Kerrigan in Copenhagen (7 page)

“Deep down you
are
a gentleman,” she says. “Try to. Be.”

He stands swaying slightly on the street outside his building as the cab rolls off. He sees her fingers twinkle at him from behind the dark glass, then the whispered roar of the engine is moving off, the rump of the car disappearing.

We followed the rump of a misguiding woman, said Fergus
.

He is standing just outside the white picket fence of the building beside his own, finds himself staring at a forsythia bush—at first blankly, then slowly perceiving that it is in bloom, an explosion of yellow buds. Dimly he remembers something she said earlier about the green of the trees at the Tivoli gate and is suddenly aware that the forsythia is in fact already beginning to fade. It bloomed probably a week ago, and he has not even noticed until this moment when it only has perhaps another week left before the dazzling tiny yellow flowers fade to the green of any other bush. Yellow as the dazzling curls that frame her face.

Though of course that yellow is surely from a bottle to conceal the gray. Don't care. I use bottled stuff, too—to make life dazzle.

His eyes fix upon the bush, fighting the blur of his intoxication, and he begins to consider his age, how many springs remain for him, how many more times he will have the pleasure of seeing the yellow forsythia or the green of the Tivoli trees.

Slowly he climbs his dusty, shadowy staircase toward the little stone angel beside the door to his apartment. And he remembers then from whence these thoughts originate. One of his father's favorite poets, A. E. Housman:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with snow along the bough …

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs is little room,

About the woodland I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

Fifty
springs? Hardly. Not half. Or half that. Or half again.

Upstairs at his desk he peers blearily across the lake to a row of night-shadowed buildings; they remind him of the sense of mystery of his youth when he believed such buildings across such bodies of water at such a dusky hour contained wondrous secrets.

Now he has the Montblanc in his hand, thinking inevitably about the mystery of Licia—When will he be free of her?—the sweet angel who appeared in his life among the faces of the students at a guest lecture he was delivering on verisimilitude one afternoon at the University of Copenhagen. He knew he didn't have a chance—she was gorgeous, twenty-five, he forty-four. Yet after the lecture she hung around, and then somehow there were just the two of them walking across Amager to Christianshavn, having a drink at the floating bar in the canal, her eyes so light and blue in the sunshine, and she said, “Men of my age are so uninteresting.”

“I'm almost twenty years older than you,” he said. “A brook too broad for leaping.”

“Don't be so sure of that. I'm a good leaper.”

He opens the lowest drawer of his bureau, where he keeps a picture of her he took on a boat sailing the Ionian Sea to Ithaca. She is smiling the smile that so enchanted him—with her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her posture—and she is wearing a blue bikini the color of her eyes. Why did he never notice how self-consciously cute she was, how posed, the angle of her head, the way her blue eyes were looking off to the side? False angel. Blue-eyed blonde treachery.

He rises, puts on a Rautavaara CD: Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928–), Finnish composer of mysterious bombastic modern “serious” music.

In his armchair he watches the flashing red-and-green neon sign of the Jyske Bank ripple across the water, disappear, reappear, as the sound of the Helsinki Philharmonic performs
Angels and Visitations
, filling the darkness of his room; the composition is from 1978, the first of Rautavaara's
Angel series:
Angel of Dusk
, 1980;
Playgrounds for Angels
and
Angels of Light
, 1994.

Rautavaara explains that his angels do not originate in fairy tales or religious kitsch, but from the belief in other realities beyond those of normal consciousness, different forms of consciousness: “From this alien reality, creatures rise up which could be called angels.” He compares them to the visions of William Blake and to Rainer Maria Rilke's figures of awe and holy dread.

The composer tells how the first impetus for
Angels and Visitations
came from Rilke's observation of his fear of perishing in the powerful presence of an angel's embrace. This caused Rautavaara to recollect a childhood dream of an enormous, gray, powerful, silent creature that would approach and clasp him in his arms. He struggled until he awoke. Night after night the figure returned and he spent his days in fear of it, until he learned to surrender to its visitation.

At the climax of the symphony, when the visiting angel's embrace is finally accepted, a man's deep, surrendering scream is heard amidst the exquisitely high encompassment of the violins and harps and celesta.

But before that moment arrives this night, Kerrigan has passed through the dark, shadowed rectangle of the bedroom door, shed his clothes, and crawled beneath the covers of his bed. The scream enters the shadows of the next room, fades into silence.

I wished on the moon for something I never knew,
A sweeter rose, a softer sky, an April day
That would not dance away.

—DOROTHY PARKER

Now his eyes are open. The white ceiling floats with shadow and light. He is heavy but not unhappy, not at all, for his now wakeful mind harbors an image of the twinkling green eyes of his Associate. He pictures her face, her full lips, delicate hands with red nails, the fullness of her breasts and shadowed line between them beneath the black neckline of her blouse, how she looks from behind, narrow dark slacks on her trimly rounded hips. A butt sculpted by Antonio Canova! Dreamy again, he remembers her pointed red nail tapping the page, her sculpted fingers he would kiss.

His breath is deep and slow. Dreamily he recalls the orgasmic, terrified cry of the man embraced by the angel in Rautavaara's symphony and remembers then the Finnish girl he met some time ago at the bar in Hotel Këmp in Helsinki, teaching him the word
Multatuli
. In Finnish it means “earth and fire” but also means, as she explained in her slow ponderous English, “I haf just hod an orgasm.”

His hand slides beneath the eiderdown as he thinks of her, of his Associate, of
Multatuli
, which also means “I have suffered much” in Latin. To suffer in the gentle way perhaps.

Up
like a skyrocket, down like a stick …

Sated, happy, he meditates on his Associate, but as he rises from his bed he feels pain invade his skull. He stands in the center of the bedroom, temples throbbing evilly. His eyes cling to a shelf of books against the wall—Poe, Dostoyevsky, London, Aristophanes, Voltaire, Kipling,
Saki, Turgenev, Augustine, Dante, Gibbons, St. Jerome, Hamsun, Conrad.
The horror! The horror!

Or, as Stanley Elkin put it, “Ah! The horror, the horror.”
Mr. Kerrigan—he dead
.

He reaches for Hemingway's
In Our Time
, begins to read “Big Two-Hearted River,” burns out at the bottom of the first page, reaches for Dante and opens it to a double-page reproduction of the William Blake illustration for the sphere of the lustful, coils of naked embracing bodies swirling away. Must it be bad to lust? To desire? Even if it
is
an illusion, it is a lovely one. What is wrong with illusions anyway? Especially if, in the end, everything is one? The illusion of life ends in death. But then he remembers the illusions of love created by Licia, how he was deluded by them.

The throbbing in his head slows, and he reaches to the bureau top for the jar of pills, pops two, dry. His eyes sweep past a framed Asger Jorn print from 1966.
Dead Drunk Danes
, oil on canvas, a colorful swirl of molten faces painted seven years before Jorn died at fifty-nine. (That would leave me three to go.) Cobra School painter—Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam. Brother of Jørgen Nash, the mermaid killer, father of Susanne Jorn, poet.

His mind is full of cobras and dead mermaids, but he thinks of his Associate's trimly curved buttocks as he pictured them in Campari-red pan ties. His senses are sufficiently deranged as to inspire doggerel for his Associate:

My mind then sold for but a rump?

By those hips parenthesized?

Up from the chair two comely lumps,

Over her shoulder, that fetch-me smile.

A spasm of his colon drives him to an act less elegantly literary than Leopold Bloom's ninety-five fictional years before, and no church bell tolls as Kerrigan sits hurriedly to void with a groan and waits, elbows on knees, for more.

What do I learn, sitting here, watching what is around me? Surely there is a lesson here, perhaps a key to all of life, of my life, but what? I must see clearly. The world around me must not be some vague blur.

What do I learn then as I sit here, awaiting a possible further spasm? I learn perhaps what a marvel is the common moment, the fact of light, the height of sky glimpsed through the unclosed WC door, out the front window, aroil with cloud, the sheer mystery of this small enclosure, the blue-gray linoleum between my feet with its vague yet irrefutable suggestion of faces in its pattern—there, eyes, a nose, a stern mouth, there a sharp profile, undeniable as if ghosts were imprinted, captured there, and in that yellow corner between the blue pipe and the standing plunger, the threads of a web on which waits a spindly-legged spider with a tiny yellow button of a carcass; hidden universe, another creature, not of my species, what does it see of me?

This roll of white paper a clue to the times in which I live, the chain I pull that drops quarts of water upon my odiferous waste. Trousers to pull up, metal teeth of a zipper, brass buckle of a belt, hands and a bar of fragrant soap beneath a chrome spout of water. Marvel of modern plumbing! Gleaming white, clean, sanitary.

And through the window I see a ponytailed man in a leather vest who pauses to place the palms of his hands on his kidneys as
he
observes something that has caught
his
attention—what? A bird it seems, a sparrow, simple as that, yet what a marvel that commonplace! Lifts with a shiver of wing into the air and flies up to a chestnut tree and there stands the tree, wiser than a man perhaps. How is it that trees exist? Do trees have some manner of consciousness, thick-skinned and eternally patient?

Kerrigan stands over the guest sofa upon which he has spread out research materials, the coffee table where there are more, the dining table that he has converted to a desk for this book. His zip satchel there surprises him—wonder he didn't lose it.

His mind is atremble, his body ashiver, but to demonstrate to himself that his will is stronger than his pain, he sits and takes up his pen, puts its nib to the white-lined pad before him, and begins to write:

Just dash any words onto it when you see a blank page staring at you like some idiot. How petrifying that is, that blank staring page saying to the writer you can't! The page stares like a fool and hypnotizes some writers and turns them into imbeciles themselves. A writer may tremble before the white empty page—however, the white empty page itself fears the fearless writer with passion who dares, who has broken out of the spell that says “you can't” forever!

The words please him, even if the essence of them is cribbed from a letter written by Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo from October 1884, six years before his death in 1890 at the age of thirty-seven, the same year Hamsun wrote
Hunger
at the age of twenty-nine.

The Van Gogh sentences kick-start him. The words are slow and clogged at first, but he keeps the pen in motion, and a space clears in the milchy surface of his mind. Words begin to flow, and it is as if he has found the words necessary for him to know he is alive and to start the day.

He pauses, looks up from the pad, and sees the window alongside his writing table. The day smiles to him. He opens the window to gaze upon a chestnut, at the lake behind it. A man in black cycles away on a red bike. He leans out to see the tree even more fully; in its fullness, it fills his senses with its furry-green scent, its color, the gentlest rustling of its leaves beneath the cloudless blue sky. Light sparkles on the surface of the lake and he thinks of the elfin women, thinks of his Associate whom he will not see again until Monday. Two days. He wonders what she is doing, pictures her barefoot, painting, and the wondering turns to a dryness at the back of his throat, thirst. He looks at his watch. Too early, much too early, but he has to move, remembering in John Cheever's diary where he records that his days have turned into a struggle to keep from taking the first gin before noon, a fight he more often than not lost.

Will that be the end I reach?

The bathing of the head and breast in water, brushing of teeth, scraping clean the stubble from the jowels, the anointment with stinging scented fluids and donning of clear fresh raiment—his expensive Italian jeans, a tie of plum-colored French silk, a jacket of fine handwoven Irish
tweed—console and heal the spirit of torment as he heeds the advice of the Divine Ale Wife to Gilgamesh:
Let thy garments be sparkling fresh, thy head be washed …

Then he is jogging down the stairs, out upon the street, and stares over the lake, inhales profoundly.

A brisk walk he needs, but first he must tend to the demands of a growling belly, a hungering mouth, a brain that calls for fried fats. It is the hunter in us, he thinks, that craves fat, to sustain us over the long chase. On quick-moving legs he ducks across the streets of the Potato Rows, Kartoffelrækkerne, where he lives—workers' housing erected in the last quarter of the last century that now houses artists, writers, young professionals, politicians, architects, and self-loving curmudgeons, row after row of narrow three-story brick row houses, a dozen short streets of them, each named for a Danish “Golden Age” (1800–1850) painter or other notable.