Beneath the Neon Egg (2 page)

Dorte slaps Benthe’s arm. “Stop that!” she says, laughing, her face long and angular.

Next day, he catches the early afternoon Prairie Express back to Hillerød for the city train to Copenhagen. He wants to get out of there before Henrik shows up. He wonders whether he feels guilty or just uneasy about facing a man whose wife and sister he spent the night with.

It occurs to him, as the train bumps across the snowy flat countryside, how fleeting time is, how he had yearned for last evening and now it is behind him and he is being taken away from it. It turned into something other than he expected, and he doesn’t know whether he liked it. He thinks he is probably finished with it and realizes how sorry he is about that, realizes that he feels more emotion for Benthe than he thought, but . . . Benthe would have been enough, but this was too much. A couple of times he was unfaithful to his ex, as he knows she had been to him, but it had not been so . . . Deliberate? Dedicated? It was too much. An image rises in his mind of the color of the faded red oil painting, the kilim, and sadness descends on him as he looks out over the white fields.

Then he warms to the thought he will be home in time to listen to some jazz CDs, drink some Stoli on the rocks. Maybe Sam is home, he thinks. Now he catches himself thinking about telling his friend and neighbor Sam Finglas all about it, is yearning to. As a war story. Which makes him wonder about himself. Is this stuff just something to tell about? Is that all it is? He cannot deny that the thought of telling Sam cheers him—but why should he need cheering up?

Smiling dreamily out over the rolling frozen countryside, he is excited by the memory of it, maybe more so than by the actual experience, the way Benthe, after three bottles of wine and much flirtation, got the three of them dancing, the way she took off her blouse, got them each to take off one piece of clothing at a time and when they were all down to their underpants, the way she herded them into the big bed in the alcove by the iron stove.

Something he’d always wanted, but he has to admit was not quite what he imagined. Benthe seemed somehow less desirable afterward, less attractive. Strangely less passionate. Scheming. Maybe that’s why he fled before Henrik arrived. And he forgot to give her the Coltrane CD. They danced to Bob Marley and the Wailers.
No woman, no cry . . . What is that lyric all about anyway?

He will be home early enough to get a full day’s work in on Sunday, for the Friday he missed. To keep afloat, he has to do five pages of translation a day, five days a week. It is a good life, better than he ever expected. Far better than his aborted bank “career.” Denmark needs a voice in what they call “the big world,” and English is the lingua franca of the big world—“American,” as the Danes say. At first he thought his language was being slighted, but they seem to prefer American, at least the new generations. The sun has set over the Empire. The U.S. is where the money is now. As long as it lasts. And Denmark. As good as the Danes are at English, they want their texts copyedited or translated from scratch to be certain they don’t look foolish in the world. And there seems an unlimited amount of translation. And he doesn’t have to worry about health care or university tuition for his kids. They even get a salary from the state for studying. All paid by taxes.

Americans are so afraid of taxes,
he thinks,
of social democracy. Socialism is a scare word
. Yet he knows that if he was in the U.S. now he would be terrified of the future, afraid of being fired at a day’s notice, losing a health care plan, the ability to send his kids to college. Here is civilization. Here is home now.

But there is something else about his life that he can’t put a finger on.

Looking out over the white lowlands, he is aware of his thoughts, his emotions, but he is also aware that he does not know what he needs. He only knows that he has a need.

Then it occurs to him what the Bob Marley song is saying. There’s a comma after the “no”—
no, woman, no cry
 . . . It’s a love song.

2. Aura—Intro

Bluett steps out of the dark, cold, empty Friday night, down the three steps to the semibasement west-side bar. He recognizes the music from the CD player behind the bar: Miles Davis and John McLaughlin doing Palle Mikkelborg's
Aura
. He knows the music of the Intro—spooky guitar notes, a background of horn, suddenly breaking loose into energy, blaring horn notes, icy guitar lines, tom-toms.

Standing in the doorway, he polishes the cold frost from his eyeglasses, puts them back on to survey the room. It seems an unlikely place for this music. The driving beat, the horn, searching, surveying, blaring, a few frantic guitar notes, bass, cymbals, piano, the searching, surveying trumpet again.

He has been out exploring, finding some interesting places, but this joint—a west-side Copenhagen dive, off Isted Street—he does not like the feel of, the look of the other men seated at tables drinking Black Gold and snow beer, a few with cheap-looking women, hard-faced. He should have gone straight home from the last joint, acknowledged the pointlessness of the night. What does he hope to find now? It is too late. He has wandered too far west in the city. Yet now he is here and the bartender looks his way.

“Double Stoli on the rocks, no fruit.”

“Double
what
?” No flicker of humor lights this craggy Danish face.

“Stolichnaya. Vodka.”

The bartender pours a double Absolut over an ice cube, chucks in a slice of lemon with his fingers and sets it before Bluett, takes his money. The trumpet is still searching against the background of percussion as he checks his watch—nearly two
a.m.
—and notices someone standing very near beside him.
Should have gone home
. He glances quickly. A tall, close-built, sandy-haired young man is standing much too near, staring at him.
Fuck. Should have gone home
. Bluett ignores him. Stares at the CD player, listens to the horn blaring, scaling, studies the glistening row of bottles, and the man leans closer.

Go away, please
.

“May I be a little fresh,” the man says in Danish, “and see what you have here,” his fingers dipping toward Bluett's shirt pocket where he put his change.

Bluett's palm smacks the pocket flat to his chest. “No you may not!” he answers in Danish and looks away again, poised.

The man is still there. “You are not Copenhagener,” he says. “From Jutland? Funen? Bornholm? Faroe Islands?” His words sweep across Bluett's face on a sour yeasty cloud.

Bluett swallows some vodka and says nothing, tensing his stomach muscles, poised for a fight, wondering if he will manage to get away with his teeth and skull intact.

But the younger man wanders away, over to one of the tables where a short, stout, dark-haired man sits, his face a thick-featured mask of stolidity, and Bluett watches surreptitiously, wondering what is in the idiot's mind as he performs the same number.

“May I be a little fresh?”

The trap of the seated man's rage unsprings instantly. He is on his feet, swinging, catches the sandy-haired man full in the mouth so blood creases his teeth as he staggers back from the blow.

I might not be old,
he thinks,
but I am too old for this
.

The smaller man hits the sandy-haired guy again, and he topples backward over a table.

No one moves. They only watch. Bluett sees the face of a girl with thick makeup, hard smile, eyes bright.

Good night
.

He drains the rest of the vodka, lifts his jacket from the hook beneath the bar and is up the three steps to the front door, out on the street in icy air, looking right and left toward Istedgade, anxious not to go the wrong way. He shuffles past a corner welfare shelter with men and women huddled in and outside the doorway, smoking, glowering at him, or lost in their own internal gloom. He glances at a man whose hand holding a cigarette to his mouth is dirty as the sidewalk. He passes a closed shawarma grill.

Not accustomed to this, out of practice. It is long since he has been out at this hour. What is he looking for? A woman? He thinks with regret of Benthe. She turned out not to be at all what he expected, what he hoped for—but after all, she is married, and her husband and she are swingers, apparently. He had called to ask her out, but she had made a counter­proposal. She had invited him to a party, the kind of party where the host had a sauna and after dinner, she told him, all the guests get in the sauna and then they come out and dance to Greek music.

“It is exciting,” she had said on the phone.

“What, uh, do they all take their clothes off?”

“Of course.”

“I think I would be shy.”

“You were not so shy two weeks ago in our country house.”

“That was . . . spontaneous. And I was a little drunk.”

“You could get a little drunk again. It is very exciting. All those naked bodies.”

He thought of the naked men, many naked women, wondered where her head was. “Well, I think I'd just like to just see you. Besides, I'm not so much of a dancer.”

It is tricky. She is the contact for his best customer. He has to extricate himself before it gets more involved. “Besides, I have a girlfriend now,” he lied.

“You can bring her, too.”

“I don't think she would like that.”

“Well, if you change your mind. I still think you are a sexy.” She says the last phrase in English.

 

Now he wonders what he is looking for. Just to see what's happening? The world has changed in the twenty years since he was alone.

He has only a vague sense of this area. To the right he knows is Halmtorvet, hookers, druggies. Bad news. He can see the Central Station looming up above the snaggle of buildings before him, aims for it. He can catch the S-train to Nørreport, Northgate, walk home from there.

The cold sidewalks are empty, dark, the black leather and pink and lavender dildos in porn shop windows dimly illuminated. An inflatable plastic woman sits in one window, her mouth a large O, her thighs spread around a plastic vulva.
Skamlæber
, they are called in Danish. Shame lips. Same root as the English, Latin,
pudenda—pudere
, to be ashamed.

He looks up to a street sign, Viktoriagade, remembers a Dan Turèll poem about Charlie Parker playing a blue plastic saxophone on Victoria Street. Doubling back to avoid a group of beefy flaneurs, he passes a doorway from the shadows of which a woman asks, “You vant to come up with me?”

Bluett has not really considered this sort of alternative to loneliness. He pauses to look at her, feels himself swaying slightly, doubts that he would be able to muster passion for this woman, whose bare legs in a mini skirt are bone-thin and blue with chill. He looks at her face, which vaguely resembles the face on the statue in the harbor of the Little Mermaid, her dirty blonde hair short and choppy and her complexion, even shadowed, not the best. Could as well do it with an inflatable plastic doll. He is lonely, but not lonely enough to go with this poor creature in the shadows of that doorway, and neither does he wish to purchase company, at least not with money. But his heart goes out to her. Perhaps he would increase the sum of human misery by blatantly rejecting her. He gets a crazy idea then—a drunken idea that he acts on.

“How much just for a hug?” he asks.

Her face is impassive. “You can't buy no love affair, dude,” she says. “You want French? Four hundred. Swedish? Three. Danish cost you five plus the room.”

He knows what French is; Swedish, he guesses is a honeymoon of the hand; while Danish, he presumes, is the style of the missionary. He shakes his head, digs into his pocket for the fifty-crown note buried there, reaches it toward her hand which automatically rises to accept it, and he turns to move on, but she darts out from the shadows, brushes her lips against his cheek. Her blue eyes almost smile. He nods and continues walking, feeling a little better, but shuddering with the cold and the thought of the woman—the girl—in the shadowy doorway. He wonders if he is really far out enough to stop on a dark street to consider a poor, wretched hooker.

Shaking his head, he continues toward the Central Station, but somehow takes a wrong turn. Down an empty side street, a tall, thick-shouldered man steps out of a doorway in front of him and says in English, “You Dane? I am from Estland.”

“Good for you,” says Bluett and steps around him. The man circles back, slaps ten fingers to his own chest, says, “My body: five hundred crowns.”

Bluett's heart lurches. “No,” he says, zigzags past, but the man gets in front of him again. His face is high above Bluett's, his nose thick, his jaw, his neck.

“Okay okay, listen,” he says. “My body: three hundred crowns!”

“What? Get lost. I'm not interested.”

“You don't like me? Last offer: My body, one hundred crowns. Now and here!”

Bluett crosses the street, turning back precisely where he does not wish to go, deeper into the west side, sees a neon martini glass that he heads for just in case he will need to duck for shelter, but someone else is on the street behind him, and the Estonian lurches away toward the newcomer.