Falling Sideways (33 page)
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 the 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.
Jaeger looked up from his desk—formerly Claus Clausen’s desk—in the tiny cramped office that had been Clausen’s and saw his colleague moving past, leather meeting planner beneath his arm, on his way to the Mumble Club. Clausen saw Jaeger looking and leaned in around the jamb, his tall, rangy body draped up against it.
“How goes?” Clausen asked.
“It goes.”
“Y’okay?”
“All in all,” said Jaeger. “I miss my windows …”
“Great windows.”
“… but it is almost worth it that I don’t have to attend those meetings anymore.”
Clausen’s smile dripped with pity, which Jaeger did not wish to have and which he feared might have been intentionally taunting. In a bid to appear lighthearted, he said, “Listen, now that you sit in on those meetings, why don’t you propose another office for me? One with windows.”
“Of all people, you should know, Harald. That’s not how we play the piano here.”
Jaeger felt the naked droop of his own lips.
Big boys don’t cry.
But clearly Clausen saw it, too.
“Guess it’s been pretty tough for you, Harald,” he said. “Did they stiff you bad on the money? What are they paying you now?”
You insolent prick! Eat this:
“Well, Claus, it’s like this. Being asked that is like being asked how big your dick is. If it’s big, discretion dictates humility. And if it’s little, well, you just don’t much want that information getting around, you know?”
Clausen looked hard at him. Jaeger’s instant of satisfaction led immediately to regret. This man could hurt him even more than he was hurt. But before he could try to make amends, Clausen was gone. And now he had said it. Clausen knew he had seen behind the towel that day in the showers.
You idiot.
He and Clausen had not been out for a drink or a meal together since what Jaeger referred to, in the privacy of his thoughts, as his “reversal of fortune.” The phrase was consoling, seemed to lend a dignified formality to the mess of his life. It seemed to him that in the snap of two fingers he had lost virtually everything of the little that had remained after the divorce: title, corner office, windows, secretary, a third of his salary, the apartment he could no longer afford to meet the mortgage payments on, and, worst of all, his two angels. And now, apparently, his friendship with Clausen.
He was struggling to maintain some semblance of pride, and he would not suggest to Clausen that they meet for a drink. Clausen would have to take that lead. If he suggested it to Clausen and was turned down, the refusal would be one more blow of the hammer driving him deeper into the pit of loss. So he had to wait and swallow the indignity of waiting, counting the pennies of the aftermath of his disgrace. At least, he thought, he no longer had to worry about calamity descending upon his life. It had descended.
And at least he still had a job. If only he had not made that crack to Clausen.
Kampman had called him in and with seeming profound regret informed him that he had reviewed the personnel budget with the board and that he had been instructed to make some rotations. “And”—he firmed his lips as if with brave sorrow—“to let some people go. Even my own secretary. We’ll be moving Clausen around. And we cannot afford to maintain the current department head structure.”
Jaeger felt sweat soak the back of his shirt, beneath his arms. Jaeger, who was two years older than the CEO, felt as though he were being lectured by his father. In a way, he realized, he thought of the CEO as his father.
Please understand me; I hate you.
“I will certainly understand,” Kampman said, “if you feel unable to accept what I can offer.”
Only after he had left the CEO’s office did Jaeger hear echoed in his own ears the sound of his own voice thanking the man profusely for the demotion and decrease in salary, see in his mind’s eye the picture of himself clutching and shaking the CEO’s hand, which declined to respond to the clinging pressure of Jaeger’s.
Now, at his new desk in his miserable little windowless alcove, he looked at the hand that had so instinctively and ignominiously betrayed his own dignity, or the scrap of it that remained. He stared at the five-fingered traitor, the pulpy tip of the pinky with the pink crescent edge of nail that had begun to reappear.
Someone passed in the hall, and he glimpsed Birgitte Sommer on her way to the Mumble Club. Had that been the edge of a smile of malicious triumph on her lips? As he sat there gazing out, the new woman from accounting passed and glanced in, smiling. Jaeger had met her only once, and they had hardly spoken. When he’d introduced himself, she had offered her hand, and as he moved to take it, she stepped closer and he accidentally cupped her breast in his palm, jerked his hand away as if stung, face full of apology, but she’d only smiled. With plump lips that were made to be kissed. And her butt so gorgeous that it was almost painful for him to behold. Now, as if his mental response to its power had radiated out into the hallway and nudged her, she dropped the pencil she was carrying and bent to retrieve it, drawing blue green denim tight around those globes of marvel. Jaeger felt himself stiffen as his heart lurched, pumping blood toward his center, rallying for action. She straightened again and smiled once more, the tip of her tongue, its underside, slipping out to wet her upper lip.
Oh God,
Jaeger thought.
Oh God, oh God, oh God, you are so fucking beautiful!
At the nadir of the long deep tiled toilet, Jaeger sat with his pants around his ankles, elbows on his knees,
trying
. Another of his losses. He had never had this problem before.
Never.
On the contrary.
The curtain slid aside on its rod, and Tatyana appeared. Jaeger coughed to alert her to the fact that he was present.
“I vill not look,” she said. She was naked. “Haf you had success?” she asked, looking away from him, in sympathy with his leaden bowels.
“Nul and nix,” he said. “Can’t even take a successful crap anymore.”
She lifted the telephone shower from its hook on the wall and began to wash herself in its feeble spray, five meters from him, turning her long thin body in the narrow space between the walls. She hummed in a minor key as she washed, eyelids lowered, a smile on her lips. The melody was deeply sorrowful, but through her smiling lips and with its resonance in the high narrow space, there seemed some reverse power at the core of its sorrow, some reverent beauty.
He studied her, the lines of her, the childlike buttocks and the mysterious cleft between, the fork of her limbs with its vertical lips—an enigmatic tilted smile, her tiny breasts, china-delicate hands, fingers, wrists, feet—the feet on which she stood, toes lightly spread to negotiate her balance. The electric light from behind the curtain limned the lines of her in the steam of the water, and it seemed to him then that her body was a screen both shielding and revealing the light that blazed within her being.
He stepped out of his pants and shoes, stripped off his shirt, and stepped forward to kneel before her. She opened her eyes and beamed her smiling mouth down at him.