Kerrigan in Copenhagen Read online

  His table is behind the concrete planters, where he hunches against the wind to get a small Sumatra lit, then waits, smoking, with the sunlight in his face, for the tall young white-aproned waitress to bring his food—a platter of herring, crab salad, a wedge of Brie that he plans to pepper liberally. When he opened his mouth to say, “And a club soda,” it said instead, “And a large draft Tuborg.” Startled by these unanticipated words, he paused, and then his mouth called after her, “And a double Red Ålborg snaps if you have it!”

  She smiled over her shoulder at him, one eye squinted shut against the sun, her white-swathed rump nothing short of magnificent, her breasts in a white T-shirt truly mighty, and she said, “We have it.”

  And there it is again: Kerrigan, a fool for love. You would be duped all over again by Licia. She was right: You are blind. So he just smiles politely to the cute-faced waitress’s polite smile as she places the fish and drink before him. And as he eats, he watches swans and ducks, joggers, and then a single heron walking slow and precise as a tai chi chuan master along the bank of the lake, while the wind stipples the water into glittering spires of silver and black, and Kerrigan feels the beer chasing the snaps through his blood; the snaps makes a clean dash for the shelter of the brain where it does its optimistic work, and the beer plows right on after it.

  He likes it here so very much, relishing with his eyes the whipping branches of the chestnuts, the potted yellow lilies framing the path line, the multi-spiring water, and the imperturbable heron. He takes out his little pad and his Montblanc, swallows more beer, and thinks of Stan Getz’s three years in Copenhagen at the end of the fifties, when he came here to find serenity, freedom from drugs and drink, and played his beautiful tenor four days a week on Store Regnegade in the old Montmartre, owned by Anders Dyrup, the jazz-loving son of a wealthy paint manufacturer whose name is everywhere on Danish paint shops.

  Getz played with bassist Oscar Pettiford, one of the great early beboppers—half Choctaw, part Cherokee, part black, married to a white woman—who came to Denmark to find a more tolerant social climate for his children. And he jammed at Montmartre with the musicians who came through—Art Blakey, Lee Konitz, Kenny Clarke, Gerry Mulligan. Picture Stan on baritone and Mulligan on tenor, switch-hitting, with Jim Hall on guitar playing for four or five hours in the dark morning hours on Great Rain Street.

  But within two years, Pettiford was dead, at thirty-seven, of a fluke disease, and one night after dinner Getz went outside the beautiful house where he lived with his wife and children and threw a brick through every window. Then he came back in and with a poker from the fireplace smashed every plate in a collection of priceless Royal Copenhagen porcelain that the landlord owned.

  The doctor put him on Antabus—an anti-alcoholic medication that causes violent illness if combined with drink—but Getz didn’t take it because, he reasoned, he was not an alcoholic. On another occasion he kicked his dog unmercifully, then beat his daughter, cursing her for trying to stop him. He even put a loaded gun to his wife’s head.

  Too tortured to live with peace of mind, he returned to the states after not quite three years—Kerrigan heard him, saw him in Carnegie Hall in ’64 and in the Rainbow Room in ’70 and twice here in Copenhagen; he came back frequently to Denmark. Standinavia was the title of one of his albums. Kerrigan heard him play at Montmartre once in 1977, the new Montmartre which had moved to Nørregade, North Street. He thinks now what it must have been like to be able to go hear Getz play four nights a week.

  Kerrigan contemplates the fact that a man who could play such profoundly beautiful music, lines that search into the bottom of your soul and lift it up through an agony of pleading to an angelic plain, could be so helpless against the demons that had him terrorize his own family.

  He thinks again of Kristensen’s Ole Jastrau, nicknamed “Jazz” in the novel Havoc, written thirty years before Getz’s stay in Copenhagen. Jastrau lashes out to destroy a life that is destroying him as an artist, as a poet. He drives away his wife and child, smashes up their bourgeois apartment, exposes himself to syphilis, performs a wild awkward dance to the jazz of a wind-up gramophone, all the while accompanied by a younger man, Stefan Steffensen, a poet who shamelessly, scornfully uses him, abuses his hospitality, a young man fleeing from wealthy parents who are both infected with syphilis, as he is, as is the girl he has with him—a servant from his house whom he himself has infected.

  Abruptly Kerrigan feels that he understands the difference between Kristensen the creator and Jastrau his creation. For just as Stefan Steffensen is Jastrau’s alter ego, so is Jastrau Kristensen’s. What kept Kristensen from the dogs perhaps was his pen. He wrote it. Jastrau only lived it and even then not in the world but in the word, while Kristensen was his god, his creator; through Jastrau he both lived and uttered it. Getz had only the music, and beautiful as it was, as it is, it did not give him the power he needed over his demons. He only played it, interpreted it; he did not create it. But no, no, of course Getz created it, his breath shaped the notes, his being improvised the turns, the leaps.

  So Kerrigan takes up his Montblanc pen, pleasingly weighted in his hand, and casts into words the spirit of the water suddenly subjected to the wind, flinging sand in the faces of the people at the café tables around him. One by one, they gather up their cakes and coffees and liqueurs and hurry indoors, hair dancing in the wind, blinking against the dust, smiling self-consciously, self-deprecatingly at their soon-solved predicament, but Kerrigan stays where he is, eyes squinted into the wind that cannot blow the ink from his page.

  Grinning, he lifts his glass and drinks beer, swallowing the dust the wind has flung into it, letting the grit of it against his teeth be pleasure, and practices one of his favorite hobbies, the memorization and juxtaposition of dates:

  In 1987 when Stan Getz was doing his penultimate appearance in Copenhagen’s Montmartre club, dying, playing “Blood Count,” which Billy Strayhorn wrote in 1967 when he was dying, the great horn man Dexter Gordon, who lived in Copenhagen from 1962 to 1976, was, incredibly, competing against Paul Newman for an Academy Award for best actor for his performance in the film ‘Round Midnight, a composite portrayal of American jazzmen in Europe. Newman won. And Long Tall Dexter Gordon, the soft-spoken six-and-a-half-footer who was described by the critic Alexander Walker as moving with a child’s gentleness but having an unsettling tension—that the big barrel of his body might contain gunpowder while his deep quiet voice seemed to emanate from a silence in which he lived, listening to sounds no one else could hear. Dex returned to America in 1976, twelve years before Kerrigan would meet Licia, twenty years before she would disappear with their baby, another maybe in her womb. Maybe of Kerrigan’s, maybe not.

  In 1943, Kerrigan was born to an Irish father and Danish mother, exactly a hundred years after the birth of Henry James and the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” and forty-five years before his meeting with the dazzling blonde Licia.

  In 1831 Darwin sailed on the Beagle, 168 years before five states in the U.S. would eradicate his discoveries from the teaching curricula of their schools (along with the Big Bang Theory) and 133 years before Peter Higgs at the University of Edinburgh discovered, and lost, the so-called Higgs boson (the “God particle”)—an elusive particle that is believed to be capable of explaining why things in the universe have mass and, thus, why life exists. In 1821 John Keats died at the age of twenty-four, the same year Dostoyevsky and Flaubert were born, two years after the birth of Melville and Whitman in 1819, which was six years after the birth of Kierkegaard in 1813, the year the Danish State went bankrupt, six years after the Duke of Wellington bombarded Copenhagen, killing nearly 2 percent of its civilian population, thirty years before Kierkegaard would write The Seducer’s Diary in 1843 while Darwin was writing The Origin of the Species, one hundred years before Kerrigan was born, 145 years before Licia seduced Kerrigan in 1988, before his forty-fifth birthday—selected, seduced, bore fruit with, and abandoned him ei
ght years later (while he was in Edinburgh, thirty-two years after Higgs made his initial discovery there), cleaned out his heart and half of his life’s savings, bombarded him with tender attention until the top of his head was blown off as surely as Wellington blew the roof off the White Lamb, and scientists have not yet found again the Higgs boson, the God particle.

  Darwin’s study would later be translated into Danish by J. P. Jacobsen, whom James Joyce in 1901 would call “a great innovator” in the techniques of fiction, and in 1843 Kierkegaard’s fictional Johannes was stalking the innocent young fictional Cordelia along the banks of this lake where Kerrigan sits in 1999, painfully aware that he was Licia’s bitch, forcing himself to savor the taste of dust, glimpsing the beautiful willowy apron-wrapped hips of the waitress who brings him yet another large draft and another lovely, elfin smile, and just like that, he is dazzled and yearns to dance in the woods with her.

  He wonders what would happen if he kissed her. Just like that—jumped up and stole a kiss from those lips, too quick for her to get away. Instead he chances to speak to her as she gathers his soiled dishes and uneaten crusts, to quote the conclusion of the Danish Steen Steensen Blicher’s Diary of a Parish Clerk, written in 1824, when Keats was three years dead, a fictional depiction of the famous tragic love affair between a beautiful young Jutland aristocratic woman, Marie Grubbe (1643–1718), and her game warden, which ends in squalor and poverty in Copenhagen and is, still later, depicted by J. P. Jacobsen in a full-length novel:

  “As for man,” quoth Kerrigan from Blicher, himself quoting scripture, to the waitress, “his days are as grass … For the wind passeth over it and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.”

  The girl’s smile is wise as Buddha’s: “Can I get you something else, sir?” she asks.

  Moved by another hunger now, less specific than the hunger for food or drink, he strolls up Østerbrogade, East Bridge Street, crosses Trianglen, the triangular joining of three avenues, pausing to look at the goddamn 7-Eleven shop where once stood a guest house and restaurant in which two hundred years before, Peter the Great, Czar of Russia, slept.

  He passes Det Røde Lygte, on the west of the three angles, the Red Light Café, whose red door lamps are innocent of prurience—a soccer bar that opened in 1886, the year after the birth of Ezra Pound in the U.S. and François Mauriac in France, seven years before the birth of Tom Kristensen, who was born a year before Dorothy Parker in 1894, fifteen years before the birth, in 1909, of Kerrigan’s father, who would migrate back from Brooklyn to Ireland and on a visit to Copenhagen in 1936, the same year that Joyce and Nora visited Denmark, would meet his Danish wife to be, Elene Mørk, who after the birth of Kerrigan never slept with her husband again, according to a confidence imparted by his father in his cups one night to twenty-year-old Kerrigan.

  Kerrigan continues up East Bridge Street, past Café Oluf at the mouth of Olufsvej, and the Park Café, Theodor’s, Le Saint Jacques, Thygge’s Inn on Viborg Street, down Århus Street past Århuskroen, the Århus Inn, the Café X-presen, offering three unspecified finger sandwiches for a song, past Café Åstedet, the Stream Place Café, and feels like Andrew Flaws in another story, this one by the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown, “The Whaler’s Return,” in which Flaws returns to the Orkneys from months at sea to be married, and between the port and the house of his betrothed in the next town are fifty alehouses waiting to take from him his wages from the long whaling journey.

  He stops here and there, buys rounds, ends in the field spying on a tinker wedding, is discovered, thrashed, and loses more money there. Finally, in the morning, muddy and tired, he finds his way up the lane of his betrothed’s house and tells her he has just enough left of his money for the first six months’ rent, while they see to the seeding and the harvest. She tells him they are also in debt for a shrouding fee and for the digging of the grave of her father who was killed by a horse while Andrew was away. But he says he already saw to that on his way in, and his betrothed replies, “There are thirty-four ale houses in the town of Hamnavoe and sixteen ale houses on the road between Hamnavoe and Borsay. Some men from the ships are a long time getting home … That was a good thing you did, Andrew Flaws.”

  Kerrigan was once in contact with George Mackay Brown. After reading the man’s stories, he had wanted to visit the Orkneys to interview him, and they made plans for it by post, but Kerrigan never got there, and his last letters to Brown in 1995 went unanswered.

  Then one afternoon, visiting Edinburgh in early 1996, at a bookshop on Princes Street, he picked up a new anthology of Scottish verse that included a lovely poem by George Mackay Brown, an account of an outing, of Folster’s lipstick wounds, of Greve’s sweet fog on a stick, of Crusack’s three rounds with a Negro, of Johnston’s mouth full of dying fires, and, in the bio notes, he learned that George had died that year—that was the same trip from which Kerrigan returned to find his bride and daughter gone, his life’s savings drained by half. You are so blind.

  But he knew nothing of that yet. Kerrigan had gone on to Milne’s on Rose Street, where 40 percent larger spirits are served, and the Abbortsford, for pints of black Orkney where George had drunk with Hugh MacDiarmid and Dylan Thomas and W. H. Auden. He thought about the fact that the Orkney Islands had been Danish until 1468. He thought of the wild Danish-Scottish islands he had never seen, although he might have, the fine writer he had never met, although he might have done that, too.

  Kerrigan thinks now about the gaudy monument to Walter Scott on Princes Street and the modest plaque to Robert Louis Stevenson in Princes Street Gardens—just his initials and years in a plaque in the grass—and of riding a mountain bike up and down the hilly roads of Lasswade, where, at the entry to the motorway, there stands a sign: PEDESTRIANS, CYCLISTS, HORSE-DRAWN VEHICLES AND ANIMALS PROHIBITED, and he looked about in vain for bespectacled four-legged creatures who might be capable of receiving that instruction. And he thinks about Licia secretly enacting her escape from him while he was in Edinburgh. But she must have been planning it long before. Licia to whom if anyone had asked him, he would have said and truly believed he was happily wed. He’d thought they were happy together.

  He doubles back and, across the street from the gateway to the stadium, pauses to gaze through the arched port at the four-meter-tall silhouetted bronze sculpture of the archer by Ernst Moritz Geyger (1861–1941) bow drawn, arrow targeted south—a giant Johannes the Seducer aiming to pierce the heart of Cordelia.

  Above the archway, Alfred Boucher’s three runners at the goal, frozen in green bronze, strive to be first over the line, each reaching for individual victory.

  It makes him feel a little more complete to know who these two statues were sculpted by and when and that they were donated by the brewer Carl Jacobsen to the city in which Kerrigan lives. Makes him feel that the world surrounding him is no mere blur, that he knows it and the objects that furnish it, even if he did not and does not know what was occurring in the secret interior of the skull of the woman he thought was his soul mate.

  On the other side of Østerbrogade, East Bridge Avenue, from Sankt Jakobs Kirke, his leather-shod feet lead him to Le Saint Jacques Café. This was once Sankt Jacob’s Bodega, a bucket-of-blood bar, but now in the hands of a French owner, Daniel Letz, it serves excellent cuisine and boasts a magnificent icon collection—a whole beautiful wall of them behind glass, sad-eyed Madonnas with child, saints with fingers raised in benediction over the diners. He orders a draft at the bar, a little bag of peanuts, then takes a wicker seat in the ebbing sunlight. He munches the peanuts from the tiny cellophane bag on which is printed PLEASE REMEMBER THAT SMALL CHILDREN CAN CHOKE ON NUTS. Here, kids, have some nuts. He dusts salt from his palms and fires up a Christian long cigarillo. Dry tobacco. Agreeably bitter in the mouth, smoke floating blue then gray up into the late-afternoon sun that glints white on the surface of the green-lacquered tabletop and glows like yellow amber in the beer.


  Music lilts from inside the café and he recognizes Billie Holiday’s voice, Ben Webster’s tenor. He also recognizes the song, a lyric by Dorothy Parker in which Dorothy, via Billie, wishes on the moon for an April day that will not dance away.

  Billie’s voice so sweet and wistful, lilting and strong; when she says “April day,” Kerrigan’s heart is filled with the accepted sadness of its retreating dance, and Webster’s tenor softens it all with a reedy mellow cool nod. Kerrigan happens to know this was recorded in Los Angeles in June 1957 when he was still thirteen years old. The Chevy was a work of art that year. But two and a half years later, Lady Day would be dead. He thinks of Frank O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died.”

  He loves the voice, the tenor, the lyric, the poem, by four dead people, but what bothers him is that the day Lady Day died, two days after Bastille Day in 1959, he didn’t even know about it because he didn’t even know about her—he was pushing sixteen then, and even if he was living in the city she died in, the city O’Hara describes in his poem, where he buys the New York Post and sees her fateful picture which Kerrigan knew nothing about from the other side of the East River where he lived with his forty-four-year-old mother, same age as the Lady when she died and when he still didn’t even know anything about her or about Frank O’Hara either who died in 1966 at the age of forty in a Fire Island car accident that Kerrigan vaguely recalls hearing about when he was twenty-three and lived on East Third Street between avenues A and B, Alphabet City, just as he vaguely recalls hearing when he was twenty-four of the death of Dorothy Parker in 1967: An April day that will not dance away …