Kerrigan in Copenhagen: A Love Story
Thomas E. Kennedy
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1620406403
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Kerrigan is writing a guide book to his adopted city of Copenhagen. Specifically, a guide to the city's drinking establishments―of which there are more than 1,500. Thus, it is a project potentially without end, and one with a certain amount of drunken numbness built into it. And that's the point: for Kerrigan, an American expat fleeing a terrible betrayal, has plenty he wants to forget. The only problem with his proposed project is his research associate, a voluptuous green-eyed beauty who makes him tremble with forgotten desire.
But his associate also has a past, and as the two of them stroll the cobblestoned streets, studying the art, architecture, parks, and poetry of Copenhagen, they also study each other, circling with uncertainty―to love or not to love? To regret or to renew?
A Joycean celebration of one city's history, culture, and people, Kerrigan in Copenhagen is at once a poignant romance and a raucous journey of discovery, of coming out of darkness to delight again in life.
much even for you, then?” Her smile is wry. “It’s not that. It’s just, you can’t get a drink there. What’s love without wine?” He trims his cigar, smiles, can see she is titillated, and he loves it. Then she looks teasingly at him. “Do not forget that I have seen you naked.” Her eyes are bold in their greenness. “You looked interesting that way,” she says, and his blush is now spiced with pleasure. But there is an undeniable fact to be dealt with first: the emptiness of his belly. “I’m still
at a rough wood table at the Parisian Café Nouvelle Athènes in Place Pigalle with a glass of the drink in front of her, her eyes empty—is a kind of portrait of late-nineteenth-century French alcoholism. Absinthe is believed to have been concocted by a Swiss woman, Madame Henriod, in the late eighteenth century. It was distilled on a base of wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) and anise (Pimpinella anisum)—spices that date back to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Arabia. In the Middle Ages, these spices
of her. She has the longest legs and shortest miniskirts he has ever witnessed, but there is no time for that now. She will board the boat back to Oslo in four hours and just as well. He remembers an earlier adventure with her on the Oslo boat, sailing across a storm-tossed Skagerrak back toward Copenhagen. They danced in the discotheque, gliding in a knot of people across the dance floor like some number choreographed by the pitching sea. It was to have been their night of carnal
plane over the green sea (not snot but jade, like his Associate’s eyes), moving landward, alongside a sailboat, over the fields of Amager, over a bunch of tiny cows in a field, a herd of tiny horses, over glittering miniature scale-model cars and roads and houses, finally larger, much larger than before, over the airfield where the great wheels bang down and roll along the tarmac. Pilferers will be severely dealt with. He knows he must easily be subject to suspicion, a heavily breathing man
and talk and gesture. The dimpled nurse’s pitying expression asking whether he has a girlfriend, Sara’s twinkle and her tattoos, and a fleeting image of his Associate beside him on Grønningen, gazing at the sculpture of the reclining girl, his Associate—Annelise—leaning into his body. The image is a weight belt that sinks him a few feet beneath the surface of consciousness. He hears a snore burring at the back of his throat, which makes him smile; he didn’t know he could snore into an oxygen