Beneath the Neon Egg (13 page)

“It has been scientifically proven that crystals have innate energy,” she says. “Why do you think they used crystals in radios? They channel through you, and then you are like the radio receiver. You tune in to the energy, which enters your body and comes out your hands. Crystals have intelligence. They attract certain energies that can channel to the higher self according to the person’s aura, and, for example, cure a disease or close the separation from the soul essence.”

“The soul essence,” he says.

“When I was twelve I made a decision that I was a have not,” she says. “I did not realize, or I forgot, that I was connected to God, but I found the way back with crystals.”

“With crystals.” As he sits there listening to her amiable nonsense, he feels a mild gentle warmth running through his body, filling his heart, his brain, his eyes, and he watches her, smiling, and realizes that this is not about love, this is about friendship and pleasure and a certain healthy skepticism of human motives, including one’s own.

Crystals indeed
.

He stands to get a drink, but goes to the window instead, and just above the lake, in the black starry sky, he sees the Hale-Bopp.

“Look!”

He remembers reading about this in the papers, in
Newsweek
, that it had last been seen from earth 4,200 years ago and would not be seen again for about another 2,400 years. The reporter for some reason had referred to it as “a frozen dirt ball,” and Lars at the Booktrader had said, “
He
sounds more like the frozen dirt ball there.”

Liselotte stands beside him watching it through the window, and he realizes it could mean nothing or it could mean something; it might all mean something, everything, that crystal, our eyes, our lives, every moment we spend together, every word we speak, right up to the last breath we draw into our lungs and release.
Maybe
, he thinks,
there
is
something. ’Cause without something, there’s nothing
.

On Friday she is free from work; having caught up, he doubles his page quota the day before so they can spend a three-day weekend together.

Thursday, just as he’s finishing his tenth page of the porcelain exhibition catalog, there is a knock on his door. Sam Finglas. Bluett invites him in, pours a cup of coffee. Bluett notes Sam is unshaven. The skin beneath his eyes is pouchy.

“Had another call from your ex, Sam?”

He shakes his head, distant, yet somehow Bluett feels he wants something. “You want to talk, Sam?”

Finglas looks at him, and his eyes send a message that reaches deep into Bluett’s heart but that he cannot comprehend, a gaze that will imprint upon him.

“What can I do for you, Sam? You got money trouble? Trouble with the woman friend?”

Sam only stares, sighs. “I got to go, Blue.” He puts out his hand, and they shake, formally, and Sam holds on to Bluett’s hand for several moments, staring into his eyes as though from very far away.

A chill touches Bluett. “Sam, I’m here. Right across the hall. Just knock on the door. Any time.”

He nods, looks at him a moment longer, raises his palm in parting and is gone.

Bluett sits at his desk with Sam’s eyes still in his mind. That stare. Startled blue eyes peering deep, but for what? At what? Conveying what? As though he were saying,
Read my eyes
.

Tell me, Sam. I can’t read your eyes
.

Or as though he were trying to read something in mine
.

He sighs, goes back to his tenth page, finishes it off, checks it, prints it out. He makes up the bill for the week’s work and clips it to the translation, copies the job onto a disk, and packages it all into an envelope, which he weighs on the postal scale. He licks stamps and sticks them to the corner, three carmine images of the face of Margrethe, queen of the social-democratic Kingdom of Denmark.

Then he showers and shaves, pats himself down with the new aftershave Liselotte bought for him, trims the hair in his ears, his eyebrows, his mustache, dresses, and pulls on his coat to take a walk down to the mailbox.

In the hall, he pauses outside Sam’s door, remembering that gaze. He knocks, knocks again.

Nothing.

The weekend with her lies before him like a little paradise, Thursday evening to Sunday night, an island of pleasure. They are to meet at the Café Europa on Amagertorv, and his step is light up to Frederiksborggade, past Israels Plads, where earthy women in tight slacks hawk vegetables and fruit, across Nørreport to Købmagergade.

The streets are full of end-of-the-day office people out to shop, meet for drinks, dinner, and it occurs to him he is beginning to feel a part of it all again, after how many weeks, months of estrangement?

Since the divorce. Something he does not want to think about. The connection to someone, the breaking of connection. He has had his life. He passes a bakery, window display of petits fours and
wienerbrød
(Viennese) Danishes, and remembers sitting drinking beer with Sam on a sunny autumn afternoon. The wasps had been at their beer and on the butter and the jelly in the
wienerbrød
on the next table, and Sam had said, “Those wasps are like us. Their work is done, their queen is dead, the hive is gone. They have nothin’ to do now but take what pleasure they can get from the little time left before they freeze to death or get swatted out. They want sugar, and they’re mean ’cause somehow they know they got nothin’ to lose. No purpose. Nothin’ to do but fly around and look for sweet stuff.”

He has had his life. His kids are grown, and the connection to Jette was a dead end. How odd it seems to him, to have spent twenty years of his life, the central twenty years perhaps, on a dead end. The kids, of course. It was for the kids, and they had turned out well, even if Timothy had not forgiven him yet. Time. They need time. Yet time is a sea that stretches in more than one direction. Memories wash up sometimes, late at night, on a lonely afternoon, of hopeful times, the times after they managed their first adjustment together, when they were a team in the world, part of a net of family. Her family really. His so many years dispersed.

He remembers Jette once saying to him, “You’re my best friend.”

He cannot recall the context, only the statement, how it surprised him with delight and warmth, an unexpected revelation of tenderness through her normally guarded exterior. Other moments, too. Their month roaming the desert in a rented Ford; last fling before having children. Swimming at sunset in a motel pool in a little town in New Mexico. Both of them brown from the sun and trim and wanting nothing more than to be together, talk, share their thoughts, make love, make babies.

Those moments too few. The failure was there from the start, too, a breach inevitable, only a matter of the destruction of their marriage waiting for the right moment.

Oh, they’re still friends, but only in extremely small doses; otherwise the emotional poison begins to leak out. There would be no growing old together, no death do us part, no better or worse left. In the end, there had been only worse and worse.

And that was your life, Bluett. You chose poorly. Or behaved poorly. Did not have the stuff it takes. You have your kids but they are cheated of a family base. They have you, they have Jette, what little remains of Jette’s family, mostly people in their late seventies, early eighties. Whatever became of the old family stretch where there were aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings? What is there now? What chance left?
Yet that had been precisely his problem—that there had been
too much
family, too many in-laws, no other life.
Remember that!

Passing the post office, a bright-faced couple catch his eye, arms slung over each other’s shoulder, strolling through the evening rush, and it occurs to him he could start over. He could pick a new partner. He could have a life. Pick more consciously this time. Commit himself. Be joined again, this time knowing something about the place.

He follows Købmagergade out to Amagertorv, the Café Europa there at one side of the three-cornered square, the parliament across the canal, and he thinks of Liselotte sitting there waiting for him, knowing somehow she has already arrived. He thinks of the pleasure they have shared these past weeks. He has told her clearly that he is not looking for love. He wants a friend. He wants to have fun. He wants to live free. She understood. She agreed, accepted. He tries to remember whether she told him what she wanted now with her life. She is twice divorced, two daughters in their mid-twenties, alone again for how long now?

Does he love her?

She believes in the intelligence of crystals.

And the two of them, years earlier, had blithely been unfaithful to their spouses. Together. Well, perhaps blithely was too harsh a word. It was not without regret. Not without joy either, for that matter, ecstasy even. No love at home.

He climbs the steps to the glass door, sees her lift her face from a table by the big plate window that looks across to the parliament, and he becomes aware suddenly of Denmark, this country, of Danes, people with a shared heritage of traditions, a thousand-year history, and him an expatriate from a country not two and a half centuries old, cut off here from his past, nose at the window of something he cannot have and does not want.

Well, what then? What are you then? You’ll never be a Dane. And you’re not American anymore.

He does not break stride crossing the floor to her as these thoughts wallop him like a sudden gust of wind, cut the breath from him.

She smiles, stretches across to kiss him as he sits, a proprietary gesture. He almost draws back, but brushes her lips (less says more) and draws away under the guise of settling in his chair, his thoughts moving too quickly to examine or even to hold for later examination, everything moving so quickly, time like water, a flow of drops, instants. His eyes focus on the glass of red wine on the table before her. “That,” he says, “is exactly what I want,” signals the waitress, glances back at Liselotte, his eyes deflecting from her neck, the sag beneath her eyes, to her pretty mouth, her breasts, her Wild Turkey–brown gleaming eyes.

She puts her hand on his. He squeezes, takes it away to go for his wallet as the waitress brings his wine, and he empties his glass in two swallows.

From the Europa, they stroll down Østergade to Hvids Vinstue, the oldest bar in Copenhagen. They sit in the evening crowd at rough wood tables in the basementlike interior. He switches to beer, big schooners of draft, and is easy with her closeness now. “Think of all the drinks that have been served here, all the people that have come here all these, what? two hundred fifty years this place has been here. More than that. Two hundred seventy.”

She smiles, playing the game, imagining. He tries to picture the place, say, one hundred years back, jowly men with muttonchops, a beer for a copper, talking of what? A century, no, more than a tenth of the history of this country, his own ancestors just settling in New York from Waterford, just beginning to mingle in the melting pot.

“Where shall we eat?” she asks, her eyes reaching for his, her glance telling him he is far away and she is calling him back.

“Are you hungry?”

“I will be.”

He looks at her face, and in his reverie of time remembers that she is a few years older than he. Four or five years. He looks at her neck, sees the years there, swallows more beer and glimpses her delicate hand on the table, so perfect, like her feet, painted nails that turn him on, twenty of them, color of peaches, like her lips, kiss the toes, lips, fingers, nape of the neck, not the throat, not beneath the eyes. Yes, kiss all of her.

Eat the peach.

He picks her hand up from the table, turns it over and places a kiss in her warm palm, puts his tongue there, sees her pale brown, Wild Turkey eyes gone tender, touches her nose, says, “I don’t like that look in your eye.”

“What look is that?”

“Like the look of, uh, love, or something sticky like that.”

Now they flash, and he chuckles, “Better.” And, “What should we play now?”

They eat on Grey Friars Square, at Peder Oxe, a prime cut served by the sweet blonde hands of a cute young waitress. Bluett looks meaningfully across the table at Liselotte. “Her?”

She smacks her palm at him.

“No?”

Falling into the game, she shakes her head. “Too young and innocent. I want someone more sophisticated.”

They finish with cognac by the fireplace downstairs in the bar, and he considers telling her about his experiences with Benthe and the sister-in-law. Then thinks,
what’s the point?

They take the few steps up from the bar to the dark square. He stands there buttoning his coat, glances at the fountain in the center, the green copper pissoir off to one side, dungareed legs of a pisser visible beneath the bottom edge of the half wall, at the ancient chestnut tree, huge and sprawling with bare wooden winter arms, twig fingers pointing everywhere.

“You know this square is older than my country,” he says, and he remembers then all the summer afternoons he had spent here with his wife when they were young, the first summer they knew one another. To blot out the thought, he reaches down to lift the hem of Liselotte’s long wool coat, splays his palm over her bottom and squeezes. “May I be so forward?” he asks.