Kerrigan in Copenhagen (10 page)

What else?

Of course: her gentle persistent insistence that they merge their bank accounts. And what argument did he have against it? What argument would he even think to pose against it? Not even the fact that his account contained the liquidated assets of his inheritance from his parents while hers contained only the few thousand kroner she had saved from her earnings. Not even when she suggested she take over the finances—she was, after all, better at it. And she was his wife, the mother of his newborn daughter. He loved her forever. Their lives and fortunes were joined, one.

Contemplating these ironies and conflicts on his bench on the bank of Peblinge Lake where Andersen once wept and Johannes stalked Cordelia, Kerrigan watches a swan drift past like a beautiful white question. He feels the presence of all this history, all this hurt and hurting, this love and rejection, weeping, sickness, pride, haughtiness, death, and he cannot stop feeling his own pain of absence of Licia, puzzling miserably over it still, after three years, wondering how he could have been so
wrong about a person, have failed to understand her as he continues to fail to fathom what might have been in her mind.

Yet he is not specifically unhappy in his general unhappiness. He has no reason to be. Happiness would be too much to wish for, but at least there might be spells of not being unhappy in unhappiness, fits of pleasure in the senses, in the dimensions of the mind. Licia's treachery extinguished much, but not everything. Yet he was not happier in his unhappiness without her. He would take her back in a second. Perhaps. Even if he still didn't know whether she was lying? Perhaps.

In the buildings behind where he now sits on
Nørre Søgade
, North Lake Street, on the right side of the third floor is the building where Ben Webster lived from 1965 until his death. There he would sit, as Bent Kauling tells it, with the superintendent of the building, drinking beer and staring out the window over the lake. The superintendent, Olsen, could not speak English—he called Webster “Wesper”—and Webster spoke virtually no Danish, so they sat in silence, saying no more than
Skål
, and drank their beer, enjoying what Webster called “the world's luckiest conversation.”

Two silent men drinking beer, watching the lake.

And a friend of Kerrigan's, Dale Smith, the African-American bluesman from St. Louis who has lived in Copenhagen for decades, tells of Webster getting fed up one night in the club Montmartre with the tootling of some very postbop saxophonists and barking, “Practice at home, motherfuckers!”

Kerrigan has a CD recorded in Los Angeles in 1959: Ben Webster on tenor sax, Gerry Mulligan on baritone, playing Billy Strayhorn's “Chelsea Bridge,” seven minutes and twenty seconds of a black man and a white man fingerfucking heaven. Kerrigan knows of no cut as beautiful and moving unless perhaps it is Stan Getz blowing his tenor in alto range on Strayhorn's “Blood Count,” recorded at the Montmartre in Copenhagen on July 6, 1987, when Getz had begun dying of cancer. Strayhorn himself wrote the number just twenty years before when he was in the hospital riding his own cancer to its end. Getz said that he
thought about Strayhorn when he played that song. “You can hear him dying … you can hear the man talking to God.”

Strayhorn wrote it for Duke Ellington to play in Carnegie Hall in 1967. It was the last piece Strayhorn ever wrote. He was Duke Ellington's right hand and Ben Webster had been lead solo in Ellington's orchestra at its best, Billie Holiday's favorite soloist, who accompanied her on
The Silver Collection
. He came to Copenhagen to live, the only city in the world where he felt he could go out without his knife, and he died on tour in Amsterdam in 1973. Webster, about whom, on the day of Kerrigan's birth, September 18, 1943, Jack Kerouac, at twenty-one, had written: “Caught Ben Webster at the Three Deuces on 52nd. No one can beat his tone; he breathes out his notes.”

Webster, Getz, Strayhorn, Holiday, Ellington, Mulligan, Kerouac, all gone now. And Chet Baker, too, who fell or was pushed to his death out the window of the Hotel Prince Hendrick on Prince Hendrickstraat in Amsterdam on May 18, 1988. All gone. And that's how every story ends, says the “Knight of Infinite Resignation,” Søren Kierkegaard, in harmony with H. C. Andersen.

But still Kerrigan can hear in his mind, clear as if he were hearing a CD, Webster's horn blowing “Chelsea Bridge,” cut into wax with Mulligan's baritone eight thousand miles from here, forty years ago, fingerfucking heaven. So they live in his mind, at least until his mind is reduced to a small quantity of gray dust inside his skull.

A wind is rising on the water, and laughing in his heart he quotes foolish Werther without moving his lips:
And may I say it? She would have been happier with me than with him
. It occurs to him that his green-eyed Associate might have another man and wonders why he should be worrying about that, whether he truly cares.

He rises from the bench, feels the now swiftly moving air across his face, sees it chopping on the silver surface of the lake, alive in the ever-changing light of Copenhagen, and he has successfully banished the memory of Licia who successfully terminally savaged for him the trust and hope he had foolishly allowed her to create for him.

Silver speckles glitter on the lake, and the beggar swans float in like
questions, one, another, two more. A purple-necked duck waddles up onto the bank to see if Kerrigan has bread for him. The dirty lake water rolls in harmless beads like oil down its back, and Kerrigan experiences the optimism of hunger and thirst. “Adieu,” Kerrigan whispers, savoring irony. “I see no end to this misery except in the grave.”

The duck sees he has no bread and waddles away, laughing.

Kerrigan laughs, too, and sets off at a brisk pace toward the opposite end of the lake, entertaining himself with the thought that in the dead of one November night in 1970, the East German authorities, in great secrecy, removed the remains of Goethe from the ducal crypt in Weimar where they had lain alongside those of the poet Friedrich Schiller since 1832, 138 years before. The flesh remaining on his bones was macerated and the bones themselves strengthened. The laurel crown affixed to his skull was removed, cleaned, and reaffixed, and then he was—still secretly—returned to his crypt, though they forgot to return his shroud and did not dare or bother to reopen the crypt to do so. No doubt some official hung it on his social-realist bureaucratic wall.

All this was discovered from records released in March 1999. The records also showed that among other things, the interior of the poet's skull had been examined, and it was recorded that found inside was “a small quantity of gray dust.” Kerrigan pictures the official pilfering the dust, preserving it in a little drawstring pouch, carrying it about in his pocket for luck.

Dust particles carry on the wind that rolls across the lake, whirlpooling on the dirt walkway, smacking Kerrigan's face as he walks forward at a slant through it. At the far end of the lake, he takes a table outside
Det Franske Café
, the French Café, across the boulevard from where Kierkegaard's 1850 residence might still have been standing had it not been torn down to let
Willemoesgade
, Willemoes Street, run past between the twin towers erected there in 1892.

His table is behind the concrete planters, where he hunches against the wind to get a small Sumatra lit, then waits, smoking, with the sunlight in his face, for the tall young white-aproned waitress to bring his food—a platter of herring, crab salad, a wedge of Brie that he plans to
pepper liberally. When he opened his mouth to say, “And a club soda,” it said instead, “And a large draft Tuborg.” Startled by these unanticipated words, he paused, and then his mouth called after her, “And a double Red Ålborg snaps if you have it!”

She smiled over her shoulder at him, one eye squinted shut against the sun, her white-swathed rump nothing short of magnificent, her breasts in a white T-shirt truly mighty, and she said, “We have it.”

And there it is again: Kerrigan, a fool for love. You would be duped all over again by Licia. She was right: You
are
blind. So he just smiles politely to the cute-faced waitress's polite smile as she places the fish and drink before him. And as he eats, he watches swans and ducks, joggers, and then a single heron walking slow and precise as a tai chi chuan master along the bank of the lake, while the wind stipples the water into glittering spires of silver and black, and Kerrigan feels the beer chasing the snaps through his blood; the snaps makes a clean dash for the shelter of the brain where it does its optimistic work, and the beer plows right on after it.

He likes it here so very much, relishing with his eyes the whipping branches of the chestnuts, the potted yellow lilies framing the path line, the multi-spiring water, and the imperturbable heron. He takes out his little pad and his Montblanc, swallows more beer, and thinks of Stan Getz's three years in Copenhagen at the end of the fifties, when he came here to find serenity, freedom from drugs and drink, and played his beautiful tenor four days a week on Store Regnegade in the old Montmartre, owned by Anders Dyrup, the jazz-loving son of a wealthy paint manufacturer whose name is everywhere on Danish paint shops.

Getz played with bassist Oscar Pettiford, one of the great early beboppers—half Choctaw, part Cherokee, part black, married to a white woman—who came to Denmark to find a more tolerant social climate for his children. And he jammed at Montmartre with the musicians who came through—Art Blakey, Lee Konitz, Kenny Clarke, Gerry Mulligan. Picture Stan on baritone and Mulligan on tenor, switch-hitting, with Jim Hall on guitar playing for four or five hours in the dark morning hours on Great Rain Street.

But within two years, Pettiford was dead, at thirty-seven, of a fluke disease, and one night after dinner Getz went outside the beautiful house where he lived with his wife and children and threw a brick through every window. Then he came back in and with a poker from the fireplace smashed every plate in a collection of priceless Royal Copenhagen porcelain that the landlord owned.

The doctor put him on Antabus—an anti-alcoholic medication that causes violent illness if combined with drink—but Getz didn't take it because, he reasoned, he was not an alcoholic. On another occasion he kicked his dog unmercifully, then beat his daughter, cursing her for trying to stop him. He even put a loaded gun to his wife's head.

Too tortured to live with peace of mind, he returned to the states after not quite three years—Kerrigan heard him, saw him in Carnegie Hall in '64 and in the Rainbow Room in '70 and twice here in Copenhagen; he came back frequently to Denmark.
Standinavia
was the title of one of his albums. Kerrigan heard him play at Montmartre once in 1977, the new Montmartre which had moved to
Nørregade
, North Street. He thinks now what it must have been like to be able to go hear Getz play four nights a week.

Kerrigan contemplates the fact that a man who could play such profoundly beautiful music, lines that search into the bottom of your soul and lift it up through an agony of pleading to an angelic plain, could be so helpless against the demons that had him terrorize his own family.

He thinks again of Kristensen's Ole Jastrau, nicknamed “Jazz” in the novel
Havoc
, written thirty years before Getz's stay in Copenhagen. Jastrau lashes out to destroy a life that is destroying him as an artist, as a poet. He drives away his wife and child, smashes up their bourgeois apartment, exposes himself to syphilis, performs a wild awkward dance to the jazz of a wind-up gramophone, all the while accompanied by a younger man, Stefan Steffensen, a poet who shamelessly, scornfully uses him, abuses his hospitality, a young man fleeing from wealthy parents who are both infected with syphilis, as he is, as is the girl he has with him—a servant from his house whom he himself has infected.

Abruptly Kerrigan feels that he understands the difference between
Kristensen the creator and Jastrau his creation. For just as Stefan Steffensen is Jastrau's alter ego, so is Jastrau Kristensen's. What kept Kristensen from the dogs perhaps was his pen. He wrote it. Jastrau only lived it and even then not in the world but in the word, while Kristensen was his god, his creator; through Jastrau he both lived
and
uttered it. Getz had only the music, and beautiful as it was, as it is, it did not give him the power he needed over his demons. He only played it, interpreted it; he did not create it. But no, no, of course Getz created it, his breath shaped the notes, his being improvised the turns, the leaps.

So Kerrigan takes up his Montblanc pen, pleasingly weighted in his hand, and casts into words the spirit of the water suddenly subjected to the wind, flinging sand in the faces of the people at the café tables around him. One by one, they gather up their cakes and coffees and liqueurs and hurry indoors, hair dancing in the wind, blinking against the dust, smiling self-consciously, self-deprecatingly at their soon-solved predicament, but Kerrigan stays where he is, eyes squinted into the wind that cannot blow the ink from his page.

Grinning, he lifts his glass and drinks beer, swallowing the dust the wind has flung into it, letting the grit of it against his teeth be pleasure, and practices one of his favorite hobbies, the memorization and juxtaposition of dates:

In 1987 when Stan Getz was doing his penultimate appearance in Copenhagen's Montmartre club, dying, playing “Blood Count,” which Billy Strayhorn wrote in 1967 when he was dying, the great horn man Dexter Gordon, who lived in Copenhagen from 1962 to 1976, was, incredibly, competing against Paul Newman for an Academy Award for best actor for his performance in the film ‘
Round Midnight
, a composite portrayal of American jazzmen in Europe. Newman won. And Long Tall Dexter Gordon, the soft-spoken six-and-a-half-footer who was described by the critic Alexander Walker as moving with a child's gentleness but having an unsettling tension—that the big barrel of his body might contain gunpowder while his deep quiet voice seemed to emanate from a silence in which he lived, listening to sounds no one else could hear. Dex returned to America in 1976, twelve years before Kerrigan
would meet Licia, twenty years before she would disappear with their baby, another maybe in her womb. Maybe of Kerrigan's, maybe not.