Beneath the Neon Egg (16 page)

And you’re second to none, I know
, he doesn’t say.
So take a fucking hike
.

The door clicks shut after her, and he slams the flat of his hand on the tabletop so his mug leaps off and spills across the beige carpet.

“
Shit!
”

From the kitchen he gets a cloth and sponges cold water on the coffee, soaks it up, rinses the rug and sponges more cold water on, rinses. Then he takes a clean rag and scrubs at the spot. The stain is lighter but still there.

“
Fuck!
”

He flings the wet rag into the sink, goes out to the front window. Halfway across the frozen lake, the back of her long woolen coat is moving away over the ice.

“Stupid,” he mutters. “Pain in the ass. Fucking liar!”

His stomach growls and he thinks of the sandwiches he dumped into the garbage the previous night, and he sits there, heavy-headed, in the dark morning, wondering what just happened, wondering whether he wants to crawl back into his narrow bed.

Part II

Resolution

One thought can produce millions of vibrations . . .

—John Coltrane

8. Groovin' High—Aura Yellow

Instead he puts on Bird's “Groovin' High” and drops to the carpet, does push-ups, sit-ups, crunches, listening to Yardbird's fast fingers and quick breath as the sweat collects on his back, his forehead. He keeps moving, twisting, lifting, forcing his will onto his body until the desire to sleep, to crawl away, is gone, and he feels only the pull of his muscles, the course of blood beneath his skin. He works out until it hurts to lift, does ten more reps, then drops back onto the carpet in a wakeful rest, staring at the white ceiling, at the spidery cracks in the center, while Parker's sax melds into “East of the Sun.”

The strings cannot belie Parker's expertise, and Bluett likes the number, but he reaches for the remote, flips back to “Groovin' High,” closes his eyes and remembers flying over the Throgs Neck Bridge in an old Chevy one summer midnight, coming from a girlfriend's apartment in the Bronx, the satisfaction all around him in the hot night, hearing this Bird tune on Symphony Sid on the car radio. The cut ends, fades to silence, and he puts on
Aura
.

Behind the red-black curtain of his eyelids he listens to the strange symphony, moving through color to the rumbling, dramatic tension of “Yellow,” sees some beast slouching across the frozen lake through the icy gloom of morning. And he thinks that the life he's living is one that he has chosen with every move he made ever since he was a child, every choice, every road taken or not taken for whatever reason, for laziness, fear, whatever. This is his life now. He is responsible for it. And it is not really so bad. He has food and appetite. He has shelter from the cold. He has a Persian carpet to lie on and a CD player and good music to listen to. He has nothing to complain about. Everyone is lonely.
Learn to be alone because you will always be alone whether or not you are with someone. There is still the possibility of kindness. There is still a possibility of being satisfied, however fleetingly; learn from your young years when you drove across a bridge from a girlfriend's house and heard jazz on the radio in the hot summer night. You don't have to understand everything. You can't anyway.

For a few more moments, he lies there in the silence at the end of the CD, still hearing Miles's trumpet in his brain, listening to his thoughts. Then he gets off the floor and goes to the kitchen. He eats breakfast. Cheese, bread, blueberries in a small cardboard basket, brews another cup of Nescafé, which he drinks at the sink by the kitchen window, looking across to the backs of the houses on the other side. The big gray sheep dog is in the yard below, pressed up against the door, waiting to be let in.

Bluett reaches across the sink and unlatches his window to let some air in, and the dog turns its head, looks up at him with black eyes through gray fur, black round nose where the fur parts, and that acknowledgement from the dog, the welcoming shiver of his black nose, the vision of it; the thought produces what seems a myriad of vibrations in Bluett's spirit, and the vibrations become Miles, become Bird, become Trane, and trill in his nerve endings and for a moment Bluett is approaching ecstasy. Maybe he's still high—or maybe not. Maybe he's high on music.

He smiles, thinks for a moment of getting a dog. The door opens, and the dog trots inside. He can see it behind the glass of the door lumbering up the stairs, and he understands that what he wanted was
that
dog, that moment of
that
dog, looking at him, nose atremble.

None of these back windows is covered. He sees a kitchen, a segment of a sitting room with colorful abstract paintings on the wall, the corner of a sofa, a hallway. On one window ledge stands a clay flowerpot with a single red tulip on a green stalk.
I don't want flowers here
, he thinks.
Flowers need attention
.

And he remembers for some reason a Danish woman he once knew, briefly, who sought him out with her eye at a cocktail party and, when he answered the call of her gaze and approached, said, “You are a sexy von.” They had no business being together, but he went home with her, and afterward sat with his head in his hands on the edge of the bed. She sat beside him, the two of them naked, still warm, and kissed his ear.

“You don't like me?” she asked.

“I do. You're fabulous. I just don't know what we're doing. I don't want you to get hurt.”

With a wide open mouth and sparkling eyes she laughed in his face. “This is how you hurt? Then hurt me again, you sexy von.”

“You know I'm married.”

She watched him for a moment. “You know vhat your veakness is? All this guilty-boy stuff. Which do you no good because it don't improve you, it only make you not to enjoy vhat you like to do. Vhat you vill always do anyway, sexy von.” Then she got up and pulled on a robe, knotted the belt with a sharp tug. “Go home to your vife and enjoy your unhappiness with her.”

He couldn't even remember her name, only her body, chubby and graceful, her bright eyes in a round smiling face, a woman he never got to know. His marriage was already finished then in all but name, and it seemed no matter where he turned he found regret. But she was wrong. Just as Benthe was wrong on the disappearing cliff when she unknowingly echoed that previous woman:
you are a sexy
. But what is the answer, then? To bind yourself. Be a slave. To some “not for fun” girl.
It seems I should already know the answers to all these questions at my age
.

Down in the concrete yard space, a sheaf of discarded doors is tilted up against the dilapidated fence, weather-rotted wood, rusted hinges.

His sink is in front of the window he looks out of, and sometimes he stands at this sink brushing his teeth while a woman brushes her teeth at the kitchen sink across the way, one floor below. Sometimes she wears only a bra or is bare-breasted and the vision of her vibrates in his spirit, beautiful as the dawn, those sweet miracles of her breasts. But now there is no one in any of the windows. He looks from the one to the other of them, half a dozen still-lifes on a brick wall, empty, motionless.

He rinses out his coffee cup, thinks of Liselotte. His anger is past, and he begins to examine what has happened. He should have known better. Of course, he did know better but allowed himself to believe that she was not looking for something he could not give her or would not give her, something he has lost perhaps, or used up. Maybe it was just the difference between men and women. Or was he, in fact, using her? For his pleasure? Without a worry how it might affect her?

Am I a bastard?
he wonders, frightened by the possibility.
Or only enmeshed in my guilty-boy stuff?
And he remembers his son thinking his own father would leave him out on the street.
But Tim and I worked that out. I reassured him. It is possible to resolve problems
.

From next door he can hear the feet of waltzing children stepping around the floor of the Kingo Institute of Dance for Children and the occasional barked commands of Miss Kingo, the stringy old turkey of a woman he sees on the street from time to time waddling about on her pigeon toes.

He thinks of the sheep dog looking up at him, nose quivering in greeting, of the bare-breasted woman brushing her teeth, and the sense of vibration of those images sings in his nerves and echoes back.

Emotion takes his stomach, and he hurries to the phone and punches in her number. She answers on the third ring, voice flat.

“I just wanted to hear how you are.”

“Not well,” she says.

“Oh.” He waits. She doesn't speak. “Well, I just wanted to see if you're okay, maybe you'd like to talk.”

“I am not okay, but I do not wish to talk.”

An impulse flares in him to argue, to point out that he stated his position from the start, that she agreed, that she forced this situation. He smothers it. “Well, I just wanted to say that if you want to talk, I'm here.”

“I do not wish to talk,” she says.

He stands over the phone, looking at the gray plastic handset in its gray plastic cradle, joined by a coil of glossy black wire. A bizarre object that people talk through, from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world, just like that, punch eight or ten numbers and you got the voice of someone ten thousand miles away.

Alongside the phone is the crystal she gave him. Intelligence, indeed! He takes it in his palms, cool and smooth. He thinks of radio crystals, channels a message to her, half-expecting the phone to ring. Then he smirks, returns the thing to the window ledge, but on second thought he picks it up again and chucks it into his bottom dresser drawer. Then he thinks once more—it's nice to look at, to touch, in a cool, desolate sort of way—and returns it to the window ledge.

Perhaps he should use the situation to get ahead of himself, work. A few pages of translation. Money in the bank. Earn money instead of sulking. But he switches on the television set as he passes it, grabs the remote and surfs.

On Eurosport, an enormous man in red tights is inside the chassis of a hollowed-out wheelless red car, carrying it red-faced along a track to a background of cheers. On CNN, a woman in a pink jacket says, “Today in Bosnia . . .” On NBC, Jay Leno's broad-jawed grin is eating applause. On MTV, a young woman with choppy hair says, “In a little while we'll be seeing viewer home videos!” On RAI, a beautiful woman smiles, speaking Italian. On France 24, a woman's beautiful face above the words
eve jackson, culture
, says, “This is my favorite author at the moment . . .” On Danmark 1, the Pink Panther tiptoes down a corridor. On Danmark 2, a lumpy man stands before a weather map. On Sweden 1, a woman in a purple blouse speaks quietly in Swedish. On Sweden 2, a man in a state trooper's hat says with a flat midwestern American accent, “I perceived that the suspected perpetrator had entered into a Grand Union Supermarket . . .”

On Eurosport, an enormous man in blue tights is inside the chassis of a hollowed-out blue car, carrying it on bulging wobbly legs along a track while a background voice speaks with hushed strain, “He looks wobbly, but he is moving at a fast pace . . .” On CNN, the woman in the pink jacket is saying, “is not all glum . . .” On NBC, Jay Leno sits at his desk across from a very tall black man. On MTV, a man with green hair and a silver ball on his tongue flails his body in a frightening shadowy room to electronic music. On RAI, a woman on a stage in a low-cut blouse says something in Italian and seems to be listening to what the audience will say to her.

Bluett watches her face, her wide, beautiful mouth, sparkling brown eyes, her graceful, slender, broad shoulders and the vee of her blouse that draws his eye into the place where her breasts are wedged together in a beautiful valley of flesh. He stares for a moment, listens to her voice, tries to hear words, wonders if it is different to be Italian, to talk to a woman in Italian, does not quite know what he means, pictures himself with this woman, what would he say, how would she respond. The camera pans back and she walks across the stage in a close-fitting minidress, her walk a subtle dance, and he remembers a green-eyed Italian girl named Janine—Janine Belviso, beautiful vision—who was his first . . .

He kills the picture, sits thinking of Liselotte not feeling good, not wanting to talk. He thinks of calling her again, pictures her once again telling him she was not okay but did not want to talk, pictures those words hurting him again, pictures her using those words to hurt him, using his concern by refusing to allow it to contact her, holding him on the leash of his caring.

Then he sees himself thinking these thoughts and wonders if he is becoming a strange, suspicious, bitter man, wonders if he is being unfair, small-minded, tells himself to see it from her point of view. She got caught in her emotion, maybe thought she
fell in love
, and she had to know whether his feelings were similar and when they showed themselves not to be, she had to get away before she made a fool of herself, felt like a fool, or did things that made her feel foolish.