Falling Sideways

by Kennedy Thomas E.

  But he had been alone now for nearly a month since the infatuation with Caecilie had petered out. Losing your touch. One day perhaps they would all be gone and he would be alone then forever, and what then?

  That time, that sorrow.

  After a last lingering glance at his illuminated face, he switched off the mirror lamp and withdrew to the inner dump to dress: crisp black Boss jeans, mint green shirt, charcoal gray cashmere necktie, his good handwoven Irish tweed jacket. And jogged down four flights, averting his eyes from the shabby institutional green woodwork to the courtyard, averting his eyes from the overfull Dumpsters, unlocked his bicycle, and mounted it at a run, coasted through the arched portal to the grime of North Bridge Street, and started pumping through the morning traffic toward the Centrum.

  3. Birgitte Sommer

  Still farther north, in the coveted north Copenhagen inner suburb of Hellerup, in a yellow-brick bungalow a few streets down from Vita Jaeger’s classic Gentofte minimanor, Birgitte Sommer woke from a dream in which she and Lars had been painting the walls of their Gilleleje summer house the sunniest shade of sun yellow. They had been naked in the dream, their lean, long bodies glistening with daubs of the beautiful paint; Lars’s dark hair somehow was yellow in the dream, golden, even the thick hair matting his chest and his groin, and he turned to her with a dazzling smile and exclaimed, Birgitte, you’re fantastic! This is the perfect color! It will last all winter so we can sun ourselves naked out back!

  And the children? she asked.

  Suddenly his face looked like someone else’s. It swooped toward her, grinning, whispering, Yes! Like this! as he cupped his hand between her legs.

  She woke smiling beatifically up at the molded stucco fringe of the high white ceiling, only to find her own hand between her legs and the bed beside her empty. She sighed and ran her palm over the rumpled sheet where Lars had slept, lowered her face to it, and breathed the sweet-sour scent left by his body. In a sun-yellow mood, she donned a crème silk robe (sixty-nine crowns from an unassorted bin at ALDI) and paused for a moment, running her long fingers through her curly black hair, gazing across the pleasantly muted light of the bedroom to the luminous gauze curtains that faced the garden she had expended nearly every weekend of the summer tending.

  Now, as the season ended, she had it nearly where she wanted it. Next year, she would turn it over to the local retiree who had offered his services for a monthly cash payment they could afford—if they shopped, without exception, in the Netto and ALDI and Fakta supermarkets instead of the upscale Irma or ISO or Brugsen—while she turned her attentions to the garden of the summer house they had closed on two weeks ago in Gilleleje. Like the garden here, it was completely sequestered by tall, ligustrum privet hedges. They could go naked there all weekend if they wished. And the necessary economies would keep them trim even as the value of their properties grew.

  Still damp from her lovely dream, she stepped into the espadrille home shoes that displayed the cleavage of her toes and padded out to the nook at the front of the house where they took their breakfast.

  Lars sat alone by the shady window over a single mug of coffee, reading the newspaper and picking his nose.

  “Good morning!” she sang out, and felt the smile of her voice emanating from the surface of her skin.

  He took his finger from his nose, brushing it on his thumb, and said, “Morn,” without looking up. And, “You forgot to buy milk again.”

  “I forgot?” She was still smiling.

  He smiled now, too, a tilted smile, and laughed a single quiet note of irony.

  “You could run up to the dairy on the corner,” she said.

  Another note of scornful laughter. “Dairy? It’s a goddamn Pakistani kiosk. Forty percent markup to fund the cousins in Jakarta.”

  Birgitte was not to be daunted. “Well, good morning to you, too, sunbeam,” she said with a smile he did not see but no doubt heard, and she went to the kitchen and switched on the radio, sawed off a couple of slices of yesterday’s French bread, and laid them on the toaster.

  On the radio, Gustav Winckler was singing “Little Summer Bird,” a song her father used to sing to her. How she missed him, the whiskers around his thick lips and the spaces between his smiling teeth as he sang; “summer bird” meant “butterfly” in Danish—Lit-tle but-terfly, lit-tle but-ter-fly—but it was also a play on their family name so that she was the little butterfly he sang to.

  Her father had frequently emphasized to her the importance of owning property. Land never devalues, he’d told her. She had grown up in a small rented apartment and had not thought so much about it, but then she’d met Lars, who shared her dead father’s dreams of property, even if he didn’t possess her father’s sentimental side.

  She was still smiling as she glanced into the oval mirror tacked above the kitchen sink and saw the best of her face, the frame of dark curls, the burgundy eyes, disregarding their narrowness and the knob at the end of her nose. But as the aroma of toasting bread lifted to her nostrils, her narrow gaze shifted from her smile to the round white face of the wall clock, and she realized it was Wednesday.

  “Shit!”

  “I can’t hear you,” Lars grumbled from the other room.

  She hurried out to him on swift light feet. “I’ve got a meeting at the Tank, nine sharp. Watch the toast won’t burn!” And she ran for the bathroom, calling back, “I’ll have to take the car!”

  “Like hell you will!” he called back, following her. “I’ll drop you off.”

  “I can’t be late!”

  “It’s just a damn meeting.”

  “It’s the principle. We’re doing the annual resource report. I have to be there if there’re questions!”

  “You’ll be there, for hell’s sake,” he said, tall and narrow-shouldered in his baggy, crap brown jogging suit (49.90 crowns at Netto, available in pee yellow, crap brown, and mucous green), his protruding Adam’s apple bowing over her at the bathroom door. “Relax!”

  Beneath the shower, she forgot the sunny yellow dream and her father’s song, disregarded her husband’s morning sourness and the increasing incidence of his nose picking and the lengthening time since they had last made love, and ran through the Tank accounts in her mind as she lathered herself with an egg-shaped cake of lemon soap. The fragrance lifted on the steam, and the feel of the soap in her palm coincided with a tweak of hunger in her stomach. She would eat toast in the car. But she wanted an egg, boiled, soft. What am I thinking?

  She opened her eyes in the steaming glass shower cabin, saw her steamy reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, straight up and down from narrow hips over flat belly to the flare of her C-cup breasts. She focused on the breasts.

  There was still time.

  She was only thirty-seven. Lars was ten years older. He had a better position than she, but he worked for the county; in the private sector, she made more. He was always insinuating the extra she made was somehow dishonest. County salary scales were reasonable. The private sector shoveled it in at the expense of the public. The world according to Lars.

  She remembered his face in her dream, when it changed to someone else’s. Whose? It had been bearded, a little yellow beard. She realized with a start that it had been Harald Jaeger’s face, from the Tank. Why would she dream of Harald? Then she recalled that she had seen him the weekend before when she was out jogging in the deer park. He was walking with the cutest little girls. One on each hand, a tiny one and a taller one. Birgitte had stopped to chat, stooped down, and the littlest one asked her, “Who are you? You’re nice!” So sweet. So very sweet.

  She shut off the water and stood shivering, wet, in the steam, and a thought she had not quite considered floated across her consciousness: Where was the time? With the summer house closing, she would have to work at least two or three or more years before they were above the watermark again. She would be forty, forty-one. So where was the time that was supposed to be?

  The door r
attled. “If you’re in such a devil-me rush for your devil-me meeting, you’d better shake your little devil-me backside in there!”

  4. Claus Clausen

  South and west again in Vesterbro, West Bridge, Claus Clausen sat at his little kitchen table spooning cornflakes and milk into his mouth, watching construction workers down in the street doling out bottles from their box of morning beer. He nearly gagged at the sight. He reached across the width of the narrow kitchen and took the jar of aspirin from the cupboard shelf, opened the refrigerator, still without rising, and lifted out a liter of orange juice, popped two pills into his mouth, and washed them down with juice straight from the carton.

  He had been out with Harald Jaeger the night before—their first time out together since Harald’s promotion. His lips twitched back from his teeth as he considered again the fact that Harald was now his boss. The head of his department. How in the fuck had that happened? Okay, Harald had been there longer, but Claus was faster, more focused, and there was nothing Harald knew that he didn’t know just as well. In truth, all Harald was interested in was chasing pussy. How the hell had it happened? Claus suspected it was that fucking Fred Breathwaite. For some reason, he always held a hand over Harald. Why? What did he have against Claus? And how had he convinced the CEO that Harald should have the promotion over him? No warning, nothing. Just one day a memo goes around inviting everybody in for coffee and cake to celebrate Harald’s promotion.

  And Claus had to go in and eat fucking dry cake and find out from a friend in accounting that Harald was now making 30 percent more than he was. Claus hated looking down into the little man’s face and being told what to do. The little peacock.

  The little fuck! And he hated sitting at his metal desk in his crummy little windowless office—an alcove, really!—and watching Jaeger and the other department heads wander past his doorless door arch on their way to the department head meeting every Wednesday, knowing they sat there behind the CEO’s closed door discussing matters over which he himself had no control, decisions in which he had not a word to say, decisions that might deploy him in their projects. Then Harald would reappear and suddenly there would be a new plan, and Claus would have to take instructions from the little fucker and report back to him.

  The little motherfucker bearded fuck.

  With thumb and forefinger he blotted a tear from the corner of each eye. The only thing he wanted to do today was not be there as they walked past him on their way to the meeting. And that was exactly the thing that he had to do. Because if he wasn’t there, his absence would be noticed.

  No, the thing to do was to be there long before they got there. To be there where the CEO could see he was the first one into the office, bent over his computer. Even the CEO must notice that Harald was never in by nine on any other day than the day of the department head meetings, while Claus was always in well before nine.

  The little cunt-chasing fucker with his pseudoponderings, looking as though he thought he’d swallowed the stone of cleverness. “Tell me something, Claus,” he’d said last night in the northside dive where they’d ended up, the only available woman hanging close to Jaeger at the bar. “Tell me, what do we actually do in the Tank? Do you have any idea? Do we actually do anything?” Clausen had given him the bland puss, thinking to himself, What we do, you asshole, is to keep the money moving from hand to hand. Know-how. Consumption. What do you expect, you jerk? We’re a little piece of a big picture. But he’d said nothing, given nothing that might later be marshaled against him.

  Now, remembering with embarrassment the rebuffed pass he’d made at that woman, Clausen chugalugged the rest of the juice and, gasping, dragged his butt into the shower.

  5. Vita Jaeger

  The au pair was sick again, and Vita’s mother could not be there for an hour. So if the day was going to hang together, Vita had to get the girls ready for kindergarten herself. Already dressed in her golfing tweeds, she smoked a cigarette at the bathroom window, gazing down to the tight-cropped grass of the back garden while the girls splashed and giggled in the tub. The grass was impeccable. It made her think of the green where she was due for a lesson in less than two hours. The day was perfect for it. Crisp and sunny. Vita would never have believed what pleasure it gave her to be out on the course.

  All her life she had despised golf as the snobby, snooty activity of people spoiled by privilege. She still referred to the game as galf in a mocking echo of the snobby, overclass pronunciation of the word, just as she referred to Gentofte as Shantofta—in parody of the accent of those who were born to it, born to money in their big villas, the type that went skiing in winter and to the sunny south islands for spring break and who got a brand-new Volvo or Mercedes sports car for their high school graduation, never having to earn anything for themselves.

  To them, she was an upcomling. But her father’s success had come from his sweat and was new enough that she remembered life in the poorest streets of North Bridge, growing up in a two-room flat with no shower and a shared toilet—the very street that Harald lived on now. Her lips tightened at the thought of him. A cheat and a liar and a lech. They could have had a good life together. He’d had promise, and he earned enough and had a good background. When they moved into this house, she thought they would be happy together forever. With two beautiful little girls and so much that life could promise within their reach. Her father had seen it right from the start. “You sure he’s not a skirt chaser, honey?” She couldn’t see anything, but … But what? She could no longer remember whatever in the world she had ever seen in him. It was painful for her now to have to turn the girls over to him every other weekend. The mere thought of him got her piss cooking. She drew on her cigarette, inhaled deeply, and closed her eyes, chasing his image with a picture of herself on the green, driving from that fine third hole, the joy of her muscles in full flex, grace of swing, shock of impact—thwack!—follow-through, slice of the ball arcing into the sky as she exhaled the smoke.

  “Pee-yew!” said Amalie from the tub, and Elisabeth giggled, picking up on it as she did on everything her older sister did. Amalie was six, Elisabeth four.

  “Yeah, pee-yew, Mommy! That cigarette stinks!” The two of them were giggling now, egging each other on.

  Vita ran the cigarette under the cold-water tap and flushed the butt down the toilet. “Okay, okay,” she said. “That’s more than enough. Are you all clean now, girls? We have got to hurry if Mommy is going to be on time.”

  “You got to wash me unner here like Dad does,” Elisabeth said, pointing beneath her arm. “It tiggles.”

  “Did your father give you a bath?”

  “We were all mud,” said Amalie. “From the deer park. The big daddy deers were ready to make the little girl deers into mommies.”

  “Yeah!” Elisabeth chipped in. “And Birgitte was there. She’s nice!”

  Vita’s eyes narrowed. “Oh? Who is Birgitte? Did Dad bring a friend along?”

  “Yeah, she’s nice. And she’s pretty.”

  “But not as pretty as you, Mom.”

  “Where did Dad wash you?”

  “In his shower.”

  “Where on your body?”

  “Unner here,” Elisabeth said again. “And back here!”

  She burst out giggling as she pointed behind her, but Amalie snapped, “He did not!”

  “Did too!”

  “He never did! He said you should!”

  “Why are you objecting so strongly, Amalie? Did your father say you shouldn’t tell?”

  The girl blinked, gazing at her mother, her mouth open as she shook her head no. “It was because we were all mud. From the deer park.”

  Vita pointed at Elisabeth’s vagina. “Did he wash you there?”

  “No, he told me to,” she said, and started giggling again. “He said, ‘You got to wash everything you own when you take a bath!’”

  While the girls toweled themselves, Vita stepped into the hall with her cell phone: “Mom, it’s Vita. Would you ask
Daddy if he could come by with you, too? Just for a few minutes. It’s rather important.”

  6. The Mumble Club

  Nine A.M. sharp: another Wednesday morning in the Mumble Club.

  Jaeger sat sober-faced, occasionally caressing his trim blond beard, his shirt still damp with sweat beneath the arms and on the back from cycling full pump through rush-hour central Copenhagen traffic. He listened as the CEO’s quiet voice said important things. October light slanted golden through the big window at the CEO’s back so his face was invisible, his shadow cast like a Giacometti sculpture down the center of the steel-legged, crème-lacquered Piet Hein meeting table. Around the table sat the assembled department heads of the Tank, each in a crème-lacquered, steel-legged Arne Jacobsen “ant” chair with arms, while above hung an unlit Poul Henningsen pinecone lamp that looked to Jaeger like an unpleasant creature a diver might encounter hanging in the depths of the sea.

  Out the window, the vast blue sky canopied the October trees of the botanical garden below. Jaeger pondered the CEO, Martin Kampman. He was two years younger than Jaeger. Which was strange, to have a guy born two years after you as your boss. Only thirty-nine years old. Made Jaeger feel kind of retarded. Maybe he was. Neither tall nor physically imposing in any way nor, for that matter, brutal or harsh of manner, Kampman had a way of keeping Jaeger unsure, even fearful to an extent. Jaeger’s own father had been something like that, and he found himself responding to Kampman sometimes as though he were his father, a guy two years younger! Somehow, almost passively, Kampman made it clear that he was not to be fucked with, that a wrong word would put you in a bad place. Jaeger would so like to understand how this was so, but he did not have the patience to concentrate on it for very long. The whole idea bored him. It was so unsexy.