Outside the rain is falling and I have my window open to enjoy the ambience. Tomorrow promises to be as busy a day as today, and the soothing sound of the rain calms my mind. It also provokes my memory. It was on a night like this that I finally penetrated the mystery of Majken.
She was a beautiful girl, one year younger than myself, broad chested, shorter than me, and always wearing black. For a long time I had regarded her with lust but with the passage of time I came to understand that friendship was all she sought. This was disappointing to my ego, but not such that I could hold it against her and deep down inside there was always the entertaining though unlikely notion that perhaps one day she might suddenly throw herself at my feet and beg to be butt fucked.
Since I didn't believe my own desires would ever be realised, I wasn't too upset when she took to telling me her inner most thoughts with regards to the various other men who made advances to her. I thought it slightly odd that she should be so disinterested in all the handsome and charming men who came her way and I did think it very odd that she should tell me these things too, after all, didn't she have any girl friends she could talk to?
One day, as we sat in the near darkness of a late summers evening, listening to Offenbach's 'Les Contes d'Hoffmann' playing quietly on my stereo, I asked her outright about her friends.
"What about your friend Lily?" I suggested. "Don't you ever talk to her about these men?"
She gave me a long hard look, made all the more piercing by the smoke from the joint she had lit.
"Why would you mention Lily?" she replied. I accepted the joint and shrugged. This wasn't the answer I had expected. The truth was, Lily, her flat mate was her only female friend that I knew of. She shook her head as if she was annoyed.
"I can't tell Lily anything" she told me.
It was the way she said it that gave her away. In that instant, I understood that Majken might be a lesbian, that she was probably infatuated with Lily, possibly even in love. I regarded her for a while, savouring the marijuana, before I put my observation to her in the form of a question. She didn't seem surprised.
"Yes."
"Have you told her?"
"No" she replied emphatically.
Until that day, I had never met a lesbian before. I had seen them in the streets of Aarhus, kissing in doorways, holding hands and touching each other at concerts. I had however never spoken with one and I had a vague idea that they were antagonistic towards men. A part of me took an instant dislike to the idea that Majken was a lesbian, but another part took solace in this explanation of my own rejection. I disregarded both of these treacherous thoughts though because I was fascinated and strangely dizzy at my discovery.
Majken was watching me closely. I smiled at her. I was somewhat stoned. She began to question me with regards to my thoughts on sex and soon she was asking me about my sexual conquests. Who was the last girl I had been with? What did I do to her? What was it like?
"Are you a virgin?" I blurted out. She wasn't. She'd had sex, but only with boys; only the sort of drunken fumbling at parties which left her feeling confused and dejected.
"Tell me how it feels to fuck a woman" she said with naked curiosity. She paused for a heart beat then said "Tell me about Ester".
"How do you know about her?" I asked in amazement. How could she know that I'd had sex with my neighbour. How could she know that a woman ten years older than me had knocked on my door one afternoon and asked me to help her lift some boxes into the attic? "How...?"
"I came round and heard you" she shrugged.
"Heard me?"
"Yeah. I listened at the door. It was open"
Her door had been open! I gaped.
Ester's front door was right alongside mine. I lived on the right of the stairwell, she lived on the left. I realised that any one coming up or down the stairs would have heard us. Majken was still watching me.
"What was it like?" I prompted myself. "Well, it was nice..."
Ester was a social worker of some kind. I didn't know much about her job except that it involved sitting all day in an office with several other women. I'd lived next door to her for almost three years and in all that time I had never seen her with a man. Sometimes I'd meet her on the stairs, usually when she came home from work, carrying her grocery bags, breathing heavily, red faced with her big fat breasts heaving. If I was going up, I'd offer to carry her bags because I knew she had weak knees from an accident in her youth.
