Beneath the Neon Egg (6 page)

 

At Kruts Karport, he eats a bowl of chili, and he feels okay, studies the green row of absinthe bottles behind the bar, 136 proof, resists the urge, orders a glass of wine. He looks into a local newspaper to avoid looking at the tables full of beery youngsters in sweaters and leather jeans, grinning and pawing each other.

Then he is surreptitiously watching a man alone at a corner table, perhaps a dozen years his senior, Sam's age maybe, little older, drinking a pint of beer. The man lights a cigar, and from a satchel on the table removes a book and begins to read. Bluett cranes discreetly to see the title.
Finnegans Wake
. Considers calling across to the man, but what? Something about James Joyce. Then the door opens, a woman in a long green woolen coat enters, eyes the green of her coat and smile so light. She crosses to the man, who looks up just in time to receive a kiss on his mouth from her pretty lips. They appear to be about the same age, couple of notches short of sixty maybe, but still youthful, like where Bluett wants to be at their age, and the way their eyes meet, their smiles, touches pleasurable yearning in Bluett.
Could happen to you. That old chemistry
.

Relieved he hadn't spoken to the man, he has another glass of wine, tips the charming, pretty, round-faced young waitress whose name, he happens to know, is Cirkeline and who rewards him with a smile meant for him only. He pastes it to his feel-good shield and sets off past Silver Square to Nørreport, down Fiolstræde, past the university, the cathedral, behind which people queue at a yellow-lit sausage wagon on the dark street to eat steaming pølser with their cold bare fingers. Through Jorck's Passage, he takes a left on Strøget and cuts across alongside the Round Tower, looks into Café Rex—and remembers a British woman he met there once who invited him home to her tiny apartment into which was crammed a white baby grand piano and who allowed him to undress her to her white lace garters, which, when he saw them, instantly caused him to go down on her. He strolls along Pilegården, continues down to the Palæ Bar on New Nobility Street, stands on the dark sidewalk, looking into the bright window at the crowded tables, decides to save that for later, doubles back for a peek into the Bo-Bi Bar.

Across the half-filled bar room, he spots a familiar face at the back table, two familiar faces. An American translator and an Irish book salesman. The Irishman waves him over. Dermot Cleary, with a face full of whisky veins, map of Ireland on his nose. Bluett notes they are drinking Black Gold beer and Gammel Dansk bitters, orders a round and three hard-boiled eggs on his way back to them. Dermot has channeled a series of lucrative contracts his way in the past couple of years and Bluett feels he owes him.

Watching their fingers fumble at the brown bits of eggshell, Bluett sees they are a few rounds up on him, reminds himself Dermot has supplied a good deal of his business in the past year. He wonders if the American resents Dermot's generosity to Bluett. He is a southern Californian who jumped ship and made his way to Sweden during the sixties to beat a tour in Vietnam, then moved to Denmark, which is a NATO member, previously off limits, when Jimmy Carter let all ship-jumpers off the hook. But the American—Milt Sever—is listening raptly to the story Dermot is telling about a Danish poet who has just returned from Brazil where, Dermot reports, the writer has reported to him in considerable detail that he had paid children to have sex with him.

Bluett cracks his egg on the edge of the table and rolls it between his palms, peels away the shell in one crackling sheet, pinches on finger salt from a stone bowl on the table.

“You wouldn't actually consider such a thing yourself, would you, Dermot?” he hears himself ask and regrets being there.

Dermot blushes, clearly surprised. “I but tell the tale that I heard told,” he says and looks at Milt Sever. “What about yourself, Milt? Would you ever consider such a thing yourself?”

Milt's smile is buttery. He is a tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired man. He clearly enjoys looking at Bluett in light of what he is about to say. “Well, now, I'm sure I would hate myself in the morning, but . . .” He shrugs serenely. Bluett is surprised to find himself having to resist the urge to take a swing at the smug mouth, realizes he would probably miss or be blocked and find himself engaged in a humiliating and ridiculous tussle, realizes he is in danger of screwing himself out of money, a lot of money, and hears himself say, “Well, I think a man ought to burn in hell's river of boiling blood for a thing like that.” He holds his breath.

“You're an honorable fellow,”  says Dermot, and Bluett starts calculating an exit that might cut his losses.

But Milt is not finished with him. “Have you seen Andreas Fritzsen's new novel?” Fritzsen is a Danish-Anglo writer living and teaching in Denmark, a novelist who makes his living in the university. Bluett has read the first chapter of the man's new novel in some literary journal. It is about the brief legality of child pornography in Denmark in the late sixties and early seventies and it includes a scene in which an adult male engineers penetration with a ten-year-old child which, when Bluett read it, had inspired him to write a letter expressing distaste to
Politiken
. Bluett's letter had evoked a surprising response from people who called upon the immortal beauty of Nabokov, Genet, and others in defense of sexual love between children and adults, all of which makes Bluett realize he has walked into a trap here. He begins to prepare an argument against the stance that Humbert truly loved Lolita by pointing out that Humbert extorts sexual favors from the child in return for her allowance, but in that direction lies rage and loss of income.

He shrugs, raises his Gammel Dansk, says, “Gentlemen. I drink to your very good health,” swallows, chases it with Carlsberg draft, and as he retreats from the Bo-Bi Bar, wonders whether he has ruined his economic stability. First Benthe, now Dermot.

Human beings
, he thinks,
are not to traffic with. And where does that leave me?

Moving toward Kongens Nytorv, he refuses to think about these people, takes a long loop behind the Royal Theater to see if there are any attractive joints back there. He notices then, just across from the New Scene, on the edge of the square, a scooped-away corner with a door on which is mounted a brass plate that says,

 

SATIN CLUB

10:00 P
.M. TO
4:00 A
.M.

RING BELL
.

 

He stares, wondering, crosses the square, past the French Embassy to Nyhavn.
Your problem
, he thinks, as he climbs down the steps into the half-basement of the Mermaid Bar,
is a classic one: Lackanookie. Well, not exactly lackanookie, but lackalove-nookie. Forget these provincial fools. Have fun until you meet someone who has the chemistry.

Here he continues with beer, orders a pint of draft lager and sits on a stool at one of the high drum tables. The place is filling up. A fiftyish Scot in the middle of the room strums a guitar and sings “The Streets of London,” as Bluett surveys the joint. No familiar faces.

The Scot takes a break, and an Italian kid comes on who is much smoother. He sings some Simon and Garfunkel, Elton John—“Benny and the Jets,” a favorite of Bluett's. The first pint goes down fast, and halfway through his second, the bar continues to fill nicely. The pleasure of a crowded bar is that it forces contact. Three women join him at his drum table. Look like office girls maybe. He likes the blonde. They chat a bit in Danish. She asks him about his accent, asks how an American speaks such good Danish. He tells her she's too kind, explains his ex-wife was Danish, the key word being
ex
, his ringless fingers resting on the table. He buys a round. More people come in, forcing them closer together. She lights a cigarette. “Is it okay I am smoking near you?”

“Sure,” he says, wishing he were upwind.

The Italian kid is singing “Nothing's gonna change my world” and doing a fair job of it. Bluett studies the blonde woman's face. She is maybe thirty-two, very full-lipped with a bright smile and light eyes. Her lips are rouged pink and he cannot take his eyes off them. They talk about films, music. She buys a round.
Nice habit for a woman
. She tells him that she lives in Albertslund.

Shit.

She glances at her watch. He guesses that she's thinking about the train schedule. Her girlfriends have moved to another table. Her name is Birgitte. The last time he looked at his watch it was nearly eleven
p.m.
Their glasses are full again, and he is shoulder to shoulder with her, the wall behind them, staring into her light, bright eyes. He kisses her full pink lips, tastes her tongue. Then she kisses him. Kisses and smiles in the dim smoky light, hands touching. Soft lips. Soft. And she surprises him by sucking on his tongue. Quite briskly. The Italian kid takes a break and the Scot comes on again with “The Streets of London.” The girlfriends are back, and Birgitte has to go, to get the train. She writes her name and phone number on a coaster, which he slips into his pocket. She gives him a last lingering tongue kiss to catch his attention, stands for a moment pressing her breasts against his arm, smiling at him, then she waves good-bye with a cute tiny circular movement of her palm.

Bluett sits there watching a snow-beer poster above the taps. The white flakes really seem to be falling down the night-blue background. He watches, hypnotized, realizes he is getting sloshed and likes it. It occurs to him once again that love is a chemical. Incredible but true. His beer is nearly empty. The Scot seems to believe that he is the vicar of Roger Whittaker in Copenhagen. Bluett takes the coaster out of his pocket, reads what she has printed there.
Birgitte Svane. Svane means swan in Danish
, he thinks.
Maybe she and I would give birth to Helen
. She had told him she was a bookkeeper at the electric works near Nørreport. She had a two-year-old daughter named Astrid. Sweet name. A little girl. Bluett has nothing against little kids. Likes them. But
Albertslund
. The chemistry was good but the geography was way off.

Bluett has been to Albertslund two times in his life, the first and the last. Middle of nowhere. If hell was absence, as Thomas Aquinas or some such philosopher suggested, Albertslund was a good candidate for hell. Nothing. Nowhere. He had suggested she stay the night with him, here, which was possibly some kind of somewhere, a lesser hell at least, and she had smiled, as if to consider it for a moment, then had said, “Call me.”

Nice answer.

But I will never visit you in Albertslund. Ever.

The Scot sings “The Streets of London” yet again. Bluett wonders if the man is having a nervous breakdown. Two American women sit at the table beside his, drinking dark beer.

“It's so rich and creamy!” the one exclaims as though she is in the grips of ecstasy, not of a pharmaceutical sort. He empties his beer and climbs out to the street, the cold clean air along the frozen canal. He looks down into it. The old sailing boats moored there are frozen into the ice. He sees an empty wine bottle frozen to the surface, upside down, the husk of a leftover New Year's Eve rocket.

There are many people on the street. Nearly midnight. He begins to walk, feeling good, past Tattoo Jack's, hears a singer through a bar door singing, “Kiss my neck! Watch me ride!” Or maybe it's “Watch me slide.” He passes Skipperkroen, Pakhus, Færgekroen, Gilleleje, all packed and noisy, some in a semibasement, some up the steps, these harbor streets that years ago were the sailor's district, now sequestered by the bourgeoisie.

He climbs the steps of one lively joint where a crowd is gathered around three guitarists in the smoky back. The singer is doing “Wonderful Tonight” as Bluett orders a beer, looks around at the men and women in the smoky light, thinks
The night life ain't no good life but it's my life
, savoring the moment, the image of a slender woman standing there alone swaying to the music. The beer is very cold and tastes wonderful.

Perhaps it is the next or the one after that but suddenly it begins to taste acidic. The musicians do a last number, then a last encore, an absolute last one, “The House of the Rising Sun,” and Bluett gets up to let himself out while the music is still going rather than having to leave a dead place, but before he gets to the door the music stops and the juke goes on, someone singing, “Kiss my neck . . .” Must be some new hit.

The streets are still full of people. He stands outside for a moment watching them, pleasantly buzzed, charged by Birgitte's kisses. Those lips.
That was really something, young woman wanted to suck on my tongue like that
. Still a little attraction value in the old forty-deuce fart. But I'll never visit her in Albertslund.
Never
.

Twenty yards up the canal, something catches his eye. A fancy leather coat. Sam Finglas.

Bluett opens his mouth to call out, then notices Finglas is walking with someone, a woman. An incredibly beautiful woman, pale, hair long, light as white gold, high cheekbones, slightly Asian cast to her face, stacked soles with even higher heels, stilettos, beneath the hem of her light fur coat. And Bluett realizes how buzzed he is because it takes a moment for him to recognize that this is the Russian woman Sam talked about. He stands there on the step, open-mouthed, breathing steam. They are coming sideways toward him before they turn toward Kongens Nytorv, and Bluett catches a full view of her. She is as tall as Sam and slender. She moves like a song, and her eyes are blue as ice, her skin white, her mouth wide, lips inviting as a plum.