In the morning I awoke stunned, lazy with grief, alone in bed. Had my pilgrimage to the front room been a dream? The light moved across the wall, unyielding. I forgot and then remembered that it was possible to see Geden, that he was not just a dream.
When I looked at the clock, it was almost twelve thirty. If I wanted him, I would have to be quick. There was no time for a real shower. I walked to the bathroom, climbed up onto the sink, propping my ass on the lip, which creaked under me. I was both afraid and hopeful that it would break, permanent damage to Søren’s uncle’s flat: proof that I had been here, proof that I had existed.
But the sink held my weight. I spread my knees and washed between my legs with Søren’s big yellow bar of soap. Another old trick from Mama. She called it rinsing out your undercarriage. My smell formed a kind of mist, stronger than the hot water and soap. It was all around me. I scrubbed hard, trying not to cry.
I did my hair in twin braids, put on my black clothes. Left.
The day was bright and hot. I had walked to the park in a rush, and now I was sweaty and panting in front of Geden, not the vision I had hoped. He sat eating a sandwich on the lowered back of his truck: bare chested, his coveralls puddled down around his waist.
“Roxana.” He said my name completely differently from Søren. A precise and shallow x, like a sigh.
“Hi.”
“How nice to see you.”
“Yeah.” I looked over his head at the back of the truck cab.
“Or perhaps not.” Geden ate the last bite of his sandwich. Drank long from a chrome thermos and offered it to me.
I shook my head and he put the thermos down.
“It is.” I reached for the hand that had held the thermos, curled it around my hip.
He gave a pleased little grumble. “Would you like to sit down?”
“No thanks.” I felt so twitchy.
He considered me. “Would you like to come sit in my truck?”
I tried and failed to exhale.
Geden put his hand on my arm. “Breathe,” he said. “Take a breath.”
I shook my head, staring at the trees, trying not to feel.
“Breathe.”
I opened my mouth and filled my lungs.
“What’s wrong?”
I looked down. “Søren is very unhappy, I think.”
“I do not know if he has ever been another way.”
I laughed shakily. “I wish I had known.” Tears came and I twisted my head away.
“Roxana, it is not my business, but you are so upset. Has he hurt you? Hit you?”
“No. No. Of course not.”
Geden took his hand away, leaving a damp spot on my arm. I missed it already. “Then why are you here, crying?”
I wiped under my eyes. “I want to go to your house.”
“What do you want to do there?” It was like a question on a test. I summoned the courage to meet his eyes.
“Take off your clothes.”
Geden put his hand to my face, his thumb under my jaw. He smelled of earth and plants, high summer, grassy and clean. I closed my eyes. He held his hand against my forehead, as if I had a fever. “You want to take off my clothes.”
I held his gaze. “Yes.”
“And to get away. From Søren, from Farsø. To forget.”
“No.”
“Then why?” He looked genuinely curious.
“I think about you,” I said. “I don’t even know your real name, but I think about you all the time. I have since the first time I saw you. Do you remember when we first saw each other?”
Geden looked at me evenly, his lips slightly parted. In his mouth waited his white, white teeth. In the dark.
“When you fell.”
I pressed my fingertips to his mouth. “No.”
His eyes slid back. “The window.”
“The window.” I nodded, hoisting myself onto the back of the truck.
His hands were at my waist. I intertwined our fingers, pulled him closer. I leaned forward, limned his ear with the tip of my tongue for just a moment. Felt him squirm under me, his breath catching.
“My home is just another place,” he said, almost whispering, apologetic.
“I leave Denmark on Saturday,” I said, pressing my hand into his mouth.
He pursed his lips against my fingers, stricken. “You will come now?”
I took my hand away. What would it mean to really leave, to disappear like that? I needed a little more time. One more night. “Tomorrow.”
He nodded. My body filled with a thick energy.
I lifted myself out of his lap with the same move I used to love at the pool, both hands on the deck. A simple push up and I was out. On the ground, a shining black lizard scampered into the sun and held itself there.
Søren was waiting for me, a straight-backed zombie on the couch. He wore his black knit cap like the Søren I had met in Copenhagen. I felt a pang. Then I felt nothing.
“Hello,” I said. He didn’t respond.
I walked down the hallway to the bedroom thinking I would pack, but of course I wouldn’t. I’d have to come back, but I could figure that out later.
Søren’s gray lockbox was open on the bed, its contents strewn everywhere, a sight so at odds with his careful sense of order that for a moment I worried that the apartment had been broken into. But only the box was open. Nothing else had been disturbed.
There were no weapons or drugs, no banded stacks of bills. Just photographs, a small pile for such a large box, in a variety of shapes and styles that traced a backward progression of cameras. The first were washed out, color but sepia in mood, round edged. There was a run of oddities, ovals, squares, black-and-white snapshots that looked as if they had been cut out by hand. Then a dense stack of Polaroids, their white edges still crisp, and finally a collection of the slick, oversize prints I remembered from my own childhood.
The first was of a little blond boy standing in a field in front of a wire fence. Brown ground littered with patches of snow. The boy was not smiling. He wore a stiff khaki jacket, green corduroy pants, an oversize no-color knit hat over long hair. Was it Søren? I held the picture close to my eyes until the boy’s face, smaller than my thumbnail, dissolved.
In the next photograph—round at the edges—a tall woman and a short man stood stiffly beside each other in ugly, handmade-looking clothes, a mustard-colored vest and highwaisted trousers on the man, a dun sack dress on the woman. It had been taken in a banquet hall with cheap wood paneling along the lower half of the walls and sparse decorations strung halfheartedly across the barren stucco of the upper. A card table stood behind them. An unflattering halo of thick, curly hair around the woman’s head, a pale fall on the man’s shoulders. Their hands hung at their sides, so close it seemed they were touching. But when I looked again I saw that they were not.
The rest of the round-edged photographs continued the story. The blond boy appeared with the man and woman or more often just one of them. They stood in a forest, holding walking sticks. They waited in line at a restaurant, the boy dressed in a green jumper. Usually it was only the boy and the woman. Her clothes got uglier as the years went on.
In the Polaroids the boy was an adolescent, nearly always alone. He had clearly taken them himself. In one he wore a stiff white shirt open over a pink tank top, a black chain around his neck, his face concerned, devout. In another he was in a bright red soccer uniform. In the next he wore a plaid flannel open over a white T-shirt. He had let his hair grow. Like the man’s it was lank and blond. He looked into the camera with an expression of rage and expectation, his brows like wings over his dark gray eyes. By the last of the Polaroids, his long hair was already thinning on top, bits of scalp showing through fine, scanty strands.
I took a ragged breath and went on. A stack of school portraits, Søren with a series of unfortunate haircuts. In the standard-size photos he appeared with a girl who wore a high yellow bun and dressed in ill-fitting outfits like the ones his mother had worn
in his childhood. They were together in a run of ten images, standing in front of gloomy buildings, holding hands across a small table strewn with empty glasses, hugging, a tower rising behind them. Then she disappeared. Søren alone atop a frozen makeshift throne of snow, laughing, his hair completely gone.
A statuesque woman with short bleached hair appeared. Mette, the girlfriend who had decamped for a nursing career in Norway. The pictures of them together outnumbered all the others combined. I flipped through them like playing cards, unwilling to let my gaze settle.
When I looked up, Søren stood watching me, his body a line in the doorway. For a moment I could see inside him, under his clothes and under his skin, into his organs, to the place where he was only component parts.
I let the photos fall out of my hand. Stacked them back inside the box.
“Roxana, can I ask you a favor?”
As if he didn’t see what I was doing. “Yes.”
“Will you read the opening of my thesis? I have translated a new version today.”
The way he avoided my eyes; it was like he knew. I followed him out of the room to the table, where his laptop awaited. I wanted to tell him again that I didn’t know anything about what he was writing about. I didn’t want to read his thesis. It wasn’t my job. I couldn’t fix it for him. A mistake couldn’t give good critical feedback, could she?
But I would do this thing for him, I decided. Not because it was owed but because it was something I could give. I sat down and opened the computer.
The file was open, titled, but there was nothing typed. I scrolled through empty pages, my pulse quickening. Had I somehow deleted it? Panic moldered, held me.
“Where is it?” I asked.
I felt rather than heard his reply. “I have deleted it all.”
I turned to face him. “Why would you do that?”
It seemed his face could not form an expression. “I hate who I’ve become,” he said. “A whiny lonely mess. I did not use to be like this.”
How could he be so lonely when I had been there suffering with him?
“I have nothing,” he said, almost philosophically. “I live in a place that has no use for me among people I don’t understand. And being with you, Roxana—”
He raised his light eyes. Once he had given me that light, his newness, the idea that there was another way to be. That I was that way.
“I’m always reminded how little I have in my life, being with you. Because I am alone even in your presence. The older I get, the harder that is to deal with.” He grimaced. “But hey I made this bed of mine I guess. That is a phrase, yes? In America.”
There was no end unless I chose one.
“Good.” I closed the laptop and pushed it away from me. “Good job.”
ARDEN
1
THE LITTLE TRUCK WAS IN ITS USUAL PLACE ON THE ROAD BEHIND THE PARK. I tapped the window.
He turned, smiling, and opened the door. “Hello,” he said.
Geden, the Goat, I thought, trying and failing to hear the soft d in my head. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t pronounce the word.
He pulled away as soon as I shut the door, not waiting for me to buckle my seat belt, and for long moments I struggled to secure it. Then it finally clicked shut and I released a sigh of relief so loud I almost apologized.
I shut my mouth. I was done apologizing.
We left town, heading straight into the fields. The sound of road under tires filled the truck.
“How are you?” Geden spoke without turning his head.
“Better than yesterday.”
We fell silent again as he drove deeper into the countryside. I considered the bump in Geden’s grand nose. His thick eyebrows grew up toward the mass of black curls on his head. It looked made to twine my fingers in.
Geden’s eyes were the troubling color of the sky before a tornado. How had they ever reminded me of Sylvie’s?
We passed a field. “Oh, ponies,” I said, before I could stop myself.
“Not ponies. Little horses,” Geden corrected me. “You call them—miniature.”
Their golden shapes receded into figment.
“The small horses like to eat the wildflowers beneath the fencing,” Geden said. “We can go back tomorrow. The farmer knows me.”
We headed into the forest, up a hill, to a thicket of tall trees, their tops so lush I felt like crying. Life, waving at me in the wind.
Hello, hello, good-bye, the trees said. We love you.
I love you too, I thought.
The road turned to dirt and we came into the shade under the trees, the light thickening as we bumped curves, gaining speed. A ravine appeared, dropping steeply to moss and rocks. Geden accelerated. We hurtled for the edge.
At the last possible minute he braked and parked. I tried to catch my breath. Geden turned my face with his palm, brushing his fingers across my mouth. I dipped them against my tongue and took the longest one down my throat. Plunged the shallow webs between his fingers with the membrane under my tongue, a trick I repeated until he puckered his lips and took in air as if in pain and then I knew I’d won.
He got out, opened my door, and gave me his arm for balance. The house stood at the top of the hill, hidden from the road by a dense stand of trees. A tall triangle set with a great red-paned window that ran the entire length of its front side. On its thatched roof, a short chimney; beneath, portholed white stucco. I followed him up the neatly landscaped front path past wildflowers as high as my waist to the door, a shining expanse of varnished red wood.
The abode I had expected shamed me—the East Monkey bachelor pad Søren had described, its yard thick with noisy, perpetually unemployed neighbors in tracksuits, a bucket overflowing with cigarette butts. Inside, cheap plastic-coated tablecloths in fake brocade print, chipped mismatched china, grimy sausages hanging from the stained kitchen ceiling. A bedroom like Dracula’s, all velvet and wrought iron, smoke and disarray. For lack of other knowledge I had bought Søren’s fundamental idea of Geden even after I came to know him, believed he was an odd hermit who smoked meat and made moonshine between illegal weekend jobs, that he burned hot dogs on a blackened grill for dinner every night.
Geden led me into the house. In the first room a long wood table stood in front of the tall window hung with gauzy white curtains, a pale green ceramic bowl of strawberries at the table’s center. The kitchen was gray and blue tile with a gas six-burner stove, a deep stainless steel two-basined sink, and a wood-paneled refrigerator that matched the butcher’s block in the middle of the room.
Geden did not offer a tour. He sat at the table, unlaced his muddy rubber-bottom work boots, rolled down his thick oatmeal wool socks, balled them, held the ball under the faucet, and used it to clean his boots, rubbing the black rubber and gray leather until it shone clean. The cool breeze from the door smelled of spruce trees. The sight of his pale feet was a cramp in my chest.
He unzipped his coveralls and stepped out of them. Beneath he wore two pieces of waffle-cotton long underwear: leggings and a shirt. He shook the coveralls three times and closed the door, hanging them on a hook.
In his skivvies the shape of his body was plain. My eyes drifted to his crotch. Geden bore my gaze without joking or turning from me. He stretched, pulling his head against one shoulder, his lips moving in a silent count. Then he reversed the movement, offering me his furred neck. I longed to taste his sweat, the intoxicating scent that enveloped me when we first met. We would be honest with each other now.
I felt the tiny weight of the red cord Søren had tied around my wrist at Fyrkat. The beach towel under the trees. I found Søren’s sweetness and lost it again, a sharp pain behind my eyes. I covered the cord behind my back with my other hand.
“What do you want?” I asked Geden.
“I was about to ask you.” He waved his arm at the kitchen’s many amenities. “Water, beer?”
“No.”
He opened his arms wide. “You are sure?”
I n
odded.
“Come with me.”
I followed him down a blond wood corridor through purple and silver dark. The falls of his feet on the floor seemed to come from inside my chest. Just the thought of his soles quickened me.
Geden led me into a third room, bigger than the others put together. An entire wall of windows faced the green depths of the forest. Against the far wall, a huge bed with an intricately carved headboard and a thick spiked sentry topping each post made with gray sheets, a pearly comforter. Over the bed hung a giant framed black-and-white photographic print, a grid of images of a city at night. Bridges, sky, domes. Light transformed the city into a mouth of fire. I walked closer and saw that the photographs were metallic exposures, slightly askew on paper thick as cloth. I put my hand on the headboard to steady myself against its grooves and ridges. Old as a ship.
Geden watched me from the doorway. He crossed the room and opened an invisible door in a wall I had taken to be an unbroken expanse of wood, revealing a gleaming white bathroom in which he vigorously washed his face.
Had he brought me home to witness his ablutions? I did not want to talk to another pajama-clad man about his feelings. I wanted to drink the sweat from the backs of his knees.
Geden returned, taking off his shirt as casually as his first undressing in the threshold. He stood still, showing himself to me. A long scar bisected his chest, crossing his left nipple. The cramp in my heart pulsed. I wanted to kiss his scar, punish the thing that had hurt him.
He dropped the shirt into a drawer he pulled from the same wall of wonders. He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his leggings, pushed them down, and stepped out, pulling his feet through like an elegant animal. I saw his legs, furred as a real goat’s. His bare slim hips. The rise of his buttocks. His crotch was the locus of the soft black hair that covered Geden under his many layers of clothing. His sex was half-tumescent, circumcised, mostly concealed by his thick hair. Oh. His naked genitals, flesh of blood, lobes and curls of skin hanging with the vulnerable loveliness of a baby animal, a thing that has not yet learned evil, and I thought: This is a performance, and because it is performed, it is more real.
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