Beneath the Neon Egg (8 page)

Then the rages burned out and were replaced by chill, and then he grew invisible to her, and he only waited for his boy and his girl to start university to remove himself.

Now he steps briskly along the dirt path of the Botanical Garden and remembers with rue the pleasures of the little garden in his home above the moor for all those years and the vegetation that with the rolling seasons became part of him. First the white snowbells and yellow eranthis, tiny blooms in the short, sparse, straw-colored grass. Then the crocus, orange and purple little bulbs of deep color. Then the bowed heads of the yellow daffodils and the upright tulips—the bulbs he’d purchased on business trips to Amsterdam—many colors, purple, green, red, yellow, but he loved the Queen of the Night most, so purple it was almost black. And then the grass thickened and turned a young green and the forsythia bloomed, overnight, like a yellow explosion. He still had a photo of his Timothy and Raffaella, at four and two, blond, the smiles of innocence with the branches of yellow forsythia slashing up behind them. Then the magnolia tree in the center of the garden with its furry buds turning to the palest lavender blooms—like lovely bloodless alabaster flesh—until the whole tree was abloom. Then the green pear blossoms and the tiny yellow mirabelles and the long, tall rose hedge blooms, red and white and yellow. And often, miraculously, the dust-ball mushrooms would appear, always in a new place, three or four of them. They would grow big as soccer balls, but he had learned the size they were tastiest—a small cantaloupe—and he would peel and slice them, fry them in butter and make a cream sauce and serve them on slices of toasted bread with glasses of chilled Riesling. Only the kids would trust his judgment enough to join him in the eating of them, and each kid would get a small glass of wine, too, while his wife grumbled and muttered that he was risking the children’s health until even his son no longer dared to taste them. Bluett knew they were safe, though.

Gone now, all of it, gone as this barren cold winter garden through which he walked. But he remembered Rilke saying that a tree only
looks
dead in winter; in truth, it is gathering its force to bloom in spring. And he must believe that of himself, too: that he is gathering force to bloom again. That he does not yet know what flowers he will bear this time, but believes that they will be strong and healthy. He must believe that. He remembers a priest he met, in, of all places, a bar, an Irish bar here in Copenhagen, who quoted a Rilke line to him:
When I stare into the chasm that is myself, I see a hundred roots silently drinking
 . . .

He comes out of the gardens at the corner of Øster Voldgade and Gothersgade, waits at the red light while rattling bicycles stream past, with red-nosed riders, scarves flying, then crosses to Nørreport and the Coal Square and to Skindergade. Three steps down at number 23, and he is in the Booktrader. The owner looks up from behind the counter, and a smile brightens his squat Dostoyevskian face with its patches of beard, and in the smile Bluett notices again that his eyes are blue beneath the beige dreadlocks.

“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 Yorker
s.

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 drifting 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.