Falling Sideways (26 page)
Karen was in the living room with her feet up on the red ottoman, a stem glass of wine balanced on the arm of the easy chair.
Kampman registered the wine with a silent glance. “I’d like a word with the au pair,” he said.
“I let her go early.” Light glinted in her stockings as she turned her feet toward each other on the ottoman.
“Oh?”
“I didn’t want you interrogating her.”
He said nothing for a moment. She sipped her wine. It occurred to him that Karen knew something. It also occurred to him that her tone was out of character.
“I can understand you’re upset,” he said. “I am, too.”
She glanced at him. “
You’re
upset?”
“Naturally.”
“How can you be so, so, so
cool
if you’re upset?”
“Let’s not paint Satan on the wall, okay?”
“Martin,” she said, “our son is missing.”
He stopped himself from saying,
Red wine won’t bring him back.
Instead he said, “Now why don’t you tell me where he is.” A calculated gambit he immediately saw would work. He saw it in the shifting of her eyes, in the careful, labored manner with which she put the wineglass on the end table and licked her lips, already wanting to pick up the glass again. If he bent to kiss her, he was certain he would smell tobacco on her breath.
“What are you talking about, Martin?” Shrill edge to her voice.
“Karen.” Quiet but firm.
She lifted her feet from the ottoman. “I have to look in on the twins,” she said, and rose, slender and graceful in her bare feet but no match for him. With a single step he moved to block her path to the staircase. Then, remembering the scene with Adam last Saturday, which he had kept to himself, he decided to limit the movement, keep it to a gesture. He wondered whether she had been in contact with Adam, whether Adam had phoned her, told about what had happened between them.
Well, yes. Sure I grabbed his arm. The boy was totally out of control.
“Karen, I know that Jytte and Adam are involved. I’m certain she knows where he is and that she told you. This rubbish has to be stopped immediately.”
He could see she hesitated to pass him, even though the path from her chair to the stairway was only halfway blocked. There would be no more violence here. He had decided that. The boy had caught him by surprise. It would not happen again.
“I think he needs time.”
“You might be right,” Kampman said. Her eyes scanned his face with rapid surprise. “But I need to know where my son is. I won’t have this information kept from me. I certainly wouldn’t keep it from you.”
She stared at her feet, toes pointed in.
“He’s staying in North Bridge,” she said. Then she reached for the wineglass, and he knew he had won.
“I’ll need the address.”
From where he stood on St. Hans Square, near a sculpture that resembled some kind of elaborate swastika, Breathwaite could see into the window of the Dome of the Rock Key & Heel Bar. What he saw through the window was his youngest son wearing a blue workman’s smock and grinding a key on some kind of lathe. It stung him to see his youngest, most intelligent boy dressed as a worker, performing the labor of an unskilled workman. Kirsten would call him a snob if she could hear his thoughts, but it was not snobbishness; it was respect for the boy’s intelligence and fear of how he was branding himself in this country, where a person who played at being an unskilled laborer ran a very real risk of ending with that as his only option. In the United States, you could reinvent yourself repeatedly. You could probably do it here, too, but only with great effort. Here you were expected to have your papers in order. It was a small country. Every failure was noticed, registered. There were people everywhere who remembered you, and opinions were seldom revised for the better.
Breathwaite still had hopes for Jes. Jes was capable of doing what he himself had almost done. Jes was capable of more, much more.
Outside the shop was a little wooden pony ride. Breathwaite could remember slotting coins into one like that on one of the Greek islands when he and Kis vacationed there with the kids many years before. He remembered Jes, the baby, delighted as Breathwaite fed drachmas into the slot for him while his older brothers smashed each other with some kind of volleyball in the pool. Where had it been? Crete? And later, Lesbos, still later Cephallonia and Lefkada and Ithaca.
Breathwaite had told Jes the stories of Sappho and Alcaeus, stories his brothers wouldn’t sit still for but which lit the fire of imagination in Jes’s eyes. He told the boy about Oedipus and Sisyphus and Homer. They traced together on a map the journeys of Odysseus around Cephallonia back to Ithaca, and Breathwaite told him about the modern Ulysses, the pacifist, who would not harm his wife’s suitors as Odysseus had butchered his, who longed for his son as surely as Telemachus longed for the return of his father. He read him the modern Greek poets, too—he could remember reading George Seferis to him, about the soul’s need to look into itself for self-knowledge.
Jes had not been more than eight or nine, but his eyes glittered with comprehension of the journeys, the Homerian monsters and the Joycean parallels, and Breathwaite knew that this was the one to put his money on. This was the boy who had it. He could have been whatever he wanted. If only he stayed with it, he could be a university professor, more. He could be a learned man, an authority, a person the world came to for wise counsel. Or a CEO with fat perks. A leader of industry, of professionals. He just needed a fix of the sweet life to keep him pushing the wheel.
This kid had so much going for him. Breathwaite would not abandon him to a career in IT, and he certainly would not sacrifice him to a key-and-heel bar. All he needed was a little taste of success, of the possibilities, a little bit of money—he would finish his university and go on.
Breathwaite opened the door of the shop and stepped in. Jes glanced up. “Hey, Dad,” he said curtly, and the little man with gray hair curling up from beneath the rim of his black cap raised his face from the shoe last.
“Is your father, Jes?” he asked, sliding off his stool, wiping his palms on his smock. “I see you boy’s face in you, Mr. Breathwaite,” he said. “I am Jalâl al-Din. We have speak in telephone. Welcome. You will have tea?”
“Thank you, Mr. Din, I only need a word with my boy.”
“Is clever boy! Very clever!”
“Thank you.”
“I’m working, Dad,” Jes said, and Breathwaite tried not to hear ironic echoes from the boy’s childhood. Was that the kind of father he had been?
I’m busy, son.
“I saw a nice place over on Ahorn Street. You know the Ahorn Room? Meet me there for a beer when you get off. I’ve got something to tell you.”
“I don’t have much time, Dad.”
“You go with father,” said Jalâl. “You go now. I finish here.”
“No, no,” said Breathwaite. “I can wait. Meet me for a beer, Jes.”
“Just
one
, Dad.”
Breathwaite killed time strolling down Guldbergs Street, past Café Rust. He stopped to read a graffito painted on the outer ocher wall: “Meat Is Murder.” The papers had recently carried a story about a shooting in the road here. Two men wearing ski masks in an idling car had fired a dozen or more bullets that riddled the wall and cobblestones, caught a young man, a karate trainer, in the leg and the buttock. Another bullet pierced the hand of a girl who happened to be standing there. A miracle no one was killed. The journalist interviewed a witness, a young man with dazed eyes. “Apparently anything can happen here now,” he said, and would not give his name.
Breathwaite wanted Jes out of here. He could sell his apartment for a handsome profit, let some other young idiot earn his street creds here while Jes moved up and on.
Right on Ahorn and into the Ahorn Room, a new yuppie bar he had read about in the entertainment supplement of
Politiken
, all chrome and prime colors in a modernized semibasement. It looked like a bad imitation of something out of Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange
. Breathwaite ordered a vodka martini straight up, and the barmaid mixed it by twirling a long chrome stirrer between her palms. A bearded man, the owner apparently, ambled over and said softly in New York–accented English, though loud enough for Breathwaite to hear, “Sweetheart, you’re bruising the gin.”
“That’s how I was taught to do it,” the girl said, smiling.
“Well, better unlearn it. Observe and be enlightened.” And he danced the stirrer up and down in the mixing glass while Breathwaite looked away and lit a cigar, suppressing the urge to tell the man that she had not been bruising gin, but he
was
bruising vodka.
The vodka eased his annoyance, and he considered the fact that the American could not be any older than he himself had been when Jes was born—thirty-seven. It seemed absurdly young to be a father, even as he recognized the absurdity of the thought. In fact, thirty-seven was not at all young to become a father; he was nearly old enough to be his youngest son’s grandfather, and maybe that was the problem. But it was said that being born to older parents enhanced the child’s intelligence.
That’s probably a crock of crap, too,
he thought, gazing through the low window beside his chrome chair out to a fenced side yard patched with withered weeds. The chain-link fence reminded him of his boyhood in Queens, as did the arrogance of the bar owner.
There is no provincial like a native New Yorker. When you come from the biggest city in the world, nothing is good enough to satisfy your ignorance.
It occurred to Breathwaite that he was developing an animosity toward his fellow American expatriates, and he wondered why that should be. Although his children all had dual citizenships, he himself was still technically an alien here; the Danish authorities required that he surrender his blue American passport before being issued a red Danish one—something he could not bring himself to do. The kids had both passports as their birthright. He suspected the two older boys were closet Republicans, Bush and Fogh supporters. Bush-men, lost in the Fogh. Jes, he was certain, leaned lefter than left, but that would correct itself in time. Everyone moved right with age, but what the hell happened to someone who was already right of center in his youth?
Morose thoughts. But the vodka helped as the level of clear fluid in the cone of the cocktail glass receded. It occurred to him that the greatest share of the drink was in the mouth of this glass. What remained at the pointed cone bottom wouldn’t fill a thimble.
He called to the barmaid, “Would you please bruise me another vodka.”
She chuckled, began spooning ice into the shaker just as Jes appeared down the little front flight of stone steps.
“Make that two, please. Doubles.” Good chill dry martini might be just the seduction needed.
Jes rendered a perfunctory hug, taller by an inch or two, though half the girth of his father, before he sat and said, “So what’s up, Dad?”
It stung Breathwaite that his son felt free to be so curt. He wondered if his own impatience with his own father had ever been so naked, supposed that it had been, supposed that he had never succeeded in concealing his disappointment that his father had never visibly addressed his wife’s (
my mother’s!
) roll in the hay with the fucking laundryman, that his father’s kindness might have been mere weakness. He recognized and appreciated the irony that he could admire the pacificism of Joyce’s fictional cuckold, Leopold Bloom, but never quite forgive his own father for the same behavior in reality.
Maybe the problem here,
he thought,
is an excessive appreciation of irony; insufficient recognition of the slaughtered emotions that lie beneath it.
Even now, forty-something years later, Breathwaite could reach in and pick at the scabs and feel the blood of anger ooze from the wound. He wished to hell that he had been kinder to his dad, hoped he had been kinder than it felt just now that he had been.
“What’s up?” he said now to his son. “A vodka. Straight up, in fact,” he said just as the waitress came around from behind the bar with a little tray bearing two classic cocktail glasses of pure clear chill liquid. Breathwaite did not fail to notice the barmaid’s appreciative glance at his good-looking son. And he was pleased to see that Jes’s time could thus be purchased; the boy’s eyes gleamed at the sight of the glass. Father and son lifted them by the stem and toasted with a glance.
“Your boss seems a nice enough fellow,” Breathwaite said.
“Well, you know how it is, Dad: You can’t teach a monkey to speak and you can’t teach Danish values to a sand nigger.”
“A
sand nigger
?”
“Maybe you prefer ‘camel jockey.’ ”
“What in the hell are you talking about, son?” Breathwaite was almost losing it, his son’s cracks had so unnerved him. “Are you implying that I use language like that?”
“Easy, Dad, it was meant as irony.”
“Irony?” There it was again. “Toward
me
?”
“If the shoe fits, repair it.”
Indignation swelled within him, and Breathwaite felt the moment spiraling away before it had even begun. He wanted desperately to drop this, but how? He calmed his voice. “Do you think I’m a racist?”
The boy shrugged. “Maybe not.”
“You
know
I’m not. So what are you talking about?”
“I was being ironic, Dad.”
“Irony is pretense. Be careful who you pretend to be, Jes.”
“Amen, Dad.”
Breathwaite wondered if he had really been so quickly, so easily, outmaneuvered. He let the moment steep for a bit as he took out his cigars, offered the opened metal box, and was heartened that his son accepted. Breathwaite lit them both up, puffed, sipped his vod martin. Then he said, “Listen, Jes. Don’t quote me on this, please, I wouldn’t want to hurt your brothers’ feelings, but I’ve always considered you the sharpest of the three …”
“I know that, Dad, and I never much cared for having that laid on me.”
“What? The fact of your potential?”