Bitter Bitch Read online

  I always become suspicious when people start talking about how much worse it is in other cultures. All too often I hear people say it in order to smooth over the injustices in Sweden, an argument that we should satisfy ourselves with the success we have had. Now I started wondering if Danish MP Pia Kjærsgaard’s racist anti-immigration stance had affected Dane Suzanne Brøgger, of all people.

  ‘But I still think we live in a patriarchal society,’ I said.

  ‘Well, everything is relative, but you can live the way you want without being killed. They can’t. I just mean that if the patriarchy still exists then it exists inside us in the form of self-oppressing mechanisms,’ Suzanne replied.

  ‘Though I think it quite clearly exists in both Sweden and Denmark too, in the form of all of the women being beaten to death by their husbands and all of the rapes. Patriarchal oppression is real and is felt by most women,’ I persisted, because as I’ve said, this is one of my passions. Oppression might take different forms in different countries, but the origin is the same: patriarchy. Or the gender power balance – men’s power over women, or whatever you want to call it.

  ‘Yes, that’s true, and men take revenge on feminism’s success. Violence against women is more common now than ever before,’ she said, and I was filled with a childish delight because we finally agreed on something.

  But then I ruined everything by asking if she knew any happy couples. Because in Deliver Us from Love, she states that one of the reasons she did not believe in coupling was that she had simply never known any happy couples. Suzanne replied that she was herself an example of a happy twosome, working sufficiently well that she would want to continue with it for the time being.

  ‘But,’ she said, ‘you probably get better at living together when you’re older. A concept like gratitude comes later, as you get older.’

  ‘Do you feel grateful?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Suzanne replied, simply.

  ‘What are you grateful for?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m grateful that I’m alive and that there is tenderness and that no one I love is sick or dying. That’s what I’m grateful for,’ Suzanne replied, and looked happy.

  I looked down into my teacup because I was ashamed that I could not hide my disappointment any longer. I had expected so much from our meeting, and not that she would sit there and be grateful.

  Maybe she did not see my disappointment, or she misinterpreted it, or maybe she just did not give a damn (respectfully) about my expectations, because she started to tell me happily about a song she was working on, about a man who could do forty-eight things.

  ‘What kind of forty-eight things?’ I asked. ‘Well, fix my fax, cut my trees, fix my computer, fill up the car and help me find my way … I’ve forgotten but there were forty-eight things, and I think that’s enough. Forty-eight things. That’s good,’ said Suzanne.

  Our tea had grown cold now and I felt as though I no longer knew what we were babbling on about. I began to wonder if I had understood her Danish. Maybe we really agreed on everything but had misunderstood each other. A simple confusion of languages? Regardless of the reason, my head was spinning and it was time to wrap things up.

  ‘Yeah, maybe forty-eight things are enough,’ I said, interested, even though I could not have agreed less, instead I thought it sounded like total rubbish. Maybe there was a symbolic interpretation of the forty-eight things which I did not get?

  ‘It’s just that I feel an impatience; that we should have come further in the thirty years since Deliver Us from Love came out,’ I tried one last time.

  ‘But maybe it’s a matter of not enough having happened with men,’ Suzanne said.

  ‘Yes, we should have a look at them!’

  ‘Or they should have a look at themselves, because quite a lot has happened with women but not that much has happened with men. It seems as though they think they don’t need to do anything. But taking up that struggle in marriage is too hard. It’s one thing raising children, it’s another if you need to raise the men too. No, that’s just too much!’

  I suddenly thought I understood her vision: it had to do with the old honourable play between private practice and universal theory. The play between society and individual, with a little bit of resignation to top it off.

  When I got back to my hotel room at Nyhavn I was cheerful again. Althugh I could not get over my embarrassment and disappointment, I felt charitable. Who was I to think (demand!) that she should serve all of the answers on a plate? Suzanne Brøgger has every right to step back and live her life with all of the contradictory feelings coupling involves. How embarrassing that I had the guts to sit there and almost feel wronged just because she feels grateful!

  I go back to my hotel room and sit on the balcony for a while and breathe in the clear morning air. It is cloudy today so I decide to take the bus to the city where the travel agency is organizing a guided city tour.

  One of the couples sits next to me on the bus. They are not talking to each other. She is looking in a brochure and he is staring straight ahead. He suddenly turns his head and catches a glimpse of his reflection in the bus window.

  ‘Ah meine frisur ist kaput!’ he says, and laughs while running his fingers through his thin, old man’s hair.

  The wife is ecstatic at this possible opening and she starts laughing hysterically, an appreciative but hollow sounding laugh. She looks around at the rest of us on the bus to see if anyone else has understood this great comedic achievement, but no one seems to have got the joke.

  Then she laughs even louder and you understand how unusual it must be in her world to have her husband crawl out of his surliness and open up a bit. And you know that when he does do it, it is important to be there with an appreciative laugh in order to get him to stick around as long as possible. Quite right, it looks as though he is satisfied with this confirmation. They start talking about the harbour, which we can see from the bus now.

  My heart aches a bit. I recognize the pattern from several relationships around me, including my own. How the women are tiptoeing around, constantly inquisitive, prepared to either parry or laugh loud and appreciatively. How much energy does this take?

  The psychoanalyst Joan Riviere, in her essay, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, published in 1929, talks about how skilled, professional women would make themselves appear more stupid when men were around. They did everything so that the men would not feel vulnerable to competition and so that their own femininity would not be questioned. To a certain degree this probably holds true even today, but here on the bus down to Puerto de la Cruz, I think today’s masquerade of womanliness is more about putting up with closed-off men and pretending that everything is fine by laughing loudly at their jokes.

  The bus stops next to a busy shopping centre in the city and everyone gathers and waits for the guide. We set off and I think how good this is, because it will keep my Stockholm snobbery at bay. I am walking with sixteen recent retirees, all of whom look like they have just returned from a campervan holiday. They are from Germany, Landvetter and Karlskrona and they are rather wonderful. They look excited at the thought of taking part in an adventurous outing: a guided city tour in Puerto de la Cruz. I can feel my heart swell and the sun makes me happy, as does the fact that people are allowed to be this nerdy. It feels liberating and relaxed.

  Two Danish families with children are also part of the group. The children are toddlers and the parents look my age. The mothers are pushing the buggies and the fathers walk slowly, falling further and further behind. Finally they end up at the back of the group, with me. They joke with each other, watching me the whole time to see if I have noticed what fun lads they are. But since I do not understand Danish, I do not understand how funny they are; instead I become irritated by their typical, public escape from their family. I consider the opposite scenario: two mothers slowing down and ending up next to the single, thirty-year-old man at the back of the group, with whom they then start flirting and trying to make contact
while their husbands are walking twenty feet ahead with the buggies.

  ‘What’s your name?’ one of them says in guttural Danish.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t speak Danish,’ I reply.

  ‘Oh, what’s your name?’ he continues in English.

  ‘Sue Ellen,’ I answer.

  ‘Oh nice,’ he says. ‘My name is Mads.’

  ‘Oh, nice,’ I say.

  ‘And my name is Henrik,’ says the other. ‘Are you here alone on holiday?’

  ‘No I’m here for work. I’m an actor and we’re here performing a play called Dallas tomorrow at the casino.’

  ‘Oh, nice,’ Mads replies, and I get the feeling that their English is not very good.

  ‘Can we come and watch you?’ Henrik asks, and looks pleased at his boldness.

  ‘Yes of course. It’s open to everyone. Tomorrow at nine o’clock in the casino.’

  Henrik and Mads start speaking excitedly to each other in Danish and I can make out two women’s names, ‘Anne’ and something that sounds like ‘Rue’. I suspect they are the wives’ names, and I wonder if it is really possible that Dallas was not shown on TV in Denmark in the 1980s?

  ‘OK, we’ll come tomorrow and maybe we can have a drink with you?’ says Henrik.

  ‘Or two drinks … or three …?’ Mads fills in and laughs at his hilarious joke.

  ‘OK,’ I say. ‘See you tomorrow!’

  Henrik and Mads grin confidently and speed up so that they have soon caught up with their wives, Anne and Rue. For a split second I feel guilty; there is no way Henrik and Mads could know that one of my favourite pastimes is to lie to men who are screwing around. But the feeling disappears when I see Henrik put his arm possessively around Anne and Mads kiss Rue tenderly on the cheek. They can stand outside the casino for a while and wonder what happened to Dallas.

  I skip the group lunch which has been organized for the guided tour and sneak off and find my own café. I order grilled swordfish, beer and an espresso. I let the sun warm my face as I continue to read about Isadora.

  She and Bennett have just arrived at the university in Vienna where the conference will be held. Isadora is angry with Bennett because he is not a stranger on a train – the zipless fuck – because he does not smile, does not talk to her. She is angry because he makes her appointments with gynaecologists and analysts but never buys her flowers, angry because he does not kiss her, or grab her bum.

  And this is when she meets Adrian. Her longed-for zipless fuck, a fantasy she has created about a guilt-free fuck which has nothing to do with buttons needing to be undone.

  The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not ‘taking’ and the woman is not ‘giving’. No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn.

  To my great sadness, neither Isadora nor I have experienced a zipless fuck.

  A few unsuccessful opportunities presented themselves when I was single, but the guilt was always there in the form of an unspoken question about whether it would become something more. I felt guilty about not wanting anything more, guilty about having taken the initiative for a zipless fuck. I felt guilty because that damned age old rule still counts if you are a woman: be hunted, do not do the hunting.

  How many times have I made a mistake there? Ever since I was twelve and excitedly rubbed myself against Fredrik L, all the way up to the men of the art academy when I was twenty-one. Sanna and I, in true kamikaze fashion, used to go up to men at the bar and ask straight out if they had a hot one. Almost none of them ever did. In any case not one they wanted to stick inside us. Or if someone came up and asked if we had a light, we said no, but we did have a burning clit. I suspect we wanted to see what it felt like to be just as fearless and cocky as the men. We had a blast, laughed coarsely, loved ourselves and hated all of the quiet, mysterious girls the boys seemed to flock around.

  It hardly ever worked.

  It only worked once and I married him. Johan was the first one to laugh when I asked if he had a hot one. In my intoxicated arrogance I interpreted his laugh as an invitation.

  ‘Let’s go and snog!’ I said, and pushed him up against the wall and he did not get scared, he kissed me back instead. Later that night we lost each other in the crowd when we were going to buy more beer, and I followed a classmate home instead and stayed over in his tiny student flat.

  Two days later Johan was suddenly standing there on the train. It was not so late at night this time so I just said hello.

  ‘Hi!’ he said smiling wide, his eyes sparkling.

  It turned out that he lived in Sandsborg too and we talked about the strange flat he and his friend were sub-letting, which looked like an old brothel. Creepy men rang the bell in the middle of the night and the furniture, which came with the flat, included beds covered in red velvet and paintings with erotic motifs.

  I told him about my building where an old man often stood, pissing in the stairwell when I came home at night, holding his dick with one hand and waving at me with the other. Then the train stopped and we said Goodbye, maybe we’ll see each other around? Yes, maybe we will.

  And sometimes I really think the world is filled with magic, or is it fate? Because not a day passed without us running into each other again on the train. Either it was in the middle of the night on the way home from a bar, or early in the morning when I was on my way to a lecture at the university.

  Finally I invited him over for red wine and quiche, and to my surprise and joy he just seemed happy and not scared. We talked and danced in my little studio flat and in the middle of the night we went downstairs to see if we could find the man pissing, but everything was quiet and dark so we went back to my bed and lay down like spoons and went to sleep. I woke up to find Johan looking at me with his beautiful, brown eyes and then I could not help but kiss him. He still did not get scared. After he left, I wrote in my journal that I would marry him, that if I was ever going to have children it would be with him.

  The next day I woke up with a fever and Johan came by after work with mandarins, bottled water and chocolate. He crawled down next to me in bed and pulled the covers over us. We stayed in bed for three days and lived on mandarins and chocolate and hard bread. On the fourth day we were starving, so Johan went out and bought a roasted chicken and crisps which we quickly ate before jumping back under the covers.

  That is more than ten years ago now. An eternity. I do not know who I was then and I am not sure I know who I am today. The greatest portion of my adult life has been spent with Johan. A life filled with dreams, longing, will, and disappointments, all so interconnected that I can no longer tell what is longing and what is disappointment. I just know that it is filled with shitty, emotional stains.

  That is why I love reading about Isadora’s confusion; then I do not feel so alone. Isadora hungers for and desires Adrian and does everything to make Bennett disappear. She makes sure she finds every opportunity to get together with Adrian while at the same time being filled with guilt about Bennett.

  Perhaps if the zipless fuck actually worked, encounters which hurt no one; if you could speak openly about what you’d done, as friends. I know in any case that I have not stopped desiring other men even though I have loved Johan for more than ten years now. I know it is entirely possible to have all sorts of feelings for others, even if right here and now on Tenerife, I am just enjoying the solitude and the sleep. Isadora on the other hand, is burning with desire for sex.

  What was wrong with marriage anyway? Even if you loved your husband, there came that inevitable year when fucking him turned as bland as Velveeta cheese: filling, fattening even, but no thrill to the taste buds, no bittersweet edge, no danger. And you longed for an overripe Camembert, a rare goat cheese: luscious, creamy, cloven-hoofed.

  But I do not think having sex with Johan is boring. It is not
at all like a Velveeta cheese, more like aged cheddar, hard and dependable both for weekdays and special occasions. Cheese with a lot of flavour. A cheese that keeps at least ten years.

  Once during secondary school, three of my best friends and I talked about what kind of cheese we would be if it could be translated into our personalities. Cissi became an aged Pastor’s Cheese, because she was obsessed with studying theology at university at the time. Charlotte was brie, because sure enough, she became a legal expert and has the income and the taste for the more expensive types of cheese. I do not remember what kind of cheese Sanna became, but I remember my desperation when the others, without hesitation, agreed that I was a taco-flavoured cheese spread. The kind you can buy for twelve kronor at Ica.

  So cheap! So American!

  I was genuinely sad. My friends defended their decision by saying that I was flavoursome and if anyone liked those kinds of cheeses it was me. In any case, I have never really got over it. The others became wonderful aristocratic cheeses with centuries of heritage while I became a very typical working class cheese. A taco cheese.

  As I am sitting in this café in Puerto de la Cruz thinking about cheese, I wish that I longed for adventure instead. Why am I thinking about cheese? Why do I get so upset about being propositioned by Danes?

  Even my sex dreams are about Johan! I do not know if it is because I have a strong superego and so much guilt that I suppress all other kinds of desire, or if maybe it is just that I am completely fulfilled in my ten-year sex life with Johan

  But Isadora’s longing just burns more and more until finally she decides to follow her desire.

  I thought of all the cautious good-girl rules I had lived by – the good student, the dutiful daughter, the guilty, faithful wife who committed adultery only in her own head – and I decided that for once I was going to be brave and follow my feelings no matter what the consequences.