In a few hours Jacob would get up and dress in the strange but not in the least exotic bedroom, before the beauty who lay regarding him tenderly, pink and sweaty. Perhaps she had been like a mystery he had tried to solve as he penetrated her, as far in as he could get. But afterwards she was again merely a gym teacher lying there with her big boobs asking when they could meet again. Perhaps Jacob was not the sort to let himself be worried by the fickleness of life, perhaps he would just lean back in his seat with a little smile, his body satisfied, and drive home to his sweet unsuspecting wife. Or would he too, like Robert, trawl through his memory to rediscover the precious reasons for his tension and dizzy expectation as he drove in the opposite direction?
You couldn’t tell, and anyway what did it matter, thought Robert, as Haydn’s emotional strings vibrated through his head. Desire was like music, just as abstract, just as meaningless and just as overwhelming. As soon as the old instruments were played again the music woke anew and made its impact on her. Far away in the darkness he could see a shining yellow ribbon which doubled up and disappeared behind the opposite wing of the hospital. It was the motorway to Copenhagen. The red and white pairs of lights passed each other along the bright curve, just as they did every night and had done on the night when Lucca Montale tried to take her life. Unless, being the worse for drink, she had merely made an error and by pure chance had gone down on to the wrong lane. In that case, where had she thought she was going? He heard the telephone through the graceful intricacies of the strings, switched off Haydn and picked up the receiver.
A woman’s voice asked in English whether he would accept the call. She had an American accent. Robert assented and a moment later he heard a young man at the other end. Robert asked where he was. Arizona. What was it like there? The young man laughed, slightly delayed by the satellite connection. What it was like? He was calling from a truck-stop. There was a petrol station and a cafeteria, and outside were tall cactus and sharp red rock formations and a long straight road. Just like a film! Robert smiled. He could hear voices in the background, sounding as if their mouths were full of potatoes. He caught sight of the slight figure of the night nurse at the end of the corridor. He held up the phone and waved at her with it. She took off her clogs and ran holding them, eager as a girl. He felt a warm sensation in his stomach. Arizona, he said, grabbing one clog as he passed her the phone.
He put it on the floor, she smiled shyly and turned her back. He went out into the foyer and sat down on the sofa Andreas used. He lit a cigarette, and as he knocked his ash into the cement bowl he caught sight of some without filters among the stubs sticking out of the sand, they had dark shreds of tobacco on the ends. Andreas had probably gone to Stockholm to start a new life since his old one was now in ruins.
He glanced at his watch, it was a quarter past two. Jacob was quite likely not going home before night duty was ended as the gym teacher’s husband had so conveniently gone on a course. Maybe they were sleeping in each other’s arms as if in a trial marriage. Maybe he lay awake, maybe she snored. But would he stay in love with the gym teacher for her boobs’ sake or out of sheer enthusiasm at the thought of starting again from the beginning? Robert pictured Jacob announcing the sad news to his wife, one evening on the terrace while the glow of the grill died down, after they had kissed the children goodnight. How he would, weighed down with guilt, but also with enjoyable reverence, bow to the laws of emotion and move from one family home to the other.
It was not very probable, though Jacob did not have the bent for drama of an Andreas, nor did Robert believe that his practical sporty wife had the imagination to drive herself to destruction on the wrong side of the Copenhagen motorway. Perhaps she too had her little secrets. Robert brushed ash from his white coat. The windows at the end of the foyer stretched from floor to ceiling, and a long way into the pallid mirror of the linoleum flooring, along the empty ranks of sofas where he dimly glimpsed his white figure and crossed legs. He could be any doctor on night duty, sitting enjoying a fag. What was that, Jacob had said? It probably didn’t have to be one thing or the other. Again he visualised one particular face. It was a long time ago.
They had just bought a bigger apartment, where they lived until that winter day three years later when he came home too early. It had actually been somewhat beyond their means. It was large and needed a lot of decorating, but they could not afford to get it done professionally. It was in an old property just outside the city centre, near the harbour. There was a playground in the courtyard where some space had been made. Monica took Lea for a holiday with her parents while he did the painting. He joined them at weekends. Lea was to start in the first class at school after the summer holidays. He had installed himself in what was to be her room, with her mattress, a lamp, the stereo and a selection of tapes. The furniture and crates had been packed into one of the other rooms under plastic sheeting.
Monica called him every day. She had a bad conscience about lying in the sun while he was left in town slogging away, but in fact he enjoyed being alone. Most of the neighbouring flat dwellers were out travelling, and he could play music as loudly as he liked. He forgot the time, absorbed in the monotonous work while Verdi’s Requiem blew through the empty rooms. Lying on Lea’s mattress in the evenings reading the paper he felt like a nomad who had temporarily pitched camp in a chance spot. The feeling of a state of emergency had a cheering effect on him, and there were moments when he even wished it could go on, this pause between the daily life that had been packed up, and the one that would begin when he had finished painting.
Sometimes he said jokingly to Monica that when Lea had grown up they could leave the flat to her and move into a hotel. It was an old daydream, to live in a hotel room with only the most essential possessions, ready to move at a moment’s warning, and while he was painting it was like bringing the dream to life. He ate at a restaurant every evening, alone or with a friend, and afterwards cycled through the town as he had done in student days. The nights were light, the walls and asphalt still held a little of the sun’s warmth, and he sat in pavement cafés observing the passers-by, sunburned and lightly dressed, as if in a southern city.
One night, with one of his old student friends, he strayed into a discotheque. It was a long time since he had been in such a place, the music had changed, now it was even more fatuous and deafening, he thought. The girls wore the same kind of clothes as the big girls had at the beginning of the Seventies when he himself was still an adolescent schoolboy. Those fashions had become smart again but that only made him feel still more out of place. A new generation had taken over the town and he enjoyed standing at the bar wistfully thinking of the time he had lurched around himself with some unknown beauty, sweating and tipsy in the flickering lights, to Fleetwood Mac or The Eagles. He smiled, ‘Hotel California’, it was there, in the stupefied and weightless morning hours, that he had fantasised about moving in some day.
When the girls looked at him he could feel that in their eyes he was an oldish, slightly foozling guy on the wrong track. They were just as unapproachable and insecure, just as ingenuous and at the same time imperious as pretty girls always had been. They only had their dreams, their bright faces and their young bodies, but as long as the music played the lack of qualifications was a strength rather than a weakness. He threw them silent glances as he sat over his beer and soothed himself by thinking that luckily he no longer had anything to prove. He had never been unfaithful to Monica, the very thought seemed absurd.
He got together with her in his late twenties, while they were students. Up to then he had had four, perhaps five girlfriends, according to how strictly you interpret that definition, and apart from those there had been a handful of other episodes with no after-effects whatsoever. He could barely remember their names or distinguish one face from another. He had been shy when young, he had found it difficult to play the game, and he found it particularly hard to talk to completely strange girls when it was abundantly clear, at least to himself, that a conversation was the last thing he was trying to instigate.