Lucca (21 page)

He put a plaster on his heel and limped into the kitchen. A bowl of cornflakes from the morning was still on the table. He did not clear it away. He liked to see the tracks she left behind, a swimsuit here, a plate there, an unmade bed or a comic among
the newspapers. The rain pattered on the leaves of the trees outside, and behind the veil of drops on the kitchen window he could see the blurred glow of the lamps in the neighbours' living room. He made an omelette although he wasn't really hungry. When he had eaten he switched on the television and sat down. He did not usually watch, he had lost interest when he left Monica, and he had only bought a television set on Lea's account. The idea of sitting watching television alone had seemed as depressing to him as the idea of drinking alone. He poured himself a double whisky and stretched out his legs in front of him on the sofa. He didn't feel like listening to music, he only wanted to sit there with the pictures passing before him. News he only caught half of, episodes of serials he had not followed, guessing games whose rules were a mystery to him and pop videos of surly young men in disused factories. Whatever.

He zapped between channels. Two films were being shown simultaneously and at one point both of them showed a sex scene. He hopped back and forth between the two, both were filmed in subdued golden light, and the close-ups of distorted faces and hands on skin melted into each other until he could no longer determine which of the films they belonged to. There was an interesting contrast, thought Robert, between the pictures of naked body parts and the pictures of the lovers' transported faces. One type of picture showed, or at least tried to indicate, what was happening. The other type showed, or tried to show, what it meant. The bodies slavishly followed their own agenda, but the faces were not content to reflect the purely physical excitement, they also witnessed something different, something more. The moist glances and pathetic expressions said that this was love, or rather that the rhythmical palpability on the screen was the urgent consequence of love, if not its urgent confirmation, which perhaps, came to the same thing.

Robert debated whether he might be getting slightly drunk. He switched off the television, poured yet another whisky and went to open the sliding door to the terrace. His foot did not hurt so much now. The rain splashed onto the paving stones, drummed against the white plastic furniture and soughed further
off in the twilight, outside the semi-circle of yellow light from the room behind him. He breathed in deeply through his nose. Grass, she had said, when he opened the window that first afternoon when he sat with her and the scent of newly mown grass rose up to them from the lawn between the wings of the hospital. He looked out into the hissing garden. Grass and twilight blue. Lea must have got home long ago. She would have been fetched at the central station by Monica or Jan, they had probably finished eating by now. No doubt she was in bed dreaming of a boy with brown eyes.

He sat down on the step, lit a cigarette and tried to find out why the sex scenes on television had put him in a bad mood. Was it only because it had been so long since he himself had been to bed with someone? He clinked the ice cubes in his glass. Well, he could just have seized the opportunity when it was offered. He felt annoyed about that sometimes, and once almost called the librarian. She was certainly a charming woman, and they might have made a go of it. They might even have suited each other when they had been through the introductory manoeuvres. But when he and Lea were walking along the beach one Sunday and passed the librarian with a younger man in a baseball cap, he had been just as relieved as he had been when he put down his brandy glass on the sofa table and told her kindly that he would prefer to spend the night alone.

He had felt tired already at the prospect of having to begin all over again. The librarian's pretty eyes had cornered him, full to the brim so they almost overflowed with expectation. Her dark gaze had tried to convince him there was so much significance in their meeting, the librarian and the doctor from the city hospital. She had presumably been in love, it was honest enough, but he had not been able to free himself of the suspicion that all she needed was a man, because she was pretty starved where men were concerned, and had wrapped up the elementary and entirely respectable needs of her body in a daydream in which the divorced doctor from Copenhagen was something unique. After all, a provincial town didn't have all that much on offer.

But wasn't he the one who was incurably romantic, since he
was so disheartened by her slightly affected infatuation? Wasn't it the best reason in the world for falling in love, that she was quite simply lonely in the good old-fashioned sense? Wasn't there a secret, immature dream of the great revelation lurking beneath his cynical exploration of motive? Perhaps he had merely been piqued because her situation reminded him of his own, suddenly making him think of scruffy widows' hen parties, where lonely hearts gather for mutual comfort. She had made him feel exposed and available, and he could not tolerate being recognised.

He remembered his shyness as a boy before his voice began to break, and he recalled the letter Lea had written to the boy with brown eyes. He thought of the times some girl or other had made her coltish approaches, and how he had rejected or simply ignored her brusquely, although she made his legs shake. Naturally he had been flattered, but at the same time he had been abashed by the girls' looks and giggles and little folded notes with squares where he was supposed to put crosses. Actually quite a practical system, those little voting cards, he thought now, but then he couldn't bear for a girl to anticipate his clumsy interest like that. He felt she recognised something in him which he had barely come to know, and that she put her fingerprints on this something, already all too familiar, as if it belonged to her merely because she had caught sight of it.

At other times a girl could make him feel guilty for no reason. Like the time his mother had got the idea of sending him to dancing class. It was held in a hall with stucco and red velvet curtains. The boys stood in a row along one wall and the girls sat on gilt rococo chairs along the opposite wall. The boys wore white shirts and bow ties and hair combed back with water. The girls were in dresses with stiffened skirts in soft colours, pale blue, pale yellow and white. At a given sign the boys had to cross the endless parquet floor, choose a girl and bow, and one day when he had trotted across the floor as usual and bowed to the first girl he came to, she looked expectantly into his eyes and asked an unexpected question which made him blush with shame and irritation. Had he chosen her because of her dress?

The feeling of shame stayed with him when he first ventured
into the whispering, fumbling darkness of teenage years. When he had courted a girl long enough and she finally allowed him to kiss her with his tongue and explore her with his hands, she also beseeched him with her doe eyes to behave as if she alone out of all the girls had managed to set his heart on fire. He felt like a deceiver, although his aims were as artless as anything could be. It was then he first discovered the remarkable gap so-called erotic scenes on television had made him think of again. The gap between bodily sensations and the feelings those sensations were so cunningly named after, making it easier and more decent to confuse them.

He learned to lie both to himself and to the girls he wanted to go to bed with, but each time he was in bed with a strange body, he wondered again why it is called ‘being in love', although you still only know each other as bodies. Lovely, strange bodies, which, it is true, do utter words, but words you can't attach to anything because you haven't in fact any idea of what those words mean, or who she is. It was ironic, he felt, but sad as well, for when you finally found out who it was you had been in love with, usually you were not in love any more because she had become so familiar. The promising strangeness that had aroused your fantasies was like a downy, shining surface that quickly wore away. Then all you could do was hope that before then you managed to become really good friends.

Monica had become his friend, and yes, he had loved her. It must have been love, the joy of seeing her again if they had been apart for a few days. The tenderness that could trickle out of him when he raised his nose from the grindstone and suddenly caught sight of her in the midst of the laborious daily routine that was so safe and boring. All the same, he had thrown himself at Sonia when she offered herself. Even though the previous day he had sat on the beach in the low sunlight watching Monica as she stood smoking a cigarette and looking out over the Sound, as if he understood in a flash why they were together. He had obviously forgotten it again as quickly, anyway there was no connection between his impulses. One day he fell in love afresh with his wife, and the next he went to bed with her little sister.

He could not get close to Sonia and be on intimate terms with her because she did not know the barrister was not her father, and his own secret cast him out of the intimate sphere where Monica and he had lived together. He was only half there, his other half stayed outside, and all the time he had to show himself to her sideways on so that she should not discover his unknown side, obscured by lies and dissimulation. The strange thing was that she was not surprised. Obviously she had grown used to not seeing him in full figure because they had gradually come to see each other in their fixed roles as colleagues, sexual partners and financial allies.

They started to talk less, more superficially on his part, since he felt the necessity for censorship. And on hers? He didn't know. He never discovered when she started to distance herself, engaged as he was in covering his own remoteness with conventional demonstrations of tenderness and the usual chat about everyday matters. In time he forgot what it was she must not get to know. It stopped meaning anything. It didn't matter who Sonia's father was, and he grew indifferent to Sonia herself, a chance passing delusion, but then Monica and he had already grown used to the unnoticeable distance that had arisen. It had already made them less to each other, more indistinct.

Only in bed was he completely surrendered to her. That is, his body was, and their bodies' commerce became a test of what things were like between them, when afterwards she cuddled up to him with a satisfied sigh and said it was good, or asked anxiously if it had been good for him. The question made it sound as if their bodies were no more than tools for the other's satisfaction, and that was how it seemed now and then. When she straddled him and rode at a furious gallop on the spot, he sometimes thought of the little painted horses mounted on a plunger that children can ride on when you put a coin in the slot. It seemed to him that they were alone with their separate desire and satisfaction. He felt lonely in spite of their being as close as anyone can be. He felt he was seeing her body and his own from another place, but where was that?

It was raining harder. Every gust of wind threw rain at his face.
It had grown cold. He rose from the threshold with stiff legs and threw his cigarette stub onto the lawn before closing the sliding door. It kept glowing on in the dark blades, surprisingly long. Then it went out. His eyes fell on the grey television screen, with the sofa and a standard lamp reflected in it. He took his glass and the whisky bottle into the bathroom. A bath, that was the thing. He put the plug into its hole and turned on the hot water until steam arose. Then he turned the cold tap on slowly, but only enough to stop him from being scalded.

As he undressed he pondered whether it was really the affair with Sonia that had ruined his marriage, and in that case whether the guilt or the memory of her young body had been the deciding factor. His clearest memory of her was the moment before they kissed each other for the first time, when she had hung up her jumper to dry on the floor-planing machine and strutted around among the paint-pots in the empty corner room clad only in bra, skirt and high-heeled shoes. As she went over to him and bent down her head to meet his eyes through her wet hair, there was a second when the well-known world raised a flap to reveal something quite different, so briefly that he could not make out what it was. The rest was less clear, his treachery and the wildness, her body beneath his on Lea's mattress in what was to be the nursery. She had disappeared from him behind the grimaces of delirium.

He dropped his clothes in a heap on the floor and looked at himself in the mirror. He had grown heavier in recent years. He considered masturbating, but couldn't be bothered. He could barely achieve a proper erection on his own, and it was a long time since he had had the opportunity of discovering whether a woman could do a better job. He remembered a nurse after a Christmas dinner when he had just moved to this town, but she had left shortly afterwards. He turned off the taps and got into the bath. Slowly he sank down into the hot water and leaned back with a sigh as the heat penetrated his flesh right to the bones. He had forgotten to take off the plaster, it loosened itself from his heel. Delicate winding threads of iodine spread like smoke in the greenish water.

He had been just as alone when he was in bed with Sonia as when he was with Monica again later. Alone some place far inside his body as it did what the two women and he himself expected of it, mechanical and obedient as a willing little horse. The difference was that with Sonia it had been sex from beginning to end. Other relationships had started with sex and had gradually come to include something more, friendship, tenderness, confidence. The particular thing about his relationship with Monica had been that it began with friendship, with an innocent, ironical agreement, when they had met in the circle of young friends who went skiing together. Whereas in the end it was about less and less until it ended in nothing but sex, food, washing and pay-cheques.

Not until long after becoming friends and much to their surprise had they found themselves together under a woollen blanket in a holiday apartment in the French Alps. If he had not broken his ankle and if she had not felt obliged to entertain him while the others were out in the snow, it might never have come to anything. But there had been a shy and unexpected gentleness in her otherwise ironic, authoritative or matter-of-fact face when she lowered it to his and pulled the blanket over their heads like a tent. That made him love her without warning, without transition, and he really experienced their bodies' first, tentative approaches as the result of love, not as its confirmation, for neither had as yet asked anything or demanded an answer.