Open Me
Page 7
“College is subsidized by taxes. Once you are admitted, there are few fees. You have already paid.”
I swallowed my beer, swallowed again, and again, until I was just swallowing saliva. My first tuition bill had come in the mail right before I left home. $25,784 for tuition and room and board for the fall semester. On top of that Mama and Dad would have to pay two hundred dollars for “tuition refund insurance.”
“So it begins!” Dad said, draining his lemonade. “So it begins. Oh, Christ.” When I asked what tuition refund insurance was, he said, “It means we’ll get our money back if you chicken out.” He had refilled his glass, adding whiskey this time.
Søren was still talking. “I was desperate for work. It is very difficult to be hired in Copenhagen, and my only experience was working in a fast-food restaurant in Hummingen. It seemed a miracle when my father e-mailed that a friend of his had work for me. She had just founded a new company named International Abroad Experiences and was looking for tour guides. She hired me on the spot. She is an American, the one with whom you spoke, I believe. Jennifer Lindsey.” He stood suddenly and inclined his head. “Bring your beer.”
I followed him out to the recessed area in front of the bar. Søren took two cigarettes from his pack with his lips, lit them both, and passed one to me. I put it slowly to my mouth, trying to mask my eagerness to taste his spit. He inhaled contentedly. When I tried to do the same, the smoke came into me fast and toxic. I heaved.
Søren didn’t seem to notice. “I learned shortly after I took the job that this woman was my father’s lover, the person who led directly to the end of my parents’ relationship. And I believe there was no bureaucratic issue with your trip. Jennifer’s daughter Kelly decided that she wanted to go to Paris. So Jennifer canceled your enrollment and gave you this free trip as a sort of consolation prize. That is why you are here. Now that I know you and see what a wonderful person you are, I cannot stand the lie. I am sorry you did not go to Paris. I wish I could fix this.”
“You think I’m a wonderful person?”
His face so earnest. “Yes, of course. A wonderful person. A beautiful woman.”
My hand twitched around the cigarette. Sylvie and I had planned to try Gauloises in Paris. Instead, this was my first time smoking. I inhaled, his words unfolding in my chest—beautiful, he thought I was beautiful, what with my lovely hair and everything—and exhaled, giddy, feeling like a dragon. I was drunk again, somehow.
“I think your cigarette is finished.”
I let the burning filter fall and ground it under the heel of my boot. Søren took another drag and blew the smoke out, considering.
“Okay,” he said.
I opened my mouth to ask what he was agreeing to and he pulled me against his chest, pushing my face up to meet his, his tongue forging into my mouth. When it was over I was afraid to look at him.
He touched my face. “So now you will tell me if you want to kiss me back, or if I am an asshole who should take you home immediately.”
I couldn’t find words.
He grew serious. “Please forgive me if this has been a grave miscalculation, Roxana. I do not want to do anything that would make you uncomfortable.”
I tilted my head back and kissed him. Søren held me at my waist.
“Well,” Søren said, after. We looked away and back again. “I will buy you another drink.”
“Sure.” The word floated away from me, a balloon.
We walked back into the bar, not touching, our bodies moving in a charged sphere. When my beer was almost empty, Søren dropped his arm on my shoulders, loosely, casually.
“Søren,” I said, settling into his arm. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But Jennifer Lindsey had an affair with your father?”
“She destroyed my parents’ relationship. Or maybe not. When people are together for a long time, sometimes they simply tire of each other, not because they do not love each other. Love itself can be tiring.”
It was a nicer way to think about what had happened between Mama and Dad. He stroked my neck. I bit my bottom lip to keep from moaning. How confusing to feel the pain of what I had lost alongside the pleasure of this new thing.
“But still. It must be hard to work for her, right? Is she still involved with your father?”
Søren laughed. “Certainly not. She has been through many men since him. He might have been her first Dane, but he was not the last.” He thought about it. “Probably he was not even her first Dane.”
I let my arm float close, closer to Søren’s, until they touched and vibrated hotly.
“Enough about her.” Søren tightened his grip on my shoulder. “How are you?”
“I need water. Can you ask the bartender?”
Søren called out and the man placed a short tumbler of water on the bar. I downed it in one gulp and pushed it back for a refill, but he was gone.
“Is something wrong?” Søren asked, as if alarmed that anything should displease me.
“Normally when I’ve had this much to drink, I try to drink about a gallon of water before I go to bed.” I blushed on the last word. With the exception of my night with Hunter, all the drinking I had ever done had been with Sylvie. Drinking so much water had been her rule.
He smiled dangerously. “That will not happen here, I am afraid. We are on the metric system.”
I kissed him. Shorter than before, a neat press of lips. He was so warm.
Søren kneaded his hat. “I want to ask you something.”
“Shoot.” I inverted the glass over my face. Shook it.
“You want water.” He inhaled sharply. “At my apartment I have water. A tap, and many glasses.”
My body flared. I couldn’t look at his face. Søren balled his hat up in one hand and pressed it into the other, as if he were trying to make it disappear. I stared at the bar, trying to stop blushing.
“I am really trying to get fired, I suppose,” he said.
“Let’s go.” I pushed back from the bar and turned to face him. I waited while he put his hat back on.
“I will take you back to Birthe’s, after,” he vowed, avoiding my eyes.
“Let’s go,” I said again, my wounded hand throbbing.
4
HIS APARTMENT WAS ONE LONG WHITE ROOM. A miniature refrigerator stood in one corner, a little tower of appliances stacked on top: a microwave beneath a hot plate beneath an electric kettle. The bathroom was a half space, the toilet crammed so tightly between the sink and the wall that I feared I wouldn’t fit if I had to pee. I sat at a small blond wood table beside the refrigerator, drinking delicious cold water from a tall glass. In the far corner were a closet, a little stand, and a piece of furniture I tried not to look at or think about. A low white double bed.
When my glass was empty, Søren refilled it. After I had drunk one and half of another, he spoke.
“I apologize for complaining about Jennifer. It was inappropriate. Especially in front of a client.” I tried not to be hurt that he called me a client. “It is easy for me to forget that my father also decided to have an affair with Jennifer. Who can say what causes anyone to do anything? Maybe my parents’ relationship had run its course. Maybe the task of raising me had exhausted them, taken them out of love.” Søren cracked his knuckles. “Relationships fall into a kind of loop. The loop itself is not a bad thing, it can be a loop of joy and excitement, but if you are not conscious of it, the loop comes to define everything you do together, your whole life with the other person, everything you produce, every failure you endure, every project you complete. Joy and excitement do not last forever. More often than not the loop sours. If you are lucky it sours to pleasant boredom. Pleasant boredom, I think, is the best you can hope for in the end.”
“That sounds awful.”
“I agree. Perhaps this is why I am single. But pleasant boredom is better than many things. Miserable boredom, for example. Or constant fighting, the kind that never really ends but is only turned up and
or down in volume. Your days become a fog. A sort of haze hangs over the house. You speak polite as strangers, thanking each other for salt and towels, and even then, more likely than not, the facade rips away and the two of you are yelling, furious, ready to hurt each other in every way, and you can’t even remember why. You walk swaddled in red cloth, your face shrouded in anger, feeling your way along the wall. But when you find the other person, when you touch them, the feel of their body and the sound of their voice is terrible to you, grating, gritty. Hideous, as if you have eaten garbage.”
I touched his arm with my fingertips. “That’s what it was like with your parents?”
He nodded. “And Mette. My ex-girlfriend.”
It was remarkable—how jealous I could be of this person who yesterday I hadn’t even known existed.
Søren cleared his throat. “I admire my parents for knowing well enough to split up. It would have been worse for them to stay together out of some sense of obligation.”
“That’s a very generous way for you to think.”
His expression softened. “It is the way I must think. I love my parents.”
“I love my parents too.” They would never act the way yours did, I wanted to tell him. I saw Mama’s and Dad’s faces. Every happy moment of my life ran together into a great cloud of time, floating away from me. They had aged, I realized, had lost something they would not recover in raising me. Had given it freely to me.
“Roxana.” I was crying. Søren came around to my side of the table, put his hand over my ear, and pressed my face into his stomach. He smelled of smoke and soap. “Why are you crying?”
I liked that he did not tell me not to cry. I sniffled into his shirt, laughing at myself. “I’m sad about my parents’ divorce.”
He lifted my chin so that he could see my eyes. “I understand. Believe me, I understand. You must take my word for it. Someday, when you think of this pain, it will be with tenderness for yourself. You will see how the pain became part of you, a part you would not change for anything.” His voice rushed into my skin, my bones.
“I’m scared that love isn’t real.”
“I felt that way, once. I remember. The feeling is not that love is not real, but that it is impossible.” His eyes were kind, his hand was warm and dry under my chin.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“I am older than you,” Søren said, stroking my face. “I offer you what I have learned. Love is real. But it can end. That is what makes it precious.”
I wanted to argue with him, to tell him that true love lasted forever. But I had no evidence to support my claim. There was only one way to silence the ringing in my head. I kissed his shirt and the top of his jeans and his belt buckle and lifted his shirt and found his lower stomach, flat and furry, and kissed him there. He made a sound in the back of his throat. His hands on my shoulders, he hooked his fingers under my arms and pulled me to my feet. Arranged me so that my neck, shoulder, and collarbone made an uninterrupted expanse of skin. His tongue on my throat took my balance, made me limp. His mouth oscillated between my collarbones.
He came up for air, holding me a little away from him. I felt his eyes travel up and down my body.
“You have no idea, do you?” Søren asked.
“Excuse me?”
“A lovely and amazing woman comes to town from a faraway land, into the life of a sad and lonely man. Over their first beer together, she tells him about an evening when she wanted to make love, but the man, the boy, could not deliver. An evening when she was sixteen years old and undoubtedly lovelier than any woman whom that boy will ever meet for the rest of his life. Then the beautiful young woman gets so drunk that she lunges at the sad and lonely man and he has to take her home and go very quickly home himself so that”—he dragged his tongue down my throat—”nothing bad happens.”
I gasped between my legs.
“And then, the next day, the lovely woman spends all day with the lonely man, as if there is nowhere else she would rather be.” He lifted my chin to access the skin under my jaw and with his tongue painted stripes from the tip of my chin to the top of my shirt.
“I didn’t know you felt that way,” I said, squirming wonderfully at his touch.
“Really? You did not intend to seduce me? I do not believe you.”
We tumbled onto the floor, him landing on top, one knee propped between mine. Every few minutes he pulled away and peered at me as if he couldn’t believe I was there. I couldn’t believe I was, either.
On one such break I gathered my courage and pressed my hand against his erection. “Roxana,” Søren warned, jolting.
“Kiss me.” I held his gaze. When I moved my hand his eyes went soft. I unzipped his fly as his mouth worked against my neck and felt him through his underwear. We continued like that until Søren rolled away panting and stretched out beside me.
“I am not sure this is a good idea.”
His doubt stung. “Why not?”
“Do not misunderstand me, Roxana. Of course I want to make love to you. Quite badly.” His hand floated over my body. He forced it back to his side. “But we have already gone far past the realm of appropriate conduct on my part.”
I smiled. “I won’t tell on you.”
Søren rolled onto his side and took my face in his hands. “Roxana, it is not just this. I already feel strongly for you. If we do this, it will not be the same after. I will want to be with you.”
My veins lit up with blood and burned and sang. There was a fluttering in my chest. “So be with me.” He glared at me, trying to resist. I took his hand and kissed it. “Please. I want you to. I want to be with you.”
“Very well.” He helped me to my feet. We walked to the bed and faced its white expanse.
“I’m not a virgin,” I reminded him.
Søren looked at me tenderly. “It will be our first time.”
So many times I had imagined how it would happen, how I would get to be in this place, the close place, the sex place, the space of nudity and bodies together, rotating in whichever face, but all I had to go on were movies and television and books, dreams and the playground with Hunter. Nothing real. None of it shimmered. But now it was me. I was the shimmering thing.
“I want you to take off my clothes.”
Søren undressed me as carefully as he had at the museum, folding each piece of my clothing into a rectangle on the floor. I was there and I was not. I was in my mind, where I had so long dreamed this, taking orders from the shape of my fantasies. He took the bottom hem of my shirt in his hands and I automatically raised my arms. He unbuttoned my jeans and I stood so he could pull them down, which he did delicately, his hands lingering on my thighs.
When I wore only my green underwear and purple bra, Søren turned his back to me and removed his own clothes. I felt whited out, on the verge of an ecstatic disappearance. His shoulders were narrow, his arms long; his chest was sprinkled with dark hair. Had the hair on his head been the same color? He wore tiny light blue briefs.
I felt shy when he turned back around. “You look nice.”
“Thank you.” Søren lay down on the bed and pulled me up so that we faced each other and kissed my hands. “You are so beautiful.”
Every part of my body he touched made it true. He licked my neck, my back, my stomach, down across the tops of my thighs. My vision flashed white. I couldn’t catch my breath. I flattened my palms against his hot skin. We found our way back to the same embrace as before, arms around each other, our cheeks hollow from kissing.
His hand alit on my bra clasp. “May I?”
I nodded and my breasts fell from my bra, heavy and warm. I turned my head to hide my face under my hair. Then his hands were on me, gentle, and I never wanted any other kind of touch ever again.
“You’re flushed,” he murmured. “Blushing. This is the word, yes? Blushing.”
“How can you tell?” I put my hands on his head, felt its heat, the busy movement inside. “You can’t see my face—”
I yanked my underwear down and kicked them into a green curve on the floor.
He stood and hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his briefs, looking away as if it hurt to be seen. The first man who had ever stood naked in front of me. I had seen pictures, films, of course, but this was different. How weirdly busy his parts were in comparison to the neat simplicity of a woman’s body. I reached to feel the underside of his purplish head, wanting to tongue the fine seam that bisected it from tip to hilt, and Sylvie’s face appeared, obscuring Søren’s body, split by the wide grin that came with her high laugh. I could almost smell her lemons and honey.
Søren leaned into me, pushing Sylvie away. He climbed back onto the bed and held me, bunching the covers between us.
“Shh, little Roxana,” he said. “Shh. You make me shake.”
“I like that,” I said, and we laughed.
He took a deep breath and kissed my body again, this time not stopping at my waist but going straight down to my pubic hair, pressing his face into it, his hands on my hips. I lay back, burning with shocks of fear as he put his mouth on me.
This was it, then. This was why everything had happened.
He lapped at me and I stared at the white ceiling, beginning to understand. Pleasure could be mine, could go from being untouchable as an ancient ship to something real that happened between my legs, passing from the mouth of a person I barely knew into my body. If I’d only known it was possible to feel this way, that the feelings I could conjure alone on my own body could enter this higher, finer evolution, every moment of my life might have been easier. Every pain bearable, every disappointment manageable.
I bucked and roiled under his tongue and lips and face, falling through a collapsing series of rooms, one into another after another after another, into a shapeless, wonderful bottomlessness. Like a scene from a cartoon. Clocks and books and furniture floated around me as I went down, down, down and eventually landed softly on some dim, warm floor.