“Do you mind?” he’d said.
“Do you really need it?” Asked mildly. With a smile.
“No, I guess not.”
Told him with my eyes how pathetic he made himself appear. Like my father. Sentimental drunk. Sad, really. Victims of themselves. Naked to the world. Mystery to themselves. The old man always nattering about the sadness of time, sitting alone in church and trying to get me to join him to pray to his dead mother.
My poor mother, her life was so sad, son.
The only thing sad around here, Dad, is you. Sad sack.
He ran his palm over the close-clipped brown stubble on his skull, waiting for thought to find him. It was as though his faculties had abandoned him today. All he got was his father and Adam’s effusive smile, and he didn’t have any use for either of them just now.
Then his bowel called him down to the perch, where he deposited a large bean. He wondered what that might weigh.
After adjusting the shower to the right temperature, he stepped into the glass cabin and surrendered to the pleasure of the steaming water, discovered himself then thinking about Bente’s husband. Some kind of tradesman, plumber. Black-haired, constant five o’clock shadow. Virile type.
Why am I thinking of him?
As he soaped his chest, beneath his arms, his groin, the image of the bloody tampon came into his mind. Fertile.
She must be off the pill. Trying to get pregnant?
And that’s what the girl had told him, using his toilet, leaving the bloody tampon. Sneaks always left clues. Did it on purpose or unconsciously. Wanted to be caught.
So. Bente wants to get pregnant.
He smiled in the steamy air, hot water beating against his skull, rolling off his shoulders, down his back. And then before long they wanted another. One maternity leave after another. Smart. And everyone’s hands tied. State regulations covering it all. They knew their rights. This would cost the Tank a lot of money. Lot of money. Not to mention all the accompanying difficulties—advertising for a temp to replace her, screening hundreds of applications, getting agreement of key people in the participatory democracy scheme, interviewing. We live in a dependency culture, my friend.
Put her on the list.
Speak to you for a moment, please, Bente? I’m sorry to have to …
And he bowed his head beneath the shower, water streaming toward his bare feet, and watched the effusive smile gather and twirl amid the soapy water sucking down the drain.
Adam was still seated on the edge of his bed, feet on the cool plank floor, when he heard the front door click shut. The house was silent. He got up and switched off the overhead light, let his butt sink back onto the bed. Slowly, he toppled sideways, drawing his legs back beneath the eiderdown, shivering as his chilled arms and hands and feet warmed beneath the soft folds of the feather-stuffed blanket, then arcing his body sensuously in the cozy warmth. He had at least an hour, hour and a half, before his mother rose, possibly another half hour after that before the new au pair arrived and got the house into motion and people started nagging him to get up.
Ninety minutes of respite. His eyes were heavy, the sweet hole of sleep drawing down at him, but he mustn’t allow himself. If he slept, the time would evaporate. He would cease to exist and it would be as if a single moment, a few moments later the tapping at his door would start, the grainy, sugary voice of his mother, the disturbing footfalls of the twins pounding down the hallway as they shrieked and argued, and his ninety minutes would be gone as if they had never existed.
He would stay awake. He would savor this little cave of time, this hideaway. It could as well have been eternity from this end of it. A ninety-minute eternity of ease. But only if he stayed awake.
Then his hand was moving downward, and he thought about the new au pair, Jytte. Her smile. The dimple in her right cheek. So pretty. But he didn’t want to think about her that way. Then he remembered the magazines he had found the Sunday before. His parents had been at the dining table over a late Sunday breakfast, sunlight slanting in the leaded windows from the garden to mix with the light of the PH lamp over the maroon Piet Hein table, laden with fruit and cereal and bread and cheese, the teapot, pitchers of juice of every color, the heap of newspapers they went through for hours, every one of them except the tabloids, leaning back in their maroon Arne Jacobsen chairs. Twins on the floor on their stomachs, chins propped on palms, leafing through their Barbie comics, studying the pictures, making up stories to fit them.
“Adam, Adam, will you read to us!”
“No.”
“Is that a way to talk to your sisters, son?” his father said without looking up from
Berlingske
.
“Sorry, no, I can’t, I’m going out.”
His mother looked up with a smile. He could see into the split of her robe, the swell of her breasts, and turned his eyes away. He zipped his jacket.
“Where are you off to, honey?” she asked.
“Going to church.”
Only then did his father look up. He said nothing, but the expression on his face was clearly skeptical for anyone who knew his father’s face.
Doesn’t believe me. What
right
do you have to doubt me?
It worried them. He could see that. Well, it worried her. His father was only annoyed by it. They went to church once a year. Christmas Eve. Apart from the occasional requisite baptism, confirmation, marriage, funeral. Adam could see the question in her smile, her searching blue eyes:
What have we done wrong?
But what she said was, “That’s really nice, honey.”
“Sunday’s family day,” his father said. “You know that.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
The cocking of his father’s head said he didn’t like the tone, so Adam repeated the words more gently. “Yeah, yeah, Dad, I’ll be back later this afternoon.”
“Long service?”
Adam was at the door now, not a meter from freedom. “Take a walk afterwards. Maybe see a film.”
“Sit in the dark on a day like this?”
“Oh, let him, Martin.”
His father was smiling, but his eyes were steady on his son. “What film?”
“I dunno.” Doorknob in his palm. “See what’s on at the Palace, maybe.” The door open to the cool sunny air. “See you later.”
“Bye-bye, Adam!” the girls chimed, and he was out the door.
He walked. Hands in the slash pockets of his jacket, shoulders hunched, head down, scuffing through the yellow leaves drifted across the pavement, heaped in the gutters. Down through Hellerup, and he cut across the intersecting pavement of the old age home, sheltered housing. Ancient faces of people bundled in wheelchairs on tiny balconies outside their tiny apartments, staring out wordlessly at him, joyless, blank as he felt. Thinking what? Seeing what? As a seventeen-year-old kid shuffled past in the chilly sunlight?
Did you have a good life, you sad old coots?
I hate this,
he thought.
He caught the city train from Hellerup and got off on the platform at Østerport, East Port, climbed the stairway up into the station house, and went into the DSB railway station kiosk. He slipped a copy of the morning tabloid
Ekstra Bladet
, bare-breasted woman in one corner of the front page, from the newspaper rack and folded it face in, plopped it on the cash desk. A dark-eyed young woman, pretty, ran the bar code across the scanner—it took several swipes before it registered, and she smirked at him. “Seventeen crowns.”
Blushing, he paid and hurried out the swing door, double-folding the tabloid beneath his arm, and waited outside the locked post office for the Oslo Plads light to change, crossed, and turned right down the street that ran parallel with the train tracks, then left into a little green square with a large sculpture of a naked woman on horseback, leaning back sensuously, sunlight glittering on her bronze breasts, head flung back and one arm raised. He paused to study the line of her body, the fork of her thighs on the horse’s back, then turned away, followed streets of apartment buildings occupied by people he did not know. He thought of the Dan Turèll poem they had read in school: “Behind every single window people live.” Who? Families. Singles. Couples. People arguing, talking, watching TV, reading newspapers, and eating morning bread with pots of coffee. People fucking in a bed. Jesus, God, he wished he could be in a bed with a woman naked, kissing her breasts, her cunt, fucking her. The bronze woman’s cunt right on the horse’s back, riding, riding … He wished he lived in one of these apartments. He wished he could live alone. Be himself, alone, in an apartment where no one was always
watching
him. Asking questions. Expecting something from him. Disappointed.
He shuffled past the Russian embassy, turned in through Garnisons Churchyard, and threaded along the paths between gravestones marking where people whose lives were finished lay rotting in boxes in the earth. He envied them. Free forever. Forever.
Past the rear wall of the American embassy and past the backs of some other old buildings he hardly bothered to look at or think about, dark stone, old dusty places, and he was out on the street again, passing in front of an apron of café tables where a few people in jackets, some with blankets on their knees, huddled in the chill sunlight over steaming cups of cappuccino, gleaming glasses of draft beer. Up along the end of the street were lakes where people strolled with children, baby carriages, fed the swans and ducks, couples with arms around each other. Ahead of him on the boulevard, a couple walked lazily, arms slung across each other’s shoulders. The woman’s palm drifted down to the man’s ass and squeezed it. Adam slowed his pace to watch, felt himself get stiff, thought,
Oh no!
and hunched, speeding up to get past them, away.
Beyond the three-cornered square of Trianglen, he turned right, down a street shabbier than any in his own neighborhood in Charlottenlund. Big deal. He would rather live here. In an apartment over a shop, over a bar. Alone. With a girl who would let him fuck her and put his face between her hot, cool thighs.
Oh no!
He hunched, sped up again, crossed, turned a corner at random. Three dark, foreign kids were coming toward him, talking loud. One of them stared hard at Adam. He crossed the street and turned again, passed a shabby church, turned again, saw a sign that said, HOLSTEINSGADE, along a narrow street lined on either side with shabby apartment buildings, a short stout sloppy man in a doorway, smoking a cigarette. He saw a bench between two young trees and thought he might sit down and look at his newspaper, glanced to see if the man in the doorway was watching him, but then something on the bench caught his eye, a glossy smear of light, a magazine.
He had a feeling. He knew what it was. He wanted it. But he kept walking, turned the slanted corner, and stopped, breathing heavily, back to a brick wall. He hesitated. Why was it there? What was it? He knew what it was.
Doubling back, he scanned the street from the corner of his eye. The man in the doorway flipped away his cigarette and went inside. Adam came to the bench and grabbed the magazines—there were two of them—folded them into his newspaper, and kept walking. He turned at the next street onto an empty sidewalk, hastily unzipped his jacket, stuffed the magazines down the front of his pants, and zipped his jacket again. On the corner, he pitched the unread tabloid into a refuse basket and headed toward the city train.
At Østerport Station, in the men’s room, in a locked toilet cubicle, he sat with his pants around his ankles and studied the magazines hastily. The one was
Rapport
, filled with glossy color pictures of naked women. You could see everything, their cunts and everything. There were also stories, articles he did not have time to read but scanned quickly, a lump in his throat, blood beating in his ears. The other was something called
The Devil’s Scrapbook
and contained nothing but pictures, no text. Pictures of things that seemed to see into the corners and shadows of his own mind. He stopped turning pages and stared at one picture, a woman with a teasing, mocking smile and eyes that seemed to stare directly from the page into his own eyes and to know him.
I know who you are,
her eyes said.
I know what you want. I know you and all your secrets.
The men’s room door opened. Through the space beneath the cubicle he saw sloppy black shoes pass to the urinals. He held his breath, heard the sound of a zipper. With trembling hands, he flushed the toilet to cover the sound as he stuffed the magazines behind the bowl, stood and raised his pants, and flushed again, let himself out. The sinks were parallel to the urinals, and from the corner of his eye, he saw a man standing there. Was it that same man from the doorway? The man stood back from the urinal, and Adam could see his penis. He was shaking it. He sighed loudly. Then he looked at Adam and asked, “What’s your name?”
Adam hurried out the door, jogged down the stairway to the platform, and hurried to the far end. Were there footsteps behind him? He didn’t dare look. The train was just sliding into the station. Adam opened the door and stepped in, sat quickly in a corner seat with his back to the car, hunched low, staring at the dirt and paper scraps on the floor.
Now, in his bed, savoring his ninety minutes, he cursed himself for having discarded those magazines. All of these things had been discussed in school, in sex ed, but nothing of what he felt, nothing of these images, their power, could surface there. There, it was jeering and jokes and feigned disinterest and vague, embarrassed teachers. What he wanted was secret, had to be secret. That magazine had been a treasure. He would never have another like it. He didn’t dare to buy one, to risk revealing his most private thoughts and dreams to the person at the cash register.
He took hold of himself now beneath the blanket, and in the current of pleasure that coursed through his skin, his blood, an intense joy enveloped him. In the dark behind his eyelids, he saw that woman’s smile, those knowing eyes, and felt the smile opening across his face, in the pit of his chest, his belly,
up
!