Kerrigan in Copenhagen

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Kerrigan in Copenhagen Page 26

by Thomas E. Kennedy


  She continues to peer silently at him, moving him to add, “Maybe a little less.”

  She keeps staring.

  “Okay, maybe a lot less. If that’s what it takes.”

  “If that’s what it takes for what?”

  “You do realize that I like you quite a lot, don’t you, Annelise?”

  “I like you quite a lot, too, Terrence.”

  “But no twelve-step city for me. I’m not on that road. Three drinks a day is what I’m told I may have.”

  She peers at him. “Told by whom?”

  “The health authorities. They tell everybody that.”

  “Oh, well, did that ever stop you?”

  “I’m hoping that we can have our three drinks a day together.”

  Once again he finds himself not wanting to tell her something; he doesn’t want to tell her about his lungs and his blood, the blood thinner he has to take every day. He doesn’t want to tell her that the whole left side of his body is one big purple bruise, or how close he came to dying and having a stroke. Neither does he want to tell her about the optimism, the sense of beauty that has opened in him from being so near death, from coming back.

  “I’m not a fanatic,” she says. “Would you like something now?”

  “Any of that cava left?”

  She brings the bottle on a tray with two flutes and a jar of caviar with crackers and a spoon and chopped raw onion and sliced fresh lemon.

  “That looks delicious,” he says, unwrapping, unwiring, and uncorking the champagne with an agreeable pop. Then he adds, “You look delicious, too.”

  “The same,” she says with lowered eyes, pursing her lips into a faint smile.

  He pours. They toast. Then she sits—not beside him on the sofa, but on the two-man sofa across from it. They don’t speak for more minutes than he is comfortable with.

  He says, “I brought you a tiny present from Dublin,” and takes the Bronnley’s lemon soap from his pocket, rises to hand it to her. “It’s”—he begins, decides on not going into the whole story about Joyce and Bloom, content to have succeeded in bringing it to her—”lemon-scented.”

  She puts it at her nose, smells, hums with pleasure.

  He gazes at her. She is as lovely as he remembered, lovelier. “Have you read Proust?” he asks.

  “No,” she says. “Do I have to read Proust to be your friend?”

  “No, no, I’ve read very little Proust myself. I only pretend that I’ve read him. But what he said about love is really worth thinking about, I think. He wrote about the impossibility which love comes up against, that we imagine we can know someone because we can know the body that encloses him or her, but we can’t know all the points of space and time he or she has occupied, and will occupy, so we don’t and can’t know them completely. We grope toward the person but can’t find them.” He wets his lips with cava. “I’m very attracted to you, Annelise. I’d like to be your friend. I’d like to be your best friend if I can. And try to help you be happy. I’d like to know you—as much as I can.”

  She peers into his eyes. “There is something about me that almost no one knows but me,” she says, and is silent.

  “Will you tell me?”

  “Do you really want to hear?”

  “Very much.”

  “On March twenty-first, 1945, I was trapped in a bombed building. Bombed by the British. It was an accident. They were aiming at the building the Germans had taken over as their gestapo headquarters and they succeeded but they also hit a school and some apartment buildings, including the one that I lived in. The girl who was watching me took me to the basement when the bombs started exploding, and we were buried in the rubble for a whole day. I kept speaking to her, asking questions—her name was Mette. After a long time, I realized she was not answering me. She could not. She was dead. I understood that she was dead. Then I decided that I had to dig myself out. I was four, nearly five. I remember it in detail. There was a lot of fire. And water from the pipes filling parts of the basement. I heard years later that several other children boiled to death. I heard the screams.”

  “Oh, God,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It was an accident. The British bombers were doing their best. They liberated us. Montgomery was our hero. And all his men who risked their lives and gave their lives for Europe. English and Scots and Welsh and Irish, too. And of course the Americans. But those hours in the basement … talking to Mette, and her not answering … and then I knew … I still get frightened sometimes …” She sips from her cava, blinks, looks at him. “Why in the world are we talking about this?” she says lightly, chuckling, closing the subject.

  “Look,” he says. “Let’s go ahead and finish the book.”

  “Do you really want to finish it?”

  “By my calculation there are a total of 1,525 serving houses in Copenhagen. I have that figure from a report of Copenhagen County’s Health Committee. They recently issued a plan to reduce alcohol consumption by five percent by closing seventy-seven serving houses. The public laughed in their communal faces, so they dropped the plan. There are still 1,525 serving houses, but we only need to pick a hundred of them for the book, only about fifty more. Then we can move on to some other project. I think we work well together. Will you?”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  He thinks for a moment, reaches to his breast pocket, lifts out the Cohiba he bought all those days ago, unwraps the cellophane. “You like music?” he asks. She nods, and he hands her the paper ring from the Cohiba. “Here’s a whole band for you.”

  She slips the gilt-paper band over the pointed red nail and knuckles of her slender ring finger and stretches her hand out as if to admire a diamond.

  He says, “I lied before when I said that I liked you quite a lot. Actually, I adore you.”

  She smiles at him with her sad green eyes. “I’m just a girl, Terrence.”

  “You’re a goddess to me,” he says. “Je t’adore.”

  She says nothing, but her eyes smile. Then they lower. “Thank you,” she whispers.

  “Maybe we should, like, plant a tree together somewhere,” he says, and can barely hear his own voice. “It could be our … tree.”

  “We could do that, Terrence.”

  “Who knows what sorrow might await us?” he says.

  “Den tid, den sorg,” she replies. “Old Danish proverb: That time, that sorrow.”

  He raises his bubbly to her. “Love, let us be true to one another, for the world … and so on and so forth.”

  “May I hear the so on and so forth?” she asks.

  He sits forward on the edge of the sofa, watching her, about to recite, and she asks, “Why are you sitting all the way over there, Mr. Kerrigan? All by yourself.”

  He rises, crosses to her CD rack, hoping, finds just what he wants, and puts it on. As the first lilting notes of “The Beautiful Blue Danube” drift across her century-and-a-half-old rooms, he bows beneath the three-meter ceiling, extends his arm. She accepts it, smiling, and leading with his good leg, he believes himself transported to a higher salvation with his lady as his hand takes her slender waist and they dance, turning, across the broad plank floor, and the world spins dizzily with them.

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  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. Kerrigan in Copenhagen is the third novel in his acclaimed Copenhagen Quartet to be published in the United States, following In the Company of Angels (2010) and Falling Sideways (2011). The fourth, Beneath the Neon Egg, will follow in the near future. His websites are www.CopenhagenQuartet.com and www.thomasekennedy.com.

  By the Same Author

  Fiction

  The Copenhagen Quartet

  In the Company of Angels

  Falling Sideways

  Crossing Borders

  Unreal City

  A Weather of the Eye

  Drive, Dive, Dance & Fight

  The Book of Angels

  Cast Upon the Day

  A Passion in the Desert

  Getting Lucky: New & Selected Stories, 1982–2012

  Last Night My Bed a Boat of Whiskey Going Down

  Nonfiction

  Riding the Dog: A Look Back at America

  Writers on the Job: Tales of the Non-Writing Life

  (as editor, with Walter Cummins)

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

  The Literary Traveler (with Walter Cummins)

  Realism & Other Illusions: Essays on the Craft of Fiction

  Copyright © 2013 by Thomas E. Kennedy

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.

  eISBN: 978-1-62040-110-1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance between the characters and actual persons living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The quotes and references from Jens August Schade are from Schades Digte (Schades Poetry), Copenhagen: Gyldendal Publishers, 1999, and are used with kind permission of Gyldendal and the copyright holders.

 

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