Falling Sideways (32 page)
To kill time, Breathwaite tore the wrapping paper off the bottle Sean Cronin had given him. “Ah!” he exclaimed, gladdened and moved to discover a limited-edition fifteen-year-old Jameson.
“You’ll like the nose on that,” Dignam muttered. “Now don’t quote me.”
Glancing at Kampman, Breathwaite said, “I’ll
bury
my nose in it,” then regretted the dig. There was still Jes.
“Freddy,” said Gussy. “Breathwaite: Now you’d be a Lambeg man, would you not?”
Breathwaite thought of his ancestor, the informer, and said, “No. My people are from Tipperary.”
Gussy’s bewildered eyes ruminated. “Never heard of a Breathwaite from Tipperary.”
“At least that’s what my father told me. Maybe he lied.”
“And haven’t our fathers all lied to us!”
Breathwaite’s secretary was beside him, whispering, “It’s time for the seating.” A table for thirty had been set sidewise along the King’s New Square window in the restaurant alongside. Breathwaite slipped his Montblanc from his inside pocket and struck it against the whiskey bottle until the conversation in the room hushed. Kampman now had his inscrutable smile on again and was watching him.
“Now it is my pleasure,” he said, “to give the floor to my young colleague Harald Jaeger, who”—he glanced at Kampman—“will be succeeding me as international liaison.”
Jaeger fumbled in his pocket for some crumpled sheets, and with his first word, Breathwaite remembered that Jaeger’s spoken English was not particularly good.
“When this is my first time to be doing this,” Harald said, a flush creeping slowly up from his collar into his cheeks, “I am remembering that the first time is always special.”
There was a mutter of laughter through the room, and Sean Cronin threw back his head, smiling with the edges of his front teeth, and said, “I hope it as good for you, then, as it is for us!”
More laughter broke out, louder, and Jaeger’s cheeks flamed. His eyes jumped back and forth as a smile slithered desperately over his mouth and a giddy laughter chuckled from his throat. Breathwaite slapped him on the back. “Good one, Harald!” Hoping it might pass as intentional.
“So it is a pleasure—”
“I
am
pleased,” said Sean. “And please do remember that those who share the same bed do not necessarily share the same dream.”
Now everyone was laughing, even Breathwaite. It was impossible not to succumb. The large strange eyes of the long thin woman at the bar were gazing with iconic compassion upon Jaeger, whose own eyes jumped about the room, from face to face, clearly seeing no one. He lifted the champagne glass in his right hand, his bandaged pinky jutting out at a vaguely obscene angle. Apparently, he had abandoned his printed text. “To velcome our guests from Ireland I vould read a digt, a poem by a poet from the wery special Wiking city of Dublin. The poet is Vilhelm Botler Yeets …”
Cronin clapped his hands once, grinning. “Oh, I love it!” And Jaeger lifted the glass formally in front of his nose. With profound seriousness and sincerity now, he began to recite:
“ ‘Love comes in your mouth …’ ”
There was a moment of tense silence through the room. Then Jaeger started giggling.
Please please please please please
, Breathwaite chanted silently in the dark realm behind his eyelids.
Please get a fucking hold of yourself!
“I start again,” Jaeger said.
“But the first start was so perfect!” exclaimed Sean Cronin.
Now Jaeger had it. Or so, apparently, he thought. He cleared his throat. The room fell to a desperately respectful silence, and Jaeger recited:
Love comes in at your mouth.
Vine comes in at your eye.
This is all vi shall know of love
Until vi grow old or die.
I raise my glass to look at you
And cry,
Skål
!
Clearly everyone had in silent complicity decided to hear wrong, or not to hear, even the Irish, even Sean Cronin. All toasted solemnly, all applauded, and Breathwaite’s blushing secretary passed around the seating plan.
Kampman stepped up to Breathwaite. “Excellent poem,” he said. “Your choice, I presume.” He was smiling.
Warm and dry in Martinus’s restaurant, Breathwaite equipped himself with a cigar and a large draft, served by the dark, eponymous Martin with his welcoming smile. Breathwaite sat at a table behind the plate window and puffed meditatively at his apostolado, gazing into the dim November light on Victor Borge Place and North Free Harbor Street. Outside, it was drizzling. A woman bicycled across the square, holding an opened black umbrella over her head. Two tables down from where Breathwaite sat, a young, angular fellow wearing a straw Borsalino and narrow, black-framed spectacles sat hunched over a latte, reading Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
, jiggling a pen over a pad, clearly prepared to take notes.
Breathwaite’s cigar was slightly stale. He studied the cracked wrapper and reminded himself that he had no income now and was diminishing his capital by the day. Start smoking cheaper. Better sooner than later. This was a twenty-crown cigar. In ALDI supermarket, he could get a wooden box of five panatelas for fifty crowns—never mind that engraved on the wooden cover were the words
Original Colombo Cigars
or that they were manufactured in Germany, not the world’s foremost cigar producer. They were cheap and they were smokable. He could allow himself two to three a day, and in time he would forget the taste of Cohiba.
He wet his mouth with the beer. In the future, when the weather was good, he might consider taking his beer from the bottle on a bench; you could get a perfectly drinkable bottle of pilsner from ALDI or Fakta or Netto for a crown and a half. He pictured himself swathed in his Burberry, Stetson tilted over his eyes. On a park bench. Daintily tipping back his pilsner. Colombo panatela clamped between his teeth. (’
Scuse me, sir, I forgot, just one more question, please …
)
He would miss his cafés and serving houses. The little pleasures. A sardine on dark rye at the White Lamb, served by an amiable one-armed waiter. Rough-cut Irish bacon and egg on toast at Dubliners, where the waiter says, “Get it down your neck now, it’ll do you good,” and it does; the continuing saga of bacon propels you through the day as it negotiates the course of your alimentary canal, sliding through on its own delicate grease. And the draft so nicely tapped in Rosengårds Bodega; decorous matchboxes of the Eiffel Bar, where a double goes for a modest tune; the friendly dour face of Hans at Café Under the Clock; the friendly fellows of Femmeren—the Fiver—on Classensgade; or a selection of bracing cheeses at Krut’s, where the former proprietor, Peter Kjaer, was in the process of distilling his own single-malt in the Scottish highlands, Bruichladdich vintage 2003 single-cask, an ex-bourbon cask treated with oloroso sherry.
Of course, there was an alternative, a very real alternative. He could do it the way his father had. Use it all up fast and shuffle off the coil. What did it matter now?
The irony had come afterward, as a kicker. After all the bitter kissing of Kampman’s butt, fighting to salvage the unsalvageable, he won the confirmation, a concession.
“Martin, about that job for my boy …”
Martin stared at him with that deceptively mild expression. Then, “Send him in. We’ll take a look at him.”
As if he were an object, a piece of meat, a donkey. Even
that
Breathwaite swallowed. But then Jes, finally cornered at a table in Pussy Galore, listened politely to Breathwaite’s offer and said, “Thanks, Dad. Really, thanks. But I don’t want a job like that.”
“Jes: It’s part-time. You’ll make a hundred grand a year for a few hours a week, have time to finish your degree, and have a foot in the door for a spot that most kids your age would give their left nut for. Even just the experience would—”
“I don’t want a
spot
, Dad. I want a life.”
“Here we go with the rhetoric. How much are you earning at that key-and-heel bar? A hundred crowns an hour?”
“Eighty.”
“Eighty! And you’re telling me no? Wake up, son!”
The boy leaned across the table. With his long body and long limbs, he made Breathwaite think of a praying mantis. “Dad, maybe
you
should wake up. Or maybe not. Maybe not. You know what happens when the dead awaken. They find that they have never lived.”
It was an interesting moment for Breathwaite. He seemed to watch it from three different viewpoints. The surface view was that his son was sufficiently culturally fluent to so easily call up an appropriate quote from an Ibsen play that was more than one hundred years old; beneath that, he admired that the boy could use the quote in a debate over serious matters, like a skilled chess player selecting an old but excellent gambit; beneath that was the fact that his own son was telling him he was a dead man who had never lived. Two points of admiration, one of pain. And even if he could discount it as the observation of a callow youth, nevertheless the pain struck deep. Yet he noted with interest that it seemed to draw neither blood nor tears. So maybe the boy was right. Maybe he was already dead. Maybe he was a dead man who had forgotten to jump down into his grave. Or maybe there was another interpretation—that death
is
an awakening, life a mere illusory slumber. And what did it really matter, anyway? He was no longer even certain that he regretted any of it.
You were given a life. You used it. Or it used you. It got used up. You got used up. The only regret he felt keenly now was the hurt he had caused Kis. He should have told her what was happening right from the start. But how could he have known that Kampman would use that maneuver with the Irish?
Bastard!
He’d already had him down, but he’d had to deliver the last lethal kick in the head. Coup de grâce.
“Did you have to do that, Martin?” Breathwaite had asked him in the office the day after. “To Kis.”
Kampman had shrugged elaborately. “Things should be up front. I naturally assumed she would have been the first you’d tell. And I wanted to give your friends an opportunity to say a proper good-bye. They thanked me for it, in fact.”
People think they are excused from their treachery because they report it to your face. Get him back. Engage the enemy. Never was good at it. But it was Kis whom Kampman had hurt. And now that there was nothing left to lose, Breathwaite investigated his heart for the desire to take revenge, to hurt the man back for what he had done to Kis. Or was it he himself who had hurt her?
Whatever, now Kis was pissed, and he was swangled again. The sweet angel was not pleased with him. Perhaps she would never be pleased with him again. The permanent displeasure of a sweet angel was like a world of enduring sunlessness. Swangled again. Swangled forever, dickless wonder.
Let your fountain be blessed, take delight in the wife of your youth, let her breasts fill you with pleasure, be entranced always with her.
Proverbs
, he thought,
5:18–19.
And,
What good has my capacity to spout quotations ever done me?
Those three couples on the bridge revisited his thoughts. He had been working the memory, constructing it, so that by now it really was a scene from a musical of his own composition, and the three couples danced mournfully in the misty evening, lake glistening behind them beneath the smoky sky. The dance they did was full of sorrow, and the lyrics to the musical were by Chaucer. Mournfully they kicked and pivoted, dipped and sang:
What is this life?
What asketh man to have?
Now with his love,
Now in his cold grave,
Alone, without company.
For a moment, a split of a moment, Breathwaite thought he was going to weep. But nothing happened. Instead he lifted the wet butt of the apostolado to his lips and drew.
It was half smoked, the pint of pilsner half drunk. He already knew, despite his Babbitt calculations, that he would be ordering a fresh pint, that he would be removing from his breast pocket another apostolado tube in order to enjoy the ritual: Screw the cap off the tube, tip out the cigar, grasp the end lug of the red cellophane zip strip with his fingernails and tear it around the circumference of the cigar, remove the cellophane from the cigar itself, carefully undo the band, not to destroy the wrapper (remember how his father used to say,
You like music, son; here’s a whole band for you
), nose the cigar, tongue it, tear off a strip from the cedar coil inside the tube, light the cedar with which to roast the tip of the cigar, then place the cigar between your lips and draw, fill your mouth with good smoke.
This was life. This was a reason to live. This was an excuse for living. He puffed the half-smoked apostolado and gazed out Martin’s window across Victor Borge Place, scattered with big soggy yellow leaves. He thought of his mother and father, years ago, attending a one-man Victor Borge show on Broadway. When? It was the mid-fifties, late fifties, maybe. When he was a child. He remembered them coming home afterward in a taxi, Dad wearing his blue suit, Mom in fashionable black, a white fur pillbox hat on her pretty head, flushed with happiness, so amused by the Dane’s monologue.
Is that what brought me here? That Victor Borge had made my parents happy?
Strange it seemed to him that that had been back in the United States, land of weak coffee, thin beer, and surly cabdrivers, in New York City, in Sunnyside, Queens, some five decades before, when he was a boy, and now he sat on Victor Borge Place in Copenhagen, fifty years and eight thousand miles away. His beautiful, unfaithful mother was dead, his idealistic, compassionate father, the amusing, sardonic Victor Borge … all dead.