“I wasn’t apologizing for your relationship. I was apologizing for asking the question.”
“It’s fine,” J says. “My girlfriend and I are in different places. Geographically. Perhaps emotionally. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be in the same place again.”
“When did you last see her?”
“Eight weeks ago.”
“And when did you last talk to her?”
“Does texting count?”
“No. I mean the sound of her voice responding to the sound of your voice.”
“Ten days.”
“That must be very hard.”
It honestly wouldn’t have been a problem before, when he was out of town and feeling more secure about their relationship. But now, hearing this observation, J feels as if he’s been walking around bleeding, and finally someone has noticed and asked him if he needs a bandage. And at the same time, he’s embarrassed to have been caught walking around bleeding, unable to bandage himself.
“Itishard,” he manages to say. Then he recovers and adds, “But that is not what we’re here to talk about! I want to get a better sense of you. For the song.”
“May I ask...how is the sex?”
J is startled by such a forthright question, but also feels it’s very V-like for Kerstin to inquire. Which might be why he answers, “Ifthat’s your way of asking if that is the cause of our problems, I think you’d have to ask her.”
“That’s a good answer. Good that you’re not presumptuous.”
The truth, of course, is that to the best of his knowledge, J and V have both gone without sex for the past eight weeks. It’s been a strange inversion of the way things usually are for him, because to him monogamy has meant that sex was something that happened at home, not on tour (unless V was along for the ride). He’s pleasured himself in the interim, and he’s sure she’s pleasured herself—but rarely in tandem, which is how they used to get through some of the longer spells apart. J knows this is a huge factor in the alone-ness he is feeling—not missing sex, per se (though he does miss that), but more having her body and his body expressing closeness. Any kind of closeness.
He is not going to tell all this to Kerstin. So instead he goes back to his usual questions and asks, “What are some of the things you and Andreas enjoy doing?”
“Well, the sex is very satisfying. He’s got the enthusiasm of a seventeen-year-old and the knowledge of a forty-year-old. It’s a good combination.”
Since Kerstin seems intent on steering the conversation here, J asks, “And is that why you’re together?”
“Hardly. We’re together because he enjoys my company and I enjoy his. I’ve dated many men before. Many, many men. And I don’t think I could have said that about any of the rest of them. They were too busy broadcasting their needs to tune in to mine. Ends up that’s what I was looking for all along. You can write that down, if you’d like.”
J has forgotten all about his notebook. Hastily, he scribbles down some of what she’s said. Then he flips back a couple of pages.
“Andreas says that being with you clears away the noise. Do you feel that way, too?”
Kerstin reaches for J’s hand, the one without a pen. It’s not a romantic gesture. She just wants him to hear what she has to say.
“No, I don’t feel that way. The noise is still there. It doesn’t go away. But I can always hear him through it, and I know he can hear me. It’s like when you’re in a dentist’s office. They’re cleaning or drilling or whatever, but through that, you can hear they’re playing a song you love. Some Fleetwood Mac, maybe. So you latch on to that, you try to push your mind as far into the song as you can, because that brings you some joy, or at the very least distraction, and you can sing along in your head while whatever is being done to you is done to you. In this scenario, Andreas is the song.”
J jots that down, then says, “So tell me about how you two met.”
“Really?” she asks, as if the question is beneath both of them.
Kerstin’s stubbornness is just like V’s.
“Really,” he tells her.
“I was at an auction. Mind you, I am not like Andreas—I’ve been to maybe three auctions in my entire life. In this case, I was doing a favor for one of my mother’s best friends. She had just been through a horrible divorce, and her ex-husband, out of a mix of spite and greed, was auctioning off his share of their art collection. There was one piece—a very small sketch by Hammershøi—that she wanted, but she didn’t want him to know she was doing the bidding. I’d never met the man, so I was deemed a safe proxy. As I was leaving my mother’s house, she ambushed me and insisted I wear this fancy scarf that had belonged to my grandmother. I don’t know if my mother has ever been to an auction in her life, but she said quite confidently that it was important to look wealthy, so other bidders would assume you’d go higher if you had to. So I wore the scarf, and I won the sketch. After, this man came up to me admiring what I was wearing. And I’ll admit—at first I thought it was a lame pickup line, like, ‘Nice scarf, lady...I’d love to see it tied to my bedpost.’ But then I realized I was wrong. This guy was genuinelyadmiring the scarf. I assumed this meant he was gay, but then he seemed to be admiring me as well, and I thought,Oh, well, this is more interesting. I asked him if he wanted to get a drink, and one thing led to another. I never returned the scarf to my mother, but I haven’t worn it again. I tend to lose things. And usually, because I know I do this, I don’t get too attached. But this time, I knew almost immediately that I didn’t want to lose that scarf, that it had become far too important to be risked.”
J and V met at a party. Should he have kept the glass she was sipping from? Crawled through all the chatter to discover what song was playing in the far background?
He can’t even remember what either of them was wearing.
