Beneath the Neon Egg Read online

  For Daniel, Isabel, Søren, and Leo

  And for the Mademoiselle

  And with deep and sincere thanks to

  Anton Mueller, Helen Garnons-Williams,

  and all their colleagues at Bloomsbury

  and to Nat Sobel, Judith Weber, Roger Derham,

  Alain de Botton, Junot Díaz, Andre Dubus III,

  Duff Brenna, Bob Stewart, Walter Cummins,

  Greg Herriges, and Gladys Swan

  Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts,

  fears and emotions—time—all related . . .

  all made from one . . . all made in one . . .

  Thought waves—heat waves—all vibrations . . .

  —John Coltrane, A Love Supreme

  Contents

  Part I

  1. No, Woman, No Cry

  2. Aura—Intro

  3. It’s So Easy to Fall in Love

  4. A Night in Tunisia

  5. Aura

  6. Noise Rock: Arab on Radar

  7. The Crystal Ship

  Part II

  8. Groovin’ High—Aura Yellow

  9. The Damned Don’t Cry

  10. Blood Count

  Part III

  11. Bad Religion

  12. Equinox

  13. Like Paradise

  Part IV

  14. A Love Supreme

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Part I

  Acknowledgement

  That silence is loud.

  —Miles Davis

  1. No, Woman, No Cry

  Friday Bluett follows desire, abandons his work, escapes to the wild.

  He takes the train from Copenhagen Central Station to Hillerød, and catches the four o’clock north from there—“the Prairie Express,” Benthe called it, and he can see why. There are only two train wagons, and they clatter across the flat, mid-January fields of north Zealand through the falling snow. His car is empty and cold. Bluett hunches in his leather coat, black wool Kangol pulled low on his forehead, long gray scarf knotted at his throat. This winter has been the coldest he’s seen in twenty years of Denmark. Beneath his black jeans he wears flannel pajama pants, his feet shod in engineer boots over thick wool socks.

  He stares out the window at the snow sketching down the already dark, late winter afternoon, and remembers his Discman, clicks it on and hears the formal opening phrases of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, which swell his heart with acknowledgement of his existence. That I exist is acknowledgement, he thinks. He feels good. Free. His ex hated jazz. Lately he has been trying to listen through all the way to the end of that symphony, but somewhere Trane loses him as he approaches the point where the music dissolves into pure vibration. When he gets there this time, he clicks it off, removes his earbuds.

  He lifts the little kylling bottle of snaps from his coat pocket, screws the cap off and tips a third of it into his mouth, slips it back, with his knuckle wipes the under edge of his mustache.

  Looking out at the countryside, foreign as it is, he realizes that he feels at home now. Earlier, too, when the train from Copenhagen traversed a long, gently winding street of yellow brick apartment buildings, darkened by automobile exhaust—which once had seemed so foreign to him, so unfriendly, especially in winter—he felt easy. Now he knows the place, knows where it is in relation to other parts of the city and the country, knows how to negotiate the geography by bus or train or on foot, even by bicycle. He left the car with his ex. He doesn’t need a car. She has the house, too, and he is happy to be free of it. All he wants is his apartment. He feels at home here now, despite the fact that he is divorced, faces the future alone. Not alone. With his kids. Who both live in Copenhagen and have started at the university. When he was married, he and his wife didn’t do anything. They worked, visited her family for birthdays, Christmas, Easter, took vacations in the parents-in-law’s summer house. The calendar of their years was irrevocably filled. They didn’t go anywhere, do anything—but get on each other’s nerves.

  Now he is free to explore, to adventure. He is discovering his new city, his new country, and he likes it. Now he has a future. Not just more sameness. As he looks out at the snow blowing across the flat landscape, he realizes that once forty-three seemed old to him; now it just seems adult. He remembers once as a young father of thirty dancing with an “older” woman at a party who pressed against him, looked into his eyes—how old she seemed.

  At the same time, he halfway wonders what he is doing; why is he taking a series of trains to go up into the northernmost reaches of Zealand to meet another man’s wife in the hopes of—and he is quite certain this will happen—what is the term? Fucking her? Mutual seduction. The woman he is meeting is extremely attractive. They have been flirting for months, but he wonders if it is good to allow himself to be carried on the tide of his desire like this. With the secretary of one of his most important business contacts to boot.

  He thinks about her face, her body, her eyes, her sexy mouth . . . Well, who could resist that? Why should he?

  The conductor steps through the car, checks Bluett’s ticket, and Bluett asks him in Danish to be let off at Halvstrand.

  “You don’t want Hundested?”

  Bluett smiles secretly, tickled by the word. Hundested means literally Dog Place. “No, Halvstrand.” Which means Half Beach. Everything means something in this country.

  “That’s a summer house area,” the conductor says. “Nothing there.” He has a series of tiny yellow warts that wiggle on his cheek as he speaks.

  “Jeg skal mødes med nogen,” Bluett says. I’m being met.

  The conductor shrugs his shoulders and his mouth, warts bobbing, and moves off, but looks back again. “You speak good Danish. You American? Wouldn’t know it,” and he moves off to the other car. Bluett takes the kylling from his pocket again and burns his tongue agreeably. He has another, larger, half-fifth bottle in the other pocket of his coat along with another CD of A Love Supreme. House gifts for Benthe. And three joints purchased on Pusher Street in the Free State if she’s of a mind to smoke them with him. He drinks off the rest of the kylling bottle to still his nerves, remembering how her blue eyes met his as she said, “Henrik won’t be arriving until late Saturday afternoon. So why don’t you come Friday evening? I will meet you at the train if you call me from Hillerød.” Her gaze lingered on his.

  He guesses she’s not quite ten years older than him, fifty, fifty-two maybe, and he remembers that “older” woman dancing at the party—she was even younger than Benthe. But Benthe looks sexy as hell, the secretary of his contact at the pharmaceutical firm that gives him much of his translation work. To his eye she looks just like Julie Christie looked in Doctor Zhivago. The first time he went to her office, she was wearing tight beige leather jeans, her bottle-blonde hair plaited into one long braid that hung like a plumb line down to her rump. She greeted him with a handshake but held his hand in her soft fingers and asked, “Should we call you Mr. Bluett or Bluett or Patrick?”

  “Why don’t you just call me Blue—everybody does,” he said, thinking You can call me anything you want—which she must have read in his gaze because her smile stayed on him, her eyes moving to his mouth. “Your mustache is red as copper,” she said.

  At that first meeting she gave him a company pocket Dictaphone. “For when we have rush work,” she explained. “You can just dictate, and I shall type it for you.”

  As their ease with one another progressed and they spoke more casually, began slowly to flirt, he told her he read a lot, which seemed to impress her. Onto one of the little Dictaphone tapes, he recorded “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and told her, “I read a poem on this one. By T. S. Eliot.” She phoned him next day
to tell him how beautiful she thought it was. “You read so well. I listened to it over and over. Even in bed. My husband almost became jealous.”

  Not having considered she might be married (she didn’t act it), he blurted, “Oh! I’m sorry!”

  “Do not be,” she said. “I like it. And I said almost.”

  The little train slows and the conductor leans in, calling, “Halvstrand next!” Bluett wedges the empty kylling between the seat and the window and rises, lists across the rocking car. As the train pulls into the station, he watches his indistinct reflection in the window of the door. He should have trimmed his mustache. The gray hairs. It is still snowing, and she stands waiting on the uncovered platform in a long sealskin coat and fur hat.

  “Do you mind walking?” she asks.

  “Shouldn’t we take a taxi?”

  Her laughter is musical. “There are no taxis here. And Henrik has our car in Copenhagen. I took the train up this morning. It’s only fifteen minutes of walking. I shall keep you warm,” she says and takes his arm, leaning into him with the whole side of her body, and he thinks it’s really going to happen, finally. He manages not to think of her husband. Clearly she’s not thinking of him.

  The cottage is tiny on a broad, low property that extends to a tall, fenced-off cliff over the beach. Before they go in, she leads him against a heavy, whistling wind to the fence and they look down from the cliff to the sliver of strand, perhaps a hundred feet below. Moonlight filters through the falling snow and dark blue clouds, and he can see ice glinting on the sea, sand glittering silver beneath a layer of snow.

  “God,” he whispers. “It’s so beautiful.”

  She huddles against him, against the wind. Her face is very close. She looks at his mouth, and he kisses her.

  “This is better, isn’t it?” she asks, and as he pulls her close to his body, she says, “Shall we not go in?”

  They step through the deepening snow toward the door of the cottage.

  “We are able to rent this because the owner cannot sell it; no one will buy it,” she tells him. “The property gets centimeters smaller every year. In ten years the cliff will be almost up to the cottage.” She shrugs, dismissing it. “I can taste you have been drinking snaps. I can taste it on your tongue.” Her smile is flirty.

  “The train was so cold.”

  “Well, we have things to warm you here,” she says. “I forgot to tell you Henrik’s sister Dorte is here.” Still with that smile, she adds, “She might want to warm you, too.”

  Inside, they stamp the snow off their boots. The cottage room is very small. There is a wood fire in a black metal stove beside an alcove with a broad bed spread with a brick-red cover, a large faded red oil painting on the one wall, small white-framed windows, a broad red kilim, whose color has been walked pale. A woman rises from an overstuffed white sofa. Must be Dorte. She is tall and thin and extends her hand. Her fingers are knotted, the knuckles swollen. But she looks no older than Benthe, who leans to Bluett’s ear and whispers, “Dorte has not had a man in over a year.”

  Dorte slaps Benthe’s arm. “Stop that!” she says, laughing, her face long and angular.

  Next day, he catches the early afternoon Prairie Express back to Hillerød for the city train to Copenhagen. He wants to get out of there before Henrik shows up. He wonders whether he feels guilty or just uneasy about facing a man whose wife and sister he spent the night with.

  It occurs to him, as the train bumps across the snowy flat countryside, how fleeting time is, how he had yearned for last evening and now it is behind him and he is being taken away from it. It turned into something other than he expected, and he doesn’t know whether he liked it. He thinks he is probably finished with it and realizes how sorry he is about that, realizes that he feels more emotion for Benthe than he thought, but . . . Benthe would have been enough, but this was too much. A couple of times he was unfaithful to his ex, as he knows she had been to him, but it had not been so . . . Deliberate? Dedicated? It was too much. An image rises in his mind of the color of the faded red oil painting, the kilim, and sadness descends on him as he looks out over the white fields.

  Then he warms to the thought he will be home in time to listen to some jazz CDs, drink some Stoli on the rocks. Maybe Sam is home, he thinks. Now he catches himself thinking about telling his friend and neighbor Sam Finglas all about it, is yearning to. As a war story. Which makes him wonder about himself. Is this stuff just something to tell about? Is that all it is? He cannot deny that the thought of telling Sam cheers him—but why should he need cheering up?

  Smiling dreamily out over the rolling frozen countryside, he is excited by the memory of it, maybe more so than by the actual experience, the way Benthe, after three bottles of wine and much flirtation, got the three of them dancing, the way she took off her blouse, got them each to take off one piece of clothing at a time and when they were all down to their underpants, the way she herded them into the big bed in the alcove by the iron stove.

  Something he’d always wanted, but he has to admit was not quite what he imagined. Benthe seemed somehow less desirable afterward, less attractive. Strangely less passionate. Scheming. Maybe that’s why he fled before Henrik arrived. And he forgot to give her the Coltrane CD. They danced to Bob Marley and the Wailers. No woman, no cry . . . What is that lyric all about anyway?

  He will be home early enough to get a full day’s work in on Sunday, for the Friday he missed. To keep afloat, he has to do five pages of translation a day, five days a week. It is a good life, better than he ever expected. Far better than his aborted bank “career.” Denmark needs a voice in what they call “the big world,” and English is the lingua franca of the big world—“American,” as the Danes say. At first he thought his language was being slighted, but they seem to prefer American, at least the new generations. The sun has set over the Empire. The U.S. is where the money is now. As long as it lasts. And Denmark. As good as the Danes are at English, they want their texts copyedited or translated from scratch to be certain they don’t look foolish in the world. And there seems an unlimited amount of translation. And he doesn’t have to worry about health care or university tuition for his kids. They even get a salary from the state for studying. All paid by taxes.

  Americans are so afraid of taxes, he thinks, of social democracy. Socialism is a scare word. Yet he knows that if he was in the U.S. now he would be terrified of the future, afraid of being fired at a day’s notice, losing a health care plan, the ability to send his kids to college. Here is civilization. Here is home now.

  But there is something else about his life that he can’t put a finger on.

  Looking out over the white lowlands, he is aware of his thoughts, his emotions, but he is also aware that he does not know what he needs. He only knows that he has a need.

  Then it occurs to him what the Bob Marley song is saying. There’s a comma after the “no”—no, woman, no cry . . . It’s a love song.

  2. Aura—Intro

  Bluett steps out of the dark, cold, empty Friday night, down the three steps to the semibasement west-side bar. He recognizes the music from the CD player behind the bar: Miles Davis and John McLaughlin doing Palle Mikkelborg’s Aura. He knows the music of the Intro—spooky guitar notes, a background of horn, suddenly breaking loose into energy, blaring horn notes, icy guitar lines, tom-toms.

  Standing in the doorway, he polishes the cold frost from his eyeglasses, puts them back on to survey the room. It seems an unlikely place for this music. The driving beat, the horn, searching, surveying, blaring, a few frantic guitar notes, bass, cymbals, piano, the searching, surveying trumpet again.

  He has been out exploring, finding some interesting places, but this joint—a west-side Copenhagen dive, off Isted Street—he does not like the feel of, the look of the other men seated at tables drinking Black Gold and snow beer, a few with cheap-looking women, hard-faced. He should have gone straight home from the last joint, acknowledged the pointlessness of the night. What does he ho
pe to find now? It is too late. He has wandered too far west in the city. Yet now he is here and the bartender looks his way.

  “Double Stoli on the rocks, no fruit.”

  “Double what?” No flicker of humor lights this craggy Danish face.

  “Stolichnaya. Vodka.”

  The bartender pours a double Absolut over an ice cube, chucks in a slice of lemon with his fingers and sets it before Bluett, takes his money. The trumpet is still searching against the background of percussion as he checks his watch—nearly two a.m.—and notices someone standing very near beside him. Should have gone home. He glances quickly. A tall, close-built, sandy-haired young man is standing much too near, staring at him. Fuck. Should have gone home. Bluett ignores him. Stares at the CD player, listens to the horn blaring, scaling, studies the glistening row of bottles, and the man leans closer.

  Go away, please.

  “May I be a little fresh,” the man says in Danish, “and see what you have here,” his fingers dipping toward Bluett’s shirt pocket where he put his change.

  Bluett’s palm smacks the pocket flat to his chest. “No you may not!” he answers in Danish and looks away again, poised.

  The man is still there. “You are not Copenhagener,” he says. “From Jutland? Funen? Bornholm? Faroe Islands?” His words sweep across Bluett’s face on a sour yeasty cloud.

  Bluett swallows some vodka and says nothing, tensing his stomach muscles, poised for a fight, wondering if he will manage to get away with his teeth and skull intact.

  But the younger man wanders away, over to one of the tables where a short, stout, dark-haired man sits, his face a thick-featured mask of stolidity, and Bluett watches surreptitiously, wondering what is in the idiot’s mind as he performs the same number.

  “May I be a little fresh?”

  The trap of the seated man’s rage unsprings instantly. He is on his feet, swinging, catches the sandy-haired man full in the mouth so blood creases his teeth as he staggers back from the blow.