Men Who Don't Wait

Featuring: A short story about searching for someone who lives in your home ✦✧

A few years ago, during a brief period of success in my writing, I received a surprising request. Swedish Public Radio asked if I’d like to write a short story for them. It would be read aloud on the radio by an actor. That idea thrilled me: the chance to become someone else.

Since I hadn’t written short stories in a long time, I chose a method that was fairly typical for me at the time. For thirty days, I wrote one story each day. Maybe one of them would turn out well?

In the end two of them did (here’s the other one). Twenty-eight didn’t (though I later had a few more recorded for a podcast and travelled around Sweden with a microphone to meet voices who read my texts aloud) (but that’s another story).

The one that was ultimately chosen for the radio program is called Men Who Don’t Wait, and it was read by the actress Maja Rung, so imagine a female voice as you read below. Here it is now, for the first time in English. The story, which has a tone and lightness quite unlike anything else I’ve written, is about searching for someone who lives in your home. A less light-hearted subject I’ve unfortunately had some experience with. I suppose I needed to write it out of my system.

Welcome away,

Jörgen Löwenfeldt

✦ Men Who Don’t Wait ✧

One Friday, when my husband claimed to be away on a business trip, I picked up my phone and started searching in that dating app I suspected he was using. Swiped through face after face and suddenly matched with a Roman, male, 35.

“I’m looking for someone specific,” he wrote. Nothing else.

We started chatting:
Me: Well, hello there.
Roman: No, you’re not the one.
I tried to catch his interest, said I was researching people’s search for connection. My survey had four or five questions about his motivations. I also asked what might be wrong when my dishwasher flashes error code E:23.
Roman: I’m leading you on the wrong path. Like I said, I’m only looking for someone specific.
Me: So am I, actually.
Roman: Have you found him?
Me: He lives in my house, but I’ve never met him here. I thought we’d match, he and I, that it would rekindle something in our relationship, but he never shows up.
Roman: Neither does my wife.

We agreed to meet that same evening. Why sit out life on sofas while our respective partners spent their Friday nights elsewhere? Blecktornskällaren was halfway between our GPS coordinates. I threw on a coat, fixed my hair, glanced in the hallway mirror and felt, well, interesting? I rushed off so I wouldn’t be last, or so he wouldn’t have to wait. But he was already outside, no mistaking him with those trembling pupils. He looked like he needed a cigarette to hold between his fingers, but probably wasn’t the smoking type.
“Yes, hi, it’s me,” I said.
“Right, hey there,” he replied.

The only free table was in the shadows by the slot machines. We ordered two Starobrno on tap and paid separately. He looked genuinely dejected, his face lined like someone sleepless. He might’ve lied about his age, people do that to improve their odds. I was hardly a jackpot, a possibly cheated-on freelance musician living off my husband’s steady income.
“So what do you do?” I asked.
“I write books no one wants to read. Want to read one?”
“Probably not.”
“Exactly.”

He drummed his fingers on the table, a soft, pulsing rhythm like Art Blakey’s Moanin’. I had to ask.
“Is that Art Blakey?”
“That’s Art Blakey.”

He laughed contentedly and started drinking before the foam had even settled. I’d put him in a good mood, he said. Normally he did the same thing, drinking beer, except alone, at home, with more obscure labels. There wasn’t really any point to it except dulling pain and calming nerves, so Starobrno worked just fine.

His wife, he said, would probably come home with a plausible explanation and then say she was tired, lie down with her back to him, and fall asleep. She was always tired these days.
“Tired of me, that is,” he said.
“Oh, so that’s how you see it. Yeah, sounds like you’ve cracked the code. Women generally aren’t drawn to men who wait.”
“So what should I do?”
“Don’t wait. That much I know. There’s nothing worse.”

A thought took root in his head. I could see it forming in his expression. Then it was fully grown. He let out a crooked, awkward laugh and gestured toward the room.
“She could be here. With him. The other man. The one who doesn’t wait.”
“I suppose so, if she’s not where she said she’d be.”
“No, she’d never go where she actually wants to go. She’d pick a slightly dingy place like this, somewhere I’d never think to look. But what if …”
“What if what?”
“What if she found us here? It might make her see me differently. That I’m not a man who waits, or whatever you said.”
“Tell me more about your books instead.”

One was called The Dentalist. It was about a dentist who hid micro-poems inside patients’ fillings. He got caught by a colleague when the fillings cracked, and that colleague started demanding new poems in exchange for silence. But the dentist had lost his inspiration, and the new works were so cliché-ridden that he admitted defeat and retrained as a physiotherapist. Half the book covered his studies.

“That sounds … avant-garde,” I said.
“Yeah, but I’d read this interview with Lina Wolff, you know, the August Prize winner, and she said her success came when she stopped caring about what’s correct. Grammar, norms, all those stupid Swedish vocabulary panels. She just let the story grow organically through her and her fingers and the text. You get it? Paul Auster says the same.”
“Right, sounds reasonable. So, a dentist.”
“Yeah, I’m actually a dentist.”
“I see.”

Now I started drinking the beer. It tasted like beer, nothing more, nothing less, like all beer.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Go ahead.”
“You writers, how much of what’s in the story is true? How much is really you, and how much is made up?”
“I’ve waited my whole life for someone to ask me that.”

Next morning, my husband lay in bed, peacefully asleep, perhaps dreaming of orange groves and fighter jets. I got up and made breakfast, an Instagram-worthy meal photographed from above. All circles: grapefruit, Jamie Oliver pancakes, bowls of yogurt and blueberries, coffee in a porcelain pot. He wandered in around ten. I was reading the morning paper and put on a cheerful voice.
“Dear Victor, did you sleep well?” I asked.
“Yeah, well, it got a bit late. Landed around ten, then Pontus wanted to go out and celebrate the contract, and, you know, I’m not really in a position to say no, what with the reorganisation. But I didn’t drink.”
“No, I know. And I understand completely. Sit down. I thought you needed a good breakfast after all the … hardships.”
“Hardships?”
“I said, sit down.”

He looked around, as if searching for hidden cameras, then wandered to the table and sat across from me. Started to speak, then stopped himself.
“What were you going to say?” I asked.
“Nothing. No, it was nothing.”
“Come on, say it,” I said sweetly.
“It’s just … is something going on, I mean, with all this? Normally you have cottage cheese for breakfast.”
“I thought you needed it. That we needed it.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, lightly tapping his spoon against his boiled egg.

The fact that I could make a living as a pianist was a feat. I had neither training nor reputation, but I could sniff out opportunity. I called nursing homes and retreat centers, claimed no one played Love Me Tender like I did, night after night, without losing passion or finesse. That wasn’t true, of course. When I got the gigs, I only played Keith Jarrett pieces, hoping some aficionado would be moved and invite me to join a real trio. Because of this, bookings became rare and travel distances longer. It wasn’t really worth the money, dragging myself across the country to press keys on schedule.

But that’s how I met Victor.

He was at the High Mountain Hotel’s defense conference, like everyone else in week three, lounging in the piano bar with a flat mineral water. After I played Birth, he came up and asked if I had a pen. I said no.
“That’s a shame,” he said. “I need to write down my room number.”
I told him my memory for numbers was excellent, thanks to my years in the military’s interpreter school (I made that up, but how would he know?).
“Room 351,” he said. “Come by. We’re playing Memory tonight. Might be your thing?”
I thought: quick on his feet, this one.

Less than a week after my first meeting with Roman, I had my second. I’d found out where he practiced dentistry and booked myself a leftover appointment. 7:10 a.m. on a Thursday.
“You really surprised me,” he said.
“That was the point.”

He quickly closed the door behind me as I walked toward the examination chair. As if I were a mistress. As if we were really those people.
“Well, go ahead and examine me then. I think I might have some inflammation. Do you think dental insurance is worth it?”
“You’re joking.”
“You won’t know until you check.”

Afterwards, he said I had some small cavities that didn’t need fixing yet, but were worth keeping an eye on. I spit into the little sink and sat back up.
“You still using that app?” I asked.
“A little.”
“Ever seen her on there?”
“No, still not. But I found a nurse from the clinic. Turns out she’s really nice. We never had time to talk before, about real stuff. She said she wanted someone to talk tennis with. So now we talk tennis during the 3 p.m. break. Roger Federer’s supposed to be quite the player, I hear.”
“He’s very good,” I said.
“Yeah.”

Silence. I still had a good twenty minutes left of my appointment. Roman scratched his neck like I’d become a nuisance.
“Have I become a nuisance?” I asked.
“No, but I think I’m starting to like you.”
“Oh!”
“Yeah, you’re easy to talk to. We’ve got similar problems. Our unfaithful partners and all that.”
“You mean you want to start a relationship?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Victor would be happy to think so.”

Roman let out a huff of laughter, started pacing around me, wagging his finger. His eyes lit up like wildfire.
“You’re not supposed to wait all the time!”
“What’s this appointment going to cost me? I’m a bit strapped right now, can’t really request new funds.”
He said:
“Some things money can’t buy.”

When I found room 351, it was empty. It was next to a pinball machine, and I considered spending the night there instead of chasing someone who’d just happened to say the right line. There wasn’t much appealing about him otherwise. He was stocky, a bit like a young Lasse Kronér but without the jolliness, and with more darkness. Maybe it was the contrast that intrigued me.

Then an arm swung into view. He leaned against the wall and said:
“I actually said room 353.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t. Memory?”

He held out a box. It was scuffed, decorated with a taped-on 1980s version of the hotel’s logo. I beat him ten times in a row, but he didn’t seem disappointed. Finally he said:
“Glenn Gould.”
“What about him?”
“Play like Glenn Gould. Hum like he does on that record. People will recognise it. They’ll think you’re a genius. Then you’re in. Then you don’t have to play for losers like me and the other blind-deaf folks in this place.”
“I don’t care how people see me.”

Ten years have passed. We tried having a kid for a while but realised, after some failed attempts, that we actually preferred avoiding responsibility. So we stopped. He continued working with missile positioning systems, and I started focusing on playing like Glenn Gould. I got a few gigs at Fasching. My name never got big, but it was respectable enough to be tarnished by mall appearances, so I couldn’t really support myself.

Eventually, I ended up alone on Friday nights with my phone. I’d learned how to swipe left by now. Suddenly, Roman popped up again—and this time, I swiped right.

Me: What are you doing?
Roman: I just got yelled at by my wife.
Me: Why?
Roman: She says I have a lover. A friend of hers saw me with a strange woman at Blecktornskällaren last week. It’s hard to explain the situation. You know: “She’s just a girl I met while online dating. She was looking for her husband, I was looking for my wife, so we decided to meet, and then she booked an appointment with me. But she didn’t actually need it, so we just talked.”
Me: Yeah … that doesn’t sound great.
Roman: She says she’s worked like a dog for our relationship and that I treat her like …
Me: A dog?
Roman: A used dishcloth.
Me: That doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
Roman: It is a bad thing.
Me: Women like men who don’t wait.
Roman: She says I should move out.
Me: That could be a bad thing.
Roman: Your advice, to put it mildly, has been complete fucking garbage. Love isn’t some game where you roll dice and move pieces. It’s like writing. Listen to Lina Wolff.
Me: And Paul Auster.
Roman: Exactly. You just have to do what you have to do because you have to do what you have to do.
Me: I don’t know anything about that stuff.
Roman: Maybe I should’ve just talked to her.
Me: Yeah. Maybe.

Saturday again. I told Victor everything over breakfast. About the dating, the micro-writings in fillings, and my friend’s imminent housing crisis. I was back to cottage cheese and avocado. He had oatmeal. He looked at me, amazed, as if I’d solved a riddle for seven-year-olds.
“You’re allowed to hang out with people,” he said. “I’ve never said you can’t do stuff when I’m away.”
“Well, I thought you were looking for someone else. But then you weren’t where I looked for you. It’s complicated.”
“I’m right here. Do you see me? I’m sitting here in front of you.”
“I see you now. But I didn’t see you then.”
“You can come to our events. I’ve said that a bunch of times. But you never want to. So I stopped asking, remember? After that time you sat in the corner at Barbro’s and flipped through tabloids.”
“They only talk in languages I don’t understand. And I can’t exactly express myself in musical notes.”

He took another bite of oatmeal and was quiet for a while before he could speak again. Then he giggled. I thought he was kind of sweet, after all. Then he said:
“I’m glad you’ve found a new friend. You need that. So I thought, though it might sound a bit silly: what about a double date?”

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I hope that some of this has resonated with you,

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt

✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se ✧ bagatellerna.se ✦

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