Beneath the Neon Egg (9 page)

Bluett is confused. He thinks that he might have misheard, due to the tokes. He says, “What, like, you are some kind of real estate purveyor for people who want to be buried?”

She laughs. She has a nice laugh. He could definitely fall for that laugh but is still confused at this business about a cemetery tour guide. From a dainty pink backpack, she removes a card that she extends to him. It shows the name of a tour guide bureau specializing in cemeteries and cemetery sculpture. She says that she shows groups around on walking tours of various cemeteries, gives talks on who is buried where. “You know,” she says. “The graves of the famous.”

She lights another joint and passes it, and he tokes and finds himself staring into the shadows of the corner. Time has that strange quality dope sometimes gives it. Then Getz is on the sound system, blowing Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count,” and Lucia and Bluett go back into the heart of the club. The lights are even dimmer than before, and most of the guests are gone, and Bluett wonders what was in that dope and can’t quite recall how many joints they smoked.

The bartender with the Spanish accent produces a soprano sax from beneath the bar and starts blowing to a guitar backup. The soprano notes are like a fine fine grade of sturdy sculpted tin in the dim light. Lucia sits on a bench and pats the space beside her for him to sit, which he does and then he hears himself asking, “Can I call you?”

To which she replies. “As long as you realize it will never be more than friendship.”

Bluett wonders how in the world he managed to fuck
that
up. He says, “Well, what’s wrong with friendship?” And then they are at the bar, and Bluett looks at his watch. Somehow the long day and night have melted into quarter to two in the
a.m.
Lucia is talking to the owner, and now Bluett is no longer getting drunk. He
is
drunk. Maybe
that
was how he fucked it up. He sees two bartenders blowing two sopranos. At first it’s, like, double your pleasure. But then it’s, like, time to go home.

The front doors are locked so he threads through the back rooms and hallways until he discovers an unlocked door and steps out into the dark, freezing morning. He walks the dirt street toward the Free State exit and sees the familiar raw wood sign over it into which is carved, on this side,
you are now entering the european Union
. He steps through the gate, under the sign, and is out on the street just in time to flag a Mercedes taxi.

As the cab rolls over Knippels Bridge, black water gleaming on either side, the green copper towers of Copenhagen up ahead cloaked in darkness, he says to the Iranian driver, “All in all, as Ivan Denisovich put it in nineteen sixty-two, it has been a good day.”

The driver chuckles, and Bluett knows he has no idea what Bluett is talking about.

5. Aura

Sunday. Already light when he wakes so he knows it is at least nine thirty or ten, reaches for his watch: 10:20. In the kitchen he spoons coffee into the electric maker for a whole pot and waits, leaden-eyed, until it drips its last into the glass pot, pours a mug of black and wanders into the living room. He sees the CD jacket of Miles Davis’s
Aura
and remembers how he had been waylaid the previous day, or was it the day before that, from listening all the way through.

Slowly the scraps of memory of Saturday reassemble in his mind: walking through the Botanical Garden, the Booktrader, Café Halfway . . .
Halfway through my life I found myself on a dark path
 . . .

Unspecified sandwiches, more walking, lamb curry, the JazzKlub, the drinks, the dope . . . Lucia. His brain is post-dope hazy but not disagreeably so.

He pours coffee down his neck, fumbles through his pockets for the card she gave him, finds it, sees and remembers that she is a cemetery guide, thinks you couldn’t ever make this shit up. He tears up the card and drops it in the garbage along with the wet coffee grounds.

Another mug and he puts on
Aura
, thinking, the day yesterday was a mere, albeit a pleasant, interruption. Lucia’s aura did not admit you. You did not have the chemistry that perked her percolator. What is chemistry anyway? Mystery. But undeniable.

Something makes him think of a woman named Johanna who wanted him to spank her, and he did it, but she said,
Not that way!
And taught him how she wanted to be spanked, starting with a gentle caress and building up . . . He felt like a dunce for not knowing that. But now he knows how, should he be called upon to administer what the Danes call an “end-full.” So many things a man is called upon to know.

In his one good armchair he sits with the hot mug balanced on his knee and listens, eyes closed, to Miles, playing the symphony Palle Mikkelborg wrote for him two years before Miles died, six years earlier. He hears John McLaughlin’s guitar opening the piece, and Miles’s unmistakable trumpet, a tom-tom. He remembers the first time he heard this CD was in the Fiver (Femmeren) on Classensgade. A tall young guy next to him at the bar asked the bartender to play the CD and told Bluett that Miles hadn’t worn his headphones when he played trumpet over McLaughlin’s guitar and all the other musicians. At first Bluett thought he was saying it had been careless of Miles, but then he saw the young guy could see that thought on his face and the guy quickly added, “That was part of his process on that recording. I can understand that, what he got from using that technique.”

Afterward the young man left, and Bluett asked the bartender to play
Aura
once again, and the bartender said, “You know who that guy was? It was Halfdan E. He’s a composer. He composed the music on the two Dan Turèll CDs. Lots else, too.”

Funny
, he thinks,
how in Copenhagen everybody mixes. No one is too famous to hang around with whomever
.

Now Bluett can’t hear this music without thinking about that, about how ingenious it was of Miles, how that information from Halfdan E enabled him to understand this music much more deeply. And he thinks about what Palle Mikkelborg writes inside the CD case: “I still thank my guardian angel for giving me the marvelous gift of meeting and working with this true master who, before we ever met, had already changed my life.”

Bluett thinks about that statement, thinks that this music in some way has changed him as well, and he doesn’t know how, but he knows that it is so. The music swells within him, and a name enters his head. Liselotte. They were lovers years earlier when they both were married to other people. She was young and beautiful and he was young and naïve and both were locked in disagreeable marriages with kids too young to leave. He heard recently that she had divorced again a while back. He hasn’t seen her for a dozen years, but she once told him,
Call anytime, Blue, I’m always home for you.
He looks for his phone book, finds it under a heap of papers on his desk, and is punching in the numbers, listening to the ring as he watches the now yellow sunlight across the lake and hears Miles blowing the “Yellow” cut.

“
Hej! Det er Liselotte!
”

So cheerful. “I didn’t wake you?” He remembers she is an early riser, remembers that she too liked to make love in the morning.

“
Hej, Blue!
”

“Wow, you have a great memory for voices!”

“I always remember your voice.”

“Listen,” he says. “I wanted to call you, tell you that I got divorced.”

“Velcome to the club,” she says. She has been divorced two times, and they talk about the experience—how it is not fun, how you always wonder if you really did enough, tried enough, and of course no one ever does, but it also takes give from the other side, but sometimes you also wonder if maybe the problem is that you gave
too
much, that you should have put your foot down instead of trying to understand, and who ever knows really, maybe in fact marriage is an outmoded institution, maybe we are evolving toward some other form of society, but sometimes it is hard to see any way around the fact that the basic unit would always be one man and one woman with children, but of course it is entirely possible to love many persons at one and the same time, and who is to say what is right, and in truth sometimes there comes a time when you know deep down in your heart that a marriage is over, done, dead, harmful, nothing left but two people full of contempt for one another and what is left to do then but get out and try to do it as gently and understandingly as possible even though probably no one ever really manages to be gentle or understanding and probably no divorce is reasonable or civilized despite your best intentions because the emotions involved are not civilized emotions, there is always rage and sorrow and deep pain and there is a time when more than anything you need your friends, it is not fun, maybe at first you feel good to be alone but after a while, well, who knows? Maybe it will be different for you so why should I try to discourage you and it is true that it is beautiful to be master or mistress of your own time, your own life, your own apartment, but one thing you surely do need is friends and please know that if you need someone to talk to, and I don’t care what time of day it is, I am here for you, just call, just come and knock on my door, Blue, I’m here.

“That means a lot to me,” he says. “Friends are important.”

“Do you have friends?”

“A few.”

“Well, I hope you will be counting me as one.”

“That means a lot to me.”

“How is it going for you in this time?”

“Actually I feel pretty good. It was the right thing. I can feel that.”

“Then you are lucky. You have done the right thing. It is not good to be together with someone you cannot love or speak with.”

“What I want now is a single life. I want never to get myself into a tangled-up situation like that again.”

“Love is never simple.”

“I don’t want love. Not like that. I don’t know what love is. If love turns into what my marriage turned into, I don’t want it. I want friends. I want lots of friends. I want to feel alive and open for a change. I’ve had my kids. What else is marriage for but to have kids? And I’ve had my kids, I have them. Now I want a different life for myself. I want to be free to enjoy life.”

“The good life,” she says. “I hope you can be able to find it.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he says “Well, I do want a lover, someone to love,” and there is a silence until she says, “I have been missing to hear your voice.”

“I’ve thought about you,” he says.

“Have you?”

Now he is busy. He vacuums the beige carpet in the living room, the gray one in the bedroom, fits on the long-snouted attachment and gets the dust behind the radiators, the wispy spidery gatherings up in the corners of the ceiling.

He fills a bucket with hot water and Ajax liquid and sponges off the white woodwork, the bathroom sink, kitchen sink, makes the chrome faucets gleam. He scours the tub and shower walls, scrubs out the toilet bowl, gets down on hands and knees and washes the kitchen and bathroom floors with a soapy rag, outside the commode.

Then he gathers up old magazines and newspapers, junk mail, brochures from tabletops and window ledges. He dusts, shakes the cloth out the window, gives it another once-over, flushes the dirty bucket water down the toilet to a background of Coltrane’s “Favorite Things,” showers and washes his hair.

He shaves, slowly lathers up and scrapes the blade across his jowls, brushes his teeth, gargles, clips his nose hair with mustache scissors, trims his ’stache, trying to clip most of the gray and leave the red, brown, and black hairs. He picks out his newest Calvin Klein underwear, a clean blue shirt, his favorite tie and pullover, clean pressed Levis. He polishes his shoes and goes out to stock up for the evening.

At the Irma supermarket he loads a basket with candles, Crémant, Cabernet, Asian snacks, chips, a couple of nice-looking slabs of entrecôte, onions, lettuce hearts and cherry tomatoes, a beautiful wedge of Gorgonzola at the perfect moment of its existence, a fresh-baked baguette. He joins the line at the checkout counter behind an elderly man, who doesn’t have a basket or a cart, seems to have no wares, only a walker. A hearing aid is visible among the sparse white hairs on his round head.

When his turn comes, he says, “I don’t know if I should be here.”

The girl at the register blinks. “Did you want to buy anything?” she asks.

In mild, apologetic confusion, the man says, “I think I was supposed to have a blood test.” He smiles self-deprecatingly and turns around, looks into Bluett’s eyes, then turns back toward the exit door. “Excuse me,” he mutters. “Excuse me. So sorry.”

One by one, Bluett lays the items in his basket on the counter, meets the young girl’s helpless eyes with an equally helpless expression in his.

“Maybe you should call the authorities,” he suggests quietly.

“You think so? The emergency number?”

“Yes,” he says, but she rings up his wares before calling, and when Bluett walks through the automatic doors of the supermarket, passes a cluster of parked bicycles, the old man is nowhere in sight. He looks up and down the street, watches a red-nosed, sniffling woman clatter her bike over the cobblestones, swing up onto the saddle.