Kerrigan in Copenhagen

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  “Yeah,” he says, “but do the curtains match the rug?”

  “How’s this? Kiss my foot while your wife watches!”

  “That’s original.”

  “I’m getting excited,” she says.

  “Why? Would you like to kiss my foot while your wife watches?”

  Her eyes blaze at him. “Yes!”

  “Maybe we should just nip up to my place on the lakes,” he suggests.

  She nods toward the back. “I just have to …”

  As he waits he refuses to worry about whether or not there is some responsibility issue involved here, whether he is getting involved, implicitly making promises. They are both adults. You don’t have to fall in love. There is no rule about that.

  Through the semibasement window, Kerrigan notices a few round wet patches up on the pavement as the day removes the warmth of its caressing hand. The light darkens and he hears the low music of the restaurant’s sound system. Synchronistically, Diana Krall is doing “Let’s Fall in Love,” and he is thinking that was recorded this year but was written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler in 1933, ten years before he was born. Despite her wish to treat, he beats her to it and is standing, looking out the glass door, as she comes up from behind and embraces him. Something in him wants to tense but he receives her embrace, melts into it, into the moment, into the joy of a woman wanting to embrace him like this, rejects worry until later. That time, that sorrow.

  “God, I love it here,” she says afterward, standing naked at the front windows of his apartment over Black Dam Lake, gazing out onto the rippling silver water beneath the young green of the chestnut trees. He watches her from behind, where he still lies naked on the double-foam mattress they threw down there to give themselves plenty of room to roll and rock. Relieved to have located his spare eyeglasses, he can see clearly again and studies her objectively, wonders if the flaws actually matter—at their age. What would she see if I were at the window with my naked backside to her? He remembers Ovid’s advice: let the light in the bedroom be dim, especially with older women. But old Ovid was right about the wisdom of her experience. He removes his glasses to see her impressionistically again.

  He is thinking about those strange advertisements they read in the tabloid to titillate themselves, and the present in which he exists seems suddenly like some weird science fiction movie of the future in which the world is organized in a strange manner with certain people as an underbreed in which they are manipulated by economics to sell their bodies to others who live in another sphere where the repression of their carnality is required as an imagined requisite for social order. This carnal suppression, however, calls forth strange desires that they must use the money their asexual occupations accrue for them to buy satisfaction amid the underbreed. He has a vision of some rich fat-cat executive who pays a large sum of cash to a street woman to piss on him. The thought is too weird for him to pursue just now.

  He stretches luxuriously to free his mind of it. “What shall we drink now?”

  “There’s jazz at Krut’s,” she says, and looks at her watch—the only thing she is wearing. “Starts in about an hour.”

  “Tick tick tick,” he says, and his eyes fall on his Finnegan satchel. He hasn’t been reading it, despite his promises to himself that this time he really will. “Just think,” he says. “If a person’s not careful, he could die without ever having finished Finnegans Wake. What can you tell me about Krut’s?”

  “It is a delightful little place. They have one of the biggest selections of whiskeys in Copenhagen, and the whiskey menu has a map so you can see exactly where what you’re drinking is from.”

  Since he can see again, he leads the way back across the Potato Rows to the café beneath the sign in blue neon script, Krut’s Karport. On one wall hangs a framed green-and-yellow painting of an absinthe label—Krut’s Karport’s own brand of the 68 percent spirit, 136 proof. The label shows a man in a dented blue top hat, chin in hand at a table, a glass of the green spirit before him, while a red-haired woman standing behind the table studies the bottle against a green-yellow impressionist wall.

  Kerrigan asks the pretty smiling waitress named, she tells them, Cirkeline, “Isn’t absinthe illegal?”

  “This is the only place you can get it in Copenhagen,” she says. “We have a special permit.”

  “What does your Moleskine have to say about absinthe?” he asks his Associate.

  “Say my name, and I shall tell you,” she says, her pouting lower lip provoking him gently.

  “Your name? Seems I did hear. Think I have it somewhere on the papers from the temp service.”

  “You bastard.”

  He smiles. “Annelise,” he says, and delights in the naked pleasure of the smile with which she rewards him. “Wery good,” she says, opening her Moleskine book. “Now I shall tell you about absinthe.”

  Originally absinthe was 72 percent alcohol, more of a demon than a spirit, she tells him. It resulted in considerable social misery in the nineteenth century in France. Edgar Degas’s famous painting L’Absinthe from 1876—a woman seated at a rough wood table at the Parisian Café Nouvelle Athènes in Place Pigalle with a glass of the drink in front of her, her eyes empty—is a kind of portrait of late-nineteenth-century French alcoholism.

  Absinthe is believed to have been concocted by a Swiss woman, Madame Henriod, in the late eighteenth century. It was distilled on a base of wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) and anise (Pimpinella anisum)—spices that date back to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Arabia. In the Middle Ages, these spices were used to cure flatulence and also as an aphrodisiac.

  “Liquor is still quicker,” says Kerrigan.

  Madame Henriod’s formula was sold to an itinerant doctor who dispensed it as a cure for bad stomachs. From him, the formula was sold to a Swiss military man, Major Dubied, who set up the first absinthe distillery with the assistance of his son-in-law, Henri-Louis Pernod. In 1805 they began production in France. Originally it was drunk by French foreign legionnaires in North Africa, both as a water purifier and as a cure for weak intestines and, of course, for recreational use. Then they brought the habit home with them, and it caught on.

  During the so-called belle epoque of fin de siècle France, it was drunk by pouring it over sugar cubes in a perforated spoon balanced on the mouth of the glass. It occurs to Kerrigan that they are also at a fin de siècle, but hardly a belle epoque. Or will it be seen as such one day?

  It was referred to as la fée verte, the green fairy, by the French poet Paul Verlaine (1844–1896)—who is also known for having shot Arthur Rimbaud, the antiauthoritarian young poet (1854–1891), in the wrist in a lover’s quarrel in 1873, the year Rimbaud wrote A Season in Hell—when he was only nineteen.

  Kerrigan says, “He was also only seventeen when he wrote ‘The Drunken Boat’ and came up with the idea of the déréglement de tous les sens—the disordering of all the senses.”

  Zola, Baudelaire, and Van Gogh drank absinthe as well. Van Gogh is said to have been under its spell when he sliced off his ear, although recently it was suggested that in fact Gauguin cut off the ear with a fencing foil.

  “A pair of character foils, ey?” Kerrigan says. “Ear done off by the green fairy.”

  The French working classes also used absinthe to “disarray their senses,” but more to escape the harsh conditions of their lives than to court the muse. Soon the green fairy acquired a new nickname: le péril vert, the green peril. By 1915 it was banned, but in 1922 a new law allowed the production of anise liquors of no more than 40 percent without wormwood; in 1938, this was raised to 45 percent, ninety proof. Here the current French national drink, pastis, entered the scene, not green but yellow in color, and when diluted with water (five to one) it turns a milky hue. “Un petit jaune, s’il vous plaît.” A little yellow one, please.

  Jake Barnes in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises drinks absinthe straight, unsweetened, toward the end of that novel and describes the taste as “pleasantly bitter,” but th
e “correct” way to drink it is as they did in the belle époque. The original absinthe has been known to cause hallucinations, but the wormwood used now is not Artemisia absinthium, which is illegal, but Artemisia vulgaris, and the level of thujune—a hallucinogenic chemical—is very low. The alcohol content is still high, however.

  “How in the name of God do you get all that into that little notebook, Annelise?”

  “My script is very fine,” she says and gazes sweetly at him. “Terrence,” she adds. “To speak a person’s name is like a caress,” she says and touches his cheek. “Terrence.”

  “Shall we have a touch of the green peril, Annelise?”

  “I should prefer the green fairy.”

  “I would prefer green panties,” he suggests, fluttering his eyebrows.

  She says, “I think you are quoting Schade again,” making a face that somehow seems to encourage by discouraging.

  The absinthe comes in tiny measures, two centiliters. They taste it straight but it is too bitter, so they dilute it with sugar and water. She consults the Moleskine once more. “Oscar Wilde said the first makes you see things as you wish they were, the second as they are not, and the third as they really are, which is the most horrible thing in the world.”

  Chuckling, he peers at her, one eye cocked.

  “You have the leer of the sensualist about you, Mr. Kerrigan,” she says.

  “Thank you. And let it be remembered that my subject is Celtic and my season spring. One other thing about absinthe,” says Kerrigan. “They drank it in Tom Kristensen’s Havoc in a variation known as the Blom cocktail, a kind of martini with four parts absinthe to one part gin.” He shudders. “I understand people were drinking absinthe here in Copenhagen right up to the nineteen fifties when it was banned.”

  The jazz group is setting up now, featuring their old friend Asger Rosenberg with the mellifluous pipes. Kerrigan orders another, though Annelise goes over to white wine. He leans back in his chair and gazes through the window behind Bjørn Holstein, the yellow-shirted drummer, at the long pale street. A child runs in the direction of the lake at the other end of the street beneath a few flurries of April snow. The snow turns to a slushy rain that ends almost as soon as it starts, and sunlight colors the gray buildings across the way.

  With his glasses on, he feels pleasure in seeing every brick in the gray-brown wall, and as Asger on bass behind Mogens Petersen on piano sings Benny Carter’s “When Lights Are Low,” Kerrigan finds himself contemplating the bricks, thinking of the hands that laid brick on brick to construct the wall, the building, the entire city. Thinking of the hands that made the bricks themselves, the hands that drew the plans, the people who envisaged it all, who led the work. Men driven by ambition, greed, passion, the desire to be part of the force that raised a block of dwellings, a street, a city, a civilization. And the German soldiers who marched in under orders of an evil madman and seized it, tried taking it away.

  Asger is now singing Frank Loesser’s “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So.”

  Kerrigan is into his third absinthe and his thoughts ride the music into their own flight of ideas, back to Germany, to Alsace, where one of his father’s ancestors fled, driven from Ireland in the eighteenth century by the Penal Laws, which denied Catholics the rights of citizens. Kerrigan’s ancestor ended in Baden-Baden, where his son’s son, Fred, in 1869, under pressure of conscription in the Franco-Prussian War, returned to Ireland and ended in Brooklyn in 1880, the year Maupassant (1850–1893) published his first story, “Boule de suif” (“Butterball”), shortly before his mentor, Gustave Flaubert, died.

  In a French humor, Kerrigan contemplates the story that made Maupassant famous and was about the Franco-Prussian War, a French prostitute, a hypocritical group of well-offFrench citizens, and a wasp-waisted German commander. The German marches his troops into Tôtes, making the pavement resound under their hard rhythmic step, driving the inhabitants into their rooms, experiencing the fatal sensation engendered every time the established order is overturned by force, when life is no longer secure, and the people in a society find themselves at the mercy of unreasoning brutality. The detachments rap at doors and enter the houses and occupy the town.

  A small group of people use their influence to obtain permission to leave in a large stagecoach to flee to Dieppe, where they can find safety. In the coach are a variety of people representing a cross section of French society, from a count down to the simple woman mentioned in the title, the eponymous boule de suif, a butterball, a chubby woman with a sensual mouth; the implication is that she is little more than a prostitute.

  At first the others in the carriage shun her. But their journey through the snowy fields proves much more difficult than expected. They go more than half a day without food and no prospect of getting any. Then they discover that she is the only one who has thought to bring provisions, a well-filled food hamper beneath her seat. Distracted by hunger, one by one they condescend to accept her humbly offered hospitality. They gorge themselves on the delicacies she has packed—chickens, pâté, glacé fruit, sweetmeats, wine, savories. In a few hours they eat food that could have lasted for days.

  They come finally to Tôtes, where they are to spend the night, but find that it is occupied by Prussians. The commandant, the tall, slim wasp-waisted man, examines their credentials before they go to their rooms, and he calls aside the boule de suif. Elizabeth Rousset. He wants to sleep with her, but she refuses vehemently. In the morning, they find that the stagecoach does not have permission to travel on. When they inquire why, the commandant replies simply, “Because I wish for it not to.”

  Each day, he sends a servant to ask Mademoiselle Rousset if she has changed her mind, and each day she assures him she will never do so.

  Her traveling companions are initially outraged, but soon think it over and tacitly agree to try to convince her to give the man that which she has so freely given so many others. They conspire to convince her it is her patriotic duty to do so. When with extreme reluctance she does give in, they gather in the dining room and drink champagne to celebrate their impending deliverance—all but one of them, Cornudet, a beer-swilling democrat. The others grow intoxicated and bawdy, tittering over what is being perpetrated in the rooms above. Only Cornudet reprimands them for their disgraceful behavior, but after he has stomped off to bed, another of them, who has lurked in the corridors, spying, tells them that two nights before, Cornudet unsuccessfully propositioned the boule de suif, and the others resume their merriment, content that Cornudet’s outrage has nothing to do with honor or disgrace but with mere jealousy.

  When the couples retire to their chambers, they are charged with passion stimulated by the act of prostitution that will soon free them.

  In the morning, however, when the boule de suif appears at the carriage that the commandant has now released, they turn their backs on her. And as the carriage continues toward Dieppe, this time it seems that she is the only one who has not thought—or had time—to bring along provisions. The others dine on theirs and ignore her, letting her go hungry while they stuff themselves.

  Finally this injustice brims up in her and tears slide down her cheeks, and one of the goodwives mutters that the woman weeps with shame. Cornudet plops his feet on the seat across from him and, with an expression of disdain for the company, whistles “The Marseillaise,” and his tune and the sobs of the boule de suif echo between the two rows of people in the shadows.

  Asger leans over his bass squinting at the sheet music, singing how in his woman’s eyes he sees strange things that her kiss seems to deny, and the image brings Kerrigan back from Alsace as Licia invades his mind again, her eyes that never revealed her lack of love, so he saw no strange things in them that her kiss had to deny.

  How still he feels. Perhaps it is the frog-green absinthe. The room seems frozen as he views its small movements from within the deep stillness of loss in which he is engulfed while Asger croons.

  Her fingernails are long and polished a deep
green, he notices now, as they lift slowly to caress the back of his neck. His eyes turn toward the green shadows of her gaze.

  “Hey, Terrence,” she whispers. “You’re not alone.”

  Five: As Sane As I Am

  It is forbidden

  to throw foreign particles

  in the VC bowl

  —NOTICE ON THE OSLO BOAT

  A long walk on a chilly May morning chases demons. For a time. Unshaven but bathed, he hikes briskly, fleeing a fragment of memory about his Associate that unnerves him. Away from the lakes toward Strøget, the Walking Street, a mile-long pedestrian walk curving through the heart of Copenhagen.

  At Gammel Torv, the Old Square, he pauses to consider Caritas Springvanden, the Charity Fountain, Copenhagen’s oldest surviving public monument, erected nearly four hundred years ago, between 1607 and 1609. A large, round, late-renaissance-style fountain, a pillar rising from the center on which stands Charity as the Virgo Lactans (in Danish den diegivende jomfru, literally “the tit-giving virgin”). Charity is holding a little child with a larger one beside, each holding a flaming heart, symbol of the love of God. At their feet three dolphins play, and the fountain’s water flows from the virgin Charity’s nipples.

  Kerrigan gazes upward at the overflowing nipples and remembers tasting Licia’s sweet milk when his daughter was an infant. The memory whets the desire of his tongue for a drink of the Lethe waters known as beer. He gazes across Gammel Torv to Ny Torv—Old Square to New Square—toward the tall columns of the City Court (Byretten), built between 1803 and 1816 by the architect C. F. Hansen. The building is tall and light; chiseled above the pillars in Danish are the words ON LAW A LAND IS BUILT from the Danish Law of 1241. In the middle of the square is where beheadings used to be conducted, and off beyond the court house is Slutterigade (Prison Street), beneath the Bridge of Sighs, across which prisoners are led from jail to judgment.

  He hikes down toward Pilestræde, Willow Lane, to Charlie’s, but stands peering in through a locked front gate, not open till four. Some twenty years before, this was a bookshop owned by an Englishman named Charlie who was losing money on books, so he turned it into a wine room that is still thriving, even after Charlie’s death, though its focus now has turned to beer. Kerrigan perfunctorily rattles the metal gate, turns away, up past the Bobi Bar at Klareboderne 14, where inter alia journalists and literati drink, but he really doesn’t have time. He has made a Tivoli Gardens luncheon appointment in a short while with a Norwegian psychiatrist named Thea Ylajali who has promised him much-needed advice about his Associate and about himself.