Caroline Eriksson - The Watcher

Am I following him? Is that what I’m doing? If I am, I convince myself, it’s inadvertent. He’ll soon reach the restaurant he’s surely heading to for lunch, meet up with whomever he’s meeting—probably a bunch of people in suits—and vanish into a murmur of voices and the smell of fried food. Then I’ll continue down the sidewalk, passing by without slowing or even turning my head. I’ll walk until I reach a stop for the right bus, wait for the next one, ride it home, and shut myself in and not go out again for a very long time. Not until it’s necessary.

But no. We pass several different restaurants, and Philip Storm doesn’t stop at any of them. He’s removed his hand from his ear and put his phone in his pocket. Has he sped up as well? There’s eagerness and tension to his steps. Finally he turns onto a small cross street with neither car traffic nor restaurants. A red-haired woman in a tight knit dress is standing outside a door on the right side, smoking. She isn’t wearing a coat and obviously works or lives on the block. When she sees Philip, she straightens up and puts out her cigarette. I linger at the corner, pretending to study an ad posted in the window of a real estate agency, as I observe them from a distance.

Philip Storm stops in front of the red-haired woman. The distance between their bodies can’t be more than a couple of yards. They’re close enough that I can hear that he sounds cheerful, and she laughs quietly in response. She puts a hand on his arm, and it looks like he’s about to hug her, but then he stops. He hastily looks around instead, as if he’s afraid someone will see them together. A second later, they’re gone, in through a doorway. I turn around and stare at the door, which is just closing behind them. What if I hurried over there and managed to grab it before it closed all the way? What if I surprised the two of them in there when they thought they were finally alone, shielded from the world’s prying eyes? What would I see?

The bus ride home is bumpy. My stomach lurches. Something comes loose and bubbles up into my chest. The bus driver brakes again abruptly. I don’t feel well. Maybe it’s motion sickness, maybe something else entirely.

All these phone calls. The ones that took place before she knew.

He called to say that he needed to finish something at work and would be home late. Or to share the details of yet another business trip that he needed to go on.

But most of all, of course, she was the one who called. She called to find out how his day was going, to ask if he wanted to meet spontaneously for lunch or quite simply to get his opinion on some practical question.

All the times he didn’t have time to talk, was in a bind, when it wasn’t a good time. All the times he didn’t pick up at all.

Sometimes she caught him on his way somewhere. She could make out the sounds of traffic and city life in the background and imagined him having just left his office. She could picture him walking down the sidewalk, his phone pressed to his ear. “Where are you going?” she usually asked. Did he ever answer that?

All the phone calls in the years they’d been married: “See you later. Don’t forget to buy milk. Bye, love ya.” One of those conversations became the last.

The last call before everything fell apart.

The last call before the beast within her awoke.

I’ve never been good at being alone, have always been too fond of having someone by my side. The single life never appealed to me. I’ve been in one relationship or another, with very few breaks in between, ever since I lost my virginity at the age of seventeen. Different women, but only one at a time—until now, that is. There are two women in my life now: my wife and Anna.

We’ve started meeting more frequently, less and less often at a hotel and more often at her place. We still fall into bed as soon as we close the door behind us. But afterward, we talk more, and for longer. We often laugh, and she cried once. Each time it feels a little weirder to get dressed and return to reality, where we mean nothing at all to each other. It’s like living in parallel universes.

Today, as I was heading to our date, my wife called. She asked where I was and when I would be home. I hate lying, hate going behind people’s backs. I feel an urgent need to tell her what’s going on. But what actually is going on between Anna and me? My head is throbbing. All I know is that it can’t continue like this.

I think back to a TV series we used to watch when we were still happy newlyweds. It feels like ages ago, but there’s still one line that is indelibly etched in my memory… “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Apparently it’s a literary quote, but I’d never heard it, and I remember that I laughed, and thought it was quite ingenious. But no matter how I try, I can’t remember my wife’s reaction. It was before she told me the terrible news. Otherwise I’d remember, I’m sure of it.

In hindsight, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that she didn’t tell me until after we were already married. I can’t help but wonder why, can’t help but wonder whether she consciously wanted to wait until we were legally bound together before she released her secret from the darkness. For all the days and nights before then, she’d been keeping something like that inside herself, concealed from me, the person she said she loved most. I still have a hard time fathoming it, making it fit with the image I have, or had, of our relationship. I thought we could talk about everything.

Sometimes, especially in the beginning, we would end up discussing our previous relationships and what had gone wrong in them. She mentioned her first love—of course she did, said that she was both disappointed and heartbroken. I remember interpreting it as a touching, although very classic, story of young heartache. There was no innuendo of anything else, not then. As I said, she waited until later to reveal the rest.

I pull my hands though Anna’s hair, press her naked body tightly to my own… but something has happened. The protective filter between us and everything else is being chipped away. It’s no longer so easy to forget the outside world. I am having more and more trouble not thinking about my wife when I’m with Anna. I’m haunted by my guilty conscience. Of course I feel guilty, but there’s something else, too. It’s related to the story my wife finally revealed—the story of what happened when she was younger, how she drove herself beyond all limits, went beyond everything that common sense dictates and everything that physical pain entails in order to seek revenge.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

I close my eyes and hold the woman in my arms even closer.

How will this turn out? How will this turn out for all of us?

I’m writing. So far it’s only fragments without any clear coherence or chronological order, but I’m writing. I start immediately after the bus ride home from downtown. It goes slowly at first. I’m far too self-aware, far too distanced. Then something happens. The text sucks me in, hits a nerve. My fingers move over the keyboard on their own, as if they can’t work fast enough. I sit at the kitchen table with the blinds drawn but angled so the afternoon light can find its way in, and time slips away without my noticing it.

When the doorbell rings, I have no idea what I’m hearing. No one has used it before. I look up and see someone standing outside, only partially visible through the gaps between the blinds. It’s not my sister. I get up and walk to the front door, checking my hair as I pass the mirror in the front hall. For once I’m properly dressed, thanks to my morning adventure. At least I pass some sort of threshold of common decency for when it’s OK to open the door.