Falling Sideways (22 page)
Interesting.
A thought fleeted across his consciousness: those couples on the bridge. Musical comedy. But they hadn’t been smiling.
Then it was gone.
Adam squatted before the shelves of Jes’s brick-and-plank bookcases, examining the titles and the bindings. They stirred a hunger in him. Not many of the author’s names were familiar, but there were a few he recognized from school: Kerouac, Baudelaire, Neruda, Rimbaud. The ones he didn’t recognize at all intrigued him even more. Still others he knew well—Michael Strunge, Dan Turèll—but could remember little he had actually read of theirs. But Jes knew them. He quoted them left and right, along with his sayings of Jalâl and another Eastern poet he called Rumi:
We have many barrels of wine
.
People say we have no future
.
That is fine with us
.
The three of them were warming up here in Jes’s apartment before going on to the North Bodega on Solitude Way, which Adam had promised to show to Jytte. She had never been into a serving house in Copenhagen and had seemed fascinated when he’d told her about it the night before. They met today at Pussy Galore to wait for Jes to get out of work in the key-and-heel bar. Adam ordered beer for the two of them and paid with money he had taken from his savings account. It seemed so simple. It was
his
account,
his
money that his father had forced him to save up ever since he could remember.
Fifteen percent of everything you get—birthday money, Christmas money, Easter money, anything you earn—goes into the account, and you don’t touch it. You let it grow. That’s how you build a fortune. Let your money earn money and don’t let yourself be distracted by the expensive gadgets kids your age waste their time and money on.
When he was still very young, it had occurred to him to ask, “If you never use it, what is it for?”
“For the future.”
“When is the future?”
“You will know it when you get there. And this way you’ll be ready for it.”
Now that he had started his future, it seemed appropriate to make a withdrawal. There were 177,000 crowns in the account, but most of it was in long-term bonds that Adam could not touch until he was eighteen, in three months. But seventeen thousand had been available. His father had had him sign papers to invest in long-term bonds every time there was an accumulation of twenty thousand. This morning, Adam had filled out a withdrawal slip for two thousand, then torn it up and filled one out for seven thousand. Then he’d added a one in front of the seven, shoved the slip across to the teller, and held his breath.
“You want this in cash?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“In cash. In money.”
“Yes, Mr. Kampman, but large notes or small?”
Mister!
“Some of each.”
He had also taken his passport with him just in case. He figured he could go just about anywhere he wanted with that much money, and Jytte didn’t have to be at work again before Monday. If he wanted to, he could just invite her to come away somewhere with him. He could hide away until he was eighteen—that was only three months away—and cash in all the bonds. He could live for a long time on 160,000 crowns. He could maybe go to Jes’s friend’s farmhouse in Jutland and hide away there until he was eighteen. Maybe Jytte would come with him. Suddenly everything seemed possible. He would never have to see his father again. He could maybe start some kind of business. Maybe he could buy a sausage wagon. He could have a lot of books in the wagon and sit there and read all day in between customers, read things like the poems Jes had recited and the ones he played on his CD player with the strange jazz music behind the voices. Someone named Ferlinghetti. And Kenneth Rexroth.
Jes came out of the kitchen with three more green bottles of beer, which he opened by pressing his cigarette lighter against the cap, and the three of them raised the bottles, clanked them together. Another record was playing now, some kind of blues, where a man sang,
Going to Chicago, baby / Sorry I can’t take you. / Ain’t no room in Chicago / Fo a monkey-face woman like you …
Jytte laughed so she had to spit her beer back into the bottle. The candlelight gleamed in the green glass and in the wet on her lips, and Adam watched sidewise from the bookcase. She was so beautiful.
Jes put on another record and started dancing with her. It was a slow song by Bob Marley, and Jytte pulled away from him with a skeptical smile. “No woman, no cry? Is that how you think?”
“People don’t understand that song,” Jes said. “It’s a tender song of admiration for a woman, telling her not to cry.”
Adam sat in a broken cane-seated chair and flipped through a book of photographs by someone named Man Ray. Strange pictures, some of naked women. Now Jes and Jytte danced faster to “I Shot the Sheriff,” and Jytte asked, “What is that supposed to mean, anyway? That he didn’t shoot the deputy? Why?”
“You know why?” Jes said. “You want to know why? Why do you think?”
“How do I know? Maybe the deputy is cute.”
Jes laughed. “
You’re
the cute one. I’ll tell you why I think. ’Cause the deputy is a subaltern.”
“A what?”
“The deputy is subordinate to the sheriff. The sheriff is the guy who’s responsible. He’s the repressive authority. The colonialist. The way I see it, the narrator in the song is out to cut off the head of the oppressor.”
“Well, doesn’t the sheriff work for somebody, too?”
“It’s a metaphor, Jytte,” Jes said, pushing his face close to hers, and Adam could see they were going to kiss. He buried his own face in a thin little black-and-white paperback titled
Howl
. On the first page it said, “Unscrew the locks from their doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!”
He flipped further forward, read a long kind of chant which repeated the word “holy” about twenty times and then went on to name a bunch of body parts that were holy—the skin, nose, tongue, cock, hand, asshole, and then that everyone is an angel.
But even as his eyes took in the words with amazement and excitement and wonder, he could not ignore his awareness that Jes and Jytte were moving into the next room. He heard Jes whisper something to her, and then he could no longer concentrate on the page as his ears tried to filter through Bob Marley’s song to what was happening in the next room. He heard a distant, audible gasp and knew instinctively it was Jytte and what it meant.
He put his hand over his eyes, but he could not stop listening. He rose and stood in the middle of the bare wood floor. There were empty beer bottles and heaped ashtrays and stacks of CDs and CD cases, empty pizza boxes and books and magazines and newspapers everywhere. The record ended. He heard Jytte gasp again, more clearly, then whimper. He looked at his beer bottle where he had placed it on the floor alongside three tall, thick candles, their flames guttering. He leaned down and, one by one, blew out the candles, then quietly let himself out the door.
Hunched forward on the leather sofa, Lars sat watching the TV news. The musty training suit from ALDI hung around him like a sour robe, and his little finger dug up into one nostril. Birgitte watched from the shadow of the living room doorway. He took the pinky out of his nose and studied it for a moment, then put it between his lips. She turned away, swallowing so that she would not gag, before stepping out into the half-light from the flickering TV screen.
“I’ll be late,” she said.
He removed his finger and held it down by his side. Was he wiping something on the leather of the sofa? He said nothing. She watched his face in profile, slack and self-absorbed, aimed at the screen.
“There are some meatballs defrosting in the fridge,” she said. “And a fresh pack of dark rye,” she added, annoyed with herself for bothering. Let him feed himself. Still he said nothing. Her impulse was to just walk out, but she hadn’t told her lie yet. Then it occurred to her that he was intentionally denying her an opportunity to tell the lie, that he was outmaneuvering her. The thought startled her, that a thinking being might be home after all behind that oblivious facade. Now the finger was up in the nostril again.
“Do you think you could stop picking your nose long enough to say good night?” she said, more harshly than she intended.
The hand came down again as he turned to face her. “What?”
“I said I’ll be late.”
His gaze moved down her body, her leather jacket and tight gray pencil skirt, dark stockings. “Lot of sudden meetings, aren’t there?”
“It’s a dinner. I told you about it months ago. You should write things in your calendar.” It was so easy to lie to a man who never listened to her. To her surprise, the lie was pleasant in her mouth. Like a numbing poison to spit into his despicably self-absorbed face. How had she managed not to consider this for so long? How strange the way things happened. Slow, invisible changes, a crack spreading infinitesimally until suddenly the wall breaks down and you see the man you live with is a stranger. Worse than a stranger.
“I thought the dinner was yesterday.”
“No. I told you. That was a strategy meeting.”
He looked at her again. A fragment of a smile touched his lips. “Strategy?” Then he looked back at the screen. She opened her mouth to speak, but his face turned abruptly to her again. “Tell me,” he said, “is somebody fucking you?” His face showed no emotion.
She smiled, could feel the meanness of it. “No,” she said. “Unfortunately nobody is fucking me, and that’s a big problem.”
“So you’re going out to solve it.”
“No. As I told you months ago, I’m going out to a dinner.”
“Where?”
“North Port, if you’d like to know.”
“Where?”
“You’re suddenly so interested. At the Barcelona.”
“Who is it for?”
“It’s a colleague’s fortieth birthday.”
“Who?”
“Harald Jaeger.”
“Didn’t he just get divorced?”
She could think of nothing to say, so she said, “What is this about, Lars? You’ve been ignoring me for months and suddenly you’re suspicious. Well, are
you
fucking somebody? Since that’s the way you think and the word you use. Are you?”
“I’ll drive you to the Barcelona. I’ll come in and say happy birthday to Harald.”
“No, you won’t.”
Now he was on his feet, moving toward her, and her head tipped back to look up into his face, the sudden contortion of his mouth. “You’re fucking somebody, you bitch, and you’re not getting away with it!” He grabbed her arm.
She stumbled back, jerking her arm from his grasp. “You bastard! Get away from me!” But he had both her arms now, and he dragged her forward off balance toward the sofa. She flailed her arms, unable to break from his grip. “You bastard, get your filthy snot fingers off me, you
smell
, you
stink
!” He was pushing her down on the sofa and let go with one hand, which he shoved up inside her skirt, freeing her one hand, which she balled into a fist and hammered down on the side of his head.
He yelled, and both palms flew to his face. “My ear! You punched me right in the ear! I’m deaf! You made me deaf!”
She was on her feet now, but the certainty of her disdain had abandoned her. She stood over him, reaching, but stopped short of touching him. “Are you all right?” she asked stiffly.
“No!” He sat hunched, palm cupped on his left ear, lifting it away to move his head, then covering the ear again, moving the palm away. Then he leapt to his feet and glared at her, his face trembling with indignation. He looked like a little boy on the verge of furious tears. She almost smiled, he looked so silly.
“Are you crying?” she asked.
“No!”
he bawled, and spun away, hurried toward the stairway, took the steps two at a time, and she heard the bedroom door slam shut.
In their six years together, she had never seen Lars like this before. She thought of that expression on his face, the squinted eyes, the lips spread flat across his face, head twitching, the tremor of his voice shouting,
“No!”
and the sight of him, hunched forward, knees, long legs pumping as he ran up the stairway.
Her thigh hurt where it had struck the side of the coffee table. The TV was still running, a smiling man pointing at a weather chart. She retrieved the remote from the carpet and clicked it off, looked for her bag, which she’d lost in the scuffle, stood at the foot of the stairs, irresolute. Slowly, she climbed the steps and stood before the bedroom door. She heard a strange noise coming from behind it, a rhythmic, high-pitched yelp.
My God, was he crying?
Her cell phone rang in her bag. She put her hand in and silenced it. Then she opened the bedroom door.
Jaeger sat in the dark, staring at the illuminated face of his cell phone. She was not answering. Long overdue and not answering. Every time he used his thumb to jab the key for the repeat call, his little finger, swathed in bandages to a bulbous girth, throbbed with pain. He had gone directly from Vita’s to the emergency room at Gentofte, where he was received by a slender nurse, bare-legged in her hospital whites, and a young doctor, who shared his every thought with her as though to secure her agreement.
Jaeger was directed to lay his hand on the table while the two of them touched and poked at it.
“That’s a nasty finger,” the young doctor said to the bare-legged nurse. Jaeger could see her underpants through the thin white material of her uniform.
“Not pretty,” she said.
The doctor jabbed it directly with his plastic-gloved index finger, and Jaeger yelled. The doctor apologized, smiling as he did so.
“Very nasty gash beneath the nail,” he said. “But probably doesn’t need a suture.”
“Probably doesn’t,” the nurse said.
“Probably just bandage it,” he said.
“Probably just disinfect and clamp it, then bandage it,” she said.