The Lover From An Icy Sea Page 18

  Daneka, however, did—as she now proved and would prove over and over again. The previous night, she knew, had simply been a test to determine whether these two people cared enough to make an effort—or whether they, like so many others before and after, would be content with a Polaroid, a silly trinket or memento, an experience of no account, an empty exploit.

  As the hostess led them to a corner table next to one of three roaring fireplaces in the main room of the restaurant, all heads swiveled to look at Daneka. Just as she’d once taken command of Kit’s street on a sunny, early-spring Sunday afternoon in New York, she now took command of a restaurant half a world away. Kit noted familiar faces from the night before, faces that had apparently taken no notice of them then, nodding, smiling, greeting them as if they were old acquaintances. There was nothing lewd or lascivious in the men’s looks; there was also nothing of envy or jealousy in the looks of their dinner companions. Rather, both men and women stared openly, like guileless children, as Daneka and Kit walked through. They were curious and appreciative, but they were also respectful. Theirs was a quiet admiration of a natural wonder, of a thing of consummate beauty, of a woman who, in their eyes, was clearly the personification of grace—even if that grace was Nordic rather than Iberian.

  More wise than vain, Daneka registered every glance. She was the sun they’d all longed for behind the fog they’d all lived with—not just that day, but for days and months and years of their lives. She radiated for them not out of vainglory, but out of generosity—and because, quite simply, she could. It was as much a pleasure for her to give light and warmth as it was for them to bathe in it, though there was no hubris or condescension either in her gait or in her demeanor.

  The hostess seated them, though without menus. Before Kit could signal to her, they were surrounded by waiters and even a wine steward who immediately opened two bottles—one of red wine and a second of white—of an unknown house and vintage. From the look of the labels and the crusty exterior of the bottle of red, it was clear to Kit that these were no ordinary wines, but something very old and possibly very rare. The wine steward didn’t, as would’ve been the custom under other circumstances, invite Kit to taste the wine. Instead, he tried it himself with his own heavy, silver tâte-vin. He pronounced it satisfactory not with a word, but with an understated Portuguese nod of approval, then poured both white and red into a pair of glasses he’d set down in front of Kit and Daneka.

  Kit and Daneka looked at each other with eyes that registered pure delight—even if Kit’s mien still registered the suggestion of a question mark at the end. Just as Kit thought once again that it might be expedient to request menus, a flurry of waiters appeared at their table with small plates of appetizers—olives, sardines, anchovies, raw vegetables, small slices of hard-ribbed bread baked in rosemary, marjoram, thyme or sage. No fewer than three little dishes of olive oil of ostensibly different grades, consistency and colors took their place among the plates of appetizers. All of this was accomplished without the exchange of a single word—as was each subsequent visit from their wine steward, who never once thought to save himself an extra trip to their table by filling their glasses more than three-quarters full.

  As soon as they’d finished their first course, hands appeared almost out of nowhere to chase their plates away. New plates appeared with tiny morsels of grilled fish, octopus, shrimp and squid—and alongside these, ice-packed earthenware tureens of oysters and clams, more shrimp, squid and octopus. There were no fewer than six different sauces ranging from tangy to sublimely sweet—none of them familiar-tasting to either Kit or Daneka, but all of them exquisite. Again—and repeatedly—the wine-steward made a timely visit to their table. Again—and without a whisper—empty plates and dishes were removed.

  Both Kit and Daneka were beginning to feel supremely satisfied when a third course arrived. This time, and once again cut into tiny, bite-sized morsels, grilled meats: lamb and beef, goat and veal, venison, partridge and quail. Additionally, small, white potatoes cut into ovals and sautéed in butter and parsley; broccoli florets and asparagus spears; buttered carrots, more sauces—and all of it delivered to their table in silence.

  Kit began to wonder what kind of a tribute would be exacted of them, and whether or not they could pay it. Daneka, however, appeared to take it all in stride, perfectly willing and able to pay whatever price their headwaiter might name. Both of them marveled, to themselves only, that such a nondescript restaurant could provide comparable fare.

  At the conclusion of what Kit hoped was their main and final course, hands reappeared, plates disappeared, wine glasses and bottles with them. The wine steward returned with two port glasses and a bottle he carried like a new-born. He put one glass down in front of each of them, then signaled to the waiters in the background, who promptly arrived with a dish of walnuts, another of almonds, a third of cashews, a fourth of radishes, and a cutting board with at least half a dozen cheeses, some soft and buttery, others hard and scaly. Kit looked at the rinds of the hard cheeses and thought he’d never seen such subtle hues of gray and brown—colors that reflected the earth tones and rocky ridges of the coastline. What he would’ve given for a light-pack and his camera at this moment! The colors of the rinds and of the cheeses themselves, the Rachel-rich clarity of the port and, in the background, Daneka in her dress—but also the fire’s flames dancing deliciously, deliriously through the transparency of it and around the firmness of her. It would be a portrait of edibles and potables—he smiled to himself—to end all portraits.

  As the wait-staff and wine steward withdrew from their table, Kit noted the arrival of the same group of musicians who’d played outside in the garden the night before. He presently had a better opportunity to study them and their instruments close up, and he saw that they were indeed mandolins—if a local variation which he’d not, until the night before, ever seen. The musicians themselves were dressed in a rustic fashion, though without a too-obvious bow to costumes or anything that could be called even remotely folkloric. They look simply natural, Kit thought—like the rinds of the local cheeses. When she finally appeared, Kit could see at a glance why Portuguese women could not claim any of that reputation for oxygen-sucking beauty that some of their Mediterranean sisters were heir to. There was something a bit too masculine about her, a bit too rough around the edges. Consequently, Kit understood immediately why the men in the room had reacted as they had when Daneka had brushed through. Hers was a beauty—and not only to Kit’s eyes—to suck more than air out of a room. If the women hadn’t reacted with jealousy or envy, Kit thought, it was only because they lacked a language of comparison, a syntax to give any real definition or meaning to sentiments of jealousy or envy of a beauty like hers.

  As if by way of compensation for her lack of physical beauty, however, this woman had a voice whose sound to his ears—and apparently to every other pair of ears present—was a thing that could rival what Daneka’s face and body could do to his and their eyes. As she began to sing the same series of fados she’d sung the night before, he leaned forward as if reeled in by the same thread Daneka had been tied to the previous night—and now began to hear the sadness that had brought Daneka to tears. He reflected on their love-making of only a couple of hours earlier. And then, as if running the film backwards and in deliciously slow motion, he reflected upon all of their love-making: place, time of day and circumstances, since the first time near the Boathouse. Finally, he reflected upon the first time he’d seen her nude, in his own apartment, and on how he’d studied the curves and contours of her as she slept.

  He didn’t know—really couldn’t distinguish—whether it was these memories, or the music, or some premonition that now saddened him. In any case, when he opened his eyes again several minutes later during a short intermission, he felt dampness on his cheeks and knew that he, like Daneka the night before, had succumbed. When he looked at her, he noted that her eyes, too, were misty, though he saw no evidence of what he’d seen the night before. She�
�d simply grown inured to the sadness and had let it become a part of her as it had long ago become a part of all of the others seated around them.

  “Shall we go, darling?” she asked as she put her hands on his.

  “Yes. Let’s.

  “And shall we leave tomorrow if the fog hasn’t lifted?”

  Kit nodded. “If that’s your wish.”

  “It is, my darling. I love it here. And I love being here with you. I could be anywhere with you and be happy. But right now, I also desperately need to feel the sun again. There’ll be more than enough fog and mist and dreariness in Denmark—trust me.”

  “Then let’s go find that sun. Let’s leave tomorrow for Italy.”

  Daneka bent down and kissed Kit’s hands. With eyes closed, she then brought her head back up and kissed him softly on the lips. She opened her eyes, reached up and touched him once on the tip of his nose, then smiled.

  “Thank you, darling. I’ll never forget you for this.”

  He hoped she never would. But that was a question only time could answer—and would answer, one day, much sooner than either of them might have anticipated.

  Chapter 33

  Daneka signaled to their headwaiter, who promptly came to the table.

  “Sim, Senhora?” he asked.

  “A conta, por favor.” The waiter looked at Daneka, then at Kit.

  “Com sua permissão, Senhor,” he asked, but without waiting for Kit to give his permission or withhold it. He bowed his head, picked up Daneka’s hand, and put his lips to it. The gesture was pure chivalry. “Este é o único pagamento que exijo, Senhora.”

  Because Daneka was European and knew instinctively how to react, Kit’s intercession would’ve been entirely superfluous. His own mother, he was certain, would’ve blushed, mumbled something girlishly incoherent, taken out her traveler’s cheques or credit card to hide her embarrassment and, in the process, would likely have insulted her host.

  Daneka, however, took the headwaiter’s hands in hers and kissed him once on each cheek. She then walked up to each of the other attending waiters and did the same. Finally, she repeated the gesture with the wine steward, paused an instant, reached down to the tâte-vin at the end of its silver chain, and brought it to her lips as a parting gesture of respect both for the steward and for the wine.

  Kit realized the room had grown respectfully silent during this impromptu ceremony. Without knowing why she was doing what she was doing, those present nevertheless seemed to have a profound admiration for what she did—and for how she did it. As Kit and Daneka walked to the front of the restaurant, Daneka paused once more face to face with the singer and, as she had with the wait staff, took both of the singer’s hands in her own.

  “Você tem a voz de um anjo, Sinhorita,” she said.

  “Muitíssimo obrigado,” the singer said. “E você tem um anjo, tem a cara, Senhora.”

  The two women stood looking at each other for an instant longer, a pair of hands in a pair of hands. Then Daneka disengaged, and Kit and Daneka walked through the reception area and out the front door.

  The fog still hung on the night air like a slightly out-of-season winter coat. Daneka, without benefit of an outer garment, huddled down under Kit’s protective arm as they walked back to their villa. Just there, where the night sky’s foggy fabric had worn momentarily thin, a full moon broke through and illuminated the villa, now within eyesight. A thin trail of blue smoke rose from the chimney and appeared to pay homage to a moon that beamed benevolently back down.

  As they arrived at the front door, Daneka reached out to open it. Kit, instead, took her hand in his.

  “Have I ever told you how much I love you?” he asked. “Not just love, but admire, respect, adore, yes—even worship you.” The last was said not in the tone of a lingering question, but with the self-assurance of a full-scale declaration.

  Daneka’s eyes did not rise to meet Kit’s. Anonymous admiration—the stares of strangers and of people who made no claim to her heart, who had no chance of ever entering in, who remained, simply and categorically, admirers—was something Daneka could easily accommodate. The adoration of one man, however, was another matter entirely. Worship from the same man was like a bit of foreign matter in the eye, and she reached up unconsciously to find and flush it out before tears might find a way to do the same.

  There was, of course, nothing in her eye to remove. The gesture had no purpose and no result other than to put an end to Kit’s declaration. “What is it, darling?” he asked solicitously, hiding as he did so his disappointment.

  “Oh, it’s nothing, Kit. Just a little something—at least it feels like something—in my eye.” She looked up at him and blinked. “Can you see anything there?” The fact that she’d finally said his name once again in as long as he could remember was like a bandage to the wound she’d just unknowingly—or perhaps knowingly—re-opened.

  “Yes, I think I see—.” And here, he peered down into her eyes, brought his hand up and pinched thumb and forefinger together as if to pluck something out. “A thorn. Or maybe an entire thorn bush. Or maybe even an entire forest of thorn bushes.”

  Daneka laughed. “A forest of thorny, horny bushes?” she asked coquettishly.

  “Scornfully thorny bushes,” Kit answered, then sighed. “Or maybe mournfully horny bushes. It’s a little hard to see the horny for the trees in this case. The forest gets lost in the thick-thistled understory.” Kit’s metaphor was not lost on Daneka. She, after all, had brought him to it. She chose not to offer a rejoinder, but instead let it hang in the air as she opened the front door.

  And there it hung, all night long, the occasional crackle from the fireplace incapable of doing anything to lighten or puncture or scare it loose from its lurking place. Kit slept fitfully; Daneka, soundly.

  At the first sign of dawn, Kit rose and walked out the back door. He figured he had a good hour or two before Daneka would awaken. He descended through the rocks to the beach below. The sky, still grey and fog-laden, joined the sea at the waistline. Further down below the western horizon, Kit knew, if his eyes could’ve seen far enough and somehow magically followed the curvature of the earth, he would find—just below ankle-level—New York.

  New York on its faster, take-no-prisoners, shit-kicking pair of feet.

  He and Daneka could fly halfway around the world. They could find a paradise in Paris, another in Portugal, a third—he was certain—in Italy. And in Denmark? He had no idea—only an inkling, really—that Denmark, too, would prove to be a paradise, even if filled with ‘fog and mist and dreariness.’ He would take any and all of it now and for the rest of his life—if only he could have her with it. But now he knew. However much of a paradise it might seem to him, it remained too small a pleasure for her.

  He knew she loved him. To the extent she was capable of loving—and it was becoming increasingly, painfully apparent that this was very little—she loved him. But there was something, some thing that made it impossible for her to love—him, or probably anyone else for that matter. Of this, he was becoming increasingly certain.

  Europe was a continent too small, too intimate, too quiet and full of fog for her to rest easy and remain content on with but one man and only the plangent refrain of her own thoughts. She needed the bang, the dash, the glare and glitter of New York to distract her. She needed New York’s constant noise, the non-stop assault on ears and eyes, nose and fingers—on every known sense and then on the other unknown, unknowable ones—to distract her from her thoughts, from some long-suppressed memory, from some cosmic collision in a brief history on earth that had left her caught in a perpetual, emotional winter.

  For all of her grace and beauty and superlative performance, Kit finally recognized Daneka for who she was: a trompe-l’œil. An illusion. A diamond of no carats. Or maybe a diamond of countless carats, brilliant in its unremitting radiance, but ultimately dead.

  He remembered his gift to her of a lichen and felt suddenly foolish. What could she know, or ca
re, of a thing that might require half a century to grow to the size of a shirt button? Of a thing that would endure any hardship, that existed for the mere sake of existence and without need of anything but the minerals it could squeeze from a rock through the secretion of its own, beggarly supply of chemical? And now it sat on her coffee table, pointless in its persistence, most likely looking to her and to all those who traveled through her living room like a locker-room fungus, the product of bad circulation and a negligent housekeeper, a hairy bit of mildew.

  What he’d seen with a clearer vision the first time he’d visited her apartment in New York was no accident: the sterile, museum-like, picture-perfect quality of the rooms where photographs and tableaux had been hung for show, but not with love; the books standing on bookshelves like an impeccably dressed Vatican Swiss Guard, their bindings no more stressed by the fly-weight of the material within than by the non-existent threat of a curious-fingered assault from without.

  Yes, he now had to concede: she was an Echo to his Narcissus, and reflected back to him only the idealized version of himself he had, until now, blindly, gratefully embraced. He was a photographer and should know better. He should know even better than a therapist how to read his subject’s exterior in order to understand what was just below the surface. And yet, he’d never trained his camera on himself—and that was the problem. Instead, he’d looked at Daneka through it; had taken at face value what his camera told him; had pronounced it, and her, beautiful. She was an exquisite trompe-l‘œil—no mistake about it. And now, he realized, he’d fallen in love, deeply in love, obsessively in love, with an illusion.

  He felt like an old man climbing the rocks back up to the villa. When he arrived, the error of his earlier conjecture struck him dumb. Daneka was up, showered, dressed, made-up and packed. Even his own suitcase was laid out on the bed with all of his things neatly folded and lying next to it. She smiled at him as he came in through the back door. He made what he believed to be an entirely successful attempt to rid his face of any expression that might reveal his struggle of the last hour.