Kerrigan in Copenhagen

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  She blows a thin stream of gray cigarette smoke through pursed smiling lips and assents with a nod.

  They walk back along Classensgade, and his Associate is saying, “Ruth always reminds me of a girlfriend I knew when I was about twelve.” Then she begins to chuckle. “We were in the country for a weekend, at a farm. And there was a horse in the pasture. A stallion.” She holds her palms out, facing each other, a foot and a half apart. “He was enormous, and we couldn’t quite figure out what it was so we tried to ask the farmer, and he said, ‘The horse? That’s Jax.’ We got hysterical laughing, and then all day, for weeks after that, all we had to do to break up laughing was one of us would say ‘Jax!’ ”

  They are laughing together now as they walk through what, to Kerrigan’s weak eyes, is the impressionistic night.

  In her apartment again as Darin sings about Lotte Lenya, Mack the Knife, and old Lucy Brown, she lights candles, puts out ice and glasses, a bottle of Chivas, and his breath goes shallow as they undress one another on the sofa.

  “You are radiant,” he whispers, his eyes full of her lovely shoulders and breasts that look much bigger uncovered, tipped with nipples the size and color and texture of berries.

  “He who flatters, gets,” she whispers.

  Then he whispers, “Jax!” and she laughs, but the laughter quickly turns to something else that draws them from self-consciousness and absorbs them at once in their senses and emotions.

  The night is full of amazements. Kerrigan had heard the term “multiple orgasms” before but never witnessed it. He listens in awe as she cries out again and again, lulls, begins anew, until finally he reaches his own single height and drops into exhaustion on the rumpled sheets.

  Then she is weeping in his arms, and he strokes her hair. “There, there,” he whispers, watching a silver triangle of moonlight on the tall white wall. “What is it?”

  “So hopeless,” she says. Her face is unattractive weeping, and his immediate thoughts are of escape, but he says, “What’s so hopeless?”

  “Me. All of it.” She reaches to the bed stand for a Kleenex and blows her nose. “I’m fifty-seven years old—no, I lied, I’m fifty-eight—and still mourning over lost chances and stupid choices. I’ve wasted my life.”

  “Hey, it’s not too late. It’s never too late.”

  “I’ll never be able to make up for all this lost time,” she says. “I have never learned.” She draws back to look into his eyes. “I have something in me,” she says. “I do. But I have never been able to express it.”

  He pulls her close and says, “You will. You will if you don’t give up,” and his thoughts are torn between escape and desire. All this emotion unnerves him. The fullness of her breasts against his chest, the fear of this, his uneasiness at getting involved.

  Out in the kitchen, he discovers a chilled bottle of cava and brings it back to the bedroom with two glasses, and they sit up on the mattress with fizzling flutes. She is smiling tenderly now, and her skin is dappled in moonlight through the open-curtained window. He places his lips against the silken skin of her neck, her shoulder, the passage between her breasts. They click their glasses. She sips but he drinks deeply, finds himself peering into the green shadows of her gaze.

  “Tell me,” she whispers.

  “Tell you what?”

  “What you’re not telling me. What is so heavy inside you. Share it with me.” She puts her flute on the nightstand and wraps her arms around him, draws his face to the comfort of her chest. At first he stiffens his shoulders, but then the sting of water burns his eyes as it brims from them, and he relaxes.

  In the quiet darkness, he begins to speak.

  Four: The Green Peril

  We drank absinthe—light green

  as the woods and as frogs,

  Campari red as breathless

  kisses and red panties.

  —JENS AUGUST SCHADE

  There are two kinds of hangover. The word for the first in Danish, tømmermænd, covers the physical sort, “carpenters”—hammering and sawing in your head. But the other kind is more agonizing, the moral sort.

  His first conscious thought when he opens his eyes and smells coffee is enthusiastic: to continue his tavernological studies, the exhilaration of sexual meeting … But then he remembers her tears in the dark, then that he succumbed to the security of her flesh—Brando in Last Tango speaking about building a fortress of a woman’s tits and cunt, and the memory of the image of that silver triangle of moonlight on the tall shadowy white wall oozes into a moral hangover, seems to speak ineffable things about the gloomy future.

  He rises, steps under a steaming shower, and the hot stream of water soothes his head. He finds a brand-new blue toothbrush in the medicine chest, tears off the cellophane wondering if it was purchased specifically for him—or for whomever.

  As he returns to the bedroom, toweling himself, she is there, wearing red jeans and T-shirt. Her eyes take in his naked body, and the sight of her doing that raises him behind the towel. “Coffee’s soon ready,” she says. “I have taken the day off. I didn’t make breakfast because it’s a little late for breakfast, and I know a restaurant I’d like to invite you to for lunch. It should be in your book. My treat this time.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know. But I want to. I insist.”

  As she moves back to the kitchen, she sings one of Svante’s Ballads by Benny Andersen, almost untranslatable, about life being not the worst thing to have and soon the coffee is ready, and about a woman coming naked from the bath while her man eats a cheese sandwich.

  Kerrigan wanders about the living room as he waits, runs his fingers along the spines of books on a shelf: Several volumes about Copenhagen and Denmark, its kings, fortifications, humble establishments, cemeteries, authors, artists, statuary, history … On another shelf are Khalil Gibran in Danish, Dreams, Women Who Run with Wolves, The Ninth Prophecy, a leather-bound works of Jack London in four volumes in Danish, Ovid’s Art of Love. He tips out the latter, leafs through to two places marked with tiny red feathers, advising that the light in a bedroom should not be too bright as there are many things about a woman best seen under a dim lamp, especially with older women, although the years bring the erotic wisdom of experience.

  Among her CDs he finds Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, puts it on, and stands by the tall window listening, staring out to the vast, weed-sprung empty lot across the avenue, hearing the familiar melody devolve, spiraling away from the harmonies, becoming stronger then, when the sax seems to reach a place of pure formless sound, working slowly back down and into the melody again. He looks at the back of the CD and reads liner notes by the composer La Monte Young, saying that if the universe is composed of vibrations, the music of Coltrane can lead to an understanding of universal structure.

  The hair lifts on Kerrigan’s arms as he hears the soprano move back again out of the harmonies, breaking free of one structure to find a purer one, music without harmony, the supreme structure of the unstructured, pure sound, world without word … Or is it, in fact, destruction, self-destruction, the obliteration of structure—or perhaps what is obliterated is recognizable structure—sameness.

  Kerrigan reads on the album that the number was recorded in October 1960, released in March 1961, that it was Coltrane’s first recording on a soprano sax, that it was bought for him by Miles Davis earlier in 1960 when they were on tour in Europe. Coltrane would have been just thirty-four, six more years to live.

  And it occurs to him that all of these improvisations are etched into his own brain already just as they are pressed into vinyl and, therefore, are no longer really improvisations. They were only improvisations when Coltrane created them and, to Kerrigan, when he himself heard them for the first time. Then they became something else, that he hears in his head, both fascinated and colonized by the notes, drawn into the rapid flow of them, but no longer surprised, abandoned to it, but in some way captive to it as well, like being buckled into a car on a famil
iar roller coaster, its dips and jerks and climbs and falls predictable, still exciting, but you are a prisoner of the sound now—because it keeps going inside your brain and no way to turn it off until you forget about it.

  The thought is so heady he has to turn from the window, and his eye falls on a strip of pale orange wall between white-lacquered woodwork. Down the strip of wall are mounted half a dozen oil paintings, unframed, pinned to the plaster. Miniatures, each the size of a large postcard.

  He has to stand close to see without his glasses. The first is identifiable, a red starfish on an abstract green-and-orange background. The next is a purple-on-purple oval. At first he thinks it is an antique portrait, but on closer inspection he sees it is an abstraction. There is a title, Girl in a Swing, and he can almost but not quite identify the subject of the title. Those that follow are by turn more and more abstract, figures from a dream, blue, red, white, black, but the last one leaps out at him—a red frog. He feels he’s seen that picture before, that she has seen into his mind and brought forth an image from inside it. All are painted on a heavy backing that feels coarse to the tip of his finger, more like stiff cotton fabric than canvas.

  He lights a cigar just as she comes in with coffee pot and cups on an oval tray.

  “These are amazing,” he says. “Did you do them? That red frog—”

  “That one I did for you. You kept talking about absinthe green as a frog and Campari red as kisses so I thought of combining them for you. Do you like it?”

  “I love it. I love them all. They’re fucking good.”

  “No need to humor me,” she says.

  “I’m not. They’re fucking good.”

  She smirks, and anger boils up in him. He snaps into her startled face, “I said they’re fucking good!”

  She is looking up at him now with a curious, naked expression he would never have expected to see on her face, and he remembers suddenly how her face looked beneath his as they made love, eyes wide, brilliant with pleasure, the surprise and surrender of her smile as she came again and again …

  But he has told her about Licia, about his daughter, about the conception that may or may not have been … Somehow letting it out, letting another see it made it realer. Especially when she said that her daughters had been taken, too—by marriage—in Canada and the U.S.A. “Once a child lets go of your hand, they never take it again,” she whispered in the dark.

  He wishes he hadn’t told her, wishes he could take it back.

  Now she is still looking at her paintings. “Do you really mean it?”

  “Yes.”

  She looks up at them as though she has never seen them before. “How could they be good? I painted them all in one weekend. Two days ago. The day I came for you at the White Lamb. I was desperate. It all seemed so hopeless, working as a secretary and playing at being an artist on the weekends.”

  “You are an artist.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “I have a good eye. I can see it. It’s right there.” He gestures up the strip of wall. “Trust me. These pictures are fucking good.”

  “Fucking good,” she teases. “Maybe it’s just because you fucked me. Maybe you’re just cunt struck.”

  “You’re pissing me off,” he says, and glowers at her. “Better watch it.”

  Her eyes brighten. “I like you that way,” she says. “Do you ’ave a leetle Franshman inside you?”

  “Jax!” he says, shoving his face toward hers, and their laughter combines, hers musical, his throaty, and he thinks maybe it was okay he told her.

  “Now we have to choose,” she says, blushing. “Is it breakfast or something else?”

  “Why either-or? Why not both-and? First the one. Then the other.” But he does not want to make love just now. He wants to get out of here, away from the possibility of intimacy, to consider what he has done. He has never told anybody before.

  They take a long walk along Strandboulevarden in the late morning sun to build hunger’s anticipation and optimism. She points up at the wall of number 27, at a plaque that notes Georg Brandes lived there. They pass the Østerport Station, then stroll along Grønningen with its beautiful erotic sculpture of The Reclining Girl by Gerhard Henning, originally a miniature from 1914, finally a full-size bronze in 1945.

  They pause to gaze on her from the sidewalk where she lies on her pedestal in a grass clearing before a pond, beautiful and rounded, one arm folded over her head as if casually to draw attention to the fullness of her breasts, one foot under one calf, one knee raised, her luscious inner thigh. Kerrigan is stirred to the point that he regrets having wanted to escape from his Associate’s apartment.

  Their pace slows, and they move closer together after viewing the sculpture. He drapes an arm around her shoulder and she smiles up at him, and he feels himself leaning toward her. Down Grønningen to Esplanaden, across to Bredgade, past the Catholic cathedral, St. Ansgar’s—with the skull of Lucius I inside his bust—and on to Dronningens Tvær Street, to number 12, a semibasement restaurant that used to, she informs him via her Moleskine, be named Jomfruen—the Virgin—and is now Kælder 12—Basement 12, owned by a couple from Bornholm. Eight steps down into the restaurant. His Associate links her arm into Kerrigan’s, and he clasps her hand in his. The restaurant is pleasantly empty, only one table taken.

  “Have you a table for two for lunch?” he asks the owner, a tall, black-and-gray-bearded fellow named Alan. “I think we can manage that,” he says with the slightest of ironic garnishes at which Danes are so adept. “Are you a Dane who moved to America?” he asks. “They have accents, too.”

  “No, I’m an American who moved to Denmark. Everyone has some kind of accent,” Kerrigan says, recalling the girl he spoke to in the New Orleans airport once who asked him where his accent was from. He told her New York via Copenhagen and asked where hers was from. “Where ah come from,” she said, “we don’t hayev accents.”

  His Associate recommends a dish on the menu called bakskuld—a fish in Danish called ising, a type of flounder, a flat fish. Kerrigan asks the waiter how the fish is prepared.

  “Now that fish is definitely served dead,” he says. “First it is air-cured for twenty-four hours, then it is salted for another twenty-four, then smoked for yet another twenty-four. And then I fry it.”

  Kerrigan scrapes the succulent, salty, smoked flesh from the flounder’s skeleton and lifts it with knife and fork onto the coarse rye bread, squeezes the lime quarters over it, and closes his eyes with pleasure when the delicate, salty meat hits his tongue. He lifts his stem glass and peers into her delightful green eyes. “This fish must swim down our gullets.” They are drinking doubles of O. P. Anderson snaps, and Kerrigan is at ease again. His Associate consults her Moleskine, reads, “Olof Peter Anderson, Swedish, 1797 to 1876. But the snaps was launched by his son, Carl August Anderson, in 1891. One hundred and eight years ago.”

  They salute with their glasses, sip, present them again, their eyes meet, they nod. “I feel so good,” he says, “that I might even eat a sweet afterwards.” He lifts his eyebrows, gazing at her.

  She smiles—thinking, he hopes, of those exquisite moments in the dark the night before, and not of what he has told her about his life, about Licia.

  “Did you know,” he asks, “apropos sweets, that what you Danes call Vienna bread, wienerbrød, the Americans call Danish pastry?”

  “Yes, and we call it Vienna bread because there was a bakers’ strike in Copenhagen in the nineteenth century, and some imported Viennese bakers taught us to like the very delicate, layered pastry we call Vienna bread. American Danish is so heavy and sticky.”

  “You’re not a fan of sweets?” he asks in English, eager to get her speaking it, too, to hear her charming accent.

  “Most are either to spice or sweets, not both. I am to spice.”

  “Well, I would dearly like to spice you right now. And sweet you, too. I’m to both,” he adds, imitating her characteristic Danish preposition misuse, which char
ms him.

  Her smile is dizzying with its open loveliness, and it is a blessed late April day, even if the Politiken he leafed through earlier predicted snow and what the Danes call Aprilsvejr, April weather, which runs the full spectrum of the four seasons in constant flux, practically from second to second.

  The snaps and beer make him remember the pleasures of their bodies, and he smiles dreamily at her.

  “You really liked them?” she asks. “The paintings?”

  “No. I lied. They’re terrible. And you’re lousy in bed, too.”

  “Couldn’t be worse than you. You know,” she says, “instead of dessert, I vas thinking of a freshly smoked eel with warm scrambled egg on dark, coarse, home-baked rye with fresh chopped chives and new ground pepper.”

  “And another double O. P. Anderson?”

  “Of course. Eel must swim, too, skat,” she says in Danish, and that word of endearment, skat, treasure, can be either ironic or sincere, and he can hear that it is sincere passing from her lovely mouth. He leans across to touch her lips with his, tasting aquavit and lime on her tongue, then peers into her green smiling eyes.

  The eel and pepper and meniscus of O. P. shoot to his brain, and Kerrigan whispers to his Associate, “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For thinking of the eel, of course!”

  He notices an Ekstra Bladet— the raunchier of the two leading Danish tabloids—on a chair, and they titillate themselves by scanning the massage ads in the back: Pussyclub kinky hot superbitch Susi, supersexed blonde with big tits and piquant butt carries out your special wishes. Everything in rubber, leather and plastic. Hot nude stripshow, gentle tingling bondage, urine cocktails, slave rearing, nurse sex, baby treatment, analblockage, long-term bondage, public humiliation, weight clips, thumbtacks pins and hands-macking with a ruler!

  “Here’s one,” she says. “Suzette offers devil-bizarre sheep herding.”

  “Sheep herding?”

  “That’s what it says. And Sissi, genuine red cunt hair and double D cups.”