Beneath the Neon Egg Read Online Free Page B

argument. Bluett can only hear the words of the wife, whose name he doesn’t even know ( good fences make good neighbors ). In the course of what he hears, however, he learns the name of the husband when she says to him, “Know what, Jørgen? Know what? No one likes you. No one. Likes. You.” Jørgen mumbles something, and she yells, “I don’t fucking care if the neighbors hear! They don’t like you either!”
    Bluett holds his tongue, but is tempted to shout toward the floor, “ I like him! But I don’t like you !”
    Soon he hears footsteps, the front door opening, closing. Then silence.
    And inevitably Bluett is thinking of all the arguments he and his ex had. But at first it wasn’t that way. When they met by chance in Copenhagen, Bluett on vacation with the money his father had left him, the fire between them was instant. And there was nothing to keep him in New York. He didn’t much like his family—only his oldest sister—and he had an immediate facility for Danish that he never had for French or Spanish. And college was free here.
    Problem was they married too young, didn’t experiment enough, still had that in them, both of them, the urge for others, and contempt seeped in when the passion burned out for one another.
    And what kind of life did they have? Bluett has to admit he was attracted to her family’s affluence, father helped them buy a house in Brønshøj, on a hill over the expanse of boggy moor. That had its price, too—beholden to the affluent father-in-law. And the sense of adventure with which he came to Denmark, his love of jazz, soon was lost to the family requirements. And his ex, it turned out, hated jazz.
    Their calendar was structured on family birthdays—brothers- and sisters-in-law, his ex’s parents and aunts and uncles and cousins—the Danish holidays, the three days of Christmas, five days of Easter, a four-day Pentecost weekend . . . Not that they were religious; they observed all these “religious” feasts with food and drink. And they spent their vacations at their in-laws’ summer house on the fjord.
    Bluett didn’t know his new country, he only knew his new family and their neighborhoods and the roads that led to them. And they didn’t have any friends because their calendar was already filled. No time for new friends. And Bluett didn’t much like going to jazz alone.
    All the result of a very small inheritance from his father. Enough to take a vacation in Copenhagen, which he had always wanted to visit for its jazz. So he flew in on Pan Am, rented a room at the Imperial Hotel, alongside Vesterport Station, went to the old Montmartre jazz club and then the new Montmartre, saw Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan there—switching horns, Getz playing baritone and Mulligan blowing tenor, and then heard Long Dexter on his tenor, too, and this was heaven, and he fell in love with the city. And then he fell in love in the city: One morning he asked a girl on Strøget, the Walking Street, for a match. He smoked then, and they didn’t give free matches with the cigarette packs and he always forgot to ask to buy a box of stick matches, so he stopped a girl to ask for a light. It wasn’t even a line.
    But it led that day to their fucking four times in her west-side room, and to more passion and to romance, it led to marriage, to immigration, to children. And then the passion burned out, and what the heat concealed was all the things about each other that they could not bear and, in time, in twenty years, it led to divorce.
    Lurid light is seeping in the windows over the frozen lake, and Bluett feels grief and regret and guilt seeping into his blood, and he can choose to stuff his face beneath the pillow, but he judges by the light that it is nearing ten, and his stomach growls.
    He thinks of the brunch at O’s, down the street, thinks of their eggs and bacon and beans