Falling Sideways (2 page)
Calm then, he wiped the corners of his eyes, demon free, guzzled half a liter of cold grapefruit juice, belched with openmouthed pleasure, scratched his butt, and stepped under a steaming shower. Beneath the scalding water, behind his pink-black eyelids, images of Amalie and Elisabeth drifted across his consciousness.
No. Not today. Please.
No use. He remembered when last he had phoned, and six-year-old Amalie told him she thought about him every single night when she lay down in bed, kept seeing his face in the dark. The demons moved closer again. Wrapped in a black plush bath towel, he dialed, only too aware what the voice of his ex could do to him if he caught her in the wrong mood—and when was Vita
ever
in the right mood? The phone burred half a dozen times before he dropped it back into the cradle and sat there, palms on knees, staring at the grimy sun-smudged window, thinking what a fucked-up mess he’d made of his life, of their poor sweet innocent lives.
No.
He rose again to the all-important oblations at the glass altar of his little bathroom sink. With a snazzy black plastic razor, he shaved the hairless portions of his lower face—cheeks, neck, up to the sculpted slant of his midear burns, tiny arrowheads pointing to the corners of his ’stache, sculpting his motherfucker beard, as it was called. He wondered why: Because bad guys sported the style? Or guys who fucked mothers? Mystery there. All mothers would have had to be fucked, making every father a motherfucker. Or was it the sexy motherfucker that Prince sang about? What exactly did the Americans mean by this term?
He selected the tiny folding scissors given him as a gift thirteen years before by a woman whose sexual beauty he remembered in detail to this day. Mystery there. Why had he chosen the irascible dark Vita over the light loveliness of Janne? Complicated by the fact that Janne was, in fact, the dark-eyed brunette, Vita the blue-eyed blonde. Ice blue.
Thumb and finger in the handle holes of the little scissors, reverently recollecting the vision of Janne’s perfect, pear-stemmed breasts and shy, bright smile, he inserted the pointy tips of the blades into his nostrils and snipped short the bristling red nose hairs, trimmed his blond mustache and its architectural extensions to the neat, square beard that framed his square, dimpled chin under the clear expanse beneath his full lower lip.
He viewed the beard with satisfaction, trimmed a stray darker blond hair from his eyebrow, spotted a boary bristle from the chamber of his left ear, and clipped that, saw as it fell to the edge of the black porcelain sink that it was not blond but gray. He picked it up between thumb and finger and held it close before his eyes. No doubt. Gray. He leaned closer to the mirror for a minute inspection of his beard, but it was blond, all blond, no gray at all. Not yet.
Relaxing again, he reverently refolded the scissors, laid the minuscule folded instrument in the palm of his hand, and gazed at it tenderly, thinking again of Janne and how she had been, how she had looked last time he’d seen her, only a few weeks ago, in the supermarket, wheeling an unpleasant-looking child in her grocery cart, her own face bloated almost beyond recognition. It had become a face that Jaeger could not love, a face that precluded desire, a fact he acknowledged with disagreeable self-awareness but acknowledged nonetheless.
No more games
, he thought.
I am what I am. For better or worse.
He smirked.
Till death do I part.
His eyes were still on the blond beard reflected in the frame-lit mirror above the sink, one of the few beautiful things in this dingy little apartment to which the divorce had relegated him. He was ashamed to take most women home to it, had to prepare them for the shock, fearing the surprised disappointment that might flash across their faces.
A man of your position! A man of your background!
Or just,
You live
here
?
The neighborhood was okay, no problem there, fashionable even, or on its way to becoming so, though he was half a generation too old for it. But the building was terrible—right from the battered and graffiti-spattered outside door and on up. There was not even a lobby and the shabby, dumpy stairwell no self-respecting academic would, as the saying went, subject his mother-in-law to. No elevator, either, so you were forced to mount by foot every dingy landing, through the lingering stench of gone generations of brown-cabbage eaters, to the fourth floor, only to find at the end of the ascent a shabby two-roomer that matched the stairwell.
Thank God his mother and father had not lived to see this downward turn, this further downward turn. By half. He had married up economically—Vita was the daughter of a plumbing contractor—down socially. He was a third-generation academic, Vita a never-employed dental assistant and cultural autodidact. He did it all to himself, he knew, and had no one else to thank.
Harald Jaeger, this is your life.
But his face, illuminated in the frame-lit mirror, was still blond and young and, he had to admit, though one wished not to be self-loving, handsome. Handsome enough, anyway. His dark blue eyes were almost violet and his lashes and brows so much darker than his beard and head hair that a woman had once asked him, with evident fascination, if he used eye makeup.
“Women sense my power,” he said aloud to his reflected face, quoting one of his favorite films. “I do not avoid women, but I do deny them my essence.”
But that was the trouble. It was theirs for the taking. Women were his everything. Women. Plural. He knew it, no need trying to deny it. He was a ladies’ man, and that was it. Not a skirt chaser, but a woman adorer.
From the elegant bottle of Armani Acqua di Giò, he dashed a generous puddle into his palm and anointed his shining cheeks with the agreeable scented sting. Dashed a bit beneath his arms, inside of his thighs, on the butt cheeks. Never knew when you might be glad you did.
But he had been alone now for nearly a month since the infatuation with Caecilie had petered out.
Losing your touch.
One day perhaps they would all be gone and he would be alone then forever, and what then?
That time, that sorrow.
After a last lingering glance at his illuminated face, he switched off the mirror lamp and withdrew to the inner dump to dress: crisp black Boss jeans, mint green shirt, charcoal gray cashmere necktie, his good handwoven Irish tweed jacket. And jogged down four flights, averting his eyes from the shabby institutional green woodwork to the courtyard, averting his eyes from the overfull Dumpsters, unlocked his bicycle, and mounted it at a run, coasted through the arched portal to the grime of North Bridge Street, and started pumping through the morning traffic toward the Centrum.
Still farther north, in the coveted north Copenhagen inner suburb of Hellerup, in a yellow-brick bungalow a few streets down from Vita Jaeger’s classic Gentofte minimanor, Birgitte Sommer woke from a dream in which she and Lars had been painting the walls of their Gilleleje summer house the sunniest shade of sun yellow. They had been naked in the dream, their lean, long bodies glistening with daubs of the beautiful paint; Lars’s dark hair somehow was yellow in the dream, golden, even the thick hair matting his chest and his groin, and he turned to her with a dazzling smile and exclaimed,
Birgitte, you’re fan
tas
tic! This is the
perfect
color! It will last all winter so we can sun ourselves naked out back!
And the children?
she asked.
Suddenly his face looked like someone else’s. It swooped toward her, grinning, whispering,
Yes! Like this!
as he cupped his hand between her legs.
She woke smiling beatifically up at the molded stucco fringe of the high white ceiling, only to find her own hand between her legs and the bed beside her empty. She sighed and ran her palm over the rumpled sheet where Lars had slept, lowered her face to it, and breathed the sweet-sour scent left by his body. In a sun-yellow mood, she donned a crème silk robe (sixty-nine crowns from an unassorted bin at ALDI) and paused for a moment, running her long fingers through her curly black hair, gazing across the pleasantly muted light of the bedroom to the luminous gauze curtains that faced the garden she had expended nearly every weekend of the summer tending.
Now, as the season ended, she had it nearly where she wanted it. Next year, she would turn it over to the local retiree who had offered his services for a monthly cash payment they could afford—
if
they shopped,
without exception
, in the Netto and ALDI and Fakta supermarkets instead of the upscale Irma or ISO or Brugsen—while she turned her attentions to the garden of the summer house they had closed on two weeks ago in Gilleleje. Like the garden here, it was completely sequestered by tall, ligustrum privet hedges. They could go naked there all weekend if they wished. And the necessary economies would keep them trim even as the value of their properties grew.
Still damp from her lovely dream, she stepped into the espadrille home shoes that displayed the cleavage of her toes and padded out to the nook at the front of the house where they took their breakfast.
Lars sat alone by the shady window over a single mug of coffee, reading the newspaper and picking his nose.
“Good morning!” she sang out, and felt the smile of her voice emanating from the surface of her skin.
He took his finger from his nose, brushing it on his thumb, and said, “Morn,” without looking up. And, “You forgot to buy milk again.”
“
I
forgot?” She was still smiling.
He smiled now, too, a tilted smile, and laughed a single quiet note of irony.
“You could run up to the dairy on the corner,” she said.
Another note of scornful laughter. “
Dairy?
It’s a goddamn Pakistani kiosk. Forty percent markup to fund the cousins in Jakarta.”
Birgitte was not to be daunted. “Well, good morning to you, too, sunbeam,” she said with a smile he did not see but no doubt heard, and she went to the kitchen and switched on the radio, sawed off a couple of slices of yesterday’s French bread, and laid them on the toaster.
On the radio, Gustav Winckler was singing “Little Summer Bird,” a song her father used to sing to her. How she missed him, the whiskers around his thick lips and the spaces between his smiling teeth as he sang; “summer bird” meant “butterfly” in Danish—
Lit-tle but-terfly, lit-tle but-ter-fly
—but it was also a play on their family name so that
she
was the little butterfly he sang to.
Her father had frequently emphasized to her the importance of owning property. Land never devalues, he’d told her. She had grown up in a small rented apartment and had not thought so much about it, but then she’d met Lars, who shared her dead father’s dreams of property, even if he didn’t possess her father’s sentimental side.
She was still smiling as she glanced into the oval mirror tacked above the kitchen sink and saw the best of her face, the frame of dark curls, the burgundy eyes, disregarding their narrowness and the knob at the end of her nose. But as the aroma of toasting bread lifted to her nostrils, her narrow gaze shifted from her smile to the round white face of the wall clock, and she realized it was Wednesday.
“Shit!”
“I
can’t
hear you,” Lars grumbled from the other room.
She hurried out to him on swift light feet. “I’ve got a meeting at the Tank, nine sharp. Watch the toast won’t burn!” And she ran for the bathroom, calling back, “I’ll have to take the car!”
“Like hell you will!” he called back, following her. “I’ll drop you off.”
“I can’t be late!”
“It’s just a damn meeting.”
“It’s the principle. We’re doing the annual resource report. I have to be there if there’re questions!”
“You’ll be there, for hell’s sake,” he said, tall and narrow-shouldered in his baggy, crap brown jogging suit (49.90 crowns at Netto, available in pee yellow, crap brown, and mucous green), his protruding Adam’s apple bowing over her at the bathroom door.
“Relax!”
Beneath the shower, she forgot the sunny yellow dream and her father’s song, disregarded her husband’s morning sourness and the increasing incidence of his nose picking and the lengthening time since they had last made love, and ran through the Tank accounts in her mind as she lathered herself with an egg-shaped cake of lemon soap. The fragrance lifted on the steam, and the feel of the soap in her palm coincided with a tweak of hunger in her stomach. She would eat toast in the car. But she wanted an egg, boiled, soft.
What am I thinking?
She opened her eyes in the steaming glass shower cabin, saw her steamy reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, straight up and down from narrow hips over flat belly to the flare of her C-cup breasts. She focused on the breasts.
There was still time.
She was only thirty-seven. Lars was ten years older. He had a better position than she, but he worked for the county; in the private sector, she made more. He was always insinuating the extra she made was somehow dishonest. County salary scales were reasonable. The private sector shoveled it in at the expense of the public. The world according to Lars.
She remembered his face in her dream, when it changed to someone else’s. Whose? It had been bearded, a little yellow beard. She realized with a start that it had been Harald Jaeger’s face, from the Tank. Why would she dream of Harald? Then she recalled that she had seen him the weekend before when she was out jogging in the deer park. He was walking with the cutest little girls. One on each hand, a tiny one and a taller one. Birgitte had stopped to chat, stooped down, and the littlest one asked her, “Who are you? You’re
nice
!” So sweet. So very sweet.
She shut off the water and stood shivering, wet, in the steam, and a thought she had not quite considered floated across her consciousness:
Where was the time?
With the summer house closing, she would have to work
at least
two or three or more years before they were above the watermark again. She would be forty, forty-one. So where was the time that was supposed to be?
