Kerrigan in Copenhagen (21 page)

Years before, this was a dive greasy-spoon coffee shop called Selandia, named for the island on which Copenhagen is situated. Since 1984, however, it has been a noble establishment, worthy of the name of the street on which it stands, New Nobility Street, host to jazz and poetry readings. It also awards, on the first day of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival in July, an annual prize of not inconsiderable prestige to a jazz artist who has distinguished him-or herself by virtue of a contribution to the genre.

The bar is already well populated when Kerrigan enters. He orders a beer and finds an empty chair at a table facing the massive painting of a long, reclining nude—Goya-inspired—that reminds him of Thea, whose secreta has dried on him. It occurs to him that people carry many manners of secret around with them. And depression descends upon him as
the voice of John Lennon warns him over the sound system that instant karma is going to do a job on him if he doesn't do a job on himself.

This strikes him suddenly as funny, and his smile wanders toward the corner, where a woman with a street-worn look sits over a basket of fresh roses. Instantly she rises, picks an amber rose from the bunch, and crosses to his table. He fumbles for some change, but she gently pushes his money hand away.

“It's because of your lovely smile,” she tells him, and tears spring to his eyes as he thanks her, breaks the stem from the rose, and fits the bud into the lapel of his tweed jacket. The sweet scent fills his nostrils, and he thinks of rot nourishing the rose.

Now I am terrified of the earth
, he thinks.
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions
.

He thinks of Thea on the boat, thinks of laughing in the face of love, thinks of how incredibly sexy she looked naked and how incredibly sad he feels now that he fucked her, wondering whether he is indeed insane. He wonders why the memory of her is more satisfying than the actual experience was, or whether it is the other way around.

Atop everything else, he is on his second pint and the bubbly buzz that had been settling begins to rise again into his stale mouth and takes the form of anger. Digging into his pocket for a coin, he heads for the phone booth beside the door of the women's room, dials his Associate, whose name, incredibly, he is unable to recall at this moment, even though her phone number is clear in his brain, a lapse that almost drives him to hang up in terror, but her voice is already in his ear, and he is already saying, “When we took the poppers the other night, did you or did you not tell me that I'm so blind?”

“I am not certain I recall saying such a thing,” she says. “That experience was … wery intense.” Which is no answer at all, but he plunges on. “Well, you must know what you said, and I think I have a right to know!”

“Easy boy,” she says, and he leans into the wall, knees buckling.

“Did you tell me that or not? It is important that I know.”

“Why? Can you not take a joke?”

“No.” Then he adds, “So you
did
say it? You have to understand. It is not the content that concerns me, only the fact of whether or not those words were spoken by you to me.”

“Come over and we shall talk about it.”

“I can't. I have to go. But I need to know.”

“Where are you going?”

He wants to goad her. “Where? Why, to the Velvet Room.”

“Vhat is that?”

“A kind of strip joint right up around the corner of New Nobility Street.”

“Mmmm. Take me wis you.”

“Why? So you can see if I'm blind or not?”

She laughs, and he does not know whether to be enraged or amused. “Come on,” he pleads. “Did you say it or not?”

“I can't remember. One says so many things. Have you ever been in the Welvet Room?”

“No,” he lies, remembering the time he went there all by himself, and an impossibly beautiful woman danced just for him, slowly undressing as she danced, holding his eyes fast with hers so he hardly even saw her naked body at all, only her eyes, her powerful, hypnotic gaze, which anyway are the most exciting part of a woman's body. She might have been wearing a burka, the focus of her eyes was so intense. Well, almost. Other features had their own specific power as well. Which almost cost him a thousand crowns for a bottle of champagne; the champagne only buys you the right to negotiate for what comes next at whatever further price is decided upon.

Kerrigan never paid for it in his life. Except that once, when he couldn't even get it up. So he paid for it without even getting it. Which meant he could still brag that he never paid for it in his life.

A woman pushes past him to the toilet, and he sees a handful of familiar faces enter the bar, expatriates: an impecunious American who is an amateur mathematician writing a book about the number 1, a Scottish painter whose specialty is abstract representations of burning forests, a mustached Wroxton man who was once mistakenly arrested
and incarcerated as the ringleader of a cocaine-smuggling band, held in isolation for half a year until they discovered their mistake but who, because he had been in possession of two joints, could not take action. There are others as well, and Kerrigan can hear from the sound system that John Lennon is now singing “Imagine”—a song that pisses him off: a billionaire doubting the general public's ability to imagine a world in which there is no money.

“Fucking fraud,” he says aloud, and his Associate asks into the phone, “
What!
”

“I wasn't talking to you,” he says.

“Who were you talking to?”

“John Lennon.”

“Are you drunk, Mr. Kerrigan?”

“Sorry,” he says, “I have to go.”

“Vhen will I see you again?” she asks quietly, and instead of an answer, he says, “I have to catch a plane.”

“To where?”

“I don't remember.” Carefully he lays the receiver back into its cradle on the wall.
You're as sane as I
, he thinks, and tries to remember whether his Associate admitted to telling him he is so blind.

Gerry Mulligan on the sound system blows “Lullaby of the Leaves” on his baritone, and Kerrigan considers the fact that Mulligan is blowing a horn invented by the Belgian Antoine Sax, born 1814 (one year after the Danish state went bankrupt and Kierkegaard was born). Sax died in 1894, 102 years before the death of Mulligan, now blowing “Lullaby of the Leaves,” before his sixty-ninth birthday.

He glances at the first table to the left of the door and remembers once coming in here and seeing two women sitting there, one of whom wore a close-fitting pink suede jacket and had extremely full lips, mythically proportioned, coated with glistening gloss. Kerrigan was with his Swedish millionaire friend Morten Gideon, who glanced at her and said succinctly, “Fat lips.” But Kerrigan could not take his eyes from her mouth; so intense was his stare that she looked up at him, and he said, “Please. I am so sorry. But I need to kiss your lips. Please. I truly need to.” And
with an expression on her face of its being her duty to provide her lips to him, incapable of denying him this humble demand, she rose, and their lips joined, then their bodies welded, and he kissed her long and rotatingly and with a delightfully satisfying sensation and perfumed taste of lip gloss.

“Thank you,” he said then, and he and Gideon sat at another table while she repaired her lip gloss, but no sooner was it repaired than his gaze once again fixed upon her lips and, mesmerized, he crossed once again to her table and said, “Forgive me. I have to again.”

“But,” she said. “I just repaired my lip gloss.”

“That is perhaps why I have to again. Please. I'm sorry. I really have to.”

With a tiny sigh of resignation, then, she rose, and they kissed again, long and luxuriously, and where was she now? That woman of such kindness as to be unable to deny him his humbly expressed need. Nothing ever came of it. Nothing needed to come of it. It was a kiss, two kisses, most memorable, most excellent kisses, to be remembered as long as he continues drawing breath. She left. He left. Gideon left with him. No names or numbers were exchanged.

And on the street Gideon, clearly envious, said, “So what the fuck did that prove? Big deal. A kiss.”

“Two kisses,” said Kerrigan.

“So two kisses. Big deal.”

“I'll tell you what it proves,” said Kerrigan. “It proves what Renée Ashley once said.”

“So who the fuck is Renée Ashley.”

“A poet.”

“And what the fuck did she say?”

“She said, ‘Every dark is not a shadow the dead cavort in.' ”

“Big deal,” said Gideon as though he didn't see, but Kerrigan could see he saw, could see that he lamented that he had not himself procured at least one of those two kisses on those mythically proportioned lips.

Remembering that, Kerrigan remembers the impulsion that surmounted any possible obstacle to those kisses, and a plan is taking form as he positions himself by the side bar glancing from the Hans Henrik
Lerfeldt Chet Baker with horn on the wall above a large early black-and-white portrait photo of Dexter Gordon with horn, diagonally across from Sonny Rollins in red, bent forward blowing his sax. Beside the front window is a five-foot wood sculpture of a sensuous woman bearing a bunch of wooden bananas and above her, from the ceiling, hangs an antique sousaphone. High on the wall opposite him is a green-and-black-and-gray-and-white abstract Lerfeldt nude, and to the right a Billie Holiday and old tin signs announcing in Danish, HERE ARE SERVED ALL MANNER OF BEER AND SPECIALTIES, ROLLED SAUSAGE AND MEATS MINCED AND SALTED. A very large orange kite in the form of a ray dangles from the ceiling, flanked by a tuba, and the plan is hatched.

He lunges for the door.

It must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic
and his season spring.

—THE HON. JOHN M. WOOLSEY, UNITED STATES V. ULYSSES

It was the woman with the roses who created a distinct picture in his mind of Molly Malone, the “Tart with the Cart,” in her bronze infinity at the delta of Suffolk and Nassau and Grafton streets in Dublin, and the recollection of the impulsion that won him those kisses from the fat-lipped woman as well as the Paddy's Irish Whiskey that Cathy of Chicago served him gratis in Copenhagen's Irish Rover those days ago that made him know the time was right for the Fort of the Danes and the Garrison of the Saxons.

He was even familiar with the flight schedule and saw by his watch there was just time, and as he stepped out of the Palæ, a taxi was just rolling toward him, and Kerrigan raised one finger and stopped it dead.

“Where to?” the corpulent driver asked, attempting to turn in his seat.

“Kastrup, please. I've only fifty-five minutes to catch the last flight to Dublin. Can you make it?”

“Let's give it a try,” said the driver as he threw the meter and geared out into traffic. That everything meshed so perfectly was proof to him that this was meant to be—the taxi, the last flight, the fact that he had a five-thousand-dollar credit line on his Diner's Club card, that huffing and puffing like a walrus,
kookookachoo!
he made it to the gate where a smiling, green-clad Aer Lingus flight attendant—who had been alerted from the ticket office that there was one more full-fare, one-way passenger, and her bewinged identity shield proclaimed her name to be Sheila Nageeg—awaited him holding open the portal with both hands
like a protective goddess above a church door, and said, “You look like a man who needs a glass of champagne, Mr. Kerrigan.”

Oh, wonders of the business class!

The fact that he could get from the Danish capital to the Irish capital so quickly—a feat that must have taken the Vikings weeks—that a room was available at Trinity College was further proof, indeed, the very room he requested in Building 38, where J. P. Donleavy had had his rooms while studying science and conceiving
The Ginger Man
in the 1940s, then known under the title of
S. D
., the initials of Sebastian Danger-field, the eponymous
Ginger Man
, the fact that it was a balmy May evening, that
McDaid's
—established in 1779—was not only open but that the outdoor tables were set up, and he sat there on
Harry Street
with a pint of the blackest black stuff contemplating the fact that in the story “Grace” in
Dubliners
, Joyce has the main character, Tom Kernan, fall down the stairs of a bar (which, Colm Toíbín notwithstanding, Kerrigan calculates to be
this
bar) going down to the gents', as a symbol of the fall from grace and a parody perhaps of Dante, although today the gents' is
up
a tricky couple of flights (especially tricky for a man in his cups)—
but!
in the fall, biting
off
a piece of his tongue so that he speaks indistinctly, thus falling not
into
but
out of
language, in contrast to Joyce's theory of the fall from grace being the development of language—all of this convinced him that God's plan, small
g
or large, was for him to be in Dublin at just this moment, and he felt certain the reason for this might reveal itself now or later or through some affiliation with an event of the past.

Considering the fact that he had read somewhere that Joyce's own father is said to have fallen down the stairs of this bar and bitten his tongue in the process, Kerrigan feels the sweat on his forehead, smells himself, and wonders what in the name of fuck he is doing here suddenly in a bar in a city on an island in the Atlantic when he is supposed to be on quite another island in quite another capital city, Copenhagen, writing a book about
that
city's bars.

Yet he is by no means sorry to be in McDaid's at this very moment. Years ago, it is said, this bar was the city morgue, later converted to a
chapel for the Moravian Brethren who were said to bury their dead standing up. The ceilings are high, he can see in through the door, the wood dark, the windows tall and gothic, and Kerrigan considering that Joyce's own father, John Stanislaus Joyce (1849–1931), was the person who in fact fell down the stairs here, contemplates how coincidental are the sources of our art, albeit touchingly so, and considers how Joyce the son credits his father with an enormous amount of his material and ideas—the spit and image of
Ulysses
.