Pluto and Mercury

It is a day in May when half of the flâneurs are wearing scarves and the other half have rolled up their shirt sleeves. Some of those hungry for summer have gathered on the long bench in the park, where I will become one of them, and she another.

The she in this story is not someone I know, but we are soon to spend an hour together, she with hers, I with hers. At first she thinks it would be better to sit on the shaded side, to create a buffer zone, since she is not alone but has brought along two lively and boisterous boys, but then she decides that the best place is probably a metre or so beside the man reading Marcel Proust’s The Guermantes Way with a pencil in hand, the same person who will write this text in an attempt to understand himself and everyone else.

She has something of a village schoolteacher about her, speaks with a Mediterranean accent, wears a sunhat and sometimes loses her words when she addresses the children. Her manner is nervous, of the kind I am often drawn to and paralysed by, since it forces me into real-time calibration. The children, by contrast, move with complete assurance, running freely past us as we sun ourselves. I have to turn up the volume in my headphones several times just to take in a few lines of the book.

Then he arrives, the man they have apparently been waiting for. It turns out he is the father of one of the boys and the Mediterranean woman’s new boyfriend. Unfortunately my first thought when I see him is not a kind one, namely: can divorced middle-aged women really imagine just anyone, simply to avoid feeling like a divorced woman? Not that the man now sitting close to me is ugly or untalented. He just comes from another planet, and this time it is not merely Mars and Venus but rather Pluto and Mercury.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have waited with the picnic,” he says without meaning it, and this is what I soon understand to be characteristic of his language: an undertone invisible to him in everything he says, but visible to everyone else. He has no village schoolteacher aura, rather that of someone who spends his days in an office, leases his car and can easily slip into casual racism in the sauna. I am being unkind again, sorry, because he does not deserve it, but I want to mark a dissonance, the one everyone notices except the unfortunate couple in love. A sort of non-existent inward attentiveness in both of them, which leads them towards feelings and impulses that hit every target except the one that matters. The elephant-in-the-room-sized one.

When there is no longer any point even in pretending, to myself, to read the book, I start making notes in the margin instead, because what is happening around me has clear Proustian qualities. He begins to speak, with that tone again, which seems designed solely to impress an audience rather than to address his son, to whom he says: “Now I want you to finish your yoghurt.” He tries to sound gentle, but also firm, letting the emphasis dance on every syllable. A manner he adopts to signal that he is both masculine and a present parent, but beneath it lies that invisible pressure of: why do I have to put up with this? A question he probably does not hear himself and is therefore unaware of.

It is complex, being a man, he surely thinks. In that he is of course right, just as it is evidently difficult to be a divorced woman in search of a decent bloke who has read some book other than Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s. The Pluto man now jokes with the children. He tries to adjust to their simpler vocabulary and references and talks first about high fives and then about the Jackson 5. The latter goes over their heads, but the jokes were never meant for them. The boys finish eating quickly and start running again. It becomes possible for me to continue reading, but then suddenly the mother begins to cry, dramatically and unmistakably extrovert, as if she wants one of us others to intervene, but we of course pretend to be deaf, since we are Swedes.

The Pluto man now knows that he needs to show emotion, but he also understands that he has to handle it neatly because there is an audience. “Think about your breathing,” he says, since he is apparently more focused on effect than cause. “That’s not how one should think,” he says, thereby explaining that in his view she is feeling the wrong way. When that does not help either, he comes out with: “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.” The sort of thing people say when they really have no intention of doing anything for the grieving person, but have not entirely ruled it out, since that would mean they were bad people.

None of this seems to reach her. She does not even understand how the crying began, offers explanations such as being stressed by the boys’ dynamic. That they show no gratitude. That she builds up a baseline stress. That she cannot find her role. That the joint trip to Öland was probably a bad idea. He says: “There, there, love.” But what she actually feels, and cannot reach, is this: everything just feels completely wrong all the time and I do not know why. It feels as though I am constantly being forced into a framework alien to my inner nature. As if I can never be seen and appreciated for who I am. As if I always end up being the hysterical one when all the disparate feelings spill over me. And what it really means is this: we do not fit together in any way. My body, my soul, my psyche are asking me to get out, but I cannot understand it.

Instead she says: “I’m hopeless and messy and you make everyone laugh.” He says: “Don’t build a narrative.” She continues, of course, to cry, because nothing is resolved, and he sits beside her helpless, as if he only has a hammer when all that is needed is a Phillips screwdriver.

The boys run lap after lap with a new, wild frenzy. Now it would be impossible even to read the back of a milk carton.

He understands that he should leave, that exit is the only solution. When he has picked up his son, he asks: “How much should I pay for the picnic?” The mother pulls herself together and says: “Two hundred and seventy-three kronor.” The moment he leaves the bench, a calm arises of the kind that comes when a photocopier stops working in an open-plan office. All that remains are our thoughts.

Here there is time to think that it is nevertheless logical that a man with such a different nature should also have a child with the same temperament and rhythm of life. That it simply is what it is. That energies either match or they do not, and so many still try to combine their hammers with screws.

Now the mother is finally still, in both soul and body. Her son too. They hug tightly, symbiotically, speak calmly in their first language. A few more tears fall. Perhaps from relief, perhaps from resignation. She probably still does not understand what is wrong. And perhaps that is how it is, that we always see everyone except ourselves, thinks the man sitting beside them, before he walks home alone.