Bo Michaëlis: Copenhagen Noir

The white wine is rich and golden in the glasses. She nibbles at her shrimp. Outside, people rush around-here inside we’re nestled in the restaurant’s plush chairs. A waiter arrives with the main courses; at my urging Kirsten has ordered lobster, I’m having baked turbot. The music is agreeably muted, business people and tourists are sitting all around us, dining. This is one of the city’s most expensive seafood restaurants, we have a view of the canals and Folketinget, the Parliament.

Kirsten smiles at me, clinks her glass against mine. “To Lucille,” she says. We drink. She tells me that she is studying literature at the University of Copenhagen. She is especially involved with poetry. We talk some about American poetry, I mention that I write poems myself. That seems to make an impression on her. “Tell me about them,” she says, “tell me about your poems.” I say that there isn’t much to tell (“Life, death, love, you know”), but I love Walt Whitman-especially Leaves of Grass -and Eliot, of course (I recite from The Waste Land: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”), but also the great Russians, Blok and Mayakovsky, not to mention Baudelaire. “Very predictable, all of them,” she says with a smile, “and you don’t even mention Anna Akhmatova?” She turns her glass in her hand. “What do you think about Sylvia Plath? You’ve read her, haven’t you?” “I’ve mostly read her husband,” I answer. “That’s a shame,” Kirsten says. She gives me a challenging look. “Listen to this: Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/and I eat men like air. ” She locks onto my eyes, then she smiles, sips her wine, and says: “You must be aware that she was much better than Hughes, wilder, much more talented and original, but she was the one who died and he had the last word. Have you read Birthday Letters ?” I nod. “He abandoned her. It killed her,” she says, loudly. I think she’s being too simplistic, that if anything is predictable here-and stupid, and completely unfair-it’s blaming him for her suicide; we discuss, her cheeks turn red, I promise to read Plath. She names a number of younger poets I should also read. She thinks I’m hopelessly behind the times. Which I’m sure she is right about. “Why don’t you read Danish literature?” she asks. My hand is on the tablecloth, she covers it with hers. “Can’t you send me some of your writing? I want to read you.” I take this as a hidden invitation to something more than poems, my stomach tightens, I think I’m blushing. She goes to the ladies’ room. I order another bottle of wine. It feels as if I’m floating. I feel my body clearly, I feel it not at all. And we sit there for another hour and a half, I have a hard time getting the turbot down, I get a little bit smashed, she does too. I enjoy watching her eat her lobster, sucking it all out, we talk and talk, especially her, I can’t take my eyes off her, her sparklingly clear gaze, the smiles racing across her face, we toast again, this time to how she will come visit me in Brooklyn.

I’m giddy from a tickling, prickling anticipation. The imprint her lipstick has left on the glass. The delicate curve of her nose. I forget that dead girl, Lucille, everything. Kirsten’s presence and the intimacy she offers me makes me light and carefree, almost ridiculously light and carefree (and I take note of that, but everything is radiant). Then we have coffee. I feel her pressing her leg against mine under the table. And I ask her if she would like to take a walk before picking up her daughter. She would like that.

We walk slowly around Kongens Have, the King’s Garden, looking at the small castle, Rosenborg, that Kirsten (and Lucille) dreamed of moving into when they were grown up, because they would be princesses. The sky is soaring and blue. Kirsten links her arm into mine and shakes her hair into place. The cold air clears my head. I haven’t told Kirsten any of the horrible details of the “case,” instead I say that the college hasn’t heard from her for a long time, that she hasn’t been reported to the police as missing, and then I ask her to tell me more about Lucille. “She visited me at the hospital when I had Mia. That was three years ago. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Her mother had just died, and she was very thin and desperate. I’d sent her a letter when I read in the paper that Isabel was dead. But Lucille was just like herself too. She is so much fun.” “Is she?” “Yes! She has the sickest sense of humor-black. Even right then, when she was holding Mia and talking about Isabel’s funeral, she was funny. That’s how she is. And I couldn’t laugh because I’d had a cesarean. I bit the pillow. She said that she wanted to be a teacher and that she had traded Isabel’s apartment for one on Turesensgade. She seemed strong and clearheaded somehow, even while grieving.” “Did she know Dmitrij back then?” I ask. “She didn’t talk about it. But I don’t think so. The first several times I visited her she was living alone, anyway. And after he suddenly showed up, I stopped visiting her.” “Because he scared you?” “Yes, honestly, he scared me to death. The way he stared at me. I think Lucille was smoking a lot of dope then. She seemed distant and listless. Totally different from that day at the hospital. And I was alone with Mia and just didn’t have the energy to help her.” I feel a rush of joy when she says she was alone. “Because she must have needed help. She was way out there, I think, really messed up. Apparently I couldn’t see it. Or I didn’t want to.” She sighs and looks up at me. “If only I’d helped her. So all… this, maybe wouldn’t have happened. I mean, that-that she would be here. Now.” “But then we wouldn’t have met each other,” I say. “Do you have a boyfriend?” I ask, out of the blue. “A boyfriend?” She looks at me, confused. My ears are burning under my cap. Quickly I light a cigarette. “Does Lucille have many friends?” Kirsten looks up at the sky. “I don’t really know. I don’t know very much about her. She’s my childhood friend. Mostly we talked about those days. What happened at school, things like that. If we’d seen this person or that person. What he or she had made out of themselves. She never really asked much about me, either.”

While we watch the ducks swimming around in the moat’s algae-green water, she slips her arm under mine again, and she leans her head lovingly on my shoulder. I sense for sure that she’s coming on to me. Something hugely electric between us. And I take hold of the back of her head, pull her toward me, and search for her mouth, try to kiss her. But she tears away from me, abruptly steps back and looks at me, angry and frightened. “What the hell are you doing?” And there’s no way to explain. I say I’m sorry, again and again. I say: “But I thought… that you…” Her eyes flash. She says: “You! You’re like a father! That’s how I remember you, like a… an adult. And you think it’s okay to kiss me ? Is that really all you’re after? To get at me? I thought this might be the start of some kind of friendship. I thought this was about Lucille!” Now she shouts: “You are just a stupid old man!” And she moves off. Rushing and raging across the faded lawns with her shiny auburn hair swinging behind her head in the sunlight. And I know I’ve ruined it, I will never see her again. I misunderstood everything. I couldn’t control myself, she’s right, I am a stupid old man. I flop down on a bench and toss what’s left of the morning’s croissants to the ducks. Exactly like old men do. Feed the ducks, sit and stare.

All I need is a cane. And a goddamn set of false teeth.

The rest of the day depressed in the hotel room. I’m on the brink of going back home to Brooklyn, the hell with all this. First I get boiling mad (at Kirsten and at myself), then I’m resigned, apathetic. Then I yell: “Why am I running around here like an idiot playing goddamn DETECTIVE ?” I alternate between lying on my side in bed and pacing around the room, punching the wall. Later I’m just plain exhausted. I step out to get something to eat. After wandering around for a half hour, unable to decide, I end up with a slice from the Sicilian pizzeria on the corner of Nansensgade and Ahlefeldtsgade. My pizza is thin and crispy like it should be. I eat at a high table by the window and look out in the dark while listening absent-mindedly to background conversations in Italian. I leaf through the local paper. I stop, then read: The man who was abandoned Thursday outside the emergency room at Bispebjerg Hospital died late yesterday. The deceased has not yet been identified. He was in his late thirties, white but dark-complected, with a distinctive scar twenty centimeters long on his upper chest. Family of the deceased are requested to contact the police. The cooks laugh loudly at something in the kitchen. I look out at the street where a few boys practice wheelies on their bikes. I leave the rest of my pizza behind and stroll down toward Turesensgade. The second-floor windows are dark. But someone has hooked the front door wide open. I can’t stop myself, I walk cautiously up the stairs.