Wait Blink Read online

  * * *

  And when she got home later and read his poems, she felt that his poems were just like his eyes. That they saw right in. The poems were clear: “Sit here,” she read, right after the book had quoted C ésar Vallejo: “Beloved the people who sit down.” Her eyes welled up. Beloved the people who sit down. She could look at the portrait and stroke the book and think: we understand each other. But you don’t know that. You, K åre, she thought, even though she noticed that when she thought his name, it somehow didn’t feel quite natural. She tried to say it out loud now and then, Kå re, but her voice sounded distorted whenever she said it, it wasn’t a natural name to say. She’d even looked it up in a name book, to see what it meant, and it didn’t mean, as she’d hoped, “the seer” or “protection” or “home,” or anything profound like that, any symbolic indication that he was in fact the one she had been searching for. K åre just meant “the one with the curly hair.” But it didn’t matter, after all, it didn’t change the deep mystic bond that she felt between herself and his eyes on the back cover of the book. It was as though she knew who he was, as though it was real.

  2

  Yes, who are you, Tryvle? Here we see K åre Tryvle. Not in miniature, but full-sized. And where is he? In Bergen. In Bergen, Sigrid’s town. In the same town where a girl of twenty-three is sitting in a room where the sharp January light comes in through the roof window, looking at a miniature portrait of K åre Tryvle with the feeling that he represents hope in life, that very same man is standing, at nine o’clock in the morning, in front of an audience of about two hundred men and maybe thirty women, all dressed in suits, at the Hotel Norge. They’re at a business conference in Bergen, and K åre has been asked to provide the morning’s entertainment. K åre stands in front of his audience, dressed in dark, worn jeans and a hoodie, with a pair of new blue Adidas sneakers on his feet, and we can tell from his mouth that he’s talking, and it’s almost possible to see from the lines around his mouth that he’s saying something funny— et violà: the audience laughs. He holds up a book and says: it’s true, you can read it for yourselves, here. You have the perfect golf swing in you, you just need to find it. The audience laughs again. So there you have it, Golf Can’t Be This Simple, K åre says. But, he continues, life is not always as simple as golf, unfortunately. And then he picks up a novel “that I have written myself,” as he says, and starts to read.

  * * *

  So, who are you, K åre? If we look at him, knowing that he’s forty-three, and see that he’s wearing jeans and a hoodie and new Adidas sneakers, we might think that he’s trying desperately to seem younger than he actually is. Or we might think that he doesn’t care that he seems to be trying desperately to look younger than he is; he likes wearing hoodies. He doesn’t give a damn that this might make it look as though he’s having a midlife crisis. Hoodies reflect who he is and always has been. He doesn’t wear a shirt and suit. It would never cross his mind. If that means he has to go to a funeral in jeans and a hoodie, then so be it. It should be noted that the new Adidas sneakers are not quite in keeping with K åre’s image; he prefers for everything to look used and worn. His hoodie is a little frayed, his jeans as well, dark and kind of rock ’n’ roll. He’s flung his big black down jacket on a chair behind him, the kind of down jacket with a fur-lined hood (only he’s taken the fur trim off, so it looks more like an anorak), and some headphones with a skull logo are sticking out of its pocket. They are quality headphones; K åre wants only the best when he’s walking through town listening to music. They have to look cool too, which Skullcandy headphones most definitely do. If we were to turn on the iPod in his pocket, we’d hear what music he was listening to on his way to the Hotel Norge and discover that he’d had to stop PJ Harvey’s beautiful song “This Is Love” just as she sings: “I wanna chase you round the table, I wanna touch your head,” one of K åre’s ten all-time favorite lines from pop songs, because of its simplicity and directness. That is to say, he’s shouted I wanna touch your head! many a time over a table in a bar late at night, even when he wasn’t coming on to anyone—though, to be completely honest, he’s shouted it when he was coming on to someone too, and it actually had a positive effect (after he’s touched the person he’s shouted at on the head)—but the main point for K åre is the quality of the sentence, the simple straightforwardness of saying, I wanna touch your head. K åre believes that every sentence should be like that, be it pop or literature, and that is the primary reason he shouts I wanna touch your head! over pub tables.

  * * *

  The truth is, if he weren’t so hopeless at singing, K åre would have preferred to be a musician. He’s musical and knows intuitively that he would be a fucking fantastic front man in a band. He just can’t sing. That is to say, he can sing, but when he made his debut as the vocalist for his band, Jimmy and the Aunts, at the age of seventeen, he quickly discovered that his voice, about which he had been supremely confident in his bedroom and the bathroom, did indeed have its limitations, which had come as a bit of a shock to him. The fact was that he wasn’t the world’s best singer and rock star, the fact was that his voice actually couldn’t reach the high notes, that he had problems getting back in tune if he drifted, and so had sung a whole song off-key, to an audience of mute-faced youth clubbers.

  * * *

  The besuited Hotel Norge audience, on the other hand, is laughing. K åre’s protagonist has just fallen on the stairs at IKEA in front of a couple of teenage girls. As he reads and looks out over his audience, K åre is suddenly filled with a kind of disgust at the situation. It’s inauthentic, he thinks as he reads (it’s often astonished him that he’s able to think and observe as much as he does while he’s reading and apparently engaging in something else, what he’s reading, for example), this is inauthentic, he’s standing in front of an audience of suits, making them laugh, they’re laughing at his protagonist, just as he hoped they would, and suddenly he feels out of touch with the situation. Is that because his own life is such a mess, is that why he feels like this? Has the state of his life caught up with him as he stands here in front of an audience? The state of his life, which he thought he could escape by coming here to Bergen, but which is now running down his spine with the chill of bog water?

  * * *

  The state of his life: The fact that it’s been over with Wanda, his girlfriend of three years, for a week now. That he hasn’t tried to contact her, and she hasn’t tried to contact him. That there’s been total and utter silence. That he doesn’t know whether he misses her or not, and in that sense, it really is over. That he’s become cynical and cold again.

  * * *

  Yes, that is the state of his life, the real state of things, for K åre Tryvle, this very moment as he stands in front of an audience in the Hotel Norge.

  3

  For Sigrid, on the other hand, in her room where the light from the skylight falls straight onto the miniature portrait of K åre Tryvle on the back of her book, things are closing in. She looks around and catches her own eye in the mirror that’s hanging on the wall above her desk. Here she sits, in her room, a book in her hands. Here she sits: on the wall in front of her is a picture of Paul de Man, a Belgian literary theorist, and on the wall beside her is a mirror in which she can see herself, and on the sloping wall behind her she’s hung up a print of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, which means something to her , and in her hands she has a book. Is there anyone else in the room? No. This is Sigrid, in her room. This is Sigrid, in her head. As always! The situation is so typical of her life. What a typical situation—that she should try to understand and understand and that everything should have meaning and more meaning, but the only understanding she could get was from a pair of eyes on the back of a book, or the stars over the mountains at night—it strikes her as she sits there with the book in front of her, and the walls suddenly feel like walls and the ceiling feels like a ceiling, as sometimes happens when the magic of the moment that you feel there is hope disappears and all that rema
ins is this: walls, and ceilings, and walls. And ceilings.

  * * *

  And oversized men’s shirts. Sigrid looks at the cursor flashing on the computer screen in front of her. That’s what she should be doing right now, writing about those oversized men’s shirts, not wasting time trying to understand the look in K åre Tryvle’s eyes. She needs to find the scene in Lost in Translation where the main character, Charlotte, wanders around in a brightly lit hotel room in Tokyo wearing an oversized man’s shirt, and is the very incarnation of a vulnerable woman. Yes.

  * * *

  Sigrid’s phone beeps. It’s a message from Magnus! that says: “Idea about girls in oversized men’s shirts OK. Send draft Friday.” That means he’s back from Prague then, she thinks, and writes: “Back from Prague? Good trip?” Oh, Prague! He’d called her to tell her that he’d bought surprise tickets for Elida, his girlfriend, who was writing her thesis about Kafka’s The Castle, and Sigrid had mused on the fact that he’d called her as soon as he’d bought them, so maybe he was actually thinking about Sigrid, that is to say, subconsciously thinking about Sigrid when he bought the tickets, and not Elida. Oh, why can’t you see that, she thought, and meanwhile pretended to be really pleased for him.

  * * *

  But she gets no answer from Magnus, she isn’t told, right away, that they had a lovely trip to Prague. What does that mean, the fact that he doesn’t answer right away? That they had a bad time? Or the opposite, that they had such a great trip that he forgot Sigrid as soon as he said what he needed to? She looks at K åre, whom she’s put down on top of a pile of other books on her desk. He’s much older than her; it says on the back flap that he was born in 1965. That means he’s…’75, ’85, ’95, 2005 = 40, plus 2008 − 2005 = 3, which makes a total of 40 + 3 = 43. Exactly twenty years older than her! She lifts him up to look into his eyes again, but she doesn’t get the same magical feeling of a mysterious bond between them, and has to put him down and instead click her way on the computer screen to a document titled: “The Windswept Woman.” The title is inspired by a poem by Geir Gulliksen, in which a woman wanders around in a crumpled man’s shirt with bare legs and feet, and the bed behind her looks like a windswept breakwater. Sigrid loves the poem, but recently she’s started to notice that whenever women are supposed to come across as fragile and vulnerable in films or literature, they’re always wearing oversized men’s shirts, with bare legs. And they often also have tousled hair. She’s begun to write an essay about it, and has now been given the green light to send it in to the literary periodical published by students at the University of Oslo. The fact is, she can’t bear it, as she told Magnus: I can’t bear any more women in oversized men’s shirts. What is it about the shirts that makes them so incredibly cute and irresistible? Take, for example, that Norwegian film I can’t remember the name of, Sigrid started, where Maria Bonnevie plays a woman who’s two things: provocative and sexy with red lips and a tight red dress, and lost and vulnerable with tousled hair and no makeup in an oversized man’s shirt. It’s true! Next piece of evidence: the lovely film Mr. & Mrs. Smith, with Brangelina Pitt. Angelina is two things: sexy in suspenders, armed to the hilt with guns, until it turns out she’s actually a gentle, loving woman—in an oversized man’s shirt with bare legs. Third piece of evidence: in the film A History of Violence, there’s the wife of the former gangster whose past catches up with him, and after they’ve had super-charged and steamy make-up sex on a staircase, where she’s banged into the steps and clearly thinks it’s the peak of physical delight, she appears in an oversized man’s shirt, and thus—having first been extremely sexy and extremely grown-up, she then looks like a little girl. Fourth piece of evidence, Sigrid argued, holding up four fingers to show how far she’d gotten, and had to hold down her little finger as it wanted to join the others: four is the young princess in Enchanted. After she’s fallen through a portal from the cartoon world, where everything is pink and rosy, and she’s about to marry her prince—which is to say, after she’s fallen into the real world, she starts to experience more complex feelings after meeting the hard-nosed lawyer, and all of a sudden she’s sitting there on the hard-nosed lawyer’s sofa late one evening, all vulnerable. And is wearing a far too big, badly buttoned pair of male pajamas. And is utterly adorable. Magnus laughed. “Pair of male pajamas,” can you actually say that? Magnus asked. Fifth piece of evidence: the main character in Lost in Translation also wears an oversized man’s shirt when she’s alone in her hotel room. Which struck Sigrid as a bit odd, really, given that the film was directed by a woman. Anyway, then there’s the poem by Geir Gulliksen, Sigrid said, which I love. The only problem is that the woman whom the poem’s I obviously loves, or has loved, is wearing a crumpled man’s shirt and is padding around with bare legs and bare feet! But describing the bed as a windswept breakwater is fantastic, Magnus said. Yes, Sigrid agreed. It is. It is fantastic. She sat for a while and imagined the windswept breakwater, a white breakwater that went straight out into the sea, and it was dark and cold around the white bed that ended in the cold, black water, and the wind was blowing every which way. It’s enough to make you shiver, Sigrid said. Suddenly she felt that she had a breakwater just like that inside her. A small, white breakwater in the midst of all the great, heavy darkness. But what, she said, going back to her original point, is so fucking (oh, a word she seldom used) lovely about windswept small women in big shirts? Eh? I don’t know, Magnus said, but it is cute, we like it! Yes, but why? Sigrid asked. Have you men analyzed it yourselves? Magnus laughed and said: no. You’ll have to do that for us. I fucking well will, Sigrid said. On the other hand, isn’t it comfortable for you to wear oversized shirts? Magnus asked, and she hit him over the head with a collection of Geir Gulliksen’s poetry. Which is precisely what she should be doing right now; well, that is to say, not hitting someone over the head with Geir Gulliksen’s poetry, but analyzing the phenomenon, women in oversized shirts, as an expression of a certain aesthetic understanding.

  * * *

  Before she starts, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror that hangs on the wall beside her desk and she sees that she’s not strikingly beautiful, but has messy brown hair, big lips and thick eyebrows, and a scrunched-up look on her face. And she’s wearing a homemade sweater that her aunt knitted for her uncle, but got wrong, in a kind of bobbly light brown wool that makes her look like a teddy bear. An oversized light brown woolly sweater clearly does not have the same effect as an oversized man’s shirt; she doesn’t look sweet and vulnerable. She looks stupid and fat. Perhaps the lack of sweetness and vulnerability has something to do with the fact that she hasn’t got bare legs. She’s actually wearing a pair of burgundy sweatpants in a kind of shiny velvet, which are tucked into a pair of thick socks, which in turn have been stuffed into a pair of woolly slippers. She looks absolutely terrible!

  4

  Here, on the other hand, we see the film director Linnea (twenty-seven) standing in an oversized light blue man’s shirt and with only a pair of briefs on underneath, at nine o’clock in the morning, on the eleventh floor of a hotel in Copenhagen. She stands by the window, looking out, and is really rather beautiful, if we say so ourselves. She’s thinking how empty the city is now, utterly empty. The light blue shirt that she’s wearing belongs to G öran F ältberg (forty-seven), professor of comparative literature at Uppsala University. We would have loved to point at Linnea and say to Sigrid: “Here is someone you can interview about oversized men’s shirts,” but sadly, that’s impossible. So, is this young film director aware that her current attire means she has joined the ranks of young, vulnerable women in oversized men’s shirts? No, Linnea doesn’t give it a thought. But is she vulnerable? Yes. The morning sun shines faintly through a layer of mist, and she can see long gray airplane bodies pushing through the clouds like weightless nails. But it all might as well be nothing. Because: G öran isn’t here. The whole city might as well not be here, but she can feel the pane of glass that separates her from the city d
own there, she can feel it against her cheek, and she is there, she is there in a very particular and palpable way, with her fingertips against the glass. Because G öran F ältberg isn’t there and she’s longing for him. Linnea presses her nose against the window. There’s a knock at the door. Linnea jumps, we can see two clear stripes on the glass where her nostrils have breathed warm air. The rest of the windowpane where she’s been standing is still steamed up. She goes over to the door and opens it, and finds Robert, her producer, standing outside.

  * * *

  Robert lowers his eyes when he sees how little she’s wearing. He wasn’t prepared for it, he’d expected her to be dressed and ready to go. But there she is, in only a shirt, the skin on her chest and legs exposed. He’s never seen her skin before, other than on her face, neck, and hands. He starts to perspire and mumbles something that Linnea doesn’t hear. Hmm? she says, and can’t help smiling, there is something about Robert, something mumbly. His clothes are always elegant and expensive, but they somehow manage to look ill-fitting, they crease or twist and sit a bit tight over the shoulder, it’s almost as if Robert’s clothes have barely consented to be on his body. As if they had screamed: okay, fine, we’ll do it, having first slammed a few doors. Robert looks up at her, his eyes wide open, as though he’s told himself that he has to pull himself together and look at her: I must have gotten the time wrong, Robert says. What time is it? Linnea asks. Nine o’clock, Robert tells her. Oh, Linnea says, sorry. I wasn’t paying attention. I’ll be as quick as I can. Can we meet in reception in half an hour? That’s fine, Robert mumbles to his shoes. I’ll just go back to … (he has to look at her again, slide his eyes up her body from her bare feet, up the shirt, to her chest, neck, face—he blushes) … to my room. Okay; Linnea smiles, as she can see he’s trying not to look, and closes the door.