Beneath the Neon Egg

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  Like Sam said. To be. What life is for, he thinks with his red Gyldendal Danish-English, English-Danish dictionaries spread out on the desk before him, coffee, juice, pills. He pops a lump of sugar from the bowl, crunches it between his teeth, sips black coffee through the crystals, a trick he learned from a Norwegian girl. Used to drive his wife crazy. Only peasants do that!

  As the sugar shoots to his brain, he thinks of other sweet games to play with her, wonders why he didn’t think of her before, thinks of sweet what’s-her-name that he met in Nyhavn, what was her name? Birgitte! Birgitte Svane. Who kissed so nice and sucked his tongue. Give her a call. He and Liselotte talked in the middle of it all about another woman. Were you ever with another woman? Would you?

  She thought for a moment, said, “She would have to be very special.”

  And he thought about Benthe and Dorte and what they had done up in the cottage in Halvstrand, and he said to Liselotte, “It’s only a fantasy. Best keep it that way. That way we can have fun with it.”

  Now he gets up from his desk, walks to the kitchen, douses his face with water from the faucet, paces the length of the apartment’s front wall, five double windows over the lake.

  He has only done three pages today so far. He reminds himself that he is seven pages behind, that he has to do five pages a day to stay here in this apartment. He owns the apartment, but the bank owns him. If he loses the apartment he can survive, but life will not be good, there will be pressure, no surplus, no vodka ad libitum, like that streak of bad luck a few years back when the only drink he could afford was cheap Danish vermouth. Bad scene. Vermouth on the rocks your only solace. Get you high, but with an aftertaste. And no room to maneuver. Why do you drink so much? Just to numb that tip of consciousness that can’t forget. Forget what? Who knows? The reaper maybe.

  He thinks again of Liselotte’s breasts, her smiling teeth in the candlelight. More of the same, please. Then he goes to the kitchen again and douses his face, his wrists, drinks a glass of club soda straight down, pees and gets back to his desk. She will leave the office at five thirty, get home by six. He sets his wrist alarm for six p.m., the earliest time that he can phone her. Then he puts his mind to the remainder of the instructions for use for the turnkey summer-house rentals.

  The weeks are charmed. More of the same, again and again. One week, two weeks, into a third, and a fourth, they are together nearly every evening, every night, alternating between his place and hers.

  They listen to jazz at the White Lamb, jazz on CD and tape cassette at Femmeren on Classensgade, to all the Central European minstrels along Nyhavn, hunched in their overcoats. They go to museums, to Glyptoteket and look at the sculpture of the Water Mother, white and naked and graceful in the center of the fountain pond, a dozen marble babies crawling up from the water for her breasts, one seated in the crook of her upturned arm, all surrounded by palm trees beneath the domed glass. They stroll through the gallery of Roman busts, and Bluett looks at face after face, two-thousand-year-old expressions no different than the faces you see now, around you every day, personalities caught in stone. He studies a five-thousand-year-old Mesopotamian lion relief cut in stone, fading, almost completely faded, indistinct. He can just glimpse the last vague lines of it—an ancient thing on the edge of extinction. Like Rilke’s poem to his father’s photograph: Oh, slowly fading portrait in my more slowly fading hand.

  Good-bye, lion. Good-bye.

  They take long walks and look at the street sculpture, the underwater statues of the merman and his sons beneath the canal reaching up to the surface, imploring the human woman who has left them to return, naked Diana on a horse at Trondhjemsplads (outside the Danish Medical Association, from which he gets a lot of translation business), the massive statues representing the Nile and Tiber rivers, depicted as reclining figures in green bronze flanking the south ramp of Queen Louise’s Bridge, the bronze reclining nude on the grass at Gronningen, so sensual she excites them both.

  For further inspiration, they visit the Museum Erotica on Købmagergade, where, as they stand looking at a photograph of the longest recorded human penis in history, thirty-two centimeters slack, she whispers in his ear, “I want my mouth full of your prick.”

  He whispers, “And I want to eat your cunt.”

  They take a walk down Istedgade and browse through the sex shops at toys and magazines. At Playtime they rent a couple of adult videos to do instant replay on scenes they want to try. At the S and M shop on Studiestræde, they buy a toy that he uses on her, and then she uses on him, and as they lie there afterward, she plays with the hair on his chest and asks if he has ever spanked a woman.

  He sips the Alsatian champagne they bought at Irma’s. They smile at each other, discussing it delicately, playing with the thought, while he secretly thanks the woman who taught him how to do it.

  “Where?” he asks. “Here?” Touching her bottom gently with his palm. She nods, smiling. “Yeah!” she whispers.

  Then they talk about another woman again, searching through the names of women they both know to see if there is one they both would like, discussing them, their bodies, their faces, their manner, considering different games they could play with them, all the while Bluett realizing it is only a fantasy, only a thought to excite them. He opens another bottle of champagne.

  It makes him begin to ask himself again about what love is. Can it be something as simple as this? To share life like this? Just unwrap, unwire, uncork the champagne and enjoy one another, and nothing else is required? Let there be spaces in your togetherness. He remembers something he read about the true religion of our time, that it is not a religion of death and sacrifice, but one of pleasure and joy and human communion and comingling. Yet he is skeptical, reminds himself of the importance of maintaining a healthy skepticism of human motives, one’s own and others’.

  He phones his oldest sister Noreen, in New Haven, who has lived apart from her husband for the past several years. “I could never trust him again,” she says. “He lied to me too many times.”

  “Is it so bad?” Bluett asks. “That a man has those desires, those needs?”

  “I have no problem with that,” Noreen says. “But I can not abide lying.”

  “Would you have tolerated it if he had been honest and told you about it?”

  “Then we would have dealt with it.”

  In the afternoons when his pages are done, he walks through the city, thinking. Noreen is probably the person in the world that he is closest to now, after his children. Her husband, she learned one day, had had a mistress for nearly ten years. He wept and ended it when Noreen found out and he vowed to be faithful, and five years later she found out there had been a new one almost immediately after the split with the first one. He could not explain himself. She could not tolerate the lies. So now they live apart, but still are married and devoted to one another.

  Bluett cannot come to terms with it. The problem feels foreign to him.

  He circles the lake, wind whistling across, sliding icily over his face. Sometimes it moans in the courtyard behind the house, and he lies in bed listening to it, staring up at the white ceiling, wondering where he is. It is late afternoon. A lone couple walks across the blue ice, same blue color as the dusky sky, and just three kids left on skates, silhouettes gliding from sight.

  There is a voice behind him, a woman’s, oddly pitched. A girl walks past, alone, reading aloud from a sheet of paper: “My parents don’t understand the situation and I am losing my mind . . .” Bluett slows his pace to fall behind, and her voice trails off. He feels guilty that he could not offer her help.

  He crosses over from the lakes to the other side of Nørreport, strolls down Købmagergade, passes the jewelry store where he bought the rings for his wedding twenty-one years earlier.

  My heart is broken, he thinks, that my marriage has failed. Where is my wife, my only wife whom I can no longer bear to be in the same room with, nor she with me?

  He considers again about the relig
ion of pleasure, thinks, I’m not sure we’re made for pleasure. We’re turned into orgasm dogs, pawing the orgasm button till we perish from neglect of our other needs. We are not meant to be happy. Guilt and sorrow is our natural lot.

  A young man passes him on the street, a dark, pallid, pimply youth with hollow purple-ringed eyes, a head too big for his body, and a haunted look on his features. Why should that boy be so lost and miserable? My sorrow is as nothing beside his.

  Now he sees a group of children wearing animal masks and carrying clubs, another kid dressed like a gypsy, and after a moment of disoriented horror, he realizes it is Fastelavn, the old pagan feast that Lent replaced. In olden days, the Danes sealed a black cat in a barrel, strung it up, and beat the barrel with clubs until it broke open and the cat, driven mad, escaped. Nowadays they use an empty barrel, paste a picture of a cat on it, and fill it with goodies. It makes him wonder about the Danes, but of course he knows you could find something as strange or stranger anywhere, and as he passes a kiosk, he glances at the newspaper headline display that says genome warfare weapons aimed to select racial traits, and he decides to stop for a cup of coffee at the Clapboard Café on the Coal Square.

  A familiar face is leaving the café, a woman. She smiles, nods. One of his neighbors. He remembers hearing her cry out in passion one night a few weeks earlier, long wracking cries that had him sit up in bed, made him feel the gleam of his own eyes, confirming something there in the lonely night, holding promise.

  As he drinks his coffee, he watches a woman at a table by the window eating a salad with bread and club soda. She eats slowly, with obvious pleasure; her face is natural, attractive in its plainness, and she looks so happy and lovely he wishes he could be her.

  When he gets home, his son, Timothy, is waiting for him at the door, and Bluett’s heart lifts.

  “Eh, Daddio!” Tim says and swings one arm around his father.

  “Timmy, boy!”

  The boy now stands half a head taller than Bluett, who continues to feel startled at his transformation from child to man. The boy’s life is recorded in Bluett’s brain in a series of snapshots. Mental photo album. Bluett can sit in his armchair in the dark and close his eyes and leaf through the pages and see Tim at six months, gnawing with relish at a hunk of cucumber, his face bright with the pleasure of being alive; can see Tim running gleefully toward him down the driveway as Bluett returned at evening from the office job he had for a time; can remember carrying him upstairs to lay him in his cradle to sleep. This is a memory to cherish when old/Climbing upstairs with a bundle of gold. From his earliest years, the boy had combined a mix of quick wit and compassionate heart that was compensation to Bluett for every bad moment of his life, though it pained him as nothing else could that his son’s wounds over the divorce had not yet healed.

  Tim’s hair is cut very short, a translucent dark fuzz against his skull. Opposite of Bluett’s own hair-revolution when he was a kid in the seventies. But how could he complain about that? Hey, Tim, don’t you think it’s about time to stop getting so many haircuts?

  Inside the apartment he ushers the boy into the living room. “What can I get you, son? Beer? Something stronger?”

  “Ah . . . just a Coke, thanks, Dad. I can’t stay long. Got a lot of reading to do.”

  Bluett knows he has to watch himself, not to scare the boy off, not to say anything that might cause him to disappear deep into his anger, out of reach. He recognizes that the anger over the divorce is combined with the natural resentment a twenty-one-year-old feels for his father, recognizes that Timothy’s way of expressing this is a kind of vague cool disdain that he keeps ready to use as necessary and that his own desire to force through that shield will help nothing. He has to relax with it. It only comes in spurts, on occasion; otherwise his son is warm and full of humor. He just never expected anything to come between them. The two of them had always been so close, had spent so much time together. He knows he has made mistakes, said awkward, regrettable things, but still they had shared such a good life together that he never expected such a wedge could appear between them. He remembers a period when Tim was thirteen or so when if they walked the street together the boy would lay his palm on Bluett’s shoulder, walking a little bit behind—allowing his father to lead him. He wonders if that same closeness will reappear in time, wonders if children and parents simply part ways at some point and perhaps this is that point for Timothy. There is a Danish saying, “Once they let go of your hand, they never take it again,” which terrifies Bluett. But he will not let the boy go. Never. He will nurture the memories of their closeness, will nurture the memory of the picture Timothy had drawn for him once when he came home from a business trip: a boy standing on the deck of a boat smiling, his arms open in greeting over the caption welcome home, captain dad! And the time that Bluett had some success with a literary translation he had done and was the subject of an article in the newspaper, and Timothy had looked into his eyes and said with emotion, “I am so proud of you, Dad.”

  “And I’m proud of you, Tim. I am so proud of you.”

  Bluett sips a beer while his son drinks the Coke and the afternoon sun disappears into the ice on the lake.

  “How’s your girl, Tim? Kristine, right?”

  “Yeah, right. She’s fine.”

  Bluett has not been allowed to meet her yet, although she and Tim have been together for almost a year. Bluett’s daughter has met her, told him a little. She is the daughter of a surgeon, very mild and intelligent.

  “How’s school?”

  The boy smirks slightly, shrugs. “Boring.”

  Bluett chuckles. “I remember I said that once to someone, a colleague, and he said, ‘Boring is not a problem. Boring one can always cope with.’”

  Tim’s eyes flash. “It’s still boring, Dad!”

  “Well, you’ll be finished soon, then you can take a break, travel some.”

  “Yeah. If I finish.”

  Weapon. Bad tact. Avoid this. Yet he finds himself playing right into it. “You’ll destroy your best chances if you quit now.”

  “I’m not talking about quitting. I’m just thinking about taking a year off.”

  “You take a year off, you may never get back to it. Then you’ll be stuck. I know what I’m talking about. I took a leave of absence at the beginning of my university studies when I came to Denmark, and it took me three years to get back into it. I couldn’t finish until I got here, and it ruined my chances for an academic career.”

  “Who wants an academic career?”

  “You might. You can’t know yet for sure. Don’t cut yourself off. Don’t shut the door on yourself.” Bluett hears what he is saying, hears cliché after cliché, knows that he is saying what he wishes his own father had said to him all those years before instead of giving him permission to do as he pleased, make his own mistakes, his father who was too lost in his and then died. Yet at the same time he senses that nothing can be accomplished with this conversation. Perhaps it is enough just to register his resistance. Change the subject.

  “You going away for winter recess, Tim? Do some skiing maybe?”

  “Who has money for that?”

  The silence extends as Bluett thinks about this, thinks he recognizes where the conversation is headed, wonders if he has set himself up for it, if the whole purpose of the visit was a touch, and why should it be otherwise? He doesn’t mind, he doesn’t mind giving the boy money; he just hates the thought that it might have been the whole purpose of the visit, hates his own suspicion that it might have been engineered by smirks and bitter comments and wonders if it is his own fault that it happens this way. Does he keep too tight a hand on his wallet? Does he use money as bait to draw the kids to him? And what kind of person is he to expect it to be otherwise, to crave this level of devotion?

  For a moment he considers making the boy bite the sour apple and ask directly, but fears he will not ask then, that he will leave without the money, go out broke and feeling lost and miserable. Blu
ett remembers how it was to be young. Not as much fun as generally believed and assumed and pretended. Best years of your life, my butt, Bluett thinks. It’s goddamned hard to be young.

  “If you need money, Tim—or anything at all, you only have to ask. If I can help you, I’ll be glad to.” Will you reach that far to me? But the boy is staring out the window, lips pursed.

  Bluett swallows some beer, waits. “Been reading anything good lately?”

  “Textbooks.”

  “Boy, you seem pretty down, Tim. You used to have so much fun with your buddies. I remember how happy you were when you got that apartment . . .”

  “Yeah, and what if I lose it?”

  “Lose it? Why should you lose it? Are you in danger of losing it?”

  “It’s not always so damn easy to come up with the rent, you know. It gets me down, I go around broke, everything I earn goes for rent and books and food, and I think to myself . . .” The boy looks down at the table but seems to be peering into an abyss. “I think to myself, what if I can’t make the rent? What if I get kicked out? I’ll be out on the street. I’ll . . .”

  “That won’t happen. I won’t let it. And if it happens, then you just come and live with me until we get you settled in somewhere else.”

  “You don’t have enough room here, Dad.”

  “Are you kidding? I’d make room. You can’t believe I would let you get kicked out into the street. You can’t believe that, son.”

  Timothy’s face is open and tender. “You would do that for me, Dad?”

  “Are you kidding? There is no question, Tim. No question at all. Of course I would do it. With pleasure.”

  The boy’s eyes are moist, and Bluett cannot believe that his own son would have the impression that he would not help him, would leave him on his own in such a situation.

  “Thanks, Dad,” he says, and his voice is thick. “Really. Thanks.”

  And Bluett feels a gratitude so deep he cannot see the bottom of it. Gratitude that these things managed to have been spoken. That he’d had the good fortune to get behind this demon and chase it off. “Listen, sonny, I came into some money,” Bluett lies, taking out his wallet, removing three hundred-crown notes, and palming them to Tim. “Here, buddy, give yourself a night on the town. Have some fun. And listen, why don’t you take a couple bottles of that beer in the refrigerator. And some of that ham and cheese there. Take whatever you like. And listen, why don’t you come over one evening soon and we can rent a video? We can order in a pizza, make a night of it . . .”