Beneath the Neon Egg

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  “Listen,” he says. “I wanted to call you, tell you that I got divorced.”

  “Velcome to the club,” she says. She has been divorced two times, and they talk about the experience—how it is not fun, how you always wonder if you really did enough, tried enough, and of course no one ever does, but it also takes give from the other side, but sometimes you also wonder if maybe the problem is that you gave too much, that you should have put your foot down instead of trying to understand, and who ever knows really, maybe in fact marriage is an outmoded institution, maybe we are evolving toward some other form of society, but sometimes it is hard to see any way around the fact that the basic unit would always be one man and one woman with children, but of course it is entirely possible to love many persons at one and the same time, and who is to say what is right, and in truth sometimes there comes a time when you know deep down in your heart that a marriage is over, done, dead, harmful, nothing left but two people full of contempt for one another and what is left to do then but get out and try to do it as gently and understandingly as possible even though probably no one ever really manages to be gentle or understanding and probably no divorce is reasonable or civilized despite your best intentions because the emotions involved are not civilized emotions, there is always rage and sorrow and deep pain and there is a time when more than anything you need your friends, it is not fun, maybe at first you feel good to be alone but after a while, well, who knows? Maybe it will be different for you so why should I try to discourage you and it is true that it is beautiful to be master or mistress of your own time, your own life, your own apartment, but one thing you surely do need is friends and please know that if you need someone to talk to, and I don’t care what time of day it is, I am here for you, just call, just come and knock on my door, Blue, I’m here.

  “That means a lot to me,” he says. “Friends are important.”

  “Do you have friends?”

  “A few.”

  “Well, I hope you will be counting me as one.”

  “That means a lot to me.”

  “How is it going for you in this time?”

  “Actually I feel pretty good. It was the right thing. I can feel that.”

  “Then you are lucky. You have done the right thing. It is not good to be together with someone you cannot love or speak with.”

  “What I want now is a single life. I want never to get myself into a tangled-up situation like that again.”

  “Love is never simple.”

  “I don’t want love. Not like that. I don’t know what love is. If love turns into what my marriage turned into, I don’t want it. I want friends. I want lots of friends. I want to feel alive and open for a change. I’ve had my kids. What else is marriage for but to have kids? And I’ve had my kids, I have them. Now I want a different life for myself. I want to be free to enjoy life.”

  “The good life,” she says. “I hope you can be able to find it.”

  He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he says “Well, I do want a lover, someone to love,” and there is a silence until she says, “I have been missing to hear your voice.”

  “I’ve thought about you,” he says.

  “Have you?”

  Now he is busy. He vacuums the beige carpet in the living room, the gray one in the bedroom, fits on the long-snouted attachment and gets the dust behind the radiators, the wispy spidery gatherings up in the corners of the ceiling.

  He fills a bucket with hot water and Ajax liquid and sponges off the white woodwork, the bathroom sink, kitchen sink, makes the chrome faucets gleam. He scours the tub and shower walls, scrubs out the toilet bowl, gets down on hands and knees and washes the kitchen and bathroom floors with a soapy rag, outside the commode.

  Then he gathers up old magazines and newspapers, junk mail, brochures from tabletops and window ledges. He dusts, shakes the cloth out the window, gives it another once-over, flushes the dirty bucket water down the toilet to a background of Coltrane’s “Favorite Things,” showers and washes his hair.

  He shaves, slowly lathers up and scrapes the blade across his jowls, brushes his teeth, gargles, clips his nose hair with mustache scissors, trims his ’stache, trying to clip most of the gray and leave the red, brown, and black hairs. He picks out his newest Calvin Klein underwear, a clean blue shirt, his favorite tie and pullover, clean pressed Levis. He polishes his shoes and goes out to stock up for the evening.

  At the Irma supermarket he loads a basket with candles, Crémant, Cabernet, Asian snacks, chips, a couple of nice-looking slabs of entrecôte, onions, lettuce hearts and cherry tomatoes, a beautiful wedge of Gorgonzola at the perfect moment of its existence, a fresh-baked baguette. He joins the line at the checkout counter behind an elderly man, who doesn’t have a basket or a cart, seems to have no wares, only a walker. A hearing aid is visible among the sparse white hairs on his round head.

  When his turn comes, he says, “I don’t know if I should be here.”

  The girl at the register blinks. “Did you want to buy anything?” she asks.

  In mild, apologetic confusion, the man says, “I think I was supposed to have a blood test.” He smiles self-deprecatingly and turns around, looks into Bluett’s eyes, then turns back toward the exit door. “Excuse me,” he mutters. “Excuse me. So sorry.”

  One by one, Bluett lays the items in his basket on the counter, meets the young girl’s helpless eyes with an equally helpless expression in his.

  “Maybe you should call the authorities,” he suggests quietly.

  “You think so? The emergency number?”

  “Yes,” he says, but she rings up his wares before calling, and when Bluett walks through the automatic doors of the supermarket, passes a cluster of parked bicycles, the old man is nowhere in sight. He looks up and down the street, watches a red-nosed, sniffling woman clatter her bike over the cobblestones, swing up onto the saddle.

  The sunlight gleams across the frozen lake now and church bells boom the hour as he climbs the wooden staircase to his apartment, thinking about the old man, thinking he should have stayed with him. Would have been about the age of Bluett’s father. Had he lived. Had he not had his heart attack twenty-five years earlier. Bluett was eighteen. In 1972. Dad was fifty-five. No age.

  After dinner, he plays Aura for Liselotte as they sip their cognac by candle flame.

  “I am loving your apartment,” she says.

  “It was the first one I looked at. I fell in love with the view but I figured, you can’t buy the first apartment you look at. So I looked at ten others, each one more depressing than the other, and came back for this. Almost didn’t get it, had someone bidding against me. Some rich dad wanted to buy it for his daughter who was in college. Even sent me a threatening letter. Nasty piece of work. The apartment is nothing special, but I need this view. It told me I could be happy here.”

  “I could be happy here, too,” she says, and there is an awkward moment. “I mean . . .” She laughs, and it passes, her pretty face older now than when he last saw her. Her neck. He feels shallow for noticing this, but he notices. Still, she looks good, trim and shapely with delicate pretty hands. He loves her hands, and sparkling pale brown eyes the color of a shot of Wild Turkey bourbon held to the light, he thinks. Hundred proof. Her pretty mouth. A brown-eyed blonde. Sweet woman.

  “I like your aura,” he says, making a private joke about the title of the music, but she gets it. She puts her hand on his arm. They sit side by side on the sofa.

  “This music is so beautiful,” she says. “So powerful.”

  He kisses her, and they put down their glasses, and it all comes back to him, how passionate she was, how they fit together, how much fun she was in bed, the games they played. Eccentric ideas excite her, and her excitement excites him.

  His bed is uncomfortably narrow for the two of them so they spread a blanket on the floor, and afterward, he lies on his back, staring up through slitted eyes at the ceiling, drifting away.

  She says, “I hope the nei
ghbors couldn’t hear. Was I too loud?”

  “Let them eat their hearts out.”

  She says, “Where did you learn that? What you did with my hair?”

  He smiles at her, takes her light hair in his fingers. It occurs to him she must color it. He tugs a little.

  “Ow,” she says.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  She smiles. “Don’t be.” And he rolls toward her again. She whispers something, and he is on her, hears her voice in his ear calling out wordlessly—what he has missed these months alone, what he missed all the last barren years with his ex, what he couldn’t get with Benthe because it was too much of a sport with her.

  By three, he is exhausted and she sleeps on her side beneath the feather blanket he has draped across her. She snores gently, a light feminine snore. She is so feminine. He feels lucky to be with her. He pours a vodka and puts on Aura again, very low, and sits by the window watching the lake.

  She is gone when he wakes and someone is hammering at the door. He is in his bed, naked. He grabs a robe, sees a note on the table—Dear you, I have to leave for work. Call me tonight? Me.

  The hammering at the door continues.

  “All right, all right,” he shouts and opens the door.

  Sam Finglas stands there with a pitcher of red stuff. “Bloody bloody,” he says. “Just the ticket for a man who drank and fucked too much last night. Got yourself a moaner, ey, boyo?”

  “Christ,” he says. “It’s fucking Monday morning! Maybe you’re independently wealthy, but I’ve got to work, Sam.”

  “Best time to do something beautiful is when you’re supposed to be doing something else.”

  They sit at his oak table with the pitcher. Bluett figures it for madness, but it’s already ten, and the night has left him with a laid-back hang­over—another laid-back hangover. He puts on music. This cold sunny day he goes for Dire Straits, Mark Knopfler singing about his honey of a conductress on the number 18, and they sip bloody Marys watching the lake to a background of Knopfler’s elegant guitar.

  Finglas lights a King, inhales as if the smoke is air and he’s dying for breath.

  “Don’t get a hernia, Sam.”

  “Funny.” He raises his glass, drinks. “So, how was your night?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “Got lucky, huh? Her moans rattled my windowpanes.”

  “Don’t talk to me about luck. I saw your Russki girlfriend.”

  Finglas glances with startled eyes. “Where? When?”

  “Over on Nyhavn. Just glimpsed her through the crowd, the two of you, walking together.” He thinks of the Satin Room, wants to ask. “She’s a knockout.”

  Finglas looks thoughtful, like he’s trying to remember something.

  “Still happy with her?” Bluett asks.

  He just shakes his head in slow wonderment and appreciation.

  Knopfler is singing about French kisses in the dark, and Bluett smacks his lips over the tang of vodka and Tabasco on his tongue.

  “Listen, Blue, mind if I put something in your storage room, a box?”

  “You run out of space?”

  “Some stuff I, uh, wouldn’t want my family to see. If anything happened to me I mean.”

  “Always wear clean underwear ’case you get run down. ’Course, then you probably crap yourself anyway.”

  “So, is it okay?”

  Bluett thinks about some stuff he has, couple of magazines, some letters, a video, he wouldn’t care to have his daughter see. He has been thinking of burning them, but hasn’t got round to it. “’Course. Feel free. It’s not locked. I ought to store a box with you.”

  Finglas chuckles. “Porn stock, eh? Never been a man alone doesn’t have one. Best medicine. Stick of weed and a hot film. Aside from the real thing. Ooo.” He shifts tenderly in his chair. “I am tapped out. My plums have turned to prunes.”

  “Alchemy, eh? She’s that good?”

  “Better.”

  “The lock on my storage room in the basement won’t lock,” Bluett says. “So put anything in there you want. Best not put any black-market cash, though.”

  “I wish,” Sam says.

  The bloodies are doing their job on Bluett. Now Knopfler sings about sweet surrender, and Bluett catches himself studying the quality of the light, the grace of the dozen skaters out on the lake, feels a smile on his numb lips as his eyes take in the patches of light on the ice. What is light? he thinks, and the question amuses him. He glances at Finglas, sees a shadow in his eyes. “Anything wrong, Sam?”

  He shrugs. “The ex. Phone call this morning.”

  “Give you a hard time?”

  “As only she can.”

  Knopfler is proposing to a waitress in the wild West End, and Bluett does not want to think gloomy thoughts about ex-wives. “What is this world?” he recites. “What asketh man to have? Now with his love, now in his cold grave,” pronouncing “have” and “grave” as two syllables, Middle English style.

  “Amen. How’s business?”

  “Fair. Want company for dinner tonight?”

  “Got an appointment.”

  “You dog.” He remembers Liselotte. “Actually I might have an appointment myself.”

  Sam sits back in his chair, one arm draped behind him, the other holding his bloody Mary on his knee, as he stares at the tall bookcase that fills the end wall of the apartment. “Jesus,” he murmurs. “All those books. I used to read, you know.” He looks at Bluett. “Can’t for the life of me remember why.”

  Bluett sniggers, realizes it is not meant as a joke.

  “It used to seem so . . . goddamn important, like something important happening with every book I put into me. Goddamned if I know what. Nah. It’s the senses that occupy me now.” He looks at Bluett again, and his eyes glitter, the tips of his thumb and two fingers moving gently together. “You know. To be.”

  “Or not to be,” sings Bluett. “That’s the question but not for me . . .” Old Danish razzmatazz. Reasonably sloshed himself, he watches Sam’s fingers, the fine contact between them, mesmerized by the quality of his voice, his words, remembering Liselotte’s body in the dark on the floor, the light of stars and moon through the window illuminating her pale flesh. “Yeah,” he breathes. “Sacrament of the senses. Ite missa est. The Mass is over. All for it. Light a candle to their lovelies.”

  Bluett thinks once again of telling him about Benthe, the ménage à trois, but realizes once again that he does not want to tell about that. It’s done. Ite missa est.

  When the pitcher is empty, Finglas takes his leave with it. Bluett still has half a glass of bloody, which he freshens from his own stock. He sits by the window in the silence, tired of music, thinking of Liselotte’s breasts, how perfectly they curved against her ribs, and how they felt against his palms, how her lips parted and teeth glinted when he touched the nipples, how soft her skin was against his cheek, her thigh, the blonde nest, shot through with gray. To be.

  At four thirty, he takes a chance and tries her number, and she gets it on the first ring, her voice full of light, like a bird, like an angel. “I left the office early today,” she explains, “hoping you would call. Couldn’t wait.”

  6. Noise Rock: Arab on Radar

  Their dinner that evening is cheese and baguettes and radishes with a bottle of Cab, a second in waiting. Bluett has power-napped the bloodies off and showered and feels mellow by the candlelight, puts on a CD his daughter forgot when she visited him the previous week. A group called Arab on Radar that she said was “Noise Rock.” Eric Paul and Andrea Fiset singing “Rough Day at the Orifice.” Bluett wonders what he thinks about his daughter listening to such stuff, then remembers that it was she who turned him on to Prince’s “Sexy M.F.,” which utterly repulsed him at first, until he opened to it and realized, without ever knowing it, that that’s just what a man thinks. As James Joyce taught him to listen to his thoughts, Prince did, too. Apparently a process that never is quite done.

  Bluett breaks a raw egg yo
lk over his Gorgonzola and half-listens to Liselotte’s chatter. He feels fresh, randy for a long night. He’s been hungry too long. Way of life, he thinks. Feast or famine. You want it so bad or you wonder what the hell it’s for, all the clawing in the dark.

  She says, “You should have some plants here. Some flowers.”

  He glances at the five window ledges, white-lacquered wood, bare but for a hand-painted vase, a piece of crystal. “Plants die,” he says. “Flowers wither. They’re lost on me. But if you like ’em . . .”

  He changes the CD to Billie Holiday’s Silver Collection, Ben Webster on tenor, and he takes Liselotte’s fine little sculpted hand and leads her out onto the carpet. She watches him with happy submissive eyes, something he loves in her. That gaze goes straight to my baguette.

  “I wished on the moon,” he whisper-sings in her ear as they dance slow, close, her leg between his, his between hers. What life is for. He nuzzles her neck, unbuttons her blouse, and it is as he remembers, better.

  They dance naked by candlelight, Carole King singing now, and Blue sings along in Liselotte’s ear, hears his own voice, high but sounding in harmony, singing about unspoken words saying you’re the only one, and they lie down on the carpet, and she whispers, “You’ve got to buy a bigger bed,” and he says, “I love the floor,” hearing the faint slur in his words as he glides into a moment so huge he forgets it will ever end.

  All things are temporal. This too shall pass, he thinks as he sits over his translation in the gray Tuesday light, waiting for the codeine tablets to do their thing and fix up his head so he can catch up on the five pages of translation he hadn’t done the previous day.

  Liselotte has a real job with a boss she has to bring coffee to and write letters for and run and hop for, so he cannot phone her for—he checks his watch—seven hours. He wants more of the same. That was what she had said to him the previous night. After he went down on her, and she went down on him, and he pulled her hair and squeezed her butt till she squeaked, she whispered, “I want more of the same.”