Kerrigan in Copenhagen (6 page)

“But Joyce also admired Andersen,” he continues. “When he was here he even bought a toy as a reminder of Andersen for his five-year-old grandson. He called Andersen Denmark's greatest writer. He was also full of praise for Carlsberg beer, and his wife was full of praise for the Danish light, its continuous changes, which is one of the things that caused me to fall in love with Denmark, too. Joyce also had a high opinion of Brandes. Also, Tom Kristensen met Joyce when he was here. Ole Jastrau in
Havoc
is reading
Ulysses
.”

She listens attentively to what Kerrigan is telling her, then stops walking and says, “Tell me something. You know so much about Copenhagen already. Are you toying with me? Why do you need my help? Do you have something else in mind?”

Kerrigan hopes the darkness hides his blush. “I only know a little,” he says. “And very little about the bars or the Danish Golden Age. You know much more than I do.”

“But,” she says, “you … you are like some kind of university professor. You have read so much.”

“Have read little. Understood less.” He looks into her eyes and doesn't tell her that he is quoting Joyce's Stephen Dedalus.

He feels heavy as they enter the labyrinthine, cavelike dimness of
Hviid's Vinstue
(Hviid's Wine Room), established in 1723, the same year as the Duke pub in Dublin, older by fifty-three years than the U.S. itself, although there is the White Horse Tavern on Marlborough Street in Newport, Rhode Island, which is older, established in 1673. Hviid's survived the great fires of 1728, 1794, and 1795 and the British attacks on Copenhagen of 1801 and 1807, just as his father escaped the British occupation of Ireland and his mother the German occupation of Denmark.

They move past the bar to one of the cubbyhole tables to the side. There are many pictures on the walls, photographs, cutout articles, caricatures. She has her Moleskine book out again, and he has to concentrate on her words.

“Upstairs here,” she tells him, “used to be the Blue Note and the Grand Café, and these three together were the outer rim of the Mine-field that started around Nikolai Church that I told you about before. In the 1950s and '60s.”

The waiter comes to take their orders, and Kerrigan asks for a pint of Carlsberg. “I can't drink any more beer,” she says, and Kerrigan suggests a Campari. As the waiter crosses back to the bar, Kerrigan says, “He looks like a pug.”

“That's Jørgen ‘Gamle' Hansen,” she tells him. “Old Hansen, they call him, because he fought until he was forty. He used to be welter-weight boxing champion of Europe about twenty years ago. He also was an actor on TV—played a small part in a crime series in the eighties.”

Kerrigan recognizes him then, and as he returns with their drinks, Kerrigan stands. “May I shake your hand, Mr. Hansen? You look like you're in just as good shape as when you were champ.”

Hansen smiles wryly with his broad jaw and hooked, broken nose, and his hand in Kerrigan's feels like a block of wood. “Appearances deceive,” the old pugilist says.

Kerrigan watches him list off. He can still remember Hansen's right that felled Dave Green in the seventies and won him the title. Suddenly, then, he notices her glass and says, “Campari red as breathless kisses.” Her eyes meet his. He can't read them, but he goes on nonetheless
. “Jens August Schade again. The poem is called ‘In Hviid's Wine Room.' From 1963.”

“Can you say it for me?”

“Night has a thousand ears, remember. Might get sued for reciting it in public. I can tell you this much—it has to do with frog-green absinthe and Campari-red kisses.” He slurs a bit. Her eyes friendly, she asks, “How drunk are you?”

“Just a wee twisted,” he says. “But not on beer alone.”

“Meaning?”

He is picturing her in red panties and nothing else and drinking Campari and kissing him with her tongue, but he says, “Did anyone ever tell you your eyes are green as the woods?”

“Frequently,” she says, but the subtext he thinks he hears is,
Never, I like it, but say it again when you're sober
. Then she writes something in her Moleskine and says, “I really must read Schade. I've heard of him but never actually read him.” She closes the book and he glimpses the star-fish stickers on it as she slips it into her black leather bag, and he recites:

The starfish crawl upon the wall

upon the floor and through the door

the starfish with their many legs

and not so many eyes

the starfish that can hug and crush

never seeing why.

She sips her red Campari. “You must spend a great deal of time memorizing verses.”

“Hey, that was my own! I just wrote it right now this minute.” In his own ears, his voice is hoarse from beer and cigars.

“
Sludder
,” she says, which means
nonsense
in Danish, but somehow more effectively, with the double soft
d
sound of garbage, slush.

“Not
sludder
. Sometimes when I get to a certain point, words start leaking out. Like Tom Kristensen said, intoxication is just a poem that hasn't got a form.”

“Did you really just make up that rhyme? I'm impressed.”

“I hoped you would be, even if it's not very good.”

“Why? Did you hope?”

“Because your eyes. Like green lamps.” He tries to think up a rhyme, pauses, knows he's lost it, has entered the stage that comes after the facile rhymes: “Dark is life, dark dark is death,” he says. “I'm stuck. That's John Hawkes. I always start quoting stuff when I'm stuck. Like the test patterns on a TV. Remember they used to have those? To let you know it's still in function, even if there's no show.”

“Recite that Schade for me again. The one with the Campari.”

And Kerrigan thinks how happy he would be if she were wearing red ones. And let him see. “Here, come closer,” he says. “I'll whisper it.” And feels his lips moving against her warm delicate ear.

He realizes too late, crossing the King's New Square toward
Nyhavn
, New Harbor, that it was a mistake to suggest one more stop. Had they simply ordered a taxi from Hviid's to his place—or hers … Of course, she only asked for the poem, but he did not fail to see the glint in her eyes over the line about the red panties, which did not fail to set him to puerile speculation over what color hers were: How foolish he feels at his age to wonder breathlessly whether she is wearing red panties. Foolishly happy. Happily foolish. And at what age might that be? Late youth. Advanced late youth.

He tries to save the moment by reciting another, composed on the spot, that he feels is true in his lungs:

Has anyone seen that friend of mine

Who said with a smile, “This is wine.

Have a glass. See what you think.

Sit down. Relax. Drink.”

But his anticipated pleasure of its hedonistic resonance sours. He feels suddenly like nothing so much as a drunk, thick-tongued with
slurred vision, and he wonders, not for the first time, if he has become hopelessly alcoholic.

Now they walk along the Nyhavn canal, where boats sit lashed between impassable low bridges (and he thinks of Rimbaud's “Drunken Boat”)—canal-narrow drawbridges actually—toward the harbor and the Malmø boats, hovercraft that take you across to the once-Danish now-Swedish city in half an hour or so, a city that will soon be reachable by the bridge scheduled for completion later this year at which time the hovercraft to Malmø will disappear. All things eventually vanish.
Ubi sunt?
He asks her to point out the different places where Hans Christian Andersen lived here. It cheers him to compare himself to loveless bungling Andersen—by contrast, Kerrigan has at least tasted love.
But what was the price?

She shows him
Nyhavn 20
, the narrow tall house where Andersen stayed in 1835 when he started writing fairy tales, and
Nyhavn 18
, his last home before he moved in with a friend to be nursed as he died of liver cancer in 1875. And she gestures down
Lille Strandstræde
, saying, “He lived there in number 67 from 1847 to 1865.”

“
Jeppe's Bade Hotel
is farther down that street, too. Jeppe's Bath Hotel. It's neither a hotel nor a bath, but good jazz CDs.”

“Interesting,” she says, and Kerrigan hears the chill of professionalism has returned to her tone. He regrets having suggested they stop into
Café Malmø
to see the world's largest collection of beer openers, as reported in
The Guinness Book of Records
.

They turn down
Havnegade
(Harbor Street) and step down into the semibasement pub, Café Malmø, and the first he sees across the bar section are two men passed out at a little table as Paul McCartney sings from a sound system, “I'm so sorry, Uncle Albert” which makes him think of Licia's note in the empty house:
I'm so sorry, I don't love you …
One of the passed-out men is wearing a Napoleon hat fashioned from a sheet of newspaper. On the wall above their slumped heads a sign offers beer and tequila shooters at a cut rate.

As they sit and wait to order, she reads to him from her Moleskine
book that the café was opened in 1870 and has its name from Copenhagen's twin city, Malmö, just across the sound in southern Sweden. It is an old sailors' bar, but many international guests come to see the beer-opener collection.

The beer openers are everywhere, framed on the walls, hanging in thick clusters like stalactites from the ceiling. Kerrigan tries to imagine tourists streaming in from all around the world to study these thousands of openers, people lined up around the harbor to come in and see. He wonders if there are doubles.

Then the barmaid is there—young and punk haired—admiring the green jade cross that Kerrigan has not even noticed all day at his Associate's throat, although he does see now that it is the same green as her eyes, and he says, “It really is, really is
beauful
,” and his own ear catches the loss of the syllable. “Beau-
ti
-ful,” he enunciates to demonstrate that he is at least not that far gone, but he says the word too loudly, and the man with the newspaper hat lifts his head. He is leaned against the wall where Kerrigan notices yet another sign: TABLE WHORES CLUB. His face is desolated, eyelids sagging low and a smile of unforgiven unforgiving unrepentant dissoluted idiocy on his wet mouth, then once more wraps his dreams about his heart and slips away. In the course of these movements, the elbow of the man overturns a glass the stale-looking contents of which spills into the lap of the other sleeping man, who jolts upright and croaks, “That was juice-
sizzle
-me
smart
!”

“Well, you're not so
cancer
-eat-me clever yourself, you ass banana.”

“Fok,” the first says, and lays his head down once again, and Kerrigan begins to realize he is watching these events through nearly closed eyes himself, nodding.

“Mr. Kerrigan!” his Associate snaps.

“Shouldn't we dance?” he says.

“You'll be doing it alone, sir,” she says.

“It is a lonely dance,” he says. “Upon monsieur's sword.” And notices that hanging just above the cross at her throat is a steel shieldlike ornament half the size of a cigarette pack. “What's that?” he asks.

“In fact,” she tells him, “it is a North African chastity belt.”

He misses a beat. “You puttin' me on?”

“No,” she enunciates, demonstrating for him how nullifyingly nil the word's message can be.
Why would she wear a chastity belt at her throat?
He considers a deep-throat joke but decides against it.

Disgrace multiplies as he stumbles, climbing up out of the basement pub to step into the idling cab that his Associate has telephoned for.

“
Nu går det hurtigt
,” he says to her in Danish. “It's going fast now.” A Danish saying. By which he means to disassociate himself from the involuntary acceleration of his intoxication. “Intoxication,” he says, “is a poem which has not found its form. That's Ole Jastrau.”

“I read the book,” she says. She is chill but not so chill as to make him lose all hope.

“You have experience at this. Handling slightly intoxicated gentlemen,” he mutters.

“My father and my first husband gave me some practice. Second was no better, though he didn't drink. Although I would not call any of them gentlemen.”

It occurs to him that maybe they are destined to repeat their lives, proceeding from wrong to wrong, she with drunken him, he adoring and losing her. He leans closer, smells her perfume, and feels the ache of loneliness in his heart. He wants so badly to touch her, for her to touch him. He wants to recite Joyce to her:
Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon now. I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch touch me
. Or even to jocularize with a word of Molly's:
Give us a touch, Poldy. I'm dying for it
. What a delightful thing for a woman to say.

But he would feel a self-pitying fool for it and wills discretion upon himself. “Listen,” he says quietly. “I'm not that bad. Just didn't eat enough. Cup of coffee fix me right up in case, you might like for example to come up and join me for a cup. I promise you: no uninvited monkey business.”

She smiles. “Not this time, Mr. Kerrigan,” she says as the cab pulls in along the curb at his apartment on
Øster Søgade
, East Lake Street.

“What a lovely view,” she says, admiring the lake across the road.

“Nicer from the apartment inside,” he says.

She shakes her head, opens the door for him. He manages not to lunge at her for a kiss, gives her his hand instead, which he feels her take warmly with a gentle embrace of her fingers.