Kerrigan in Copenhagen (11 page)

In 1943, Kerrigan was born to an Irish father and Danish mother, exactly a hundred years after the birth of Henry James and the publication of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Black Cat” and forty-five years before his meeting with the dazzling blonde Licia.

In 1831 Darwin sailed on the
Beagle
, 168 years before five states in the U.S. would eradicate his discoveries from the teaching curricula of their schools (along with the Big Bang Theory) and 133 years before Peter Higgs at the University of Edinburgh discovered, and lost, the so-called Higgs boson (the “God particle”)—an elusive particle that is believed to be capable of explaining why things in the universe have mass and, thus, why life exists. In 1821 John Keats died at the age of twenty-four, the same year Dostoyevsky and Flaubert were born, two years after the birth of Melville and Whitman in 1819, which was six years after the birth of Kierkegaard in 1813, the year the Danish State went bankrupt, six years after the Duke of Wellington bombarded Copenhagen, killing nearly 2 percent of its civilian population, thirty years before Kierkegaard would write
The Seducer's Diary
in 1843 while Darwin was writing
The Origin of the Species
, one hundred years before Kerrigan was born, 145 years before Licia seduced Kerrigan in 1988, before his forty-fifth birthday—selected, seduced, bore fruit with, and abandoned him eight years later (while he was in Edinburgh, thirty-two years after Higgs made his initial discovery there), cleaned out his heart and half of his life's savings, bombarded him with tender attention until the top of his head was blown off as surely as Wellington blew the roof off the
White Lamb
, and scientists have not yet found again the Higgs boson, the God particle.

Darwin's study would later be translated into Danish by J. P. Jacobsen, whom James Joyce in 1901 would call “a great innovator” in the techniques of fiction, and in 1843 Kierkegaard's fictional Johannes was stalking the innocent young fictional Cordelia along the banks of this lake where Kerrigan sits in 1999, painfully aware that he was Licia's bitch, forcing himself to savor the taste of dust, glimpsing the beautiful
willowy apron-wrapped hips of the waitress who brings him yet another large draft and another lovely, elfin smile, and just like that, he is dazzled and yearns to dance in the woods with her.

He wonders what would happen if he kissed her. Just like that—jumped up and stole a kiss from those lips, too quick for her to get away. Instead he chances to speak to her as she gathers his soiled dishes and uneaten crusts, to quote the conclusion of the Danish Steen Steensen Blicher's
Diary of a Parish Clerk
, written in 1824, when Keats was three years dead, a fictional depiction of the famous tragic love affair between a beautiful young Jutland aristocratic woman, Marie Grubbe (1643–1718), and her game warden, which ends in squalor and poverty in Copenhagen and is, still later, depicted by J. P. Jacobsen in a full-length novel:

“As for man,” quoth Kerrigan from Blicher, himself quoting scripture, to the waitress, “his days are as grass … For the wind passeth over it and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.”

The girl's smile is wise as Buddha's: “Can I get you something else, sir?” she asks.

Moved by another hunger now, less specific than the hunger for food or drink, he strolls up
Østerbrogade
, East Bridge Street, crosses
Trianglen
, the triangular joining of three avenues, pausing to look at the goddamn 7-Eleven shop where once stood a guest house and restaurant in which two hundred years before, Peter the Great, Czar of Russia, slept.

He passes
Det Røde Lygte
, on the west of the three angles, the Red Light Café, whose red door lamps are innocent of prurience—a soccer bar that opened in 1886, the year after the birth of Ezra Pound in the U.S. and François Mauriac in France, seven years before the birth of Tom Kristensen, who was born a year before Dorothy Parker in 1894, fifteen years before the birth, in 1909, of Kerrigan's father, who would migrate back from Brooklyn to Ireland and on a visit to Copenhagen in 1936, the same year that Joyce and Nora visited Denmark, would meet his Danish wife to be, Elene Mørk, who after the birth of Kerrigan
never slept with her husband again, according to a confidence imparted by his father in his cups one night to twenty-year-old Kerrigan.

Kerrigan continues up East Bridge Street, past
Café Oluf
at the mouth of Olufsvej, and
the Park Café, Theodor's, Le Saint Jacques, Thygge's Inn
on Viborg Street, down Århus Street past
Århuskroen, the Århus Inn
, the
Café X-presen
, offering three unspecified finger sandwiches for a song, past
Café Åstedet
, the
Stream Place Café
, and feels like Andrew Flaws in another story, this one by the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown, “The Whaler's Return,” in which Flaws returns to the Orkneys from months at sea to be married, and between the port and the house of his betrothed in the next town are fifty alehouses waiting to take from him his wages from the long whaling journey.

He stops here and there, buys rounds, ends in the field spying on a tinker wedding, is discovered, thrashed, and loses more money there. Finally, in the morning, muddy and tired, he finds his way up the lane of his betrothed's house and tells her he has just enough left of his money for the first six months' rent, while they see to the seeding and the harvest. She tells him they are also in debt for a shrouding fee and for the digging of the grave of her father who was killed by a horse while Andrew was away. But he says he already saw to that on his way in, and his betrothed replies, “There are thirty-four ale houses in the town of Hamnavoe and sixteen ale houses on the road between Hamnavoe and Borsay. Some men from the ships are a long time getting home … That was a good thing you did, Andrew Flaws.”

Kerrigan was once in contact with George Mackay Brown. After reading the man's stories, he had wanted to visit the Orkneys to interview him, and they made plans for it by post, but Kerrigan never got there, and his last letters to Brown in 1995 went unanswered.

Then one afternoon, visiting Edinburgh in early 1996, at a bookshop on Princes Street, he picked up a new anthology of Scottish verse that included a lovely poem by George Mackay Brown, an account of an outing, of Folster's lipstick wounds, of Greve's sweet fog on a stick, of
Crusack's three rounds with a Negro, of Johnston's mouth full of dying fires, and, in the bio notes, he learned that George had died that year—that was the same trip from which Kerrigan returned to find his bride and daughter gone, his life's savings drained by half.
You are so blind
.

But he knew nothing of that yet. Kerrigan had gone on to Milne's on Rose Street, where 40 percent larger spirits are served, and the Abbortsford, for pints of black Orkney where George had drunk with Hugh MacDiarmid and Dylan Thomas and W. H. Auden. He thought about the fact that the Orkney Islands had been Danish until 1468. He thought of the wild Danish-Scottish islands he had never seen, although he might have, the fine writer he had never met, although he might have done that, too.

Kerrigan thinks now about the gaudy monument to Walter Scott on Princes Street and the modest plaque to Robert Louis Stevenson in Princes Street Gardens—just his initials and years in a plaque in the grass—and of riding a mountain bike up and down the hilly roads of Lasswade, where, at the entry to the motorway, there stands a sign: PEDESTRIANS, CYCLISTS, HORSE-DRAWN VEHICLES AND ANIMALS PROHIBITED, and he looked about in vain for bespectacled four-legged creatures who might be capable of receiving that instruction. And he thinks about Licia secretly enacting her escape from him while he was in Edinburgh. But she must have been planning it long before. Licia to whom if anyone had asked him, he would have said and truly believed he was happily wed. He'd thought they were happy together.

He doubles back and, across the street from the gateway to the stadium, pauses to gaze through the arched port at the four-meter-tall silhouetted bronze sculpture of the archer by Ernst Moritz Geyger (1861–1941) bow drawn, arrow targeted south—a giant Johannes the Seducer aiming to pierce the heart of Cordelia.

Above the archway, Alfred Boucher's three runners at the goal, frozen in green bronze, strive to be first over the line, each reaching for individual victory.

It makes him feel a little more complete to know who these two statues were sculpted by and when and that they were donated by the brewer Carl Jacobsen to the city in which Kerrigan lives. Makes him feel that the world surrounding him is no mere blur, that he knows it and the objects that furnish it, even if he did not and does not know what was occurring in the secret interior of the skull of the woman he thought was his soul mate.

On the other side of Østerbrogade, East Bridge Avenue, from Sankt Jakobs Kirke, his leather-shod feet lead him to
Le Saint Jacques Café
. This was once Sankt Jacob's Bodega, a bucket-of-blood bar, but now in the hands of a French owner, Daniel Letz, it serves excellent cuisine and boasts a magnificent icon collection—a whole beautiful wall of them behind glass, sad-eyed Madonnas with child, saints with fingers raised in benediction over the diners. He orders a draft at the bar, a little bag of peanuts, then takes a wicker seat in the ebbing sunlight. He munches the peanuts from the tiny cellophane bag on which is printed PLEASE REMEMBER THAT SMALL CHILDREN CAN CHOKE ON NUTS. Here, kids, have some nuts. He dusts salt from his palms and fires up a Christian long cigarillo. Dry tobacco. Agreeably bitter in the mouth, smoke floating blue then gray up into the late-afternoon sun that glints white on the surface of the green-lacquered tabletop and glows like yellow amber in the beer.

Music lilts from inside the café and he recognizes Billie Holiday's voice, Ben Webster's tenor. He also recognizes the song, a lyric by Dorothy Parker in which Dorothy, via Billie, wishes on the moon for an April day that will not dance away.

Billie's voice so sweet and wistful, lilting and strong; when she says “April day,” Kerrigan's heart is filled with the accepted sadness of its retreating dance, and Webster's tenor softens it all with a reedy mellow cool nod. Kerrigan happens to know this was recorded in Los Angeles in June 1957 when he was still thirteen years old. The Chevy was a work of art that year. But two and a half years later, Lady Day would be dead. He thinks of Frank O'Hara's poem “The Day Lady Died.”

He loves the voice, the tenor, the lyric, the poem, by four dead people, but what bothers him is that the day Lady Day died, two days after Bastille Day in 1959, he didn't even know about it because he didn't even know about her—he was pushing sixteen then, and even if he was living in the city she died in, the city O'Hara describes in his poem, where he buys the
New York Post
and sees her fateful picture which Kerrigan knew nothing about from the other side of the East River where he lived with his forty-four-year-old mother, same age as the Lady when she died and when he still didn't even know anything about her or about Frank O'Hara either who died in 1966 at the age of forty in a Fire Island car accident that Kerrigan vaguely recalls hearing about when he was twenty-three and lived on East Third Street between avenues A and B, Alphabet City, just as he vaguely recalls hearing when he was twenty-four of the death of Dorothy Parker in 1967:
An April day that will not dance away …

He sips his amber beer and wonders who might be dying today that he had never even or only vaguely heard of. For a fleeting instant he pictures Licia dying, dead, relishes it, but instantly withdraws the thought, not to wish his little girl motherless, wherever she might be. Anyway, Licia will surely outlive him. And then he thinks of Licia as an April day that danced away while his back was turned.

The sun has slid away from the Le Saint Jacques tables, slants across the other side of the little square. Kerrigan drains his beer, crosses Skt. Jakobs Place to the sunny side and
Theodor's
. The tables are all taken, but anyway he sees what the pattern of his day will be: He already has to pee again. Good day to sit closer to the loo than to the bar. And he composes a bit of doggerel on his way to the gents':

A Mystery

If I sit closer to the loo

Than to the bar, I think

That's 'cause I piss more than I drink.

How that can be so, I do not know.

I only know it's true.

Inside the black-and-chrome interior he finds the gents', repeats the fate of the exasperated spirit, proceeding from urinal to urinal. Room made for more beer, he strolls across the barroom toward the outside tables, but notices a note on the glass door: WE LIKE BABIES, BUT BREAST-FEEDING IS NOT PERMITTED ON THESE PREMISES, thinks how curiously un-Danish to be opposed to breast-feeding, the breast being (in the words of Knut Hamsun in
Hunger
) a “sweet miracle” as well as the one human organ that can only nurture and cannot be used to strike, gouge, fire a projectile, or cause any manner of pain other than the sweet agony of longing.

He finds an empty chair, sits, orders, lights a Christian. He holds the match before his eyes. The air is now so still that the flame seems not to move at all, seems perfectly still yet vibrant, eating the wood of the match-stick, violent yet stable—structured in a perfect symmetrical spire, at one and the same moment beautiful, fearsome, mysterious. He wants to ask the waiter why the breast-feeding prohibition, but is in no mood for controversy. Remembers Licia allowing him to taste her milk—such a miracle.

Then he notes a newspaper section on the chair beside him, takes it up. It is the Copenhagen section of the
Jutland Post, Jyllandsposten
, folded open to an article about a hundred-year-old telephone kiosk that is about to be auctioned off on Kongens Nytorv—the King's New Square. The starting bid is $60,000. It is the first of a number of telephone kiosks designed by Fritz Koch in 1886, roomy and richly appointed with wood and copper and glass, large enough for an office with a panorama of windows. There are only a handful of them left. That they survive out on the streets without being vandalized is a tribute to Danish civilization. It occurs to Kerrigan to buy it, use it for an office. Sit there in his oversize telephone box on the King's New Square surrounded by a wide circle of elegant buildings, the Royal Theater with its great seated sculptures of Ludvig Holberg, considered the Danish Molière, and Adam Oehlenschläger, the early-nineteenth-century romantic poet whose little sister Sophie married H. C. Ørsted's older brother and was loved by many poets, including of course Hans Christian Andersen.