Falling Sideways

by Kennedy Thomas E.

  “Spanish is a more important language,” Jytte said officiously, and Jes looked at her with a smile. He had gotten more out of her than he would have dreamed. She’d already dropped at least two masks, but the real Jytte, he was convinced, was still concealed somewhere under this jingoistic one. He could have gobbled her up. Maybe he would. Such transparent defense could only be a vestibule leading to very, very hot pants.

  “And where did you come from, little goose, little goose?” he said.

  “Don’t you call me ‘little goose’!” she snapped, chin raised, eyes clear and cold, and he saw suddenly that he had gone too far for her. But he couldn’t resist another little dig.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I meant little goose-sick.” He kissed his lips at her.

  Still glaring at him, she said, “I think I’ll go now.”

  “I’ll walk you,” Adam said.

  “No.” She was slipping on her shoes.

  “Let her go,” Jes said. “She’s homesick-sick.”

  “Let me walk you, Jytte.”

  “No. No, thanks, Adam.” She kissed his cheek.

  “Why go, anyhow?” Jes said. “Can’t you take a joke? I was just fucking with you. Don’t be so self-serious. It’s a mortal Danish sin. Stay and we’ll have a party, celebrate that you don’t have to work for that asshole tomorrow.”

  She was looking at his T-shirt, a small, bemused smile on her mouth. “Fuck it,” she read out. And, “I think I want to sleep in my own bed tonight.”

  Jes watched Adam follow her to the door. He sure did like her butt in those dirty beige jeans she was wearing, but he was beginning to wonder where she was coming from. He was about to call after her, Who sent you? thinking of William Burroughs going mad in Paris and Tangier, but realized it would be lost on her. Dylan was now singing “Just Like a Woman,” and Jes snorted. Breaks just like a little girl … But she hadn’t broken. He couldn’t figure out what had happened. Who can read the heart of a Jutland girl? What was she so fucking uptight about?

  “Night, Jytte,” he called as she hugged Adam and closed the door behind her without a word.

  Fuck it, he thought, and glanced at his shirt in the mirror over the CD player. TI KCUF. He liked that. TIKCUF.

  Now Adam was depressed again. Fuck depression, anyway. The lad was sitting on the floor in a corner, head bowed, elbows on his knees.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, man? Come on, forget your troubles, come on, get happy, for chrissake. Tikcuf. Tikcuf it all.”

  Adam looked up. His eyes were wet. “I was just remembering something,” he said, thick-mouthed. “When I was, like, ten years old once. There was a picture of my father in the newspaper because he had got some big promotion. Director of something or other. I was so proud of him, and I told him that. ‘God, Dad, I am so proud of you.’ And he looked at me, really cold, really, and he said, ‘What are you kissing my ass for?’ ”

  And the kid started weeping. Literally weeping snot. Jesus.

  “Hey, Adam, listen to me. Do yourself a favor. Don’t waste your tears on the man. Fuck him. He’s not worth it. Don’t be sad, be mad. Don’t let the bastards getcha. Come on, have a beer. Fuck him, anyway!”

  42. Frederick Breathwaite

  Trying not to consider the distance from his earflap chair to where Kirsten slept, across the archipelago of carpets, down the hall, in their antique four-poster, Breathwaite sat up in his library, reading. Sweet woman who still desired him, and what could he give her now? How discreetly but indefatigably she tried. Until his pale response, his limp hugs, his chaste caresses, finally succeeded in fatiguing her. It seemed to him now only a matter of time before she gave up, too. How long can a woman of passion do without? Please realize, sweet Kis, that it is not by choice that I have chilled. I am not able.

  And it seemed she was ready for a surrogate. Came home from work today excited about the puppies her boss’s golden retriever had had. “Freddy, they are just so cute! If you just saw one, you would melt.”

  “Mmm.”

  She caught the drift, read the tone, and he saw she was getting sad again. The swangler. He modified, in hopes of dispersing the clouds of sadness. “Of course if we ever did get a dog, it would definitely have to be a golden. They’re more like another species of human than a dog. Lovely creatures.”

  “They are so beautiful, Freddy. It’s almost like holding a baby!”

  “Let’s think it over, shall we?” he said, and saw she knew what that meant. And went to bed. And he sat there wondering why he was such a fuckless fuck.

  But the muscle of his heart was too soft at present to bear such thoughts. He discharged the matter by reassuring himself that Kirsten had to be protected against herself, against her sentimental enthusiasms. All she saw was a cute puppy; she failed to perceive all the trouble involved, the housebreaking, the vet expenses—and not to mention what she was not yet even aware of: that they would have to be looking for a new apartment, and not every apartment allowed dogs. Or that she, rather, would have to be looking for a new apartment. Another thought he did not wish to follow just now.

  No.

  Staring into the air, redolent with Cohiba smoke, he thought again of those people on the bridge. Had he been hallucinating? Or just suggestive in his weakened state? Already he could feel his memory evolving the moment from a glimpse to a scene. He pictured them going into a dance on the dusky sidewalk, lake gleaming behind them, singing some Tin Pan Alley love song. Life as a musical comedy. Or Dennis Potter weird. Lars von Trier’s dancers on the lumber train of falling darkness. Like the “Lonesome Polecat” dance in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which Breathwaite remembered from when he was about eight. Was he going nuts?

  He turned his attention instead to the new issue of the New Yorker that had arrived that day. He read a short story by V. S. Naipaul about a doomed affair between a man and woman of two different classes in England, attracted to each other because of the distance between them, which, once breached, destroyed the illusion of the otherness that had drawn them in the first place. There were some other levels in it that he could not quite grasp, could not quite follow to a satisfactory conclusion.

  Pondering it, he poured another dram of an inexpensive blend, lit a cigar, then paged forward to an article about Isaac Bashevis Singer that surprised him. He had read and enjoyed a couple of collections of Singer’s stories but had never realized or considered how complex the man’s life had been. One sentence toward the end disturbed him, stating how much a refugee flees from, not least himself. In other words, you can leave your shore but not your soul behind.

  Breathwaite looked at his watch: one A.M. It seemed a bad time of night to encounter such a sentiment. He flipped back to check the name of the man who had written the article, Jonathan Rosen, paged further back to his bio note, which offered no enlightenment about the man other than that he was about to publish a novel entitled Joy Comes in the Morning.

  He wondered whether that was a double entendre about a woman named Joy, realized it could only be, considered how Kis loved French breakfasts, how he wished he could deliver that joy to her tomorrow. He thought about what his own morning might bring, then about the fact that it was already morning, that a mere six or seven hours separated him from the new day.

  More musical comedy: Kelly, O’Connor, and Reynolds, dancing and singing, “Good Morning.”

  Those people on the bridge. He shivered.

  It hardly mattered. He could sleep until nine or ten if he wanted. No, he would have to get up, not to arouse Kis’s suspicions. Then he could slip back into bed if he wanted. It didn’t matter anymore. The only thing that mattered was how he handled the Irish visit at the end of the week.

  And he still had not spoken to Jes about the opportunity he had engineered for him. It was all he had to leave the boy. He had to make him understand the value of this little inheritance. The phrase résidence secondaire, which he had read in one of the New Yorker articles, popped into his mind, and it se
emed such a grand and eloquent term compared with his own secondary residence, the little beach cottage in Gilleleje. Kis could sell it and buy herself a small apartment in the city. Or go up and live there. That would keep it in the family, at least. If she could get permission from the authorities to turn it into a year-round residence. She could have a puppy there if she wanted. To fill his empty shoes. Jes had always loved the cottage. Breathwaite remembered him there the summer he had graduated from high school, wearing the white student cap. Such a hopeful time. He remembered the graduation day. Jes had been at the top of his class, one of the highest averages the school had ever seen. And valedictorian. Shook them all up talking about 9/11 as an effect rather than a cause. Might have seen the seeds of this nonsense there. Not that he was wrong, but a man had to learn to be strategic about the good.

  Breathwaite remembered the boy’s joyful face as he climbed into the open-backed truck with the rest of his class, decorated with pine branches, stocked with cases of beer, the truck pulling away, honking, all the boys and girls in their white caps, up on their feet, hoisting beers, cheering, Jes’s head tall above them all, his face glowing as they drove through town to stop at the homes of each student for a drink and snacks. Fine tradition.

  Breathwaite and Kis had hurried back to the Tank, where they would receive Jes’s class, when it was their turn, in the main hall at a long table draped with starched white linen, decked with bowls of strawberries and tiger prawns, chips and dip, a glittering row of green bottles of beer for those who preferred it to the Crémant magnums in their gleaming ice buckets. Cheers and honking and toasts in the summer afternoon. Just four years ago, when everybody was still happy. The boy could have done anything he wanted, anything. But he flitted from one thing to the other and landed in a fucking Pakistani key-and-heel bar.

  Breathwaite’s stomach growled. In the kitchen, he poked around inside the refrigerator, found a container of vanilla ice cream that was nearly half-full. He ate it straight from the container with a soup spoon. The ice cream was too hard, too cold. He had to melt the first few spoonfuls against his palate, and his teeth began to ache, his temples. Then the sugar carried its optimisms to his brain, and he thought, Complex organisms take longer to gestate. Jes would find his way, and he would do well, with that quick intelligence he had. His son would prevail. His son. His youngest son.

  He finished the ice cream and stuffed the empty container down deep into the garbage bag where Kis would not see it and then wondered why he did that. She never complained about his appetites. It was his lack of one particular appetite that was the problem.

  Back through the library he fetched his cigar, still smoldering in the ashtray, sipped his whiskey, and let himself out onto the balcony. The street below was empty and still. A bicycle rattled past on the bike path, and he watched its red taillight drift off out of sight.

  Something happened in his gut as the cold ice cream made its way lower, and he heard the mournful sound of a long fart moaning into the night. Another. Another.

  He snorted. Ice-cream farts. Threw back the rest of his whiskey and swallowed without tasting it, then looked ruefully into his empty rock glass. Irish crystal. Gift from his colleagues there. He had an urge to fling it down at the roadway. Instead he took a last pull at the cigar and flipped it over the railing. He watched its red glow spiral downward for a good few seconds before it exploded silently on the road into a scatter of sparks that quickly died out.

  Quite a drop, he thought. From here to there.

  Then he went inside to refill his glass.

  43. Jes Breathwaite

  “I think … I think I love her,” Adam said.

  Jes said, “Nah.”

  The two of them were back at their opposite ends of the sofa again, legs stretched out onto the coffee table between the long, glistening flanks of empty green bottles. From the CD player, Bob Marley sang a question about how long they would kill our prophets.

  “I do,” Adam insisted.

  “You may think you do, but you don’t.”

  Jes glanced at Adam, who sat with his head back, eyes closed, mouth open and wet.

  “You know, Jes, you’re kind of cyncical.”

  “Cyncical, am I?”

  “Cynlical.”

  “Right.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Right.”

  “If you keep on saying that, I’m gonna get very angwy.”

  “Angwy?”

  “Fuck you, Jes.”

  “No, fuck Jytte. You’ll feel better.”

  “I’m telling you, Jes, I’m not kidding.”

  “Right.”

  “You don’t know how I feel.”

  “Do. Been there.”

  The Marley record ended.

  “Hear that?” Jes said.

  “What?”

  “Water. In the pipes.”

  “So?”

  “They turned the heat on. Summer’s really dead.”

  “So?”

  “It’s autumn. Anyone who hasn’t found a home by now won’t find one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit and read, write letters all evening, and wander along the boulevards, back and forth restlessly while the dead leaves carry on the wind.”

  Adam squinted disbelievingly at him from his end of the sofa. “What the fuck are you talking about? I thought you were my friend! Are you mocking me?”

  “Relax, man.” Jes rose and stooped before a bookshelf, searching. “I was not mocking. I was sharing. Where the fuck is it?…” He rummaged through the shelves. “Where the fuck is it? Oh, fuck it! It’s Rilke. He says that you have to love your solitude and hear the sweetness in the lamentation of the suffering that comes with it. Because you can’t take anyone there with you. By its nature, solitude is experienced alone. And to be kind to those you have to leave behind. And not to expect anything from your parents—just accept the warmth of the love they offer even if it does not understand you.”

  “Warmth?”

  Jes looked at the boy and thought of his own father and felt pity. His own father was so full of delusion, but he was not a bastard, he was not like Adam’s. “You know, people are so afraid of being alone, so afraid of failing—of failing to do what everybody else tries to do. It’s all a failure. A failure to realize the failure that we’re being expected to live up to. Listen to this.”

  Jes remembered something more. “You know what else Rilke said. He said that solitude is great and difficult to carry sometimes. So difficult that we try to exchange it for any intercourse, anything at all, no matter how cheap it might be. But then he says that it’s necessary to be alone, the way a child is alone among grown-ups with all their ‘important business.’ But you find out that all those ‘important’ things are useless. All the ‘important things’ that the grown-ups try to do. It’s hard to be alone and it’s hard to love; to really love is the hardest thing we have to do, and the most important thing. Young people don’t know about love—they have to learn about it, but we’re impatient and we throw ourselves at each other and we fail in our love. We have to learn how to love but first we have to learn how to let our solitude develop.”

  Jes was surprised to see Adam watching him intently. “I don’t understand,” he said. “It, that doesn’t sound like you, I—”

  “It’s not me. It’s Rilke. But it’s also me. All I’m telling you is not to be afraid. You’re like a little tree that’s full of fear, that hasn’t been watered. It’s afraid it won’t grow, but you’ll grow to be just what you’re destined to be. Rilke says that, too. Don’t fear the rain. Don’t fear the seasons and don’t fear the rain. Rain is sacred. Water is from God. What do you say?”

  Adam looked into Jes’s eyes, standing above him. “You believe in God?” he asked incredulously.

  “What do you think, I’m an asshole? Of course I believe in God. I just haven’t figured out who or what He or She or It is yet. Maybe I never will. But I’ll keep on trying. Now let’s have more mu-sick and beer-sick!”


  Irish Night

  Wine Comes in at the Mouth

  44. Karen Kampman

  With mascara and pencil and eye shadow, Karen Kampman did her eyes at the vanity table, glancing from time to time at the reflection of her husband, who stood behind her, before the full-length mirror, fitting the gold-and-pearl studs into his tuxedo shirt. She studied his face as he watched himself in the mirror, meticulously fastening the antique studs into each buttonhole. She wondered if he could see that she was looking. Nothing on his face seemed to suggest that he could, but neither did anything on his face seem to suggest anything at all of their exchange earlier in the week about the bracelet.

  She remembered then the expression on his face once when she overheard him in response to an admiring comment from someone at a dinner, responding that the shirt studs and cuff links had belonged to his great-grandfather. Which was not true. She had been with him when he bought them, from an antique dealer on Bredgade. They were eighteen karat, red gold with natural pearl inlays. They had cost a fortune. Martin knew nothing about his great-grandfather or his grandfather, either; Martin’s father had been raised by a single mother who had never told him who his own father was. The secret died with her.

  But looking at his face—its expression of warm modesty—as he told that lie, she almost came to doubt the fact. She asked him about it afterward, and he said, “No, no, I told her it was from the time of my great-grandfather,” so convincingly that she concluded she must have heard incorrectly. She thought about that from time to time, wondering whether she had heard right or not. If he really had lied about that, though, she felt the lie was an endearing one; Martin was ordinarily so devoid of sentiment that it touched her to think of him lying about this, saw the lie as a glimpse of emotional pain otherwise scrupulously hidden from view. She had almost begun to think of him as unfeeling, so that little glimpse of pain, of a fear of inadequacy, enlarged rather than diminished him in her view. If indeed she had not misheard what he said. The question now seemed important. Extremely so.