The visit is soon concluded. They embrace at the door, and Bluett watches his son’s shaven head disappear along the street in the darkening afternoon, cherishing the memory of the boy’s voice when he thanked him, cherishing the thought that this one obstacle had been broken down. Maybe with just a little time they will get beyond this, wondering if they will ever be close again in anything like the way it was before. He knows other men with children older than his who assure him it changes for the better again later and he hopes for that, determined that it will be so. His own father died when he was eighteen, at a time when they were at least partly at odds, so no new level of being together had ever been achieved.
He still remembers the day Tim was born, all the hope and promise of the day. He and his wife were in bed, about to sleep, talking a bit, and Bluett told her some joke, got her laughing. It felt good so he told another, and her laughter turned to something else. The bed started vibrating with her body, and she said, “You better get me to the hospital right now.”
Timothy was born two hours later, and the nurses rolled the bed out into the hall afterward so he and his wife could sit up together with the baby for a while. Little Tim there, with his light eyes open, seeing what?
Bluett went home alone and lay down to sleep but he couldn’t. He couldn’t stop thinking about something, about the baby’s head. He thought it had looked kind of dented. He couldn’t stop wondering if there was something wrong with it.
Next day he found the baby already in his wife’s arms. She was nursing him. It took some moments before Bluett could raise his eyes to the boy’s head, but when he did, there it was again. Dented. Why had no one mentioned it? The baby was deformed.
He took his wife’s hand, and their eyes met, and Bluett smiled. “He’s so cute,” he said. “Cute head,” he said, his pulse sounding in his ears.
“Yeah,” she said, “they get squeezed out of shape from the birth. It takes a day or two before they’re normal shape again.”
Probably nothing in his life, before or since, had had such an impact of reprieve upon him as that moment. Perhaps it was what he hoped for now. A moment of explanation that would eliminate this partial, temporary estrangement, bring them together again as they had been all the years of Tim’s childhood and early adolescence.
When he and his wife were separating, Bluett tried to explain it to the boy. Bluett and his wife by then could not speak to one another without bickering, and in the course of trying to explain how impossible the situation had become, he said to the boy, “It’s this life, son. It’s no life for me,” by which he meant the life of bickering with a wife with whom he no longer shared any joy and who he could not make happy. But the phrase stuck out in his own mind, his own memory, as out of place, as ill-chosen. What might the boy have made of that phrase? He suspected the boy might have thought Bluett meant the life of the whole family, life with him and his sister. He tried to talk to him again about it, but the boy cut him off, would not allow him to explain anything more, and still, a year later, they had not come beyond that point.
He stands now at the window and watches the corner around which his son disappeared and looks back in one sweep over his life, and he knows that he cannot regret the things he has done, cannot regret his marriage, it had been necessary, it was his life, a big hunk of it, the main part, that which brought his children to life. How can you regret your life? He and his wife had made vows and broken them, but not without regret, and their love had soured, had worn away, but they had also grown together, and who was to question the fate that joined them, that produced two good kids looking for their own way in the world. Who could question or regret that? Chance turnings decide a fate you thought you had all of time to pick out for yourself. All of a sudden it’s there and then it’s gone, and what is left but sawdust shavings?
At the windowsill, he remembers Tim’s voice—Thanks, Dad. Really, thanks—and wonders what kind of man he is, that his own son could think that he would let him get kicked out into the street.
7. The Crystal Ship
Alone again in the darkened apartment, he carries the empty glasses out to the kitchen and thinks about calling someone, but who can he talk to about what he feels now? He doesn’t want to turn to Liselotte for reasons he does not comprehend. Maybe he doesn’t want to show himself emotionally naked. His sister, perhaps, but he remembers Noreen saying to him last time they spoke, “This is going to cost you a fortune.” He wanted to protest, but it was true, he couldn’t afford it, his phone bill the previous month had been a killer. “I’ll translate an extra page tomorrow,” he had said.
“Do you have an infinite supply of pages to translate?”
He had laughed, but as he stands looking at the phone on its little table by the window he realizes that there is no one to call because the pain he feels just now is and must be something he is alone with, realizes it is something to embrace, one of the edges of loneliness, a truth.
We don’t know, he thinks, what knives we put in one another’s hearts, mates, parents, children, lovers. But he feels some edge to the thought that is of no use and with that realization feels it slipping from him. For many moments he stands there over the telephone table gazing out the window at the frozen dark blue lake. He knows that what he feels now is a gift of some sort, the edge of sadness, the sorrow at the core of loneliness, a place he will return to in the future to learn more from.
As the depth of the feeling levels up to the surface, and he finds himself away from it again, just standing blankly, the moment having reached the end of its circuit, the telephone rings.
It’s Liselotte. “Hi?” she says in a tone of query. “Are you okay?”
The hair on his neck rises. “Why do you ask that?”
“I just got a feeling that you might not be . . . okay.”
“What are you, psychic?”
“Was I right?”
“Listen, you doing anything? Why don’t you come over for a nice post blue-hour highball?”
“We don’t have to drink. I don’t want to interrupt your day, but I have something for you.”
He nurses a Stoli-rocks while he waits for her, then another, and halfway through the second he feels it doing its work in his brain, feels that crisp certainty of anticipated pleasure, feels that perhaps he loves her, cautions himself not to speak that word, realizes that if he were always drunk he would always love her for when he is drunk all that exists for him and all he exists for is the moment, the beat of blood in the wrist, the response of his body to hers.
He finishes the second Stoli surfing the TV, watches a bit of David Letterman, Jay Leno, Oprah Winfrey, Ricki Lake, Jerry Springer. Springer is in a serious moment at the end of his freak show: “Love is accepting,” he says solemnly. “And you also have to accept the love that people offer. You have to drink their milkshakes.” Bluett clicks off the remote.
On his way to the kitchen to freshen his Stoli, there is a knock at the door. He opens as he passes and kisses Liselotte’s mouth, her brown eyes bright as amber lamps with surprise and pleasure. He caresses her round full breasts, murmurs, “I want to drink your milkshakes.”
Instead of a drink she asks for juice, so he takes a club soda to slow his progress. He sits on the sofa beside her, stirred. He wants her, but she takes something from her bag and holds it out to him. A large white jagged crystal, the size of a coffee mug.
“This is for you,” she says. “You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want, but it told me you were feeling sad. That’s why I called and asked how you were.”
He takes it in his hands, cooling his palms with it.
“Close your eyes,” she says. “Feel its energy. Let it in.”
Despite himself, he feels something coursing faintly into his hands, his arms, his veins. Then he thinks that what he feels is nothing more than his blood.
“I didn’t realize you were into crystals,” he says, feeling vaguely disappointed.
“Something happened to me w
hen I was twelve . . .”
Bluett chuckles. “Something happened to everybody when they were twelve.”
He sees annoyance flash in her eyes, but she governs it. “You don’t have to believe me,” she says, and he is sorry for his flippancy, tries to turn it to humor, warmth. He holds the crystal to his ear. “So this here rock told you I was sad, did it?”
“It has been scientifically proven that crystals have innate energy,” she says. “Why do you think they used crystals in radios? They channel through you, and then you are like the radio receiver. You tune in to the energy, which enters your body and comes out your hands. Crystals have intelligence. They attract certain energies that can channel to the higher self according to the person’s aura, and, for example, cure a disease or close the separation from the soul essence.”
“The soul essence,” he says.
“When I was twelve I made a decision that I was a have not,” she says. “I did not realize, or I forgot, that I was connected to God, but I found the way back with crystals.”
“With crystals.” As he sits there listening to her amiable nonsense, he feels a mild gentle warmth running through his body, filling his heart, his brain, his eyes, and he watches her, smiling, and realizes that this is not about love, this is about friendship and pleasure and a certain healthy skepticism of human motives, including one’s own.
Crystals indeed.
He stands to get a drink, but goes to the window instead, and just above the lake, in the black starry sky, he sees the Hale-Bopp.
“Look!”
He remembers reading about this in the papers, in Newsweek, that it had last been seen from earth 4,200 years ago and would not be seen again for about another 2,400 years. The reporter for some reason had referred to it as “a frozen dirt ball,” and Lars at the Booktrader had said, “He sounds more like the frozen dirt ball there.”
Liselotte stands beside him watching it through the window, and he realizes it could mean nothing or it could mean something; it might all mean something, everything, that crystal, our eyes, our lives, every moment we spend together, every word we speak, right up to the last breath we draw into our lungs and release. Maybe, he thinks, there is something. ’Cause without something, there’s nothing.
On Friday she is free from work; having caught up, he doubles his page quota the day before so they can spend a three-day weekend together.
Thursday, just as he’s finishing his tenth page of the porcelain exhibition catalog, there is a knock on his door. Sam Finglas. Bluett invites him in, pours a cup of coffee. Bluett notes Sam is unshaven. The skin beneath his eyes is pouchy.
“Had another call from your ex, Sam?”
He shakes his head, distant, yet somehow Bluett feels he wants something. “You want to talk, Sam?”
Finglas looks at him, and his eyes send a message that reaches deep into Bluett’s heart but that he cannot comprehend, a gaze that will imprint upon him.
“What can I do for you, Sam? You got money trouble? Trouble with the woman friend?”
Sam only stares, sighs. “I got to go, Blue.” He puts out his hand, and they shake, formally, and Sam holds on to Bluett’s hand for several moments, staring into his eyes as though from very far away.
A chill touches Bluett. “Sam, I’m here. Right across the hall. Just knock on the door. Any time.”
He nods, looks at him a moment longer, raises his palm in parting and is gone.
Bluett sits at his desk with Sam’s eyes still in his mind. That stare. Startled blue eyes peering deep, but for what? At what? Conveying what? As though he were saying, Read my eyes.
Tell me, Sam. I can’t read your eyes.
Or as though he were trying to read something in mine.
He sighs, goes back to his tenth page, finishes it off, checks it, prints it out. He makes up the bill for the week’s work and clips it to the translation, copies the job onto a disk, and packages it all into an envelope, which he weighs on the postal scale. He licks stamps and sticks them to the corner, three carmine images of the face of Margrethe, queen of the social-democratic Kingdom of Denmark.
Then he showers and shaves, pats himself down with the new aftershave Liselotte bought for him, trims the hair in his ears, his eyebrows, his mustache, dresses, and pulls on his coat to take a walk down to the mailbox.
In the hall, he pauses outside Sam’s door, remembering that gaze. He knocks, knocks again.
Nothing.
The weekend with her lies before him like a little paradise, Thursday evening to Sunday night, an island of pleasure. They are to meet at the Café Europa on Amagertorv, and his step is light up to Frederiksborggade, past Israels Plads, where earthy women in tight slacks hawk vegetables and fruit, across Nørreport to Købmagergade.
The streets are full of end-of-the-day office people out to shop, meet for drinks, dinner, and it occurs to him he is beginning to feel a part of it all again, after how many weeks, months of estrangement?
Since the divorce. Something he does not want to think about. The connection to someone, the breaking of connection. He has had his life. He passes a bakery, window display of petits fours and wienerbrød (Viennese) Danishes, and remembers sitting drinking beer with Sam on a sunny autumn afternoon. The wasps had been at their beer and on the butter and the jelly in the wienerbrød on the next table, and Sam had said, “Those wasps are like us. Their work is done, their queen is dead, the hive is gone. They have nothin’ to do now but take what pleasure they can get from the little time left before they freeze to death or get swatted out. They want sugar, and they’re mean ’cause somehow they know they got nothin’ to lose. No purpose. Nothin’ to do but fly around and look for sweet stuff.”
He has had his life. His kids are grown, and the connection to Jette was a dead end. How odd it seems to him, to have spent twenty years of his life, the central twenty years perhaps, on a dead end. The kids, of course. It was for the kids, and they had turned out well, even if Timothy had not forgiven him yet. Time. They need time. Yet time is a sea that stretches in more than one direction. Memories wash up sometimes, late at night, on a lonely afternoon, of hopeful times, the times after they managed their first adjustment together, when they were a team in the world, part of a net of family. Her family really. His so many years dispersed.
He remembers Jette once saying to him, “You’re my best friend.”
He cannot recall the context, only the statement, how it surprised him with delight and warmth, an unexpected revelation of tenderness through her normally guarded exterior. Other moments, too. Their month roaming the desert in a rented Ford; last fling before having children. Swimming at sunset in a motel pool in a little town in New Mexico. Both of them brown from the sun and trim and wanting nothing more than to be together, talk, share their thoughts, make love, make babies.
Those moments too few. The failure was there from the start, too, a breach inevitable, only a matter of the destruction of their marriage waiting for the right moment.
Oh, they’re still friends, but only in extremely small doses; otherwise the emotional poison begins to leak out. There would be no growing old together, no death do us part, no better or worse left. In the end, there had been only worse and worse.
And that was your life, Bluett. You chose poorly. Or behaved poorly. Did not have the stuff it takes. You have your kids but they are cheated of a family base. They have you, they have Jette, what little remains of Jette’s family, mostly people in their late seventies, early eighties. Whatever became of the old family stretch where there were aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings? What is there now? What chance left? Yet that had been precisely his problem—that there had been too much family, too many in-laws, no other life. Remember that!
Passing the post office, a bright-faced couple catch his eye, arms slung over each other’s shoulder, strolling through the evening rush, and it occurs to him he could start over. He could pick a new partner. He could have a life. Pick more consciously this time. Commit himself. Be
joined again, this time knowing something about the place.
He follows Købmagergade out to Amagertorv, the Café Europa there at one side of the three-cornered square, the parliament across the canal, and he thinks of Liselotte sitting there waiting for him, knowing somehow she has already arrived. He thinks of the pleasure they have shared these past weeks. He has told her clearly that he is not looking for love. He wants a friend. He wants to have fun. He wants to live free. She understood. She agreed, accepted. He tries to remember whether she told him what she wanted now with her life. She is twice divorced, two daughters in their mid-twenties, alone again for how long now?
Does he love her?
She believes in the intelligence of crystals.
And the two of them, years earlier, had blithely been unfaithful to their spouses. Together. Well, perhaps blithely was too harsh a word. It was not without regret. Not without joy either, for that matter, ecstasy even. No love at home.
He climbs the steps to the glass door, sees her lift her face from a table by the big plate window that looks across to the parliament, and he becomes aware suddenly of Denmark, this country, of Danes, people with a shared heritage of traditions, a thousand-year history, and him an expatriate from a country not two and a half centuries old, cut off here from his past, nose at the window of something he cannot have and does not want.
Well, what then? What are you then? You’ll never be a Dane. And you’re not American anymore.
Beneath the Neon Egg Page 9