Breathless (23 page)

I am making love to a moth. He weighs nothing, lifts me off the sheet, we levitate, revolve, transpire. I give him a hard-on, he gives me goose bumps, I give him . . . well, what? He has everything already. I can only give him the one thing he doesn't have—myself.

“People like you don't grow on trees, Lo. Or maybe you do, a very rare sort,” he whispers, thrusting so deep inside me it hurts.

A man's penis is enlarged during dream sleep and on physical contact. I look at him to check and, yes, that is correct. On the other hand, if impotence can be cured with the smell of cinnamon, as they say on the radio, a scent from childhood, a mother's baking, that can't be proved with Yoel, he's not at risk. Sometimes he gets hard while he's frying eggs or when he's shaving or talking to a friend on the telephone, even when he's sitting staring at his dissertation.

“I want to have you, can't you see?”

“Put a bag of ice on it.” I have promised to say no to him next time I distract him while he is studying. But I don't say no. If it isn't me, it will be some other craving that disturbs him. This thesis will never be finished, and it isn't my fault.
Coitus a mammilla
. The urge to play.

“Slowly,” he whimpers, when I try to swallow him too fast. It is so powerful that we can hardly move, a blackout of pleasure,
la petite mort
. Yoel is fluent in the language of love.

—

“I love you,” I say and don't mean it. It is so easy to say.

“I love you too,” he whispers and doesn't mean it either. Storms and accidents don't touch us. I am naked apart from some black pieces of jewelry around my wrists and neck. Some cheap trash he has bought me for fun, magnetite, jewels for those on the way down—and I go right to the bottom with him, not deep, because he has no depth. He says that himself, and laughs with all his crooked white teeth.

He requires nothing of me. Not like Lukas. There are things Yoel wants, but it isn't a need, not dependency, just desire. He fills me up and at the same time he makes me feel lighter than ever before. But when I want to dance on his feet, he complains that I'm too heavy, and when I want to go out with him, he says that I'm too young. At least for the places he wants to go to. Kisses me between the eyes and goes.

—

When we're drunk we're useless in bed, but the day after we can keep going for hours. There's no greater aphrodisiac than a moderate hangover, I soon learn. The ease with which Yoel moves through his life, I'm waiting for it all to be overturned. Is there really no cloud on his horizon?

One of his former girlfriends seems to have the same unequivocal attitude to life as he does. She comes past sometimes and has a glass of wine on her way somewhere else. Treats me as if I were a home helper who is having a break between cleaning the toilet and ironing shirts and quite possibly sexual services that in her world are clearly part of that sort of job. She has always bought something incredibly expensive that she wants to try on and show off, after Yoel like a fool has helped her with the zip. It's the only time he ever appears to be an idiot; we all have someone who is more than a match for us, and she is his.

I start to feel very ill at ease when I see her through the peephole.

“You're such a loser still living here,” she says and gives him an air kiss without touching his cheek. She never touches anyone, he says, except possibly when she has to lie with someone to . . . well. At least once every six months so that her boyfriend doesn't tire of her, and now and then with someone who can give her something she wants. The one-night stands seem to be reserved for what they can give her outside the bed rather than in it.

I listen, my ears like cupped batwings. She isn't bothered that I'm listening, perhaps that's the intention—just as the whole time she can obviously see me, though she never looks directly at me. She spreads disquiet with her mere presence in Yoel's kitchen, has the ability to use up all the oxygen in the room. Always the same pattern: she sweeps in, asks him to open a bottle of wine, takes three sips and leaves the rest, rapidly sums up everything that has happened to her since the last time. Her life is a triumphal procession and we have the honor of being the audience. I glance at Yoel while she's talking. Have the feeling that he is actually dazzled by her successes and that the apparently self-inflicted disasters awake his sympathy. Then she relates her human conquests—man or woman, it's not all that important. However, it's never a question of sex. Sex is just the means, tried and tested, a win every time.

—

Several times a day I lace up my gym shoes and stuff a little money into my pocket, coins and small notes that I find all over in the apartment.

“Where are you going?”

“Out.” Kiss him as I go past, taking long strides, eager to be moving. It's like having a dog, according to Yoel, a dog that takes itself out. I have nothing against being a dog. Adaptable, independent, always on the move.

“I miss you when you're not here . . . but you'll come home when you're hungry, won't you?” Yes. I'll come home when I'm hungry, but first I have to sniff around the whole town.

Stockholm is a dream from which I don't want to wake. The water doesn't smell at all like the lake at home, not fermenting sludge, if anything an acrid chemical smell of diesel and oil. At the beginning I managed to ignore everything that was ugly. In Yoel too.

Wallpaper with ominous eczema-colored flamingos in the bedroom, kitchen chairs in poison-yellow plastic that make me lose my appetite, on the wall above the bed Warhol's
Car Crash
in shocking pink.
The monotone repetition and the garish colors express a moral and an aesthetic emptiness that is a goal in pop art,
he recites. The monotone repetition and moral emptiness swim above us every time we make love; the cars crash at the same moment he twists my head backward.

The days with him float like music in a piano bar, hardly noticed. Neither of us goes out to work. He has money, so we manage, and if he has none, then he sorts it out one way or another. Yoel the fixer, trickster. Money is something to be handled with discretion, not something you talk about. If you have it, you spend generously on yourself and others. If you don't, you lie low for a while and don't grumble about it. Behave as if nothing has happened, it's just a downswing.

Lukas talked about money all the time. For him the downswing was perpetual, mental, or even in the blood. He was oppressed by it. Often talked about what he would do if he ever became rich, though we both knew it would take a miracle for him to become rich, and miracles never happen. That's why they're called miracles.

For Yoel the crises are never serious. He can afford to have a laissez-faire attitude to everything, can always call and bow and scrape a little and get his mama to write a blank check for him when the bills are piling up or he has found something expensive he wants for himself. Yoel the bon vivant, the dandy.

If there is a single cloud in his sky it is his parents, though it is more of a light cloud that at regular intervals passes by and is gone. The family meets twice a year, dispassionately. Gathers together in a large apartment on Riddargatan that's empty the rest of the time. His mama travels from Budapest, his papa from Berlin. To play at being married. The whole thing is topped off in a weekend, punctually and dutifully.

“Come home and sneak the wedding ring on again, just often enough to keep up appearances. They don't believe that we know they're separated, isn't that touching?”

He is the last shoot on some noble old tree, as high-class as he is poor. There's money in the family even if he doesn't think he has an adequate share of it. He has grown up in his brothers' cast-off clothes, and when he was a teenager his father was so stingy that Yoel was obliged to seduce his mother's friends for pocket money. He didn't tell me that, but he told his ex-girlfriend, who passed it on to me on one of her nighttime get-togethers in his kitchen. A middle-class objection to spoiling their children—you have to have a certain hunger to get anywhere in this world. Yoel's mama wants her sons to get as far as possible. So that she doesn't have to look at them, is his guess.

My mama didn't want me to get anywhere at all. All the others had gone. I try not to think about it—the reason—it is like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, where most of the pieces are missing; you will go mad if you try to do it. The only thing I know for certain is that it all began when Papa left. That piece of the puzzle was in the middle, and even though the family was large, it only needed one person to disappear for it no longer to be whole.

I don't call her. Don't even open her letters. Reply to them unread. I miss you too, I write. But I can't go home, I can't cope with the feeling I would have standing in front of Lukas, even in my head. We met and parted against a backdrop of fire. Perhaps it meant nothing, but behind my eyes when I am asleep it is still burning, and in my dreams Mama calls and tells me that Lukas walked straight into the fire when I went. He left me a farewell letter, she says, but when she tried to read it the ink was smeared, completely illegible.

“But you'll definitely know what it said, Lo.” I slam down the receiver as if it has burned me. Then I wake up.

I have begun to think like Yoel,
mañana,
I will do it tomorrow, anything less important than sex can wait until tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes. With every day that passes it becomes more and more impossible to contact Lukas. Likewise to call home, and the letters Mama sends I leave unopened in a pile.

“Isn't it better just to throw them straight out?” Yoel asks. He thinks it's reproach I'm afraid of, but it's not that.

In Mexico there's a volcanic mountain that hasn't erupted for three hundred years, and yet clouds of smoke can still be seen over the snow-clad peak. When I heard about that I thought of him, how sometimes time is of no consequence. I'd like to live in Mexico. I hear it's so lovely. If you don't love too much you don't love enough. Words, so easy to say.

What happened when I left with Yoel must have felt to Lukas like being overtaken in the last yards of a marathon. He had always expected me to race him at growing. He was an adult, but he couldn't live as an adult, must have felt castrated, seen the change in my face, sensed the teenage smell. To be starving and recognize the smell of something you want to have.

I know it's only words, but perhaps you have to stop trying to forget, so that one day you notice that it has worn off by itself, the cloud of smoke no longer hovering above the volcano.

—

It's hard to say what ruthlessness is, what insensitivity is and what just pure thoughtlessness is. Yoel's former girlfriend will never get away with it, I think, as she tells me how she does what she will with people to get what she wants. But the world around her seems infinitely forgiving. She does all right every time and Yoel does too.

When she looks at me her eye moves straight on, as if my face bores her.

“Don't take it so seriously. Look on it as entertainment,” Yoel tells me, when she has finally gone. Entertainment? Is that really all she is for him? “You're just jealous,” he teases me. Jealous? Never. Me? What is there to be jealous of? Well, yes, for that matter I am jealous of the way she gets him to look at her—it's the only time he shows a hint of vulnerability. At some time she has hurt him deeply and he knows that she can do it again.

While she leans against him and laughs at something only they understand, from the corner of one eye she looks at me:
I could seduce him . . . if only you were worth the effort, if only it didn't mean I would have to touch him . . .

Why does she never touch anyone, I ask Yoel when at length she's gone. “Yes, why?”

He hesitates. “I don't know, because she thinks it's a waste of herself, probably.”

When Yoel thinks I have gone to sleep he satisfies himself.