When I returned, he abruptly said: “It’s your fault that I’m sitting here. In a tux and bow tie.”
“Really?”
“I preferred the stage. Sensing the audience in the theater, sitting in the dressing room, going out for a beer afterward with everyone. Film felt very lonesome to me. No, not lonesome, fragmented, you might say. You know: you show up, say your lines, walk off, and that’s it. You might meet with the actors at the premiere.” He inspected his well-groomed hands, the whiskey glass he had set down the chess table, a short and stout rook, golden brown. “But then you simply vanished that time, called in sick or whatever it was that happened…”
“When?”
“Playing the innocent, are we? That leading role in the Carlsen film was yours. Have you repressed that, man? You must think I’m senile. You disappeared off the face of the earth, so they called me instead.” Rützou flung out his arms again, theatrically, and there was nothing else he needed to say: that film was his breakthrough, the roles started pouring in afterward.
“You’ve performed at the Royal Theater between all the films, I know that much, Erik. Even at Kronborg! I think I’ve seen you in commercials too. And some really bad family films.” The kids loved them.
“Everything except the old bawdy films,” he laughed. “They were before my time. But you’re right.” He stifled a belch. “But anyway.”
“You raked in the roles and the money, man.”
“I have.” He nodded solemnly. “I have,” he repeated. “And ladies.” He tasted the word, stretched it out, lay-deeze. “But… what happened, really, back then?”
“Uh… yeah.” Another cigarette. “It was… it was nerves,” I admitted, after a second. I had nothing to lose. Maybe I even needed to talk about it; I had never told this to anyone, not even my wife back then, definitely not the kids. “The pressure was too much. I couldn’t handle it. The thought of playing that part, I couldn’t wait for it to start, I was so happy, and I was dying of fright. Not just performance anxiety, but real anxiety. The long and short of it is, I crashed.”
“And when you finally got up again, it wasn’t so easy to find parts,” he added sympathetically; that is, malevolently.
“No, it was easy enough, at first. Certain bit parts. Like the deranged bar type, and the disgusting apartment caretaker. Always halfway drunk. The guy nobody likes.”
“Oh yeah,” Rützou said. “It’s so tiresome playing yourself all the time. Don’t misunderstand me. It’s why I have always taken various parts. Hamlet one day, beer commercials the next. But listen, Klaus. You could have worked your way back, slowly. But you gave up.”
“Yeah, I did. It wasn’t fun anymore. And I couldn’t bring in enough to make a go of it, financially.”
“Financially! Bah! I have a good friend, a well-known writer. He’s not exactly swimming in money but he writes anyway. Because he can, won’t do anything else.”
“Does he have a rich wife?”
“No, Klaus. He’s got balls!”
I finished off the whiskey, hissed: “I’m groveling at your feet, Erik. You are the greatest. And the ride’s on me.” I got ready to stand up. “Thanks for the drink.”
“Plural, if I may say. You have put away two very serious drinks. Downed them. Doubt you can drive. You want to destroy your glorious taxi career too?”
“I was close to a Bodil for best off-meter driving, right?”
“Ooh, I had forgotten how screamingly funny you can be. Listen: you can still get it, Klaus.” He reached for the bottle of whiskey on the chess table between us, some expensive brand I’d never heard of. The Bodil stood there too, tall and elegant, as if it was silently listening. “Stay for a while, let’s have a nightcap.”
I sank down in the chair, held my empty glass out like some beggar. He had hit my weak spot. I’ve never been good at saying no. If I lost my driver’s license, then… Usually I drank only after work and on off-days. Except for the few drops of aquavit in my thermos.
“What can I still get?” I said, mad at myself.
“The lady here.” He stuck the statuette up in my face. I pushed his hand away, but he kept sitting there waving it around. “A special-award Bodil. For all you could have accomplished…”
Of course I wanted to smack him, but I had driven a cab for so long and met so many extremely drunk people or just plain brain-dead types that I had learned to control myself. People had vomited all over my gearshift and my clothes, they had put a stranglehold on me from the backseat, they had tried to run from the fare, even that stoned-out floozy from Skovlunde without any money who invited me up, yeah, I hadn’t even smacked her when she screamed that I’d raped her when her boyfriend suddenly appeared in the apartment, a big dude. I hit him, sure, but in self-defense. The judge couldn’t understand what I was doing in her apartment, and my wife couldn’t either.
Rützou fenced with the Bodil as if it were a sword or a scepter, right at the tip of my nose. I grabbed it and held it threateningly above him.
“What the hell are you doing, Erik?” Now it was me doing the acting.
“Getting you to wake up. You still have it in you. You are not a big zero. All this could have been yours. But you were an amateur. You blew it all. And look at yourself now, what you’ve become: a beer gut in a cheap leather jacket. It looks like something you bought on the black market in Moldavia. All that’s missing is the mustache. And by the way,” he added off-handedly, “you should do something about your eyebrows, they look like two goddamn bushes.”
He sat close to me now, leaning forward, a scruffy birdlike figure in a tux.
“What happened with your girlfriend?” I asked.
“Fuck her.”
“You threw her out, didn’t you? You’re throwing everything out, aren’t you? Cleaning house.” I laughed, pointed to the chaos in the room. “If you can call this cleaning house.”
“You blew it all, Klaus. When you pull out of here, I’m calling the police, you’ll be nailed for drunk driving. Fired, out of work. Maybe you can find a cleaning job.”
I sat the glass down carefully. I didn’t pity him, or only very little.
“It’s terminal, isn’t it? Where at? Lungs? Throat? Lymph nodes?”
“Life is terminal. Did you read the profile of me they published? Nobody will write about you, will they? You’re dead and buried. The papers haven’t been interested in you for a hundred years. I’ve even looked once in a while. Usually people show up in these ‘Where are they now’ type columns, but no. You are just a goddamn moving man driving humans around in an old diesel car. Meaningful work, eh? Challenging.”
“How long do you have left? Three months, six months?”
“I have a full calendar, Klaus. Lars von Trier calls me constantly, begging me. They call from Hollywood, goddamnit!”