Love Me (19 page)

 

 

 

 

Dear Turkey, Do not be honest with a poet or she might slit your throat with a serrated steak knife. Poets do not accept criticism gladly. A sour word about their work makes them very very quiet. Turkey hunters are Sunday school teachers compared to poets, whose murderous impulses toward enemies real or imagined are not to be underestimated. Their feuds go on for decades, their vendettas rival the Venetians’ for sheer malice. Tell the poet that her poems mystify you with their depth and resonance on many levels, and let it go at that.

 

PS Save the news about AA for the right moment when she’s a little snappish with you and you need to make her feel guilty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Brian, Let me call you Brian, okay? The $175,000 is gone. Kiss that good-bye. As for marrying Katherine, have you ever considered poverty and celibacy? There are groups of men who practice both and they live in handsome brick-and-stone enclosures in scenic rural areas and they seem content with their carpentry, bread baking, brandy distilling, or whatever they do. Do a Google search on the word
Trappist.
Send for a brochure.

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Moonflower, Young love is replete with sweet pangs and retroactive jealousy is one of them. It’s a sort of greediness born of happiness, trying to extend the romance back into the past and bump off all rivals. Be happy, move forward, live memorably and your romance will attain a rich history of its own and the distant past will fade. It might help if you’d stop writing poems for awhile, though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Smitten, Get out of Minnesota. This is not a state where men can accept getting a poem from a woman, especially not one as frank as yours. Try New York. There, a woman can sleep with anyone she wants to sleep with and nobody says boo about it.

In the midst of my long drought, I met a Danish woman named Lone (“Pronounced LOAN-uh,” she said sweetly) and for a couple months she became the Glorious Woman who would rescue me from myself. The name was on her place card at the Max Henius Society dinner sponsored by the Danish consulate and her place card was next to mine. She had short red hair and a big grin and she led me out onto the dance floor and we gyrated vigorously to a Dixieland band and sat down and held hands through the speeches—Denmark is a nation of after-dinner speakers and there were fourteen of them that evening, each one proud of his ability to be funny in English. I was completely potted. Henius was a chemist who ran an institute of fermentology in Chicago in the 1890s, a farsighted man who tried to persuade the beer industry to stave off Prohibition by cleaning up the American saloon and making it into a beer garden with good food and white tablecloths, but his advice went unheeded and soon public tippling was outlawed by the beady-eyed Baptists, and Henius returned to Denmark, where the finer things of life were still appreciated.

We all drank a toast to Henius, and to Queen Margrethe, and to the president, and to amity between nations, and in my alcoholic fog, I sat at our table and listened to an engineer discuss wastewater management, and then turn to the woman on his left and resume a conversation about the male superior versus the canine position in coitus. Danes are so free with each other!

Someone at the podium up front was yakking about trying to make a difference in the world and not just earn a lot of money, and lo and behold, it was someone introducing me for my award. What was it for? I hadn’t the faintest idea. Little did they know how drunk I was. I managed to rise to my feet and take a bow, but no. They wanted a speech. People were waving me toward the front, so up to the podium I went. Someone handed me a glass of something. A vodka sour or something. My fine motor skills failed me and I dropped it—on myself, unfortunately—as I grabbed the microphone and bent it toward me and it made an explosive rumble.

I got teary-eyed about Iris and talked about my writer’s block and living in New York and The New Yorker and the problem of girlish writing—the speech was going very well! People were enjoying it! I talked about Iris and her crazy people and old Gus at the open house and saying that to the TV cameras—and then Lone guided me back to my seat. I was grateful to her. People clapped.

I had an ugly tear-shaped Lucite trophy in my hand. I told Lone I hoped to visit Denmark someday.

She said, “Come over and stay with me in Copenhagen.”

She meant it.

“I could stay in a hotel,” I said. “Really. There’s no need to put you to a lot of inconvenience.”

“Nonsense. I live alone in the heart of Copenhagen. You’ll stay in my apartment.”

So I went. Flew SAS and landed at Kastrup Airport early in the morning, in the lovely rain, the air fragrant with green grass and coal smoke, and took a taxi past the green soccer fields and a stream of bicyclists in bright yellow and red and green rain gear biking to work, poker-faced Danes queued up for buses, streets of brick apartment houses with brown tile roofs, stone churches with green-and-gold steeples, the Royal Theatre in its sooty stone castle, over the train tracks, to a narrow street and a door with a golden 3 above it, and Lone’s big, old, echoey apartment with fourteen-foot ceilings with plaster moldings of flowers and fruit—it looked as if they’d just finished drafting the Treaty of Ghent and gone out for breakfast—and Lone had made coffee. She poured us cups and I thought, How remarkable to fly across an ocean to be with a woman you don’t even know. She wore a sort of rose-colored wrap over her pajamas and was quite happy to see me. She said that we’d have to go see Rosen borg Castle and the Marble Church and the walking street and Ma gasin and Tivoli and Karen Blixen’s house, and then she said, “But first you must come to bed and sleep.” Through the open window, the smell of the sea and the whoosh of express trains racing north toward Elsinore, and a police siren like in an old spy movie echoing off the gray stone buildings, and the telephone rang its musical Danish ring, and she didn’t answer it, she closed the bedroom door, and then she and I were kissing, and then we descended into the soft white bed, under the down comforter, and embraced, our two coastlines gently washing against each other.