I’m not sure if the new man was aware how sad everything was, the way it all expelled a sigh that afternoon. I don’t think he did. We understand each other, only he can’t face seeing how unhappy I am. I can’t cope with the pain of any more women — right, muso.
And what’s with your girlfriend, was something I never asked.
RELAX, EVERYTHING WILL be all right, says the new man. He fiddles with a candle, turning it between his fingers, making sure it’s straight, turning it again, another adjustment.
It’s under control.
I think about what he means, what exactly is under control. I nod and take his hand, holding it tight on the table between us. He pushes a plate aside, squeezes my hand in a rhythm I fail to recognize from anything in nature.
THE ROOM’S DARKNESS is limp. The night is emptied, its remains deposited in the corners, in her face. She thinks about calming herself with rhymes. She must know so many, how often she must have rattled them off in order to remain in a place. She feels an urge to go walking with him. One of their first days together he told her about a hike he had done, somewhere in Sweden, with his mother and his son. How marvelous it had been. That was the word he used: marvelous. I’d like to do it again, he said, and she thought he meant it to be a kind of invitation. That it was she he wanted to go hiking with in Sweden. Only it never was.
She extracts herself from his arms, he gives a start, then wakes slowly. She gets out of bed, his eyes latch on to her naked body, then close again. She doesn’t think he sees her from behind as she goes to the bathroom to get some water. You can sense things like that. But you can choose to believe he is watching nonetheless.
Maybe he’d rather have been left alone, she thinks. I’m glad you’re here, he lies. But she knows: he wasn’t watching her, and what he really wants is to be on his own. Like a woman with a little child, who after a while just needs to be alone. When at night she begins to dream that not only five infants, but also her man and her parents, her sisters and girlfriends start sucking milk from all her fingers and toes, her nipples and earlobes; when all you really want is to be able to go to the bathroom on your own — and simply be a self-sufficient human. If such a thing even exists. I am an instrument of solitude, a tool by which to become myself, to be on my own at last. If this cannot be, she thinks, then I want nothing. It’s that simple, too. That there is no reasonableness, but: unreasonable wants, unreasonable love, even when no love exists, unreasonable love is there. What you give and what you get, with no accordance between them. There is something decadent about not loving those who love you. But decadence is only the start. There is something cynical about it. The way there is something cynical about loving a person who has never asked to be loved by you. These are thoughts that may occur to her. A militant, warlike love, boiling away inside her, a subjugation of land. Love resembling violence.
MY DAD WAS suddenly there for me again, her new man says.
They have to duck to walk under the washing on the line. He’s got the same pillowcase in his hand as when they started three rows earlier. He keeps stretching it out. She nods.
The enthusiasm in his voice is for this encounter with a father who it seems has never been there for him before, the way no fathers ever are. This, too, is a truth like so many others. Such as them being there always. She bends down and pulls up a top with long straps from the basket. It is entangled in some tights and a pair of his underpants, but he lets her do the unraveling on her own. She wonders if his love for her is actually a love for the space she has cleared inside him. It was like she sorted him out, the way you sort out a basement storage room after a partner has left and gone: shifting boxes and bags, throwing out stuff heavy-handedly and sentimentally at the same time. Until gradually spaces appear, small areas of floor, open, barefooted cubic meters, making room for something else. A father, for instance.
HER BODY IS confused, like nature these days; spring flowers finding their way into winter, snow in May, elderflower in February. And now, her childhood lake freezing over, the fish suspended beneath its ice, beneath the glowing orb of a sun. The body is confused, as the air, too, is confused, gusting richly with rented smells of harvest and wool, apples lying stored and silent in barn lofts, rancid fat. One minute her body is a festival, the next it is a darkened tunnel through which passes a shuffling funeral procession. A feeling of elsewhere. In the weeks after meeting her new man, she thinks: there is a state worse than wanting something and not knowing what it is. What’s worse is: knowing what you want, and knowing it to be found, only not here. The mere fact of its existence. Longing is not an emotion, it is a thing. It takes residence in the body and has weight. It distorts the face, and you can’t sleep properly on account of it being there all the time. An attraction to calamity.
WHEN FINALLY HE falls asleep, he does so on top of her arm. She feels how it tingles and throbs, with no way she can move it. She lies there for hours in that way. Kept from sleep by the fear of waking him. He never asked for me, she thinks to herself; he thinks: I never asked her to come, never asked her to stay. Her new man’s breathing is unsettled, fever sweeps through their bed, all is damp. His mouth is open, she sees, it is light enough to see as much. And his feet, sticking out from under the duvet. She thinks: should I ask if he wants a sheet instead. But then she cannot bring herself to utter the words. As if he were a piece of furniture for which there is no longer a use, as if he were dead. She lies there, trapped beneath him, thinking about how she cannot find sleep with her feet sticking out in that same way, a feeling that any part of her not covered by the duvet will be cut away in the night, amputated. Her mother’s mother, drawing the cover up over her if she as much as yawned; a child slept there, always. Her parents visited her mother’s mother and they, too, slept. Disasters may be averted in that way. Many catastrophes are mostly about:
being hungry
lacking sleep
believing oneself to be a victim
The victim finds there to be a particular reasonableness about everything. After all you’ve put me through. After all I’ve done for you.
Her arm tingles; she has never been as comfortable in all her life.
OR ELSE MY mother phones. Mornings are, as ever, a trial. I wake up in a bed without having slept.
My mother tells me things are rough. I sit up in bed and force my legs over the edge.
Things are always rough, I think to myself. She mumbles. My hair is a mess, and the new man reaches out from under the duvet and messes it up even more. I sink my head between my shoulders like a horse about to bite, that expression, ears flat, eyes narrowed like slits of light under creaking doors.
I snap at them.
I’m ill, she says.
I am not breathing. I flex my feet, shuffle further to the edge. You’re ill, I repeat, emptied. Those words, and me, emptied.
The new man’s hand stops its tousling. I feel the abruptness with which it halts, as if suddenly encountering some sloppy mass on my scalp, something that once had life.