Beneath the Neon Egg Read online

  I might not be old, he thinks, but I am too old for this.

  The smaller man hits the sandy-haired guy again, and he topples backward over a table.

  No one moves. They only watch. Bluett sees the face of a girl with thick makeup, hard smile, eyes bright.

  Good night.

  He drains the rest of the vodka, lifts his jacket from the hook beneath the bar and is up the three steps to the front door, out on the street in icy air, looking right and left toward Istedgade, anxious not to go the wrong way. He shuffles past a corner welfare shelter with men and women huddled in and outside the doorway, smoking, glowering at him, or lost in their own internal gloom. He glances at a man whose hand holding a cigarette to his mouth is dirty as the sidewalk. He passes a closed shawarma grill.

  Not accustomed to this, out of practice. It is long since he has been out at this hour. What is he looking for? A woman? He thinks with regret of Benthe. She turned out not to be at all what he expected, what he hoped for—but after all, she is married, and her husband and she are swingers, apparently. He had called to ask her out, but she had made a counter­proposal. She had invited him to a party, the kind of party where the host had a sauna and after dinner, she told him, all the guests get in the sauna and then they come out and dance to Greek music.

  “It is exciting,” she had said on the phone.

  “What, uh, do they all take their clothes off?”

  “Of course.”

  “I think I would be shy.”

  “You were not so shy two weeks ago in our country house.”

  “That was . . . spontaneous. And I was a little drunk.”

  “You could get a little drunk again. It is very exciting. All those naked bodies.”

  He thought of the naked men, many naked women, wondered where her head was. “Well, I think I’d just like to just see you. Besides, I’m not so much of a dancer.”

  It is tricky. She is the contact for his best customer. He has to extricate himself before it gets more involved. “Besides, I have a girlfriend now,” he lied.

  “You can bring her, too.”

  “I don’t think she would like that.”

  “Well, if you change your mind. I still think you are a sexy.” She says the last phrase in English.

  Now he wonders what he is looking for. Just to see what’s happening? The world has changed in the twenty years since he was alone.

  He has only a vague sense of this area. To the right he knows is Halmtorvet, hookers, druggies. Bad news. He can see the Central Station looming up above the snaggle of buildings before him, aims for it. He can catch the S-train to Nørreport, Northgate, walk home from there.

  The cold sidewalks are empty, dark, the black leather and pink and lavender dildos in porn shop windows dimly illuminated. An inflatable plastic woman sits in one window, her mouth a large O, her thighs spread around a plastic vulva. Skamlæber, they are called in Danish. Shame lips. Same root as the English, Latin, pudenda—pudere, to be ashamed.

  He looks up to a street sign, Viktoriagade, remembers a Dan Turèll poem about Charlie Parker playing a blue plastic saxophone on Victoria Street. Doubling back to avoid a group of beefy flaneurs, he passes a doorway from the shadows of which a woman asks, “You vant to come up with me?”

  Bluett has not really considered this sort of alternative to loneliness. He pauses to look at her, feels himself swaying slightly, doubts that he would be able to muster passion for this woman, whose bare legs in a mini skirt are bone-thin and blue with chill. He looks at her face, which vaguely resembles the face on the statue in the harbor of the Little Mermaid, her dirty blonde hair short and choppy and her complexion, even shadowed, not the best. Could as well do it with an inflatable plastic doll. He is lonely, but not lonely enough to go with this poor creature in the shadows of that doorway, and neither does he wish to purchase company, at least not with money. But his heart goes out to her. Perhaps he would increase the sum of human misery by blatantly rejecting her. He gets a crazy idea then—a drunken idea that he acts on.

  “How much just for a hug?” he asks.

  Her face is impassive. “You can’t buy no love affair, dude,” she says. “You want French? Four hundred. Swedish? Three. Danish cost you five plus the room.”

  He knows what French is; Swedish, he guesses is a honeymoon of the hand; while Danish, he presumes, is the style of the missionary. He shakes his head, digs into his pocket for the fifty-crown note buried there, reaches it toward her hand which automatically rises to accept it, and he turns to move on, but she darts out from the shadows, brushes her lips against his cheek. Her blue eyes almost smile. He nods and continues walking, feeling a little better, but shuddering with the cold and the thought of the woman—the girl—in the shadowy doorway. He wonders if he is really far out enough to stop on a dark street to consider a poor, wretched hooker.

  Shaking his head, he continues toward the Central Station, but somehow takes a wrong turn. Down an empty side street, a tall, thick-shouldered man steps out of a doorway in front of him and says in English, “You Dane? I am from Estland.”

  “Good for you,” says Bluett and steps around him. The man circles back, slaps ten fingers to his own chest, says, “My body: five hundred crowns.”

  Bluett’s heart lurches. “No,” he says, zigzags past, but the man gets in front of him again. His face is high above Bluett’s, his nose thick, his jaw, his neck.

  “Okay okay, listen,” he says. “My body: three hundred crowns!”

  “What? Get lost. I’m not interested.”

  “You don’t like me? Last offer: My body, one hundred crowns. Now and here!”

  Bluett crosses the street, turning back precisely where he does not wish to go, deeper into the west side, sees a neon martini glass that he heads for just in case he will need to duck for shelter, but someone else is on the street behind him, and the Estonian lurches away toward the newcomer.

  “You, yes,” he says, “my Danish cousin. My body for you: four hundred crowns. Wery cheap bargain.”

  Bluett reaches the corner, sees the Central Station, mounts the stone stairway from the street to the elevated parking area, recognizing all at once the place where he finds himself now, a place he left behind when he was a kid, where hunger drives you out roaming, lonely sleepless nights. But he’s not a kid now; he’s forty-three years old.

  I forgot about loneliness, but now I remember it again, I feel as lost as I ever have in my life even as I plan to tell my friend Sam about Benthe and Dorte, about the Estonian, the bar fight, the girl in the doorway, tell it light, good for laughs, when me and Sam swap war tales.

  At the rim of the parking area, by the station front, several lone figures huddle in the icy dark. He recognizes the drunken unsteady movement of his feet toward the revolving door, considers how bad he would feel if one of his kids happened to be in there, see their father out alone at this hour, wandering, lost.

  How can I explain it, kids? I am a man still. I am alone and I have not quite found my way yet. Play it cool. Invite them in for a beer. Talk. Yet it would break my heart for them to see that this life is not the life I raised them to. There was supposed to be a family unit here. There was supposed to be stability behind them, to nurture them through these university years. What would they make of all this? What would they think of their old man out on the town looking in all the wrong places for company, for solace, for someone to fucking talk to?

  Regression, he tells himself. That’s what it is. Like when you were twenty-one years old, ending at three in the morning in Bickford’s in New York staring dourly into a plate of scrambled eggs, a cup of weak coffee. Those years when you were a young banker. Now it’s more than twenty years and a country later. Scandinavia. Standinavia. Copenhagen. Jazz city.

  You’re lost, man.

  The train pulls into Nørreport, and he climbs the stairs, thinks he will take a cab the rest of the way if there is one in the queue, but there is not. Only an empty, dark, cold street, which he cro
sses, past the geological museum, the national art museum, the botanical gardens, dark and withered in this freezing January night.

  Then he is up to Sølvtorv, Silver Square, crosses it to Sølvgade, Silver Street, dark and empty at this time of night, and follows down to the frozen lake, stands for a moment on the corner looking across at the red neon Jyske Bank sign and the neon chicken laying neon eggs that glimmer in the black ice.

  The outer door of his apartment building doesn’t lock, but he has stopped worrying about that. Up the winding wood stairs, he pauses to look across at Sam’s door, considers pounding on it. Wake the bastard up. Tell him the story of your night. He seriously considers it, looks at his watch. Almost three. He lays his ear against the scarred wood of the door and hears what sounds like the faint silken line of Getz’s tenor. He taps lightly, and the music shuts down. He thinks he can hear someone listening on the other side of the door, taps again with a fingernail. “Sam!” he whisper-shouts hoarsely, clears his throat. “It’s me. Blue.”

  The door swings open, and Sam’s vivid, startled blue eyes peer out.

  “Want company?” Bluett whispers, then repeats, in a normal voice, “Want company? I’m oiled but coherent. I think.”

  Sam turns the music up again—Getz blowing Brazilian stuff, Jobim, dreamy, very dreamy—and cracks a bottle of Danish stout and another of green Tuborg, pours from the two at once into the same glass—one for Bluett, one for himself. Black and tans.

  “My dad used to mix the black stuff with champagne,” says Bluett. “Drink it with raw oysters.”

  “Black velvet,” Sam says. “Give you one hell of a hangover.”

  This apartment is the mirror image of Bluett’s own. Instead of having its main view out onto the lake, it looks out over roofs and backyards, black angles silhouetted against the cold sky with its blurry, ghostly wafer of moon. Just one small window over the lake. The apartment is a mess of books, papers, sloppy stacks of things, dirty plates, hardened remains of coffee.

  “Geez, you’re a slob, Sam.”

  “There is order in my slop. As it is, I can find anything. Impose some artificial order on it and I wouldn’t be able to find thing one.”

  Parched, Bluett empties half the glass onto his dry tongue, sighs, listens slit-eyed to Getz wailing elegance. Then he remembers the Estonian who stopped him earlier and tells the story, leaving out the fact that he was scared, telling it for a laugh. “You my Danish friend. Last offer: my body, fifty crowns!”

  Sam’s laughter is hearty, although Bluett sometimes wonders how genuine it is. Sam is his best buddy in the world, also divorced, also with grown kids, but Bluett sometimes feels he’s never got beneath his friend’s surface to where Sam really lives. Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m the one who’s all surface and cheap laughter. He thinks about telling the story of Benthe and Dorte, but the desire to do so makes him feel cheap; instead he says, “So whas happenin’, dude?”

  Sam’s lips go owlish in his delicate-featured black-Irish face.

  “What’s that look supposed to mean?” Bluett asks.

  “Look?”

  “That look on your Irish kisser. I know a look when I see it, and you got a look on. Written all over your . . .”

  The smile spreads. “Met someone, you know? Of the female persuasion.”

  “You met someone of the female persuasion? Well, come on. Tell Uncle Pat. She got a sister?”

  Sam’s eyes go distant for an instant, and whatever they are seeing in that distance translates into purse-lipped pleasure.

  The pleased lips tighten. He sighs. “I don’t want to jinx it, Blue. It’s too . . . tentative.”

  “Well, does she got a friend or not for crissakes?”

  “All in good time, Blue. All in the fullness of time.”

  Across the hall again, with difficulty, he works his key into the lock of his door, lets himself in and realizes he is still wearing his coat, hadn’t even taken it off at Sam’s. He pees in the little water closet. Then is standing in the living room, staring out the windows to the frozen lake, thinks about Sam, the lucky dog. You got to meet someone, too, fall in love. He thinks of Benthe, Dorte, but doesn’t want to go there—Benthe is married, and her arthritic sister-in-law wants some, too, and it’s too much. Dancing to “Zorba the Greek” with a bunch of naked people! He thinks about another drink, a nightcap, some music on the CD player, a little night food: dark rye with salami and raw onion rings maybe, use the scissors to make confetti out of those chives on the kitchen windowsill . . . But suddenly the mere thought that he could make food, the mere thought that he has food and hunger, that he has shelter from the cold, the mere thought that he exists is acknowledgement, and it is enough.

  Pitching his coat on the sofa arm, he moves to the bedroom, drops his pants on the hardwood floor, and is grateful to realize that by the time—by the fullness of time—his head touches the pillow he will be asleep.

  He wakes in the dark, the incidents of the night slowly reassembling themselves in his consciousness, the pointless incidents. He reaches for his watch, presses the illumination button. Just past eight. Then he remembers it is Saturday and sighs with relief. He doesn’t feel bad. Still drunk maybe, but in a good way. Horny way. In the dark, alone, meat in hand, he can go anywhere, do anything. Benthe is there with him then. And Dorte. The heat of their flesh, wetness of their mouths, their cunts, yes, the heat and hardness of his prick, yes, he will go to the sauna, dance naked, go down on Benthe in front of them all, she wanted me to lick my own come off her thigh—I wouldn’t now—I would while her eyes blaze her lips full of lust, teeth glinting . . .

  As his breath stills and his eyelids sag, he can feel the dreamy smile in the dark. Would be nicer to have a warm body beside him now, to stroke with his palm, his fingers. Tender. He wonders why he will do it in his mind alone but not with Benthe and the others. Maybe because the others would still be there afterward, when his passion was spent and it was all revealed as fantasy but with real people still there. He doesn’t quite understand that. But remembers how it was to have Dorte there afterward up in Halvstrand. Couldn’t get away fast enough.

  And what you would do in heat and would repulse you after the fact. He thinks about a copy of Playboy he saved from a few years earlier, special on the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe. In it was a secret diary or transcript of a tape where she free-associated for her psychiatrist, and in which she claimed to have shaved Joan Crawford’s pussy and gone down on her. Also claimed that her agent had her piss in a champagne glass and drank it. He wonders if it was true. Exciting to think of when you’re hot, but repulsive when you’re not.

  Difference between fantasy and reality maybe. Or maybe because of my Catholic upbringing. Or maybe something else. Maybe I really don’t like sex but need it, like the idea of it. Who knows? Maybe it’s better than nothing. Maybe it has to be more than passion?

  With his ex, their passion was so hot but burned out fast and then they had two children. Mistake to marry so young in heat. But if they hadn’t, the kids would not exist. Is it so bad not to exist? Well, he wouldn’t know, would he? Because there would be no one to know. Strange thought. Having no consciousness. No existence.

  Do I like existing? Would I prefer not to?

  Cannot deny I am as confused as when I was a teenager. More confused. Because then I believed in romantic love. Now I wonder whether it is all just to procreate and nothing more, to keep the species going and for what end? And we are useless as autumn wasps, men, after we have procreated, as Sam once put it.

  He wonders whether the problem with Benthe is because she’s married. That religious thing again. The couple of times I fucked another man’s wife—even while one of the husbands was passed out drunk in the next room. I performed without hesitation, not feeling I did anything at all wrong until afterward; the regret rushed in like a foul wave of sewer vapor. Learned this about myself and tended to avoid repeating that kind of behavior. But somehow the flirting wi
th Benthe went too far for me to stop myself. Then she sprang Dorte on me with her arthritic fingers taking my stiff rod. Actually wasn’t so bad. In memory. Kind of sweet. How she took it in her hand, fingers slow and careful in their deformity, and then looked into my eyes and smiled.

  Till afterward.

  Once, before I married, even with the husband’s consent. No, he directly asked me to because he wanted her to stop fucking some guy he hated. I knew about myself that I suffered moral hangovers that far outweighed the pleasure I got from certain things and that was one of those things. The five-year-old son of the father who gave me permission, asked me to, rattled the locked bedroom doorknob while I was fucking his mother and called through the door, “What are you doing in there, Mommy? What are you doing with Patrick?”

  That was in 1972. I was eighteen. Just after my father died. The seventies was the wildest decade, wilder than the sixties. Now we’ve been through the eighties and more than half the nineties. And glad I am free of my ex, glad my children exist. But what’s next?

  Not more of the seventies. Not Benthe on their disappearing cliff with her arthritic sister-in-law or her nude Greek post-sauna dances with hopping cocks and jiggling breasts. Don’t want to be with naked men.

  The couple downstairs is having one of their very rare arguments, but it’s a bad one, a divorce argument. Bluett can only hear the words of the wife, whose name he doesn’t even know (good fences make good neighbors). In the course of what he hears, however, he learns the name of the husband when she says to him, “Know what, Jørgen? Know what? No one likes you. No one. Likes. You.” Jørgen mumbles something, and she yells, “I don’t fucking care if the neighbors hear! They don’t like you either!”

  Bluett holds his tongue, but is tempted to shout toward the floor, “I like him! But I don’t like you!”

  Soon he hears footsteps, the front door opening, closing. Then silence.

  And inevitably Bluett is thinking of all the arguments he and his ex had. But at first it wasn’t that way. When they met by chance in Copenhagen, Bluett on vacation with the money his father had left him, the fire between them was instant. And there was nothing to keep him in New York. He didn’t much like his family—only his oldest sister—and he had an immediate facility for Danish that he never had for French or Spanish. And college was free here.