Beneath the Neon Egg Read online

  Problem was they married too young, didn’t experiment enough, still had that in them, both of them, the urge for others, and contempt seeped in when the passion burned out for one another.

  And what kind of life did they have? Bluett has to admit he was attracted to her family’s affluence, father helped them buy a house in Brønshøj, on a hill over the expanse of boggy moor. That had its price, too—beholden to the affluent father-in-law. And the sense of adventure with which he came to Denmark, his love of jazz, soon was lost to the family requirements. And his ex, it turned out, hated jazz.

  Their calendar was structured on family birthdays—brothers- and sisters-in-law, his ex’s parents and aunts and uncles and cousins—the Danish holidays, the three days of Christmas, five days of Easter, a four-day Pentecost weekend . . . Not that they were religious; they observed all these “religious” feasts with food and drink. And they spent their vacations at their in-laws’ summer house on the fjord.

  Bluett didn’t know his new country, he only knew his new family and their neighborhoods and the roads that led to them. And they didn’t have any friends because their calendar was already filled. No time for new friends. And Bluett didn’t much like going to jazz alone.

  All the result of a very small inheritance from his father. Enough to take a vacation in Copenhagen, which he had always wanted to visit for its jazz. So he flew in on Pan Am, rented a room at the Imperial Hotel, alongside Vesterport Station, went to the old Montmartre jazz club and then the new Montmartre, saw Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan there—switching horns, Getz playing baritone and Mulligan blowing tenor, and then heard Long Dexter on his tenor, too, and this was heaven, and he fell in love with the city. And then he fell in love in the city: One morning he asked a girl on Strøget, the Walking Street, for a match. He smoked then, and they didn’t give free matches with the cigarette packs and he always forgot to ask to buy a box of stick matches, so he stopped a girl to ask for a light. It wasn’t even a line.

  But it led that day to their fucking four times in her west-side room, and to more passion and to romance, it led to marriage, to immigration, to children. And then the passion burned out, and what the heat concealed was all the things about each other that they could not bear and, in time, in twenty years, it led to divorce.

  Lurid light is seeping in the windows over the frozen lake, and Bluett feels grief and regret and guilt seeping into his blood, and he can choose to stuff his face beneath the pillow, but he judges by the light that it is nearing ten, and his stomach growls.

  He thinks of the brunch at O’s, down the street, thinks of their eggs and bacon and beans and home fries and a big glass of tomato juice—maybe a bloody Mary—pictures himself munching happily while he leafs through the Saturday morning tabloid with its tales of violence and injustice and sex and photos of scantily clad women . . .

  Saved by appetite.

  3. It’s So Easy to Fall in Love

  What is time? he wonders. A work week is never so long. Neither is a weekend. A bottle of vodka is not so deep, a drink is shallow. But as he steps out of the shower, towels himself dry with Getz’s “Sweet Rain” on the CD player, douses his jowls with the agreeable sting of his Armani aftershave, garbs himself in clean Calvin Klein briefs, Boss wife-beater, pin-striped Marimekko, binds a half Windsor in his old silk favorite, steps into fresh-pressed black jeans, bit worn about the cuffs, pulls on a sweater the color of the wine-dark sea and his trusty old lambskin, black Kangol backward on his pate, the world is so new again and full of hope.

  It always starts again with hope.

  Friday, blessed Friday. Time to open the gates of the world hidden behind the veil of matter. With the purest of elixirs. The sacrament of vodka. An allergist revealed this secret to him once when he was suffering from a bout of rhinitis. If you must drink, drink vodka. The purest of drinks. Her face rapt as she told him, her elephantine face like Lord Ganesha, remover of obstacles. There have been cases of patients with acute, near fatal asthma attacks cured by vodka, one woman who had to drink two wine glasses of chilled vodka every hour to keep her lungs functioning under a drastic attack. Think about it.

  Bluett thinks about it as he lets himself out the door, wondering what Sam is planning for the evening. I met someone.

  He descends the wooden staircase from his apartment and enters the freezing gloam of afternoon. A thief’s start on l’heure bleue: red sun still hangs on the smoky horizon of the frozen lake. He waits a few respectful moments, watching his breath, watching the red glare from the far edge of Saint George’s Lake, the old leper colony, as it stains the ice of Black Dam Lake.

  In medieval times, Copenhagen stopped here, where he stands. No one was allowed to live beyond the lakes, only the lepers or a few tinkers whose shacks were razed during threat of invasion. Now, with Copenhagen no longer a gated city, this is part of the city center, this side of the lakes, and a million people live on the other side, the leper colony has been shut down, and Saint George, their patron, has joined the long line of dead saints. Bluett thrashes about in his mind for the source of that line—my dead saints—but cannot find it.

  A dark-skinned, gray-eyed man, huddled against the cold, sidles past him, limping slightly, nods without meeting his gaze and enters the building next door to his own. A neighbor Bluett has never spoken to. Foreigner. South American, perhaps. Who? So many strangers so close to home.

  The red ball of light sinks into the ice. Bluett waits for a taxi to pass, then crosses the blue road beneath the bare chestnut trees and steps out onto the ice. A lone skater makes lazy loops out in the center, gliding through the steepening dark, and Bluett trudges across the ice, his heart, his mouth, his brain yearning for the sacrament of vodka, his first drink of the week, of the weekend. He experiences this moment as worthy of a frieze on a Grecian urn. Drunk Stolis are sweet, those undrunk are sweeter yet.

  To his right, across Fredensbro, the Peace Bridge, stands the tall white graffitied monolith of Fredensport, the Peace Gate, slanting up phosphorescent into the dusk, a keyhole cut into the middle of its flank. A door that will not open, falling but never completing its fall.

  Pranksters once climbed it in the dead of night and shoved an enormous skeleton key into the carved keyhole at its center, some two stories above the grass. Bluett was offended. He has come to treasure that ever-falling monolith. It seems to him that as long as it stands, he stands.

  Above the dark buildings behind it, Rigshospitalet, the State Hospital, looms like a beast of prey, waiting to gobble up the weak and dying—and to help those capable of surviving to survive. And to the left, his favorite: a neon chicken, mounted five stories up on the top floor of an apartment building, laying neon eggs. The light sequence gives the illusion of movement: First the chicken appears, yellow in the dusk, with a red head and feet, then a large red egg drops, hangs at an angle on the wall, a smaller blue one drops on top of that and finally a tiny white one atop the heap. The great red egg hangs suspended above the frozen lake, reflected in the cold black surface; the chicken’s red head turns to view its art before, in the wink of an eye, egg and chicken both disappear into darkness. Then the process begins again with a neon note of praise for the eggs of Irma’s supermarket.

  Bluett steers his course between the two cherished artifacts, monolith and egg, around the frozen island, toward the Café Front Page on the opposite embankment.

  Chill seeps up from the ice through the thin soles of his shoes, penetrates his socks. He pictures thin ice cracking beneath his feet, the icy plunge, black grimy water in his eyes, his lambskin coat dragging him down as he claws toward the dark surface and all the ghosts of the dead lovers and lepers, drunks and killers, bankrupt and disgraced who took their lives here in Black Dam Lake reach up to his feet, his ankles, drawing him down to their encampment in the black cold watery room beneath the ice.

  Tightening the fur collar around his throat, he whispers aloud in Danish, “Jeg går ud til Sortedamsø,” a Danish proverb of sorts: I�
��ll go out to Black Dam Lake, something like Good-bye, cruel world, down the flusher.

  He steps up onto the opposite embankment, tries to stamp warmth back into his soles, crosses to the Café Front Page, nearly empty at this hour, despite the fact that l’heure bleue comes charitably early at this parallel in winter. Eyeglasses steaming and nose running in the sudden warmth, he strips off his coat and scarf and gloves and Kangol, mops nose and lenses with a clean white handkerchief, and proceeds to the bar.

  An indifferent barmaid, heartbreakingly slender, looks at him without speaking.

  He smiles at her, cheerfully says, “Hej!” Then, “Double Stolichnaya on the rocks,” he says in Danish. “No fruit.”

  She squints with incomprehension. He points at the bottle. She scoops ice into a glass with her slender red fingers, pours the vodka into a pewter measure, once, twice. Four centiliters, hardly enough to fill his hollow tooth. He likes the fact that her bare fingers touched his ice cubes, would kiss them if allowed to.

  “Introibo ad altare dei,” intones Bluett.

  She peers at him. “Hvad for noget?” she says. “What for something?” Danish idiom.

  He shakes his head with a smile, pays, takes a bamboo-mounted newspaper from the rack and sits by the window where he can watch the street, the lake and the interior of the café all at once. He raises his drink, relishing the chill damp glass against his palm and fingers.

  “To god,” he mutters, being the only customer in the place, tastes, sighs. “The joy of my youth.” He tastes again, sets the glass down.

  He is looking at a newspaper, BT, a late-morning Copenhagen tabloid, and it makes him think of Francesca, whom he met through a personal ad in that newspaper, just after he and Jette split. Her ad was one line of a poem, unattributed—“If I were tickled by the rub of love”—and a name, Francesca, and post box. He wrote out another line from the Dylan Thomas poem, “Rehearsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve,” and signed it Blue Patrick and his e-mail address.

  A moment passes now when he thinks of what happened between Francesca and him, and he pictures himself face in hands, head beneath a pillow, dying dead and gone, put out, snuffed. Why does he feel that way? Nothing so bad happened. Nothing bad at all really. Well, a little bad. They exchanged e-mails for a month, fell in electronic love, not yet in chemical love. She was a professor of literature in Odense, a little younger than he, and they finally met. She proposed renting a suite in the Hotel Scandinavia, and they would meet in the living room of the suite, drink a bottle of champagne and see if they wanted to proceed into the bedroom. She confessed that she wanted him to tell her to undress while he just sat there in the living room, watching her evaluatingly.

  When he let himself into the suite, she was already there, seated in an armchair, and he knew at once that he did not want to go farther and saw in her eyes that she did and that she saw in his eyes, in his posture, that he did not. But he pretended. He thought perhaps he could get past the first impression. They drank the champagne. By tacit agreement, they skipped her fantasy of his ordering her to undress. They went into the bedroom and undressed one another—how falsely he pretended—and made love, no screwed, actually it was more technical than a screw, and afterward he sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her toes. They were so stubbed, and all of his pretense must have been translucent at that moment, for she began to weep, and all masks were down. She knew and he knew and it seemed such a moment of frailty, of the frailty of affection, that whenever after he thought of her, he had that reaction of wanting to bury his face in his hands and his head beneath a pillow. For shame. For sorrow. For not wanting her when she wanted him. For the thinness of his pretense.

  This is not a good thing to be thinking on a Friday night, he thinks, and while the sound system plays Buddy Holly singing about how easy it is to fall in love, he turns to the BT and leafs through it at a leisurely pace. The front page story is about a seventeen-year-old Russian boy, son of an immigrant family, who killed his father with an ax while the man sat in his chair and watched television. The boy’s two younger brothers stood by with knives prepared to intervene in case the coup should fail, and three sisters and the mother huddled in the kitchen. The boy was found guilty but received no sentence because the father, it came out in the trial, had been a mad sadist who had tormented his family for all their lives. In the mornings they were compelled to rise in silence, bathe, dress, and sit silently in their assigned places at the breakfast table until the father sat and gave the nod that they could begin to eat and speak. Sometimes he made them wait on his pleasure for an hour. If they did not comply, they were whipped, punched, kicked, threatened with death. It seems the father was a jovial man in public. All this occurred in secret, within the family walls.

  Bluett turns the page, sips his vodka, orders peanuts which the gloomy barmaid delivers without a word, takes his ten-crown coin silently.

  He reads an item about a pig farmer who is suing the state because he has lost more than fifty percent of his hearing from the constant pig screams. He is a state contractor, so feels the state must compensate him.

  Another, heartier draught of spirits and he proceeds to an article about a freak hailstorm in Dublin. The article includes background research on hail. “Like tumors,” it says, “hailstones come in standard sizes: the size of a pea, a walnut, a golf ball, a pool ball, a baseball, a grapefruit. There are even cases on record of cars totalled by hailstones, of light aircraft whose fabric was torn to rags, of cattle killed out on the open range, leaking their bespattered brains into the ground.” Bluett rereads the last sentence to be certain it actually says that; it does. The Dublin hail had decimated a flock of pigeons on O’Connell Street; a dozen dead birds were found outside the post office.

  On the next page he reads an article about the Hale-Bopp comet accompanied by a map with flow arrows showing where it will be visible when. He writes behind his ear (as the Danes say) that it should soon be clearly displayed in the northern sky above the lake here.

  He drains his glass. The slushy ice chills his teeth. He calls to the barmaid for another just as the door opens and his friend Sam Finglas floats in.

  “Sam!”

  The man halts and looks about with his startled blue eyes. He has a dreamy look about him. Then, with a visible reluctance that wounds Bluett, “Hey, Blue,” he says mildly.

  “You been over to Christiania smoking some of that hippie hay or something? You look spaced.”

  Sam chuckles, and Bluett notices the man’s clothes: a Pierre Cardin black glove-leather coat he hasn’t seen before, with a padded, leather-trimmed vest under it, black shirt and burnt-sienna silk tie under an elegant bottle-green cashmere sweater. The waitress delivers Bluett’s vodka and waits to be paid, eyeing Sam’s coat.

  “Join me in the sacrament,” Bluett says to his friend.

  “Can’t, Blue. Got an appointment.”

  “An appointment? You dog. Is that who you’re all cleaned up for?”

  Sam grins self-deprecatingly.

  “That’s a delicious coat,” the barmaid says, her fingers trailing affectionately over the leather on Sam’s chest, and Bluett is jealous. He tips her, gets no thanks, says to Sam as she disappears, “Well, what in the hell are you here for if you’re not drinking?”

  “Just a quick one, then.” He goes to the bar, and Bluett watches him chatting with the girl there. She smiles brilliantly as she takes his money, and he returns with a bottle of snow beer.

  Bluett says, “My feel-good shield has suffered a few blows.”

  Sam’s startled eyes show lack of comprehension. Bluett drops it, though he can’t help but wonder about himself in comparison to Sam. “So tell me about this appointment.” They raise their glasses, say, “Skål, slanté, kipis,” sip. Bluett adds, “Terviseks,” an Estonian toast, in honor of the madman who had accosted him in Vesterbro the previous week.

  “Just an appointment,” Sam says through a cryptic smile.

  “You’ve gotten lucky.
What do you have that I don’t? Don’t answer. Other than that fantastic coat? Be careful. Your brothers’ll hit you on the head and throw you in a ditch.”

  Sam takes a long draft of his beer while Bluett sits watching the white snowflakes imprinted on the blue label of the bottle.

  Sam lowers his glass, sighs. “Tell you, Blue: this woman rings the bell. Never thought this would happen again. Again? Hell, never happened before. Never really wanted it to. But here it is. Happening. It’s like . . . you hold back, you hold back, and suddenly . . .” He shakes his head, baffled.

  “You surrender,” Bluett says, thinking he’s completing Sam’s thought.

  The startled eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “You surrender. You know, you give in to the, uh, the calling of love. Or some such.”

  “Yeah,” Sam breathes. “Yeah, like that.”

  Bluett laughs. “You got bit bad, my friend!”

  The startled eyes flash, blue glass. “You got something better going?”

  Bluett raises his hands. “Hey, no offense, I’m nowhere. I’m jealous.” He thinks again of Benthe and wonders why he doesn’t want that. But he doesn’t.

  Sam’s eyes are earnest again. “Listen. You live a life that is all, like, broken up. Compartmentalized. I don’t mean you, I mean people. Like the Brits say: One. It don’t have to be that way.” He sighs, abandoning the enormity of explaining himself.

  “You gonna marry the chick or pay her off?”

  The eyes flash again, then damp down. “No. Don’t know. Hardly really know her to say it like it is. Yet, anyway.” He burps discreetly behind his fist.