Lacke’s long-term heavy drinking

Lacke’s long-term heavy drinking is conveyed through repeated domestic details rather than a stated diagnosis: wine shared with Virginia, the dregs of a bottle finished alone after midnight, and empty bottles accumulating in the pantry. The pattern belongs to an unsettled relationship in which the two repeatedly draw close and keep their lives apart. The text makes drinking part of that arrangement, while leaving its exact extent—and any clinical label—unstated.

A life together, then apart

Eight years before the later scenes, when Virginia’s daughter had just left home, Lacke moved into Virginia’s one-bedroom apartment. Virginia had worked since leaving school and was still employed at the ICA grocery store on Arvid Mornes Road above China Park. Lacke, by contrast, spent his days sitting in the apartment, walking, talking with people, and reading books and newspapers. He could work with electrical wiring and cooking, but Virginia could not understand what he did for a living or where his money came from. Their different rhythms of work and daily life form the background to their intimacy; they do not, by themselves, explain or quantify his drinking.

After four months Virginia asked him to leave, and he did, packing his clothes and books into separate bags. They did not see each other for six months. During that interval Virginia began drinking more, alone. The account distinguishes her drinking from Lacke’s, but places both within the history of their separation: hers is explicitly described as increasing in his absence, while his is not assigned a particular amount or timetable at that point.

Lacke returned after his father died. He had spent the intervening months living with his father, who was dying of cancer in a house in Smaland. He and his sister inherited the house, sold it, and divided the money; Lacke’s share enabled him to buy a small condominium in Blackeberg. The narrative gives these circumstances of his return, but does not present the inheritance as a cure for his habits or as an explanation for them.

Wine within an intermittent relationship

In the years after Lacke came back, he and Virginia met increasingly often at the Chinese restaurant. Sometimes they went home together and made love; by tacit agreement, Lacke was gone by the time Virginia returned from work the next day. Their connection was real but deliberately loose: months could pass without their sharing a bed, and the arrangement suited them. Their drinking appears against this recurring pattern of intimacy without a settled shared household.

A later evening condenses that pattern into a few concrete acts. Virginia cooked stew beef with onions and crushed tomatoes while Lacke showered. After dinner they split a bottle of wine, although he managed to eat little. They then split another bottle in the living room before going to bed. The scene records two bottles shared over the evening and Lacke’s poor appetite, but does not say that he was unable to drink, describe intoxication, or claim that the wine caused his physical condition.

The tenderness of the evening does not erase the precariousness of their bond. In bed they looked into each other’s eyes, and Virginia told Lacke that she had stopped taking the Pill. The disclosure shifts the scene toward a possible consequence of their renewed intimacy, but the passage does not establish what they decide or what follows from it. For the drinking pattern, the significant circumstance is that wine accompanies a rare stretch of domestic closeness: a cooked meal, two bottles shared, and a night together, rather than an account of social drinking in a crowd.

Solitary drinking and the bottle record

Another morning reveals what happens outside those shared evenings. Lacke wakes coughing in a smoky room, with an overflowing ashtray beside the bed. The previous night he and Virginia had stayed awake talking and smoking after making love; she had put out the last cigarette and said it was time to sleep. Lacke later got out of bed, drained the remaining wine from the bottle, smoked more cigarettes, and returned to bed beside her sleeping body. His account of the night is specific about sequence: the shared intimacy ends, Virginia goes to sleep, and he continues alone with the bottle and cigarettes.

The episode connects drinking with the solitude that persists inside the relationship. Lacke reflects that he would have liked always to have someone beside him and that, if anyone could have filled that place, it would have been Virginia. Yet he doubts that they could sustain a shared country life, imagining a house and potatoes before concluding that they would soon get on each other’s nerves. These reflections do not prove that he drinks to manage loneliness. They do place his solitary finishing of the wine beside his wish for company and his recognition that permanent domestic life with Virginia is unlikely.

The bottles leave a small but recurring material trace. Before leaving his apartment on another day, Lacke empties the ashtray and puts an empty wine bottle upside down in the pantry because the other bottles leave no room for it upright. The action is practical and unremarked, but the crowded collection makes drinking legible as more than the wine consumed on one particular evening. Alongside the bottle he drains after Virginia has gone to sleep, it supports a picture of repetition without providing a count, a schedule, or proof of a medical condition.

What the evidence establishes

The account presents Lacke’s drinking through contrast: wine shared with Virginia during their intermittent reunions, wine consumed alone after she sleeps, and bottles stored with the accumulated empties. It also shows that Virginia drank more alone after he left, a parallel that belongs to the history of their separation rather than evidence that their habits were identical. Their relationship moves between long absences and familiar gestures, and drinking is one of the recurring details through which those domestic encounters are shown.

The limits of the record matter. There is no stated daily quantity, formal diagnosis, or scene establishing that Lacke’s drinking causes a specific illness or event. His coughing, cigarette smoking, sparse eating during the dinner, and the bottles are all described, but the text does not collapse them into a medical explanation. What it does establish is a repeated practice: wine shared across an evening, the dregs consumed after midnight in solitude, and empty bottles put away among others. That restrained accumulation makes long-term drinking visible as part of Lacke’s ordinary life without claiming more than the scenes reveal.