overwhelmingly loving. That’s what I fell for. And that’s what later on I punished her for. She was so easily hurt, she was innocent, she didn’t understand my moodiness. Which in a way came about because I felt I was a worse, less giving person than she was. Which also happens to be true. I confused her, I played funny games, as Joe would say. When I met Isabel, Lucille had just turned three. She was trusting and her speech wasn’t yet fully developed-she could say idiot in Danish, and Salut and Je suis une tres tres grande fille. In the beginning I left her to Isabel. But that changed. I was the one who took her to school on her first day. Who biked with her across the commons on weekends, who taught her how to drink soda without getting it up her nose. And who told her stories at night when she lay in her bed. About small creatures with horns and fangs. I was also the one who in the end failed her and disappeared. The sense of Isabel’s sleeping body close to mine is sometimes so strong and real that I wake up in the night thinking she is there, though I still don’t believe she was the love of my life. Which has yet to happen for me. But her presence. Her being there and her ability to create-life, a kind of safeness, safe and sound. I wonder if Lucille looks like her. If her laughter is as bright as her mother’s. Not that there is much to laugh about just now, when I’m not even sure that she can laugh. I walk along the lakes toward Vesterbro. Past Hovedbanegarden, the main station, where the pushers hang out, and down Istedgade, the porn street. An addict has just shot up in a basement stairwell. He falls forward. The last drunks stagger noisily down the street. In the gray dawn I see a group of young black women. They are huddled together on a corner, they laugh and talk loudly to each other in their native language. They look young and healthy, they don’t look like whores. But they are at the bottom of the pecking order and come out only after the other prostitutes have gone home. They get the worst customers. All the scum. The violent, the drunk, the sick. A car pulls up to the group and stops. Negotiations take place through the front windshield. A fat hand points at the girl it wants. She gets in the backseat. For a moment the group is silent. Then I recognize one of the four men from the fight last night on Turesensgade, he shows up all of a sudden. His jaw is swollen and cut. He speaks harshly to the girls and apparently orders them to spread out, and so they do, immediately. It looks sad: now each one of them is alone on this miserable November morning in a foreign country. I walk on up toward Halmtorvet and shuffle past Tivoli and Radhuspladsen, the town hall square, cut through Orstedsparken where there is still some action, then up Gothersgade and Bartholinsgade. I stop at the front lawn of the Kommunehospital, the old district hospital. I’ve bought coffee and warm croissants, I find a bench and rest. Moisture drips from the trees. Windows gradually begin to light up, people awaken; I notice that the rosebuds have been ruined by frost, that a fox sneaks through the bushes, I hear birds chirping and the wind rustling shriveled leaves. I came here often with Lucille, we played ball. I taught her how to catch and she was furious at me every time she missed. She stomped the ground and hid under the snowberry bushes. They’re still here, the bushes, with their perfectly succulent white and pink berries. It’s nine o’clock. I try to take stock of the situation. The body in the sack, the wounded Russian. A possible war over prostitution. And the hash traffic that might be much more than just that. But nothing leads me to Lucille. Nothing. I consider whether I should go to the police with my information. But they weren’t exactly helpful before. Besides, they have enough to keep busy elsewhere in the city; there are gang wars and shootings in Norrebro again. I don’t know what to do. I fumble around in my pocket for my phone and call Kirsten.
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
