“The One That Got Away”

As deep as the woods come in this part of the country.

The One That Got Away

a short story by

L. J. Lundblad

January 2012

“Everything will be okay in the end and if it’s not okay it is not the end.”

[unknown]

The spring of that year I began wishing every plane I boarded would crash. Up until that point, I was the embodiment of a success story. As a child I had been a good girl with good grades who eventually graduated from a good school to attend a good university where I acquired more good grades and also eventually graduated. I then became a good doctoral candidate with a good research topic and good academic prospects. In addition to the general goodness in my life I was also good-looking.

It seemed nothing bad could ever happen to me.

Until the day I published a bad paper.

The bad contents of the bad paper cost me my good reputation, my good connections, and my good sanity. Could it be a case of “bad papers happen to good people”? If only! When it was brought to my attention that my paper was bad, other things that weren’t good came to my attention, one after the other. After this failure I began to see how several other failures had been hidden from me by the general goodness of things.

Even though I was aging rapidly – funny how a progressing youth does that to people – I had failed to take precautions and find a suitable mate of the opposite sex with whom to reproduce. Instead I dedicated precious downtime to brief relations with both professors and students; up until the spring of that year I had not recognized the badness contained within this flirtatious tendency. There were plenty of other things I hadn’t done. I hadn’t written a novel even though I was supposedly destined as a teenager to become a good writer of fiction. I hadn’t traveled to Italy. I hadn’t even settled for a hairstyle of significance despite being well into my late twenties. I hadn’t climbed a single mountain. I hadn’t even gone skinny-dipping in the rain.

Every element of my life had been channeled toward being good. After it became a generally acknowledged truth that I was bad, I arrived at an understanding of how I had neglected everything else in order to attain that which was now impossible – that is, a good career as a good professor of a good subject at a good university.

Not badness but rather the understanding of badness led me to throw myself from a famous bridge one windy evening in late April. It was the culmination of failure: instead of waking up at the pearly gates I woke up in a hospital three days later to hear the riveting story of how I had been saved unconscious from the cold water by a courageous surfer and brought barely alive to the emergency room. “So it goes,” said the kind nurse and I could do nothing but agree with her. I took the bus home from the hospital, withdrew from my academic position, shipped the bare essentials of my belongings back home and hoped for the best – that is, I hoped the plane would crash.

Back home nothing and nobody awaited my untimely return: with two complete and one incomplete degrees in a field of knowledge useless and pointless outside the world of academia, I was predestined for unemployment. I was too old to pretend I hadn’t done anything with my life up until this point and too proud to invent other plausible occupations. Back home everyone else were married with children and houses and cars and mortgages and I was the absurd black sheep who had been away too long doing my own thing to be allowed a meager slot in everyone else’s busy lives.

The beautiful young woman who gave inspiring talks at conferences wearing a red dress was but a memory. All that was left of her were a list of irrelevant publications and a wardrobe of formal attire not appropriate for the rugged environment in which I found myself at the beginning of May that year.

I relocated to a cottage in the countryside for the summer while I licked my wounds and contemplated how not to fail at a suicide that wasn’t academic. Finding myself in the deep woods of western Sweden – as deep as they come in this part of the country – my first step to marking my new territory was cutting off my long blonde braid and taking long contemplative walks in rubber boots. Among the numerous things I hadn’t done while dedicating myself to scholarly ends was get a driver’s license. Instead, I traveled the rural surroundings on bike wearing nothing but a bikini top and shorts on warm days. I learned how to chop wood for the fire place. I repainted the upstairs bedroom in a color I wasn’t comfortable with (bright orange). For a week I painted pictorial scenes from the countryside and stumbled upon the realization that I was not a painter. The week after I read nothing but detective novels and ate nothing but blueberries with vanilla yogurt. Once I began talking to myself, I realized that I should perhaps think outside also this box and thus did something as unprecedented as sign up for the position of usher during service at the local church.

My clerical stint could have resulted in only catching up on local gossip while sipping church coffee with the elderly, had I not been approached by the only other person my age there – the priest.

“I know who you are,” he said, “I saw your picture in an article in the paper once.”

“You have to be more specific,” I said, “I’ve been in lots of articles. Some of them I’ve written myself.”

“This one was from about four years ago… and you didn’t write it. It was an interview, I think. I remember seeing your last name and recognizing it as belonging to one of the members of the congregation and thinking that must be a local girl. I was new on the job back then.”

“Was it a good article?”

“It wasn’t bad. You seemed to be an impressive person, with all that success at what you’re doing and stuff…” the young priest smiled. “I suppose that’s why they interviewed you for the paper. You’re working at some fancy university, right?”

“I was,” I said, not smiling.

“My name is Patrick,” he held out his hand.

“My name is Tekla,” I said and we shook hands. “But you probably knew that.”

“You look even better than you did in the paper.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you home for the break?” he asked.

I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s going to be a long break. I’m probably going to become one of those old ladies drinking their church coffee here one day.”

Patrick the priest appeared confused. “I’m sure that’s not true? You’ll get out of this village and become a famous professor one day, right?”

I shook my head. “I left the university world and I’m not coming back. I used to think I’d be a good scholar one day but now I’m thinking I’ll master the bad lands instead.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story, Patrick. Not the kind of story you tell during church coffee.”

Patrick looked at me without understanding and I left him standing outside the picturesque little church in his green shirt with the diminutive white priest collar peeking out in the shape of a square. I glanced back at him one last time to wave before getting on my bike and thought that it was unfortunate I could not say to myself that it would be the last I saw of him because as he was the priest and I was an usher, we’d be seeing each other every Sunday until his retirement – or relocation. Or both. Or maybe until the authorities came to take me away to where all the other former academics and current crazy people are kept. He waved back at me, standing looking both handsome with his broad shoulders and repulsive with his failed attempt at facial hair.

On a cloudy afternoon three days later I was taking one of my now customary contemplative long walks in rubber boots without an umbrella and got caught in a sudden outburst of rain. About an hour away on foot from my safe haven the cottage, I sat down under a pine tree and wrote senseless messages to myself in the muddy ground with the tips of my rubber boots. I could have been sitting there to this day – or to the end of that rainy evening because I didn’t feel like walking back and get my wool sweater soaked in the mercilessly cold summer rain – if not a man in a green cloak with a black umbrella in his hand had come across me and my scribblings in the ground. He bent down and looked at me with an oversized smile which I didn’t understand at the time but nevertheless reciprocated.

“Caught in the rain, huh?” the man said and laughed.

I nodded.

“Long way to walk back to where you came from, huh?” he continued his monologue.

I nodded.

“My farm’s just around the corner. Come on. Don’t sit there and catch your cold and get your boots all muddy. I’ve got a nice warm fire going at my house.”

I got up and contemplated expressing gratitude but it was premature.

“Come in under the umbrella,” the man offered and I obeyed. “You’re Tekla, aren’t you, huh? I heard Patrick the priest say something about a new female scholar in the vicinity. And who else but an academic goes for a stroll in the woods when the skies look like they’re about to burst any minute now, huh?”

“I’m Tekla. Who are you?” I asked and glanced slightly up at the man walking next to me under the umbrella.

“I’m a farmer,” said the man as if defying a proper presentation.

“And your name is?”

“Erik,” he answered.

We walked up to Erik’s house and he invited me to step over the threshold. A quick observation of his living arrangement rendered it palpable that Erik and I had nothing in common: where there should have been respectable collections of the classics on the bookshelves there were disorganized magazines, movies of questionable quality, and outrageously profane yet quite quaint porcelain sculptures. Inside it was, however, dry and warm and unpredictably cozy. He removed his green cloak to reveal a sturdy masculine frame of the kind that is only cultivated by physical labor. It was somewhat concealed by an awkward plaid flannel shirt – in my version of the world this attire is predominantly worn for the semiotics of irony – accompanied by a presumptuously unkempt beard and unabashedly dirty jeans. He offered me a glass of whiskey which I did not decline while continuing to study the curious palimpsest of unpretentious ornaments on his walls. Somewhere in the kitchen a calendar from five years ago with a blatantly patriotic photograph of the royal family hung for everyone to draw their own pejorative conclusion. A faint smell of damp fur lingered in the air.

“Carina is out for the moment,” he said and filled me in: “My dog.”

“So you’re a farmer?” I began a polite exchange of professional musings.

Erik nodded. “Born a farmer, raised a farmer, and now a grown farmer.”

“I see,” I said.

“I have cows.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Not really,” said Erik and sipped his whiskey. “There’s not much else a country boy who flunked out of school at the age of sixteen can do around here for a living. My father retired a few years back and I inherited the farm from him and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”

“Besides getting married and having lots of babies?” I asked and sipped my whiskey.

“Not a lot of women around these days who’d go for the simple life with a good old farm boy.”

 I thought Erik would smile coyly after this line. He didn’t.

“But you, Tekla, or so I’ve heard, is some kind of big shot university person,” he said and smiled though not coyly.

“Perhaps I used to be something of the kind but now I’m just another washed up disillusioned female with an assortment of extravagant degrees who is too old to get hitched to anyone normal and too young to figure out something better to do with her life. For the time being I’m merely living on memories – or, to be more exact, on the royalties from a successful academic book I published when I was still under the misconception of my own scholarly grandeur.”

“Huh,” said Erik and paused as if in serious contemplation of my words before continuing: “You’re pretty cute for a washed up female with a published book and everything.”

“Maybe that was the problem.”

“But I’m sure you got to do all kinds of fun stuff?” he looked at me as if trying to figure out if I was on the verge of supplying our pleasant dialogue with wonder tales from my years at large in the universe. “And go all kinds of places?”

“I’ve been some places.”

“I haven’t been nowhere.”

“That doesn’t mean I have done anything, though. There is a lot I haven’t done. I haven’t even gone skinny-dipping,” I concluded with a grim expression of worldly disenchantment as my lips once again approached the edge of the glass. “Not even once.”

“We can do that right now if you’re up for it,” Erik generously offered to be of service.

“We don’t know each other.”

“I know I wouldn’t mind seeing you naked,” he said and laughed as if it had been a joke.

“Get in line,” I laughed.

“So that’s how it’s going to be?”

“How old are you anyway?”

Erik still laughed when he said: “Old enough to know when I’ve come across the kind of woman I wouldn’t mind going skinny-dipping with.”

“This will never amount to anything,” I concluded sternly. “You like me because of the way I look and when I look at you all I see is this robust rural fellow who has rough big hands and nothing possibly in common with me whatsoever. What in the world would we talk about?”

“Who said anything about talking?” Erik moved slightly closer to me on the couch where we were sitting in front of the fireplace.

“You don’t understand. I’m an eloquent woman of refined taste who demands…”

“When in Rome…” said Erik and put his right arm around me. “We should get you out of this wool sweater anyhow. You’ll catch a cold sitting around in wet clothes for so long.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t have anything underneath.”

“I know you don’t.”

That rainy afternoon in the wilderness ended as anticipated after the kind of conversation conducted between us: with Erik and I running barefoot through the wet grass down to the shore of a lake located conveniently enough close to his property. Later on the same evening I sat with dripping wet hair wrapped in a blanket on the wooden floor in front of Eric’s fireplace with another glass of whiskey in my hand and a farmer in the nude next to me. Supposedly a bad story like this should end with a good conclusion of the sort found in proper love stories: “Erik and I soon realized that we weren’t so different after all and decided to unite not only our bodies but also our souls in the sacred union of heterosexuality.” But at the end of my summer that year – during which I, contrary to coherent narrative strategies, divided my time between Erik the farmer and Patrick the priest – I realized something else entirely.

On my way to claim another doctorial position at another university two things occurred to me: 1. that I didn’t wish the plane would crash; and 2. that I was the one who got away not once but twice. Or three times if you count the departing scenes with these two rural men as separate events. I will allow for the reader to use her own good judgment in this matter.