Open Me

by Lisa Locascio

  Dear Dad,

  I don’t really know anyone here well enough to go get ice cream together. Other than Sylvie but she doesn’t really like ice cream even. I don’t know. I feel kind of lonely. I’m sure tomorrow will be better.

  I miss you,

  Roxana

  Should I have told Mama and Dad the whole truth? There didn’t seem to be any point, not anymore. I had gone this far, and they hadn’t questioned any of it. They were wrapped up in their own world. They were probably glad I was gone.

  I spent the day on the couch, sleeping and staring at the Internet. My lower back burned with a new pain, as if the inside of my body had graduated, too. I didn’t bother cleaning up in the little ways I normally did, wiping down the counters and washing my coffee cups, and was still in my pajamas when Søren got home after seven. When he walked into the apartment, tall and elegant in his green pants and black shirt, I felt all my disarray at once. My oily face and hair. Every time I moved, the thick pad between my legs gushed.

  “Hello!” Søren jauntily dropped his bag on the couch. Was he humming?

  “I have had a phenomenal day. I discovered a work-around for a problem I’ve been having with the categorization of Ash’s early novels. A breakthrough! Let us celebrate.” Søren took a bottle of red wine out of his bag and went into the kitchen for the corkscrew.

  I heard a drawer slam. “Roxana, are you ill? The kitchen looks as if someone died in here!” He laughed like he had said something funny and set to tidying up.

  All through dinner I let him talk to me about his project, smiling at the right times, as he tossed incomprehensible jargon at me. After dinner we watched three half-hour episodes of a Danish sitcom that made Søren laugh so hard he neglected to translate. I sat with my knees curled into my chest, sipping my wine. If I held very still, I experienced the terrifying sensation that I did not exist.

  When he nodded off I put my hand on his crotch and stroked him urgently. Only now did it seem safe to do what I wanted.

  Søren’s eyes fluttered open. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” I muttered, resisting the urge to skitter my hand away like a spider.

  He exhaled heavily. “Please do not touch me when I am sleeping. And please, when I am sleeping, do not stare at me.”

  What can I do, then? I wanted to ask. “Well, do you want to …?” I tapped his fading erection.

  He sat up. “Please do not be vulgar. I do not feel like it tonight.”

  For the first time since the foxwoman’s, I slept in my pajamas.

  My period lasted a full week, longer than ever before. Every day I approached Søren for sex, and every day I was rejected. One night he was tired, another he was too keyed up from working, a third he had a stomachache. His habit of falling asleep next to me on the couch began to seem willed. I had always wanted to know what it was like to have sex on my period. But we did not. My body did not draw his eyes. I kept bleeding, unpenetrated, and wondered.

  Alone in the apartment, I reveled in my unwashed body. Blood dried in thick stripes on the inside of my thighs and between my legs. Every membranous violet smear on the gritty toilet paper was proof to me that I existed. When it was time to change my pad, I rolled the old one up in the new one’s flimsy wrapper and pushed the little package down to the very bottom of the trash can. All day I flitted from bodily need to bodily need, until the sky took on the purple tinge that meant we were passing into the second, dimmed brightness. When I realized Søren would soon be home, I arranged my hair and carefully washed my hands, working out the crusts of dried blood from my cuticles.

  The day after my period ended I wanted to start fresh with Søren, to be perfect for him. I took a very long shower, scrubbed the crack of my ass and the backs of my thighs with a soaked washcloth. I shaved my legs and armpits, trimmed my pubic hair. I massaged oil into the ends of my dry hair and braided it tightly. For perfume, I rubbed a cut lemon under my ears. I set my eyes in my face like lockets. In the mirror I was an icon, middle part and sharp lines. Who could resist me?

  When I heard his key in the lock, I stretched out on the couch naked. I wanted to look like the odalisque paintings Sylvie and I had been obsessed with one summer. Slave—that was what odalisque meant.

  Søren came in absorbed by the tiny tasks he completed every day upon returning home. His keys went exactly on the corner of the table near the door, his wallet beside them, his bag on one of the chairs at the long table. Without seeing me, he turned to wash his hands in the kitchen sink. I listened to his ablutions, still spread on the couch. He would have to notice me at some point.

  He dried his hands by grabbing the entire roll of paper towels and turning it over with his wet palms and fingers, a habit I hated, and strolled back into the living room, whistling.

  “I had a good day, if you can believe it!” He still didn’t see me. “I figured out—” He saw me. He did not smile. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

  I kept my face pretty. “I was just waiting for you.”

  Søren blinked, turned around, and walked down the hallway to the bedroom. He returned with a dyne and covered me. “You could catch a cold.”

  “What?”

  “If you sit around naked like that, you can catch a cold.”

  What? I wanted to ask again, but I did not. I pushed the duvet down to reveal my breasts.

  Søren looked away. He sat down beside me and patted my thigh through the duvet. “Where’s the control?”

  Another night I waited until we were stoned, leaned over, and kissed him as deeply as I could. Took off my shirt and pants, tried to sit in his lap.

  “Roxana, please!” Søren scooted out from under me. “I can’t see the TV!”

  One morning in bed I touched myself in front of him, spread-eagled on top of the duvet, imagining that my hands were his hands. Søren shifted. I held my breath.

  “What are you doing?”

  I opened my eyes to his horrified face. He began to laugh, awkwardly, awfully.

  By eleven on the day I finally sneaked out, the sun had emerged in full, heat coagulating around me in the apartment. The atmosphere inside had changed. What had been calming, dulcet, like being suspended in clouds, was now claustrophobic and stuffy. But I still had no key and I couldn’t figure out when to ask. Søren had no safe mood. Once he had brought the key up himself, as evidence of his worthlessness, moaning that he had forgotten once again to have it cut. He pulled a throw pillow over his face and screamed into it.

  The apartment, once a place of abundant possibility, now seemed crowded with emptiness, haunted. Søren never came home before five o’clock. Farsø was the deadest place I’d ever been. I could slip out and back in without him ever knowing.

  Take myself out.

  It was so easy. I tied my purple sneakers. Wedged Sylvie’s heart-shaped rock between the door and its frame. Went out, down the stairs. Outside.

  For a moment the light was so bright all I could do was stand, stunned. Time was a blinding elevator and I was in it, going up and down.

  The main road took me to a distant stand of trees. Across the way stood a row of long low buildings Søren had told me housed sick people. I passed three young women in summer outfits, linen tunics and straw hats. An old lady in a little garden raised her trowel in a gentle wave. Two middle-aged men in gray scrubs played chess. It was good to have left, I thought. I could get some fresh air and return home rejuvenated, able to begin the project of figuring Søren out again. I had thought of the apartment as “home,” I realized, and this made me happy.

  I arrived at a large pond. A grove of trees had grown together into a canopy above the water, blotting out the sun, shrouding everything in soft green. Moss grew on the surface of the water like a reflection of the trees. A little red shack stood at the pond’s far edge. I circled the water, admiring the flowers that dripped from tree branches and flowed up from the ground, bright paint smudges on the bushes and dirt. Even the close-buzzing bee that would have sent
me into a panic back in Creek Grove did not lessen my pleasure.

  Three teenagers arrived at the park. Two girls with sipping-straw legs, skinny all the way down. A blonde and a dyed redhead. Half of the blonde’s hair was up in an ornate bun, and the rest fell past her shoulders in loose ringlets she had made with a curling iron. The redhead’s was shellacked into a stiff chignon. Both wore short shorts, white on the blonde, dark blue on the redhead. Polite breasts rose beneath their spaghetti-strap tops. The boy was good-looking, with a swoop of honey-colored hair, big eyes surrounded by dense black lashes, a long lean torso under his gray T-shirt. He reminded me of Hunter.

  Their conversation fluted across the pond to me. I had made the goal of having brief Danish conversations with Søren over breakfast, but he never showed much enthusiasm for teaching me. “Just find some videos on the Internet,” he suggested, but it made me too sad, lying in bed, watching people enunciate Danish words on a tiny computer screen while outside real Danish people spoke real Danish.

  I stood behind a bush so the teenagers wouldn’t see me. How old were they? The girls’ makeup and push-up bras made it hard to tell. The boy, lanky and beardless, could have been fourteen or eighteen. They continually swapped their cans of soda. They made faces and laughed, touching each other often, contact disguised as necessity or accident. The boy leaned over too far and dropped his head into the redhead’s lap. The redhead tried to fix the blonde’s hair and ended up stroking her shoulders instead. The blonde played a game in which the boy had to lay his hands atop hers, palms up, and wait. He won if he pulled away before she slapped him. She won if her slap landed, and she won again and again.

  I had played these games. Not the hand-slapping game but the real game. Playing at wanting each other. I looked hard at the teenagers. Which one did I want? The blonde had better legs, the redhead better breasts. The boy would be awkward and shy. I imagined kissing each of them, somewhere else. In a bar, where I would discover they were underage and have no choice but to take them safely home.

  The teenagers played on, oblivious. The girls began to casually hold hands for the boy’s benefit. Then he took their hands, too, and the three of them sat there like it was a prayer circle. It wouldn’t be long now. Soon they would stroke each other’s arms or ankles, unleashing what had been waiting all along. A kiss, eyes closed, for the third to watch.

  Watching was making me too sad. I left the park and headed toward the home for invalids. Watched my purple sneakers walk in zigzags, lifting my arms into wings. Where would I go, if I could? Back?

  I closed my eyes and tried to conjure Sylvie’s face, her smell. My left foot fell and I tripped into the street, my eyes opening too slowly, my hands flying automatically out in front of me. A sharp pain jolted my chin. I was bleeding.

  A pair of black steel-toed boots appeared. A man, his face blacked out by the sun, spoke to me in Danish.

  “I’m sorry.” I held my hand to my chin. “I don’t—”

  “Are you all right?” The accent was different from Søren’s. I still couldn’t see his face. He dangled his hand like bait on a fishing line and I took it. It was hot and dry. I tried to stand with one hand still on my chin, but couldn’t. I started to apologize. The man shook his head, grabbed my wrists, and pulled me to my feet.

  He took my head in his hands and turned it. “A scratch.”

  From between his wrists I saw him properly. He was tall, with curly black hair that grew down into a short beard. The lowered front zipper of his coveralls revealed more hair bubbling above an undershirt. His eyes were steely and still as he let me go. Geden. The Goat. Did he recognize me?

  “Thank you for helping me. I’m Roxana.” I extended my hand.

  He ignored it. “You must be careful when you’re walking.”

  “My eyes were closed.”

  He cocked his head. “Why?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why were you walking with your eyes closed?” He reached for my hand, lifting it. More an embrace than a handshake. “No matter. They call me Geden, but it is not my name. Be careful when you walk, Roxana.”

  He looked as if he would say something else, but instead he turned, climbed into his truck, and started the engine, winking as he pulled away. I sat back down on the pavement, dazzled. He had touched my hand, looked in my eyes. He had lifted me. More importantly, I had stood.

  You can choose, I repeated to myself until the words held no meaning. You can choose you can choose you can choose you can choose …

  6

  AFTER THAT I WALKED TO THE POND EVERY AFTERNOON, HOPING I MIGHT SEE GEDEN. Fall in front of him again. I daydreamed of sustaining a worse injury. Requiring his care.

  I perimetered the park, entered it. I looked for him and didn’t find him, and I kept looking. I sent my desire out into the day hot as a knife passed over a flame. My power grew threefold as I walked farther and farther, into the declining violet light, not caring who saw me, not minding the looks I got when I ordered ice cream or bought bread in plain American English, my want for Geden emanating from me like a directional fever. You don’t know who you’re dealing with, I thought, hissing air out my nose at the Danes.

  It surprised me to discover I was angry at them. So precious with their tax money. The young people in Farsø all looked sickly to me, pale and snot nosed, clad in ensembles of tracksuits and cheap Tshirts sporting poorly translated English phrases. PARTYING IS LIFE WITH THE BULL SHIT CUT OUT read one meek little girl’s black tee, beneath a photo of a woman on her knees.

  Then one meltingly hot day I finally saw Geden again. I was about to go back to the apartment when I spotted him walking toward the stand of trees on the other side of the pond. I froze and crouched behind a bush, sure that if I made a careless noise the sound would travel the distance and drive him deeper into the woods.

  Geden walked like no one I had ever seen, his feet meticulous, each step plotted and yet utterly natural, something long and shiny in his left hand. When he reached the edge of the woods, I almost called out, but instead I ran for him, putting the scream into my breath. Be with me, I thought. Want me. He turned his head for just a moment and I lost my nerve at the sight of that sharp profile, those questing eyes. I ducked behind a tree. When I looked again he was gone in the green.

  My socks and shirt were soaked with sweat, my head full of buzzing. The hair on the back of my neck and arms stood as if drawn by a current. Bring him to me. His head on a plate, I thought before I could stop myself. And then I felt guilty, and then I felt good. I rustled the leaves, hoping he’d return.

  When he did not, I walked to the mall in Farsø and bought the biggest ice cream the hot dog stand sold, pointing at the picture of a vaffel is, twelve balls of ice cream stuffed into a waffle cone, topped with a flødebolle, meringue cream on a wafer covered in dark chocolate, and a scoop of the strange pink froth called guf. I ate it like I hadn’t tasted food in weeks.

  That was the first night I didn’t try to seduce Søren. It was such a relief.

  What had gone wrong between us? Was it something I had done, or had his newness worn off in a month? His fine slim body and pale eyes, that way he had of drawing me close with one quick swoop of his long arm. That was the only touch he had for me now, other than a dutiful peck in the morning and before bed.

  Thoughts of sex swarmed me. I’d be out on one of my walks, staring into the storefronts on the street that served as Farsø’s downtown, and the want would come on all at once, overwhelming.

  I wanted and wanted and wanted. I masturbated three and four times a day, bringing myself off so hard that my legs shook and cramped and my ankles ached and I struggled to keep from crying. Five times. Six. I slept and lived in the same pair of leggings and underwear for days at a time, coming in my underwear so frequently that the combination of my clothes and my body began to produce a completely new smell, a rich pre-rot. A dare for Søren, a lure for Geden. Come smell me, I thought. Come to my smell.

  I luxuriated in my unwa
shed body. Once I had planned every outfit for every day of the sixty we were to spend in Paris. Sometimes two, day and evening both. Now, when I took down my underwear to pee, I had to peel the sticky fabric away from my skin. When I smelled myself I thought of Mama doing laundry. Sylvie walking through a museum in a brand-new dress. I lay supine and spread, waiting to be given a reason to move.

  I needed more information. At dinner I took a deep breath and pitched my voice as casual as I could. “Søren?”

  “Mm.”

  “Do you remember that day we went to Fyrkat?”

  He rolled his eyes, expecting sentimentality. “Of course.”

  “You remember how on the way there we saw that man? The one you said was called Goat?”

  “Geden.” He didn’t even bother to make eye contact.

  I made my voice light. “How do you know him?”

  He took a bite, chewed. Frikadeller again. “I know him as everyone in Farsø knows him. He has been in this miserable little place a long while.”

  “And he’s not nice?”

  Søren sighed and put his fork down. “The man cannot be bothered with anyone other than himself. The things I hear about him have served to bolster this impression.”

  I cut my meatball in half, halved the halves, halved the halved halves. How long could I keep going? Could I cut until the frikadeller simply disappeared?

  “What kind of things?”

  “Stories. Apparently as a teenager he reported his neighbor’s dog. A pit bull. It is against the law to own one. Their jaws can lock, and if they attack a child, not a pretty picture. But Geden’s neighbor’s dog was sweet, not very large. Little children lived in the house with it and it never did them any harm. He did it out of sheer spite. To hurt them.” Søren gulped his beer. “The other things are only rumors, I suppose, but rumors of this sort tend to be true. He has some minor underworld involvement, works off the books. Dodges his tax liability, which is infuriating. Bosnians are lucky in Denmark. They look European. Until they speak, no one knows they are different. They take advantage of that.”