Beneath the Neon Egg Page 6

  “Patrick Bluett!” cries Lars, the owner, in his deep growl, and Bluett extends his right hand to shake and his left bearing his plastic-bagged offering of New Yorkers.

  Lars takes the bag with an eager smile. “Bluett, you’re my only friend!” He shuffles through the half-dozen magazines. “This will give me hours of pleasure, my friend!” Then, glancing at his watch, he asks, “Is it too early?”

  “Never too early,” Bluett says, and Lars brings up a bottle of Merlot from beneath the counter and two juice glasses. With the Swiss Army knife that was a gift of appreciation from Bluett, Lars expertly slits the foil from the neck of the bottle and, with another blade, screws out the cork. On the wall above his head, in large thick black letters, is a palindrome Lars created in Latin. A palindrome generally reads the same backward and forward; however, this palindrome reads the same backward, forward, and up and down as well:

  N E M O

  E R A M

  M A R E

  O M E N

  I was nobody. The sea was an omen.

  In fact, though Lars says Bluett is his only friend, Bluett knows he has many friends, for this bookstore is the hangout of scores of people. Bluett recognizes familiar piano notes from the CD player, a bass introduction, and realizes he is listening to Bill Evans and Paul Chambers and soon will be hearing Miles and the Trane and Cannonball going into “So What,” and he just tilts his head toward the CD player, and Lars says, “Isn’t life wonderful,” in layers of irony that lead to genuine wonder as he lifts his glass. And there, beneath the Kasper Holten erotic ceiling sculpture—a wreath of figures emerging from a book, each performing some various manner of sexual intrusion on the next figure in the wreath, all headed toward a small distant heart—there, Bluett raises his glass in response and hears the chest-deep notes of Miles saving him from loneliness, from despair.

  And he engages in sporadic, desultory conversation with Lars, happily characterized by long silences during which Lars tops up the wine and Coltrane, Cannonball, and Miles top up the music.

  On any given day, Bluett is likely to meet anyone in this antiquarian bookshop—artists, musicians, writers, actors, composers, translators, ornithologists, criminologists, bookbinders, sculptors, flaneurs, expats, beautiful women aging and young—but this particular day no one appears, which is perhaps as it should be. Peaceful.

  In the good weather, Lars and Bluett take advantage of their vantage point in the semibasement bookshop to enjoy a strategic view of women passing the ten-foot-wide window up to the street. Lars is fond of quoting a 1940 poem by Kaj Munk, a Lutheran priest liquidated by the Gestapo in 1944 for his anti-Nazi writings and left in a roadside ditch with a bullet in the back of his head.

  But the poem Lars quotes is one in which the priest declares that he wishes to be the bicycle seat of his beloved so that he could be “intimately near God’s workshop’s secret territory/Nirvana’s polar opposite/Life’s dark spring.” When Munk published the poem, it was immediately attacked by critics, to whom he responded, “I write a tribute to the female sex, bliss’s earthly primordial place, and instantly a pack of curs comes baying under the flag of the figleaf and praise its pornography. Go to hell! That’s where you belong with your swinish thoughts!”

  When Lars told Bluett that, about the response of Munk to the critics, Bluett almost wanted to join the Danish state religion.

  Lars closes at two on Saturday, and Bluett eats lunch around the corner on Krystal Street, across from the synagogue, beside the main library. A couple of pints of Royal pilsner and three “unspecified” open sandwiches, deep ones served on dark rye by a pretty, smiling waitress who reminds Bluett of the British actress Babs Milligan when she was young. The place is called Café Halvvej—Café Halfway—and the name always makes Bluett think of Dante:

  Halfway on the path of my life

  I went astray and found myself on a dark road

  For the straight way was no longer in view . . .

  The remainder of the afternoon he spends walking, to earn an appetite for dinner. Copenhagen is a city to walk in, one of the reasons he settled here. He is a walker. And he loves the serving houses, of which there are many. And the light, even in winter, when the city is a perfect noir setting, dark—in the depth of winter—from before four in the afternoon until nearly ten in the morning.

  By seven o’clock, he finds himself wandering through darkness across Knippels Bridge toward Christianshavn, and he realizes that all along he has had a plan. Down from the bridge and along Torvegade, over the canal, past Christianshavn Square, he follows the plan to the Spicy Kitchen for a dinner of curried lamb and a pint of Carlsberg Classic.

  By nine, after a beer and a shooter of Havana Club at the Eiffel Bar on Wilders Street, he is strolling past Our Savior’s Church and along Prinsessegade toward Christiania, an abandoned military installation taken over by squatters in 1971, just barely tolerated now as a social experiment in conflict with the police and the conservative citizenry. Through the front gate, he walks the unstreetlighted, frozen, rutted mud of the path to Pusher Street, sparsely populated this freezing night, toward the JazzKlub. The shutters are open at the entrance, and he steps in.

  The girl at the door says, “Nothing really happening yet.”

  “If I can just get a beer while I wait.”

  “Just holler into the kitchen for the bartender.”

  Bluett pays his forty-kroner entry and holds out his hand for her to scribble on it with a marker so he can return to the club if he steps out for a joint, but she says, “Forgot the marker today. I’ll remember you. I know your face. I’ve seen you before.”

  “Did I behave in an orderly manner?”

  “I don’t remember what you did, but I don’t have bad memories of you.”

  The bartender, a dark-haired man who speaks Danish with a Spanish accent, is already at the bar. He recognizes Bluett from previous visits. It’s nice to be recognized. Bluett passes him a twenty-kroner coin for a bottle of red-label beer. The first patron in the place, he has his pick of tables, each different, some metal, some wood. He picks one that has an overview of the whole club and all of its black walls and pipes. There are also long benches against the long back wall of the little room, beneath a row of oil paintings of jazz artists, only one of whom he recognizes: the great tenor sax player Dexter Gordon, wearing a long coat on his tall frame, a leopard-skin hat perched on his head.

  Over the sound system come Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker blowing “Night in Tunisia,” written by Diz in 1942. He remembers one day the previous July during the Jazz Festival, sitting in the sun all day drinking golden pints of draft on the canal at Gammel Strand, listening to the Esben Malø Quartet, young musicians—trumpet, tenor, contrabass, el guitar—play cool jazz in the hot afternoon while kayaks and yachts with half-naked people sunning on the foredecks and flat canal boats of waving tourists floated past—right across from Thorvaldsens Museum, yellow sun high in the arch of the blue sky, points of light glittering on the green tower of the parliament and the black tile roofs of the pastel-colored canal houses—and the red-headed young trumpeter blew an approximation of Cannonball Adderley’s version of “Autumn Leaves,” a cool subject for a hot day, and the breeze ruffled the edges of the broad white umbrellas over their stage area. He had watched a two-man kayak lance past in the water, the back space empty, while the sunlight tingled his flesh.

  Life is gorgeous sometimes.

  Bluett had asked the cool young quartet if they would play “Night in Tunisia,” but the trumpeter had confided he was too hungover to take on that number. Now it’s playing on the JazzKlub’s sound system, and those two simple disparate experiences make him feel some manner of continuity.

  He wonders that he has been drinking all day and is not getting drunk. Unless he’s in that dangerous sort of drunkenness where he’s so drunk that he doesn’t think he’s drunk.

  The singer and her guitarist, Kelley and Tony, are setting up on the stage now, and people are dr
ifting in. Kelley and Tony are joined by a visiting alto sax man from Russia, a Danish guy with an electric guitar, a bass man, a drummer. The music is mellow. It seems to be one of those days when no matter how much Bluett drinks, it just keeps him on Mellow Street. Kelley is singing “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” her voice cool and clear, and the Russian laces around her words with alto riffs, and the guitar notes glide so cool and so electric into the dim smoky light of the club.

  A dog is wandering around among the tables, one of the most beautiful dogs Bluett has ever seen, a mix of golden and collie and husky with a beautiful white coat, immaculately brushed. He makes welcoming lip noises to attract the dog, and it noses over, makes a polite perfunctory greeting, allows Bluett to scratch its neck for a minute then wanders off, and Kelley is singing bossa nova in Portuguese, and through some incalculable series of maneuvers, somehow Bluett finds himself speaking with the owner of the dog who is every bit as gorgeous as her dog—and sweet and friendly and nicely shaped. Her name is Lucia. Maybe she will be the light of Bluett’s life.

  He wonders if Lucia will decide she likes him. The woman always decides whether it is a possibility. Otherwise it’s rape. Tell you their decision with a smile—of rue or complicity or surrender. Rue means you get nada, with complicity you’re in for a good time, but with surrender you’re just in for it. He is looking at Lucia, and she smiles at him—what kind of smile? he wonders, but doesn’t really care; it is just so goddamn nice to be smiled at by a sweet woman. She touches his arm and asks if he would like to share a joint with her in the kitchen.

  Then they are in the kitchen, and she is sitting on the deep kitchen sideboard with her legs stretched out, and her toenails are polished plum blue, and he tokes the joint and studies her clean, beautiful feet. He wants to touch and to kiss them. Tentatively, he lays a fingertip on Lucia’s toes, and she does not protest. In fact, she touches his arm again and asks if he is married.

  “I haven’t had sex in a year,” she says.

  Out in the club Kelley is singing “How About You?” and then “Lovers and Friends.” He is wondering how old Lucia is, notices that her face is not exactly beautiful, as he had thought, but more attractive in an unusual way. She has an agreeable voice—a voice Bluett could definitely fall for. He keeps stealing glances at her face to determine what precisely constitutes its unusualness. By now his fingers are massaging her feet, and she is leaning back on her elbows and telling Bluett about her work as a cemetery tour guide.

  Bluett is confused. He thinks that he might have misheard, due to the tokes. He says, “What, like, you are some kind of real estate purveyor for people who want to be buried?”

  She laughs. She has a nice laugh. He could definitely fall for that laugh but is still confused at this business about a cemetery tour guide. From a dainty pink backpack, she removes a card that she extends to him. It shows the name of a tour guide bureau specializing in cemeteries and cemetery sculpture. She says that she shows groups around on walking tours of various cemeteries, gives talks on who is buried where. “You know,” she says. “The graves of the famous.”

  She lights another joint and passes it, and he tokes and finds himself staring into the shadows of the corner. Time has that strange quality dope sometimes gives it. Then Getz is on the sound system, blowing Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count,” and Lucia and Bluett go back into the heart of the club. The lights are even dimmer than before, and most of the guests are gone, and Bluett wonders what was in that dope and can’t quite recall how many joints they smoked.

  The bartender with the Spanish accent produces a soprano sax from beneath the bar and starts blowing to a guitar backup. The soprano notes are like a fine fine grade of sturdy sculpted tin in the dim light. Lucia sits on a bench and pats the space beside her for him to sit, which he does and then he hears himself asking, “Can I call you?”

  To which she replies. “As long as you realize it will never be more than friendship.”

  Bluett wonders how in the world he managed to fuck that up. He says, “Well, what’s wrong with friendship?” And then they are at the bar, and Bluett looks at his watch. Somehow the long day and night have melted into quarter to two in the a.m. Lucia is talking to the owner, and now Bluett is no longer getting drunk. He is drunk. Maybe that was how he fucked it up. He sees two bartenders blowing two sopranos. At first it’s, like, double your pleasure. But then it’s, like, time to go home.

  The front doors are locked so he threads through the back rooms and hallways until he discovers an unlocked door and steps out into the dark, freezing morning. He walks the dirt street toward the Free State exit and sees the familiar raw wood sign over it into which is carved, on this side, you are now entering the european Union. He steps through the gate, under the sign, and is out on the street just in time to flag a Mercedes taxi.

  As the cab rolls over Knippels Bridge, black water gleaming on either side, the green copper towers of Copenhagen up ahead cloaked in darkness, he says to the Iranian driver, “All in all, as Ivan Denisovich put it in nineteen sixty-two, it has been a good day.”

  The driver chuckles, and Bluett knows he has no idea what Bluett is talking about.

  5. Aura

  Sunday. Already light when he wakes so he knows it is at least nine thirty or ten, reaches for his watch: 10:20. In the kitchen he spoons coffee into the electric maker for a whole pot and waits, leaden-eyed, until it drips its last into the glass pot, pours a mug of black and wanders into the living room. He sees the CD jacket of Miles Davis’s Aura and remembers how he had been waylaid the previous day, or was it the day before that, from listening all the way through.

  Slowly the scraps of memory of Saturday reassemble in his mind: walking through the Botanical Garden, the Booktrader, Café Halfway . . . Halfway through my life I found myself on a dark path . . .

  Unspecified sandwiches, more walking, lamb curry, the JazzKlub, the drinks, the dope . . . Lucia. His brain is post-dope hazy but not disagreeably so.

  He pours coffee down his neck, fumbles through his pockets for the card she gave him, finds it, sees and remembers that she is a cemetery guide, thinks you couldn’t ever make this shit up. He tears up the card and drops it in the garbage along with the wet coffee grounds.

  Another mug and he puts on Aura, thinking, the day yesterday was a mere, albeit a pleasant, interruption. Lucia’s aura did not admit you. You did not have the chemistry that perked her percolator. What is chemistry anyway? Mystery. But undeniable.

  Something makes him think of a woman named Johanna who wanted him to spank her, and he did it, but she said, Not that way! And taught him how she wanted to be spanked, starting with a gentle caress and building up . . . He felt like a dunce for not knowing that. But now he knows how, should he be called upon to administer what the Danes call an “end-full.” So many things a man is called upon to know.

  In his one good armchair he sits with the hot mug balanced on his knee and listens, eyes closed, to Miles, playing the symphony Palle Mikkelborg wrote for him two years before Miles died, six years earlier. He hears John McLaughlin’s guitar opening the piece, and Miles’s unmistakable trumpet, a tom-tom. He remembers the first time he heard this CD was in the Fiver (Femmeren) on Classensgade. A tall young guy next to him at the bar asked the bartender to play the CD and told Bluett that Miles hadn’t worn his headphones when he played trumpet over McLaughlin’s guitar and all the other musicians. At first Bluett thought he was saying it had been careless of Miles, but then he saw the young guy could see that thought on his face and the guy quickly added, “That was part of his process on that recording. I can understand that, what he got from using that technique.”

  Afterward the young man left, and Bluett asked the bartender to play Aura once again, and the bartender said, “You know who that guy was? It was Halfdan E. He’s a composer. He composed the music on the two Dan Turèll CDs. Lots else, too.”

  Funny, he thinks, how in Copenhagen everybody mixes. No one is too famous to hang aro
und with whomever.

  Now Bluett can’t hear this music without thinking about that, about how ingenious it was of Miles, how that information from Halfdan E enabled him to understand this music much more deeply. And he thinks about what Palle Mikkelborg writes inside the CD case: “I still thank my guardian angel for giving me the marvelous gift of meeting and working with this true master who, before we ever met, had already changed my life.”

  Bluett thinks about that statement, thinks that this music in some way has changed him as well, and he doesn’t know how, but he knows that it is so. The music swells within him, and a name enters his head. Liselotte. They were lovers years earlier when they both were married to other people. She was young and beautiful and he was young and naïve and both were locked in disagreeable marriages with kids too young to leave. He heard recently that she had divorced again a while back. He hasn’t seen her for a dozen years, but she once told him, Call anytime, Blue, I’m always home for you. He looks for his phone book, finds it under a heap of papers on his desk, and is punching in the numbers, listening to the ring as he watches the now yellow sunlight across the lake and hears Miles blowing the “Yellow” cut.

  “Hej! Det er Liselotte!”

  So cheerful. “I didn’t wake you?” He remembers she is an early riser, remembers that she too liked to make love in the morning.

  “Hej, Blue!”

  “Wow, you have a great memory for voices!”

  “I always remember your voice.”