I thanked him, eyeing the latch that held screen and keyboard closed.
“Shall I show you how to turn it on? No, of course not, you are much more intelligent than I.” He hastened back to the door. “And so beautiful. I am so lucky! Until this evening!”
He beamed at me from the threshold. I blushed and blew a kiss, which he caught. Then the front door shut hard.
I lay quite still, trying to recapture the sleepiness I had felt in my first waking moments. Maybe I would feel better if I let the day get a little older, curled up under the covers and induced a nice dream. First I was cold, and all the covers couldn’t warm me, not even when I layered Søren’s duvet over my own and pulled both over my head. Underneath the light was pink and thick.
Then I became frantically hot. The tang of my sweat lodged in my nose. I had last shaved the day before graduation. I fingered the fuzzy hair that had grown in the ten days since and then held my hands under my nose. My sweat was vinegar sharp. Three sticky dried lines demarcated the creases between the rolls of my stomach. I scraped their whitish stuff up with my fingernails and rubbed it between my fingertips until it dissolved into oil.
Farther down was another smell, one I sensed rather than inhaled. The place between my legs. A force, an idea.
I had never settled on a name for it. Mama, ever a nurse, hated the use of “vagina” as a blanket term for the urethra, clitoris, and labia minora and majora. Nicknames like “pee-pee” and “private place” were even worse.
“Your vagina is inside you,” she told me when I was very little. “You can’t touch it without reaching inside, and you don’t pee out of it, and the parts of you on the outside are not your vagina. They have their own names.”
The sex ed books she gave me were written by doctors. One had an exhaustive chart of “common slang terms for primary and secondary sexual characteristics,” which confused more than helped. Maybe they were antiquated; to this day I’ve never heard anyone refer to a woman’s “honeypot” or a man’s “peter.” Their pages were filled with scientific drawings of genitalia interpolated with commonsense explanations of swelling breast buds and involuntary erections.
If these pictures embarrass you, one book suggested, why not draw polka dots, zebra stripes, or other designs on them in colored pencil? Being a little silly will help you to feel more comfortable with these images, and with your own body. But I couldn’t draw on the illustrations. They looked like faces to me.
I liked the books, their dorky friendliness, but they didn’t answer my questions about my own body. What about the excretions on the crotch of my underwear at the end of each day? The books did not explain the white goo that sometimes appeared there. They did not unlock the secrets of the yellowy mucus that occasionally clung in ropes between my body and underpants, nor did they teach me to divine the meaning of the rusty pre-or postperiod clumps streaked with veins of purplish tissue. How to determine whether a given intimate paste was a yeast-infected “yellow-gray” and “foul smelling” as the books warned? My body always smelled interesting to me; even when my stink was unpleasant, it was mine. How could they expect me to call any of these substances I generated discharge?
There was no hope of going back to sleep. I flung off the duvets, walked naked into the bathroom, carefully locking the door with its latch mechanism, like the one at the foxwoman’s, and turned on the dangling showerhead, immediately spraying myself in the face with a torrent of freezing water. I screamed.
The shower took the better part of an hour. I turned it on, wet my hair, turned it off, frothed the shampoo against my skull, realized my hair wasn’t really wet, turned it on again, added more shampoo, turned it off, poured a handful of minty liquid soap into my palm and rubbed it against my body, turned it on again, attempted to rinse. Repeated. The cold water made my skin so slick it was impossible to tell if I had rinsed away the soap. The water warmed only when I finally gave up on my hair.
“Wash between your legs,” Mama used to say when she bathed me. Or sometimes: “Wash your bunny.” That was what she and Dad settled on so he could bathe me without embarrassment—”bunny,” a compromise Mama accepted because it was so cute. I liked it because I liked bunnies generally, but even when I was tiny I understood the difference between my bunny and actual bunnies. When it was his turn, Dad helped me shampoo and soap up my flat torso and then looked politely away.
“Okay, your bunny now,” he’d mutter.
The last days rose around me, a cloud, as I washed my bunny for the first time in Søren’s apartment. I stood engulfed in a new smell, that part of myself newly and rightly used, until it diffused under the water, hot at last.
Sylvie had found the long violet linen dress with the cap sleeves for me in a store called the Blue Bell. When I emerged from the dressing room in it, she gave me a glittering smile. “You look so fantastic, Rox. You look like a motherfucking fox and a half.”
I twirled in front of the mirror, showing her the way the skirt inflated like a giant tulip, and even the shopkeeper came back to admire me.
I wore it that first day alone in Jutland, with all the jewelry I had brought with me. Rose-gold stud earrings, five neon Bakelite bangles, a metal ring that looked like a big cat climbing up my left middle finger. I smeared my lips with red gloss, tidied the room, made the bed, scooped up our dirty clothes from the floor. Domesticity!
The hamper was in the closet, under Søren’s seven hanging shirts and a crunchy gray garment bag that held a three-piece gray suit. When I opened it, the bag released a breath, the last memory of a missing person, and I knew that a woman—Mette, Søren’s ex?—had put it carefully away. I put my hand inside the jacket, feeling as if I were reaching into a body: the entire suit was lined in creamy salmon satin. It bore a hand-sewn label: SAVILE ROW.
I zipped the bag back up and lifted the hamper out of the closet, revealing a gray rectangle beneath. I tried to lift this, too, to see if there was anything under it, but it was surprisingly heavy, a metal lockbox with a complicated lock. The lid wouldn’t budge.
I dropped my clothes in the hamper and went into the kitchen, where Søren had left a French press with ground coffee already in the bottom of the carafe. There was even a note in his hand, which was more extravagant than I had imagined. Tall loops and lingering lines. Boil water in kettle and fill to top line. No salutation, no signature.
All day I made myself busy. I swept the apartment, gathering a palmful of golden grit I threw out the open window. I cleaned the toilet, wiped down the sinks. I took the racks and drawers out of the refrigerator, scrubbed them in hot water, and reorganized all the food in the fridge. I straightened the scanty towels and sheets in the cabinet outside the bathroom.
All day I forced my thoughts from the gray box, from what was inside. This is where I’m living now, I thought. It felt like it would go on forever. That I could.
We quickly established our routine. I woke to the sounds of Søren’s toilette and watched him finish dressing in underwear, socks, pants—the dark green jeans seemed to be his favorite—and a T-shirt beneath a button-down.
Some mornings we had coffee together, but mostly he went straight from the bedroom to the door. “Bye, skat,” he called as he stepped out the door.
“Bye!” I waited for the sound of the door, sealing me inside. I was still waiting for a key of my own, but this seemed a distant concern. From the windows Farsø looked dull, almost static, while the inside of the apartment had become a world unto itself. My world. When he was gone, I brought my cup of coffee and glass of water back into the bedroom and climbed back into the warm bedclothes. Any pleasant time over coffee was a window that closed, creating the room of my hours alone, my real day, which began only after he left.
The first thing I did was head to the toilet to shit copiously. I couldn’t remember a time in my life when I had been so regular. By the fourth day it had become a gleeful ritual. Waking and pouring coffee, yogurt, oatmeal down my throat, waiting for the ingredients to do
their work. Filling up, emptying out, flushing it all down. Sitting there, I was lost again in the world of my body. Søren and I often made love in the night, one of us nudging the other to wakeful action and falling immediately back to sleep after. Some mornings I wasn’t sure if I had dreamed it until I went to the toilet and my unwashed crotch and armpits and feet presented themselves. There was no one to rush me out of the bathroom. I could stay as long as I wanted.
The lunches I made for myself were haphazard and insubstantial. An apple, a single carrot. More yogurt, more oatmeal. Leverpostej, the pork liver pâté Søren bought every week at the slagterbutik, the slaughter boutique, the butcher shop. Slices of cucumber or tomato. Pieces of the ubiquitous rugbrød, the rye bread, toasted in the oven and spread with butter. Each ingredient sped my efficient bowels for an afternoon encore. I had never been any good at dieting, but here I was barely hungry. All I wanted was coffee and air and my thrilling secret life. I waited to become smaller.
I was an animal with elemental needs. After I ate and shat I went back into the bedroom to bring myself off in bed or on the floor, usually more than once. I had always masturbated, but never as much as I did in the apartment. Before I had been furtive, quick, doing it only when I had to, in the shower or in bed right before sleep. At home I rarely came, falling asleep with my hand still on my crotch and waking to my scented fingers.
Now my body was live. It could take me anywhere I wanted to go, and I wanted to go everywhere. The space between my legs became the center of everything, opened like a peeled grapefruit. I soaked my underwear so thoroughly that I had to change after or let it dry for hours against me, birthing another new smell.
I put my fingers inside my body and then in my mouth. I wiped my palm against my labia and rubbed it across my face. I imagined Søren doing it. Hunter. Other men whose names I had forgotten or never known in the first place, nerve magic sparking from head to toe, jumping up and down my spine. I became expert at conjuring it, walking myself right up to the moment when I was about to come, and then begging off by pulling my pubic hair or pinching my thighs. Or I let myself come but didn’t stop, again, again. I did it until my legs shook and the room loosened, until I was dehydrated and bright shocks sparked at the corners of my vision. I came right on our sheets and wiped my face on the pillows.
3
WHEN I TURNED SøREN‘S COMPUTER ON, INCOMPREHENSIBLE WHITE PRINT APPEARED ON A BLACK SCREEN, MSDOS OR DANISH OR BOTH, CEDING EVENTUALLY TO THE DESKTOP. The keyboard was different, too. I had to pay close attention when I e-mailed my parents.
Hey Roxie, How’s it hanging in Gay Paree? Love, Dad
Dear Dad,
Everything is going well. Today Sylvie and I went to see a really old church and tomorrow we will take an overnight trip to Versailles. I tried a new French food called quenelles, kind of a yummy paste-ball, which the guide said are a poached mixture of fish, bread crumbs, and eggs. It sounds kind of gross, but it was really good.
Miss you,
Roxana
I imagined Dad and Mama squinting at the e-mail, sounding out the strange word.
Søren had the Parisian Experience schedule memorized. He walked me through the tours I was missing, the sights I wasn’t seeing. The Paris tour leader was a woman named Signe, whom Søren admiringly called a terrific bitch. I liked the image of Sylvie struggling along behind Signe on some picturesque lane.
I thought I would feel bad about lying to my parents, but I didn’t. If I felt anything it was an echo of the impulse to feel bad, a memory of the idea that lying was wrong. I was just telling a different version of the truth, one that spurred me into fantasies about how far my lies could carry me. I saw myself pregnant, with a child even, Søren’s uncle’s apartment made cozy with colorful curtains. A pot on the induction stove, a Pack ‘n Play, an elegant wooden mobile from one of the housewares shops. Søren read in an imaginary armchair as a child with curly brown hair took his first steps, babbling Danish babyspeak, and there I was at the laptop, still lying to my parents about France.
Hi Mama and Dad,
Today we went to Reims to see the famous Gothic cathedral, where thirty-three French kings were crowned. Wow, it was so beautiful! Sylvie thinks that Notre-Dame is prettier, but I think it’s Reims all the way.
By the time Søren got home from the library each night, between six and seven o’clock, I had transformed myself again. I wiped down the surfaces, did my dishes, washed vegetables, chopped them, put on a nice outfit. For dinner, Søren made hearty dishes—delicious, simple food. My favorite was tomato sauce with ground beef over pasta. On the table he kept the sauce and the pasta in separate bowls. Leftovers went into the fridge like that too, separately, in discrete containers, one of pale starch, one of thick gravy. That was what Søren called pasta sauce: gravy.
Søren cooked beef patties fried in butter. Bacon and eggs. Frikadeller, the pork meatballs he called the national dish of Denmark. Everything was served with potatoes, tiny ones he brought home in clear plastic sacks or fist-size yellow ones from the grocery store. One night he boiled pigs’ hearts with prunes in cream, a dish that looked like purple baseball mitts. My least favorite was a kind of soup of boiled chicken and canned white asparagus spooned into tartlet shells, whose texture reminded me of drool. But I ate whatever Søren put in front of me. I felt so adult standing there with him in the kitchen, drinking red wine from a low glass.
“How was your day?” I asked, like some woman in a movie.
“All right,” he pronounced grimly. “I did some work. Not a waste, I guess.”
“Good!” I arranged my features into what I imagined was wifely transmuted pride. I experimented with pet names for him, tried “darling,” “honey,” “my sweet,” but none of them stuck.
Sometimes I tried to broach the topic of excursions, but Søren didn’t seem hear these inquiries. He just kept speaking, returning always to his thesis argument and his terror that it didn’t make sense.
“My premise is that Ash and other African American writers working in the genre position otherness as a confrontation between known and unknown that is designed to unsettle the imperialist, colonialist, and racist implications of the traditional othering relationship in which other is object and the narrative is controlled by a hegemonically appointed subject. I have good support from Fanon, but it doesn’t work entirely because he was a psychiatrist, not a theorist. Perhaps I can use Lacan, but I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
He smiled weakly. Relieved, I smiled back. His face fell.
“That was a joke! A terrible joke! Because Lacan was a psychoanalyst.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
He swore in Danish and put his face in his hands. “For fanden. What the hell am I going to do?”
I stepped closer, put my glass of wine on the counter, squeezed his shoulder so he would know it wasn’t his fault.
Most nights he rallied after this nadir. Apologized, kissed me. Told me how happy it made him, knowing I was here in his uncle’s apartment while he was out working. Raised his eyes to the ceiling, called, “Thank you, God I do not believe in, for sending this beautiful and patient woman to the saddest man in Denmark!” And he laughed and laughed and I did too.
One night he lifted his head, but instead of speaking to God he spoke to me.
“Roxana, you are my only joy. If this bastard text gets written, it will be thanks to you.” He slipped his hand over mine. “So, given that you are its inspiration, can I ask you to read some of my work?”
His muse! “Sure, but I don’t know if I can help—” His inspiration.
He was already withdrawing his laptop from his bag, lifting its screen. “Just read, please.” He kissed the top of my head, wrapped his arms around my shoulders. “I have translated a bit into English for you. I need your help! Thank you thank you thank you! Tak tak tak!”
He kissed my ears, my cheeks, my forehead. Over and over again, like a little boy. I held very still, wanting it to last as long as possible.
The recently announced death of the author Violet Ash (born Violet Alva Marie Ash in Daly City, California, US, in 1940, died in La Grande, Oregon, US, in 2005) offers a grand opportunity to revisit her novel of 1980, Spirit Home. Despite the novel’s moderated form, one cannot help but feel that the book is the arguably most emblematic fictional work of the African American author of science fiction. The novel is set in early 1980s US, in an era before identity politics had infiltrated intellectual discourse, before the insistence upon multiculturalism had reached Europe, and shortly after the television show Roots reached our screens and redefined the popular cultural narrative of African American experience significantly.
The document was ninety-five pages long. I looked up into Søren’s face.
“What do you think so far?” He asked.
I barely understood it. “It makes me want to read her book.”
He ran out of the room and returned with a paperback. The cover was long gone, leaving the yellowed title page to do its job.
I flipped to the first page, scanned it, and handed the book back to Søren. “Cool.”
He didn’t take it. “Aren’t you going to read it?”
“Right now?” Didn’t he know that was just what you did when people talked about a book they liked—say you wanted to read it, even if you didn’t?
He smiled. “Is there something else you are doing with your days?”
I stared at him.
“Do not be a child about it. Perhaps it is for another time, for you.” He took the book out of my hands.
I snatched it back. “I’m not a child.”
He kissed me on the forehead and took it away again. “It is all right, Roxana. I was only joking. Do not read the book if you do not wish to.”
“I do, though. I do.” I was close to tears.
He dropped the book into his bag. Closed his laptop and took it away too.
“It is not your job,” he said. “It is mine. Perhaps you can read more later. If you want. I am interested in your perspective.” He stretched, cracking the tendons in his neck. “Oh, Roxana, if only I were you! I would understand these things much better.”
Open Me Page 10
