Falling Sideways (4 page)

Jaeger wondered if he was unfair in his judgment of her. They say there are always two sides to a story. But as far as he could see, there was a good deal more to blame on her side than on his. He had thought they could tough it out together, for the sake of the children, for the sake of their beautiful villa and their promising future; but when the violence started and began to escalate, he knew it was time to get out. It started with a heavy glass ashtray on his head and the two of them on their knees cleaning blood out of the expensive white-shag carpeting. She seemed at first to go always for the head, drew blood three times from his scalp, but then once when she came at him, he covered his head, and she lowered her sights, caught him full in the testicles. He swung wild and clipped her on the ear, damaging her eardrum. Thank God it healed. He could never have lived with himself if he had done permanent damage to her, and the prospect of that made it clear to him that it was time to end it.

He did not know why these things had happened. All right, he had cheated on her. More than once. But she had cheated on him, too. With the next-door neighbor, a man named Felix who worked as a poultry expert for the European Union offices in Copenhagen. Another northsider. Jaeger did not mind. In fact, he was pleased. He felt liberated to pursue his own interests, but she seemed to feel that his cheating was less forgivable than hers. There was nothing to do but end it as the mistake it had been from the start. If only they had done so before the girls were born—but how could he ever regret the existence of his two little angels?

Jaeger had eagerly agreed to the unfairly weighted terms of his divorce, had proposed the terms himself. Even the judge presiding in her chambers had requested the clerk to enter in the record that the terms were unfairly weighted against him and required him to affirm that he was aware of that fact before approving the agreement.

The judge, the clerk, both lawyers, and, of course, his ex-wife had all been women. Jaeger had been the only man in the room. Sometimes, in the dark kingdom behind his eyelids, as he made love to some woman or his hand, he reentered Judge Dorrit Kierkesen’s chambers and reorganized the proceedings as the true Dionysian ceremony for which they were a metaphor. Judge Dorrit had not been bad-looking for a woman in her late fifties, nor had his own lawyer been, or his ex-wife’s, who he later learned had herself been divorced from a history professor who kept locks on the refrigerator, telephone, and television set at home, for these, he asserted, all belonged to him and not to his wife or children.

On either side of him now at the Piet Hein table, in their regular places, sat Signe Cress, head of the legal department, slender and sharp as a knife with a tuft of curly blond locks atop her narrow head; and Holger Hansen, chief of public relations, recently recruited from a regional news service, an owl-faced man whose voice when he spoke rattled out of his sinuses. Across the table were Frederick Breathwaite, chief of international affairs, the Tank’s token foreigner, a large, bulky man who walked slowly through the headquarter hallways, speaking Danish like a broken arm; and the newly acquired spin doctor, Ib Andersen, a slender, sprightly man with glistening clean-shaven jowls and manic blue eyes. Andersen was their press spokesman—chosen for the position, Jaeger was convinced, because no one could understand much of what he said, although he spoke with intimidating emphasis and achieved successful results. Jaeger wondered if perhaps that was the secret of success: to emphatically pronounce things no one could quite understand. The CEO was good at that, too. They studied these things in their management courses. Team building and such. Went out to climb mountains together, ford rivers, paddle canoes, eat wild birds cooked over fires built without matches, and learn to mumble double-talk.

Even sitting silently at a meeting, Andersen was his usual hectic self, guzzling coffee, chewing and clicking his trademark red ballpoint pen, shifting in his chair, folding and unfolding his arms, then suddenly sitting bolt upright and flinging the pen down onto his pad and slouching back again, refolding his arms, immediately unfolding them to pick at the corners of his eyes and inspect whatever came away on his fingertips, then, as if suddenly inspired, lunging for the thermos can to refill his coffee cup. He had a restless smart mouth, too, and Jaeger avoided him and his eyes, not to be subjected to one of his sudden epithets or rhetorical questions:
Nobody likes a clever dick
, he might spurt. Or,
What would
you
say if you had something to say?

It grieved Jaeger that he never had a response ready. His mind was usually elsewhere, often immersed to the waist in the wisps of sexual fantasy, and if he replied off the top of his head, he risked voicing inappropriate scorn and resentment. The right response always occurred to him only later, when it was too late. To
Nobody likes a clever dick
, he might have said,
Are you saying you have no friends, Ib?
To
What would you say if you had something to say?
he almost shot back,
I’d say you have a big mouth!
But that had too much surface feeling. Subtle sarcasm was called for. Like:
Say to
you
? Not a pin.

Jaeger shifted his gaze to Frederick Breathwaite, doodling on his pad. Breathwaite had been there longer than any of them. He had chaired the committee that hired Jaeger and had been instrumental in his recent promotion to department head, too, beefing up his work with portfolios from his own department.

Between Fred and Ib, directly across from Jaeger, sat Birgitte Sommer, chief of finance, an angular woman with dark curly hair and burgundy-colored close-set eyes, small and very slender, though with wonderfully round breasts. Even as he considered this, the burgundy eyes turned toward Jaeger for a moment. He looked away and wished he hadn’t, remembered meeting her the Sunday before in the deer park when he’d had his little girls out to see the rutting deer. Birgitte had been out jogging and stopped to chat and had been so sweet with the girls, hunkering down to chat with them, her smile so light, before she’d jogged away again.

Someone’s stomach rumbled. Ib Andersen straightened his posture and touched his middle.
Guilty!
But then he tilted his head and gazed quizzically at Jaeger, as if to cast the ball of guilt over to him. Stomach can’t take all that coffee, eh, Ib? he considered saying but decided it was better not to tempt the spin doctor to start spinning him.

The sun had moved. The CEO’s shadow on the tabletop now slanted to his right, blurring at the far edge. Half his craggy face was now visible, the other half in shadow.

Rather, Jaeger thought, the world had moved, not the sun. The sun was stationary in relation to the earth. That had been proven hundreds of years ago by someone. Who? Galileo? Who went to prison for daring to assert that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the planetary system. Yet we still talk about the sun rising. The sun, Jaeger remembered having read somewhere or other, suffers unendingly and owes us nothing. Jaeger owed things. He owed money to his ex-wife and daughters that had to be paid every month for at least twelve years, perhaps more if the girls went on to university, as he fervently hoped they would, debts he was grateful for and eager to pay. The girls were six and four years old, blond like their mother. But blond Vita’s shadow was dark as the pit.

His eyes turned to the great oil painting on the wall at the opposite end of the conference table from where the CEO sat. The subject was hard to identify. It looked like some kind of deep canyon viewed from the rim above, red and blue at the same time, like cold flames, like those blue flames on a gas-run fireplace, like a chilly hell. He could not recall how long it had been there or who had selected it. Perhaps the immediate past administrative chief, a toad-faced blond-headed Clever Dick who lasted only two years in the organization and whose dislike of Jaeger was evidenced by his habitually forgetting to include Jaeger’s name on meeting invitations. He had even once invited the assembled staff to a reception at his own home without inviting Jaeger. But Jaeger was still here and Clever Dick was gone, a matter of grim satisfaction. Jaeger’s feelings had been hurt by the man, but he’d never disliked him, had wanted the man to like him, or at least not to dislike him. It had been clear Clever Dick had wanted Jaeger gone, and he suspected that Breathwaite had saved his backside for him. Not the only time, either. Why? Goodness of his heart? Or to stockpile favor vouchers?

He glanced over at Breathwaite again, still doodling elaborately on the pad before him. Jaeger tried to get a glimpse of the doodles, but Breathwaite’s free hand was cupped around the pad. His gaze lifted toward Breathwaite’s face, took in his necktie, a broad, sporty slant stripe of silver and blue knotted neatly at his throat, and the sporty robin’s-egg jacket he wore. The lapels, Jaeger noticed, were hand-stitched. Elegant. The lapels of Ib Andersen’s gray jacket were hand-stitched, too, though a bit frayed. He wore the same jacket every day. Jaeger wondered when it had last been cleaned. Then he tried to remember when he himself had last cleaned the jacket he had on, one of two he owned, handwoven Irish tweeds he’d bought on sale at Cleary’s in Dublin some years before, on holiday when the punt was low. Pre-euro money. Before the green tiger. Before divorce. He couldn’t recall if the lapels were hand-stitched and didn’t care to bend his face down now to see, but he was quite certain they weren’t, even if the jacket
was
handwoven.

The CEO was tieless, wearing a black turtleneck shirt with the word
Boss
emblazoned black on black at the collar, his beige, glove-leather jacket on the chair back behind him. With a glove-leather jacket, you hardly needed hand-stitched lapels. But did a CEO really need a turtleneck shirt that said “Boss” at the collar, even if discreetly black on black? A mounting sense of insufficiency rose in him. He didn’t have money for a new jacket. He wondered if the other two men on his side of the table also had hand-stitched lapels, wondered if this was noticed about him. Cheap-ass clothing. He remembered … Lost the thought.

The woman beside him, Signe Cress, head of the legal department, also one year younger than Jaeger and one step higher on the hierarchical totem, was taking notes with a silver Cross pen in a fine script he could not quite decipher. It worried him vaguely that she seemed to understand enough of what the CEO was saying to take notes. Maybe there really was something wrong with his ears. Or perhaps she was only writing a grocery list or some private ruminations. Perhaps she was planning the menu for a party she would host. Or writing a poem. Fat chance. Now Breathwaite might be writing a poem, although he was not writing at all at the moment or even doodling. He was only staring down into his glass of water—he never drank coffee at the meetings as the others did—as though he saw in its depths some foreign epic of great tragedy. Breathwaite was a great reader of books, which reminded Jaeger of the days when he himself used to read books. Jaeger was once placed at the international table of the annual banquet with Breathwaite and an American couple, the male half of whom had been trained as an astronaut and whose wife said that her husband read to her at night in bed. “What does he read?” Breathwaite asked.

“At the moment he is reading me
Lassie
,” she replied. There was a silence, and then she asked Breathwaite, “Read anything good lately yourself?”

“Yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact, Neruda’s memoir.”

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“A Chilean poet. He won the Nobel Prize in 1971.”

“Oh, how cool!” she exclaimed. “A
poet
!”

Even if his English was not all it ought to be, Jaeger had enjoyed the exchange, although it made him slightly uneasy that while he did know, vaguely, who Neruda was, he had never read a word the man wrote—in Spanish, English, or Danish.

The CEO cracked a joke, and everyone laughed. Jaeger heard only half the joke and did not get it.

Birgitte Sommer, across the table from him with her exciting, curly black hair and narrow burgundy eyes, laughed by opening her mouth wide so he could see all her teeth and her tongue. The end of her tongue, a small red bulb, wobbled in the dark vault beneath her palate, and her round breasts jiggled alluringly.

Jaeger tried to figure out the joke even as he laughed. He wondered if all the others understood the joke, whether he was the only one who did not get it, though in his own defense he reminded himself he had only been half listening. Idly he wondered what would happen if he said now,
I don’t get it
.

He glanced at Breathwaite and noticed that there was no merriment on the man’s bulky, jowly face. Jaeger liked Breathwaite, a loner, a somewhat shadowy figure, though always approachable, always helpful and quick with sage advice. Nearly twenty years Jaeger’s senior, Breathwaite alone was not placed in the hierarchy of the department heads, for his sphere of responsibility was not linked with the others. Breathwaite was the Tank’s eyes in the greater world outside of Denmark. What Danes usually termed “the big world,” meaning the “real” world that did not really matter, for it seldom enough rippled the water of this little kingdom of islands. Such had it been since 1864, when the last great battle was lost, in Jutland, to the Germans, and the nation’s spiritual adviser, N. F. S. Grundtvig, advised the country, “What we have lost to the world we must regain from within.” Or something like that. Jaeger could not remember all the details.

Breathwaite would surely know precisely what Grundtvig had said and meant even if Breathwaite was a foreigner. He had once heard Breathwaite remark that if Denmark had not lost to Germany in 1864, Bismarck would never have been able to unite Germany and neither the First nor the Second World War would have happened. Of course, he’d added, something else, maybe even worse, surely would have filled the vacuum.

Jaeger was intrigued by Breathwaite’s book reading. He always had a book with him, on his messy desk, in his bulky satchel, novels and poetry and other things. It worried Jaeger that he himself had stopped reading years ago. Periodically he tried to begin again and would start some book or other, but invariably he got so excited by the first sentence or paragraph or page that he would close the book and start thinking about it, pour a drink, turn on the TV, and never get back to it.