Beneath the Neon Egg Page 5

  “It’s so rich and creamy!” the one exclaims as though she is in the grips of ecstasy, not of a pharmaceutical sort. He empties his beer and climbs out to the street, the cold clean air along the frozen canal. He looks down into it. The old sailing boats moored there are frozen into the ice. He sees an empty wine bottle frozen to the surface, upside down, the husk of a leftover New Year’s Eve rocket.

  There are many people on the street. Nearly midnight. He begins to walk, feeling good, past Tattoo Jack’s, hears a singer through a bar door singing, “Kiss my neck! Watch me ride!” Or maybe it’s “Watch me slide.” He passes Skipperkroen, Pakhus, Færgekroen, Gilleleje, all packed and noisy, some in a semibasement, some up the steps, these harbor streets that years ago were the sailor’s district, now sequestered by the bourgeoisie.

  He climbs the steps of one lively joint where a crowd is gathered around three guitarists in the smoky back. The singer is doing “Wonderful Tonight” as Bluett orders a beer, looks around at the men and women in the smoky light, thinks The night life ain’t no good life but it’s my life, savoring the moment, the image of a slender woman standing there alone swaying to the music. The beer is very cold and tastes wonderful.

  Perhaps it is the next or the one after that but suddenly it begins to taste acidic. The musicians do a last number, then a last encore, an absolute last one, “The House of the Rising Sun,” and Bluett gets up to let himself out while the music is still going rather than having to leave a dead place, but before he gets to the door the music stops and the juke goes on, someone singing, “Kiss my neck . . .” Must be some new hit.

  The streets are still full of people. He stands outside for a moment watching them, pleasantly buzzed, charged by Birgitte’s kisses. Those lips. That was really something, young woman wanted to suck on my tongue like that. Still a little attraction value in the old forty-deuce fart. But I’ll never visit her in Albertslund. Never.

  Twenty yards up the canal, something catches his eye. A fancy leather coat. Sam Finglas.

  Bluett opens his mouth to call out, then notices Finglas is walking with someone, a woman. An incredibly beautiful woman, pale, hair long, light as white gold, high cheekbones, slightly Asian cast to her face, stacked soles with even higher heels, stilettos, beneath the hem of her light fur coat. And Bluett realizes how buzzed he is because it takes a moment for him to recognize that this is the Russian woman Sam talked about. He stands there on the step, open-mouthed, breathing steam. They are coming sideways toward him before they turn toward Kongens Nytorv, and Bluett catches a full view of her. She is as tall as Sam and slender. She moves like a song, and her eyes are blue as ice, her skin white, her mouth wide, lips inviting as a plum.

  He closes his mouth and follows at a distance, unable to resist. Sam has his arm around her shoulder, and her head is tipped onto his. They cross the square toward the Royal Theater, past the statue of the mounted king in the center, and on the other side, they stop in front of a door. She rings the bell. A moment later the door opens, and they enter.

  Standing on the opposite sidewalk, he feels like a voyeur, staring through a keyhole at a door: the Satin Club.

  He considers following them in, ringing the bell. Then he peers down beneath his fog of drink at the muddy brown toes of his shoes and sees he should not, walks home along the teeming Copenhagen streets.

  It is a thirty-minute walk to the lakes. Good exercise. Past groups of people, couples, the scattered lone wolf, staggering. Two a.m. Some big-faced kid yells at him, his stomach plunges, he keeps moving.

  Along the lakes, the street is deserted and dark, the frozen water streaked silver in the moonlight, most of the windows on the other side blackened. Just the neon chicken, the neon eggs dropping, the red neon chicken head turning to see the product of its work, then nothing again.

  A taxi flies past, green dome light lit. He finds himself thinking about his kids, when they were little, when they were a family. How he misses those years. Family. A point in time is all. There and gone. He is proud of them, both off to university, doing well. Maudlin thoughts assail him there, thinking of his wife and how he never managed to make her happy, even as much as he wanted to, as much as he tried, even if she would not agree with him that he had tried. For that matter, did she try to make him happy? Two-way street there. Mexican standoff.

  Suddenly he misses his father, aware of the burden of fatherhood, wishes his father were here so he could tell him he understood that it had been hard for him, that he had not understood that before.

  He thinks of all the years in Denmark, speaking a foreign tongue, which he is good at, but nonetheless to him is like wandering through a misty landscape, finding the words, but more slowly, rarely one hundred percent sure where you are, never quite at home here. Never quite at home in the States anymore, either. He thinks of a book he read as a kid, The Man Without a Country, a man torn between the U.S. and England in the early years; he recalls it ending with the man on a raft out in the ocean by himself, not allowed in either place anymore. The image is very sharp in his memory. Then he remembers that is because in fact he did not read the book, he read the classic comic and that was the drawing on the cover.

  He crosses Queen Louise’s Bridge, pauses in the shadows, and the sweep of the moonlit ice finds his heart. He mocks himself for a self-pitying fool. This is a beautiful place. He has nothing to regret. All he has to do is translate five pages a day and he can survive. Simple enough. What a deal. No boss. No annoying office intrigues. He has it made. He thinks fleetingly of Dermot Cleary and Benthe and wonders if he has fucked himself out of a flow of work, thinks, Ah fuck it, fuck it all.

  He blows his nose, moves on, remembering how when he was a kid, fifteen, eighteen, in his early twenties, he yearned for a woman, desperate to be complete. Missing a girl and trying to make it real, to make it mean something, excite him, but he was only exciting himself. He is not quite certain what he means with that thought, thinking again of kissing Birgitte Svane in the bar, the healing touch of her mouth, her fingertips on his cheek, in the close-cut hair at the base of his skull, her sweet spearmint tongue.

  All my life, he thinks, decade after decade, I ask myself is it really true, am I deluded, can this be a fact? But decade after decade, my eye, my heart, my body tell me the most beautiful thing in this world is to see a woman walk, to see a woman, to look in a woman’s eyes, kiss a woman’s mouth. What I am to do with her and what it is all about I do not know. I used to think it was sex, to fuck, but it is not really that at all. It is to touch, share a moment. He remembers moments with his wife over all their years together and feels unreal to think they are apart, that their life together failed. But it did. And that’s that.

  At his building he pushes through the unlocked blue street door, climbs the stairs to his first-floor apartment, glances across the hall at Sam Finglas’s door. He’ll get married, you watch. They’ll move. That apartment is not big enough for a couple. Who could resist a woman who looks like that if she is all the things he spoke about? Sam is his closest friend in Denmark. Another departure.

  He lets himself in to his apartment and sits in the armchair without taking off his coat. He feels that his vision is dimming, his stomach hurts. He feels he is dying.

  Fuck that.

  He rises, sheds his coat, pours a glass of vodka on three rocks, and turns a straight-back chair, back to the window, straddles the seat and looks out across the lake. A lone couple is walking, arm in arm, across the silver-lit ice, silhouettes moving on the frozen water.

  Sometimes when he thinks about the fact that this life might be all we have, nothing but a growing accumulation of memories that will end in the wall of death and vanish, sometimes when he thinks that this is all there is and all that will be, that it will all be over just like that, the life of his childhood, his parents, his own children’s childhood, all of them done with, he feels he is locked in a small windowless room and that he must break out, must try to break out and that he must do everything,
anything, yet that too, all of it is doomed to the same end, vanishing, and all the while, every minute trickles away, the sun burns consuming itself, and we are without power, alone, kissing in some smoky room listening to some cheap music before we die . . .

  Rising, he reaches to the CD player, locates Miles’s Aura, slots it into the machine, presses play, backs up to his armchair, sits, hears Miles’s trumpet, John McLaughlin’s guitar, the strange fusion symphony of jazz, rock, contemporary “serious” music, lowers his eyelids, listening, but lifts them again just as the “Electric Red” cut begins.

  He raises his glass, looks through it at the neon chicken, the neon egg that seems to drop, its red reflection smeared across the silver-black ice of the lake, seeming enclosed in Miles’s “Electric Red” horn blares, and Bluett thinks of all the lovers down there beneath the surface in their freezing black room.

  4. A Night in Tunisia

  Bluett opens his eyes to see patterned on the wall the light cast by a streetlamp through the slats of the windowblinds. Still dark. He lies on the narrow bed listening to the thump thump of little feet in the apartment upstairs, waits for signs of a hangover to move in his blood, but feels nothing.

  However, if he sits up, he suspects, pain will begin to migrate within the tender walls of his skull. He puts it off, staring at the egg-white ceiling high above his head. From time to time the air splits with the shriek of a machine, a lathe perhaps, something that cuts metal, some industrious person out back somewhere working to improve his rooms. The ceiling is clear as an empty screen. The flies are gone, dead or hibernating for the winter, or planted as eggs somewhere. In summer there are always a few flies flitting around beneath the ceiling, at the top of the tall window. He lies here sometimes and watches them, and they seem so pointless, so very pointless that they are almost friends, seem like friends, kindred creatures, black specks floating beneath a blank white ceiling. He misses their presence now.

  He tries to guess the time. No music emanates from the Kingo Institute of Dance for Children next door so it is not yet ten. Nor can he hear Miss Kingo’s barked commands. Yet the dark is not nighttime dense. He guesses eight a.m., reaches for his watch. Close to eight. The movement brings no pain. He remembers Birgitte from Albertslund, those lips, that sweet tongue, reaches under the blanket, considers, then heaves the covers back and swings out of bed. Out in the living room he does fifty push-ups on the dusty carpet, sneezes and rolls over on his back panting, staring up through the window, through the lacework of bare walnut branches to the dark blue winter sky and the still-bright globe of moon behind the tree.

  How to use this virgin day?

  He could translate, get ahead of himself, extra five pages. There are two projects on his desk—an instructions for use for a turnkey summer-house rental plan and a museum catalog for a porcelain exhibit. He is stuck halfway through the summer-house instructions. Something about the shower. It says, Du er nødt til at fange dråberne når de er der. Literally: You have to catch the drops when they are there. Meaning, he presumes, something like: The shower does not always function optimally. If it doesn’t work, try again. No, not quite. He’s not certain the Danish sentence is valid. Maybe written by a foreigner, translated from a bad translation from the Japanese. His temples throb.

  No translation today. Take your Saturday as a day of rest, of play.

  He considers calling Benthe. He’s horny. Got the hangover horns. She’s so goddamn sexy. But that’s a can of worms, and he finally got the toothpaste back in the tube by lying to her, telling her he had a girlfriend, so why try to open it again. He thinks of calling the woman with the white lace garter belt, but he can remember neither her name nor precisely where she lives. Simplest thing is to have a honeymoon of the hand. Up like a skyrocket, down like a stick.

  The sky is now a paler blue but the moon is still visible, and the sun has not yet reddened the tops of the trees or the upper windows across the lake. He thinks of crawling back into bed, does sit-ups, staring up at the white ceiling, until he can do no more, and lies back breathing heavily, his forehead and back clammy with sweat.

  This is good for you, he thinks. To suffer.

  Something makes him think of Sam Finglas, that door, the Satin Club, that woman. He remembers Birgitte’s light eyes, her mouth. He gets up and looks for his coat, finds it slung across the armchair, and in the pocket the coaster with her number on it. The moon is just over the tops of the buildings across the lake now. There is an icing of white frost on the street and roadway, on parked cars and on the frozen lake.

  The moon has grown paler in the sky. He drinks a glass of tomato juice and imagines another night in the bars listening to a jowly Scot trying to imitate Roger Whittaker singing the bloody streets of bloody fucking London.

  Hour be damned. He picks up the phone and keys in Birgitte’s number. It rings eight times before it clicks off, unanswered. He taps out the number again, carefully. No answer.

  He feels stupid, wonders if she gave him a phoney number. But why? He didn’t ask for it. It was her idea. He tries again, gets a sleepy woman’s voice, asks for Birgitte and is told she is spending the weekend with her mother in Odense. Which makes no sense, but he hangs up and looks out the window to see the red tint of sunlight on the treetops and roofs. He does another set of push-ups, needs something, music. Aura is still in the CD player. He punches the button to start it and makes a cup of Nescafé, which he drinks at the window, allowing the strange compelling swells of sound from Miles’s horn to sweep over his body. He watches a rook walk along a benchtop on the lake bank below, a jogger moving swiftly along the opposite side, a flash of gulls lift from the ice.

  His gaze fixes on the tilted monolith, the Peace Gate, frozen in its fall. Now there are two rooks, facing each other with bowed heads. A blonde girl passes, walking a black-and-white cocker, and the sunlight has made its way to the red brick on the other side. A couple jogs past in fuchsia sweats.

  He wants to get out. Get showered, get dressed, get out! Thinking of a place to go, he gathers some copies of old New Yorkers, one of his self-indulgences, and finds a plastic bag to carry them in.

  Grateful for his legs, his feet, which carry him briskly along Webersgade, beside the many-colored faces of its narrow row houses, across Silver Square, past the Café Under the Clock, into the open gate of the Botanical Garden, diagonally across through the barren winter trees and bushes, each labeled neatly in Danish and Latin. Bluett cannot retain the names. He is aware that he sees trees and bushes, even flowers, generically mostly.

  No, he can remember every tree and bush and flower in the garden that he shared with his ex and his children for all those years in the Brønshøj house, by the moor, until he became invisible in his own house. Not to the kids. Never to the kids. To the ex. First there were her years of rage. At what? Bluett thinks she raged only at herself, but is aware that he cannot see his own face, his own being. Who knows what he did, what provocations he was guilty of? He only knew love was gone, if there had ever been love in the first place (and what, indeed, is love—never solved that question), and then she was raging—over everything, anything—that the Christmas tree was not straight. Every single twenty-third of December, same thing: You Irish slob! You can’t do anything right because you don’t care, because you don’t see, you are not aware of anything but your own fat sloppy ass . . .

  Then the rages burned out and were replaced by chill, and then he grew invisible to her, and he only waited for his boy and his girl to start university to remove himself.

  Now he steps briskly along the dirt path of the Botanical Garden and remembers with rue the pleasures of the little garden in his home above the moor for all those years and the vegetation that with the rolling seasons became part of him. First the white snowbells and yellow eranthis, tiny blooms in the short, sparse, straw-colored grass. Then the crocus, orange and purple little bulbs of deep color. Then the bowed heads of the yellow daffodils and the upright tulips—the bulbs he’d purcha
sed on business trips to Amsterdam—many colors, purple, green, red, yellow, but he loved the Queen of the Night most, so purple it was almost black. And then the grass thickened and turned a young green and the forsythia bloomed, overnight, like a yellow explosion. He still had a photo of his Timothy and Raffaella, at four and two, blond, the smiles of innocence with the branches of yellow forsythia slashing up behind them. Then the magnolia tree in the center of the garden with its furry buds turning to the palest lavender blooms—like lovely bloodless alabaster flesh—until the whole tree was abloom. Then the green pear blossoms and the tiny yellow mirabelles and the long, tall rose hedge blooms, red and white and yellow. And often, miraculously, the dust-ball mushrooms would appear, always in a new place, three or four of them. They would grow big as soccer balls, but he had learned the size they were tastiest—a small cantaloupe—and he would peel and slice them, fry them in butter and make a cream sauce and serve them on slices of toasted bread with glasses of chilled Riesling. Only the kids would trust his judgment enough to join him in the eating of them, and each kid would get a small glass of wine, too, while his wife grumbled and muttered that he was risking the children’s health until even his son no longer dared to taste them. Bluett knew they were safe, though.

  Gone now, all of it, gone as this barren cold winter garden through which he walked. But he remembered Rilke saying that a tree only looks dead in winter; in truth, it is gathering its force to bloom in spring. And he must believe that of himself, too: that he is gathering force to bloom again. That he does not yet know what flowers he will bear this time, but believes that they will be strong and healthy. He must believe that. He remembers a priest he met, in, of all places, a bar, an Irish bar here in Copenhagen, who quoted a Rilke line to him: When I stare into the chasm that is myself, I see a hundred roots silently drinking . . .

  He comes out of the gardens at the corner of Øster Voldgade and Gothersgade, waits at the red light while rattling bicycles stream past, with red-nosed riders, scarves flying, then crosses to Nørreport and the Coal Square and to Skindergade. Three steps down at number 23, and he is in the Booktrader. The owner looks up from behind the counter, and a smile brightens his squat Dostoyevskian face with its patches of beard, and in the smile Bluett notices again that his eyes are blue beneath the beige dreadlocks.