Falling Sideways (7 page)
Breathwaite crossed the lakes, chiding himself for his hard and pessimistic frame of mind.
What the hell? Just been fired. Got a right to be sour.
He followed Nørrebrogade past the grimy streets where he’d had his own first apartment in Copenhagen, he and Kis when they’d started out, a two-room on Peder Fabers Street that they’d bought for nothing, sold for triple what they paid, but which now would have been worth a cool million. Mistake to sell that, too. Now, apart from their summer house, they had nothing, a rented luxury flat. Money out the window every month.
Mistake.
He paused on the avenue to gaze across through passing traffic. In the gaps between the cars whizzing past, he could make out the broad face of a burial association. Danish terminology always made him smile, straight from the shoulder as it was. No portentous purple metaphors here. No funeral parlors—which was to being dead, he thought, as a cocktail lounge was to being crocked. This particular shopfront advertised, ARBEJDERNES LIGKISTER—literally, “Workers Corpse Boxes.”
At Blågårds Place, he stopped at Café Flora and ordered a pint, sat in hopes his son might happen by, and found himself thinking about his conversation with the CEO. Shit-canned at fifty-nine.
“Unfortunately we have to cut from the top as well as the bottom,” Kampman said. “I’m sorry.”
Breathwaite had entertained this possibility but considered it a long shot. The international work at the Tank had grown increasingly important with the growth over the past decades of the European Union from six member states to nine to twelve to fifteen to twenty-five, soon to twenty-seven. How in the world could they do without his experience? Well, clearly, they could. His salary was second only to the CEO’s and equal to the administrative chief’s. He had counted on staying until he was sixty-five to build up his pension in the last five years. By stopping him now, they saved at least six million plus benefits. The arithmetic was simple and clear. But even though Kampman was only thirty-nine, he had finesse enough to let that say itself.
Breathwaite knew he had to say what he had said next, though he profoundly regretted it. “And if I took a cut?”
Kampman only shrugged slowly, smiled ruefully, more a firming of the lips than a smile. An answer that was not an answer. Unquotable. They learned these things in their management courses. He would get not a golden, but a silver (rather a silver-plated) handshake. A half year’s severance. Half a million crowns. He converted to dollars—something he still had to do to get a real sense of the value of the figure. Not quite eighty thousand bucks gross.
Nothing, really. Nothing. Considering the Danish tax structure.
And conditional, it went without saying, on his delivering his Irish contacts.
Breathwaite considered what else he might say. He found himself thinking how old guys know how nasty young men are because that’s how they once were themselves, covetous and impatient, overrating themselves as they lunged out after what they wanted and did not have, what some older man was occupying, blocking them from.
I was never like that. I wasn’t. I fought with hard work. Or am I kidding myself?
If the soul is ever to know itself, it must gaze into the soul.
That is, if you even have a soul. Anymore.
Then he remembered what he’d wanted to say to Kampman: “We knew this was coming. We saw it coming two years ago. Longer.”
“It was a possibility,” said Kampman with firm lips.
“Why didn’t we prepare for it?”
That shrug again. That rueful smile that was not a smile. Conveying what? An answer that was not an answer.
You saw the advantage in this
, Breathwaite did not say.
Now, in the café, a black fly landed on the back of his hand resting on the tabletop. He flicked it away. It rose and landed again on his wrist. Another flick and it buzzed his nose. He backhanded at it, but it landed again a few inches from his beer, lifting and falling on its spindly legs that sawed against each other. Hideous little bat the size of snot. Breathwaite wondered if he would be fast enough to flatten it with the tip of his index finger, but at his first movement, the fly was up and buzzed his ear. This was unfair. It buzzed him again, and then he thought,
What is that fly trying to tell me? As if it had an urgent message. As if I am a glorious planet, it lands here and there on me, touching down again and again despite my every effort to discourage it, to indicate that it is not welcome. Does it
want
me to kill it? Is life as a fly so miserable?
He finished his beer and strolled back toward the lakes, stood on the bank of Peblinge watching the swans float around like question marks. A duck crawled up onto the concrete lip of the bank and waddled over to him, perhaps thinking he had bread to share. The duck looked up at him and honked twice.
Which, Breathwaite thought, translated from duck as,
No bread
.
It was love at first sight. Leaving him behind about broke Kis’s heart. An eight-week-old golden retriever pup she had been offered by her boss for practically nothing. He looked like a little furry clump of golden sunlight, and the minute she set eyes on him, a name popped into her head. Amon-Ra. Who was that again? Then she remembered it was the name of the Egyptian sun god. Or, no, it was just plain Ra, wasn’t it? Better yet, and that was what she would call the pup.
Ra
. If she could call it anything.
Fred would never go along with it.
She stepped away from the building front on Østergade where she worked and felt the ache of emptiness in her arms where the little thing had been. So sweet.
So
sweet. She felt like a child whose father had refused her a pet. Helpless. Hopeless. She would do
anything.
I’ll
take care of it, Fred, you won’t have to do a thing.
Turning up Strøget, the Walking Street, she decided that if Magasin’s outdoor café was still open, she would stop for a cappuccino—
no
, for a glass of wine—and do some thinking. But it was not open. So—to hell with it!—she pushed through the side doors of Magasin and rode the escalator down to the basement café and ordered a glass of merlot.
She lit a cigarette and found herself thinking about the pope. It was
his
fault that she couldn’t have a puppy. Fred was all locked up in guilt. Martin Luther was right. The Catholics had it all wrong. Guilt and shame. Kneeling and bowing the head—bowing for what? the butcher’s knife?—and beating the breast.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
Ow my tit, ow my tit, ow my most battered tit!
And that story about the guilt wheel in the heart that some damn priest had told Freddy when he was a boy.
If you do a bad thing, the guilt wheel starts to turn and its sharp edges cut into the tender skin of your heart and the blood of shame and pain spills from the cut. But the more bad you do, the duller the edges get, so finally you can’t even feel the pain anymore. You just sin and sin and sin and you don’t feel a thing.
Sounds like a plan to me, Freddy.
He had liked that. He didn’t want the guilt, and he’d come a long way from it, she thought, but still it was the guilt that made him fold into himself and cut him off and fear being engaged with others. If you were engaged with someone, you might do something wrong, something to hurt them. When you were alone, there was no one to hurt but yourself. Not even a puppy!
It’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s that he doesn’t dare.
She was certain of that. It
had
to be that. If it wasn’t that, she didn’t know him at all, and if she didn’t know him after all these years, why then …
He had done so much better when the children were little, when they needed him. Such a loving father. But his expectations were so great and his disappointments, too. When the children didn’t do what he saw as best for them, then the guilt got cooking, and it was
his
fault, and there it was again.
Sometimes she wanted to shake him, shock him.
Freddy, you’re your mother’s son! You’ve got an Italian heart, not an Irish one. You’re not Catholic, you’re an amorist! A hedonist! No wonder your mother cheated on your father! Who could stand to live with all that guilt and piety? It’s enough to make a sinner of anybody!
But of course, she wouldn’t say that. Such words were not spoken or even insinuated.
She lit another cigarette and signaled for another glass of wine, which the waiter brought with a dazzling smile, a tall, slim boy with tight black pants pinching his delightful ass. Tight at the front, too. Nice thick wad to wrap your palm around. Oh, to have Fred’s prick in me again! But all he thought about these days was his disappointment with Jes.
“That boy has greatness in him, Kis,” he had told her once.
“Who needs greatness? Let him live and be happy. All a person really needs is a little love in his life, Fred.” (
Or
her
life
, she didn’t add, but he heard it anyway.)
“Want me to try Viagra, Kis?”
“No! What if you get a heart attack? Anyway, it only works if you have the desire—I read all about it—and if you have the desire, why in the world would you need Viagra? This is all mental, Freddy.”
“Since when are you such an expert on everything?”
“I know a few things, Freddy. It’s the Sermon on the Mount that matters about the church, about any church that calls itself Christian. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that we should love our neighbors. That’s what matters. Not all that guilt and sin, but love. That’s what Jesus said.”
“In fact, Jesus did not say that in the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, it is from the Old Testament. God to Moses as reported in Leviticus. And in the same chapter, God instructs Moses that certain women, if they are not free women, that it’s appropriate to scourge them for adultery. That’s something of a conflict, wouldn’t you think?”
“You know so much, Freddy. But how much do you really understand? Who cares where it’s written, it’s true.”
“It’s your truth.”
“The only truth.”
He was smiling at her. He reached to touch her face. “Sometimes I think you’re the only real Christian I’ve ever known.”
“My God!” Jaeger yelped, following Breathwaite through the entryway of his apartment into the triple en suite living room. “What an apartment!”
Breathwaite spoke over his shoulder. “As a wise man once said, If you have to be bored, it might as well be in comfortable surroundings.”
“You don’t strike me as particularly bored,” Jaeger said, running his fingertips over the multicolored spines of books in the library shelves, floor to ceiling. He calculated quickly—four meters by four meters. Sixteen square meters of books. He felt his knees might buckle under the weight of the diminishment he felt. It occurred to him he could never invite Breathwaite and Kis home to his own measly apartment. He felt ashamed. He felt like nothing.
Kis floated lightly in from the next room with a bright smile of greeting. She kissed Jaeger lightly on the lips. “Hello, Harald. Welcome.”
“Jesus,” said Jaeger. “This man has
everything
. A beautiful home, a sweet beautiful wife, three grown successful kids …”
“How’re your little girls?” Kis asked.
“I just love ’em to death,” he said in stilted English, a line from some American movie. “They are so sweet.”
“Enjoy them,” said Breathwaite. “Those are the best years.”
The thought of his girls cheered him. At least he had that.
“Do the girls have a puppy?” Kis asked. “You should give them a puppy. Every little girl should have a puppy.” She glanced at Breathwaite, who rolled his eyes. “How about Vita?” Kis asked then. “How is she holding up?”
“I’m sure she’s fine as she can be,” Jaeger grumbled. Then, “I envy this apartment,” he said, trying to get control of the envy by confessing it. “What a place!”
“It’s okay,” she said, “but you know what? I never asked for this. I could be happy in a construction shed.”
“Says you,” said Breathwaite, and Jaeger laughed sarcastically.
“I mean it,” Kis said, then added, “As long as I could have a puppy.”
Breathwaite grunted.
“Really,” Kis insisted. “I was up and down once in my childhood. My father lost everything, and my mother became a bitter woman. It killed her and it killed their marriage. She thought she was a displaced princess deprived of all the things she had a right to, so she couldn’t enjoy what she did have.”
Jaeger glanced at Breathwaite, who shook his head almost imperceptibly.
“What did she have?” Jaeger asked. “Other than a puppy?”
“Don’t ask,” said Breathwaite. “Excuse me while I fetch the drinks.”
“We had a nice little apartment in Rødovre.”
Jaeger guffawed. He could hear the strain in the laughter and in his own voice. “Jesus Christ, you know what? When I got divorced I started seeing a psychologist to help me deal with how it might affect the kids …” The words slipped out too fast. They were part of a funny story, but he hadn’t realized what the story would reveal about him.
“That was a good thing to do, Harald,” Kis said softly.
“Yeah, and he was good. He was really good.” No graceful way out of it now. “He was really helping me sort through it all. We really hit it off. So much that he wanted to be friends with me. Then he invited me home to meet his family …”
“Do psychologists do that sort of thing?”
“What sort of thing?” Breathwaite asked, returning with a tray of glasses and bottles.
Kis clammed up. “Oh, we’re just jabbering,” she said.
Jaeger was impressed by her discretion.
She respected my confidence.
He realized that she had recognized his own surprise at stumbling into his story. But he wondered if she wouldn’t tell Fred about it later anyway, so he thought he might as well plunge right on. “I was just telling Kirsten about how I went to a psychologist to help me deal with my divorce, with how it might affect my little girls.”