He zapped between channels. Two films were being shown simultaneously and at one point both of them showed a sex scene. He hopped back and forth between the two, both were filmed in subdued golden light, and the close-ups of distorted faces and hands on skin melted into each other until he could no longer determine which of the films they belonged to. There was an interesting contrast, thought Robert, between the pictures of naked body parts and the pictures of the lovers’ transported faces. One type of picture showed, or at least tried to indicate, what was happening. The other type showed, or tried to show, what it meant. The bodies slavishly followed their own agenda, but the faces were not content to reflect the purely physical excitement, they also witnessed something different, something more. The moist glances and pathetic expressions said that this was love, or rather that the rhythmical palpability on the screen was the urgent consequence of love, if not its urgent confirmation, which perhaps, came to the same thing.
Robert debated whether he might be getting slightly drunk. He switched off the television, poured yet another whisky and went to open the sliding door to the terrace. His foot did not hurt so much now. The rain splashed onto the paving stones, drummed against the white plastic furniture and soughed further off in the twilight, outside the semi-circle of yellow light from the room behind him. He breathed in deeply through his nose. Grass, she had said, when he opened the window that first afternoon when he sat with her and the scent of newly mown grass rose up to them from the lawn between the wings of the hospital. He looked out into the hissing garden. Grass and twilight blue. Lea must have got home long ago. She would have been fetched at the central station by Monica or Jan, they had probably finished eating by now. No doubt she was in bed dreaming of a boy with brown eyes.
He sat down on the step, lit a cigarette and tried to find out why the sex scenes on television had put him in a bad mood. Was it only because it had been so long since he himself had been to bed with someone? He clinked the ice cubes in his glass. Well, he could just have seized the opportunity when it was offered. He felt annoyed about that sometimes, and once almost called the librarian. She was certainly a charming woman, and they might have made a go of it. They might even have suited each other when they had been through the introductory manoeuvres. But when he and Lea were walking along the beach one Sunday and passed the librarian with a younger man in a baseball cap, he had been just as relieved as he had been when he put down his brandy glass on the sofa table and told her kindly that he would prefer to spend the night alone.
He had felt tired already at the prospect of having to begin all over again. The librarian’s pretty eyes had cornered him, full to the brim so they almost overflowed with expectation. Her dark gaze had tried to convince him there was so much significance in their meeting, the librarian and the doctor from the city hospital. She had presumably been in love, it was honest enough, but he had not been able to free himself of the suspicion that all she needed was a man, because she was pretty starved where men were concerned, and had wrapped up the elementary and entirely respectable needs of her body in a daydream in which the divorced doctor from Copenhagen was something unique. After all, a provincial town didn’t have all that much on offer.
But wasn’t he the one who was incurably romantic, since he was so disheartened by her slightly affected infatuation? Wasn’t it the best reason in the world for falling in love, that she was quite simply lonely in the good old-fashioned sense? Wasn’t there a secret, immature dream of the great revelation lurking beneath his cynical exploration of motive? Perhaps he had merely been piqued because her situation reminded him of his own, suddenly making him think of scruffy widows’ hen parties, where lonely hearts gather for mutual comfort. She had made him feel exposed and available, and he could not tolerate being recognised.
He remembered his shyness as a boy before his voice began to break, and he recalled the letter Lea had written to the boy with brown eyes. He thought of the times some girl or other had made her coltish approaches, and how he had rejected or simply ignored her brusquely, although she made his legs shake. Naturally he had been flattered, but at the same time he had been abashed by the girls’ looks and giggles and little folded notes with squares where he was supposed to put crosses. Actually quite a practical system, those little voting cards, he thought now, but then he couldn’t bear for a girl to anticipate his clumsy interest like that. He felt she recognised something in him which he had barely come to know, and that she put her fingerprints on this something, already all too familiar, as if it belonged to her merely because she had caught sight of it.
At other times a girl could make him feel guilty for no reason. Like the time his mother had got the idea of sending him to dancing class. It was held in a hall with stucco and red velvet curtains. The boys stood in a row along one wall and the girls sat on gilt rococo chairs along the opposite wall. The boys wore white shirts and bow ties and hair combed back with water. The girls were in dresses with stiffened skirts in soft colours, pale blue, pale yellow and white. At a given sign the boys had to cross the endless parquet floor, choose a girl and bow, and one day when he had trotted across the floor as usual and bowed to the first girl he came to, she looked expectantly into his eyes and asked an unexpected question which made him blush with shame and irritation. Had he chosen her because of her dress?
The feeling of shame stayed with him when he first ventured into the whispering, fumbling darkness of teenage years. When he had courted a girl long enough and she finally allowed him to kiss her with his tongue and explore her with his hands, she also beseeched him with her doe eyes to behave as if she alone out of all the girls had managed to set his heart on fire. He felt like a deceiver, although his aims were as artless as anything could be. It was then he first discovered the remarkable gap so-called erotic scenes on television had made him think of again. The gap between bodily sensations and the feelings those sensations were so cunningly named after, making it easier and more decent to confuse them.
He learned to lie both to himself and to the girls he wanted to go to bed with, but each time he was in bed with a strange body, he wondered again why it is called ‘being in love’, although you still only know each other as bodies. Lovely, strange bodies, which, it is true, do utter words, but words you can’t attach to anything because you haven’t in fact any idea of what those words mean, or who she is. It was ironic, he felt, but sad as well, for when you finally found out who it was you had been in love with, usually you were not in love any more because she had become so familiar. The promising strangeness that had aroused your fantasies was like a downy, shining surface that quickly wore away. Then all you could do was hope that before then you managed to become really good friends.
Monica had become his friend, and yes, he had loved her. It must have been love, the joy of seeing her again if they had been apart for a few days. The tenderness that could trickle out of him when he raised his nose from the grindstone and suddenly caught sight of her in the midst of the laborious daily routine that was so safe and boring. All the same, he had thrown himself at Sonia when she offered herself. Even though the previous day he had sat on the beach in the low sunlight watching Monica as she stood smoking a cigarette and looking out over the Sound, as if he understood in a flash why they were together. He had obviously forgotten it again as quickly, anyway there was no connection between his impulses. One day he fell in love afresh with his wife, and the next he went to bed with her little sister.