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Close to each other on the plane. Close to each other through the arrivals lounge and out into the air. Close, close to each other through the streets, in cafés, in restaurants. Closer to each other than ever before, we will grow from this, you’ll see. We can only grow closer, more intimate, if that is even possible, perhaps he actually believes it? Every cloud has a silver lining. Couples who manage to stick together for better or for worse, tell each other everything, they forgive and accept. Just look at us now! Even better friends than before. Why should an affair make any difference, destroy the precious relationship we have? From now on they will tell each other everything. They are solid. Cheers, Ida!
:/
Professor Twig starts to cry. At the age of only sixteen he could boast of having read the four great Norwegian writers. ‘Read the four greats!’ he said to his sister, who was studying Home Economics and had been taught that the four greats were onion, leeks, potatoes and carrots. It is not until now as he is nearing fifty that Professor Twig begins to have doubts. Perhaps onion, leeks, potatoes and carrots really are more useful than Ibsen, Bjørnson, Lie and Kielland, he muses, then stops himself. What use is literature to Professor Twig now? He no longer knows if he can hope for a miracle.
lol
They book a weekend trip to northern Spain to recover. Arnold misses his plane to Oslo, and Ida can hear why in his voice. He denies it, but when their plane to Spain is delayed in Copenhagen due to fog and they are sitting in the airport, drinking, her fears are confirmed and she thinks: he is never going to change. If he can do that after they have been to war together. If he can do that now.
Did he not see their relationship the way she saw it, if he was willing to risk it all to fuck a student? Or, more likely, he thought about it the way she thought about it and moreover he was so sure of it, its rare quality, so confident was he that he didn’t think it could ever be at risk, that it might come crashing down.
They don’t have the same need for closeness. Having the same need for intimacy or distance is important. He wants to be closer than she does. He believes that the person who wants to be the closest, the most intimate, is the person who loves the most, she disagrees, but she can’t get her point across to him. She is as close to him as it is possible for one person to be to another without morphing, without losing herself, becoming dependent, although dependency is tempting. But she must have space. He strives for symbiosis and she feels its attraction, but soon needs to get back out, to the others. She needs other people. She loves him, but she looks forward to travelling with other people, without him. It is nice to be with other people when she knows she has him, her beloved in her heart, who is waiting, to have him to return to, to be away in the knowledge that he is there, at home, waiting while she is away. She can travel to another continent and feel her love for him, look forward to coming back to him to tell him what she has been doing in his arms. She has to travel, to go away so that she can come home again.
‘I want you with me everywhere,’ he says, ‘on all my trips,’ he says. ‘Everywhere,’ he says reproachfully as if it makes him better than her, his love greater than hers.
she's right tbh
When she is out running on her own, she listens to her Walkman. If she is running with Arnold, she doesn’t, he gets annoyed if she does. Even though they don’t talk while they run, she can’t listen to it because it takes her to a place where he isn’t, where she can lose herself in something he can’t hear and she disappears to him. He will race ahead of her to demonstrate what he thinks of her Walkman, and she will turn it off and accelerate to catch up with him and she will shout:
‘I’m not listening to it anymore! Look, Arnold!’ she will call out, showing him her earphones hanging loose around her neck. She experiences a silent, undefined failure to thrive. Thoughts are stirring, thoughts are stirring inside Ida.
girl LEAVE HIM
[...] Ida is right there and yet he touches the other woman, but in the same way, which makes it worse. Love is only possible where there is innocence, a tiny little bit of innocence, a little bit of trust. The knowledge that you can’t be substituted, that you are not replaceable or interchangeable, that the hands of the beloved and a stranger can’t be the same, that they can’t touch a stranger in the same way they touch someone familiar and loved, that hands, when they can choose, will always choose the beloved. They are quiet in the taxi on their way home. The experience turns them on. They have sex all night and in the morning, it turns them on, but makes them sick, they can’t go to the seminar they are meant to attend. Arnold can, Ida can’t, she is unable to get up, Ida is sick, they have to call and say so: Ida is sick, it is true, she can’t get out of bed. Turned on by it all night, perhaps he thinks they both are, but she is alone.
[...] He can come with any woman and it will feel pretty much the same, she already knows that. It is like that for everyone, she already knows that too. Except it is not like that for Ida, but she doesn’t say so. No one must know what it is like for her. He must not know how alone she is. They drink. That helps. Soon they laugh it off. We learn, we grow, they tell each other. We’re pioneers, rule-breakers, we embrace the darkness and we learn, we grow, they tell themselves and each other, we seek knowledge all the time. Anyone afraid to tremble is a coward, they say. But they are not cowards and that is why they are trembling now.
Do you feel freer now? No. More intimate? Perhaps it glues them together. They suture their bodies together with a sharp needle. They get to know each other’s bodies better, each other’s desires and responses. They look deeply into each other, they learn as much as is possible, they watch each other with strangers, in ever new situations, anything you can imagine, isn’t that a good thing? His hand cupping another woman’s breast. As it has cupped countless women’s breasts, also while they have been together. That is just how real life is. It is just the real world.
A wagtail lives behind her garden wall. It flies around, constantly busy, but they never see another one, no mate, no chicks.
‘A divorced wagtail,’ Arnold says and tilts his head. ‘Poor thing. Never leave me. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill myself!’
No matter how open he pretends to be, he is never entirely open. No matter how vulnerably he presents, he is never completely vulnerable. No matter how desperate he seems, he is never truly desperate. He calls to say that he is going to kill himself, but he is one of those people who never will. He might appear needy, but he has his own campfire, he can survive anything. She is the one who might perish.
classic abuse move tbh
Who doesn’t want an adventure? Familiarity is all well and good, but predictable and humdrum in the long run. Who doesn’t dream about a life with no bills, no laundry, no mortgages or kids? Arnold does! A purely erotic space with a postgraduate or an undergraduate who admires him, her tutor, her professor, to be irresistible for a few hours, wise, fiery, invent yourself and present yourself at your most advantageous to this semi-stranger who swallows you raw. Who doesn’t need to be worshipped and admired like that? Arnold does! [...]
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This is the end. There is no mistaking it. But I’m not going to milk it, wallow in it, it bores me already, it seems so infantile, so banal, that even the pain it caused seems infantile, banal, embarrassing, a source of shame; with the little bit of common sense still active in her brain Ida realises how banal it is, yet still it hurts, perhaps it hurts even more because even the most stupid, most infantile action can cause pain, but I won’t wallow in it because I, too, know shame, even now as I sit here writing down only the most important insight: the pain was so all-consuming that only one remedy would do. End it so it can’t happen again. The only remedy that will help: making that decision. She has no choice, her entire body is telling her that it is over, it is enough, now it is just a question of survival, she will never, ever sleep with him again.