8

We spent the summer by the sea, Astrid, the children and I. While I was in New York she had arranged to rent the house where we had stayed the first summer we were together, when she was expecting Rosa, and where we had holidayed several times. It had originally been a low-ceilinged, thatched fisherman’s cottage, enlarged around the turn of the century with an extension on two floors, holding several generations of summer guests at once in its numerous little rooms with faded wallpaper and creaking beds and floors with scrunching sand, furnished through generations, so the place seemed as timeless as the sea outside the windows, below the slope. I did all I could to seem enthusiastic. When I stood among the rose bushes again, on the steps that led down to the beach, and looked out over the empty, uniform sea, time felt longer than it had before, the time that had passed since the night I kept watch after Astrid had been taken away in an ambulance. She had almost lost Rosa, what had become Rosa, the long-legged ten-year-old with brown legs and sun-bleached plaits, who now ran along at the edge of the beach throwing jellyfish at her big brother and screaming shrilly and affectedly when he turned her upside down and threw her into the waves. Here I had sat, on the steps among the fragrant rose bushes, looking out at the dark breakers as I lit one cigarette from the butt of the last one and talked to Astrid as if she could hear me where she was in the hospital. As if it could make any difference, my repeating the same inadequate little words over and over again through my clenched teeth, hold on, hold on. And now I was prepared to let go of it all. I thought of Elisabeth all the time, and I had to make out I had problems with my book on the New York School, explain to Astrid that was why I was so often absent-minded or irritable. In reality the book had been finished for several weeks, I only needed to write a brief concluding chapter and go through the manuscript, but I spun it out and sat for hours bent over the fair copy by my window facing the Lakes and later by the rickety dressing table before the window looking onto the idle and intemperate blue sea, while the others went swimming or lay in the sun. I felt closer to Elisabeth when I was writing of the painters we both loved, just as I had felt closer to her in Copenhagen, perhaps because it was closer to the airport.

After a week by the sea Astrid was brown and lovely, and scented with wind and salt when she lay down beside me. I myself was still as white as a skeleton and smelled of nothing except too many cigarettes and far too much black coffee. I was amazed at her patience and even that irritated me. Elisabeth had come between us, and clearly she had come to stay. It was only by dint of all my concentration that I succeeded in responding to Astrid’s caresses at night, and now and then perform a half-hearted and routine shag so as to allay any suspicion. But it was unnecessary, she seemed to think it was my work as usual that distanced me from her, she even tried to comfort and encourage me, which only made me still more morose. When I was not thinking of Elisabeth I thought, for the first time ever, that Astrid had never understood what engaged me. Not only was she ignorant of the fact that I had been unfaithful to her, she had hardly any perception at all of the world where I spent half my life, whereas I had often talked to her about the films she made and showed her how the directors she admired had taken their inspiration from painting in their compositional technique. Suddenly it seemed to me that we had not lived together but beside each other, each in our own world, with the children as our chief concern. Was I to stay with her purely for their sake? As I saw it that would merely make me more resigned until finally I would shut myself in completely behind my words and my pictures, because in time it would only be the pattern of repetitions we had laced ourselves into that could still call me back to our mutual reality, not Astrid herself and the urge to reach out to her, the spontaneous tenderness, the recurring desire that had earlier set the pattern in movement. Would we just be friends? Could Astrid agree to live with a man who loved another woman?

There I had to stop my self-justifying defence speech. Did I really love Elisabeth or had she just become an obsession, a phantom for my frustrated craving for something different, another life, a new beginning? I visualised her in the sun on Tompkins Square, in front of her easel and bent over my sheets of manuscript, with yoghurt on her top lip, quite clear but also mysterious. The sight of her struck me with something resembling pain, but it did not answer my question, and I knew there was only one way to get an answer. Once or twice since my return I had dropped a hint that I might have to go back to New York for a week or so to undertake supplementary research, and my alternately melancholy and sullen introversion only started to diminish when Astrid herself suggested that I should go again, since I had worked so well over there, where I had direct access to the pictures of the artists I was writing about. She really did say that, and I hated myself as I kissed her, hated myself, because my gratitude could not be distinguished from the silent, patronising contempt that oozed out of me behind my smile. But perhaps she was not as gullible as I fancied, perhaps she had in fact caught a whiff of what was happening. Perhaps her unexpected and generous suggestion was just another expression of the almost aristocratic dignity everyone admired in her, and which made the more insolent arrivistes in our circle wince when she smiled graciously at their intimidating or bitchy attempts to disconcert her and chisel a crack in her cool façade. Perhaps she had already thought things through and decided she would rather set me free than demean herself by holding on to a man whose love she had already lost. It might even be, I thought in my shadowy room looking out on the dazzling summer days by the sea, that she herself had noticed weariness growing like a distance between us, exhausted as I was by the repetition of everything, by no longer being on the way to some definite place, but further into a future that was no longer so unpredictable as it had once been. Perhaps she was merely waiting with deceptive passivity for me to take the first step. In the state I found myself in, the idea was almost encouraging, and I sucked at it as you suck a sweet until it has melted, dissolved by saliva, leaving only a sticky, sweetish and vaguely shaming feeling in the mouth.

One afternoon while the others were on the beach I called Elisabeth again. I had been on the point of it several times but held back, either because Simon or Rosa had come rushing in or because I’d lost courage at the last moment. It had become all too heavy, all too serious to call her compared with the easy, untroubled way we talked about whatever crossed our minds during the three weeks we spent together. I held my breath when I heard her deep serious voice speaking to me at the other end in its impeccable New York accent, and I was just about to answer her when I realised it was an answering machine I was listening to. She said she was away until the end of August. As I sat with the receiver pressed to my ear and listened to her voice, I saw Astrid come into view among the rose bushes outside, naked and sunburned under her open bathrobe, swinging her wet bathing suit like a child in a cloud of sparkling drops that made the leaves on the bushes flutter as she walked past. She didn’t see me as she passed the narrow windows in the low-ceilinged room with bent head, immersed in her own unknown thoughts. The wet sand stuck to her calves and ankles and her beautiful breasts swayed softly in time to her strides, slightly paler than her brown face and legs. Why didn’t I go out to her? Why didn’t I carry her off to the furthest room of the house in this quiet afternoon hour, while the children roamed on the beach? Why didn’t I just forget this hopeless story, why did I sit here clutching the telephone and listening to the message Elisabeth had recorded, most likely several weeks ago, addressed to all and sundry? She hadn’t said anything about going away. But perhaps she had only decided at the last moment, after all she was free and independent and could make decisions from day to day. Had she travelled alone or was she with someone? Actually, I knew hardly anything about her or the people she knew. She must surely see others sometimes, and maybe I was not the only man in her life. ‘In her life.’ The phrase suddenly seemed far too solemn. Wasn’t I just a man she had been with for a couple of weeks in the spring? Had it ever been written ‘in the cards’, as they say, that I should be anything more? I imagined her at this moment sitting on the back seat of a motorcycle driving through the Mojave desert, with her arms round the hips of one of the aspiring young artists in black leather jacket and narrow sunglasses I had seen leaning world-wearily against the bar counters in the East Village. While I sat here at the same time in a thatched holiday cottage, married and bourgeois and filled with longing. I couldn’t even see the comedy or complete distortion of being jealous of the woman I had been fucking behind my wife’s back.

A few days later I drove into town to meet my editor. Afterwards I went to look at an apartment in the city centre, which had been advertised in one of the Sunday papers. The owner was a journalist with a beer belly and sweat on his upper lip, who was to be stationed in Moscow from the autumn, provisionally for a year, he wanted to let the flat furnished he said as he showed me round. He had exceptionally bad taste, which in a way encouraged me because his smoked glass tables and brandy-coloured leather sofas merely dramatised my revolutionary and brutal determination. If one altered the vulgar furnishings a little Elisabeth and I could have a room each where we could work, hers even had a balcony facing north, and with a bit of goodwill the room could function as a studio. I was amazed at my own self-assured initiative as I questioned the owner about heating costs and the shared facilities of the property. I behaved as if Elisabeth had not only decided to return to Copenhagen, but was also intending to move in with me although I had scant reason for believing any of this. When the journalist showed me the bathroom and proudly pointed out that the gilt armatures matched the brown tiles and mahogany toilet seat, he wiped the sweat from his upper lip and looked at me with a jovially approving glint in his eye, as if he had acquired certain rights now I had seen the way he lived. Was I getting divorced? Or did I just need a discreet little love nest? He really did use that expression. I was speechless, and it struck me as often before that people’s heads are probably furnished like their homes. I mumbled something about a working apartment now the children were growing up and needed more space, but he merely grunted contentedly, it was nothing to do with him. It was not only his bathroom that was brown, suddenly I felt brown inside too. He asked for a telephone number but I said I would be away for the rest of the summer. I would call back. Good luck, he smiled, sweatily, and his raffish glance, man to man, stuck to my flustered face as he closed the door after me. As I drove northwards I tried to convince myself that the journalist’s sticky smile and his brown interior wouldn’t need to affect us, and that what had come into being between Elisabeth and me would be the same regardless of where we lived. But what had I actually imagined? What would our new life be like? Would she ‘be like a mother’ to Rosa, she who was so distrait that she forgot to tie her own shoelaces? Would she and Astrid become ‘friends’? Or would she take Astrid’s place at the dinner parties with friends? It seemed unthinkable that she would sit in her worn leather jacket and washed-out T-shirt and participate in the worldly table talk in a villa out in the northern suburbs. As I drove along the motorway in the slanting afternoon light that made the cars throw long, deformed shadows on the glittering asphalt, I realised that it was not only Astrid but the whole of my previous life I was about to leave. And perhaps it was not only the thought of Elisabeth that seemed so obsessive, but also the thought of leaving it all. The thought of being no one again and leaving behind me everything I was in the eyes of others, like a snake sloughing its skin. The thought of feeling the empty air in my pores again and breathing in the dizzy sensation that everything was still possible, that my account with the future was not yet made up.

It was Midsummer Eve. I had completely forgotten Astrid had invited guests, they were already sitting with their drinks in front of the house, beside the table among the dog-rose bushes above the sea, the curator, his wife and my mother. He raised his glass in the air when he caught sight of me, with a cheerful, man-about-town gesture, and an enthusiastic roar came from my mother as if it was Santa Claus himself arriving six months late. I turned round as Astrid came out of the house carrying a tray of various tapas and proffering her cheek with an intimate glance, as if she wanted to excuse my own mother’s exaggerated and theatrical joy over seeing me again. She smiled, she thought I had run away. I hastened to laugh at her light, ironic tone and sat down with the others. The sun was setting, everyone had left the beach and the shadows began to flow into the hollows in the sand where millions of heels had trod. I caught sight of two small silhouettes out in the water, black against the backdrop of whirling golden reflections below the horizon, soon afterwards they came up the beach, it was Rosa and Simon. Had I really thought of leaving them? As if the time for beginnings were not long ago past, the great shining openness to everything possible. It was theirs, the openness, not mine, as they came running towards us across the beach, their wet bodies glistening in the low light. How would I ever find the words that could explain why I left them before time? Before the time when they themselves would leave us to discover whom they might become. The curator suggested we had a dip before eating, and I went up to fetch my bathing trunks. From the window I could look down on the little group in front of the house. Simon and Rosa stood with their towels draped like cloaks around their shuddering bodies explaining something or other with frozen blue lips and dripping hair, and Astrid massaged their backs while my mother leaned forward to hear what they said, with the demonstrative teacher’s expression she always put on when she spoke to the children, as if conversing with two backward pupils. Astrid looked at me in surprise as I came down in bathing trunks with a towel slung sportily over my shoulder. She creased her lips and smiled with her narrow eyes. Now I must really take care not to catch cold.

The water was actually quite cold. The curator is one of those who make use of the ‘townee’s’ method when they brave the first swim of the summer. He cupped water in his hands and rubbed it into arms and stomach before carefully easing his skinny body under the surface. I enjoyed the breathless moment when the water closed around me like a gigantic ice-cold hand, and I swam quickly out to the sand-bar to get warm, dazzled by the glittering drops on my eyelashes. He was puffing with effort when at last he came up with me. We lay on our backs floating like two afternoon gentlemen in their chaise-longues in the smoking room. Had I met any interesting people in New York? He had kept his glasses on and they reflected the sun so I couldn’t see his eyes. I replied that I had kept to myself most of the time. He smiled his foxy smile. Had I called Elisabeth? I said we had had a coffee together, and started to swim towards the quay of stakes and boulders framing the little bay where the fishermen had once pulled their boats up on shore. I didn’t like him calling her by her first name. He swam after me. Charming, didn’t I think? I turned towards him, treading water. She was certainly very sweet, I replied, doing my best to sound casual. And he was right, I went on, she was certainly talented. I had already said too much. So had I got to see her pictures? I had the sun at my back, I was no more than a silhouette before the silhouettes of the quay’s big stones, but he smiled all the same as if he could see my expression. He knew she would be just my type. What did he mean by that? He smiled again. I needn’t worry, it would be just between ourselves, we were friends, after all, weren’t we? I swam out, he followed and came up beside me. It was nothing to be ashamed of, a good-looking guy like me, alone in New York, of course it wasn’t. Besides, I wasn’t the only one to appreciate her talent. He had had the pleasure himself, like so many others, from what he knew she had a liking for men. I started to swim in to the shore. I could see the others in front of the house but only as insubstantial little figures, my mother’s wide-brimmed straw hat, Astrid’s dark hair as she bent forward to pour into a glass. The curator gave me a chummy punch on the shoulder as we stood drying ourselves on the beach. He was glad I had made myself at home over there. He held up his glasses against the sky and polished them with his towel, blinking at me short-sightedly. Everyone needed to try something different, eh?

The roses resembled coloured Japanese paper flowers in the lavender-blue air when the sun had disappeared behind the calm sea, which reflected the evening sky with a faint, greenish tinge below the horizon. While we were eating, the curator’s wife questioned me about my book, and I chatted on about the New York School painters. Everything I said sounded superficial and conventional, but she nodded eagerly as I spoke, simultaneously asking myself if I had got anything out of the past months’ work except this handful of tired, complacent clichès. Like Astrid, she had no idea what her husband got up to behind her back. Nor did she know anything of the hidden doors and trapdoors in her apparently harmonious and comfortable life. On the other side of the table my mother was initiating the curator into the most nerve-racking manner in which she had had to confront hidden and painful sides of herself while preparing for her latest role, and he bowed his bald head respectfully as he listened and smiled his slyest and most ingratiating smile almost as if he had in mind to seduce her. His intense gaze made her even more fervent and hand-wringing in her account of how hard it was to be an actor and every evening to bare one’s innermost soul to the audience down there in the dark. Astrid went in and out with Simon and Rosa to serve each new course, now and then catching my eye and looking at me affectionately, as if she rejoiced that I had at long last risen to the surface again after the long period when I had been cranky and introspective. I looked sidelong at the curator as I entertained his wife with the stages in Jackson Pollock’s development. To this day I don’t know if Elisabeth was lying when I asked her if she had slept with him. If he had really been telling the truth when we were out swimming in the sunset, was that perhaps why a year or two later he felt he had a right to place a hand on Astrid’s knee when he drove her home after dining with our mutual friends, when I was away? Perhaps he even told her about Elisabeth and me in order to somehow justify the sudden presence of his hand on her knee. In that case Astrid had been clever at concealing her knowledge from me. But on that Midsummer’s Eve I was convinced it must be he who lied. And even if there was the least scrap of truth in his chummy confidences, they belonged to a pub or a changing room, not in my memory of Elisabeth and our three weeks in the East Village, floating in our transparent soap bubble outside the world, occupied only with each other and our work. Even if she really had spent a night with the curator, however improbable that seemed, it could not have had the same significance for her as the time she and I had spent together. Or rather, our time together could not have meant so little. Those were my thoughts as I sat chattering mechanically about Jackson Pollock, alternately observing the curator’s shining pate and the canine teeth in his foxy smile, his wife’s gentle, gullible cow’s eyes and my mother’s ravaged, dramatic face in which every single movement was distorted into an exaggerated caricature, as if she not only wanted to convince the curator but herself as well that she really thought and felt as she said she thought and felt.

Later on we went to the Midsummer Eve bonfire that had been lit further along the beach. I carried Rosa on my shoulders although she was really too big and heavy, and she grabbed hold of my hair each time I was about to stumble on the loose sand. She told me to hurry, the flames had already taken hold of the witch’s clothes, and I heard Astrid and the others laughing behind us when I broke into a run towards the fire with Rosa hooting above my head. There were crowds of people on the beach and I recognised several faces as we passed them. It was almost like taking a walk along Strøget in Copenhagen on a Saturday morning, I thought as I made my way among the figures with dark faces, in white dresses and jackets, which glimmered luminously like the small lines of foam in the blue transparent semi-darkness over the sea and the beach. At a distance the faces were impossible to read, they blended into one with the dark pines of the plantation behind the dunes, so it looked as if the light-coloured dresses and suits were moving of their own volition in and out among each other like lost, anonymous ghosts, chatting and laughing. We move on sand, I thought, and took my place in the group gathered around the bonfire. The flames shot high into the air and the flickering reflection of the fire offset at first glance all the differences in the ring of faces, red-brown like burned clay, like the statues of Chinese warriors I had seen a picture of recently, thousands of life-size clay warriors that had been dug up during the excavation of an emperor’s grave, each with his individual features and yet alike, with the same red-brown, uniform complexion. I felt Astrid’s hands on my hips and heard my mother laughing loudly at something the curator had told her. Simon was on the other side of the fire talking politely to a grey-haired man who like myself carried a little girl on his shoulders, and a moment later I recognised his father, the film director. Of course he was here too, everyone was here on such a Midsummer Eve, and it really wouldn’t have surprised me if I had seen Inès and Elisabeth among the women in their summer dresses, with red-brown cheeks, squeezing up their eyes against the heat from the bonfire. Astrid lifted Rosa down from my shoulders and said she would go back and put her to bed before putting the kettle on for coffee. She probably didn’t want to confront the film director, who was having a conversation with the son of his second marriage while his little daughter pulled his hair and his new young wife stood in the background smiling shyly. Would I be standing like that one Midsummer Eve in a few years with a new little child on my shoulders, while Elisabeth shyly looked on as I questioned Rosa on her progress at school, slightly awkward, slightly strange, now we had happened to come across each other?

Next day was overcast. The curator and his wife had already gone when I woke up. Looking out of the window I saw my mother sitting in front of the house reading aloud to Rosa with clear, dramatic diction, just as she did on the radio, but it really seemed as if she relaxed in the role of grandmother, sitting on the bench among the dog roses with Rosa on her lap and a faded scarf around her dyed hair like a Russian peasant woman. Astrid and Simon went out on the lawn, she asked if Rosa wanted to go shopping with them, and soon I saw the three of them go to the car. My mother remained on the bench with the closed children’s book on her lap, gazing at the sea, grey like the sky, grey and bottle green, dappled with darker sections where the sand floor was covered with seaweed. I couldn’t recall when I had last seen her sit like that, alone with herself, passive and unmoving, her face resting slackly in its ravaged folds. You could still see how beautiful she had once been, but here before the sea, where she thought no one could see her, she did nothing to divert attention from the baggy weight of her cheeks and the hanging corners of her mouth around the lips that had kissed so many men and allowed the words of so many writers to pass through her mouth. I drank a cup of lukewarm coffee in the kitchen and went out to her. She smiled quietly when she saw me, but didn’t say anything. I stood for a while looking down on the empty beach and the tired grey waves breaking in the offshore wind. Then she suggested we should go for a walk. There were no people on the beach. We walked at the water’s edge where the sand was damp and firm, past the quay and the burned-out, charred bonfire and further on beside the pine plantation. At first we walked without breaking the silence in the pauses between the dull beating of the little waves. They just about covered the sloping extent of sand and withdrew again at once, the sand reflecting the grey light only for a moment before it sucked in the water and again grew lustreless and gritty. We walked for a long way like this before she finally looked at me.

Time after time over the years I have been surprised that this vain and superficial woman should possess such sharp eyes. I cannot hide anything from her, and I hadn’t been able to this time either. Her voice was subdued and completely calm, almost gentle, quite lacking in the usual drama when she asked if I had met someone else. I tried to defend myself, if only for the sake of appearances. What had given her that idea? She smiled but without any sting. I needn’t talk about it if I didn’t feel like it. I realised I might as well give up. I said I didn’t know what to do. She said I was wrong. I knew perfectly well what I should do. That was why I hesitated. What did she mean? She took my hand and pulled me aside a little, just as a wave was about to wash over my shoes. She had hesitated as well, she went on, when she broke up with my father, even if I didn’t believe it. She knew quite well I had never forgiven her, and from the start she had seen clearly that she would have to live with that. She had known what she was doing and that was why she had hesitated. Because she knew what she was about, and because she knew she would have to pay the price. It was a pathetic remark, but for once there was nothing at all pathetic about her tone of voice. She asked me to tell her who it was. I held back a bit, mostly because I couldn’t decide where to begin. Then I told her how I had met Elisabeth, about the strangely clear and finely tuned wavelength we had immediately found, as if for years we had thought about and experienced the world on the same frequency, without knowing each other. I told her about Elisabeth’s pictures and our weeks together in the spartan apartment in the East Village, how when I met her I had discovered that a distance had grown in me over the years, an old gap that had reopened, although I’d thought I had put it behind me long ago. The same old gap I had once more put behind me, together with Elisabeth, for the first time in many years completely present, wholly and fully there in everything I was and held. My mother merely smiled as I was speaking, until I fell silent again, because suddenly the words seemed so inadequate, so imprecise and foolish in their anonymity. She took my arm as we walked across the beach and up the sand dunes, in through the pine plantation, which the wind had shaped into crooked interlacing. When I looked at the wind-blown pine trees I couldn’t decide whether to fasten upon their malformation or the stubbornness which kept them growing, despite everything. We could no longer hear the sound of the waves, only the wind’s occasional sigh among the grey-green, stiff and sticky needles of the trees.

But what was she like? My mother looked darkly, almost threateningly at me as she asked. I told her about the contrast between Elisabeth’s Botticelli hair and her angular face and gawky body, about the contrast between her ascetic lifestyle and her almost hypersensitive sense for the colours and surfaces of things, whether it was a rusty nut she gave me on the street in Soho, or a pumpkin she bought from the Korean greengrocer on Avenue A, merely to keep it on her table to look at and feel with her long, nervously registering fingers. I told her how from one moment to another she could suddenly change between her cool, consistent and merciless faculty for abstract thought and her almost childish, spontaneous and playful whims, as when she woke me up in the small hours because she wanted us to see the sun rise over Brooklyn Bridge. In fact I knew hardly anything about her, I said, but it was not an erotic obsession in the usual banal sense, it was not even so amazing when we lay grappling with each other on her hard futon. If I couldn’t forget her it was rather that everything around me, movements, places and things, light and shadows, when I was with her, awoke my old longing just to be, here and now, in the midst of the world. As if I had woken up after sleeping for a long time only to discover that I already was where I had dreamed of being. I could see from my mother’s raised eyebrow that even she thought that sounded a touch over the top. That was what it was like, I persisted, what it had been like to wake beside Elisabeth in the morning, as if I had slept for ten years, ever since Inès left me and I grabbed at the first girl who came along, by chance, and rushed to make a life with her, as if it couldn’t go fast enough. My mother regarded me for a long time as she lit a cigarette and blew smoke from her nose. I said smoking wasn’t allowed in the plantation because of fire danger, and she put her head on one side as she knocked off her ash on the rusty red needles covering the sandy path. Fancy, wasn’t it really? Then she stopped. Wasn’t Elisabeth too the first girl who happened along, after ten years with a wife and children? I had to admit it. But then, what was the difference? Was it just time that had done it? Time and boredom? She smiled sarcastically. Hadn’t Astrid’s cheerful nature and lovely face been just as revolutionary as Elisabeth’s Botticelli locks and her ability to think in the abstract? I stood for a while looking down at my shoes. Really the two of us were alike, she said, throwing down her cigarette and treading out the stub with exaggerated thoroughness, looking up at me sideways. Would the forest ranger be satisfied? We went on among the twisted pines until the plantation was succeeded by broad-leaved trees.

I might not believe her, but she had actually expected it to happen. I was much too complicated for a woman like Astrid, and she didn’t say that to denigrate her, I mustn’t think that. She really was a wonderful girl. On the contrary she had feared that I would hurt her one day. Ever since I was a child I had carried a darkness within me, which I concealed from my surroundings and which therefore had only grown denser through the years, impenetrable not only to others but also to myself. It sounded like a speech from one of her television plays I had always switched off as soon as she showed herself on the screen. Formerly she had believed that she had been to blame for my having sought flight in that darkness, where I had hidden for so long that I could no longer catch sight of myself. But in time she had come to the conclusion that she was no more responsible for my closed and secretive nature than she was for the fact that I had inherited her nose and her eyes. I must excuse her, but she could no longer reproach herself for leaving my father. If she understood me now it was only because the decision I hesitated to take was the same decision that she herself had taken then. And I should not rely on this Elisabeth to make it easier to decide. To her it was probably just an affair, what we had had together during my little holiday from the marital grind. She knew me all right, she knew how I always felt everything much more deeply than everyone else. She had not left my father because she was in love with someone else. She had gone her own way because she could not stand dissembling any longer. This so intellectual and spontaneous and ascetic and sensual Elisabeth was merely an occasion, just as her own various affairs had been, and I might just as well realise that now. But she knew it all right, she had the same problem as I did, she went around with the same darkness within her. Of course I didn’t believe her, she knew perfectly well I despised her for her mannerisms and prima donna fads, but that was her way of enduring herself. She knew the darkness in which I staggered around like a blind man. She knew the impatient expectation that someone, an unknown totally strange person, would open the door on that darkness, let in the daylight and discover who she really was. But now she had waited for many years, and that person, she had gradually come to realise, that person didn’t exist. You had to go out into the light on your own, at least occasionally, when the darkness inside grew too dense and impassable. That was what she had done when she made her escape from my moaning wimp of a father and chose freedom with all its costs. And that was what I was about to do if I could summon enough courage to leave my sweet pretty wife and my sweet children and my cosy, comfortable life, where I was on the point of being suffocated. But it was up to me, and she thought we should stop talking about this business now.

I had never talked to my mother in that way before, and never have since. Even when we were alone together we did not touch on ‘that business’. She was right, and so was the Count of Monte Cristo in the chapter I read aloud to Simon and Rosa in the evening: ‘There are two strong weapons against every evil – time and silence.’ When we arrived back at the house Astrid had prepared lunch, and my mother was overdoing it as usual. The fried herring tasted divine, not just good, and Astrid had never looked as enchanting as she did that summer. All things considered there was always something which had never been so wonderfully delightful, so shudderingly and ecstatically fantastic, and so her life glided on towards still new, still dizzier heights. We were completely exhausted a few days later when she was obliged to go back to ‘her rehearsals’ as she always called them, as if the producers and the other actors only breathed to be able to serve as humble and grateful witnesses to the unfolding of her graceful talent. When later I recalled our conversation that summer day on the beach and in the wood, I was amazed both at how much she had perceived and how little she had understood. Her words had hit me, but I couldn’t avoid the fact that she was the one who had pronounced them. By insisting we resembled each other, wasn’t she only trying to ease her bad conscience by making me her accomplice? Because it would absolve her in my eyes if I repeated her old crime? Otherwise why should it be so urgent for her to get me to leave Astrid and the children? She had boasted of having walked out honestly, not for the sake of some or other man. I reckon she walked out for one or another or a third man’s sake, so all in all she was probably right, she had merely acted in accord with her restless nature. After she walked out on my father she hadn’t spent as much as a fortnight without having at least one hungry worshipper whom she could alternately hold off or let in. Not until age had begun to make itself felt in earnest did she get to know loneliness, and perhaps it was this new, enforced loneliness she had tried to transform into something heroic, retrospectively, when she described herself during our walk as another Nora, who had left her Helmer out of sheer inner necessity. Only with the difference that in her case it was Helmer who was thrown out while Nora stayed on in the doll’s house and turned it into a brothel. If we had ever again discussed what happened in New York that spring, she would no doubt have criticised me because I actually did stay with Astrid. She would have scorned what she would have seen as my cowardice, but like me she chose to let time and silence solve my little problem, and with the years I think she simply forgot what we had spoken of, that we had ever been for a walk together beside the grey sea among the contorted pine trees.

The summer passed and with every week I grew better at concealing my interior unease. Everything was apparently as usual. Astrid seemed to be convinced it was merely my ‘writing crisis’ which sometimes tortured me and made me melancholy. She even asked me when I intended to go to New York to finish my book, and I replied September would be a good time, it was too hot in August. I learned to live with my treachery and neutralise a sneaking contempt for her, which lured and attracted me at the back of my mind like a tempting offer of relief from my guilt. The revolting, secretive contempt of her credulity I made use of to feel coldness towards her caresses. I fought against it, fought at least to rediscover a cool, neutral tenderness for her, for ‘everything we had together’. I tried to protect my tenderness against my guilty desire when I made love to her, violently, at times almost brutally, as if I could chase away the memory of Elisabeth, if only for half an hour. And gradually I succeeded in splitting my interior into separate worlds and prevented them from coming into contact with each other. Perhaps what they say is true, that you can get used to anything. Perhaps it helped too to think of the hypocritical way my mother had spoken of Astrid’s ‘cheerful nature’ and of how I was far too complicated for a woman like her, and then fifteen minutes later, when we returned to the house, had overwhelmed her with her usual sham and exalted compliments. Her denigrating remarks about Astrid almost resuscitated my loyalty to the woman I had betrayed, and in the following weeks I was especially considerate, sometimes downright affectionate to her, as if she was ill without realising it herself. I rose early in the morning and let her sleep on, I swam and played with the children while she lay in the sun, and when the weather was grey I went cycling with them in the forest. There were times when I discovered that I had completely forgotten to think of Elisabeth, and not until the evening, when quietness descended on me and I sat alone on the steps among the rose bushes looking out over the sea in the eternal twilight of the summer night, did the house become a strange place again, where I felt I didn’t belong.

The same feeling lay in wait when I next had an errand in town and opened the door of our apartment. It had been empty for over a month and when I noticed the dusty, enclosed air I thought it was not merely a place we had shut up for the summer. It already resembled a place I had left and would not return to. I dialled Elisabeth’s number as I read the headlines of a yellowing newspaper we had left behind on the day we packed the car and drove into the country. This time the answering machine was not on, but a long time passed and I was about to put the receiver down when she answered at last. She sounded out of breath, she had been on her way up when the telephone rang. She was glad to hear my voice, she had been almost afraid of forgetting how it sounded. She had come back from Mexico the previous week, she had travelled around the Yucatan peninsula all alone, it had been horrific. She had been ill in a dirty hotel room with cockroaches as big as armadillos, it came flooding out of her at both ends, and she had lain there wishing I was with her and wondering if she would ever hear from me again. I smiled at the idea of my jealous fantasies about her streaking through the Mojave desert on a motorcycle with another man. She told me it was just as hot and humid in New York as in Mexico, she couldn’t bear it anywhere, and it was impossible to get anything done, all she could do was lie without a stitch on gasping beneath the electric fan. I visualised it clearly, her voluminous hair spread out over the sheet, the protruding ribs under her small breasts, her long pale legs, her light grey fearless eyes. She was suddenly so close again, not just a thought, an image, but the person she was, all skin and hair. I said we would soon meet again. Was I coming to New York? She sounded glad but also surprised, she obviously thought by a lucky coincidence some other reason made it possible to meet. I said I couldn’t do without her, I had thought a great deal about what had happened. She had thought about it too, she said after a pause, and she really sounded very thoughtful. When was I coming? In September, I said, sometime in September. I didn’t say anything about the apartment I had looked at. I wanted to take one thing, one step at a time. Perhaps I was afraid of frightening her, perhaps I already suspected it was a castle in the air, that apartment, a mirage with brown tiles in the bathroom. I couldn’t yet know whether Elisabeth was only a cause, a random stranger, who had inadvertently opened the door of my darkness, as my mother put it, so the light had suddenly poured in and dazzled me. I had to see her again to be able to know, I thought, as I mumbled a few tender words of farewell. As if it would be something that could be seen.

One evening in September I landed again at John F. Kennedy airport. I couldn’t see Elisabeth anywhere when I walked into the arrival hall, and I wondered anxiously whether she had heard the message I had recorded on her answering machine before boarding the plane. I stood still in the stream of impatiently pushing passengers looking around me in disappointment, when a smiling young woman came towards me. It was the smile I recognised first. She had had her hair cut, her wavy, golden brown hair only reached half way down her neck and she was dressed in a black tailored jacket and a short black skirt and shoes with heels that made her half a head taller than me. I had never seen her in a skirt, as a whole I had never seen her so well-dressed, and as we embraced I was brought to think for a moment of the elegant woman in black I had secretly observed one afternoon in the sculpture garden behind the Museum of Modern Art. Was it for my sake she had dressed like this, to offset the contrast between the Bohemian slattern and her well-dressed bourgeois lover? To show me she could get along in my world, and was prepared to go with me wherever it might be? Or was it someone else who had taught her to make something of her appearance? Was it to make herself attractive to another man’s expectant eyes? We stood there in a long unmoving embrace in the midst of the confusion of people and luggage, and I sniffed the unexpected, strange scent of perfume on her neck. In the taxi she laughed at my surprise, and I caressed her naked, delicate neck as she questioned me about my book and told me of the exhibition she had had, and about her journey to Yucatan that suddenly sounded like a long exotic adventure without any stomach problems at all. It was suddenly very real to be sitting in a taxi on the way through Brooklyn talking about this and that, far too real. She was almost frighteningly beautiful to look at, and her new cool elegance made me uneasy, as if it was a first warning that all might not go as I hoped, even though she pressed against me and leaned her head against mine. But to begin with there was something euphoric about our reunion, as if we had cheated the whole world and everything that in the past months had prevented us from being together, and we could hardly wait for the taxi to stop in front of her doorway. We did not let go of each other until far into the night, sweating and breathless. She went into the bathroom, I stayed in bed, exhausted by the flight and our hectic reunion. The cat crept soundlessly around on the bare floors sniffing cautiously at our clothes, that lay jumbled together in contorted heaps. I could hear the water running in the bath, at first with a hard metallic sound, then a soft splashing as it filled up. The rusty taps creaked and then there was silence. I listened to the faraway police sirens, the voices calling in Spanish down in the street, and the cars now and then passing with techno-music beating out through the rolled-down windows. It was a warm night and the windows were open in the house opposite, behind one of them a man was shaving, even though it was past three o’ clock, from another a slow tango was playing, and I recognised Astor Piazzolla’s passionate bandonéon. It was many years since I had heard that recording. When I went into the bathroom Elisabeth lay in the bath with her face covered by a flannel. The greenish water distorted her body slightly, so it seemed flat as photography, and the damp towelling stuck to her nose and eye sockets like a mask. I sat down on the edge of the bath. I said I had thought of what she had talked about a few times. That she had considered moving back to Copenhagen. The tap dripped, and the drips measured out the silence as they struck the water. The little rings made the surface tremble and blot out the image of her unmoving slender body. I said I loved her, she was the one I wanted to be with, and I had decided to leave Astrid, but the drops merely went on measuring the seconds, plock, plock, one second at a time as is the case with seconds. Cautiously I took hold of the edge of the flannel under her chin and pulled it until her face came in sight. Her eyelids were closed and she lay unmoving for a long time, before opening them and looking at me with her light grey eyes.

So after all, our hours together, even the most precious, had not had any special consequences. The unexpected understanding, the spontaneous intimacy of each single moment had not been a pact, then, a promise of future moments. They were not to be linked together, they were not a story, or only a story that continuously ended and constantly started again, until one evening it was broken off in the middle of a sentence, just as unexpectedly as when I seized her hand five months earlier as we looked over the Hudson River. Seven years later when I stood pondering Elisabeth’s cool, monochrome abstractions at a gallery in Soho, a man of my own age came up and asked if I knew her work. I said I was an old friend, but we had lost contact. He introduced himself as her art dealer and we started to talk. She lived in Vermont now, in a house a long way out in the country, with her husband and their small son. He was a sculptor, very talented. I nodded with interest. The art dealer showed me a photograph hanging on the notice board above his desk in the back room. The picture had been taken in the evening in front of a house of white-painted boards, just after sundown, with a flash. There was a strange contrast between the white flashlight and the sulphur-yellow glow in the narrow section of sky behind the corner of the house. I came to think of Hopper’s lonely American houses backed by the evening sky. Their eyes shone red, the black-haired boy in baseball gloves with sun-tanned arms, the dark-skinned man with a black beard standing behind the boy with hands resting on his shoulders, and Elisabeth, standing beside them in an old-fashioned, flowery summer dress, lowering her face so her cheek touched the man’s. She still had short hair and looked only slightly older. She smiled as she gazed into the camera with her red pupils. She looked like herself, the smiling woman, and yet it wasn’t the one who had lain in her bath one September night seven years before looking at me with expressionless grey eyes. It amazed me that I should have been prepared to turn my life upside-down to be with her, although we didn’t really know each other and had only spent a few weeks together in spring. It had needed nothing more, so flimsy had been my ideas of who I was and where I belonged, as weightless as pictures and words.

Of course it hurt, but not as much as I would have believed, when she considerately explained to me that was not quite what she had in mind, not because there was anyone else she would rather be with, but quite simply because she felt good living alone. Moreover, she had decided to stay on in New York. She even dropped a tear for my sake as a little sacrifice to the beautiful story I had made up about us, and I kissed her tear away and pulled myself together. Had the curator been right after all? Was I just another man in the row of men I visualised standing in a long, impatient queue right up to First Avenue? I never found out, it is of no consequence now. The next day I booked into a cheap hotel in Little Italy, but we did go out to dinner once or twice and we talked as we had done from the beginning, about the New York School and everything else we hit upon, on the same wavelength as before. And if I had not weighed down the balance between us with my untimely and drastic plans for the future, I am sure we would have romped around on her futon for another week, observed by her completely indifferent cat, for she was really fond of me, there was a real flow between us when we were together. It was just what it was, nothing else, nothing more. I was not particularly unhappy when we parted, I was paralysed and in a way also relieved. On the day I left we had lunch together in Spring Street where we had first met. Afterwards we stood for a while looking at each other on the corner of West Broadway, before I hailed a taxi. If at that moment she had reconsidered, everything might have been different, but she only patted me affectionately on my shirt front and told me to look after myself. I felt like saying the same, but made do with an adult smile and a kiss on her forehead before getting into the taxi and asking for the airport. Nice lady, but very slim, said the driver in his winning Pakistani accent, as he drove up West Broadway. Yeah, very nice, I replied, turning round on the back seat to get a last glimpse through the back window of her tall slim figure, making its way with long quick strides among the other pedestrians, a moment later impossible to distinguish from the silhouettes of people in motion.