Falling Sideways (24 page)
There was some mystery here, it seemed to him. He was being admitted to the mystery of a hidden part of life away in the north of the city. He felt more alive than he could remember feeling for a long time.
He glanced again toward the man seated at the bar with his triple vodka and cigarette. His clothes were messy, lumpy, pale blue jeans and a cheap, dark rain jacket. The man glanced over at Adam and seemed to stare for a moment before looking away. Adam felt as though he were remembering an old and faded nightmare. Was he going nuts?
Again the door jingled—there was some kind of metal wind chimes it struck when it opened—and a man leaned in, glancing quickly around the room, holding the door from closing as though deciding whether or not to enter. A neatly trimmed red beard and mustache circled his mouth, and he wore a rumpled gray suit and red tie. Adam noticed the man’s eyes were chafed and the little finger of his right hand was wrapped in a thick dark bandage.
The woman in the window niche gestured dreamily with her long fingers. “Here is Danish chantleman,” she said.
One of the angry men at the table across from Adam shot a quick look at the man in the doorway and grumbled, “You plan to close that door or what?” He wore a sleeveless shirt that showed his thick, tattooed arms and shoulders.
“Excuse me,” the man said, shutting the door carefully. “Excuse me.” He sat just beside the window niche and ordered a draft. “And please give the lady what she might like.”
“I know you was chantleman,” she said, and lifted an empty stem glass to the bartender. “I am Tatyana,” she said, and extended a long hand in a slow, dreamy reach.
“Harald.”
Their fingers touched, and she said, “You have cigarette for me?”
Jaeger asked the bartender for a pack of ten.
“With the filter,” said Tatyana.
The one angry man—the one with the thick bald head—muttered to the other, “Tatyana’s found a purse for herself,” and the two chuckled and coughed. The bartender delivered the cigarette pack and tore it open for her, then poured peppermint schnapps into Tatyana’s glass.
“To chantleman,” she said, raising the stem glass.
Jaeger was fascinated by the movement of her hands. She looked like some kind of fallen Eastern European nobility. He willed his gaze away from her slender cleavage, up to her thin poppy red lips.
“But you are vounded,” she said, and touched his hand lightly with the tips of her long fingers.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“Hero,” muttered the bare-armed angry man.
“Are you Russian?” Jaeger asked the woman.
“Never Russian,” she said. “I am on way to Stockholm but am stopped here by love. Since three years I am stopped here. He was wery kind to me.”
“Was? Did you leave him?”
“I could never to leave his kindness. He is dead since eight months. Now I wait to come me over him until I continue my journeys. He leave to me his domicile. Little apartaments beneath the level of the sidewalks. I sell this and move on when I am strong again.”
Jaeger nodded, looked into his beer. Sorrow everywhere he turned.
She touched his hand again. “You wanted I should be Russian?” she asked. “Then you do not spit upon me, perhaps?”
“Why in the world would I spit on you?”
“The Danish peoples they spit upon me two times. They spit upon me because I am Polack. And they spit upon me because I am Jew.”
“I’m a Jew myself,” said Jaeger.
“No surprise there,” muttered the angry man.
She stared at Jaeger. Then she reached up to the green-glass shade of the lamp hanging over his table and tilted it back so it shone into his face. “Let me to see your eyes,” she said, and studied him. Then, “You are
not
Jew.”
The angry tattooed man muttered, “Can see clear down to his foreskin.”
She made a little sign to Jaeger to disregard them, shaking her head. Jaeger looked at her cleavage, her thin red lips, her tea brown eyes. Her smile registered and approved his inspection of her.
“Jewish women are best,” he said.
“Perhaps you wife is Jew.”
“I have no wife.”
“You have been with Jewish woman?”
“No.”
She laughed huskily and only now reached for a cigarette from the open pack he had bought her. Jaeger fished a lighter from his pocket, thumbed it clumsily in his left hand, and she drew the hand to her with a gentle touch.
“You do not take cigarette, too?”
“Don’t smoke.”
“Do not smoke but carry lighter to light cigarettes of women. I am right. You
are
chantleman.”
Adam carried his empty bottle to the bar and ordered another Hof, turning his back to the man who had been watching him. Or had he? He wanted to take a good look at the man’s face, to remember it if he showed up again, but he was afraid to provoke him. What did he want? Was he the same man from before, following him? Or was he just going nuts?
As he sat again with a fresh Hof, he glanced up. The man was trimming his cigarette along the edge of a large black plastic ashtray, and it seemed to Adam he was watching him sidewise. He wanted to get away now. Something bad seemed about to happen. But he thought if he left his beer unfinished, it would look queer. And what if someone came after him? All that money in his pocket. But where could he go? Not back to Jes, not with Jytte still there. Picture walking in on them fucking. The thought both excited and depressed him. He could rent a hotel room, but where? And how much would it cost? How old did you have to be? What if he left and the man at the bar followed him? He would run. He was younger, surely he could run faster.
With a jangle of the metal chimes, the door popped open again and Jes leaned in, spotted Adam, and headed straight for him. “Hey, man, what’d you leave for? I been looking all over for you.”
Without knowing he would do so, Adam snapped, “Fuck you, Jes.”
Jes raised his palms in front of his chest. “Whoa!” Then he straightened his posture to imitate Jalâl and proclaimed formally, “When one is greeted with salutation, offer a greeting nicer still. So, my friend: Fuck you twice, please.” Jes got a beer from Erik and straddled the chair across from Adam. “Hey, man,” he said, “I’m sorry if it hurt your feelings that I, you know, fucked your friend.”
Adam sneered. He felt this unexpected mood taking hold of him and followed it unwillingly as it dictated his responses. He wondered how to stop it.
“Hey, I didn’t know you had the hots for her. I thought you were just, like, acquaintances. And she was so cute and so …
ready
.”
“Just fuck you, Jes.”
“You ever been laid?”
Adam’s sneer intensified, and he said nothing.
“Hey, it’ll happen, Adam. You’re young.”
“Oh, and you’re so old, right? The sayings of the wise man Jes.
Ha.
”
Jes rose and made an Arabic fanfare with his right hand. “If any do a bad thing in ignorance but then repents and make amends, assuredly mercifulness and forgiving will forthcome.”
Adam chuckled. He felt the evil mood begin to lift from him, and he began to feel that maybe the man at the bar was just a stranger after all.
The angry man reached one thick, tattooed arm over the back of his chair toward Jes. “You the kid who works for that key-and-heel place, right? That spic perker?”
“At least he’s not a prick jerker,” Jes said with a smile that put Adam’s nerves on edge. He didn’t want any trouble.
“Let’s go,” he muttered. “Let’s go back to your place.”
The tattooed man stared blankly at Jes while Erik rang open the register, shuffled to the jukebox, and dropped in some coins, punched buttons. Daimi came on singing, about her need to find a man who would treat her like a goddess on Solitude Way.
Jaeger and Tatyana started dancing. The tattooed man lifted his beer bottle to his lips without taking his eyes from Jes.
“Something wrong?” Jes asked with a smile.
“You’ll know when it is, mac.”
“Well, good. For it is said that God has sealed the lips and covered the eyes of the ungrateful who have forgotten how to speak nicely to people.”
The tattooed man turned his eyes back to his friend. “You know what the fuck he’s talking about?”
“Not a trace.”
Adam was on his feet, and Jes let himself be edged to the door, still peering back at the man, who muttered, “
Tarzan
, huh?” with sneering lips, tilting back his beer.
The door jangled shut behind them, and Adam hurried toward North Port Street. Jes sauntered behind him. “Come on,” Adam whimpered. “They may come after us.”
“They won’t come after us. They’re losers, man. Losers. Racist assholes.”
As they turned the corner, Adam glanced back and saw the bodega door swing open. “Shit, they’re coming! Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here!” He began to run just as Tatyana appeared around the corner of Solitude Way, snuggled up against the arm of the man with the bandaged little finger.
A rattling plastic bag cradled in each arm, Adam and Jes climbed the six flights to Jes’s apartment.
“We should’ve bought plastic Tuborgs,” Adam said.
“No, my boys,” said Jes. “We are talking about delayed gratification here. We suffer the extra weight now in order not to have to suffer the taste of beer out of plastic later. Plus, this labor increases our thirst, so our enjoyment of beer from glass bottles is even greater. Plastic is multinational shit. Glass is good. Millions of peaches, peaches for me. And you!”
Adam was winded. “What do peaches have to do with anything?”
“You don’t know The Presidents of the United States of America? You’re in for a treat, my boys.”
“Hey, thanks for letting me stay, Jes.”
“Hey, you pay your rent, you’re welcome. The rent is beer. We have thirty-two bottles of beer. Think of it. People might say we have no future, that’s fine with us. Hey, did you see the guy with the finger? At the bodega? That guy works with my father. He works
for
your father. He lives around here. I see him once in a while. What a mess, huh? You see that woman?”
“Looked pretty good to me.”
“Man, you
are
fucking horny.”
The apartment had been littered with empty bottles, heaped ashtrays, and pizza boxes when Adam left. Now he was startled to find the living room all tidied up, glass ashtrays emptied and polished, drinking glasses and plates and utensils washed and stacked in the little kitchen. Even the floor had been swept and the pillows on the ragged sofa plumped.
Adam squatted before the refrigerator and started stacking beer bottles on the shelves.
“I smell a Jutland girl,” Jes said, and slipped down the two-step hallway to the bedroom, tiptoed back, whispering, “There’s a Jutland girl in my bed.”
“In your bed?”
“Yeah, and I think she’s naked. Have you ever seen a Jutland girl naked? Dear God, man, you’re trembling, you are literally trembling. Listen, listen, here is what you got to do. You go in there quietly and you sit on the edge of the bed and you just watch her. Just watch her face. And when she opens her eyes, you smile at her. Don’t blush or fumble or get scared. Just smile right into her eyes. She smiles back, which she surely will, then you lean down and kiss her on the mouth. Not hard or fast—just slow and light. And let what happens next happen.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You got to. Come on.
In.
In in in.”
Adam stood in the bedroom doorway. An oblong of coppery light from somewhere outside fell obliquely across the bed, touching Jytte’s face and her chest beneath the pale bedspread. Beside the bed was a chair, and Adam could see her clothing folded neatly there. A bra, too, hung over the back of the chair. His heart lurched. Jes shoved him lightly and whispered, “Get in there.”
On watery knees, Adam crossed the bare gray planks of the floor and stood beside the bed. It sat very low off the floor, and he felt he towered over the sleeping girl. This wasn’t right. He looked back over his shoulder. Jes jabbed his index finger downward.
“Sit!”
he whispered.
It wasn’t right. She would be so disappointed in him. But he sank to the edge of the bed, not sitting, but on his knees, hypnotized by her pretty, calm face. Her cheekbones were high and luminescent in the coppery light, her jaw strong, her nose, and her skin so clear, so silken, to his eyes. He wanted to reach out and slide his finger down the soft beak of her nose.
Bone in the nose,
he thought, and remembered the time when Jytte threatened to tickle him. The memory brought a smile to his mouth just as she opened her eyes and looked into his face. Her eyes got big and round and so blue, he was afraid she might scream, but then they settled in recognition, and she returned his smile. There was an understanding in it, an acceptance, and she lifted up a little on her elbow to meet his slowly lowering mouth.
Jaeger held his breath and slipped his arm from beneath Tatyana’s neck, slid quietly out of her bed. A car passed outside on Griffenfelds Street, its headlights sweeping through the shallow basement windows, across the bed. She looked so very thin and fragile there in the fleeting light.
His jacket was slung over the back of one of the two chairs in the dining alcove, and he lifted the cell phone from his inner pocket with his left hand. His bandaged finger was throbbing. He looked around for a place where he might call in privacy, without waking her, but there was only this one room, a complex of asbestos-covered whitewashed pipes across the low ceiling, an armchair leaking its stuffing, and a battered drum table in one corner, the dining alcove, a bureau, a scrap of kilim in the center of the gray, stained wall-to-wall. There must be a bathroom.
He found it behind a curtain, a very narrow, very deep room at the end of which was a white toilet bowl. The room was so narrow, his shoulders barely cleared the walls. Fear clutched at him as he moved deeper into the length of the room, a sense of being trapped here, no way out but back, and if someone suddenly appeared, charged him … He could not run, could barely turn, his naked back a square target. He dialed Birgitte’s number with the thumb of his left hand while he peed, and it occurred to him he had not used a condom.