Beneath the Neon Egg (23 page)

That was how the police found him. They brought him in and would not allow him to put on his own clothes again. They put him in a cell like that, with three other men, and phoned his father to come and get him. His father was most upset about the fact that the clothes he had taken were his sister’s. “How could you have put on your own sister’s clothes for such a purpose?” he asked him again and again.

He was charged with violation of a state penal code against public lewdness and “unnatural sexual acts” and because he was not yet eighteen years old, it was up to the judge whether or not to release his name and details of his arrest to the local press. The judge decided to do so. The story was printed in the newspaper, along with his name and address.

There had been nothing for him to do then but leave town, to start a new life somewhere. He had an uncle in England who took him in and eventually he made his way to Denmark, where he met his wife to be. On the night she accepted his proposal of marriage, Sam told her that he had once gone to jail, that he had been convicted of a crime in California, that he would prefer not to tell her what it was, but if she wished him to, he would do it. She told him she did not want him to tell her anything that would make him unhappy, and they left it at that.

A dozen years later, after their children had been born, she woke him in the middle of the night and said that she could not stand it any longer. He would have to tell her. All those years it had been preying on her and now, when they had children, her not knowing what it might be was too much for her, she could no longer bear it. Had he raped a child? Killed? What?

He told her.

At first she laughed, but with a strange light in her eye that she then turned on him, and he could see repugnance in her eyes. He tried to talk it through with her. She assured him it was nothing, it was insignificant, people were free to have their desires, but finally, after he had pursued it for some weeks, she admitted that it would have been easier for her to accept if it had been murder. This was so . . . ludicrous. She had lost respect for him. Especially when he admitted that he still had these desires, that he had been keeping them hidden from her all those years.

“Do you put on my things?” she asked him, and he saw such revulsion in her eyes, heard it in her voice, that he saw he must bury it all away again.

He quickly assured her that it was no longer the same. He lied to her, said that she had misunderstood, he no longer desired any of it. He could only remember the desire from the confusion of his youth. He thought that she halfway believed the lies, that she wanted to believe them, but he could see that it was the end of intimacy for them. She never looked at him again without a trace of that expression in her eyes being visible to him. Or did he project it? No, it was there.

He knew then that he could never reveal this to another person. He could not bear the thought of being looked at with such revulsion.

Until he and his wife had parted and he met Svetlana.

The journal ends there, gives no account of his time with Svetlana.

Bluett sits back. The Coltrane has ended, and it is so dark outside that all he can see from where he sits is his own reflection in the black glass. He glances to the walls, the masks there, the one with the corkscrew eyes drawing him in. He has refilled his glass several times as he read the journal, and he can feel the vodka in him, in the heaviness of his chest, the flatness of his mind.

His eyes roam the apartment, taking in the film of dust on the tele­vision, the stereo, crumbs on the coffee table, scattered beneath. He tries but cannot remember the last time he cleaned, then realizes it was not so long ago, when Liselotte was coming. He stares at the African phallus on the wall and remembers the games he played with her and wonders what they meant, what they were after, trying to fill each other’s emptiness.

What
had
they been after?

Whatever it was, he thinks, it was not treachery. Fumbling perhaps, misunderstanding, but not fucking treachery.

13. Like Paradise

He dreams that he is not asleep, but lying awake in bed with the light on working through intricate thought patterns. At some point, he reaches a conclusion so startling that he wakes, sits up and gropes at the night stand for a pen to write it down, realizes that the light is not on, hits the lamp switch, gets his glasses on and sits there on the edge of the bed with a ballpoint and pad, but his mind is empty.

He can remember nothing of his sleeping thoughts. Yes, he recalls meeting his father in a dream sleep. He called to him, “Dad! Dad!” and his father turned, winked.

“Know what I’m doing now, son? I’m the ambassador.” He smiled. “See you at the embassy, son, eh?”

He staggers out to the bathroom, pees, rinses his vodka-parched mouth, crawls back under the feather blanket and sinks like a stone, wakes to the eight-o’clock church bell with throbbing temples and his heart full of hatred for the arrogant smile of the thieving bitch who has cheated Sam’s children of their modest inheritance. It is clear to him now what she has done, how she has played him, no doubt teased out of him all the information in his diary, his fear, his vulnerability.

It occurs to him then that it is Saturday. No pages today. He rises, pulls on old jeans and a sweatshirt, gets out the vacuum cleaner from the hall closet, attaches the aluminum pipes and runs the carpet-sweeper attachment over the rug beneath the dining table, coffee table, the TV stand.

In the bedroom, he vacuums beneath the desk and shelving, pulls out the sofa bed and sees something white stuck in against the wall. Liselotte’s bra. He puts it to his face, inhaling, feels hot and lonely and yearns for her.

Then he gets mad at her again, kicks the on button for the vacuum and starts running it over the carpet again.

He chucks his dirty clothes into a plastic basket, carries it down to the basement, and stuffs the clothes into the washer, pours in soap, adjusts the temperature, the spin, waits to hear the water begin to pipe in, standing in the puddles of lake water that have seeped up through the floor.

Upstairs, he kicks off his damp shoes, fills a red plastic bucket with hot water and Ajax and scours the tub and shower stall, the bathroom sink, the chrome faucets. He gets into the slots of the gunky drain with alcohol-dipped Q-tips, pokes into each hole, swabs. The mirror he takes with Windex and a piece of dry, torn T-shirt, swipes away the toothpaste spatters, finger smudges. On his knees, he cleans the tile floor with a rag.

He empties the dirty bucket water into the toilet, flushes, refills the bucket and takes on the woodwork in the living room, the coffee table, the TV, stereo, window ledges, watching the grime come away on his rag, which he dips into the bucket, rings, dips again and wipes across an end table, seeing the film of dust disappear in swipes—just like a TV commercial.

He attacks the kitchen sink with a scouring pad, turns to the countertops, the linoleum. At last he scours the toilet, flushes, scours again, pours Drano in the sink and runs the hot water until the sink water empties smoothly.

Downstairs again, he shifts the wet laundry to the dryer and sets it for forty-five minutes, comes back up to wash his hands and drink a cup of Nescafé at the window.

Across the lake he sees a fox dash out of the bushes, run along the bank in the sunlight, and disappear again through a stand of trees.

Liselotte’s bra is on the oak table. He takes it in his fingers, feeling the soft, cool material against his skin, sighs, goes in to shower, scrubs his scalp, his skin, his neck, the soles of his feet, stands for a long time beneath the hot spray, letting it beat against his head and wash down over his body.

By late afternoon, he stands at the window in a clean shirt, silk tie, slacks, jacket, sipping his first vodka of the day as the yolk-gold sunlight burns across the ice of the lake.

He slips on his Burberry trenchcoat and takes a long walk around the lakes, turning right to the near end and across to the Black Dam Embankment, which he follows all the way into the western side of the city. He wears clip-on shades against the sunset and walks at a fast pace along the outer edge of Copenhagen’s old city, where the lepers once lived and no one else. He thinks now of the expanses of dwellings running all the way up north to Helsingør and beyond, thinks of Hamlet’s castle there. Revenge. Failed revenge. The failed righting of a wrong.
Shakespeare must have known Denmark
, he thinks.
Denmark in winter, a landscape of brooding doubt
.

He feels good, legs taking long strides, arms swinging, breath easy, steaming from his nostrils. Without breaking stride, he threads around a girl on a rattling bicycle, steps to the side for a couple with a stroller.

He crosses the Peace Bridge, past the Café Front Page, past the little boat dock, crosses Queen Louise’s Bridge, and walks the embankment of Peblinge Lake, trying to remember some tale he read about this lake, about an aristocrat thrown into the water by three drunken soldiers. Did he drown? Was his spirit still trapped there in the water, spirit of vengeance?

Ducks paddle toward him as he approaches, a patch circling out from the bank where the authorities have melted the ice to accommodate the birds; they think he has come to feed them as so many do, throwing them the rest of the bread from their lunches.

A white swan, wings arched gracefully behind it, glides along the golden black water. Overhead he hears an eerie yet familiar whirring sound, looks up to see four swans in flight, long necks stretched out flat before them, wings flapping in unison.

He once knew a woman who was walking her dog along the embankment. She removed the leash so it could run free, a little French terrier, and the dog jumped into the lake for a swim. A swan glided over and with one sweep of its neck broke the dog’s spine, then held it under until it had drowned. Bluett always thinks of this story when he sees a representation of the five flying swans that symbolize the five Nordic countries. A swan appears elegant and peaceful, but it is fierce as an eagle.

The sun hangs low now behind the white Lake Pavilion, a building that looks like some Walt Disney representation of fantasy land. He crosses Gyldenløvsgade to the so-called Svineryggen, Swine Back Path, which runs along the last of the lakes, Saint George’s—named for the patron saint of lepers, here where the leper colony stood several hundred years earlier, outside the gates of the city. He thinks about this as he walks, the fate of the lepers, fate, what happens to all of us, each of us.

He crosses Kampmannsgade Bridge and takes the last link of Saint George’s Lake, still on Swine Back, down to Gammel Kongevej, where he turns left under the foot of the lakes and heads in toward the city. He knows where he is going, but there is no hurry.

How cold the city grows in the dark, the eerie sweeps of green in the night sky, red stains of neon, Saturday nightlife beginning to stir on the chill pavements.

He glances surreptitiously at people passing by, wonders about their lives, especially the lives of these people, out on the street at a time when the great family Denmark is sitting down to dinner, perhaps with guests, just slicing the edge of a spoon into a halved avocado filled with tiny fjord shrimp, taking a discreet mouthful while they wait for the host or hostess to raise a glass, say
skål
. All glasses lift, eyes meet, lips sip, the glasses are presented again, the eating resumes. The cozy visits. Who are they to one another? This is a question Bluett has never solved for himself, not in twenty years of living the Danish family life with his wife and in-laws. What do they mean to one another? They seem so cool, so distant, yet perhaps that is only because he is a foreigner among them, could speak Danish with them but perhaps not quite well enough.

All their rituals—the three days of Christmas, joining hands to circle the tree and sing together gazing up at the candles burning on the tree, the Easter lunches in the country, the Advent Sunday gatherings, burning the straw witch on midsummer night—year after year of ritual gatherings with those of your blood, and still he asks himself what they
are
to one another. Perhaps it is only that, the mass of ritual, the language, the traditions. And perhaps that is enough. How they love their queen. How so many of these mostly peaceful, tolerant people will turn and hiss like an angry swan if you question their monarchy.

Perhaps it is just the history of their little kingdom—little now, once great, the great times and the broken times, the wars with Germany, Sweden, England, the destruction of their fleet, the loss of northern Germany, of Norway, of southern Sweden, the great fires of this city—a thousand years of history that binds them. Perhaps they do not need to ask what they are to one another. Perhaps it is enough for them to know who they themselves are, who they share their identity with.

But those are the people sitting around their tables now. He wants to know who these people on the street are: foreigners like himself, even if only in spirit? What are they out looking for? What do they hope might wait for them in the night? Young men, of course, are seeking young women, and young women young men. Other men of course seek men or boys, and other women seek women, and yet others seek other things. They are not all young. And what are they seeking? Those not going to the theater, to the movies, those only walking the cold dark streets?