The Lover From An Icy Sea Read online

  His free associations were temporarily interrupted, however, when he noticed their car rapidly gaining on the rear bumper of a slower-moving truck up ahead. As he approached close enough to read its license plate, Kit identified the tell-tale first two letters of the truck’s registration: PA—Palermo. The truck’s exhaust emitted an ugly stream of black smoke, and its rear panel had been gussied up with a pair of nudes. The solid gold silhouettes of two women in provocatively reclining positions faced each other off like some kind of cheap faïence at opposite ends of a fireplace mantle. Poverty, Kit thought to himself, headlined itself in more than kitsch and bad dental care; it could also be read in the absence of catalytic converters.

  He checked his mirror for traffic approaching from the rear: only one car—far behind, its headlights curiously flashing on and off—so not a problem. He figured he’d need only a few seconds to get past this truck. He set his blinker, accelerated, and moved out into the passing lane just as he caught sight of a portion of the truckdriver’s face in the vehicle’s exterior side-view mirror. A couple of day’s dark, stubby growth highlighted two or three remaining teeth in the gaping “O” of the man’s mouth as his eyes bulged and his eyebrows shot up into two panicked crescents.

  * * *

  Kit later confessed to Daneka that he had no recollection of the next few seconds. The longer minutes that followed, however, resulted in feelings of remorse such that, from that day forward, he never again drove a car without hands clenched on the steering wheel in equal parts dread and guilt. If it had been possible, he would never have driven again at all.

  * * *

  As Kit pulled out into the passing lane, the car approaching in the same lane from his rear reacted quickly—but not quickly enough for the speed at which it was traveling. There was too little space between Kit’s car and the median for it to squeeze through without side-swiping Kit’s car in the process. The driver consequently swerved to the right to try to reach and then pass on the shoulder. The low front bumper of his candy apple-red Lamborghini caught the rear bumper of the truck and sent it into a tailspin. Kit braked his own car as the truck swerved in front, struck the center median, then bounced back and flipped over. It rolled several times before spilling its cargo and then bursting into flames. As Kit’s car quickly decelerated through 50 mph, leaving a rubber skid mark on the pavement as proof of his effort to avoid colliding with the truck, a detached arm bounced up off the pavement and slammed into his windshield.

  In the meantime, the brief handshake of the truck’s rear bumper and the front bumper of the much lighter, much faster-traveling Lamborghini had been sufficient to send it gliding off onto the shoulder like a paper plane, where a cement kilometer marker caught it head on. The marker didn’t budge; consequently, what had to give was the Lamborghini. The energy of its velocity needed to go somewhere, and a simple kilometer marker, small yet robust, refused to yield to close to a ton of steel and fiberglass traveling forward at 120 mph.

  The car upended and turned somersaults. When it finally came to a rest, it—like the truck a split second earlier—burst into flames, as its gas tank had separated from the vehicle in the enormous expenditure of energy unleashed by the accident. By the sheer force of the tank’s collision with the cement median, it had broken apart. The result was a fireball that engulfed both sides of the highway.

  The two occupants of the Lamborghini, apparently not wearing seatbelts, were ejected upon impact with the cement marker. They, like the vehicle itself, instantly became an assortment of unusable spare parts whose market-value would no longer bear scrutiny, much less appraisal. As the Lamborghini’s roof detached itself from the car, it took their heads with it. The driver’s lower torso had merged with the steering column with the force of the impact, and so remained behind. The upper half of him, less head, flew like a wet pillow through the air until it collided with the trunk of one of the pine trees lining the autostrada, where it now hung from the sharp stub of a branch.

  The body of his much younger female companion initially suffered none of the indignities of dismemberment except for the loss of itself from the neck up, which part rolled on down the autostrada like a knobby soccer ball until it came to rest several hundred yards away against the median. The rest of her—less one four-inch spike heel that stayed behind and burned with the car—followed for a much shorter distance, leaving a bloody exclamation mark that would not entirely wash away until the season’s next rainstorm. Her crumpled torso—like the point in that exclamation mark—would be removed, however, within the hour.

  Traffic came to a halt in both directions, but at a safe distance from the flames. People emerged from cars, cell phones in hand in order to call for help. Some of them, whether from an urge to gawk, or simply unlucky in their curiosity, peeked over the median into wreckage and body parts—and vomited. Others, perhaps more hardened by work, by war, or by some calamity of their own making, slowly removed themselves from the scene and walked back to their cars to await the arrival of the police—also, of those personnel whose joyless job it was to first assemble statistics, then clean up the stuff of those statistics.

  Two hours later, their windshield wiped clean of any evidence of their mishap, Daneka sat in the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition to start them back up on their journey south. Check-in, she calculated with a sigh of relief, would no longer be an issue, as noon would’ve come and gone by the time they reached the hotel in Positano.

  Kit was beyond calculation of any kind, stuck in a horror he felt he had engineered, however unwittingly. Daneka had done her best to convince him otherwise, but her efforts had worked no particular magic in this instance. He remained hard stuck, and no words of consolation could pry him loose.

  They rode in silence. Traffic on the autostrada eventually began to find its selfsame rhythm—for all, that is, but the driver of one Sicilian truck and the occupants of one candy-apple red Lamborghini. Their rhythm was now quite different. Their music had stopped altogether. For them, a concern with dental care, kitsch, or catalytic converters—or with the choice of spike heels versus utilitarian flats—would no longer have quite the same urgency.

  Chapter 42

  By one o’clock, Daneka had managed to navigate the last bit of autostrada from Rome on past the chaos of Naples to Salerno, then onto a country road along the southern coast of the peninsula up through Amalfi and on to Positano. This was a two-lane town; she knew that asking directions to the Albergo Casa Albertina was unnecessary, not to say irrelevant. Instead, she drove slowly and conducted her own visual check—as Kit was still in no condition to help out.

  She found it, or rather its marker, and parked the car in the white gravel lot just off the road. She vaguely remembered that the hotel itself was situated on a shoulder of the cliff overlooking the gulf. They could carry their baggage down if they cared to; alternatively, they could simply walk down the couple of hundred stone steps to the lobby, then send a porter up for their bags. She opted for the alternative as she thought an unencumbered view of the gulf might help to lift Kit’s mood.

  “Darling, we’re here,” she said as she turned off the engine. She said it to him as if to a sleeping child after a long trip home—just a soft nudge to wake him up and get him moving in the direction of bed. Kit, like that same child suddenly stirred from sleep, acknowledged her words with a grunt, then opened his car door, stepped out into the bright sunlight and squinted. She came around the back of the car and took his arm in hers, then walked him to the stone stairway.

  They descended together, she leading him by the arm. The view in many respects was spectacularly similar to the one they’d enjoyed from their villa in Cabo de São Vicente, even if they’d now exchanged the Atlantic Ocean for the Tyrrhenian Sea. Kit couldn’t tell whether the blues were truly bluer—or merely appeared to be so by contrast with the red he’d seen, in all of its many morbid hues, in the course of the last several hours. In any case, these blues soothed. And little by little, step b
y step, he emerged from the mental cave into which he’d crawled following the accident.

  He knew that he might never leave that cave entirely behind, and that he might re-enter and dwell there for periods of time, on and off, for the rest of his life. The cave was now a part of him: every bit as much as the memory of swings and fresh cut grass of his youth; of countless beautiful bodies and faces he’d photographed or made love to—or both—during his later years; of this woman who was still very much a part of his present, but who, he knew, could just as easily and for no fathomable reason become a distant and silent part of his past.

  Everything in life was but a moment; a snapshot; an event; and then, eventually, just an entry in one long log of memories—until, of course, through natural cause or sudden accident, the log was lost, the lights grew dim, the memories were deleted.

  They reached the lobby of the Albergo Casa Albertina. The attendant greeted them effusively—a bit too effusively, Kit noted even in his stupor, although he was growing accustomed to this peculiar Italian sense of cordiality. And yet, it seemed to him there was an all-too-easy familiarity between the attendant and Daneka—a subtle undertone lying just beneath and at an odd angle to what one might otherwise expect between hotel host and guest. He suspected she’d been here before; after all, she’d made the reservation—while he’d never even heard of Positano until the day she’d first suggested it as part of their itinerary.

  The attendant finally presented them with a pair of room keys and promised to send a porter up to get their bags. Daneka thanked him with a wink. He looked at Kit with something bordering on disdain, then returned Daneka’s wink. It was while walking to their room that Kit decided the time was right to ask the question that had been nagging him.

  “Daneka, how did you come to know about this place?”

  “Positano? Or this hotel?”

  “Both, really.

  “Well, it’s a long story. For one thing, Luigi Pirandello used to vacation at this house long before it became a hotel. You’ve heard of him, of course. He wrote a play called Six Characters in Search of an Author. Well, I was one of those characters.” She said it with a light-hearted laugh and looked sideways at Kit for a response, but he’d missed the joke.

  “Oh, darling, don’t be ridiculous! He was dead long before I was born—before even my mother was born!” Kit’s sigh suggested to Daneka’s ear she might find something more than a pout at the end of this line of inquiry. “I was just your average Scandinavian girl,” she lied. “After a long winter, all we ever wanted was to see the sun,” she lied further. “My parents would bring me here every summer,” she lied outrageously. Kit, however, had no way of knowing to what degree—as he really knew nothing about her parents’ financial condition during Daneka’s youth. What he did know, however, was that Danes, while anything but poor even by Western standards, were not really wealthy, either—at least not wealthy enough, with few exceptions, to summer on the coast of Italy year after year.

  “Some summers, we’d spend a month here in Positano. Other summers, a month in Amalfi. You might’ve noticed it when we drove through on our way here. Still others, we’d spend the time in Sorrento, just across the peninsula on the Gulf of Naples. And if it had been a particularly good year, we’d take a private boat out to the Isle of Capri—which is just across from the Punta Campanella at the tip of the peninsula.”

  A series of little lies was snowballing into the big lie. Kit had been quite prepared to believe her until her mention of Capri. But models talked—on the job and off. He knew about places like Capri and Ibiza from snippets of conversations he’d heard over the years. Supermodels had made the rounds of all of them—their particular brand of finishing school. The occasional beauties from Boise were sent off immediately to ripen their farm-fresh milkiness with a soupçon of bacterial culture—usually via Milan or Rome where they could hook up for the week or for the month with someone who just happened to own a yacht, who just happened to have some extra time on his hands, who just happened not to have that same time—or at least not the inclination—to invite the wife and kiddies along for the cruise.

  If Vegas was Disneyland for adults, Kit knew, then Capri and the smallest of the Ballearic Islands, Ibiza—just off the Costa Brava in the Gulf of Valencia—were Disneyland for the decadent. But family vacation spots? Hardly—not even for well-to-do Scandinavian families.

  Still, he was in no humor to probe. The accident continued to eat at him. If anything, he wanted to go to sleep; wake up; then find it had all just been a nightmare.

  They arrived at their room, and Daneka unlocked the door. Kit looked around in amazement. If possible, it was even more spectacular than their room at the Grand Hotel de Champagne, in Paris. Irregular squares of polished stone peeked out from between the more regular rectangles of Persian rugs. The furniture was classic Italian; solid; not a cheap piece in sight—at least not here, in the living room. Kit crossed to an open door leading to the bedroom and looked in. More of the same, all of it perfectly coordinated. The bed reminded him of one he’d seen in his youth in the Albert and Victoria Museum in London, and which had once belonged to Henry VIII. (He remembered wondering at the time—he was still just a kid, with a kid’s imagination—whether that particular Henry had needed so many wives because he owned such a large bed, or whether he’d needed such a large bed because he had so many wives. For Kit at the time, ‘serial monogamy’ was not a working concept.) Four heavy posters and a canopy. Four-poster beds had meant multiple wives to his kid’s imagination; to his adult’s better-informed imagination, they meant something quite different.

  He walked into the bathroom. It was enormous, all marble, with space enough not only for a double sink, stand-up shower, bidet and bathtub, but also for a Jacuzzi. The Jacuzzi, itself, had space enough for four adults, or—but of course—for one very well-off Danish family in its annual celebration of an Italian summer sun.

  “What do you think, darling? Do you like it?”

  “It’s exquisite,” Kit said, and now it was his turn to lie. The rooms were indeed exquisite—nothing less than—but Kit’s eye couldn’t look at the furniture and the bathroom amenities without, at the same time, seeing a younger version of Daneka in them. Nor was it the ghost of the child he imagined cavorting with the other ghosts of one happy Danish family.

  “Do you mind if I lie down and rest?” he asked. “I’ve got a bit of a headache.”

  Daneka grimaced. “My poor darling. Yes—by all means, please do. Try to sleep it off while I put our things away. Then, if you feel better, we can go to lunch. Okay?”

  “Sure. And thanks.”

  Kit lay down. He didn’t really have a headache; nor was he in the least bit sleepy. He simply wanted to clear his mind of mental images that wouldn’t allow him to see this place for what it really was: a small piece of paradise. Whatever it had been to Daneka at one time was not for him to question. He’d not been a part of her life then; he was a part of her life now. And the only thing that should matter to him was her happiness—their happiness—now and for as long as he could keep it and her.

  The accident was just that—an accident. His part in it had been an unhappy coincidence. He hadn’t been careless, ignorant or in violation of the rules of the highway. He’d simply been caught in a blind spot. Life was full of blind spots, of unknowns, of accidents just waiting to happen. If you were cautious, careful, attentive, you could avoid most of them; but not all of them—not all the time.

  Kit was cautious. He was also quick and alert. This morning, however, he’d just not been cautious or quick or alert enough.

  Chapter 43

  When Kit awoke to the sound of a closing door, it was mid-afternoon. He’d eventually fallen asleep after all, and Daneka at some point had slipped out quietly and closed the bedroom door behind her. He now heard her sandaled feet crossing the living room towards the bedroom. She turned the knob slowly, quietly, then peeked in. Kit looked back at her and blinked.

 
“Darling, you’re awake! ‘Feeling any better?”

  “Much, thanks. Where’d you go?”

  “I went up for a bite to the terrace restaurant. The view is stupendous! You have to come and see it.”

  ‘Wha’d you have?”

  “Just a hamburger. ‘You hungry?”

  Not only was Kit not hungry; the thought of red meat made him nauseous. “Not particularly. I think I’m really much more in the mood for a walk.”

  “Wonderful! And a swim?”

  “Maybe. In any case, I’d really like to take a walk on the beach if you’re up for it.”

  “Sure! Why don’t we put our bathing suits on just in case?”

  “Sounds good.”

  Daneka put on a bikini and a dab or two of sun block, then stepped back into her sandals. Kit put on his own bathing suit, also a pair of jeans over it and a shirt. If she felt no particular compunction about walking out three-quarters naked into a semi-public space, he wouldn’t either—at least not on her account. His Pennsylvania roots, however, were beholden to a somewhat different sense of propriety where his own body was concerned.

  They left their hotel room and walked out through the lobby, Kit just a couple of paces behind her. A few stray males and one familiar-looking attendant at the reception desk pretended indifference. Kit knew better and so did Daneka. He thought there might be more than just her usual sway as he watched her hips cross the lobby and saunter out to the pool area. Kit held his stare as he nodded to the other males in that way that certain males have of staring and nodding when they’re just out for a stroll with a mate in tow. The other stray males and one attendant nodded back in that way that certain other males have of acknowledging another male’s proprietorship—at least for as long as subject and object are visibly linked.