is. It’s part of the arrangement that he shouldn’t have to worry about her well-being – autonomous, capricious and well-travelled as she is. She’s the one he has fun with, not someone who adds to the weight and worries that are part of his faithful, ordered life.
The mistress reads the landscape when they’re out and about, always ready to step aside so she won’t be seen to belong to the one the world perceives as belonging to another. Loyally, she helps the deceiver deceive, out of empathy for the lover but also to benefit the long-term outcome. She’s the one who won’t appear in the obituary, but in the worst case, defiantly sends in her own so she can finally be allowed to exist and to be acknowledged.
In the event of the lover’s divorce, something else shifts, too. The dethroned wife becomes hysterical and capricious. She may even submit her own version of her ex-husband’s obituary in order to reveal the true nature of the situation.
Everything the mistress/temptress or the dethroned wife does, she does with full knowledge of the secret place to which only she and he are granted entry. This is where he has made all the confessions that assure her she is actually number one even though in every way she is number two.
Through all of this, the hapless spectator gets constant confirmation that this is about a particular kind of woman (a woman unlike the down-to-earth, dull maternal type), who is dreamt of by men and women alike and who nonetheless makes them suffer.
Nyhamnsläge is a small exclusive residential area near the sea, located between Höganäs and Mölle along Skåne’s north-western coast.
Around midnight, they arrived at Olof’s house, which stood alone by a rape-seed field. A modest but lush garden in thirsty bloom spread out from the house. The house was empty and the night was dark. After their reconciliation around Jönköping, and up until Linköping at least, Ester harboured great hopes about the arrival. She was a stranger to the region, and in this dense nocturnal dark it would’ve only been natural for Olof to suggest she wait until morning before beginning her search for where she was staying: an unknown house in an unknown location in a strange landscape. But he got out of the car and thanked her for the lift before pointing and explaining how to get to Mölle. Go back out on the main road, take a right and then it’s straight ahead until the T-junction. Take a left and after a few kilometres left again. And then down to the harbour.
With these precise directions, he made it clear that even his ambivalent side wasn’t considering an overnight stay. It was the first time he displayed certainty. This made it easier for Ester, for it was his wavering that kept her hanging on: the glimmer of possibility that always appeared when he claimed something to be unthinkable. But not now.
Ester decided to forget Olof over the summer. The liberation this implied was bitterly pleasant. It was a relief to not count hours and days, to not hope, to not devise strategies for contact, to not wonder what Olof was thinking and feeling. Longing gave way to loss. The days in Mölle passed in mild melancholy. Ester and Vera took day trips and visited art galleries, sunbathed, cooked dinner and talked long into the night. Ester’s thoughts about how things with Olof could be different – the most consuming of notions – faded like an old poster. She endeavoured to be in the now, albeit under the veil of sorrow.
This resignation turned out to be seasonal. She had really only given her hopes a rest, because when she interrogated herself she realized that she still believed he’d be divorced by autumn, anything else would be unthinkable considering the year he’d had, and this is what was keeping her upright.
She lay on the rocks for hours, letting her thoughts float together and apart like the clouds overhead. The droves of tourists hadn’t yet begun to arrive for the season. In a few weeks, this place would be full of well-fed families with thick, shiny hair and a clear sense of their distinguished lineage.
She spent a week like this with the summer and with Vera. Then a text arrived. Ester was sitting on the quay reading a biography about Mary Shelley parallel to rereading Frankenstein. The text contained five words.
‘Ice cream at the harbour?’
It was two p.m. A lone scrim of clouds was moving across the blithe azure sky towards Kullaberg. It was said that here three seas meet, as if water could be divided and delineated, but perhaps there were oceanographic criteria for when one became the other. On the horizon were barges and passenger ferries that at first glance appeared to be still, but were indeed sailing along the glittering waves.
‘Ice cream at the harbour?’
She read the message several times. Her skin prickled, her ears rang, she who had almost left her phone in the house because she was no longer hoping for anything.
To seem less eager, she waited two minutes before she wrote:
‘Gladly. Are you here in Mölle?’
Three minutes passed, as long as three days.
‘In half an hour.’
She slipped a simple cotton dress over her swimsuit and after twenty-five minutes she walked to the harbour. There on a sun-drenched bench sat Olof, one leg slung over the other. Gingerly, she sat next to him and their fingers touched. When his hand had rested on hers longer than was appropriate he got up to buy them each an ice cream at the harbour kiosk. Did she want sprinkles? She did, ice cream with sprinkles had more character. Actually, she didn’t want ice cream at all but ate it for the sake of communion and the moment.
Black-headed gulls circled the harbour square and the moored boats. Ester was disconcerted. Olof had initiated this meeting when she’d retreated. Now she knew that he too had the itch, the dreadful love itch. Through the sensors that linked them, he could always feel when she was pulling away and reacted accordingly.
One line of reasoning she’d often pursued in order to preserve the realism of her judgements was now grinding away in the far recesses of her consciousness. It went like this: does one have the right to create expectations for which there are no grounds? No. Does Olof know that this is what he’s doing? Yes. So why is he doing it?
One: He’s taken a fancy to me but is undecided.
Two: He’s taken a fancy to me and can’t help it even though he has decided.
Three: He’s distracting himself and taking what’s on offer, and it’s up to the one who can’t handle the arrangement to tell him to back off.
Through all her years with Olof, Ester was as good as convinced that it was number one. His next statement strengthened this belief.
‘I went for a bike ride around the village a few days ago. Looking for your little car.’
‘You did?’
‘But I didn’t find it.’
‘You should have called.’
She knew full well, far too well, the stinging longing and emptiness that made someone cycle around in the hope of catching a glimpse of the person consuming your thoughts. It burned in him like it burned in her! All she had to do was help rid him of his pretences, he was in love!
The retreat was immediate:
‘I was only out for a spin.’
The admission that he’d sought her out not once but twice co
st him dear. And so he looked up at the hillside where the houses were climbing on top of each other in the glaring light. Bright bolts shot from the windows.
‘I thought I might visit my friend who lives up there. That’s why I’m here.’
Even if his retreat was expected it exhausted Ester. Could it never just be beautiful? She got up from the bench and prepared herself for the looming goodbye. This encounter was not worth the cost. She would pay with days and weeks of agony and sadness for half an hour’s trivial contact. Not to mention the ice cream she’d gobbled up for his sake alone. Nothing was leading anywhere. He didn’t even want to admit that he’d cycled all the way to Mölle for her. She was overcome with anger.
Then Olof put his arm around Ester’s shoulders and kept it there as they followed the road along the water, the bike between them, and she rested her hand on the saddle as if it belonged to his body.
‘I’m glad you came,’ he said.
‘Me, too.’
The wind was hot though it was rolling in from the sea.
‘I’m going home to pack,’ said Olof.
He was going to Stockholm over Midsummer where his wife and grown children were waiting, adorned with the holiday’s prerequisite flower crowns.
‘I’m turning off here,’ said Ester.
‘You are?’
‘Yes. I’m going to the quay. Vera’s there reading.’
He looked at her.
‘We can take a day trip around Kullabygden when I get back. Before Ebba comes down. I can show you around.’
‘When is she coming, then?’
‘In two weeks.’
‘That would be nice.’
She said this without conviction. The wife’s name was enough to make the weight drop back down on her.
‘I’ll be in touch when I’m back,’ said Olof and dusted his fingertips over her bare upper arm. Then he pedalled away.
The delicate equilibrium Ester had managed to maintain over the last weeks disappeared the moment he left, and a considerable pain began to tinge all she thought and felt. It became impossible to concentrate and nothing was truly fun any more. Everything became viscous. She asked Vera why Olof didn’t just leave her alone since he didn’t want anything. Or did he want something and that’s why he had reached out? What was she supposed to be thinking?
Acts of Infidelity Page 8
