Beneath the Neon Egg

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  “Oh, Dad,” she says. “It’s all shit.”

  “You two have a fight?”

  “He is so . . .” When she does not speak further, he asks, “Is it serious?”

  “Who knows? Who cares?”

  “You want to come stay over here for a while?”

  “Could I?”

  “You bet you could. Listen, you got any money? Pick up a couple good steaks on the way, I’ll pay you back. I’m hungry. We’ll have us a nice dinner here. I’ve got some wine. I’ll pay you for the steaks.”

  He hangs up and stands at the window watching sunlight ripple on the cold melted water, the edges of broken ice, his tongue playing at his tooth. On the other side, two swans swim in the melted water. He goes to the bathroom mirror to look at his loose tooth, but he can see nothing other than that he looks like hell. The swelling of his mouth has gone down, but there is still a red bruise across the side of his face. His forehead, too, is bruised, and the white tape across his nose is dirty.

  You were lucky, he thinks, looking at himself. You can still walk. Your head is intact.

  Gently he sponges his face with a hot washcloth, washes beneath his arms, his groin. He washes his hands thoroughly, runs water over his scraped palm, scrubs and trims his fingernails, cleans his teeth, careful to avoid the loose canine. As best he can, he sponges dirt from the bandage on his nose so it appears more presentable.

  He wonders if he will ever feel safe on the street again, thinks about acquiring a weapon, but cannot imagine himself using it. He certainly could not use a knife or a sap. Perhaps he could wield a pistol, but then he might use it, and the thought of firing bullets into someone is abhorrent. He would end in jail himself and the thought of that is worse than abhorrent. Defenseless. But you need some kind of defense, protection.

  Those men were sent, he realizes with certainty. They were definitely sent. Just like the photographs. It was a message, a warning. Persist and we break your back. We send the pictures to Sam’s kids and ex-wife. The very thing he killed himself to avoid, so his death will have been utterly pointless. Their power to blackmail is dead with Sam. Except for this pressure to keep Bluett’s mouth shut out of respect for his friend’s memory. For that matter, out of fear of another beating. I’m no fucking hero.

  What would it do for Sam’s son to know the details?

  Nothing.

  So they win?

  Yeah. They win. What they got out of it. Let them choke on it. Let them have their own filthy world to themselves.

  Then there is a knock on the door, and Raffaella is there, clucking over her father’s bruised face. He enjoys the attention for a bit, then tells her it looks a lot worse than it is, tells her it was some drunk on Nyhavn, nothing important, no serious damage.

  “Want a drink, honey?”

  “Got any Coke?”

  He takes Coke, too, and they chat, about the melting lake, the end of winter, the lengthening days—here it is, nearly five, and still half light. El tells him something his son said about him recently, about how cozy he is as a father, and Bluett feels the water in his eyes. “Timothy said that?”

  She nods several times, smiling, happy to see how happy it makes him. She does not mention Jens-Martin again, and he doesn’t ask, allowing her to take her time coming around to it. She puts on a Carole King CD. She says she is studying that CD for her singing lessons. Then she takes the CD off and sings a number for him a cappella that she is working on. “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” She sings it slow, strong-voiced, contemplatively, and Bluett closes his eyes in gratitude that he did not skimp on the lessons, that she would care to sing the song for him.

  “You sing like an angel,” he says when she is finished.

  “Oh quit exaggeratin’, Dad,” she tells him, her cheeks flushed with pleasure.

  In the kitchen they work together to prepare the steaks, two beautiful slabs of entrecôte she bought from the ecological butcher on Frederiksborggade. She washes lettuce, quarters tomatoes, dices cucumber, while he peels an onion before the open window, cold water running, mixes a dressing of olive oil and seven-year-old Balsamico red wine vinegar, mustard, sea salt and freshly ground pepper. She has also bought a little plastic tub of fresh béarnaise, which he heats slowly in a saucepan. He shoves a platter of frozen oven-ready fries beneath the grill, pops a frozen baguette into the oven, and spills half an envelope of frozen peas into boiling water.

  With a clean linen cloth spread across the oak table, he uncorks a bottle of Pomerol and puts on Mozart’s Horn Concertos and lights a candle in the old-fashioned brass stick his ex-wife gave him for Christmas once.

  They get lucky with the steaks, perfect medium-rare and tender, and she doesn’t talk about Jens-Martin at all.

  “The birds are back on the lake,” he says.

  She nods. “Maybe we should take a walk down and feed them some bread afterward.”

  “Let’s do that,” he says.

  She runs a French fry through the béarnaise on her plate, munches, smiling. “Dad, ’member when you used to sing to me at bedtime?”

  “You bet I do.”

  “You used to sing ‘Mr. Blue’ and ‘I had a dog and his name was Blue’ and ‘Eileen Og.’”

  “You remember all that?”

  “I loved it,” she says and starts to cry. He comes around the table and lays an arm around her shoulder, squeezes, and his heart is flooded with gratitude that she has come to him for comfort as he says, “Hey, honey, it’s okay, it’s all okay, your dad is here for you.”

  She wipes away the tears with the heels of her hands, and Bluett returns to his side of the table, refills their wine glasses.

  He thinks a moment and tells her about the monkey he dreamed, how vivid it was, tall and scrawny, and how it said in a piping voice, Blessed be His name! Though the memory is no longer vivid—only a memory of its vividness.

  There is wonder in her gray eyes as she listens to her father. “That’s amazing,” she whispers. “Where did it come from?”

  He shrugs, shakes his head in bewilderment, but is comforted by her amazement, her enthusiasm at the image.

  “It’s like, what do they call it? Like an archetype, you know, Dad?”

  The phone rings. Bluett goes to it, trying to minimize his limp, puts it to his ear and listens tensely. “’Lo.”

  Jens-Martin. He apologizes for the interruption, asks for Raffaella. Bluett pretends not to listen as she speaks on the phone but cannot miss the sound of her voice changing from chill to forgiving, hears her accept an apology, twice. “It’s okay. I understand. It’s okay. I know you were under pressure.”

  She replaces the receiver and her step is light returning to the table.

  “Everything okay again?”

  She nods brightly. “I guess I won’t stay the night after all, if you don’t mind.”

  “Just remember, honey,” he says, “you always have a place here, you always have a home here as long as you need it. It’s not big but we could fix it up so we each had our own space if ever you needed a place to turn to.”

  They have coffee and After Eights, and he gives her a bag of old bread to throw to the birds on her way back.

  He stands at the window and watches as she walks her bicycle across to the embankment, sees the phosphorescent shapes of swans gliding toward her in the dark as she brakes and pitches clumps of bread out into the water. Then she is shaking the last of the crumbs from the plastic bag, which she stuffs into the pocket of her red quilted jacket. She swings her leg onto the bike, glances up at his window. He realizes she knew he was watching. It makes him happy that she knew, that she knows him. She waves, and peddles off along the embankment to the bridge.

  Bluett clears the table, rinses the dishes and stacks them, decides to let them be. He pours himself a Hennessy, flicks off the kitchen light.

  Then he thinks of something.

  From the top of his closet he takes down the “dossier” envelope from the box Sam had stored with him.
He stuffs it into the garbage bag beneath his kitchen sink. The garbage collectors come on Thursday. He will put the bag down into the dumpster early tomorrow morning, and wait and watch as they take it away to be burned. And that will be the end of it.

  Out of his desk drawer, he gets the envelope with the photos of Sam in it. Without opening it again, he lights the edge of it on the flame of the candle on the dining table, holds it down to let the flame climb, and drops it in the big metal ashtray. He watches the blue tongues of flame lick around it and grow, his nose pulling against the stench of burnt photo paper lifting to his nostrils, and he thinks, Ah Sam, it was just silliness, that’s the tragedy. You let it get away with you and then you got caught, but it was all just silliness, you poor guy. If only . . .

  He wonders what he himself would have done in a similar situation, to protect his own children from disillusionment.

  It was just bad luck, Sam. Bad judgment and bad luck. If only I had not let you go back to your apartment. If only I had insisted that we talk it through.

  The last bit of blue-yellow flame curls out, leaving ash and paper stub.

  Let them choke on it, he thinks. Let them live choking. And wonders how he will ever be able to find peace and forgiveness for himself, if he will have to carry Sam’s staring eyes with him for the rest of his life.

  The stereo is silent now. He clicks it open and slides in Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. He turns his armchair to face the window and inhales the bouquet of the Hennessy, sips, thinking of the years it took to produce this taste, the planning, the confidence that you would still be there, someone would still be there twenty, thirty years later to tap the kegs.

  That’s what I like about Europe, he thinks, as Coltrane blows the opening formal bars of “Acknowledgement” and introduces the theme.

  Idly Bluett reaches to the windowsill for the jagged cool-white crystal there, takes it in his palm, wonders half-seriously if it would signal her.

  Then he puts it back on the sill, and reaches for the phone.

  Her voice is bright at the sound of his.

  “I was wondering,” he says. “A good friend of mine, his funeral is being held on Friday. I was wondering if you would come with me.”

  There is a silence.

  “It would mean a lot to me,” he says.

  “Yes,” she whispers. “Of course. I am glad that you would ask me. How are you?”

  “I’m okay. I’ve missed you.”

  “I have missed you, too. Wery much. All these thoughts have been turning through my mind,” she says. “I think of you and I think of my ex-husbands, how it never worked with them, how it all went wrong, and wondering why I wanted so much for it to be the same with you.”

  He realizes how much he wants to see her, to have her here with him, to touch her. No questions, just two people, two friends, lovers, the best of friends.

  “Would you like to come over?” he asks. “I would like so much to see you.”

  “Give me half an hour,” she says.

  He places the phone back in the cradle, puts aside his cognac snifter, and waits for her. Down along the bank, a jogger bobs past in the shadow of the streetlamp, and Coltrane’s tenor loosens the fist of his mind so it can move with the urgency of the notes to escape form, to find the source of cohesion, vibration. The music moves like a current inside him, like a phosphorescent angel that defies form, that fills his chest, his mind, his heart. Up above, Hale-Bopp glows in the dark vault of the sky, and across the embankment, the red neon egg shimmers, vanishing into the black melting lake.

  A Note on the Author

  Born and raised in New York, Thomas E. Kennedy has lived and worked in Copenhagen for three decades. His books include novels, story and essay collections, literary criticism, translation, and anthologies. Beneath the Neon Egg is the final novel of his acclaimed Copenhagen Quartet to be published in the United States, following In the Company of Angels (2010), Falling Sideways (2011), and Kerrigan in Copenhagen (2013). He teaches in the M.F.A. in creative writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Kennedy recorded his translations of works of the late beatnik Danish poet Dan Turèll set to music by the renowned international composer Halfdan E, released on CD by PlantSounds records in 2013. Kennedy’s websites are www.CopenhagenQuartet.com and www.thomasekennedy.com.

  By the Same Author

  Fiction

  The Copenhagen Quartet

  Kerrigan in Copenhagen, A Love Story

  Falling Sideways

  In the Company of Angels

  Getting Lucky: New and Selected Stories, 1982–2012

  Last Night My Bed a Boat of Whiskey Going Down

  A Passion in the Desert

  Cast Upon the Day

  The Book of Angels

  Drive Dive Dance & Fight

  A Weather of the Eye

  Unreal City

  Crossing Borders

  Nonfiction

  Riding the Dog: A Look Back at America

  The Literary Traveler (with Walter Cummins)

  Realism and Other Illusions: Essays on the Craft of Fiction

  Winter Tales: Men Write about Aging (as editor, with Duff Brenna)

  The Book of Worst Meals (as editor, with Walter Cummins)

  Writers on the Job: Tales of the Non-Writing Life (as editor, with Walter Cummins)

  The Girl with Red Hair (as editor, with Walter Cummins)

  Andre Dubus: A Study of the Short Fiction

  Copyright © 2014 by Thomas E. Kennedy

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make

  available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without

  limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording,

  or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does

  any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution

  and civil claims for damages. For information address Bloomsbury USA,

  1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018.

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  A 9,500-word novella entitled “Autumn Wasps,” which ultimately grew into this novel,

  appeared in 1999 in Agni and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Maxine Kumin,

  former Poet Laureate of the United States and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

  An excerpt appeared in altered form in Epoch magazine and in Frank: A Journal of

  Contemporary Writing & Art in 2001, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and received

  the Frank Expatriate Writing Award in 2002 at the Geneva Writers’ Conference.

  Material in this novel appeared in altered form in the 2003 book Bluett’s Blue Hours.

  The quote concerning hailstones is from Jonathan Raban’s “The

  Unlamented West,” in the New Yorker, May 20, 1996. The Latin palindrome in chapter 4 is

  copyright Lars Rasmussen and is used here with his kind permission. The quotes from Kaj Munk

  and from Dan Turèll’s “Charlie Parker on Isted Street” are translated by Thomas E. Kennedy, the

  latter with the kind permission of Chili Turèll, and were first published in Poet Lore, vol. 107,

  nos. 1–2, Spring-Summer 2012. With thanks to Barry Lereng Wilmont for his facilitation of

  permission for the translation. And with thanks to Daniel Kennedy for advice on how to

  represent Halfdan E’s statement about Miles Davis’s Aura in chapter 5. The lines quoted in

  chapter 9 are from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29,” from William Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” from

  John Keats’s “A Thing of Beauty Is a Joy Forever,” from John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” from

  Michael Drayton’s “Idea,” and from Dan Turrèll’s “I Should Have Been a Taxi Driver.”

  Librar
y of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Kennedy, Thomas E.

  Beneath the neon egg: a novel / Thomas E. Kennedy.—First U.S. edition.

  pages cm

  eISBN 978-1-62040-142-2

  1. Irish Americans—Fiction. 2. Divorced men—Fiction. 3. Male friendship—Fiction.

  4. Aliens—Denmark—Copenhagen—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3561.E4277B47 2014

  813´.54—dc23

  2013042336

  First U.S. edition 2014

  This electronic edition published in August 2014

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