Jensen Beach - Swallowed by the Cold - Stories

He was watching a rebroadcast of a Liverpool versus Arsenal match that was playing on one of the sport channels. If it spoke to his completeness as a soccer fan or some abiding desperation in his character that he could remember watching the match on television when it first aired, he didn’t know. May 26, 1989. He was nineteen and had just graduated from high school. He’d first watched the match in a bar on Kungsholmen. Jacob had been a Liverpool supporter his whole life, just like his father. He didn’t have to watch to the end to know that Michael Thomas would score a goal late in injury time to win the match 2–0 for Arsenal. He’d cried in that bar, not big sobbing tears or anything, but he’d gotten misty eyed.

Regulation time had just ended when he saw the headlights of Jenny’s car fill the narrow driveway. He was a little annoyed that she was home. The time alone was nice and he’d enjoyed the match. Quickly, he shut the television off and snuck upstairs. He didn’t want to hear about the birthday party. Pernilla was annoying and snobbish. Whenever Jenny spent time with Pernilla, she needed a good forty minutes to decompress, recount the entirety of Pernilla’s offenses. Jacob slipped out of his jeans and pulled on his pajamas without turning on the light in the bedroom. He heard the front door open and close. He heard his wife on the stairs, and he shut his eyes and tried to breath evenly. The bedroom door opened. “Jacob,” Jenny said. He didn’t respond. He listened to her cross the room, her bare feet sticky on the hardwood floor. The light in the bathroom switched on. He listened to the water running, the loud flush of the toilet, more water running. The bathroom light switched off. He didn’t open his eyes. Jenny sat on his side of he bed, ran her fingers through the back of his hair. “I saw something tonight,” she said.

He knew if he lay still long enough, she would stop. He tried hard but after what might have been a minute or maybe a little bit more, he turned to her, blinked his eyes in a way that he thought would indicate that she’d woken him, and said, “You’re home. How was it?”

“I saw something tonight,” she said.

“At the party?” Jacob said.

“On my way home,” she said. “An accident. It was awful.”

Jacob propped himself up on his elbow. “You were in an accident? Are you all right?”

“Not me,” she said. “A man. I sat with him. He was hurt. There was so much blood.” Before she could finish, she lay down in the bed beside him and sobbed. Jacob wrapped his arm around his wife and held her without saying anything. He listened to her cry and felt his own heartbeat in his arm as he held her tightly. After a long time, she fell asleep, and Jacob took one of the blankets from the chair on Jenny’s side of the room and draped it over her shoulder. It was late. He was hot and sat on the edge of the bed, as still as he could, and removed the socks he’d forgotten to take off earlier, trying as hard as he could not to wake her.

III

Not long after the accident, in the last week of July, maybe the first week of August, Jacob couldn’t remember exactly which, Jenny started visiting Henrik in the hospital. The bruise on Kristina’s knee had faded to a funny yellow color, and she’d nearly stopped limping. At first, he didn’t believe Jenny when she told him she was visiting Henrik. It seemed so unlike her. There must be some other explanation. She wasn’t the type to have an affair. He probably was, though the occasion hadn’t presented itself.

One morning after his run he checked the GPS in her car. The route he found saved in the device led directly from their house to St. Göran’s Hospital, where the glowing purple line extinguished in the parking garage. Over coffee that night after dinner, he told Jenny he knew she visited Henrik.

“Of course you do,” she said. “I always tell you when I go.” It bothered him that she didn’t try to hide it. He would have tried to hide something like this. When he thought this, he understood that his wife was a better person than he was and this bothered him too.

He looked down at his coffee cup. It was nearly empty and the end of the coffee was translucent. He pushed the cup away. “What do you do when you visit?” he asked. One of the girls’ cats had nuzzled itself up against his chair. He felt the easy rise and fall of its chest against his leg.

“I sit with him,” she said. “I know it’s strange, but I want to be there. I feel like I owe it to him.”

He turned a sugar spoon so that its bowl was pointing toward his wife. For the past three days, he’d felt a sharp ache in his chest, just below where he thought his heart was located. He felt the pain now. It was a fist slowly clenching. He closed his eyes. This pain had been keeping him awake at night. This wasn’t because he felt the pain with any regularity but because even when it wasn’t present, he was sure it indicated some serious health issue and he was terrified to have it examined. He put his hand to his chest and began to knead at his soft, aging body. When he saw Jenny’s glance move to focus on his hand on his chest, he began to scratch as if he simply had an itch.

IV

Near the end of August, he went on a weekend vacation to golf with his friends Edvin and Joel. He hated golf. It was a stupid and boring sport. On the second night of the trip, at dinner in a little Indian restaurant Edvin had suggested, Jacob told his friends about Jenny and her visits to Henrik.

Henrik had come between them. That was how he explained it. Edvin sipped from his drink, nodded along with all Jacob said. Joel kept his eyes on the television above the bar. A soccer match was on. Of course, it wasn’t true that Henrik was the problem. That was the easy answer. Henrik was a symbol for something else. The more complicated answer was that Jacob himself had come between Jacob and Jenny. He knew that it was unfair for him to be angry with his wife. She’d witnessed a terrible accident and felt linked, intractably, with the victim of that accident. He didn’t understand it exactly, but none of it was unreasonable. That he was angry, on the other hand, was completely unreasonable. And it was because he understood this — because he wanted to allow his wife this simple thing and could not — that he was afflicted. This was a word he’d been using privately for roughly a week and knew was far past the appropriate register for whatever his problem exactly was. When Edvin pressed him on the issue, Jacob took a piece of ice from his drink with his fingers, put it in his mouth, and said, “She’s being unfaithful to me.” They’d long since finished the meal, plates cleared, a second then third round of drinks ordered.

Edvin was the head of the human resources department at a very large corporation and for this reason often gave unsolicited psychological advice. “If you’re upset about Jenny visiting this man,” he said, “you should visit too. Face your fear.”

Just after this the soccer match that had been playing silently ended in victory for the Swedish side against a team Jacob thought might have been Latvia, and all around them applause erupted and the conversation was lost. Later that night, though, when Joel was in the bathroom and they were all quite drunk, Edvin put his arm around Jacob’s shoulder and said, “I’m serious, Jacke. Visit.”

The course was beautiful. Skirting the fairway along the sixth hole, the lake rippled with a light wind. He watched a heron land on the water. The bird nimbly waded into the tall grass at the shore to observe the golfers. Jacob regretted having told Joel and Edvin about his wife and Henrik. His left arm was numb and he thought, when he’d first woken up, hungover and sweaty, that it was because he’d slept funny on it. But as the morning progressed, the numbness had not gone away but only moved up his arm to his shoulder, and he started to worry that the pain in his arm was an early sign of a heart attack or stroke. He was young for both, of course, but Leif a friend he, Edvin, and Joel all shared, had died the year before. A heart attack at the Friskis and Svettis gym at Hornstull. He was only forty-three. None of this would ever be resolved. If it wasn’t Jenny and Henrik, it was his health, or his children, or improvements to his house. There was no shortage of things to worry about. It infected everything in his life, a counterweight to all that was pleasurable.