I have never seen hands this small,” I say, making slow, languid circles on her palm. “But the rest of you is miniature as well, I suppose.”
“You make me sound like a dwarf, Christian Rixen of Hirschenborg! Pardon me, little person.”
“Enchanting, how you say my whole name when you are annoy—”
“Don’t change the subject, mister! I’m not so little. Five feet five!”
“Diminutive is a better word, perhaps.”
“Only because you’re so dang tall!” She purses her lips and pouts, yet we both know the anger is a façade. In no time, she is giggling once more. “I was little back in the day. Daddy used to say, ‘You’re no bigger than a tater bug.’ But I grew, thank goodness.”
“A tater bug?”
“A bug that lives in potatoes, goober!”
“Goober?”
“Stop teasing me!” she squeaks. “It hurts my feelings!”
I look at her pityingly, though we know this to be an untruth. She finds the subtle mockery an aphrodisiac.
Never, in my lifetime, has a woman required such tremendous effort.
In Denmark, the women came to me. Lined up, awaiting the opportunity to . . . what is it that a tiger does? Pounce.
Take the most beautiful girl in the room, the one who spent the evening knocking potential suitors to their knees. I should only have to wait, if I so chose, for her to sift through the kæmpe nar debris and present herself, ready and willing, for my disposal.
As for dates, they are as foreign to me as Cordelia’s Jesus. I’m accustomed to, perhaps, a series of questions during the drunken half hour prior to the inevitable exit. Where do you study? Your musical taste? Long-term plans for the future? Ready to fuck?
The interview is necessary as, come dawn, you must decide: a future together or pull a hindbærsnitte, saying, Shall I fetch breakfast?, and shoving a flat, sprinkled pastry in her mailbox before you run.
I, of course, would never debase myself in such a manner; I would send a servant instead.
“I want to put you in my pocket and carry you around,” I tell her. “Is this a strange thing to say?”
“Yes.” Another laugh, equally as charming.
“Have some more wine.” I’m already pouring from the newly uncorked bottle the sommelier just delivered, holding it out to me as though presenting a firstborn child. As well he should at forty thousand kroner a bottle!
“No, I couldn’t,” she says.
“You could. And this one is special, acquired just for you. Château Margaux.”
“Sounds fancy.”
“It is.” I lift my glass, though she simply peers at her own, face concentrated, as though facing down a cunning, fearsome opponent.
“I don’t . . .” She halts at my expression. One, I am sure, that appears both hopeful and pleading. “Just this once,” she says, lifting the glassful with the solemnity of Communion wine. “After all, Jesus drank it, right?”
Once again, I am surprised by her lack of irony, her vigorous reverence for a fossilized dogma. Along with the vast majority of my Danish countrymen, I find religion a lovely, if rather antiquated, series of rituals. Christmas trees are nice, but the deep contemplation of a child savior born thousands of years ago? Rather tiresome.
Her face conflicted, the rim touches her lips.
I am fascinated by her convictions, which I find both enthralling and infuriating in equal measure.
She sips.
Sådan!
“It’s good.” She smiles.
“As well it should be. Nineteen ninety-four, an excellent year.”
“The one I was born in!”
“Indeed,” I say, hiding my surprise. Six years is a sliver of time, but still I ponder the question: Is this not, as the Americans say, the paradigm for robbing the cradle?
“Don’t worry, Christie!” she says, as though reading my mind. “Eighteen is legal. You won’t get arrested!”
“How could I worry in the presence of such loveliness?” I say, a quick recoup. “And besides, they rarely arrest those of royal descent.”
“Oh,” she says, gazing off abstractly for a moment, her eyelashes appearing to flutter independently of her body. “Well, I guess you can’t believe everything you read on Danish Google.”
I reach for my wine and swallow, in the next ten seconds, what I estimate to be $250 worth.
For approximately six months, I lived as the average man.
An average man of extraordinary abilities, perhaps, but also one who fetched his own coffee in the morning, obtained from an ordinary local smorgasbord. The average student in transit to class, I would push through the still-drunk throngs seeking nourishment after their drunken evening escapades, offer up a god morgen to the harried waif behind the counter, and stir in two cubes of sugar. With my very own hand.
I had never been so happy.
At the Jewelry Academy of Copenhagen, I was learning the secret language of precious minerals, their dispersion and fracture and placement within the refractive index. I had come to understand some compounds were far older than a title and far more enduring than the sacredness of royal ceremonies.
Beauty born of this earth, not bequeathed upon it.
Rubies, for instance. And diamonds.
In cutting a diamond, my instructor Emil informed us early on, the most time will be spent in evaluation of the rough stone. A delicate, thorough scientific process that takes into account directional hardness, gemological context, crystallographic plane orientation . . .
He’d circled the room, allowing each of us to hold the raw materials. Five small, unremarkable rocks in my cupped palm, gray and rough as those I had found on the beach in Hornbæk as a child, identical to those I aimed at the unsuspecting local boys who called me “pussy rich boy” and refused to let me join in their football games.
You must consider many possible outcomes, use science and the eye, determine what facets will enhance the luster, fully disperse the white light. . . . Ultimately, you decide which flaws to remove and which to keep.
These little nothings in my hand. Little nothings that, once cut, could transform beyond imagination.
I had been jealous of those diamonds. For being allowed flaws in the first place.
Nothing is harder than a diamond. To cut one, you must use another. Most students preferred the saw, the phosphor-bronze blade edged in diamond dust. A tedious yet reliable process with a determined outcome.
I preferred the hammer. One well-calculated blow could achieve perfection. The risk being that a minuscule miscalculation might destroy the stone itself. To do this correctly, cutters were trained for years, even lifetimes.
I was willing to put in the time.
If any knew of my royal status in Copenhagen, they did not let on. Or perhaps they simply pretended not to, sensing this to be my wish. I had convinced my father to relieve me of servants. I knew this would be my one chance and opted to try real life on for size, to see if it fit my measurement. As for my tailored uniforms of the past, I traded them for jeans and button-down shirts. Shirts bought at the mall and paid for out of my own wallet. An H&M one at that.
Whatever they knew, my classmates treated me as an equal. By day we discussed stone setting and burnishing techniques and learned to manipulate metal, curving it at will. I would roll up my sleeves just like the others, burn my fingers right along with them.
Through each new design, and inevitable misstep, we began to define our singular visions, our unique aesthetic approaches. During long beer-fueled evenings—yes, beer—we debated tradition versus the avant-garde, innovative usage of material versus mastery of technique. Can we not have both? I would ask, to which the others would roll their eyes and moan, Oh, Christian, you’re a broken record!
True, piped up Ina one day, Christian’s opinions may be repetitive as hell. But I think we can all agree his work is stunning.
My classmates had simply nodded, as though this fact had long ago been agreed upon.
For once, I was stunned into silence. She was one of the most talented students in the school—I was awed by her color arrangement and use of gemstones—as well as the most intelligent.
Now get me another beer, Christian, she had added. I will need it to endure more of your jabbering.
I was no longer that young man entrapped on the family estate, the one whose only recourse had been coke-fueled yacht getaways with idiotic heiresses. There were no more champagne-bath parties in Monaco, whole afternoons wasted on spraying thong-clad girls with bubbles.
That part had not been so bad, to tell the truth.
But this was better. And I still partied, but I did it like every other young man in Copenhagen, avoiding those places my ilk frequented. I opted for the nonprivate of establishments, taking on the routine of the everyday citizen: hit the bar around midnight, get trashed by three, and exit, young woman in tow, no later than five.
And no matter the adventure, I was never late to class in the morning. Not ever.
Sometimes I would even forgo the pussy, staking out the early-morning dens of outcasts. I would smoke with whores, play darts with bikers, and otherwise stumble about with the ne’er-do-wells of Copenhagen.
My partner in these escapades was Jais, a rough-and-tumble kid from the wrong side of Jutland, whose use of natural pearls was both twisted and innovative. Is there a right side of Jutland? I often queried. Fuck off, rich boy was the standard response.
Jais was the only soul to whom I offered up full disclosure, slurring the truth during one 7:00 a.m. round of beers at Spunk in the red-light district. My father is a count, I had said.
No shit, he had responded. You hold your beer bottle like a prissy girl. Well, in that case, next round’s on you, Your Highness!
If too inebriated to make it back to the dorms, he would crash in my expansive apartment, the one loaned to me by my father and stationed in the center of Copenhagen. Do not vomit on that, I would tell him, motioning to the settee he had sprawled across. It was a gift from Queen Margrethe.
A fuckin’ ugly-as-shit gift, he would say, then snore.
Jais was the one who took me to Christiania. I can’t believe you’ve never been, he said, to which I responded, I do not get out much.
In truth, I had avoided the place. My scene had been more five-star-club hopping in Ibiza than squatter community built on an abandoned military compound. At some point, those hippies crashing on the grounds had taken root, the government giving them residency. And now they’d grown into lawyers and politicians, their acreage lush and untouchable, and the government horrified to have given away such valuable land in the center of city. And even within Christiania itself there was exclusivity. I cringed at being designated to Pusher Street with all the other outsiders.
I had been an outsider long enough.
Do not bring a camera, I had oft heard it said, or they’ll kick your ass right out of there. Not to mention, the raids were frequent, the government shutdown attempts regular. The land was valuable, everyone knew that, and Danish officials resented this freak settlement. As for me? I had no idea what I had been missing.
Jais knew this place well, had been escaping to it since childhood. Obviously, I responded. You’re from Jutland.
As if you’d go anywhere you could get your hands dirty, he had said.
There was plenty of dirt in Christiania, as I soon learned. And I wanted to see every bit.
The hidden skate park, where some American World Cup champion was crashing with three girlfriends and one sleeping bag. Yo, said one of his entourage, offering a joint and stories of living on the beach in Malibu. After this, I’m off to Morocco. Hear they got killer waves out there.
What is in this? I had said, holding up the joint. I can barely see your face.
Eternal salvation, my friend. Enlightenment.
I smirked. Americans, I thought.
There was the ancient, grizzled man who opened his decrepit shack, revealing a pristine rare-car collection. A million kroner worth, I had muttered. More, he said through his yellowed beard.
There were the cafés, each a new universe, the inhabitants living in their chess games and books, their dramatic entanglements and massive spliffs. They bathed in the communal showers, bedded down in makeshift communal dwellings. Their new families lived in enormous gravity-defying tree houses, cinder-block sheds, and reclaimed artillery stockades under the ground.
We even went beyond the regulated confines. The progeny of Christiania, barefoot and shirtless, following us warily with their eyes. They were the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those hippie founders, and while the tourism helped fund the massive community’s legal bills, we were far from their kind. No one lived in Christiania without an invitation or legacy, and their parents were intent on keeping it that way.
I was more like those kids than they could have fathomed.
Yet Jais waltzed right in, and no one dared ask him to stop.
Jais showed me twisting pathways and ornate mansions, the surprising structures that rose unexpectedly from the brush. We saw Hans Christian Andersen–like fairy-tale houses of glass and chrome, mammoth concrete cubes hidden in the trees. Enough of this, he said after an hour. Let’s go to Pusher Street and get fucked-up.
Because this, as most Danish citizens were well aware, was the main purpose of this mystical dwelling. For interlopers and tourists, at least.
Not again, said Jais a few hours later. Another raid.
I followed his gaze to the flock of police assembled at the entrance to Christiania. They were halting every person who exited.
We had been on our way out, still passing the hash pipe. The hash itself had been transported, scored from one of the Iranian Mafia–run carts lining the street, painstakingly weighed and offered up in a yellow gift bag.
Shall we turn around? I asked, every nerve on edge.
No. They’re already inside, most likely.
I started to hyperventilate.
Chill, Your Highness, said Jais. They always do this. They’ll ask some questions, write you a ticket. And Pusher Street will be up and running again by morning.
What about the pipe?
Let me finish it off. He grabbed for it.
He was right about the ticket. My name, my documents, a few questions, and a slap on the wrist. But what Jais had not expected? The photographer using the cops as a cover. Stop, I had said to the flashes. I thought there were no cameras in Christiania!
Get the hell out of here, the cop told him. But by then it had been too late.
By the next morning, my cover was blown, my picture in every newspaper. The Count was furious and refused to pay my tuition. This is what you do with your chance? he had sneered. Well, there will be no further vanity endeavors, Christian. Time for you to grow up.
I would not have returned to my intership, even having been given the choice. It would not have been the same. I had not changed, but my fellow classmates had. My one attempt had led to them eyeing me warily, muttering fraud under their breath.
My father showed a bit of mercy, not having me removed from the family home immediately. I made good use of the month before I was officially summoned back to the castle, hitting all the right spots with all the right women. I am starting a jewelry line, I would tell them, so drunk I would occasionally even slobber on them as I spoke.
Tell me all about it! they would say. And you must describe the castle!
Spit on their clothing, vomit on my own, they never seemed to mind, willingly posing for the press that now regularly trailed me. Might as well give them a show, I would say, then do something to bring more shame upon my legacy.
Handsome Royal Heir Out on the Town! said the headlines. The No-Account Count Strikes Again!
When my father offered America, I knew it was my last chance. A place to be reborn, I had thought. To meld tradition and avant-garde. To create something entirely new. Only the raw materials would not only be diamonds this time. They would be me.
I had not found myself,” I say with finality.
“Oh, Christian,” she says.
The story I have told is founded in truth, though I omitted key details and embellished others. In America, I have heard, they call this spin. Yet I am careful. Cordelia has seen the pictures, of this I am sure. The one where I am passed out in the car, or the one where I scream at the photographer, my face enraged. That candid shot where I stumble from the club, shirt untucked, model on my arm. Or under my arm, as she was holding me up.
These portraits, I believe, are not an adequate rendition, as they are of someone I do not know. A jester, a hammered buffoon. Someone who had lost his path—his art—and has now crossed the ocean to find it again.
Cordelia listens carefully, eyes growing wider, her wine disappearing with each absentminded sip. I refill the glass, my speech never missing a beat.
Danish women are known for their toughness, their power. They run corporations and believe in equality, if not superiority, to their male counterparts. They can fuck and not grow attached and, if unsatisfied with your performance, state their annoyance clearly.
Not that I know from experience. Except, perhaps, for that time with the Spanish pop star in Costa Brava. But in that case, the coke was to blame.
A Danish woman would never respond in this manner—at one point, Cordelia’s eyes even fill with tears—allowing her emotions to be on such blatant display.
In the end of this story, I follow my own path, one that takes me two thousand miles on a private charter. I land here—at this very table, in fact—but those demons continue to haunt me.
“Oh, Christian,” she says again, reaching for my hand. “That’s just not fair!”
In that moment, I realize the truth: it is exactly what I have told her. Especially the overbearing-father part.
“You deserve better,” she says.
Is she for real? I wonder, once again running my thumb in slow circles against the back of her hand. Do I admire her naïveté or simply feel sorry for her? That open heart, like an unbound wound, waiting to be broken. That wanting of the best in people, which is destined to lead her to disappointment.
Perhaps, on some level, I am jealous. Or simply thankful.
“And that is why I am here, in America. To bring my art to the world, to make contacts and launch my brand.” I move up her bare flesh, drawing a steady line, the pressure of my thumb light, the hairs on her arms rising. “Or perhaps”—I have begun to wonder myself—“I came to meet you.”
A pause as she takes this in. Why am I nervous?
“You’re giving me goose bumps!” she finally says. “Do you have those in Denmark?”
“No. And we do not have rainbows, either.”
“Oh, you! I was talking about the word goose bumps, you know that!”
“Ah, yes. Gåsehud. The literal translation is ‘gooseflesh.’”
“That’s so pretty! Not the dead-goose part, of course, but the Danish. I love hearing you speak that language!”
“And I love watching you hear.” Now I am tickling the inside of her elbow. “Unfortunately, I cannot stay in America forever. In fact, I worry I must leave sooner than later.”
“Why?” she says, her worry palpable.
“I only have limited time, and a limited budget. My trust fund will not be available for years. I came to seek investors and be noticed, which is why I was in the Hamptons, in fact. But it seems America has not taken the . . . what is that saying? Not caught the fish?”
“Taken the bait.”
Now I am running my nails lightly along the curve of her shoulder, my hand moving toward her face.
“I will not let that happen.”
“You,” I say, her chin in my hand, “cannot stop what is inevitable.”
She peers up at me.
I sigh, pulling away. “Well, I suppose we should finish off this wine.”
Her expression tells me everything.
In that moment, I know. It has taken four encounters—excuse me, dates—but she has finally cracked the drawbridge.
I’m sure of it. By later tonight, I’ll be inside the castle.
“I have to be—”
“Why are you whispering?”
“She is in the next room.”
“She’s still there? Good sign.”
“Indeed. And there’s more—”
“Tell me. I’m dying!”
“She wants to feature my pieces in the magazine. A whole spread!”
April Holiday shrieks so loudly I must hold the phone from my ear.
“You did it, buddy! Now you’re gonna blow up!”
“Yes, yes. But the launch party is in two weeks, so she says we need to schedule the shoot immediately. I said I would have my manager contact—”
“I’ll reach out first thing, get the whole DL on this party shindig—”
“Wait until she leaves here, at least. April, hold on a moment, will you please?”
Balthazar is staring at me. I am clad only in boxers, the sleep still in my eyes. “Sir, will you take breakfast in the parlor?”
“That’s fine.”
“And the young lady?”
“Why not?”
A pause, a curt nod. Before he exits, I see a flash of disdain.
“Who was that?” asks April. “The girl?”
“The butler.”
“The butler! You are a riot, I swear! Well, this is great, Christian. Wasn’t I right about calling her?”
“I mean, I’d pretty much given up on Hoff Media, and staking out the daughter’s boyfriend? What a nightmare! That moron. Took three hours of surveillance to get him alone.”
“Yes,” I say, voice still low. “But I shall have to—”
“But he’ll get his, don’t you worry! That’s what anonymous tips are all about. Even better when you got the visuals! And right now is the perfect time. I mean, no press is bad press, right?”
I have no idea what she is talking about, nor do I care. “April,” I say, exasperated, “I must go. She might wake at any moment.”
“Just one more question, okay? So how was the little Southern belle?”
I pause for a moment. “A virgin.”
“No!” Again, I am holding away the phone. “Are you fucking with me?”
“I am afraid not. I have the ruined sheets to prove it. Listen, I really—”
“Gotta go. Gotcha. But don’t forget about that check. I mentioned it last week, remember? Made out to Your Fifteen Minutes LLC?”
“Your fifteen minutes?”
“Oh, Christian. The personal paparazzi staffing service? And FYI, buddy—the head honcho—is überpissed. Says his actors got roughed up by Hoff’s goons. He’s like, they’re trained professionals, April. Some of them are, like, SAG—”
“Fine, fine,” says Christian. “But see to it we get the negatives. I should like to see the images they shot.”
“Images!” She cackles. “There was no film in those cameras, you silly royal! Just flashing bulbs.”
“Oh,” I say. “Rather a waste of money.”
“You never know. Might have impressed that little Southern virgin.” April snorts. “Lucky you make rings, huh? She’s probably already got the Vera Wang picked out.”