Beneath the Neon Egg (12 page)

Tim’s eyes flash. “It’s still boring, Dad!”

“Well, you’ll be finished soon, then you can take a break, travel some.”

“Yeah.
If
I finish.”

Weapon. Bad tact. Avoid this. Yet he finds himself playing right into it. “You’ll destroy your best chances if you quit now.”

“I’m not talking about quitting. I’m just thinking about taking a year off.”

“You take a year off, you may never get back to it. Then you’ll be stuck. I know what I’m talking about. I took a leave of absence at the beginning of my university studies when I came to Denmark, and it took me three years to get back into it. I couldn’t finish until I got here, and it ruined my chances for an academic career.”

“Who wants an academic career?”

“You might. You can’t know yet for sure. Don’t cut yourself off. Don’t shut the door on yourself.” Bluett hears what he is saying, hears cliché after cliché, knows that he is saying what he wishes his own father had said to him all those years before instead of giving him permission to do as he pleased, make his own mistakes, his father who was too lost in
his
and then died. Yet at the same time he senses that nothing can be accomplished with this conversation. Perhaps it is enough just to register his resistance. Change the subject.

“You going away for winter recess, Tim? Do some skiing maybe?”

“Who has money for that?”

The silence extends as Bluett thinks about this, thinks he recognizes where the conversation is headed, wonders if he has set himself up for it, if the whole purpose of the visit was a touch, and why should it be otherwise? He doesn’t mind, he doesn’t mind giving the boy money; he just hates the thought that it might have been the whole purpose of the visit, hates his own suspicion that it might have been engineered by smirks and bitter comments and wonders if it is his own fault that it happens this way. Does he keep too tight a hand on his wallet? Does he use money as bait to draw the kids to him? And what kind of person is he to expect it to be otherwise, to crave this level of devotion?

For a moment he considers making the boy bite the sour apple and ask directly, but fears he will
not
ask then, that he will leave without the money, go out broke and feeling lost and miserable. Bluett remembers how it was to be young. Not as much fun as generally believed and assumed and pretended.
Best years of your life, my butt,
Bluett thinks.
It’s goddamned hard to be young
.

“If you need money, Tim—or anything at all, you only have to ask. If I can help you, I’ll be glad to.” Will you reach that far to me? But the boy is staring out the window, lips pursed.

Bluett swallows some beer, waits. “Been reading anything good lately?”

“Textbooks.”

“Boy, you seem pretty down, Tim. You used to have so much fun with your buddies. I remember how happy you were when you got that apartment . . .”

“Yeah, and what if I lose it?”

“Lose it? Why should you lose it? Are you in danger of losing it?”

“It’s not always so damn easy to come up with the rent, you know. It gets me down, I go around broke, everything I earn goes for rent and books and food, and I think to myself . . .” The boy looks down at the table but seems to be peering into an abyss. “I think to myself, what if I can’t make the rent? What if I get kicked out? I’ll be out on the street. I’ll . . .”

“That won’t happen. I won’t let it. And if it happens, then you just come and live with me until we get you settled in somewhere else.”

“You don’t have enough room here, Dad.”

“Are you kidding? I’d
make
room. You can’t believe I would let you get kicked out into the street. You
can’t
believe that, son.”

Timothy’s face is open and tender. “You would do that for me, Dad?”

“Are you
kidding
? There is no question, Tim. No question at all. Of course I would do it. With pleasure.”

The boy’s eyes are moist, and Bluett cannot believe that his own son would have the impression that he would not help him, would leave him on his own in such a situation.

“Thanks, Dad,” he says, and his voice is thick. “Really. Thanks.”

And Bluett feels a gratitude so deep he cannot see the bottom of it. Gratitude that these things managed to have been spoken. That he’d had the good fortune to get behind this demon and chase it off. “Listen, sonny, I came into some money,” Bluett lies, taking out his wallet, removing three hundred-crown notes, and palming them to Tim. “Here, buddy, give yourself a night on the town. Have some fun. And listen, why don’t you take a couple bottles of that beer in the refrigerator. And some of that ham and cheese there. Take whatever you like. And listen, why don’t you come over one evening soon and we can rent a video? We can order in a pizza, make a night of it . . .”

The visit is soon concluded. They embrace at the door, and Bluett watches his son’s shaven head disappear along the street in the darkening afternoon, cherishing the memory of the boy’s voice when he thanked him, cherishing the thought that this one obstacle had been broken down. Maybe with just a little time they will get beyond this, wondering if they will ever be close again in anything like the way it was before. He knows other men with children older than his who assure him it changes for the better again later and he hopes for that, determined that it will be so. His own father died when he was eighteen, at a time when they were at least partly at odds, so no new level of being together had ever been achieved.

He still remembers the day Tim was born, all the hope and promise of the day. He and his wife were in bed, about to sleep, talking a bit, and Bluett told her some joke, got her laughing. It felt good so he told another, and her laughter turned to something else. The bed started vibrating with her body, and she said, “You better get me to the hospital right now.”

Timothy was born two hours later, and the nurses rolled the bed out into the hall afterward so he and his wife could sit up together with the baby for a while. Little Tim there, with his light eyes open, seeing what?

Bluett went home alone and lay down to sleep but he couldn’t. He couldn’t stop thinking about something, about the baby’s head. He thought it had looked kind of dented. He couldn’t stop wondering if there was something wrong with it.

Next day he found the baby already in his wife’s arms. She was nursing him. It took some moments before Bluett could raise his eyes to the boy’s head, but when he did, there it was again. Dented. Why had no one mentioned it? The baby was deformed.

He took his wife’s hand, and their eyes met, and Bluett smiled. “He’s so cute,” he said. “Cute head,” he said, his pulse sounding in his ears.

“Yeah,” she said, “they get squeezed out of shape from the birth. It takes a day or two before they’re normal shape again.”

Probably nothing in his life, before or since, had had such an impact of reprieve upon him as that moment. Perhaps it was what he hoped for now. A moment of explanation that would eliminate this partial, temporary estrangement, bring them together again as they had been all the years of Tim’s childhood and early adolescence.

When he and his wife were separating, Bluett tried to explain it to the boy. Bluett and his wife by then could not speak to one another without bickering, and in the course of trying to explain how impossible the situation had become, he said to the boy, “It’s this life, son. It’s no life for me,” by which he meant the life of bickering with a wife with whom he no longer shared any joy and who he could not make happy. But the phrase stuck out in his own mind, his own memory, as out of place, as ill-chosen. What might the boy have made of that phrase? He suspected the boy might have thought Bluett meant the life of the whole family, life with
him
and his sister. He tried to talk to him again about it, but the boy cut him off, would not allow him to explain anything more, and still, a year later, they had not come beyond that point.

He stands now at the window and watches the corner around which his son disappeared and looks back in one sweep over his life, and he knows that he cannot regret the things he has done, cannot regret his marriage, it had been necessary, it was his life, a big hunk of it, the main part, that which brought his children to life. How can you regret your life? He and his wife had made vows and broken them, but not without regret, and their love had soured, had worn away, but they had also grown together, and who was to question the fate that joined them, that produced two good kids looking for their own way in the world. Who could question or regret that? Chance turnings decide a fate you thought you had all of time to pick out for yourself. All of a sudden it’s there and then it’s gone, and what is left but sawdust shavings?

At the windowsill, he remembers Tim’s voice—
Thanks, Dad. Really, thanks
—and wonders what kind of man he is, that his own son could think that he would let him get kicked out into the street.

7. The Crystal Ship

Alone again in the darkened apartment, he carries the empty glasses out to the kitchen and thinks about calling someone, but who can he talk to about what he feels now? He doesn’t want to turn to Liselotte for reasons he does not comprehend. Maybe he doesn’t want to show himself emotionally naked. His sister, perhaps, but he remembers Noreen saying to him last time they spoke, “This is going to cost you a fortune.” He wanted to protest, but it was true, he couldn’t afford it, his phone bill the previous month had been a killer. “I’ll translate an extra page tomorrow,” he had said.

“Do you have an infinite supply of pages to translate?”

He had laughed, but as he stands looking at the phone on its little table by the window he realizes that there is no one to call because the pain he feels just now is and must be something he is alone with, realizes it is something to embrace, one of the edges of loneliness, a truth.

We don’t know
, he thinks,
what knives we put in one another’s hearts, mates, parents, children, lovers
. But he feels some edge to the thought that is of no use and with that realization feels it slipping from him. For many moments he stands there over the telephone table gazing out the window at the frozen dark blue lake. He knows that what he feels now is a gift of some sort, the edge of sadness, the sorrow at the core of loneliness, a place he will return to in the future to learn more from.

As the depth of the feeling levels up to the surface, and he finds himself away from it again, just standing blankly, the moment having reached the end of its circuit, the telephone rings.

It’s Liselotte. “Hi?” she says in a tone of query. “Are you okay?”

The hair on his neck rises. “Why do you ask that?”

“I just got a feeling that you might not be . . . okay.”

“What are you, psychic?”

“Was I right?”

“Listen, you doing anything? Why don’t you come over for a nice post blue-hour highball?”

“We don’t have to drink. I don’t want to interrupt your day, but I have something for you.”

He nurses a Stoli-rocks while he waits for her, then another, and halfway through the second he feels it doing its work in his brain, feels that crisp certainty of anticipated pleasure, feels that perhaps he loves her, cautions himself not to speak that word, realizes that if he were always drunk he would always love her for when he is drunk all that exists for him and all he exists for is the moment, the beat of blood in the wrist, the response of his body to hers.

He finishes the second Stoli surfing the TV, watches a bit of David Letterman, Jay Leno, Oprah Winfrey, Ricki Lake, Jerry Springer. Springer is in a serious moment at the end of his freak show: “Love is accepting,” he says solemnly. “And you also have to accept the love that people offer. You have to drink their milkshakes.” Bluett clicks off the remote.

On his way to the kitchen to freshen his Stoli, there is a knock at the door. He opens as he passes and kisses Liselotte’s mouth, her brown eyes bright as amber lamps with surprise and pleasure. He caresses her round full breasts, murmurs, “I want to drink your milkshakes.”

Instead of a drink she asks for juice, so he takes a club soda to slow his progress. He sits on the sofa beside her, stirred. He wants her, but she takes something from her bag and holds it out to him. A large white jagged crystal, the size of a coffee mug.

“This is for you,” she says. “You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want, but
it
told me you were feeling sad. That’s why I called and asked how you were.”

He takes it in his hands, cooling his palms with it.

“Close your eyes,” she says. “Feel its energy. Let it in.”

Despite himself, he feels something coursing faintly into his hands, his arms, his veins. Then he thinks that what he feels is nothing more than his blood.

“I didn’t realize you were into crystals,” he says, feeling vaguely disappointed.

“Something happened to me when I was twelve . . .”

Bluett chuckles. “Something happened to everybody when they were twelve.”

He sees annoyance flash in her eyes, but she governs it. “You don’t have to believe me,” she says, and he is sorry for his flippancy, tries to turn it to humor, warmth. He holds the crystal to his ear. “So this here rock told you I was sad, did it?”