Falling Sideways (20 page)
Yeah, Dad. I killed my future.
Good for you, sonny! What else did you do?
Went to a bar in North Port.
Great! Was it fun?
It was fucking terrific! I drank beers with my new friend, Jes. And he introduced me to his friends there. And you know what he said when he introduced me? He said, “This is my friend Adam.” There was this tall skinny funny guy named Bjørn and a guy they call Zack who owns a big farm in Jutland, and he invited me to come stay there anytime for as long as I want. They really liked me, and I told them I quit school today and they cheered and bought me a Gammel Dansk, and we toasted my freedom. They invited me to come back again tomorrow, and you know what else? I felt so good when I got home that I had this great conversation with Jytte, and I told her all about everything, and she listened to all of it, and I could see in her eyes and in her smile that she liked me and that she thought it all sounded exciting, and you know what else? She’s going to meet me in North Port tomorrow, and she’s coming with me to the North Bodega.
She’s coming with
me.
So you see, Dad: My new future is starting already. I was right. You were wrong. And Jes told me about what you do for a living. You fire people. How come I never knew that before, Dad? You keep it a secret? Ashamed, maybe? ’Cause
I
sure am.
The tea was lukewarm, but it quenched the arid thirst of his mouth left there by the beers and schnapps. He wondered if there was any beer in the house. Sometimes when his mother and father had dinner guests, after the coffee, cold drinks would be served and cold bottles of beer. Maybe there were some down in the basement refrigerator, but there was a padlock on that. Where did he hide the key? If Adam could find it, he could get Jes to make a copy for him.
The thought of Jes made him smile, remembering how at the bar Zack had said, “Speak to us of the sayings of Jalâl, O wise Jes.”
And Jes got them all laughing. He got this expression on his face that made him look foreign and raised one hand like some kind of Arab priest or something and said, “Those of whom God has made apes and swine and slaves of seduction, theirs is indeed an evil state.” And, “The life of this world is nothing but play and sport.”
“Heard,” little muscular Zack shouted in Danish. “Heard!” And he lifted his beer and all of them were cracking up with a high giggling laughter that made Adam feel a certainty he had not known since he was a child, perhaps had never known before.
“Adam?”
The twins stood at the kitchen door in their white nightdresses, barefoot, with big shy hopeful eyes. “Will you read to us?”
The sight of them filled him with a sadness he did not understand.
Poor kids
, he thought.
Poor sweet little kids.
“Sure,” he said. “Sure I will.” And he followed them up the stairs to their room.
Kampman looked from the wheel to the girl as he pulled out onto Tonysvej. “You ought to get yourself a bicycle,” he said.
“I have one. My parents are sending it from Tønder.” She sat far from him, pressed up against the door.
He glanced at her with a smile. “Are you afraid of me?”
“No.”
He chuckled, lifting and dropping his shoulders rhythmically. “Good.” He could feel himself relaxing already in the thought of where he was headed. “What do you think of me?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
Kampman laughed again. “See? You
are
afraid of me. You’re afraid to tell me what you think of me.”
“Being polite is not the same as being afraid.”
Another laugh barked from his throat, and suddenly he was interested in what might be concealed behind her huffy face. She was warm to everyone in the house except him. To him she was only polite, and he could sense she disliked him. Or perhaps she was just afraid of men in general. Maybe her father had given her a hard time. He glanced at the long slim line of her leg, crossed over the other, then up at her breasts, which looked like half oranges pressing against her aquamarine T-shirt. She pulled the lapels of her jacket together and zipped it up, and he turned to her face with a smile on his lips aimed to tell her he could see her thoughts and acknowledging that she had interpreted his correctly.
“Are you a slave to good manners, then?”
“It’s the way we are. But if someone is impolite or naughty to me, he’ll get to know it pretty fast.”
“
Naughty?
I like that.” He stopped for a light at Trianglen, then turned up East Bridge Street, hooked right on Århus. “Just for fun, try just once to take off the mask of your good manners. Just like that. Like removing a hat. And tell me what you think of me. Open and free. I won’t hold it against you. On the contrary.”
“Okay,” she said. “I think you’re not very nice.”
This was good. “And why should I be nice?”
“It’s nice to be nice.”
He turned left at the foot of Århus Street. “Not for me it’s not. If I went around being nice all day, the company I’m responsible for would go right down the slippery slope. I’m not paid to be nice. I’m paid to run an organization. Everyone else is free to go around being nice. My job is to take care of things.”
They were on Strandboulevarden now.
“It’s just up there,” she said, “where the red mailbox is on the wall by the tall windows. That’s my room right there.”
He pulled in along the curb. “Nice place,” he said. “One of those high-ceilinged places with fancy plaster moldings. Rent-controlled.”
“I just have a room.”
“What do you give for it?”
“Isn’t that a personal question?”
“Is your room furnished?”
“Yes,” she said with annoyance. “Why?”
“Because I bet you’re paying two thirds of the rent on that whole apartment. If your room is furnished, the law allows that. So you get to live in one fifth of the place and pay two thirds of the rent. That’s not very nice, either, is it?” He grinned and leaned across to open the door for her, being careful not to touch her.
“Thanks for the ride,” she snapped.
“You should thank me for the lesson. Think about it.”
He watched her let herself into the front door of the building, saw the lobby light come on, then a few moments later the light in the first window to the right of the front door on the ground floor—just as she had said, right alongside the mailbox. Funny she would have told him that. Volunteer information. To someone who was not nice. He could see the outline of her body behind the long-curtained window. One of the vent windows up top was open.
Typical Jutland girl. Sleeps in a cold room. Fresh.
Clutching, he threw the Toyota into gear and pulled out.
He parked up near the Teachers College, around from the Radiometer offices, and sat behind the wheel, thinking. He was excited. The girl had excited him. He would have to talk to Karen about her, about letting her go.
Are you certain she’s suitable? She seems to be getting a little too friendly with Adam.
He chuckled mirthlessly, lifting and dropping his shoulders.
The dashboard clock said eight. He would be late. The thought brought a bemused smile to his lips. He raised his haunch to get his billfold from the hip pocket of his runners, removed two thousand-crown notes and three hundred-crown notes, which he folded and buttoned into the inner pocket of his jacket. Then he chucked the billfold and his omega wristwatch into the glove compartment and locked it. He zipped his key ring into the hidden collar pocket inside his jacket, pulled his halfpenny running cap low on his forehead, and got out of the car.
Through the dark chill autumn evening, alongside Emdrup Pond he jogged, inhaling the crisp, mulchy air as anticipation built in his blood, in his lungs. He was trembling as he came out into the light of the streetlamps on Emdrup Way, past a row of old yellow-brick apartment houses to a newer building, red brick, clean, well lighted.
He rang, spoke into the two-way, was buzzed in, crossed the bright lobby, and rode the elevator to the third floor, where he pressed the bell on an unmarked door. He was admitted by a smiling middle-aged woman, dressed more like a receptionist than the receptionist at the Tank—primly middle-class, though with a touch of silk-and-wool British elegance. He liked that. It excited him. He already had two of the five notes folded in his palm, two of the hundreds, and he passed them to her.
She thanked him, counting them quickly, discreetly, then gave him a large plush black towel and showed him to a door in the hall. “You can change there, honey,” she said, and returned to her place in an armchair by the door, took a magazine from the tabletop beside it.
See and Hear.
Kampman could see, on the cover, a picture of the crown prince and princess. “Honey,” she had called him. Again. Vulgar. It blemished his entry. When he left, later, he would slip her the last hundred and tell her, for next time, not to call him honey. He wanted this to be perfect, and that one detail was bothering.
Now he entered the dressing room and locked the one door behind him.
The undressing room
, he thought. His hands trembled as he took off his clothes and folded them on a chair, and his knees felt loose as he tapped on the other door.
A woman’s voice said, “Come.”
He watched his hand shake as it rose to turn the knob. The room was tastefully furnished, a little old-fashioned, a parlor. A long, slender woman sat in an armchair in the center of a red Persian carpet, her long, bare legs crossed. She was naked but for a narrow, black-leather mask. Blue eyes watched him from the slits in the mask.
He looked at her body.
“Lower your gaze,” she said.
He did as he was told.
“You’re late.”
“I—”
“Be still.”
He shut his mouth.
She motioned him forward with her forehead. “You will regret that,” she said.
Every third Friday was Kampman’s day to sleep in. He woke in the basement guest room, opened his eyes to the white ceiling, and reached for the alarm watch he had set for seven.
Six fifty-eight.
He smiled, deactivated it before it could ring. Then, gazing at the blank screen of the ceiling, he gingerly stretched his limbs beneath the covers. Each detail of his body’s discomfort contained a minuscule fragment of mystery he knew he must push from his consciousness lest he become morbidly fascinated by it. If he dawdled here, savoring it, reconstructing what was now behind him, he would surrender force to the experience, rather than winning from it. Abruptly he threw off the bedclothes and limped naked into the bathroom, turned the cold tap on full, and willed himself beneath it, counting slowly. Only at sixty did he allow himself to begin to add warm water to the stream, soaping himself gingerly, refusing to wince when it hurt.
Of course it hurts; I am stronger than pain.
Dressed and shaven, he went straight up to Adam’s bedroom, meticulously stifling the annoyance that was already asserting itself at his anticipation of having to wake the boy even though he had also been allowed to sleep an extra two hours today. Lazy.
Adam’s bed was empty, unmade. Adam was not in the room. Adam was not in the bathroom. The twins were still asleep, and Adam was not in there, either.
Back down the stairs to the kitchen, where he could hear Karen fussing about. He smelled coffee.
“Are you limping?” she asked when she saw him.
“Strained a muscle. It’s nothing. Where’s Adam?”
“He was off early today.”
Kampman blinked, annoyed. Something fishy here. “Off to where?”
“Why, to classes, I presume.”
Fishy.
He took the BMW and was in his office at the Tank by eight twenty. Even that late, he was still the first one in. No, Clausen was at his desk.
“Morning, Mr. Director,” he said as Kampman passed his doorless office.
Kampman drew the corners of his mouth into a little smile. “Early bird.”
“Yes, sir.”
At last there was hope, at last the chance for love, for Birgitte, a woman he could love. And his little girls liked her, too. “You’re nice,” Hanne had said to her in the deer park. Spontaneously. And today he could tell them, hint to them that they might be seeing more of Birgitte—maybe even this evening. Jaeger had taken a half personal day to get a head start on his weekend with his little angels. He opened the white wrought-iron gate and stepped into the little front garden of the house he had owned for ten years and to which he no longer even possessed a key. The grass, front and back, was still green and tight as a golf course. Vita’s pride. She practiced her putting here.
Galf
, she called it, a parody of Gentoftian High Danish that to Jaeger was beginning to sound less like a parody than an assimilation. Let her. She had taken up golf after their split. He pictured himself telling her,
Well, some people work and some play
, but quickly dismissed the thought. Nothing but trouble in that direction.
Beneath his arm he had a little gift for her, a book of golf cartoons wrapped in silver paper and tied with a dark green ribbon. Last time he came, he’d got the idea of bringing a little present as a surprise and saw that the gesture had startled and moved her, and he was eager to repeat that success.
He gazed from the grass to the agreeably uneven assortment of trees—larch, lilac, pine, the brittle rose vines that in spring and summer blossomed with fat blooms of red, yellow, white. The forsythia hedge was nearly bald now in the gray early afternoon, but in the eye of memory he saw it as an explosion of bright yellow late April leaves, his two yellow-haired baby girls standing before it with their big, sweet smiles. Returning here was always like a dream fragment for him, the unreal real. A return to the life he had always assumed temporary until it took root, grew clinging vines he had to hack away, and somehow he had managed not to realize the result would be pain, blood. Yet had he not decided—
now! quick!
—he was certain they all would have died slowly and with a greater, all-consuming pain.