Kerrigan in Copenhagen Page 5

  He tries to save the moment by reciting another, composed on the spot, that he feels is true in his lungs:

  Has anyone seen that friend of mine

  Who said with a smile, “This is wine.

  Have a glass. See what you think.

  Sit down. Relax. Drink.”

  But his anticipated pleasure of its hedonistic resonance sours. He feels suddenly like nothing so much as a drunk, thick-tongued with slurred vision, and he wonders, not for the first time, if he has become hopelessly alcoholic.

  Now they walk along the Nyhavn canal, where boats sit lashed between impassable low bridges (and he thinks of Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat”)—canal-narrow drawbridges actually—toward the harbor and the Malmø boats, hovercraft that take you across to the once-Danish now-Swedish city in half an hour or so, a city that will soon be reachable by the bridge scheduled for completion later this year at which time the hovercraft to Malmø will disappear. All things eventually vanish. Ubi sunt? He asks her to point out the different places where Hans Christian Andersen lived here. It cheers him to compare himself to loveless bungling Andersen—by contrast, Kerrigan has at least tasted love. But what was the price?

  She shows him Nyhavn 20, the narrow tall house where Andersen stayed in 1835 when he started writing fairy tales, and Nyhavn 18, his last home before he moved in with a friend to be nursed as he died of liver cancer in 1875. And she gestures down Lille Strandstræde, saying, “He lived there in number 67 from 1847 to 1865.”

  “Jeppe’s Bade Hotel is farther down that street, too. Jeppe’s Bath Hotel. It’s neither a hotel nor a bath, but good jazz CDs.”

  “Interesting,” she says, and Kerrigan hears the chill of professionalism has returned to her tone. He regrets having suggested they stop into Café Malmø to see the world’s largest collection of beer openers, as reported in The Guinness Book of Records.

  They turn down Havnegade (Harbor Street) and step down into the semibasement pub, Café Malmø, and the first he sees across the bar section are two men passed out at a little table as Paul McCartney sings from a sound system, “I’m so sorry, Uncle Albert” which makes him think of Licia’s note in the empty house: I’m so sorry, I don’t love you … One of the passed-out men is wearing a Napoleon hat fashioned from a sheet of newspaper. On the wall above their slumped heads a sign offers beer and tequila shooters at a cut rate.

  As they sit and wait to order, she reads to him from her Moleskine book that the café was opened in 1870 and has its name from Copenhagen’s twin city, Malmö, just across the sound in southern Sweden. It is an old sailors’ bar, but many international guests come to see the beer-opener collection.

  The beer openers are everywhere, framed on the walls, hanging in thick clusters like stalactites from the ceiling. Kerrigan tries to imagine tourists streaming in from all around the world to study these thousands of openers, people lined up around the harbor to come in and see. He wonders if there are doubles.

  Then the barmaid is there—young and punk haired—admiring the green jade cross that Kerrigan has not even noticed all day at his Associate’s throat, although he does see now that it is the same green as her eyes, and he says, “It really is, really is beauful,” and his own ear catches the loss of the syllable. “Beau-ti-ful,” he enunciates to demonstrate that he is at least not that far gone, but he says the word too loudly, and the man with the newspaper hat lifts his head. He is leaned against the wall where Kerrigan notices yet another sign: TABLE WHORES CLUB. His face is desolated, eyelids sagging low and a smile of unforgiven unforgiving unrepentant dissoluted idiocy on his wet mouth, then once more wraps his dreams about his heart and slips away. In the course of these movements, the elbow of the man overturns a glass the stale-looking contents of which spills into the lap of the other sleeping man, who jolts upright and croaks, “That was juice-sizzle-me smart!”

  “Well, you’re not so cancer-eat-me clever yourself, you ass banana.”

  “Fok,” the first says, and lays his head down once again, and Kerrigan begins to realize he is watching these events through nearly closed eyes himself, nodding.

  “Mr. Kerrigan!” his Associate snaps.

  “Shouldn’t we dance?” he says.

  “You’ll be doing it alone, sir,” she says.

  “It is a lonely dance,” he says. “Upon monsieur’s sword.” And notices that hanging just above the cross at her throat is a steel shieldlike ornament half the size of a cigarette pack. “What’s that?” he asks.

  “In fact,” she tells him, “it is a North African chastity belt.”

  He misses a beat. “You puttin’ me on?”

  “No,” she enunciates, demonstrating for him how nullifyingly nil the word’s message can be. Why would she wear a chastity belt at her throat? He considers a deep-throat joke but decides against it.

  Disgrace multiplies as he stumbles, climbing up out of the basement pub to step into the idling cab that his Associate has telephoned for.

  “Nu går det hurtigt,” he says to her in Danish. “It’s going fast now.” A Danish saying. By which he means to disassociate himself from the involuntary acceleration of his intoxication. “Intoxication,” he says, “is a poem which has not found its form. That’s Ole Jastrau.”

  “I read the book,” she says. She is chill but not so chill as to make him lose all hope.

  “You have experience at this. Handling slightly intoxicated gentlemen,” he mutters.

  “My father and my first husband gave me some practice. Second was no better, though he didn’t drink. Although I would not call any of them gentlemen.”

  It occurs to him that maybe they are destined to repeat their lives, proceeding from wrong to wrong, she with drunken him, he adoring and losing her. He leans closer, smells her perfume, and feels the ache of loneliness in his heart. He wants so badly to touch her, for her to touch him. He wants to recite Joyce to her: Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon now. I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch touch me. Or even to jocularize with a word of Molly’s: Give us a touch, Poldy. I’m dying for it. What a delightful thing for a woman to say.

  But he would feel a self-pitying fool for it and wills discretion upon himself. “Listen,” he says quietly. “I’m not that bad. Just didn’t eat enough. Cup of coffee fix me right up in case, you might like for example to come up and join me for a cup. I promise you: no uninvited monkey business.”

  She smiles. “Not this time, Mr. Kerrigan,” she says as the cab pulls in along the curb at his apartment on Øster Søgade, East Lake Street.

  “What a lovely view,” she says, admiring the lake across the road.

  “Nicer from the apartment inside,” he says.

  She shakes her head, opens the door for him. He manages not to lunge at her for a kiss, gives her his hand instead, which he feels her take warmly with a gentle embrace of her fingers.

  “Deep down you are a gentleman,” she says. “Try to. Be.”

  He stands swaying slightly on the street outside his building as the cab rolls off. He sees her fingers twinkle at him from behind the dark glass, then the whispered roar of the engine is moving off, the rump of the car disappearing.

  We followed the rump of a misguiding woman, said Fergus.

  He is standing just outside the white picket fence of the building beside his own, finds himself staring at a forsythia bush—at first blankly, then slowly perceiving that it is in bloom, an explosion of yellow buds. Dimly he remembers something she said earlier about the green of the trees at the Tivoli gate and is suddenly aware that the forsythia is in fact already beginning to fade. It bloomed probably a week ago, and he has not even noticed until this moment when it only has perhaps another week left before the dazzling tiny yellow flowers fade to the green of any other bush. Yellow as the dazzling curls that frame her face.

  Though of course that yellow is surely from a bottle to conceal the gray. Don’t care. I use bottled stuff, too—to make life dazzle.

  Hi
s eyes fix upon the bush, fighting the blur of his intoxication, and he begins to consider his age, how many springs remain for him, how many more times he will have the pleasure of seeing the yellow forsythia or the green of the Tivoli trees.

  Slowly he climbs his dusty, shadowy staircase toward the little stone angel beside the door to his apartment. And he remembers then from whence these thoughts originate. One of his father’s favorite poets, A. E. Housman:

  Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

  Is hung with snow along the bough …

  And since to look at things in bloom

  Fifty springs is little room,

  About the woodland I will go

  To see the cherry hung with snow.

  Fifty springs? Hardly. Not half. Or half that. Or half again.

  Upstairs at his desk he peers blearily across the lake to a row of night-shadowed buildings; they remind him of the sense of mystery of his youth when he believed such buildings across such bodies of water at such a dusky hour contained wondrous secrets.

  Now he has the Montblanc in his hand, thinking inevitably about the mystery of Licia—When will he be free of her?—the sweet angel who appeared in his life among the faces of the students at a guest lecture he was delivering on verisimilitude one afternoon at the University of Copenhagen. He knew he didn’t have a chance—she was gorgeous, twenty-five, he forty-four. Yet after the lecture she hung around, and then somehow there were just the two of them walking across Amager to Christianshavn, having a drink at the floating bar in the canal, her eyes so light and blue in the sunshine, and she said, “Men of my age are so uninteresting.”

  “I’m almost twenty years older than you,” he said. “A brook too broad for leaping.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that. I’m a good leaper.”

  He opens the lowest drawer of his bureau, where he keeps a picture of her he took on a boat sailing the Ionian Sea to Ithaca. She is smiling the smile that so enchanted him—with her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her posture—and she is wearing a blue bikini the color of her eyes. Why did he never notice how self-consciously cute she was, how posed, the angle of her head, the way her blue eyes were looking off to the side? False angel. Blue-eyed blonde treachery.

  He rises, puts on a Rautavaara CD: Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928–), Finnish composer of mysterious bombastic modern “serious” music.

  In his armchair he watches the flashing red-and-green neon sign of the Jyske Bank ripple across the water, disappear, reappear, as the sound of the Helsinki Philharmonic performs Angels and Visitations, filling the darkness of his room; the composition is from 1978, the first of Rautavaara’s Angel series: Angel of Dusk, 1980; Playgrounds for Angels and Angels of Light, 1994.

  Rautavaara explains that his angels do not originate in fairy tales or religious kitsch, but from the belief in other realities beyond those of normal consciousness, different forms of consciousness: “From this alien reality, creatures rise up which could be called angels.” He compares them to the visions of William Blake and to Rainer Maria Rilke’s figures of awe and holy dread.

  The composer tells how the first impetus for Angels and Visitations came from Rilke’s observation of his fear of perishing in the powerful presence of an angel’s embrace. This caused Rautavaara to recollect a childhood dream of an enormous, gray, powerful, silent creature that would approach and clasp him in his arms. He struggled until he awoke. Night after night the figure returned and he spent his days in fear of it, until he learned to surrender to its visitation.

  At the climax of the symphony, when the visiting angel’s embrace is finally accepted, a man’s deep, surrendering scream is heard amidst the exquisitely high encompassment of the violins and harps and celesta.

  But before that moment arrives this night, Kerrigan has passed through the dark, shadowed rectangle of the bedroom door, shed his clothes, and crawled beneath the covers of his bed. The scream enters the shadows of the next room, fades into silence.

  Two: The Seducer

  I wished on the moon for something I never knew,

  A sweeter rose, a softer sky, an April day

  That would not dance away.

  —DOROTHY PARKER

  Now his eyes are open. The white ceiling floats with shadow and light. He is heavy but not unhappy, not at all, for his now wakeful mind harbors an image of the twinkling green eyes of his Associate. He pictures her face, her full lips, delicate hands with red nails, the fullness of her breasts and shadowed line between them beneath the black neckline of her blouse, how she looks from behind, narrow dark slacks on her trimly rounded hips. A butt sculpted by Antonio Canova! Dreamy again, he remembers her pointed red nail tapping the page, her sculpted fingers he would kiss.

  His breath is deep and slow. Dreamily he recalls the orgasmic, terrified cry of the man embraced by the angel in Rautavaara’s symphony and remembers then the Finnish girl he met some time ago at the bar in Hotel Këmp in Helsinki, teaching him the word Multatuli. In Finnish it means “earth and fire” but also means, as she explained in her slow ponderous English, “I haf just hod an orgasm.”

  His hand slides beneath the eiderdown as he thinks of her, of his Associate, of Multatuli, which also means “I have suffered much” in Latin. To suffer in the gentle way perhaps.

  Up like a skyrocket, down like a stick …

  Sated, happy, he meditates on his Associate, but as he rises from his bed he feels pain invade his skull. He stands in the center of the bedroom, temples throbbing evilly. His eyes cling to a shelf of books against the wall—Poe, Dostoyevsky, London, Aristophanes, Voltaire, Kipling, Saki, Turgenev, Augustine, Dante, Gibbons, St. Jerome, Hamsun, Conrad. The horror! The horror!

  Or, as Stanley Elkin put it, “Ah! The horror, the horror.” Mr. Kerrigan—he dead.

  He reaches for Hemingway’s In Our Time, begins to read “Big Two-Hearted River,” burns out at the bottom of the first page, reaches for Dante and opens it to a double-page reproduction of the William Blake illustration for the sphere of the lustful, coils of naked embracing bodies swirling away. Must it be bad to lust? To desire? Even if it is an illusion, it is a lovely one. What is wrong with illusions anyway? Especially if, in the end, everything is one? The illusion of life ends in death. But then he remembers the illusions of love created by Licia, how he was deluded by them.

  The throbbing in his head slows, and he reaches to the bureau top for the jar of pills, pops two, dry. His eyes sweep past a framed Asger Jorn print from 1966. Dead Drunk Danes, oil on canvas, a colorful swirl of molten faces painted seven years before Jorn died at fifty-nine. (That would leave me three to go.) Cobra School painter—Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam. Brother of Jørgen Nash, the mermaid killer, father of Susanne Jorn, poet.

  His mind is full of cobras and dead mermaids, but he thinks of his Associate’s trimly curved buttocks as he pictured them in Campari-red pan ties. His senses are sufficiently deranged as to inspire doggerel for his Associate:

  My mind then sold for but a rump?

  By those hips parenthesized?

  Up from the chair two comely lumps,

  Over her shoulder, that fetch-me smile.

  A spasm of his colon drives him to an act less elegantly literary than Leopold Bloom’s ninety-five fictional years before, and no church bell tolls as Kerrigan sits hurriedly to void with a groan and waits, elbows on knees, for more.

  What do I learn, sitting here, watching what is around me? Surely there is a lesson here, perhaps a key to all of life, of my life, but what? I must see clearly. The world around me must not be some vague blur.

  What do I learn then as I sit here, awaiting a possible further spasm? I learn perhaps what a marvel is the common moment, the fact of light, the height of sky glimpsed through the unclosed WC door, out the front window, aroil with cloud, the sheer mystery of this small enclosure, the blue-gray linoleum between my feet with its vague yet irrefutable suggestion of faces in its pattern—there, eyes, a nose, a stern mouth, there a sharp profile, undeniable
as if ghosts were imprinted, captured there, and in that yellow corner between the blue pipe and the standing plunger, the threads of a web on which waits a spindly-legged spider with a tiny yellow button of a carcass; hidden universe, another creature, not of my species, what does it see of me?

  This roll of white paper a clue to the times in which I live, the chain I pull that drops quarts of water upon my odiferous waste. Trousers to pull up, metal teeth of a zipper, brass buckle of a belt, hands and a bar of fragrant soap beneath a chrome spout of water. Marvel of modern plumbing! Gleaming white, clean, sanitary.

  And through the window I see a ponytailed man in a leather vest who pauses to place the palms of his hands on his kidneys as he observes something that has caught his attention—what? A bird it seems, a sparrow, simple as that, yet what a marvel that commonplace! Lifts with a shiver of wing into the air and flies up to a chestnut tree and there stands the tree, wiser than a man perhaps. How is it that trees exist? Do trees have some manner of consciousness, thick-skinned and eternally patient?

  Kerrigan stands over the guest sofa upon which he has spread out research materials, the coffee table where there are more, the dining table that he has converted to a desk for this book. His zip satchel there surprises him—wonder he didn’t lose it.

  His mind is atremble, his body ashiver, but to demonstrate to himself that his will is stronger than his pain, he sits and takes up his pen, puts its nib to the white-lined pad before him, and begins to write:

  Just dash any words onto it when you see a blank page staring at you like some idiot. How petrifying that is, that blank staring page saying to the writer you can’t! The page stares like a fool and hypnotizes some writers and turns them into imbeciles themselves. A writer may tremble before the white empty page—however, the white empty page itself fears the fearless writer with passion who dares, who has broken out of the spell that says “you can’t” forever!