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THE WALLS WERE COVERED IN LAYERS OF OVERLAPPING STICKERS. Hundreds of candle nubs burned in nests of melted wax among the bottles behind the bar. Punk music played quietly from a paint-splattered radio. We were the only customers. The bartender, an aproned man with a great quiff of brown hair, spoke softly as he drew beer into two glasses from a green tap. After Søren paid, the man leaned carefully against a wood beam that split the wall behind the bar in two. He looked a workingman’s saint, silhouetted in fire and booze.
Our table was covered in decals: DELICIOUS FLORIDA ORANGES. A DAY AT THE FAIR. WELTSCHMERZ. Søren’s bare head gleamed in the low light. Sylvie always complained that bald men were unattractive. I smiled, liking the idea that she could be wrong.
He gave me a little nod. “You have brothers? Sisters?”
“No. It’s just me and my mom and dad. Or, well, I guess it was just me and my mom and dad. Two weeks ago they told me they were getting divorced.” I emitted a manic bark, a sort of laugh.
There was no concern in his face. “I see. And what will you study in university?”
“Maybe literature. But you can’t really do anything with an English degree but be a high school teacher, so I actually was thinking about business. You know, to work at a company or something? But since my parents announced they were splitting up, I thought maybe I could be a therapist? To help people?”
Out loud, the ideas that had gained a veneer of resolve in my head sounded half-formed and desperate.
Søren peered at me over the top of his beer. “I think it is very different in the United States.” What was? When he pulled the glass away from his face, his upper lip was covered in foam. “You were surprised by your parents’ decision to divorce, yes? But it is probably for the best. They will be happier.”
Why did everyone say that, as if their happiness was so easy to figure out? I had lived with them all my life and never been able to figure out what they wanted. And he didn’t even know them. “Splitting up won’t solve anything. It can only make things harder. It’s ridiculous. And selfish.”
He cocked his head. “Why is it selfish to end a relationship? Could it not be an act of generosity, to the other person and to yourself?”
But what about to me? I thought but did not say. Since the announcement of the divorce, everything had been all about them.
“Mine have split up a long time ago, almost twenty years ago, when I was ten.” Søren went on. “But they are still friends, still see each other.”
“The divorce didn’t make them hate each other?”
“They never married.” Søren rubbed his hands together. “You are eighteen, yes? Is this your first time at a bar?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “But it’s not my first time drinking.” I gulped my beer with what I hoped was gusto, feeling happy activity in my neck and hands.
Sylvie and I had started drinking together in eighth grade, when she found a bottle of red wine marked VAMPIRE in the miniature bar her parents had set up to the right of their kitchen sink. We sneaked it up to her room, still fairyland-themed then, and drank it in ponderous gulps from the water glass on her nightstand, afraid we’d reveal ourselves if we went back down for another cup. After that we filched from Mr. and Mrs. Elmaleh as often as possible, sampling whatever looked or sounded most exotic: pomegranate liqueur, a fancy rose-infused gin, a faceted bottle of cognac in its own silk bag. I liked drinking. Not for the drunkenness but for the feeling of conspiratorial intent, the way it dropped a velvet curtain around Sylvie and me.
The picture window at the front of the bar showed a tiny street. People passed on bicycles and foot, talking on phones or to friends who walked beside them. Men and women carried briefcases or wore backpacks or bags slung from their shoulders. They sipped from bottles of water and sent text messages and laughed. The light had only grown brighter, bluer.
Søren went for another round and I was suddenly sure he wouldn’t return, that he would abandon me at the bar. I walked in a small circle around our table, swaying on one heel, so that if he didn’t come back it would appear that I too had been about to depart. How would I get home?
He returned with more beer. My relief dropped me back into my seat.
“Tuborg. The other famous beer of Denmark,” he said. It was more sour than the first, thinner.
Strings rose from the radio behind the bar. Søren yelled in Danish and the bartender removed himself from his perch among the candles to increase the volume. A man’s rich voice filled the room. Thundering bass and timpani. Søren closed his eyes and my cathedral feeling whirred, filling me.
It was my special secret, the way my body prickled and beamed. On the handful of Saturdays when Mama and Dad had taken me downtown to museums or to the orchestra. In my grandma’s living room when she played Beethoven piano sonatas on her old record player just before it was time for us to go home. During the multipart harmonies the school choir sang in the winter and spring concerts. I wasn’t a member but I loved to listen.
Sometimes it even happened in the privacy of my bedroom when a favorite song came on the radio. It took me over, took me out, made sense of all the upping and downing of my days, the way formless hours could fall wide as splayed knees. It was a gathering together, the generation of a geometric narrative, a vast structure that suggested I had a place within it, was bigger, more important, more fated than I feared. The first time I ever had the cathedral feeling had been when I was five on a trip to my dad’s college, a beautiful campus in the middle of nowhere set with grottoes and grand auditoriums, dominated by a church that seemed older than old. It soared above me gray and majestic and I went transparent, became a part of everything.
When I told Sylvie about the cathedral feeling one night in her bedroom, a space that seemed hung with the feeling’s fetters like ribbons, she laughed at me. “Oh, Roxana, you always want to be magical.” And again I was a bag of feelings with no start and no end, a tunnel through which sensation moved.
The silence was huge when the song ended. “Do you know it?” Søren asked. “Sam Cooke.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“When I was a little boy, my mother often sent me to a little store to buy cigarettes. The man at the store kept a small turntable behind the counter, on which he played many records, records my parents played all the time. But he also played one that I had never heard before. A beautiful voice singing about love and freedom.”
Søren finished his second beer and balanced his chin on his fist, looking at something I couldn’t see. I wanted to know him—the other Søren who appeared when his eyes went distant.
“He was a good man. A hard worker. He did not think anyone owed him anything. He was very grateful to Denmark for accepting him as a refugee and proud of the fact he had taken almost no assistance from the government. He didn’t just come here to live off the state as many do. Anyway, that is how I became interested in African American culture, which led me to African American literature, and that is how I somehow became that dreadful thing, a graduate student studying literature. All because of a Palestinian playing Sam Cooke.” He laughed.
“Søren.” I heard my voice, high and uncertain on his name. “What do you mean about people wanting to live off the state?”
He looked into his beer. “It is a bad situation, with so many immigrants here now. There are many cultural conflicts, not easily solved.”
“Oh,” I said.
His eyes blazed at me. “You are a woman. Do you want a man to tell you to cover your lovely hair?”
My lovely hair. “No, of course not,” I said, shifting in my seat.
He beamed at me and I felt like such a good girl. “Is that what your thesis is about? African American literature?”
“Yes.” He leaned back in his chair and made a pyramid of fingers under his chin, looking up as his spoke. “I am exploring the ways in which Viola Ash’s fabulist fiction—I designate it fabulist rather than under the more common and general grouping of scien
ce fiction precisely because of works such as Spirit Home, which maintain Ash’s interest in the layered possible realities but deviate from the conventions of sci-fi—the way this preoccupation with the unreal intersects with her portrayal of racial identity.”
“Cool,” I said. I realized I was drunk and decided to be secretly, covertly drunk. Drunk in mind only, not demeanor. “When does the sun go down?”
“Ten thirty, eleven o’clock? It is not even July.” Yoo-lee. “The days will soon become even longer.”
My abdomen was suddenly full to bursting. “I have to pee,” I announced and immediately blushed. What a little kid thing to say. Søren pointed to a small hallway and I stumbled to the bathroom, a tiny shaft just large enough for a toilet and a sink. The mirror held a strange brightness that smoothed my features.
It had always been hard to tell if I was pretty. Mama and Dad and Sylvie said I was. But if you were pretty, weren’t other people supposed to see it? Wouldn’t the popular girls, and the boys over whom they held sway, have responded to my beauty? I always just looked ordinary to myself. Hair the color of brown rice that couldn’t decide if it was curly or straight, light eyes, rosy cheeks that freckled in summer. Nothing about me drew the eye like Sylvie’s sharp features and smooth black hair, and everything I wanted to wear looked funny on my body. Breasts that had been big from their first appearance on my chest, soft tummy, wide hips, a butt whose crack peeked above every pair of pants. Medium height, medium mouth, pale neck. I thought my hands were nice, when I hadn’t chewed my nails too much.
That night my hair was French braided away from my face in two plaits that ended just below my shoulder blades. The clothes I had quickly thrown on—a blue jacket, tight black jeans, my softest green T-shirt—felt handmade for me. I peed for what felt like an hour, staring at my face from the toilet. My glowing skin. Why had I ever thought that I was ugly?
When I returned, a new beer waited sweating on my half of the table. My foot turned under me and I fell into my seat.
“I should take you home,” Søren said. “You are very tired.”
“I’m great.” I took a long sip. “I think I got my second wind.”
“Your what?”
“My second wind.”
“I do not know this phrase.”
“It’s like—you have newfound energy after being worn out.”
“Ah! I see,” Søren said. “And this is related to the phrase ‘three sheets to the wind’?”
I laughed. “Different winds.” I was finally drunk enough to ask. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
He flinched. “I do not. My girlfriend—my ex-girlfriend—she has just left me. But it is all right.” For a moment his face was anguished, and I felt I was seeing him again, the Søren inside. I wanted to comfort him. But then he ironed out his features, folding his hands neatly on the table. “She moved to Norway. She is a nurse, and she has a job there. She is a very good nurse. She will be happy.”
This struck me as impossibly sad. “You couldn’t move to Norway?”
“No. It is complicated.” He gave me a tight smile. “I did not want to move to Norway.”
We stared at the stickers on the table: WE ARE THE PEOPLE OUR PARENTS WARNED US ABOUT. THE ARC DE TRIOMPHE. Paris, where I was supposed to be.
When I was six my father gave me a shining red rubber ball printed with white stars and sent me into the alley behind our house to play. That was where she found me. Sylvie in her Pocahontas dress. We played until warmth seeped from the dark folds of shadow, from her hands on my sweatshirt and the princess crown askew on her head. And she asked me to be her best friend and I said yes. Then she asked me to go with her to Paris, and the world was a word in her mouth, and I said yes.
She had books of photographs of the City of Light, souvenirs from the trips her parents had taken there before she was born, favorite movies. But to me Paris was Sylvie’s bedroom, with its miniature Eiffel Towers and paintings of black cats and swan-girls stretching in falls of sunlight; her dresser, desk, and side tables painted with green hills and gray castles and white beaches; her pink velvet window seat; the lavender sachets in her drawers; the light passing through her sheer blue curtains. I understood Paris as the sharp pang of wanting something I didn’t even know existed before her.
Sylvie. Always inside me like another, better self. Beneath everyday desires and victories and defeats, behind school and parents and teachers, we passed into the realm of shared diaries and the humid intimacy of our beds on nights we slept together. My best friend. My only friend.
“Do you have a boyfriend, Roxana?”
I snorted. “Nope.”
We drank. The radio played classical music now, so quietly I wondered if I was imagining it.
“You are a serious person, focused on your studies.”
“That’s nice of you to say. But I don’t think that’s why. It just hasn’t happened for me, unlike for basically everybody else I know. Plenty of people going to way better colleges than me seem to have no trouble getting laid, if that was what you were implying.”
Søren stroked his face. “I was not.”
“Well, they do.”
He leaned across the table. “Roxana, you are quite loud. Just so you know.”
My face burned. When I spoke again it was from behind my glass, in a near whisper. “Sorry. I just meant to say that people definitely do have sex. A lot! But not me. Not me.”
Søren looked pained. “Well, that is your choice, of course. I wasn’t so much talking about sex as relationships, matters of the heart. You should not—I mean, you should not feel that you need do anything that you do not wish to do. I—well, I sound like an idiot. But all I mean is that that is fine. Everything is fine.”
Isn’t sex a matter of the heart? I wanted to ask him. But I had started talking and I couldn’t stop. I wanted to tell someone. I would probably never see him again after the program began the next day, anyway.
“No it’s not,” I said, feeling the alcohol. “It’s hard. It’s hard when your best friend is very beautiful and everyone, even boys, even boys you might like, tells you that. Even your mother and father tell you. And it’s hard because boys never talk, except for when they have to talk to you in school, the rest of the time they just huddle together and you never know if they’re laughing at you. And then, then when you finally get to be alone with one you like, a boy you really like, it gets all screwed up. Of course.” I took a miniature sip, looking into Søren’s face. “Can you explain it to me? Does it get easier? At all?”
On the table his hands worked. “You are quite angry.”
“I’m not.” I poured beer down my throat and thrust the glass back down on the table, sloshing liquid over the sides. Søren’s chair skidded back like the spilled beer was fire. Calm down, I almost said. I should take my own advice. Inside I felt sloppy. I wanted another beer, but he probably wouldn’t buy it for me. I squinted at his pale shape feeling angry and worn out—sick and tired, I realized. Suddenly I knew exactly what that meant. I wanted something from Søren and he wouldn’t give it to me. No one would.
I would tell the story so that I knew for sure that it was pointless. Liking him.
“Two years ago I went to Homecoming with a boy I really liked, Hunter Landson. Homecoming is a school dance where—”
Søren nodded thoughtfully. “I know from movies.”
Hunter. He is always to me as I first saw him, a slinking honey-eyed boy in a blue plaid hoodie, dark hair lank as dog fur on his thin neck. He crossed the threshold of our honors chemistry classroom, that yellow-lit hall of flame and hypotheses, holding his hands in his kangaroo pocket as if it were a lady’s muff. When he was led to my table and told to sit, he took off his backpack, and I saw his hands, lithe and slim fingered, gloved in rosy skin.
“Hi.” He tapped the notebook I’d had custom-made at the drugstore, with a picture of my cat, Mushi, as the cover. His cuticles were neat and smooth, unchewed. “That your kitty? I have one too.”
He leaned in close, hair in his eyes. When he spoke, spray coated my nose. “Her name’s Peanut Butter.”
How long had I been wanting? Forever. In Hunter, those swirling emotions at my dark center coalesced into a person. A purpose. Hunter saw me.
Our conversations were meted out by his tic of jerking his head back to flick the hair out of his eyes, a violent motion. Our hands touched each time we lit our Bunsen burner. It took only a few days for me to conjure him in my bedroom after I turned out the lights. Rolled under my torso, my arm became a part of his body. Now leg, now arm, now cock, or what I could imagine of it. My fingers his attenuated ones. It felt as if I had been doing this since before memory.
One day in class Hunter’s T-shirt caught as he took off his hoodie, revealing a trapezoid of lean flesh bisected by a line of rich auburn hair—his treasure trail—and a purplish nipple, winking and puckered in the perpetual lab chill. His arms were covered in scabs, mostly thin scratches, but here and there a deep gouge or scrape hashed over with brittle crust.
He caught my eye. Flicked his hair. Saw me see the scabs, the question in my face.
“I volunteer at the animal shelter and the cats really tear me up when we play. You’re sharp, Roxana. I can’t hide anything from you.”
I sucked my bottom lip into my mouth and tore a wing of dead skin from my lip with my incisor, peppering my tongue with blood. Under our table I wedged my fist into my crotch.
We lit the flame, raised the beaker.
In the last week of September I wrote the question on a piece of computer paper with a tiny brush dipped in lemon juice and slid it across the invisible boundary we observed on the desk.
“Hold it up to the Bunsen,” I told him. “A message will appear.”
He lifted the paper, applied the flame.
Will you go to Homecoming with me?
“Aw,” he said. “Of course.”
He reached over and touched my shoulder, one grip, one squeeze, and I felt so fine I thought my clothes might fall from my body and expose me.
Sylvie was jealous. She said she wasn’t, but she was.
Open Me Page 3
