Always, Kåre thinks as he walks toward the record store, Wanda had to bring up the feminist perspective! The thing with the relationship between The Bride and Bill is a gangster film trope, he’d told her as they walked along the river that evening, the boss’s minions are always subservient, they always look blindly up to the boss, and sometimes they eventually have to kill the boss, which is the case with The Bride! She kills him! How do you get that to fit in with your feminist criticism? Kåre said, then added that she should appreciate that it was a major twist on this trope that a female was the most feared of all the minions, and that it was she who won in the end, plus the fact that she had a daughter who appeared to be as fearless as her mother, as they lay there on the bed in a hotel room and watched Shogun Assassin! And Kåre actually thought that it was good that The Bride was a mother, that rather than confirming conventions, it was turning them on their head, because what mother would allow her five-year-old daughter to watch a film filled with cold-blooded murders carried out by callous hands? But more than anything, Kåre thought, keeping quiet at first, what was really bothering Wanda was that she was jealous of Uma Thurman. Because she knew that the only women that Kåre could stand were strong women, he couldn’t bear uncertainty and hesitation, and that she herself, Wanda, was one of the strongest people Kåre knew, and that was part of his attraction and love for her. And she liked that, because she was strong. But she had a flaw too, and that flaw was her jealousy. And it was a tragic paradox, Kåre thought—the very fact that she was attacking Uma Thurman’s character for being the image of a subservient woman in fact only revealed her own uncertainty and lack of confidence. Because hadn’t she gone all weird and grumpy when he’d clicked on an interview with Uma Thurman on the Dagbladet website after he’d already read an interview with her in VG when the film first came out? Yes. “What’s with the Uma Thurman obsession?” “Obsession? Because I’ve read two interviews with her?” Yes, wasn’t it a bit obsessive to open an interview with this woman in Dagbladet when you’d just been reading about her in VG? Were there any particular nuances in the Dagbladet interview that he was pleased to discover? Jesus, could he not just look around on the Dagbladet website without it meaning that he was going to fly out to Hollywood and start a relationship with the most desirable actress in the world? Jesuuus!! And it certainly didn’t improve her mood when he said that she was just jealous because Uma was so blonde and beautiful, and Wanda said that this was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. Until she, having sulked for the entire day and walked aggressively round Frognerparken in her sneakers with PJ Harvey playing in her ears and cried in secret, then snuggled up to him on the sofa in the evening and asked if he didn’t love her more because she’d been jealous of a film star he’d never meet? And that perhaps it wasn’t about Uma Thurman, as such, but more about the potential other woman, who might suddenly appear from nowhere? I think, said Kåre as they walked along the river, it’s about Uma Thurman. I think you’re still jealous. Wanda turned toward him with a furious expression. What did you just say? She rounded on him, her eyes narrowed under her black bangs. You think this is about jealousy? Yes, I do, Kåre said. Fucking hell, Wanda said, you’re fucking worse than Bill. You don’t even believe I can think, you think I’m ruled by my bodily functions and emotions, any minute now you’re going to ask if I’m premenstrual! You think I’m worse than Bill? Kåre shouted, because of that question, you think that I’m worse than someone who was prepared to kill his own girlfriend and unborn baby? Aaaaaargh, you know what I mean! Wanda shouted. No, I fucking well don’t, Kåre said. And neither of them pushed the matter any further, Wanda threw up her hands and felt like her head was boiling, her stomach was boiling, with rage, Kåre imitated Wanda and threw up his hands, and was exasperated, fed up. They walked home in silence, but that made it even worse, perhaps, the fact that they didn’t carry on arguing, but were silent, and that neither of them picked up where they’d left off or tried to do anything to end the silence, they were just totally and utterly silent. They were silent as they walked down the street toward the house, silent as they opened the door, silent as they walked up the stairs into the flat, they were silent as they ate separately, silent as they brushed their teeth separately, as they each lay down on their side of the bed, and silent as they fell asleep. And when Kåre woke up in the middle of the night and the room was dark and he looked at Wanda as she lay there asleep, he thought of a quote, but couldn’t remember who had written it, where he’d read it: “How strange this will seem to you, when you no longer have this arm under your head,” because that was the truth! He suddenly just knew it, as he lay there gazing at her sleeping face—that he would pull back his arm, that she would sleep without his arm under her head from now on. And he put his head down on his own pillow and looked up at the ceiling and felt icy cold inside. As though his heart had turned itself off. Click: darkness. As though it was irrevocable, too late. And he turned to the wall, closed his eyes, and fell asleep. When they woke up the next morning, everything had changed, they tried to be normal, but everything was abnormal, it was abnormal to eat breakfast and abnormal to say have a good day, abnormal to hug, their bodies were all kinds of stiff, and it was abnormal to come home again after he’d played golf, and in the end he and Wanda sat at the kitchen table and cried and said that perhaps they should take a break, she wanted to go back to her mother’s for a week and then they would see. Hadn’t they both felt that the relationship had been teetering on the edge for some time now? Yes. (Tears.) But he didn’t feel much; all he felt, when he looked at Wanda standing there with puffy eyes, looking out the window, was nothing, even a kind of relief. He withdrew his arm. And she took her bass guitar and left. And that was what had bothered him for a whole week, that he was back in that old place again, that nothing made an impression, that he was just cold. So what he’d felt when he watched the scene where Bill says to The Bride that she’s wrong had been right, he could do something like that to her, shoot her in the head. He’d felt like he’d been found out. He had it in him too!
* * *
The record shop isn’t open yet. He decides to go and find somewhere he can have a coffee, his plane isn’t until five, and he now regrets thinking that it might be good to look around another town before traveling back to Oslo and the state in which he left his life. And the state of his life, thinks Kåre, is that he feels nothing, even when faced with the ultimate woman.
* * *
He goes to Baker Brun, and as he orders a double espresso over a glass counter full of sugared buns filled with almond paste and vanilla cream, he thinks how intensely he dislikes pastries.