Beneath the Neon Egg (22 page)

Bluett coughs and the acrid stench now fills his nose and throat with burning. He coughs, swallows more vodka. There is nothing. Nothing on the ice. Nothing in his nose. But a thought in his mind.

The box.

He has been putting it off all week. Afraid of what he might find. Or not find.

After many moments he rises, fixes the door so it won’t lock and descends the stairs into the basement, feeling along the damp wall for a light switch.

The concrete floor is wet; the lake seeps up through breaks in the concrete and gathers until the pump sucks it up and spits it down the drain. A puddle splashes against the sole of his shoe. He mutters, opens the door to his storage space and waves in the air for the string switch, stands scanning all his cartons of junk there. Old financial records. Family photos. Letters. Books. Old clothing he could not quite bring himself to throw out. Junk. He ought to burn the lot so his kids never have to confront this gloomy pile of trash, hoping perhaps to discover some clue, some answer, and rooting through to find nothing but worthless junk.

Shoved back beneath a splintery raw-wood shelf, on top of one of his large packing crates, is a brown cardboard carton the size of a large cake box, sealed with heavy duct tape. Printed in marking ink on top are the letters
sf
, and
c/o p. bluett
. The box is light in his hands, and he stands there wondering again what his instructions were from Sam. He cannot quite recall the conversation. He could take this right now and shove it into the trash barrel outside. The garbage men would come on Monday and cart it away, burn it, and that would be the end of it. He knows he will find nothing of consequence here, no answers, he feels sure of that. Let a man’s secrets die with him.

Yet Sam had taken the trouble to ask to leave it here, had left it here, had not wanted to burn it before taking his life. If he had not wanted someone to see it, he would have burned it himself.

Bluett carries the box up to his apartment, steps out of his damp-soled shoes at the door, not to dirty the carpet with the lake water he has stepped in, and puts the box on the oak table.

For some time, he stands there, staring at the box. Then he sits on the sofa and watches it from across the room before going to the kitchen for a steak knife, which he plunges into the seam at the center of the lid, tracing the blade across and around the edges of the flaps.

He finds himself wondering for a moment if Sam was murdered, dismisses the thought as melodramatic nonsense. There had been no question from the police.
Sam killed himself. The note explained it. That was it. So what could be here in this box that is any business of yours?

The box is a mess of paper. Credit card receipts, some legal documents, notebooks, business letters, financial papers, a few photographs. One of the photos is of the Russian woman, Svetlana Krylova, wearing black stockings and a black leather corset. Her chin is tilted, a small arrogant smile on her lips. The other pictures are of Sam in a tuxedo, of Sam’s son and daughters as children, some others of ordinary-looking people Bluett does not know.

Bluett studies the one of Svetlana Krylova, puts it aside, shuffles through the papers. There are final statements from a canceled bank account. He runs his finger up the column, following a reverse growth from three hundred thousand crowns up through zero. More than fifty thousand dollars. The withdrawals are large, nothing less than ten thousand crowns, a few of twenty-five thousand, and the last two of fifty thousand crowns each. He puts the statements aside, next to the photo of Svetlana Krylova, continues to sort through the papers.

He comes to a credit card receipt from the Satin Club for nine thousand crowns, another for five thousand, another for eighty-five hundred. There are more, over a course of three or four months, perhaps twenty of them. He goes to his desk for a large envelope, stuffs in the receipts and the bank statements, the photograph, and sits wondering what it is he hopes to do with them, what they mean.

Maybe Sam made a fool of himself and killed himself in shame. Maybe he had cancer and wanted a last fling before he went out. Maybe something else. He thinks of the photograph, the smile, the leather.

He turns back to the box and dumps the rest of it on the table. In a large envelope, he finds a letter from a lawyer on Købmagergade, noting that Sam’s apartment has been sold to Ms. Svetlana Krylova, that his insurance, pension plan, and savings will be divided equally between his children. The savings account number is given; it matches the number on the canceled account, the one that has been drained to nothing. The insurance, Bluett guesses, will be canceled out by the suicide.
At least they got the pension plan
, he thinks and looks to see how much that is. It is a capital pension, but he sees that that too has been drawn on, borrowed against. What remains is insignificant—a few thousand to each kid, not even the forty thousand the estate agent had estimated. Where did the rest go? He looks at the photo of Svetlana again, the arrogant smile. The letter from the lawyer shows a carbon copy to Ms. Svetlana Krylova, which seems odd to Bluett, as if Sam were trying to prove something to her. That he loved her? Or something else?

Out the window, all the many windows of the buildings across the lake reflect their squares of yellow light in the black surface of the ice. He thinks of all the people rumored to have taken their lives in the lake, thinks of those reflections as windows to their watery graves, thinks of the lake water seeping up through the earth into the basement of this building.

His breath is shallow. He looks at the phone, thinks of friends, acquaintances he might call. A woman he knows in Norway whom he feels very close to, who has a clear mind, but what would her husband think to have him calling her like that, and what would he say? Cry out for comfort? Words? Advice? Whimper? Whine? Say,
Ain’t life a bitch, sweetheart?

There was a cousin in New York he knew would be happy to hear his voice, a friend in San Diego who would sense his need and try to buddy him through, another in Chicago. There was his sister, of course, but she had so many worries of her own. There were two or three friends here in Copenhagen, but what would he say to them, and what would it change?

What he could say was that he had seen Sam’s eyes the day he died, that he had their startled blue gaze imprinted in his soul, the gaze of a man who knew he was going to his death, who was not saying good-bye so much as gazing across the threshhold at him, nothing left to say, nothing left.

He puts on Coltrane, “Equinox” again, and goes for the vodka, returns with it to the oak table and the pile of papers with Coltrane’s tenor in his head. He stuffs the legal papers into his envelope.
Sam’s “dossier,”
he thinks.
For what?

Most of the rest he sifts through seems to be without significance, and he drops it, piece by piece, back into the cardboard box for possible later review. Near the bottom of the pile he finds a sheaf of folded yellow legal pages covered with handwriting. The handwriting is scrawled across them, perpendicular to the lines, like words behind bars. He recognizes the handwriting as Sam’s.

On the first page is a title that has been scratched out, and beneath the scribble he can just make out the word
memoir
, also lined out repeatedly. The next page is blank and the next begins, “There is a life inside me I have never revealed to others, maybe not even myself in a way. Memories I treasure. Reflections of strange passion.”

Or perhaps it says “
strong
passion.” Bluett cannot see for sure.

I do not understand these feelings and never have but I only know that they are connected to something in me very powerful, a feeling of what I expect religious people mean by the word
grace
even if what causes that feeling are events far from what I would connect with religious things or prayers or whatever else. It is not always an event. Sometimes it is a reaction to an event. I can remember certain things vividly and sometimes they are only a glimpse of something.

For example, Helene Graham in fourth grade meeting my eye with a secret, excited smile when the nun smacked me in front of the class for something I didn’t do. Why should that memory be one of my treasures? I have relived it a thousand, ten thousand times in the years since. Helene Graham lives in my heart because of that smile of pleasure at my humiliation.

To think of cruelty to children is so ugly to me but the memory of Helene enjoying my humiliation is a treasure. I see her face, and her freckles; and her thin lips that resembled the color of a raspberry, her blue eyes full of sparkles.

And now I am fifty-five years old and all of my life this and other similar things have lived onward as secrets in me that I have always feared to explore—

Or perhaps it says “feared to explain.”

Even when it was offered to me I turned away from it, unable to reveal this part of me, so fearful of how ridiculous and pitiful, contemptible I might seem to those few people whose opinion of me I valued and value if they ever found out.

Can’t a man have another life? Shall one live with unfulfilled longing forever?

I do not wish to be the subject of my own morbid self-absorption, but there are experiences I long for as a person longs for grace and it seems so futile to be forever in control.

There are men who go to prostitutes for this, but that is commerce and as far from what I am looking for as anything could be, yet I know that if this ever were exposed it would destroy me, I could not live it down.

The journal goes on in this vein for several pages, occasionally giving an account of a memory or perhaps a fantasy, mostly brief instants that apparently captured his mind or soul with passion. There is an account of an evening at scout camp around a fireplace in a cabin where one boy is made to answer twenty questions, for each of which he cannot answer he is to remove one article of clothing. Sam describes a fever rising in the room as the boy fails again and again and is left wearing only his underpants, standing in front of the fire, and the last question is posed, and he is unable to answer.

We all jumped to our feet. I was with them even if I hated myself for taking part in Serenies’s humiliation. He was so clearly miserable with the situation, but unable to get himself out of it and therefore so much the victim. So abandoned to his own victimhood that it seemed like he was ordained for it, and as he stood there in the firelight looking at the eager hungry faces around him in the dark he was pretty as a girl. He trembled and begged with his eyes, and I wanted to free him if I could, but I couldn’t, and even as I was caught by my own desire to see his complete exposure and humiliation, I was afraid of what might happen to him when he was completely naked. There was so much heat in the room, and I wished I could help him but then I understood that more than that what I wished and wish for was to be him, to be in his position, to be the one standing in the firelight almost naked while all those faces stared hungry at me for my exposure.

Bluett puts the diary aside and sits back in his chair, listens again to Coltrane play “Central Park West,” mellow bittersweet lines of music full of longing for human love so pure and so sad. He sips his vodka and glances at the pages on the table before him. He does not want to read more, but he knows he will read it all. The pages tremble in his fingers, and he feels a dropping deep in his stomach that is a mix of embarrassment and sympathy for Sam.

There are half a dozen similar entries of events spaced out through Sam’s life, always producing a passion, a desire so powerful he did not dare to respond to it, frozen by the power of its attraction.

Is it evil? Or is it grace? It feels like grace. It feels like something holy. Or is it the flame that kills the moth? I believe that many men, maybe all men, have a shadow life, and that most men hide it and that that is why they are so willing to attack one whose secrets are revealed and why it is necessary to keep them hidden. I know this from bitter experience.

He then went on to tell a story of his one attempt to try to bring his desires into reality. He was seventeen years old, living in a small town in northern California. One of his friends had told him about a woman who lived in a trailer on the other side of town and who did strange things for money. He questioned the boy about these strange things and received sketchy details, but enough to make him understand.

By asking indirect questions, studying the map, taking exploratory night drives, he finally located the woman’s trailer. He drove by frequently, and always there was a car parked outside, often different cars. Sometimes he saw an automobile pull up, a man step out, look over his shoulder, go in. Once he waited and saw the man come out again, walking slowly, limping. He copied the name from the mailbox, looked in the local phone book, got a number and called, and a woman’s voice answered.

He was afraid to go to her because he had once seen a police car parked outside, afraid he might be arrested, so the woman agreed to come with him, to follow him in her car to a place she knew in the woods where they would be undisturbed.

It cost a lot of money, a large part of the savings from his high school job, but the experience fulfilled his greatest dreams, an experience of profound beauty, despite the strangeness of it. It was dusk in the woods, a balmy summer night. She dressed him as a woman, in the clothes he had brought with him, then she went through the question game with him, and when he had come to the end of it, she did other things that they had discussed in advance. He had been unable to find release so when she left him he put on the women’s underclothes and stockings and sat in the backseat of his car to masturbate.