The Lover From An Icy Sea Page 15

  “Yes and no.” Daneka chuckled self-mockingly. “What’s that line from Amazing Grace? ‘I was lost, but now I’m found’?” Kit put out a hand and began to caress the knuckle of one of her fingers with the tip of his own index finger.

  “Tell me about the ‘lost’,” he urged, though with more of request in his voice than of command.

  Daneka sighed. “I’m not a little girl anymore, Kit. You and I both know that. I’ve been around the horn a few times. You and I know that, too. I figured up until a few weeks ago that the last love boat had left port, that I’d missed my chance. Nature’s fairly ruthless, you know, where women are concerned. We can keep on in the work world, of course. Or as mothers. At the very least, as providers of some kind of hearth and home to someone. But as viable and desirable egg-donors? As candidates for love and romance? Well, that’s another story. Love and romance belong to young women. To women who carry fresh eggs, whose fertility is defined and on display in curves that rise and fall in all the right places.

  “Men don’t look at women my age except for a raise or a hand-out—or sometimes, just a hand-job.” Daneka chuckled again, but it was bile rather than boastfulness that drove the sound from her throat. Kit winced.

  “I don’t feel old. My desires are every bit as real as they were twenty years ago—maybe more so. But I can’t speak about them. I can’t put them on a T-shirt and then walk around braless like some rude matinee marquee. Not at my age. I have to get my needs taken care of in some other way.” Daneka paused and looked Kit in the eye. “At least I did until a few days ago. Now—?”

  Her question, like her glance, hung in the air—as did the second half of the lyric: ‘ … but now I’m found.’ Kit wondered whether this was the moment to risk it all and pronounce the three words he’d been thinking almost since the moment they’d first sat knee to knee on two adjoining sofas. He decided it was. “Daneka, I—”

  She missed the signal. “Da quando amo, riesco ad indossare i miei anni: non sono piu' vecchia,” she murmered, seemingly out of some parallel universe in which she was traveling quite alone.

  “Excuse me?” Kit ducked his head low.

  “Nothing. Just something I read a couple of weeks ago inside the wrapper of a Perugina Baci.”

  “Bacio.”

  “Huh?”

  “You read it on the wrapper of a Perugina ‘kiss,’ right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then it’s one Perugina bacio.”

  “No. Actually, Kit, it would be one ‘bacio perugino’ if we wanted to be grammatically correct. But I was talking bonbons.” She looked at him and it suddenly seemed as if the stars had lost all of their former luster.

  Oh, fuck—? Kit floundered for a moment, then resorted to the only pair of words that had, historically, proved redemptive. “Forgive me,” he said.

  Daneka looked back at him, and the stars—at least in her eyes—slowly began to twinkle once again. “It all happened so fast—. I just don’t know. You frighten me. It frightens me. I want it. I want you. But I don’t know how much longer I can keep you.”

  It was once again Kit’s turn to be knocked off balance. Was she being intentionally ambiguous? Did she mean “keep him” in the sense of hold on to him, maintain his interest and his exclusive attention? Did she mean “keep him” as a pet, as a plaything, as a kept man? Or did she mean “keep him” until her own interest necessarily dissipated, her own eye began to wander?

  He knew the answer to the first and would’ve been only too eager to make a declaration of love, now and forever. The second possibility was one that had occurred to him and that had already begun to trouble him. He didn’t know how he was going to be able to maintain a life-style that came naturally to her—and yet, he wasn’t prepared to be kept by any woman, by any human being for that matter. It was simply not in his constitution to be kept.

  The third possibility was the one that most troubled him—not just then, but from the start of their relationship, when he’d first seen how easily she could disappear for long stretches at a time. The same if he acted spontaneously—as he had once when he’d arrived at her apartment without appointment and, so far as he knew, with only a few seconds’ prior announcement. There was, of course, also the matter of the telephone declaration he’d overheard the afternoon he came to get her for their trip out to JFK. What did it mean? To whom was it addressed? Who now, in his place, was sitting at home in front of a computer screen or walking the streets of New York in a daze, obsessing over this same woman? Whoever it was was competition. And yet, Kit didn’t wish his same former predicament on anyone—even on a competitor.

  “Darling, can we go?” Her question suggested he wouldn’t get an answer—at least not now, not at this table. “Garçom,” she said just loud enough to be heard over the music of another fado. Their waiter promptly arrived, and Daneka, this time, addressed him in what sounded to Kit’s ears like flawless Portuguese.

  “Sim, Senhora?”

  “Podia-nos trazer a conta, por favor?” she asked, handing over her credit card at the same time.

  “Pois não, Senhora.”

  * * *

  “You could have told me, you know,” Kit said sheepishly. You could have spared both of us the embarrassment.”

  “‘Embarrassment?’” she asked. “What ‘embarrassment?’ You were doing just fine. I was very proud of you,” she said as she reached out and gave Kit’s cheek an affectionate pinch. “Nothing you do could ever embarrass me. Trust me. I know.”

  When their waiter returned with the check, she glanced at it, signed the credit card receipt, then handed the lot of pen, check and receipt back to him after having first torn off her copy and taken back her card. “Muito obrigado, Senhor. Foi um prazer.”

  “Nós vê-los-emos outra vez, Senhores?”

  “Naturalmente. Talvez já amanhã à noite.” Kit and Daneka stood up at the same time. “Boa noite, Senhor.”

  “Boa noite, Senhores. Até amanhã.”

  They made their way to the front door and past the hostess, who likewise wished them a pleasant evening. When they walked out of the restaurant, they were greeted by an unobstructed canopy of stars, the equivalent of which Kit, at least, had never seen. He offered his hand and Daneka took it. They then walked off into darkness, their footpath made clear to them only by moonlight, while their other path, Kit thought to himself—the path of their future—was illuminated by much weaker starlight.

  Chapter 27

  They walked for a long while in silence. Silence, to Kit’s way of thinking, was the real reward of confidence. When two people had a firm enough foundation—whether as lovers or even just as friends—the luxury of walking, eating, standing, or sitting in silence was their just reward. He felt it here under the stars. He wondered if she did, too, and if their separate desires to economize on dialogue were a reflection of that same confidence. Yet he didn’t dare ask. To ask would have suggested doubt, and doubt was a thing he wanted none of just now. If they didn’t say another word to each other between this moment and their last goodnight kiss, that, to Kit, would be just fine.

  As he was about to discover, however, Daneka’s train of thought during their walk back to the villa had been running along a quite different track, had been gaining steam along the way, and was about to enter a long, dark tunnel—the first of many tunnels in the coming months until, it would seem to Kit, there were only tunnels—long, dark and silent, though none of them suggesting the silence of confidence.

  She dropped his hand, and he suddenly felt the weight of it at the end of his arm. At the same time, and although there was nothing in the night air to even hint at an arresting chill, she crossed her arms tightly across her chest as if to ward one off.

  “The other day, Kit, when I mentioned Granta to you—”

  “Yes, I remember. It was during the fli—.”

  “Precisely,” Daneka cut in. “Your memory for detail never ceases to amaze me, darling.” From the tone, Kit surmised that th
e next words out of her mouth were not going to comprise a compliment, and that ‘darling’ was not intended as a term of endearment. She stopped walking and turned to him. “It seemed to surprise you somehow. That I would read it—or even know of it, for that matter.”

  Whatever morning lark of confidence Kit had felt moments earlier fled from him like a bat from a cave. He became uneasy. The memory of his sleuthing about her living room and bookcases the first time he’d visited her apartment was poking around like an unwelcome stranger. It rattled the back door of his conscience, pulled insistently from without as he held tight to the knob from within.

  The knob broke apart. The door sprang open. The stranger leered at him. This stranger, Kit discovered, was no stranger at all. He, of necessity, had done commerce with this stranger many times in his adult life—though never, until now, where Daneka was concerned. The stranger was a thing Kit hated in principle, and would never have allowed to share even the same air he breathed with Daneka. The stranger was a lie.

  “Well, I just didn’t … I couldn’t … I wasn’t prepared to make any assumptions.”

  “Assumptions?” Daneka’s eyebrows arched up. “What might you have assumed, or not, about my reading habits?”

  “Granta isn’t every man’s choice of a journal, Daneka. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

  “And so I’m every man, Kit?”

  The moonlight was just bright enough for Kit to see the steel in Daneka’s eyes, and he suddenly realized why it was that Ron was chauffeuring Daneka—and not the other way around … why she lived on East Ninety-sixth Street, while he lived where he did … why she walked or didn’t walk, ate or didn’t eat, traveled or didn’t travel, when she wanted to do these things—and not when others ordered her to do them.

  Daneka, too, understood the meaning of silence—especially when it came back to her, head hung low, in answer to a reprimand. She could let someone swim indefinitely in a pool of it, let them thrash about, let them eventually drown if she so chose. But that wasn’t her choice now—not here, not with Kit. She let the steel melt. She’d wanted to put him on guard, and she’d succeeded. He’d clearly felt the sting of his error, and he clearly wouldn’t forget it for a long time to come—if ever. It was, she felt, time to offer a truce.

  “Darling,” she cooed as she sidled up to him and took his arm in both of hers. “I read lots of things. It’s my job. Not necessarily cover to cover. For that, I hire readers. I have a roomful of them, and they do nothing all day but leaf through magazines and journals and surf the ‘Net looking for good stories. They bring me those stories, maybe four, five, six a week. I read a few paragraphs to see if the story is right for us. If it is, I buy it. Sometimes, if I like it a lot, I may read the whole thing—just for kicks. That was the case with Jennie Erdal’s ‘Tiger’s Ghost’. Besides, I’d just read it the evening before we left New York and had called the next morning to make her an offer. It was still fresh in my mind—especially her wordplay with ‘discretion’ and ‘ardor.’ I liked it. And it proved useful to me, as I was sure it one day would.”

  Kit knew she expected him so say something back, and yet he was frozen. The steel in her eyes had shackled him, had gone straight through his flesh and clamped onto his bones. He marveled at the power of this woman—apparently over all things and people in her life, and now over him. She had him in thrall because she now owned the power to make him lie—or at least bend the truth—so as not to jeopardize this fragile thing between them.

  There was no way around it. A lie had entered their relationship, and no matter how piddling, how trivial, how “white,” it was there like an indelible spot. He couldn’t remove it because he couldn’t tell her the truth. He wondered whether this white lie would spawn other little white lies. They always did. Lies were like viruses. Once they’d found a willing host, they invariably multiplied. Let one little vector through the back door, and soon they’d own every corner and every niche, where they’d quietly propagate themselves into great, hoary multitudes. Soon, what had started out as one little white lie would become a grey mass, squeezing out of corners and niches by virtue of its sheer volume until even the air took on a grey hue. And then, ultimately, the grey would convert to black, and the entire relationship would become one black lie.

  Only moments earlier, Kit had been deliriously happy and confident of his future, of their future together. Now, however, he felt the first prick of sadness, as if this stranger entering through the back door of his conscience had just slipped up behind him and put the tip of a knife against his back. There was no blood; it was just a pin prick. But the knife was there, and the stranger had no intention of removing it. Ever. And so the pin prick would eventually, through force of lie upon lie, become a gash. From that gash, blood would flow—first in a trickle, then in a torrent. What had started out as a pin prick of sadness would become a torrent of sorrow until, he feared, his body and their love would become a bloodless, lifeless, bootless corpse.

  As he’d learned early on in life, Kit knew his only recourse now lay in action—the consequences be damned. He stopped, faced Daneka, looked into her eyes, and spoke the three words neither of them had dared speak to one another until this moment.

  “I love you.”

  He’d broken the dam. He’d set mad fire to a forest of emotions. Flames flared and water poured through; he no longer cared whether he might be consumed by the one or drowned by the other. At this moment, he cared nothing about the fate of the planet; about wars or famine; about melting polar caps; about Portugal; about a full moon over the Atlantic; about fados or mandolins; nothing about photography even. If he’d had a wife and children, even they would’ve meant nothing to him at this instant. Only one thing in all of his known universe meant anything to him right here and now, and that thing was this woman.

  Kit couldn’t see Daneka’s upturned face as it perched on his shoulder, her cheek hard against his, her eyes looking not at the guileless gaze of stars peeking out from under the black comfort of heaven, but rather looking out over the western horizon in the direction of New York, where they sought electricity and neon, streetlamps, headlights, marquees—and the cold, self-reflecting adulation of eyeballs acting like mirrors.

  Love was complicated. She could speak of it easily enough to her housekeeper, to a neighbor’s dog; could say it about a symphony or a painting, about a new purse or another woman’s hairdo. But to declare it to a man to whom she was actually making love? To say it with real emotion and reciprocal obligations attached? That had consequences.

  And so, the smile she might otherwise have willed in this instant struggled with years of suppression, of keeping this one, single sentiment under strict lock and key in the deepest, darkest dungeon she could find. The result was not tears or even a sigh of happiness at liberation. No attendant cri d’amour—still less, a cri du coeur—climbed back up out of that dungeon to meet Kit’s declaration. Instead, she answered with a voice like a carapace.

  “I love you, too, darling.”

  The vectors were already abuzz in warm and sticky propagation.

  Chapter 28

  Kit and Daneka, his arm about her waist and hers about his, continued walking once again in silence until they reached their villa. In the hours since they’d first gone out to dinner, the temperature might’ve fallen by a degree or two at most.

  “Kit, what would you say to a little moonlit dip?” Daneka asked as she walked through the front door.

  “Dip, did you say, or dollop?” Kit was feeling coy—kittenish, really—and Daneka was clearly up for the game.

  “Wisp or wallop, what shall it be?”

  “No hanky-panky—okay, Spanky?”

  “I’ll race you to the pool!” Daneka challenged, shedding most of her clothes en route, but momentarily delayed as she attempted to hop out of her jeans.

  “A place where I can drool,” Kit growled as he bounded across the living room and lunged out at Daneka from behind. He attempted to grab her where h
e knew her to be most amply padded, but instead came up with only a handful of panty. Kit’s lunge had more behind it than either of them might’ve expected. Something like a little girl’s scream escaped from her throat as Daneka fell to the floor neither in pain nor in fear, but in sheer delight. Her panties tore loose in Kit’s hand. She lay on her back, mouth open, legs and arms akimbo.

  “Some like it rough,” she said, her eyes like tiny flames and her tongue moving slug-like over her upper lip. Kit crawled up on hands and knees between her legs.

  “Some lack the stuff,” he answered as soon as he’d determined that Daneka had not been hurt by the fall. As he bent his head to let his tongue find hers, Kit felt both of her hands reach down between his legs, unzip his zipper and unbuckle his belt, then reach for his shorts, out of which another part of him was already peeking. She caressed him once, then moved her hands to the material on either side and yanked hard. His boxers tore easily.

  “Tit for tat, darling,” she smiled up at him.

  “Tits for that,” Kit said and put his mouth on one her breasts, licked the nipple a degree or two past ennui, then moved immediately to the other.

  Daneka yelped as she scurried out from underneath him, jumped to her feet, and ran out the back door. Kit stood up, stepped out of his jeans and former boxer shorts—now, at best, a dustcloth—and walked to the back door, where he stood for a moment to admire Daneka in the moonlight.

  “Some like it clean,” she said in a hoarse whisper as she descended slowly into the pool. He walked over to the same set of steps she’d just used to enter, stepped in to find the water at a temperature equal to that of the night air, and slipped into the pool behind her.