Kerrigan in Copenhagen (18 page)

Their pace slows, and they move closer together after viewing the sculpture. He drapes an arm around her shoulder and she smiles up at him, and he feels himself leaning toward her. Down Grønningen to Esplanaden, across to Bredgade, past the Catholic cathedral, St. Ansgar's—with the skull of Lucius I inside his bust—and on to
Dronningens Tvær Street
, to number 12, a semibasement restaurant that used to, she informs him via her Moleskine, be named
Jomfruen
—the Virgin—and is now
Kælder 12
—Basement 12, owned by a couple from Bornholm. Eight steps down into the restaurant. His Associate links her arm into Kerrigan's, and he clasps her hand in his. The restaurant is pleasantly empty, only one table taken.

“Have you a table for two for lunch?” he asks the owner, a tall, black-and-gray-bearded fellow named Alan. “I think we can manage that,” he
says with the slightest of ironic garnishes at which Danes are so adept. “Are you a Dane who moved to America?” he asks. “They have accents, too.”

“No, I'm an American who moved to Denmark. Everyone has some kind of accent,” Kerrigan says, recalling the girl he spoke to in the New Orleans airport once who asked him where his accent was from. He told her New York via Copenhagen and asked where hers was from. “Where ah come from,” she said, “we don't hayev accents.”

His Associate recommends a dish on the menu called
bakskuld
—a fish in Danish called
ising
, a type of flounder, a flat fish. Kerrigan asks the waiter how the fish is prepared.

“Now that fish is definitely served dead,” he says. “First it is air-cured for twenty-four hours, then it is salted for another twenty-four, then smoked for yet another twenty-four. And then I fry it.”

Kerrigan scrapes the succulent, salty, smoked flesh from the flounder's skeleton and lifts it with knife and fork onto the coarse rye bread, squeezes the lime quarters over it, and closes his eyes with pleasure when the delicate, salty meat hits his tongue. He lifts his stem glass and peers into her delightful green eyes. “This fish must swim down our gullets.” They are drinking doubles of O. P. Anderson snaps, and Kerrigan is at ease again. His Associate consults her Moleskine, reads, “Olof Peter Anderson, Swedish, 1797 to 1876. But the snaps was launched by his son, Carl August Anderson, in 1891. One hundred and eight years ago.”

They salute with their glasses, sip, present them again, their eyes meet, they nod. “I feel so good,” he says, “that I might even eat a sweet afterwards.” He lifts his eyebrows, gazing at her.

She smiles—thinking, he hopes, of those exquisite moments in the dark the night before, and not of what he has told her about his life, about Licia.

“Did you know,” he asks, “apropos sweets, that what you Danes call Vienna bread,
wienerbrød
, the Americans call Danish pastry?”

“Yes, and we call it Vienna bread because there was a bakers' strike in
Copenhagen in the nineteenth century, and some imported Viennese bakers taught us to like the very delicate, layered pastry we call Vienna bread. American Danish is so heavy and sticky.”

“You're not a fan of sweets?” he asks in English, eager to get her speaking it, too, to hear her charming accent.

“Most are either to spice or sweets, not both. I am to spice.”

“Well, I would dearly like to spice you right now. And sweet you, too. I'm to both,” he adds, imitating her characteristic Danish preposition misuse, which charms him.

Her smile is dizzying with its open loveliness, and it is a blessed late April day, even if the
Politiken
he leafed through earlier predicted snow and what the Danes call
Aprilsvejr
, April weather, which runs the full spectrum of the four seasons in constant flux, practically from second to second.

The snaps and beer make him remember the pleasures of their bodies, and he smiles dreamily at her.

“You really liked them?” she asks. “The paintings?”

“No. I lied. They're terrible. And you're lousy in bed, too.”

“Couldn't be worse than you. You know,” she says, “instead of dessert, I vas thinking of a freshly smoked eel with warm scrambled egg on dark, coarse, home-baked rye with fresh chopped chives and new ground pepper.”

“And another double O. P. Anderson?”

“Of course. Eel must swim, too,
skat
,” she says in Danish, and that word of endearment,
skat
, treasure, can be either ironic or sincere, and he can hear that it is sincere passing from her lovely mouth. He leans across to touch her lips with his, tasting aquavit and lime on her tongue, then peers into her green smiling eyes.

The eel and pepper and meniscus of O. P. shoot to his brain, and Kerrigan whispers to his Associate, “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For thinking of the eel, of course!”

He notices an
Ekstra Bladet—
the raunchier of the two leading Danish
tabloids—on a chair, and they titillate themselves by scanning the massage ads in the back:
Pussyclub kinky hot superbitch Susi, supersexed blonde with big tits and piquant butt carries out your special wishes. Everything in rubber, leather and plastic. Hot nude stripshow, gentle tingling bondage, urine cocktails, slave rearing, nurse sex, baby treatment, analblockage, long-term bondage, public humiliation, weight clips, thumbtacks pins and hands-macking with a ruler!

“Here's one,” she says. “
Suzette offers devil-bizarre sheep herding
.”

“
Sheep
herding?”

“That's what it says. And
Sissi, genuine red cunt hair and double D cups
.”

“Yeah,” he says, “but do the curtains match the rug?”

“How's this?
Kiss my foot while your wife watches!
”

“That's original.”

“I'm getting excited,” she says.

“Why? Would you like to kiss my foot while your wife watches?”

Her eyes blaze at him. “
Yes!
”

“Maybe we should just nip up to my place on the lakes,” he suggests.

She nods toward the back. “I just have to …”

As he waits he refuses to worry about whether or not there is some responsibility issue involved here, whether he is getting involved, implicitly making promises. They are both adults. You don't have to fall in love. There is no rule about that.

Through the semibasement window, Kerrigan notices a few round wet patches up on the pavement as the day removes the warmth of its caressing hand. The light darkens and he hears the low music of the restaurant's sound system. Synchronistically, Diana Krall is doing “Let's Fall in Love,” and he is thinking that was recorded this year but was written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler in 1933, ten years before he was born. Despite her wish to treat, he beats her to it and is standing, looking out the glass door, as she comes up from behind and embraces him. Something in him wants to tense but he receives her embrace, melts into it, into the moment, into the joy of a woman wanting to embrace him like this, rejects worry until later. That time, that sorrow.

“God, I
love
it here,” she says afterward, standing naked at the front windows of his apartment over Black Dam Lake, gazing out onto the rippling silver water beneath the young green of the chestnut trees. He watches her from behind, where he still lies naked on the double-foam mattress they threw down there to give themselves plenty of room to roll and rock. Relieved to have located his spare eyeglasses, he can see clearly again and studies her objectively, wonders if the flaws actually matter—at their age.
What would she see if I were at the window with my naked backside to her?
He remembers Ovid's advice: let the light in the bedroom be dim, especially with older women. But old Ovid was right about the wisdom of her experience. He removes his glasses to see her impressionistically again.

He is thinking about those strange advertisements they read in the tabloid to titillate themselves, and the present in which he exists seems suddenly like some weird science fiction movie of the future in which the world is organized in a strange manner with certain people as an underbreed in which they are manipulated by economics to sell their bodies to others who live in another sphere where the repression of their carnality is required as an imagined requisite for social order. This carnal suppression, however, calls forth strange desires that they must use the money their asexual occupations accrue for them to buy satisfaction amid the underbreed. He has a vision of some rich fat-cat executive who pays a large sum of cash to a street woman to piss on him. The thought is too weird for him to pursue just now.

He stretches luxuriously to free his mind of it. “What shall we drink now?”

“There's jazz at Krut's,” she says, and looks at her watch—the only thing she is wearing. “Starts in about an hour.”

“Tick tick tick,” he says, and his eyes fall on his
Finnegan
satchel. He hasn't been reading it, despite his promises to himself that this time he really will. “Just think,” he says. “If a person's not careful, he could die without ever having finished
Finnegans Wake
. What can you tell me about Krut's?”

“It is a delightful little place. They have one of the biggest selections
of whiskeys in Copenhagen, and the whiskey menu has a map so you can see exactly where what you're drinking is from.”

Since he can see again, he leads the way back across the Potato Rows to the café beneath the sign in blue neon script,
Krut's Karport
. On one wall hangs a framed green-and-yellow painting of an absinthe label—Krut's Karport's own brand of the 68 percent spirit, 136 proof. The label shows a man in a dented blue top hat, chin in hand at a table, a glass of the green spirit before him, while a red-haired woman standing behind the table studies the bottle against a green-yellow impressionist wall.

Kerrigan asks the pretty smiling waitress named, she tells them, Cirkeline, “Isn't absinthe illegal?”

“This is the only place you can get it in Copenhagen,” she says. “We have a special permit.”

“What does your Moleskine have to say about absinthe?” he asks his Associate.

“Say my name, and I shall tell you,” she says, her pouting lower lip provoking him gently.

“Your name? Seems I did hear. Think I have it somewhere on the papers from the temp service.”

“You bastard.”

He smiles. “Annelise,” he says, and delights in the naked pleasure of the smile with which she rewards him. “Wery good,” she says, opening her Moleskine book. “Now I shall tell you about absinthe.”

Originally absinthe was 72 percent alcohol, more of a demon than a spirit, she tells him. It resulted in considerable social misery in the nineteenth century in France. Edgar Degas's famous painting
L'Absinthe
from 1876—a woman seated at a rough wood table at the Parisian Café Nouvelle Athènes in Place Pigalle with a glass of the drink in front of her, her eyes empty—is a kind of portrait of late-nineteenth-century French alcoholism.

Absinthe is believed to have been concocted by a Swiss woman, Madame Henriod, in the late eighteenth century. It was distilled on a base of wormwood (
Artemisia absinthium
) and anise (
Pimpinella anisum
)—
spices that date back to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Arabia. In the Middle Ages, these spices were used to cure flatulence and also as an aphrodisiac.

“Liquor is still quicker,” says Kerrigan.

Madame Henriod's formula was sold to an itinerant doctor who dispensed it as a cure for bad stomachs. From him, the formula was sold to a Swiss military man, Major Dubied, who set up the first absinthe distillery with the assistance of his son-in-law, Henri-Louis Pernod. In 1805 they began production in France. Originally it was drunk by French foreign legionnaires in North Africa, both as a water purifier and as a cure for weak intestines and, of course, for recreational use. Then they brought the habit home with them, and it caught on.

During the so-called belle epoque of fin de siècle France, it was drunk by pouring it over sugar cubes in a perforated spoon balanced on the mouth of the glass. It occurs to Kerrigan that they are also at a fin de siècle, but hardly a belle epoque. Or will it be seen as such one day?

It was referred to as
la fée verte
, the green fairy, by the French poet Paul Verlaine (1844–1896)—who is also known for having shot Arthur Rimbaud, the antiauthoritarian young poet (1854–1891), in the wrist in a lover's quarrel in 1873, the year Rimbaud wrote
A Season in Hell
—when he was only nineteen.

Kerrigan says, “He was also only seventeen when he wrote ‘The Drunken Boat' and came up with the idea of the
déréglement de tous les sens
—the disordering of all the senses.”

Zola, Baudelaire, and Van Gogh drank absinthe as well. Van Gogh is said to have been under its spell when he sliced off his ear, although recently it was suggested that in fact Gauguin cut off the ear with a fencing foil.

“A pair of character foils, ey?” Kerrigan says. “Ear done off by the green fairy.”

The French working classes also used absinthe to “disarray their senses,” but more to escape the harsh conditions of their lives than to court the muse. Soon the green fairy acquired a new nickname:
le péril vert
, the green peril. By 1915 it was banned, but in 1922 a new law
allowed the production of anise liquors of no more than 40 percent without wormwood; in 1938, this was raised to 45 percent, ninety proof. Here the current French national drink, pastis, entered the scene, not green but yellow in color, and when diluted with water (five to one) it turns a milky hue. “
Un petit jaune, s'il vous plaît
.” A little yellow one, please.

Jake Barnes in Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises
drinks absinthe straight, unsweetened, toward the end of that novel and describes the taste as “pleasantly bitter,” but the “correct” way to drink it is as they did in the belle époque. The original absinthe has been known to cause hallucinations, but the wormwood used now is not
Artemisia absinthium
, which is illegal, but
Artemisia vulgaris
, and the level of
thujune
—a hallucinogenic chemical—is very low. The alcohol content is still high, however.