Falling Sideways

  “I did not forget family,” said Breathwaite, instantly reframing. “Family is a sine qua non which I take as a given. Without your mom and you, I … and your brothers, of course … I might as well cash it all in.”

  Yet now he saw he had left out another vital element: the job he thought he didn’t give a fiddler’s fart for. How ironic to be undone by that. Blindsided.

  And in those three years since, something had changed. Instead of going on through to his master’s degree, Jes took three potentially fatal leaves of absence.

  “Aren’t you afraid you’re making a mistake, son?”

  “I’m not afraid of making a mistake, Dad. Even if it’s for the rest of my life.”

  Touché. Breathwaite caught the reference: “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”

  “You’re very well-read, it’s well-known,” said Jes.

  Touché again. Dylan. They had all the same references. Only the slant was different.

  “Dad, listen.” The boy sat forward, elbows on his knees. “I’m sorry to say it, but your life is not the life I want for myself. I know you make good money, and you have this great pad and all, but that’s not what’s important for me. I want to do something that matters. Sorry.”

  “That’s admirable, Jes,” Breathwaite said. What he did not say but only thought was, I hear the sound of violins, I see Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, I hear the smarmy sound track of The Way We Never Really Were. Breathwaite had been startled by the force of his own cynicism, which he had never before confronted head-on.

  Now he fished his wallet from his back pocket and flipped through the credit card section to gaze at the platinum AmEx and Diners and the gold MC there, his gold pass to the airport lounges, his supply of company taxi vouchers. Could as well clip them into pieces right now.

  At least I don’t have to travel so much anymore, he thought, and felt an immediate nostalgia for the comfort of being on the move, that period of suspension, being nowhere, no longer where you were and not yet where you would be, an intense present during which you were tended to by smiling, business-class stewardesses proffering unlimited free drinks from cozy, rattling trolleys, free cigars in the airport smoking lounge for gold card holders only. Pour-your-own triple vods on rocks, XO Hennessy, Bloody Marys ad libitum, chips and peanuts and Japanese snacks, free newspapers in many languages, taxi to and from the airport at company expense.

  Now into Bowmore Islay Single Malt twelve-year-old, Hebridean isle of Islay (color: warm amber; nose: lemon, pears, honey; palate: peat smoke, dark chocolate; aftertaste: long and complex), and, contrary to his custom, a second robusto, he recalled a quote from Seneca: “No one can win without the other losing.” Which he had years before set out to disprove, thinking he could have it both ways. Win-win. Build a life of cooperation, sharing information, helping himself by helping others. It hadn’t always been possible, but it had seemed to work better than he might have hoped. Accumulating win-wins for the Tank.

  Doesn’t really work that way, I guess. You were piping smoke.

  Memo to file: Autobiography. My name is Fred. Means “peace” in Danish, engraved on every churchyard stone. Rhymes with dead. Better to call me Lance. Not peace, but a sword. Buddha’s sword of wisdom slashes through incorrect thinking. My daddy was a cuckold, descended from a Lambeg informer. My mom was a ginny tart, like her Neopolitan whore of a mother before her. The B of my initial separates into a one and a three. Thirteen. Bad luck been waiting all these years like a catch clause on a pact with the devil. Entered into when? Negotiating with my first CEO, who hired me three decades ago, when I was just a few years older than Jes now.

  He asked, “So, Fred, what are your thoughts on the job?”

  I said, “This is a cause I would be pleased to serve. I believe in Europe.”

  He named a figure. I raised by a half. He laughed and cut the half in half. I smiled and cut the severed half in half, and we shook hands and I thought, You will now direct me. I will be your subaltern. But I will live well and not betray my mind. I am not selling you my soul, only a piece of it.

  That’s not really me. That wasn’t me. The way I was. The way I am.

  Just as it is not really me who had to write that speech for Jaeger to make at the Irish dinner, signaling all his old contacts that Fred is now out, Harald is in. I wrote it out in longhand on lined paper. Page and a half: “Here’s what you say, Harald. Tickle their Celtics. You say, ‘It is a pleasure to welcome to the Danish capital our Irish friends from the other old Danish city of Dublin, Dubh Lin, the Dark Lake, beside which our Viking emissaries founded the first Danish-Celtic cooperation some 1,200 years ago.’

  “That will get you a chuckle. You leave implied the fact of the rape and pillage the Vikings perpetrated there. Then you touch your red blond beard and you say, ‘But Brian Boru gave better than he got and sent us all home again smartly with a few Celtic genes in our kit.’

  “That’ll get you a chortle, and then you say, ‘What better way to seal this important educational cooperation between us, the modern Irish and the modern Danes, than with a few words and a toast from the great Danish bard Mr. Yeats.’

  “That’ll get you a laugh. And then you say, ‘To our guests and their beautiful ladies.’ And you recite:

  Wine comes in at the mouth

  And love comes in at the eye;

  That’s all we shall know for truth

  Before we grow old and die.

  I lift the glass to my mouth,

  I look at you, and I sigh.

  “And then you raise your wineglass and you say, ‘Sláinte. Skål.’ ”

  Breathwaite did not add, And then my Irish friends and colleagues become your Irish friends and colleagues. And my Jes becomes your right hand and gets his arse the hell out of that Paki key-and-heel bar.

  Now it was time for that last finger of Glen Grant pure malt highland, no age statement, 40 percent (color: gold; nose: fruity, flowery, nutty, faintly spirity; body: light but firm; palate: dry, slightly astringent at first, becoming soft and nutty; aftertaste: herbal).

  Thank you, God, for the grains that you provide. And God, if You do exist, Your intelligence is so far beyond mine that I would be akin to a flea on Your divine butt. Pig without arsehole, amen. He placed the empty Glen Grant on the floor of the terrace beside the kneeling Chinese archer, diminishing his honor guard by one.

  They would all be better off without me, he thought.

  “What’re you up to out there?”

  Kis with a mischievous smile at the balcony doors. Dreaming of a magic poker I cannot provide.

  Breathwaite smiled and said nothing.

  21. Harald Jaeger

  The breeze on the Coal Square was from the north, chill. It was too cold to sit outdoors and too warm to sit in. Jaeger took one of the few remaining outdoor tables, close to the wall of the White Lamb, and sat watching the quitting-time pedestrian traffic hustle toward North Port Station. The flower and green stalls had packed up their wares and departed, and the sausage wagon puttered off behind the sausage man. The trees were growing balder by the day, and it occurred to Jaeger that he still had not secured a new love. At one of the other tables, half a dozen young men and women gabbed loudly, laughter hanging above them like a cloud of hysteria, unnerving him.

  A large draft on the table before him, he hit the repeat button on his cell phone. He nursed the beer. Would not do to be high if he got hold of Birgitte. Might give the wrong impression. Without beer, Jaeger would never have made it through the year since his divorce. He drank every day, sometimes just a little, sometimes more. He was a happy drinker. If he felt bad, drink made him feel good; if he felt good, it made him feel better. Sometimes he took schnapps with the beer, too, and sometimes—not often, maybe once every other month—he got so drunk that when he woke the next day he couldn’t remember what had happened. Sometimes after such an experience he would quit for a week or more, drink only Diet Coke or juice or Danish water, and during that time, he
would think he had been redeemed from the person he had become, back to the path of the person he had always been meant to be; but slowly, he would realize that that person lacked passion and imagination, tended to be ignored and overlooked in company, and was of little interest to women. In fact, that person hardly knew what to say to a woman or what to do if he happened to get one talking. So it seemed to him a choice between sobriety and passion.

  He wondered if this meant he was an alcoholic. He looked at the AA site on the Web, but it seemed much too extreme and religious to him. Perhaps he could solve the problem with some antidepressants. He went to his GP, who administered a multiple-choice test to which Jaeger did not answer yes to enough questions to qualify him for an antidepressant prescription.

  “Everything in measure,” his GP told him—a man ten years his senior with a port-wine nose. “Don’t quit drinking altogether, just quit drinking alone. Quit drinking at home. And make sure there are at least two days a week, in a row, where you don’t drink at all. That’s important.”

  So Jaeger mostly stopped drinking at home. He went out to drink. The two alcohol-free days per week were difficult, but sometimes he did hold one. Still, those blacked-out nights appeared with a certain regularity every other month or so, but he never knew when. Every time he ordered the first beer of an evening, it occurred to him that in the blink of an eye, morning might be upon him with a smudged-out memory peppered here and there with a blurry glimpse of something that may or may not have happened, something he may or may not have said, a woman he may or may not have groped for or tried to kiss or succeeded in kissing or feeling up. Nobody had ever come after him. When he returned to the scene of the excess—say, to the office after the annual Christmas party or after the summer outing—no one made any cracks, not any that he could put his finger on, at least, and he never knew for certain whether those little broken fragments of warbly memory were founded in fact or dream.

  The most useful advice he ever received about it was from Breathwaite, to whom he had confided his problem once, in a moment of lonely worry. Breathwaite had said simply, in English, “Many a good man’s weakness.”

  That was the mantra that helped him through now: Many a good man’s weakness. But not tonight. He had nursed the first half of his beer for nearly an hour. It hung like dishwater in the pint glass, sticky streaks of foam clinging to the walls of the glass as he tried Birgitte’s cell phone number yet again. Her cheery voice kept coming on, and every time, at the first sound of it, he was duped into thinking it was really her voice; but then the canned electronic qualities crackled through and he killed the call without leaving a message.

  The day had been torment for him ever since the excitement of this morning, the magnificent surprise of suddenly having her in his arms, her tongue in his mouth. She had initiated that part. How sweet and fresh and smooth and moist it felt slipping between his lips. His hand trembled now lifting his beer glass with the memory of it; he poured the rest of the lager down his throat in one long draft and signaled down into the bar for a refill, which was carried out promptly to him by a waiter with one arm. The waiter adeptly balanced the tray on the edge of the table, placed Jaeger’s beer in front of him, made change for the fifty-crown note. Jaeger watched him return down into the bar and felt somehow the man was more complete, more balanced, more sturdy, than he himself was.

  He had waited in his office as the long hours of morning dragged by, met with Breathwaite to plan the Irish speech. Kampman had told him to “tell Fred,” but Fred already knew everything about it. So why had Kampman told him to tell Fred? To confuse him? To confuse Fred? Implement friction?

  Back in his office, he phoned Birgitte’s extension, but there was no reply, so he strolled down the corridor to where it crooked around the opposite end to her office. Her room was dark. Birgitte’s secretary, Lise, a cute plump girl, tight jeans riding the big curves of hip and rump, smiled out at him from her door across the way. Above her smile, her brown eyes seemed knowing. “She had to take half a personal day, Harald.”

  “Oh? We had an appointment.” Those knowing brown eyes; routine babble from the mouth while the eyes X-ray your soul. And that butt, which never worried about humility.

  “She must’ve forgot, Harald. Anything I can do for you?”

  You teasing bitch! You see my need and mock it! Or …? “No, thanks, Lise. You think she’s home?”

  “Is it that urgent?” Lise asked.

  He saw the calculations being shuffled around behind her keen brown gaze, so he shrugged it off. “No, no, it’ll wait.”

  But it wouldn’t wait. He had to know. He had to have her. As if on cue, he noticed that the music seeping out the door of the cellar bar behind him was Bob Marley asking himself over and over again if it was love that he was feeling.

  Life’s startling synchronicities. Or, he wondered, had he subconsciously heard the song and then thought that?

  Against his better judgment, he swallowed a fourth of the new cold pint in one pull just as a woman with a plain appealing dark face and beautiful, perfect breasts walked past. Pear-fect. Pair-fect. The cups of them like two bonbonnieres filled with sweets. Her rump was gorgeous, too, and turned him speculative: How can this form so move me? But then he began to feel as though he were being unfaithful to Birgitte, so he pressed the redial button again, got the electronic voice.

  Across the square, outside the window of a bookshop, a man and woman leaned the fronts of their bodies together and kissed passionately while waning sunlight glinted off the brown cobblestones. Jaeger felt simultaneous happiness and loneliness at the sight of them. He thought of Birgitte’s tongue in his mouth. The young woman was pressing up against the young man’s chest, and Jaeger was fascinated by the urgency of her movement. She was so hungry for his body. Her sweater pulled up over her backside so he could see how her blue black jeans conformed precisely to each of her buttocks and to the cleft between them as well. The material was all the way up her crack. He wondered how she did that. Ask a tailor, Please take these in so the denim goes right up my crack? Lucky tailor, to touch her there. How did it feel for her?

  His phone rang, and he took it quickly, his heart lifting as he heard Birgitte’s voice.

  “You’ve been calling, Harald?”

  “Why did you leave without telling me? We were supposed to meet.”

  A long silence ensued, and he was about to speak again, but she said, “I was confused.”

  “Birgitte, I need to see you.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Birgitte, I need to see you. I need to see you.”

  Silence. Then: “Why?”

  He rose from the table, walked away into the doorway of a clothing shop alongside the bar, whispering, “Birgitte, please, we’ve just got to talk this through. Please, meet me. Just half an hour. For a cup of coffee. I’m so worried about you.”

  Silence. Then: “Just half an hour.”

  “Just half an hour.”

  The only decent piece of furniture he had was the coffee table, a curved trapezoid slab of raw beech hardwood, low to the floor above an antique red brown Turkoman carpet he’d inherited from his mother. He had arranged half a dozen pillows around it and lit half a dozen candles in a silver-plated candelabra, set the table with antique mocha porcelain and hundred-year-old cognac glasses, also inherited, and a sterling silver bowl in which he’d placed the little olive tree his last girlfriend had given him at the end of the fortnight they’d lived together. It looked like a bonsai tree in the candlelight. He hoped this little island of elegance might distract her from the seediness of the rest of his tiny apartment.

  What she said to him at the door after climbing four flights up, slightly winded, was, “I never thought you would be such a Bohemian,” and suddenly he saw his apartment in another light, through her eyes—or her diplomacy. She slipped off her shoes at the door, and he heated water for Nescafé espresso. His heart leapt as she sat back on the pillows, her skirt crawling up her slender thigh
s so he could see the shadow between them. And one of her opulent breasts tipped downward beneath her furry sweater, a nippled nod. She smiled at the candles. “So romantic.”

  He cracked the seal of the split of VS Courvoisier he’d invested in. The scent of the cognac chuckling into the crystal snifters lifted to his nostrils as Al Green sang softly from the stereo. “Let’s Stay Together.”

  He could see in the sheen of her burgundy eyes that there would be no pretense, no contest. She knew why she was here. Optimism sang in his blood as he reached across gingerly to touch her toes, took her foot in his palm, and began to massage it. She watched him curiously for a moment, then hummed the pleasure of her acceptance, and he bowed forward to tenderly kiss her toes.

  “No!” She pulled her foot away. “I haven’t showered.”

  “Birgitte,” he whispered, “Birgitte, goddammit, je t’adore,” and pressing his lips to the salty arch of her foot, he murmured, “God, God, I have wanted you so long.” And they tumbled together on the carpet, his heart pounding at the wall of his chest, and nothing in the world existed beyond the glow of this candlelit oval in the dark of night.

  Afterward, she lay with her cheek on his naked chest, and he stared up at the dim, crackled ceiling, thinking about the fact that when you’re married, all the uncertainty of being single, of wondering whether you will have sex tonight, is gone; because when you’re married you pretty well know for sure you’re not going to have sex tonight. The thought tickled him, and he considered sharing it with her but feared she might misunderstand and think him cynical. He was not cynical. He was in recuperation from a loveless marriage. At this moment, hearing Al Green’s baritone on repeat, he was as happy as he could ever be.

  Birgitte excused herself to use the toilet, and he watched her naked, graceful body as she crossed through the candlelight to the little water closet. He considered how slightly disappointing it always was to see a woman naked, how their faces always sort of decomposed as masks fell away, barriers removed themselves. It was the barriers that excited, the masks. Or something deeper at the heart of what they were, of what the beautiful allure of their bodies seemed to be, to stand for, that which drove them to paint themselves, their faces, their fingernails, toenails, to adorn their bodies with jewels. He felt a desire to devour then that he knew could never really be fulfilled. And so there was nothing to do but try again in order to experience the ecstasy of hope that this time, this time, it might succeed, might happen, a moment of ecstasy that became permanent.