Free Other People's Lives by Johanna Kaplan

time?”
    A-boat. A-boat. To stop herself from laughing, Louise said very quickly, “I know why my sister wouldn’t write to me.
    Elisabeth walked around the streets of Stockholm, her blondness the same as the city’s pure white light, her cold, even features the same as its architecture. Cameras were slung over her shoulders and her small eyes squinted into the distance, envisioning in it a building which did not yet exist. Her clothing also seemed blond, which in these streets appeared unremarkable like everything else about Elisabeth, but, exactly like the photograph in the Times, was the purposeful opposite of what was true. She stopped now and then to buy things; she smiled though she did not mean it, she spoke in perfect Swedish, she counted up her change and left. At an outdoor stand she bought flowers, and in her stark, blond, grainy apartment, placed them in a dark-red cut-glass vase. The vase did not exactly belong with the apartment, but stood out in its own old-fashioned vivid beauty just for that reason. It had belonged to her husband’s family for generations, and had been given to Elisabeth as a wedding present. She walked with it carefully, nimbly, quietly to the kitchen, where she filled it with water and, still carrying it, managing it easily, went past her sons’ bedroom. It was neat and colorful, this room, filled with unusual, ingenious European toys. The two little boys, Per and Arne, tiny and towheaded, were playing together, rolling on the floor, giggling and shrieking. Elisabeth smiled and raised one finger to shush them; it was possible, even, that she might have hugged them, but she was carrying the flower-filled vase, which she did not return to the living room. She walked on with it farther back into the apartment and put it down finally on a small white ledge in the study. In this room, wide-windowed and curtainless, the light was ice cold and the stillness absolute: it was exactly what Elisabeth liked. Two high, slanted drafting tables and raised high-backed chairs were facing opposite walls. On one of the chairs sat Elisabeth’s husband, his body straight, long, and lean, his hair very fair but slightly curly. Only the back of him was visible, he was concentrating on a blueprint on the slanted drafting table. The phone rang—the short several buzzing rings of European phones. Elisabeth’s husband got up to answer it. He did not say hello, but said, “Bjelding,” and after a brief conversation consisting mainly of Swedish monosyllables, hung up the phone and noticed the vase and flowers on the sill. He smiled at Elisabeth and more or less grasped her hand. They stood that way for a few minutes, and then sat down, both of them, on their high-backed chairs which faced opposite walls. Occasional Swedish monosyllables floated between them in the ice-cold light of the room which Elisabeth loved. She had climbed directly onto the screen of a Bergman movie, and had allowed nothing and no one to stop her.
    â€œShe’s afraid I’ll contaminate her and make her crazy.”
    â€œExplain to me how that—” Dr. Vinograd was beginning, but the phone rang.
    The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense, Symposium on Suicide, Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Language and Thought in Schizophrenia, Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory, Wayward Youth, Searchlights on Delinquency, Character Analysis, The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Men Under Stress, Patterns of Mothering, Modern Clinical Psychiatry, Dreams and the Uses of Regression.
    â€œWe’ll have to talk about that next time, Louise. It’s very important. And next time, I promise you, I’ll have the answering service pick up the phone. In the meantime, get a hold of some college catalogues and find out about registration. Anyway, you can register late, it doesn’t matter.”
    He had not said, “Our time is up.”