Something happened in the movie and Søren yanked away. His impenetrable laughter fell on me like snow.
Every day in the week before I was to meet Geden for lunch, I made a silent promise. If Søren showed me one ounce of interest, I wouldn’t go. It was an illogical pledge. Why shouldn’t I? Lunch was not infidelity. And the strangeness of Søren’s dislike for Geden made it easy to lie. Besides, he didn’t even know that I had been leaving the apartment.
One of those nights we were at dinner, pushing wilted lettuce across our plates, and I heard Sylvie’s voice. She always knew who and what I wanted before I did. “Do you want to fuck Geden?” The question turned me so red that Søren opened the window in concern, saying, “You wanted a salad,” as if I had complained.
I left the table, went to the bathroom, closed the door, and took off my pants. My feral smell rose to greet me. I conjured Geden’s eyes. Licked from the tip of my pinkie to the knobby bone in my wrist, brought myself off with that.
The next morning we went to the grocery store to buy ingredients for an American dinner I was supposed to cook, Søren’s idea.
“I’ve cooked every night you’ve been here. You’ve had enough Danish food. Do I get an American abroad experience?”
“Ha,” I said. “An American broad experience, maybe.”
He didn’t get it. We paced the aisles with one of the tiny grocery carts that passed for useful here. What was I supposed to cook? Sylvie and I had made obscure French things together: hachis parmentier, tartiflette, magret de canard. Outside of these experiments, I didn’t have much experience in the kitchen. I could produce toast, a grilled cheese sandwich, cereal with milk. Søren wanted baked potatoes, a steak, a hamburger. Tacos.
We trailed through the meats. Ground pork, pork chops thick and thin, the sausage medisterpølse, other, paler sausages. Chicken, steaks. A package of oblong pigs’ hearts. I reached to tap their cellophane wrapper with my fingers and jumped at Søren’s sharp intake of breath behind me. He dropped his hands heavily onto my shoulders, swearing in Danish.
“For helvede, Roxana! I’m starving.”
He let go and walked away. A pack of boneless, skinless chicken breasts stared up at me from the refrigerated case.
Suddenly Søren was beside me again, whispering in my ear. “Pick something, pick something please, please, please, pick something. I’m starving.”
His needs were always so insistent and my own were nothing.
I turned to face him. “I haven’t figured out what I’m cooking yet! Give me a second!”
Søren somehow shrank and became more erect at the same time, as if both embarrassed and smugly confirmed by my behavior. “Please keep your voice down.”
“Who cares?” I made my voice louder. “Honest to God, who cares? No one is listening!”
As if to prove me wrong, an old lady in a sweatshirt slowly shook her head as she made her promenade around the meat cases.
“Why does everyone here act like that?” I asked Søren.
He covered his eyes with his hand. “You are making a scene.”
“Oh, I’m sorry!” I said. “Please excuse me!”
I couldn’t breathe. I would cry. I couldn’t cry. I wouldn’t.
Søren grabbed my shoulder and pulled me close. “What? What are you apologizing for? Everything’s fine.” He said “fine” exactly as Dad did when he was mad. A nothing word, a cold little shrug.
“I just don’t know what I want to buy! I’m not a very accomplished cook! Give me some time!”
Søren took the cart. “Fine, we’ll have chicken tartlets again. Please grab those chicken breasts.” He turned away.
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t cook. Søren? Søren! Talk to me! Søren!”
He whipped around and took my elbow. “We are leaving.”
“But I still want to cook dinner.”
“Be quiet.” He sighed heavily. “You make everything so complicated. I just want to get in and out of here before the entire day is gone.”
Why was he always in such a rush? What else did he have to do? It had been his idea that I cook in the first place. My face was immediately all wet, as if I’d dunked my head in a bucket.
“I need a second to calm down,” I whimpered. “Then I’ll figure it out.”
“Stop it,” Søren whispered, furious, as if this was the worst thing I’d said yet. He began pulling me to the exit.
“No! No!” I cried. “I don’t want to go with you! I don’t!”
The teenage boy sweeping the floor twisted his neck unnaturally just to keep from seeing me. Søren stopped, put his arm around me, drew me close.
“I’m sorry, Roxana.” he said in a low voice, almost kind. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
I looked up into his face. “What are you sorry for?”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” he hissed. “I cannot bear to be here any longer. This is exhausting. Please leave the store before you embarrass yourself further.”
You were supposed to run away from alligators in a zigzag, I remembered, so I zigzagged out of the store. Back out into the day and the cave-like car. I collapsed in the seat, slit my eyes. Søren drew my seat belt over me, clicked it shut.
“What did I do?” I whimpered, suddenly wanting to be small, a child who had misbehaved and could be forgiven.
He set his mouth and looked straight ahead, turned the key in the ignition. “Be quiet. Please just be quiet.”
By the time we got home I felt as flat and blank as a sheet of paper. Søren brushed his lips against my forehead and said he hoped I was feeling better. For dinner, we had chicken tartlets.
The next night Søren brought home a movie he thought I would like, about a poor young girl growing up in a housing project in England. One morning the girl goes downstairs and puts a saucepan of water on the stove. She is dancing alone when a man’s voice surprises her. A shirtless stranger has entered the room. Lithe, muscled, rough. My eyes traced his golden triangle of shoulders, waist, crotch. The Swiss actor from the science fiction movie. The android. She is in her underwear and a purple T-shirt, and he is in jeans only, which sit low on his hips, revealing the incipient curve of his ass. The ridges of muscle in his torso, his flickering arms as they make breakfast. The camera her eye.
Beside me Søren fell asleep, slackening, his breath slowing, his soft lips pressing. His elegant hands unclasped, released.
At a party, the girl steals a bottle of vodka from a couple engaged in the early stages of intercourse in her kitchen. She drinks herself to sleep on her mother’s bed, waking to her mother and her mother’s new friend the lovely man talking beside her. The mother wants to tell her to leave, but the man shushes her, scoops up the girl in his arms, and carries her to her bedroom.
The girl is awake but the man thinks she is asleep.
They pass through the hallway in lush layers of darkness, gray-on-black.
The man’s arms around her, the dark passage of the hallway, her secret wakefulness.
He lays her in her bed. Takes off her sneakers. Rolls down her socks. Gently, gently.
Her body asleep but not, that reverent state in which the form, independent of the mind, seeks to be perceived as unconscious. If he learns she is awake the spell will break. He takes off her pants, revealing modest white underwear. He folds the pants, covers her with a blanket, turns off the light, leaves. That’s all. He’s a good guy, at least for tonight.
The girl opens her eyes in the dark.
Søren’s breath caught in his throat, made a kind of sucking sound.
Sometimes when I watched movies stoned I couldn’t focus. Sometimes I fell asleep and woke, slept and woke, deeper and deeper, until waking up was like dragging myself out of a pit. This annoyed Søren. “Wake up, skat. We are spending time together.”
I wanted what I saw when I let my eyes unfocus and the shapes on the screen went blurry. The contours of his body and the beats of the scenes already inside me, ready for replaying.
; I turned off the movie when Søren was safely asleep. I was tempted to rewatch the scene where the man carries the girl to her bedroom. But instead I rose from the couch as quietly as possible and went into the bathroom, the only room in the apartment with a lock. Not even a lock, really, just the little latch bolted to the door frame. It would do.
I had learned to avoid the mirror when entering the bathroom, to hold my head so I wouldn’t see my unholstered breasts loose hanging above my tummy in Søren’s shirt. Seeing my body would compromise my ability to dream the man. The fantasy was coming together in dissonant, embarrassing points. I had to not think about it too much.
The girl in the movie was thin, with skinny arms, knobby breasts. Even smaller in person, I was sure. But all she did with it was wear those hideous giant sweat suits.
I lay down on the floor and pressed the first and second fingers of my right hand up into my crotch. The bath mat was damp under my head, smelling of mold. I pressed the rise of my pubis, a sustained pat, the way I firmly pressed Mushi’s head, over and over, until his eyes closed. Here. I am here, I thought with each press. I am inside here. Where I live.
I want to go somewhere, I thought.
I had to be careful not to cry.
I pushed again, harder, releasing a flash of wonderful feeling, vibrant and fast. A horse I could ride. I knew where I wanted to go.
During my senior year I had become preoccupied with a different actor. I saw him on an award show and had that same sinking feeling. He was the one for me. Not in real life. In my fantasy life. He had a jagged, angular face and a spare tall body. He was awkward and funny in interviews. His mother, I learned, was a renowned painter with a significant body of work, which made me like him most of all. Son of a strong woman, learner of her worth.
I cut pictures of him from magazines and pasted them in a photo album with a soft blue cover. I took the train into the city with Sylvie to see a movie that would never make it to Creek Grove in which he played a petty criminal, a con man in love with a pretty girl. It wasn’t good, but I didn’t care. All I wanted were the lovemaking scenes.
The whole time I was hung up on that actor I thought: This is the last time. I am in my last year of high school. I am eighteen years old. I will leave school and go to another school in a city, by myself. This is the last time I will clip pictures of a handsome stranger from magazines.
Maybe there was never a last time, only a concerted gap between nexts. I curved the fingers of my right hand between my legs and pulled up, unleashing an arc of pleasure that settled against the flash in a kind of firework. A little one. A starter.
When I was younger it was harder to assemble a world. Fantasizing felt silly, put on. I just pushed and pulled at the approximate location, blank, until I couldn’t breathe anymore and bright flowers blossomed and I blinked around the room, incredulous, and the purple smoke came.
It wasn’t like that anymore, after Hunter. After Søren. I learned that when someone touched me I changed. Every time.
There was a truth here. Søren would not give himself to me as I wanted.
In the bathroom I was safe. Søren could not find me. I wasn’t with him here. I was leaving. I was going somewhere else.
I closed my eyes.
A fancy hotel room. Fluffy towels, marble surfaces, windows full of sparkling sea behind lowered pearl shades.
Behind me, the actor from the movie.
I made the rules. The actor looked at me with cold eyes.
I ran one and two fingers against my clit, and thought what would happen.
He would come to me and take off his jacket, loosen his tie.
He loved the taste of my sweat. The way it collected sour in the crevices of my body.
First he would kiss me. His tongue would paint mine. Our teeth in each other’s way.
He cupped and groped my breasts. His hands diligent, trained, knowing. He would rub his palm up and down the central line of my body, reaching between my legs.
No questions. No conversation.
Him behind, biting the back of my neck. Him on top, hitting me across the face with an open palm over and over again. Solidifying the diffuse pain I swam in, making it solid and real. It felt so good to be seen.
Where were we, back there in the hotel room? On the cold marble floor or in the sheets?
He told me to spread my legs.
To spread them wider. I opened my mouth and was bidden to put my tongue on every part of him. To lick the bottoms of his feet.
When the purple feeling began to smoke inside me—blooms and combustions and exploding bulbs tornadoing up, fierce and terrifying—I sat up and threw my crotch back and forth against the heel of my hand, hard. The purple smoked and I tensed and released and tensed and it smoked and I released. Every lean brought another gust, another wash. Each tensing was complete, crystalline, the fantasy coming together now, complete and determined.
I sat on the actor, breasts aloft, hair wild. He was naked and mine. I rocked back and forth. He looked up at me, helpless, lost, begging to be shown the way.
I leaned and cut a little nick in the shallow, thin skin above his clavicle with something sharp. My fingernail? A knife? It didn’t matter. I opened him with the sharp and blood puddled at the wound. He threw his head back. This was what he wanted, the thing he couldn’t speak. To be opened.
I pressed my mouth to the wound. Tongued the edges of the cut. He climaxed, convulsing like a death rattle. The feeling of him beginning to fill me took me there too.
In the hotel room I coughed, moaned, screamed like I was dying.
In the bathroom I panted and whispered.
He would be gone soon, but it wasn’t over, I was still caught in it, an anemone in a thunderhead. There was one last image before he left. His expression of horrified gratitude.
I threw myself against the tile, slapping my face, frantic to stay high as I fell back down to the bathroom, to the apartment, to Farsø. My life filtering in, my self, the lights coming up after the film.
I spoke the words out loud. “Oh God, oh Jesus, yes, please, hurt me, hurt me. Hurt me.”
When the vision had left me I leaned against the wall, satisfied and sad. I sobbed fiercely for a moment, curling my body in on itself, feeling the vacuum of want inside, the blowsy, ugly place where Søren had left me alone.
“No,” I said, standing on shaking legs, the blood that had rushed to my face at the slaps already leaving me. I could never do it hard enough to leave a mark.
Avoiding my face in the mirror, I washed my hands and went back out into the apartment.
8
THE MORNING OF MY LUNCH WITH GEDEN I PULLED MY LILAC DRESS OVER MY HEAD AND EXAMINED MYSELF IN THE MIRROR. The color still complemented my complexion and the fit hadn’t changed, but the dress was wrong. I couldn’t see or feel it without seeing the faces in its history. Sylvie’s, on the day we had bought it together, and Søren’s, sometime later, taking me from behind in the bedroom with the skirt bundled at my waist.
I stripped the dress off and dropped it on the floor, barely restraining the urge to stomp on it. What would I wear? The rush of practical anxiety was comforting. It had been weeks since I cared.
I dumped my drawer out on the bed and picked through it, vetoing everything with a memory. Not the T-shirt from the Michigan City Corn Roast. Not the maroon skirt with the elastic waistband that Mama brought back from Boston. Not the hard-won jeans I had found after hours of searching. I was left with black pants, a black T-shirt, a black sweater. It wasn’t the prettiest outfit, but it was more important to be free.
The sky was a seasick green. Trees crashed together in the wind. I rounded the bend. Geden stood beside his little beige truck. He saw me, smiled, and waved. I ducked my head, scared that Søren would appear. The pulled-down top of Geden’s coveralls hung at his hips like a skirt. Beneath he wore a close-fitting black pullover. When I came close he said my name, bending the r in his strange way.
“Hi,” I said.
> “Hi,” he aped, as if he had never heard the word before.
We stared at each other. This is a bad idea, I thought.
Geden opened the passenger door. “Please.”
For a moment I was sure I would leave, just turn and go. How could I know this was safe? Then I was in the car. I clicked my seat belt closed, keeping my hand on the buckle like it was a gun. Geden shut my door and walked around back, drumming his fingers on the body of the truck.
A bald man appeared at the margin of the park. My breath caught in my throat. Søren, with his bag and his dark green pants. I closed my eyes and counted, bracing myself. Geden climbed into the driver side, bringing with him his own smell. Woods, sweat, smoke. He had taken off the coveralls and undershirt and now wore only what looked like a pair of black leggings. I gripped my door handle.
“We will go to Viborg,” Geden said. “A medieval capital. A Viking capital.”
“Okay,” I said quickly, trying to take deep breaths. I thought I could see Søren’s facial expression. First, total incomprehension—eyebrows slightly lifted, little mouth forming a question—segueing quickly into baffled anger lit by a victorious sense of offense. My mind spun out, seeking plausible explanations for what I might be doing here in the park at Geden’s truck. There were none. Søren would perceive everything.
Crazily I hoped he would hit me. I wanted some physical proof of his cruelty to show Geden. To show, to explain it.
Geden started the truck and pulled away from the curb. I expected Søren to rush the car, to put himself in its path, bang on the hood. But he did nothing. When I turned to look, he had already passed. Now all I could see was his back. His gait was off, his shoes a garish yellow, his pants gray. It wasn’t him.
The truck careened through a roundabout, barreling out the last exit. Buildings pulled away from the road and we were out in farm country, alongside wide fields. I let myself look at him. A dense black fur covered the center of his slender chest, his shoulders rising over his jutting clavicle. His neck ran up to his face in careful hollows.
I put words in my mouth to fill it. “Do you have a restaurant picked out?”
Geden snorted. I couldn’t tell if it was a form of laughter or an actual snort. “Yes, I have one ‘picked out.’“ He set the words apart with delight.
Open Me Page 16
