These buns are really good, Kåre says, and takes another bite. They’re still soft and warm, and Kåre and Sigrid are still a bit puffy-faced after all the crying earlier in the day. They’re sitting on the sofa, each in their part of Kåre’s men’s pajama set, Kåre wearing the bottoms and Sigrid the top, they’ve had sex again (there’s no reason not to have sex, Kåre had thought, when you’ve already done it once), they’re eating buns and Sigrid is exhausted to the very tips of her fingers. So what are we going to do about us? Sigrid says, because she thinks it was so nice when he said that in the café that time, and she said that they could kiss. He gives her a strange smile, but doesn’t answer. Yes, what are we going to do, he says, staring into space. We could get married and have children, Sigrid says, because she has decided that she has to be genuine and direct and say things straight, but as she says it she hears that it’s not quite as sassy as “well, we could kiss,” especially since it was her who got him to repeat the question. There’s a ring at the door. Kåre has a strange expression on his face. Who could that be? he says, I don’t know that I can be bothered to answer. Oh, Sigrid says, I forgot to say, it’s probably someone called Ståle who came by earlier today when you were asleep, and I wrote down on a piece of paper that he would come back at five, but then we were so busy crying that I forgot to tell you, she says, but he doesn’t laugh, hmm, says Kåre, who clearly doesn’t want to open the door. He’s forgotten that he, out of habit—an age-old habit to be fair, but all the same, now that he was free from everyone and everything after splitting up with Wanda, and was starting out on something new, and the thought of green, no, it was white, months just fizzed up in him, he’d come to the conclusion that having “a real blowout” (which we embarrassingly have to quote him on) might be fun—had rung up Ståle, his old contact, who doesn’t live far from here. He’d completely forgotten. Are you scared it’s Wanda? Sigrid asks, in a rather flat voice; no, I’m not, Kåre says, without knowing that Wanda is standing just down the street with a hammering heart because she’s decided to go and ring his bell and ask if maybe they couldn’t try again, she loves him, she really does, she doesn’t think she can live without him, she’s realized, and is now standing down the street with her hand on her forehead, she just has to pause a moment, her legs feel weak. What’s holding you back, she’s thought over and over this past week. A few principles, that’s all.
* * *
What would have held her back, naturally, if she’d known about it, was the fact that Kåre was sitting there in his pajama bottoms and another woman was sitting beside him in his pajama top, and the other woman had just said that she wanted to marry him and have his babies. But what would have made her happier, Wanda that is, was if she’d known that Kåre didn’t react to what the other woman said in the way that the other woman dearly hoped he would react, instead he reacted with a kind of claustrophobia. And if she had known, Wanda, that the sharing pajamas thing was a test on Kåre’s part, though he was fully aware it was an idiotic test, but all the same: he wanted to see Sigrid in a pajama top similar to the one that Wanda had appropriated as soon as she moved in with him, without even thinking about it, and left him freezing in his pajama bottoms, and he wanted to see if he got the same feelings for Sigrid as he’d had for Wanda when she wandered around the room with bare legs in the oversized pajama top, and with her black hair that was normally so straight and silky now attached to her head as though it was unaware of itself, as though the ever hard and cool Wanda had disappeared and the real, inner Wanda had appeared in her place. And she would have been a bit happier, Wanda, if she’d known what Kåre had thought earlier this morning when he woke up, before he got up and made scrambled eggs: that he suddenly remembered what had happened during the night, that he had been woken suddenly by something tickling his chin, and that, for a wonderful split second, he’d thought that it was Wanda who was there, as always, and in that split second understood that it wasn’t Wanda, but Sigrid, and that the familiar feeling of hair against his chin was in fact an unfamiliar feeling, there was an unfamiliar woman in his bed, who was now sitting on his sofa and saying that she wanted to marry him and have his babies. He didn’t even really know her! And it would have made her even happier, Wanda, if she had known that when Kåre was sitting there on the sofa and eating buns, feeling slightly awkward, because he wasn’t a man who ate buns, he didn’t particularly like biscuits and cakes, and certainly not buns—their only redeeming feature was that they were round and soft—if Wanda had known that Kåre, feeling slightly awkward about eating the buns baked by Sigrid, looked at Sigrid as she sat there watching television in his oversized pajama top, which she had buttoned up almost all the way, with hair that was much thicker and somehow more self-conscious than Wanda’s thin black hair, and had suddenly and somehow known that it was over. Click: blackout.