by Dorthe Nors
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Anja. The yellow flowers spread across the dress fabric and resembled creeping potentilla. That was something she had loved, and I always see it when I go out into the marsh. It blossoms abundantly in the groundcover, and there was something about her face, especially her mouth. Yet restless, that she was. Couldn’t be in the place she found herself. Once when we were at a dinner, she whispered to me that she felt naked without her vestments and wanted to go home. She had a way of leaving me, also in bed. When her legs began to get twitchy under the comforter, I’d place a hand on one of them and say, “A little while yet,” but it was no use, and now here was this woman Anja, sitting in the bosom of her family, tearing a napkin to pieces.
I suggested that we take a little walk, down to the water. She cast a sidelong glance at her aunt and mother and ended up standing on the beach, backlit at the water’s edge. As she stood there in silhouette, we agreed that it would be best if she drove me back to the cottage. My car was there, after all. “I feel terribly embarrassed,” she said a couple of times on the way, and I said she shouldn’t. “I did get a nice drive out of it.”
It was still warm when I drove south, and somewhere on the Agger Isthmus I pulled over at a scenic rest stop. A light breeze was flowing across the terrain. Into the landscape went a path, and I followed it until it vanished in the dunes. Then I took off my shoes. Down by the breakers, flocks of gulls. When they weren’t climbing the wind they stood frozen on the beach, gazing outward. Oddly abandoned and always on the lookout for a fish. After a while I pissed and went back to the car. There I sat, next to Route 181 southbound. The key in the ignition, the sunset, the night.
PERSHING SQUARE
THIS HEAT, NO PEACE. SEEN FROM THE HOTEL ROOM window, the palm trees tilt. Down in Pershing Square is a tower that someone’s erected, with a bright Christmas ornament at the top. At first she thought it was a bell tower, but the ornament can’t ring. The first evening, when the heat eased off, she walked guardedly down Grand Avenue. When she came to a cross street, someone yelled, “Hey girl, are you European?” and then she turned and went back to the hotel. She’s no girl any more, that’s obvious. But she is European, though how would he know? It might be her pale skin, but then she could just as easily be Canadian. Which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
On the streets of downtown LA she sees all sorts. What they have in common are their faces, their gaits, and the shape of their limbs. But more than anything they share indifference. The insane and the addicted fill the avenues. If she should collapse, no one would notice. A middle-aged white woman, hands outstretched and pleading faintly, would be just another wretch downtown. The sun is blazing and she moves around slowly, a bit stiffly, sweating. I’m moving as if I’m one of them, she thinks, and then she returns to the hotel and lays herself down on the bed.
There was a time when the heat wasn’t so hard on her, but now it’s combined with a new condition in her body. It’s her heart, it’s got a flutter, or something in there is pressing, and on one of her first evenings she met up with a colleague. They had a beer together at a sidewalk restaurant. The idea had been to talk about some new program development in connection with the conference. The whole time he was checking his messages. There she sat, pretending to watch the street life until a friend of his showed up. Then they chatted a little, but there was a moment, while the friend had his back turned, fiddling with his phone, and her colleague was gazing down at his, when she felt so minimally present that she leaned across the table and asked where the bathroom was. Her colleague looked up and smiled, confused.
Afterward, at the hotel, she determined that her heart was beating heavily, and that she was tired of straight men. Years ago, a psychologist she’d gone to had told her that, when she met a man, she should avoid being so clever. She hadn’t understood this advice. Then the psychologist, who was a hetero male, explained that because men were afraid of rejection—and because their penises meant so much to them—they were anxious that a smart woman might laugh at them because they masturbated out in the bathroom. That’s the phrase he used, “out in the bathroom.” “Men think,” the psychologist said, “that less intelligent women won’t mind their sexual behavior so much.”
He had his legs crossed, she recalled, and she could also recall saying that that couldn’t be true. “That’s just the way it is,” the psychologist said, and the entire drive home she thought about an episode of Dr. Phil she’d once seen. It featured a woman not unlike herself. She sat on stage and lamented the fact that men rejected her because she was intelligent. Dr. Phil affirmed this without hesitation. Then the woman said it was wrong and unfair. Then Dr. Phil asked, “But do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?” Whereupon the audience applauded wildly.
She often imagined men jerking off in some nearby bathroom. Sometimes she would get an urge to tell them that, her intellect notwithstanding, it didn’t bother her that they masturbated. Yet she was tired of the haggle for respect, so when it was only her third day in LA, she skipped the conference sessions and called Pete and Anthony. They became giddy, as only they could. The palm trees swayed, and now she’s at the hotel, looking down on Pershing Square. They’d built a tower there and placed a Christmas ornament up at the top. It’s a curious tower, pointless, she thinks, and that morning, before the restlessness returned, she walked slowly around downtown. “Hey lady, be safe!” shouted one of the ill, and she really isn’t—safe that is. But perhaps if she’d been Canadian. It’s safer in Canada than most places. Maybe it’s the vast landscapes, the distances. Maybe it’s the gun laws, Newfoundland, and the figure skaters. She was born in Vojens, and her mother was treasurer of the hockey club. She was also responsible for the Christmas raffle. Sometimes hockey-playing boys from other countries would stay with them. Once between Christmas and New Year’s they hosted two brothers from Toronto. They could only speak English, but back then she didn’t dare to. She can remember the combination of the Christmas tree and their longish dark hair in the large living room. And she can remember that the one brother had to borrow some socks in order to sleep. These days she thinks of him often, when she herself is going to sleep. She has a pair of socks on right now. It’s ninety-five degrees outside, but operating the air conditioner is a challenge: “Hey girl, are you European?”
“No, Canadian,” she’ll say if they should ask her again the next time she ventures out. And it’s not unlikely. After less than a week downtown, she can already distinguish one homeless person from the next. She recognizes them by their walks, their haunts, the particular ways they protect themselves from the world: the big woolen hats, the winter jackets, the out-of-place carry-on luggage, and beneath the Christmas ornament in Pershing Square she saw a woman with a top hat and floral umbrella direct an invisible drum corps with such battered grace, she had half a mind to follow. Perhaps if she’d been younger, and Anthony and Pete had been there, she thinks, slowly sitting up in bed. They came and got her the other evening. Threw their arms around her and demanded a guided tour of the hotel. When she confided that she felt heavy, Pete squeezed her shoulder, while Anthony laughed—“Come on girl, you’re in LA”—and then they went out into the stifling heat together.
They’d chosen a restaurant on Broadway, where the bread was shaped like sea turtles and the food had to be retrieved from a labyrinth. It was good food, and plentiful, but it was impossible to deal with all that entertainment. She also had a hard time looking down at her plate. A black cavity opened up beneath her when she tried. Like a hole in the ice, she thought, and looked up at the ceiling, but that didn’t help. As they ate, Pete and Anthony narrated scenes from their life together. In some of them, she appeared as a walk-on from the old days, and then she would try to laugh along with them, but at some point she got to her feet. “I’m just going to stand up and talk,” she said. “My legs are starting to fall asleep,” she said, though that wasn’t true. It was the hole in the ice, she was scared of
sliding down into it. Anthony had teased her a bit. She looked funny, he said, and she considered asking whether they knew a good doctor, but she couldn’t deal with the consequences of seeing a doctor, so she just stood.
It was while she was standing there that she caught sight of a man down on another level of the restaurant. He was a relatively old man. Brown and wrinkled from the sun, and he had hair that was much too black, cut in that style that men had when she was a girl. Glam rock hair, and he stood chatting with women who had been variously patched together. None of them were pretty. Everyone she’d met downtown looked as if they were a bit ill, and the fellow down there on the other level was as thin as a razorblade.
It got to be too much for her, so she’d asked Anthony and Pete to take her back to the hotel. They had done so, though she can’t remember what they talked about as they walked. She was thinking mostly about how, back when they were young, Pete and Anthony gave her lessons in men. This is how they liked to be stroked, this is how they thought about certain situations. She recalled that their basic principle for relations with men, regardless of sexual orientation, was that they had fragile egos. Decent men knew they had fragile egos, so when someone trod on their toes, they’d take a step back before reacting. In that way, decent men kept themselves under surveillance for any misplaced aggression. But bad men were men who reacted immediately whenever they felt insecure or something offended their vanity. They were men who felt they had the right to lash out at anyone and anything. Some of them verbally, others physically. No matter what, just stay away from category number two, they explained to her. A man only has his pride, they said, and at the time she thought that sounded nice. If her body hadn’t felt so heavy on the walk back to the hotel, she would have asked about it again, but it was all she could manage to tuck her arm under Pete’s and declare herself tired. So that was that, and now she’s lying here and longing for Canada. In California, and maybe all of the us, people think of Canada as somewhere nondramatic. Hollywood movies often have jokes about Canada. The jokes concern Canadians’ unflappability. Their policemen wear red coats and ride horses. The English speakers have a distinctive way of saying their o’s. You can especially hear it in the word sorrow. sore-oh, they say, as if the word itself wanted to wrap its arms around you. More than anything else, the two Canadian hockey brothers had been well mannered. They were good-looking, with that longish dark hair, and they carried their plates out to the kitchen sink. They thanked her mother for their dinner and made their own beds. Boring kids, she thinks, seen from today’s vantage, and she stretches her legs underneath the sheets so that her socks poke out the bottom. The one boy had stood in the doorway to her room the evening he asked about the socks. And she understood what he was asking for and got a pair of woolen ones from her mother’s room. “Thank you,” he said when she gave them to him. “We get cold feet in Canada,” he said, and then she nodded, he smiled, they went into their respective rooms and slept, and now she’s lying here looking at the tower with the Christmas ornament. That ornament can’t ring, and the lights go on in the square below. A woman is walking around down there with top hat and umbrella, and a thin black figure passes through it all like a straight razor. She places a hand on her chest, something’s pressing inside, and there is ice on the lakes in Canada.
HONEYSUCKLE
THE YEAR BEFORE HE MET HER, HE’D BEEN DOING research on the immune system at nyu, as part of his medical studies. It had become a habit for him to make his way home through a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn. They didn’t welcome strangers, but he was discreet and would act as if he were on some errand. The women went about in long dresses, and now and then he found an opportunity to observe a couple of them on a street corner. Drably dressed, no makeup, long skirts and sleeves. To most Western men they might seem lacking in imagination, but there he stood, watching them with a palpable erection.
He had that way of coming to a standstill over there. In July, when the heat was at its height, he sometimes came to a halt by the big flower beds in Central Park. The irises stretching upward, the scent of roses, and in one place honeysuckle. He would stand there in the sun, thinking of his parents’ yard in Risskov. Perhaps he was longing for home, but mostly it was for the way everything seemed when seen from the street. Or when one looked at the family in old photos. These days his mother tried to avoid the camera, and his father didn’t own one. He devoted himself to gardening instead. In front of the house was an area with pruned yews and cedars, while roses were tended in the backyard. On the south gable end a honeysuckle grew. When it was in flower, its sweet odor settled over the yard, and then he didn’t know how to feel about anything.
But when he returned to Aarhus in ’88, he discovered her on a couch in Hasle. She had a withdrawn face. It didn’t really occur to him till afterward, but she did. The thick lenses, the black hair, the smallness of her eyes. She was sitting with two girlfriends on a couch. The other two were good-looking, he remembers, yet next to the black-haired one they quickly faded away. Tea was passed round, and cookies, and she sat by the padded armrest in a summer dress and said she was studying to be a social worker. He would be continuing his research in immunology at the university hospital, and he couldn’t stop staring at her. It was the way her mouth moved, the words disconnected from her eyes. Out in the hallway, he asked her how much she could actually see, and then she placed a fist in front of both eyes. She did it to illustrate that there was a small tunnel of clear vision, there where her fingers didn’t close completely. She’d been born that way, she explained; her eyes weren’t properly alive, and it was true. There was something untouched about her, and on the bike ride home it struck him that her face was withdrawn, and that that was why he almost couldn’t sit to pedal.
In the days that followed it was hard to find any peace. Her reserved face haunted him. He masturbated in the bathroom, in bed, in the greenhouse in his parents’ yard during Sunday dinner, while the other family members sat intoxicated with the scent of honeysuckle. They were sitting on the patio, his brother and his brother’s family, Uncle Tyge with his new wife, his mother and father at either end of the table. When he had finished, he came to a standstill. He didn’t feel like leaving the greenhouse. From inside, through the grapevines and ripe tomatoes, the scene looked like a summer dinner in some carefully tended family. The large salad bowl, the leaves gleaming with oil, the white wine, and just behind it his mother with her face. Because the family had these blood vessels that lay on the surface of their cheeks, his mother’s condition could be discerned from the greenhouse. The edema, and the contrast with his father and all his talk about the hedge trimmer.
Before he left, he got them to stand in the sun with their backs against the south gable. “We never take family photos anymore,” he said. At first his mother didn’t want to be in it. He should at least take it from over by the sundial, she said. So he did that, took up a position there, and then he zoomed in on her and clicked. There she stood, blossoming in the sweet smell.
But the girl from Hasle was called Annette, and she wasn’t like that. She couldn’t see much, though that didn’t matter because he could see for them both, and on the whole it suited him just fine that he was allowed to be a man who was invisible, yet present. The sort of man who would always be there with a light hand on the small of his woman’s back. Nor did it matter that he was a mere mist on her half-dead retinas. That way he wouldn’t be judged for his grimaces when he lost control. It was a heartening thought, and it made him cross his legs on the number 8, in the seat reserved for those with restricted mobility, where once a heavily made-up girl had got him to stand up by claiming she was a semiotician and had tired legs. That was before America, before the faraway but well-planned walks, and that kind of girl didn’t interest him anymore.
Annette was studying to be a social worker with help from the Institute for the Blind. She came from Randers. Her hair was black, her face white, and her body present in a slightly provincial way,
and he couldn’t ask her to the movies. Instead he took her to concerts in Tangkrogen. A blanket on the grass, white wine, and his hand, which he often rested on hers. As they sat there, she would sing along now and then, or listen as he talked of his family in Risskov. His father was a doctor, he said, and his mother taught in a kindergarten. In his free time his father was an avid gardener, an identity he could imagine himself taking on, he admitted. In any case, he had gone on some lovely walks in Central Park when he was studying immunology in the us. The lilies there were gorgeous, the scent of lavender almost Provençal. Annette loved the smell of flowers too, she said, and while she described the size of the sunflower she’d once grown in Randers, he pictured the Hasidic women. They’d stood on that street corner in their black skirts, far from Aarhus. Not shaved bald yet, not wearing wigs and headscarves. Still with their dark hair tied back. High-neck blouses, long sleeves, ballerina flats. As they stood there, they swished their skirts back and forth, glancing uncertainly about for fathers and brothers, smiling faintly in their modesty. He’d had a similar experience once before, when he’d found himself standing in line behind a veiled woman in the supermarket on Guldsmedgade. He hadn’t wanted her to leave the store, though usually he wasn’t attracted to that type. The faces of most young women with veils seemed to him ambiguous, though on the other hand he’d recorded a documentary about the Amish on vhs. He’d watched that documentary often after he came back from the us (their bonnets, their bonnets, those braids, their bonnets), but he couldn’t tell Annette that. Nor could he tell her about the photo of his mother under the honeysuckle. How he’d had it blown up and stuck it up on the fridge in his apartment, the glowing pores, the white wine sheen. When he gazed at the picture, he could recall how she smelled when she kissed him goodnight.