Falling Sideways

More laughter broke out, louder, and Jaeger’s cheeks flamed. His eyes jumped back and forth as a smile slithered desperately over his mouth and a giddy laughter chuckled from his throat. Breathwaite slapped him on the back. “Good one, Harald!” Hoping it might pass as intentional.

  “So it is a pleasure—”

  “I am pleased,” said Sean. “And please do remember that those who share the same bed do not necessarily share the same dream.”

  Now everyone was laughing, even Breathwaite. It was impossible not to succumb. The large strange eyes of the long thin woman at the bar were gazing with iconic compassion upon Jaeger, whose own eyes jumped about the room, from face to face, clearly seeing no one. He lifted the champagne glass in his right hand, his bandaged pinky jutting out at a vaguely obscene angle. Apparently, he had abandoned his printed text. “To velcome our guests from Ireland I vould read a digt, a poem by a poet from the wery special Wiking city of Dublin. The poet is Vilhelm Botler Yeets …”

  Cronin clapped his hands once, grinning. “Oh, I love it!” And Jaeger lifted the glass formally in front of his nose. With profound seriousness and sincerity now, he began to recite:

  “ ‘Love comes in your mouth …’ ”

  There was a moment of tense silence through the room. Then Jaeger started giggling.

  Please please please please please, Breathwaite chanted silently in the dark realm behind his eyelids. Please get a fucking hold of yourself!

  “I start again,” Jaeger said.

  “But the first start was so perfect!” exclaimed Sean Cronin.

  Now Jaeger had it. Or so, apparently, he thought. He cleared his throat. The room fell to a desperately respectful silence, and Jaeger recited:

  Love comes in at your mouth.

  Vine comes in at your eye.

  This is all vi shall know of love

  Until vi grow old or die.

  I raise my glass to look at you

  And cry, Skål!

  Clearly everyone had in silent complicity decided to hear wrong, or not to hear, even the Irish, even Sean Cronin. All toasted solemnly, all applauded, and Breathwaite’s blushing secretary passed around the seating plan.

  Kampman stepped up to Breathwaite. “Excellent poem,” he said. “Your choice, I presume.” He was smiling.

  Aftermath

  While there is Still Time

  46. Frederick Breathwaite

  Warm and dry in Martinus’s restaurant, Breathwaite equipped himself with a cigar and a large draft, served by the dark, eponymous Martin with his welcoming smile. Breathwaite sat at a table behind the plate window and puffed meditatively at his apostolado, gazing into the dim November light on Victor Borge Place and North Free Harbor Street. Outside, it was drizzling. A woman bicycled across the square, holding an opened black umbrella over her head. Two tables down from where Breathwaite sat, a young, angular fellow wearing a straw Borsalino and narrow, black-framed spectacles sat hunched over a latte, reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, jiggling a pen over a pad, clearly prepared to take notes.

  Breathwaite’s cigar was slightly stale. He studied the cracked wrapper and reminded himself that he had no income now and was diminishing his capital by the day. Start smoking cheaper. Better sooner than later. This was a twenty-crown cigar. In ALDI supermarket, he could get a wooden box of five panatelas for fifty crowns—never mind that engraved on the wooden cover were the words Original Colombo Cigars or that they were manufactured in Germany, not the world’s foremost cigar producer. They were cheap and they were smokable. He could allow himself two to three a day, and in time he would forget the taste of Cohiba.

  He wet his mouth with the beer. In the future, when the weather was good, he might consider taking his beer from the bottle on a bench; you could get a perfectly drinkable bottle of pilsner from ALDI or Fakta or Netto for a crown and a half. He pictured himself swathed in his Burberry, Stetson tilted over his eyes. On a park bench. Daintily tipping back his pilsner. Colombo panatela clamped between his teeth. (’Scuse me, sir, I forgot, just one more question, please …)

  He would miss his cafés and serving houses. The little pleasures. A sardine on dark rye at the White Lamb, served by an amiable one-armed waiter. Rough-cut Irish bacon and egg on toast at Dubliners, where the waiter says, “Get it down your neck now, it’ll do you good,” and it does; the continuing saga of bacon propels you through the day as it negotiates the course of your alimentary canal, sliding through on its own delicate grease. And the draft so nicely tapped in Rosengårds Bodega; decorous matchboxes of the Eiffel Bar, where a double goes for a modest tune; the friendly dour face of Hans at Café Under the Clock; the friendly fellows of Femmeren—the Fiver—on Classensgade; or a selection of bracing cheeses at Krut’s, where the former proprietor, Peter Kjaer, was in the process of distilling his own single-malt in the Scottish highlands, Bruichladdich vintage 2003 single-cask, an ex-bourbon cask treated with oloroso sherry.

  Of course, there was an alternative, a very real alternative. He could do it the way his father had. Use it all up fast and shuffle off the coil. What did it matter now?

  The irony had come afterward, as a kicker. After all the bitter kissing of Kampman’s butt, fighting to salvage the unsalvageable, he won the confirmation, a concession.

  “Martin, about that job for my boy …”

  Martin stared at him with that deceptively mild expression. Then, “Send him in. We’ll take a look at him.”

  As if he were an object, a piece of meat, a donkey. Even that Breathwaite swallowed. But then Jes, finally cornered at a table in Pussy Galore, listened politely to Breathwaite’s offer and said, “Thanks, Dad. Really, thanks. But I don’t want a job like that.”

  “Jes: It’s part-time. You’ll make a hundred grand a year for a few hours a week, have time to finish your degree, and have a foot in the door for a spot that most kids your age would give their left nut for. Even just the experience would—”

  “I don’t want a spot, Dad. I want a life.”

  “Here we go with the rhetoric. How much are you earning at that key-and-heel bar? A hundred crowns an hour?”

  “Eighty.”

  “Eighty! And you’re telling me no? Wake up, son!”

  The boy leaned across the table. With his long body and long limbs, he made Breathwaite think of a praying mantis. “Dad, maybe you should wake up. Or maybe not. Maybe not. You know what happens when the dead awaken. They find that they have never lived.”

  It was an interesting moment for Breathwaite. He seemed to watch it from three different viewpoints. The surface view was that his son was sufficiently culturally fluent to so easily call up an appropriate quote from an Ibsen play that was more than one hundred years old; beneath that, he admired that the boy could use the quote in a debate over serious matters, like a skilled chess player selecting an old but excellent gambit; beneath that was the fact that his own son was telling him he was a dead man who had never lived. Two points of admiration, one of pain. And even if he could discount it as the observation of a callow youth, nevertheless the pain struck deep. Yet he noted with interest that it seemed to draw neither blood nor tears. So maybe the boy was right. Maybe he was already dead. Maybe he was a dead man who had forgotten to jump down into his grave. Or maybe there was another interpretation—that death is an awakening, life a mere illusory slumber. And what did it really matter, anyway? He was no longer even certain that he regretted any of it.

  You were given a life. You used it. Or it used you. It got used up. You got used up. The only regret he felt keenly now was the hurt he had caused Kis. He should have told her what was happening right from the start. But how could he have known that Kampman would use that maneuver with the Irish? Bastard! He’d already had him down, but he’d had to deliver the last lethal kick in the head. Coup de grâce.

  “Did you have to do that, Martin?” Breathwaite had asked him in the office the day after. “To Kis.”

  Kampman had shrugged elaborately. “Things should be up front. I naturally
assumed she would have been the first you’d tell. And I wanted to give your friends an opportunity to say a proper good-bye. They thanked me for it, in fact.”

  People think they are excused from their treachery because they report it to your face. Get him back. Engage the enemy. Never was good at it. But it was Kis whom Kampman had hurt. And now that there was nothing left to lose, Breathwaite investigated his heart for the desire to take revenge, to hurt the man back for what he had done to Kis. Or was it he himself who had hurt her?

  Whatever, now Kis was pissed, and he was swangled again. The sweet angel was not pleased with him. Perhaps she would never be pleased with him again. The permanent displeasure of a sweet angel was like a world of enduring sunlessness. Swangled again. Swangled forever, dickless wonder.

  Let your fountain be blessed, take delight in the wife of your youth, let her breasts fill you with pleasure, be entranced always with her.

  Proverbs, he thought, 5:18–19.

  And, What good has my capacity to spout quotations ever done me?

  Those three couples on the bridge revisited his thoughts. He had been working the memory, constructing it, so that by now it really was a scene from a musical of his own composition, and the three couples danced mournfully in the misty evening, lake glistening behind them beneath the smoky sky. The dance they did was full of sorrow, and the lyrics to the musical were by Chaucer. Mournfully they kicked and pivoted, dipped and sang:

  What is this life?

  What asketh man to have?

  Now with his love,

  Now in his cold grave,

  Alone, without company.

  For a moment, a split of a moment, Breathwaite thought he was going to weep. But nothing happened. Instead he lifted the wet butt of the apostolado to his lips and drew.

  It was half smoked, the pint of pilsner half drunk. He already knew, despite his Babbitt calculations, that he would be ordering a fresh pint, that he would be removing from his breast pocket another apostolado tube in order to enjoy the ritual: Screw the cap off the tube, tip out the cigar, grasp the end lug of the red cellophane zip strip with his fingernails and tear it around the circumference of the cigar, remove the cellophane from the cigar itself, carefully undo the band, not to destroy the wrapper (remember how his father used to say, You like music, son; here’s a whole band for you), nose the cigar, tongue it, tear off a strip from the cedar coil inside the tube, light the cedar with which to roast the tip of the cigar, then place the cigar between your lips and draw, fill your mouth with good smoke.

  This was life. This was a reason to live. This was an excuse for living. He puffed the half-smoked apostolado and gazed out Martin’s window across Victor Borge Place, scattered with big soggy yellow leaves. He thought of his mother and father, years ago, attending a one-man Victor Borge show on Broadway. When? It was the mid-fifties, late fifties, maybe. When he was a child. He remembered them coming home afterward in a taxi, Dad wearing his blue suit, Mom in fashionable black, a white fur pillbox hat on her pretty head, flushed with happiness, so amused by the Dane’s monologue. Is that what brought me here? That Victor Borge had made my parents happy?

  Strange it seemed to him that that had been back in the United States, land of weak coffee, thin beer, and surly cabdrivers, in New York City, in Sunnyside, Queens, some five decades before, when he was a boy, and now he sat on Victor Borge Place in Copenhagen, fifty years and eight thousand miles away. His beautiful, unfaithful mother was dead, his idealistic, compassionate father, the amusing, sardonic Victor Borge … all dead.

  There was a little blue sign with white letters—VICTOR BORGE PLADS/J E OLESENS GADE—fixed to the brick above the gaudy blue-and-white sign spanning the whole girth of the wall diagonally across from Martin’s window. In enormous letters, it said, STØVSUGER BANDEN. It had always amused Breathwaite that the word for vacuum cleaner in Danish was støvsuger, literally “dust sucker.” A functional language. Støvsuger Banden meant “the Dust Sucker Gang.” A cut-rate vacuum cleaner shop. Electrolux. Eurocleaner. Universal World Cleaners. What is a universe without a Universal World Cleaners dust sucker?

  Directly out in front of the window where he sat were benches and dead bare bushes, a glass bus shelter, a Plumrose sausage wagon giving off orange light in the dull, dim afternoon, its rear glass window reflecting the broad sign of the Vasketeria—“Machines and Dryers”—and the cozy front of Erland’s serving house.

  And on the opposite corner, a 7-Eleven occupying the ground floor of an elegant fin de siècle building. End of what century? The nineteenth. Twentieth also finished now, by God. Across from 7-Eleven in the other direction, moving counterclockwise around the square, a Wonderwear lingerie shop with a picture in the window of a woman in panties and bra so erotic that it would have been illegal when he was a boy. Used to study the ads in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, gaze rapturously at a black-and-white woman in her underwear rowing a boat in the Central Park Lake: I dreamed I rowed a boat in Central Park wearing my Maidenform bra. Word for bra in Danish is brysteholder, literally “breast holder.” Picture a woman in a breast holder running a dust sucker. I dreamed I sucked dust in my Maidenform. Maidenform. Maiden. Old-fashioned word for virgin. Maidenhead. Hymen. Jomfruehinde in Danish—“virgin membrane,” “virgin film.” More poetic in English.

  What is to be learned of all this I see and think and remember? he wondered.

  Half a dozen dark autumn trees are scattered about the square, a yellow-and-orange ambulance screams past on North Free Harbor Street. Above the dust sucker shop sign rises a wall of bay windows, cozy lamps, and curtains. An Ethiopian-looking woman crosses the square pushing a baby carriage. Tall and slender and so magnificently black, a long, olive-colored veil billowing around her in the air. So beautiful. Why do some Danes object? Try to make policies against head coverings. No veils, no head scarves in school or on supermarket checkout cashiers. Why? Shall we also ban all nostalgic 1950s photographs of lovely Danish girls in head scarves? See the Muslim women sometimes so covered that all you can see are a pair of eyes peering out a slit at you. Mysterious. Who are you in there? What are you thinking? Might just as well be wearing veils ourselves, all of us, for all the secrets in our skulls. We peer out the slit of our eyes from amid them.

  Now a chubby young man in punk attire, unnaturally red hair stritting up like the comb of a giant rooster. (Wonder is strit an English word or only Danish? No longer know. Who I was is fading into who I am.) What sadness behind that boy’s young posturing as he bops his head to the music from his earphones. Wrapped in private music. Just as that woman was wrapped in her veil.

  Just as I am wrapped in private thought. No, my thought is fed by the world I see around me. That boy is wrapped in private music that blocks out the sounds of the world around him.

  Another orange-and-red ambulance screams past. Two emergencies. Double suicide? My father and my great-granduncle, the informer from Lambeg.

  Some ancient uncle in the Sunnyside branch of the family had known him. Said he had been an intelligent and kind man. That was what nobody could understand. Why did he turn informer? Remember Dad saying, “What in the world made him do it, then?”

  “Pretty simple, really. He did it for money and privilege and position. What else? Didn’t expect it would blow up in his face. Fooled himself. Wound up putting a bullet in his own forehead.”

  Dad, too. Not a bullet, but the pills. Washed down with gin—Cork blue hundred proof. No note. Why, Dad?

  It was after Mom died. Must’ve loved her, despite what she’d done. And maybe done again, who knows? How old was he then … let’s see, she died in 1992, would’ve been seventy-three, he was four years older. Seventy-seven. Not young, but these days you expect more. Was it the loneliness? Or something else? Did you finally decide your pacifism was just cowardice? Or worse? Indifference? Vomit yourself out your own mouth?

  How was it, Dad? Breathwaite wondered now, and realized he was talking to his father inside his skull. How was it in t
he end when the pills and gin mixed in your blood? Did your body fight to survive, to undo what you were doing to it? Did you feel a dread sickness of approaching death washing up through your arteries beneath the blank ceiling of your numbed consciousness, patched over perhaps with fleeting bits of thought like a fevered dream? Was it too late then to stop, or did you think with the last sparks, Yeah, yeah, get it over, get it done. Out, out.

  Then Breathwaite half remembered a dream he’d had last night about his father. What? His dreams had been taking him to strange places he had never been before but that he could remember, and there was discourse of some kind, and it was not pleasant.

  The discourse with Kis:

  “How could you have kept that from me, Fred?”

  “I thought you said the job and position and all of it didn’t matter to you.”

  “That is not the subject. I am talking about your keeping such a thing from me. Letting me find out like that. What else is hidden away?”

  “Can’t you forgive me?”

  “It’s not a matter of forgiving or not. It makes me sad.”

  Swangled. Kis is pissed. Has a right to be. I should learn to understand that, learn to suffer with grace. Learn to take it. Try to learn to be a human being for a change. Maybe I could. Consider Kis. Looks so sad about this. As my mother was. Have I made Kis unhappy? Consider your wife.

  Then he remembered something else, a dream fragment, the word wifle. Your little wife. Your rifle.

  Ah!

  The rifle over the fireplace in act one. In the trunk. The antique chest. Frederick Breathwaite, for the crime of having not made sufficient use of your life or setting an example worthy of the three sons you created or being worthy of the beautiful wife who loved you, you are hereby sentenced to recapitulate the act of your father and his great-granduncle before him.

  Ah!

  Breathwaite raised his hand toward the bar. “Martin!” And lifted his empty pint glass. “Another, please.”

  Then he lifted the last apostolado from his breast pocket and began to screw the cap from the end of the aluminum tube.