Love Me (20 page)

I stayed in Lone’s apartment there on Trondhjemsgade for a whole week of starstruck pleasure. She was an unabashed sensualist. She’d stroll into the living room naked from her shower, natural as could be, and we sunbathed in the nude with hundreds of others in the park in Frederiksberg. A glorious week. We dined on oysters and champagne in Kongens Nytorv and rode bicycles around the lakes and through the old star-shaped earthen fortress, Kastellet, the salt breezes blowing her close-cropped red hair as we pedaled up along the coast through the Royal Deer Park at Klampenborg and Taarbeck and Skovshoved to Hamlet’s castle in Helsingborg and stood watching the car ferry cross the water to Sweden. Her family owned a chain of optical shops; she was an optician. She was also, so far as I could tell, a communist or the next thing to it. And yet she lived glo riously well. Good wine, good food, sex. I visited her mother, Elly, one day for lunch in an apartment complex in the suburbs. A tiny one-bedroom apartment full of dark furniture, with a tiny balcony. She had fixed steak and French fries and bought a California caber-net and baked an apple pie. A tall woman of noble bearing. Americans were friendlier than Danes, she told me, pouring Jim Beam into a glass full of ice. The Danes had collaborated with the Nazis, while the Americans drove the bastards out of Europe. She wept. “I cannot speak of the Occupation. To me, it is too painful. Thank God for America and the Marshall help.” She looked at the floor coquettishly and twisted her hands. “I always wished that Lone would marry an American,” she whispered.

“I almost married an American. In 1939. I used to go dancing at a club called Zigeunerhus, the Gypsy House, where Victor Borge played in a jazz combo. Once he jumped up from the piano and danced with me. He was wanting to move to America and escape the Nazis and get into the movies. I told him, Don’t get a big head. He introduced me to a guy named Howe from the American embassy, and I fell in love with him. He was quiet and kind and he had money. I saw a lot of Mr. Howe. We biked along the coast and took the ferry to Sweden and went to jazz clubs, and in August, he took me on a vacation trip to Leningrad, and we had a marvelous time. We rode the train through Germany and Poland and into the Soviet Union in that beautiful green August, and we were so much in love, we never so much as glanced at the newspapers. All we thought about was love and marriage. We returned to Copenhagen on the train on the last day of August. On September 1st, the Nazis invaded Poland and World War II began. All the little villages we saw from the train, the children running in the streets, the people riding their bicycles, that world was pretty much destroyed in the next five years. And Mr. Howe went off to war and he never came back. We said good-bye in the train station and that was the end of it. He died in North Africa. Everything was changed after the war. I married Oscar and had Lone and Mette but I never forgot my American.”

“You look so much like him,” she said. “A pity you’re thirty years younger. But I’m too independent to marry, anyway.” She poured another round of whiskey.

“I like independent women,” I said. I was drunk.

“You’d die of boredom in Denmark. All of us old Social Democrats, we’d bore you to tears. All our silly customs. And you’d try to learn Danish, but believe me, a language learned in middle age is a leaky boat. You’re lucky if you can float, there’s no such thing as navigation. And besides I’m far too independent to be tied to one person for the rest of my life.”

She drained her glass. “God, you remind me of him. But we Danes are realists. We seldom lie, and never to ourselves.

“The Little Mermaid never married the prince, you know. Her feet hurt so bad, trying to walk on dry land, she cried all the time, and she missed her mermaid pals too much, so she shriveled up and turned into sea foam. Like so many women. She fell in love with the wrong guy. She should’ve looked for a nice dolphin.”

I walked around Copenhagen, around Kastellet and along the wa terfront, where the cruise ships dock, and down to the Gefion Fountain with the great bare-breasted goddess, her whip hand raised, lashing her oxen as water gushes up from the blade of her plow and sprays from their flared nostrils, and through the streets to Gråbrø dretorv—the loveliest square in Copenhagen and impossible to pronounce, with four separate r’s to swallow—and sat in a café there, a pint of Tuborg in front of me, and thought, I am already very well married to a suitable woman, I just need to find my way back. Which is like trying to retrace your 1939 journey across Europe in the spring of 1945. But I suppose it can be done.

Lone was astonished that I gave advice to strangers in a newspaper column. “Don’t you realize the harm you could do?” she said. “People are complex. It’s no joke. You can’t just read someone’s letter and tell them what to do with their lives.”

But you can, of course. Most people aren’t so complicated. They only like to think they are. And I loved being Mr. Blue. It felt good to write the words on the screen and click on send and know they’d appear in the paper the next day. And the money was all I had to live on. It was the only writing I did. Other stuff I blanked on, but I’d pick up a letter from some poor lost soul and it stimulated some cortex in me—some deep avuncular impulse—and I rattled off advice to them, no problem. As Marley’s ghost said, we wear the manacles we forge in life. And I felt I had the key.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Desperate, What are you waiting for? Shower, shave, put on a clean shirt, get Denise, and go to the jewelry store. A $25,000 ring should be about right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Mrs. Mom, Yes, indeed. There are Road Mama clubs in the Twin Cities, Duluth, Fargo, even in Rochester, home of the famous Mayo Clinic. Pediatric cardiologists, OR nurses, ophthalmic technicians, women who are calm and caring through their work shift and then go home to be good mommies and best pals, but on Saturday night when the sun goes down, these babes put on the leather and jump on the hawgs and go looking for ass to kick. Fifty or sixty of them rumbling through the hamlets of Olmsted County. Mayo’s Marauders, out for cheap thrills at high speed. All week they care for the sick and raise healthy children, and one night is theirs to piss away in senseless frivolity. They are better people for it. Those who stay in the harness day after day wind up taking out their aggressions in other ways. This is better.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Absolutely, No. You’re very young and still discovering your powers and learning to be your own person, and what you need now is to get out and have experiences and become a responsible and self-reliant woman. Romance is great fun, but it doesn’t advance your cause right now to get tied up with this guy. A big love affair is no shortcut to the adult world. There are many regretful young women with two small children living in tiny dingy apartments who know the truth of that. Say good-bye to him, shed a bucket of tears, fly away, and learn how to make yourself happy as a solo.

 

 

 

Dear Brian, Either you’re in love with him or you’re not. I say you’re not, because if you were in love, you wouldn’t be asking me what to do. True love is an imperative, and people jump off the cliff for it. We know this from Puccini. It’s nobody’s business who you love, but of course everyone will find out eventually so you and Ted may as well hire a brass band and march through the monastery holding hands. If you’re really in love, throw yourself at him. But don’t imagine you’re in love if you’re only in heat. Not the same. I almost made this mistake in Denmark, Brian. I flew over to see a great woman after I’d been having a rough time in New York—basically, my whole career went into the toilet—and I think the pressurized jet-liner raised my libido and I landed in Copenhagen and we tumbled into bed and there was so much jiggery-pokery in the next 48 hours, it felt like Amore. We drove around looking at little villages with red-tile-roof houses and ancient whitewashed churches and hiked along the beach and ate herring and drank shots of aquavit and I thought, Maybe this is it, but I saw my own foolishness in time and escaped without harm. Life is not about flying. It’s about falling and then picking yourself up.

 

 

 

Dear Moonflower, We’re all artists and we’re all critics. Each of us has beautiful creative impulses, and each of us comes equipped with a bullshit detector that looks at emperors and thinks, Naked. Your boyfriend saw you as naked. And you may very well have been. Don’t attempt to contact him now. Do as Fitzgerald, Whitman, Frost, Updike, and God knows who else did when they lost their manuscripts—they sat down, tried to reconstruct from memory, and wound up writing something better.