The Lover From An Icy Sea Read online

  Kit registered their conditional acknowledgement. At the same time, he made a mental note not to let Daneka out of his sight for as long as they were in Positano.

  He followed Daneka out to the pool deck where there were lots of sunbathers, many of them topless. At a glance, he could see that none of the females present was pre-pubescent. Maybe, he observed to himself with just the hint of a dark chuckle, all of the Scandinavian families were summering in Amalfi this year.

  Daneka seemed to know exactly where she was headed—and so, Kit followed. After they’d crossed the pool deck, they found themselves at the entrance to a structure with two doors. Behind one of the doors stood an elevator; behind the other, a cable and empty space. Daneka opened the door leading to the cage-like elevator, then turned to Kit.

  “This will take us down to the beach, darling. Down to the Spiaggia delle Sirene. Quite a fetching name, don’t you think? ‘Beach of the Sirens.’ I wonder if we’ll see any. If we do, I’ll just have to plug up your little ears with beeswax,” she cooed to him as she reached up and pinched a lobe.

  Kit wondered whether ‘fetching’ was a left-over from her early English-as-a-second-language school days, or rather from some more recent encounter—hence, whether her unconscious employment of it might suggest the possibility of a British liaison in a not-so-distant Positano past. He decided, in either case, the word could stay exactly where she’d dropped it. ‘Fetch’ was not a sound that fit easily into his mouth—except when the subject-matter was dogs. Or maybe their training.

  Once they’d boarded the elevator, Daneka pushed the “S” button and the elevator began its descent. As they slowly dropped towards the beach, she pointed along the cliffs to a kind of ravine off in the distance.

  “It’s called the Sentiero degli Dei, she said. “‘The Path of the gods.’ Do you know why they call it that?” Daneka was fairly certain that he didn’t. “That’s where the Christians hid during the Muslim invasions of the tenth century. ‘The invasion of the Saracens’ is what they called it. Nasty and brutish! Brutish and nasty! Not a very pleasant night-time tale for a child,” she said, but there seemed to be more delight than disgust in her pretense of a grimace.

  “Indeed,” was as much as Kit could offer in return. Yet Daneka apparently didn’t hear in the terseness of his two syllables a lack of interest—at least in this case—in historical minutiae. The taurine in her seemed to relish the opportunity to rumble a bit of the china in his closet.

  “Yup. Ever wonder why southern Italians are so much darker than northern Italians? Well, sure, the sun has something to do with it. And they are, for the most part, agrarian. So they spend a lot more time outdoors, tending their flocks. But suntans don’t travel very well, genetically speaking. Genes do. Whether, as they say, ‘consensually’ or ‘non-consensually’ doesn’t really make much of a difference to genes. Moreover, there’s only so much hiding you can do, you know. And seekers generally fare better, over time, than hiders. Saracen seekers especially. Christian hiders especially not.”

  Kit could connect the dots without Daneka’s having to take him along by the hand. This was already more of history than he really wanted to know. He looked out at the hillside as it fell away to the sea. It was indeed a little piece of paradise. But even in paradise, hell could find a foothold and flourish. He forced himself to imagine what it would’ve been like to have to hide, day after day—but most especially, night after night—in paradise: to see the sun rise, and be glad for it; to see the moon rise, and feel fear in every follicle; to have all of the hairs of one’s body stand on end, ready for flight at a second’s notice and at the merest hint of an approaching torch. As marauders moved through the mountains, Christians would’ve crouched and waited like lambs before their inevitable slaughter: men, with certainty, and immediately; women, only after certain other amusements had been exhausted; children and babies, for the sheer fun of it.

  Kit wondered how many women would’ve been compelled to smother their babies into silence—eternal silence—so as not to precipitate quick and easy discovery in paradise. And what of those who couldn’t, or who demurred a second too long? Remnants of old, stagnant gene pools would’ve been dashed onto the rocks below, hurled out into the air and into the sea like bad seed and replaced—how had Daneka put it precisely, if also euphemistically? ‘non-consensually’—by new seed, new genes, an entirely new pool.

  Genes were nature at its most brutish. Genes cared nothing for religious distinctions, the purity of races, rising moons or setting suns, hell or paradise—or hell in paradise. Genes simply marched forward, by whatever means possible, in a relentless quest for survival.

  The elevator arrived with a bump. Kit was thankful that something as simple as a funicular vehicle could put a hard stop to a reverie that was doing little to improve his mood.

  Chapter 44

  The beach was empty, deserted, not a body in motion in either direction, up or down, for as far as Kit could see. He took Daneka’s hand and they strolled, combed the beach for secrets. He wanted to know hers, but neither the waves nor she would give any of them up. They tested the water with their toes; found it chilly; continued walking.

  About a half-mile distant from the hotel, they found an old fishing boat, its paint long since sacrificed to age and the elements. Still, it didn’t look abandoned—someone had at least taken enough care to turn it over and store the oars underneath.

  “Darling, what do you say? How about a little ride? This isn’t the Boathouse, and we can’t really order up strawberries and champagne. But we can still pretend, can’t we?”

  “I don’t know, Daneka. This boat looks to me like a means to someone’s livelihood. For all we know, that someone comes out to fish at this time of day. If he arrives and finds his boat gone, what’s he going to tell his wife?”

  “He’s going to tell her it’s gone. And then he’ll probably want to gnash his teeth and beat his children or kick the dog. But she’ll calm him down and tell him it’s probably just been borrowed for a couple of hours by someone—or, more likely, by some ones—from the hotel. Who will no doubt have the courtesy to leave a few thousand lire so she can buy meat. Then he’ll be satisfied, she’ll be ecstatic, and the kids will eat something other than fish for a change.”

  She’s got it all figured out, Kit thought. She always does. If there’s an explanation to be had that will justify her desire, she’ll find it. “Okay—just so long as one of us first runs back to the hotel for some money.”

  Daneka smiled, reached into her bikini bottom and withdrew a small stack of bills. “Mille lire notes. Never leave home without ‘em.” She looked in both directions and, spotting the thing she wanted, ran and picked it up. She returned to Kit and the boat with an old tin can. “Ecco!” She counted out ten notes and slipped them into the can, which she half-buried in the sand in place of the anchor she’d just pulled out.

  Together, the two of them turned the boat over and pushed it out to where the waves were just breaking. Daneka let out a little scream as a wave crashed up against her, soaking her backside and resulting in the chill she’d tried so diligently to avoid, as well as an abundance of gooseflesh on her arms and legs. Kit snickered, gave her back and shoulders a few brisk rubs, then helped her up into the boat where she sat huddled and shivering. He pushed the boat out until the bottom cleared the sand entirely, jumped in and set the oars.

  For the next thirty minutes, Kit rowed in silence. Daneka had long since stopped shivering and now lay stretched out before him. One hand extended out over the bow of the boat and trailed in the water—her index finger, a miniature vessel accompanying their much larger boat, its wake spreading out in tiny imitation of the boat’s much larger wake. Even the boat’s wake, however, amounted to a barely perceptible demonstration of energy in contrast to the natural surge and flow of the gulf waters surrounding them—enough energy, that is, to move them forward.

  The sun, no longer directly overhead, nevertheless radiated with the
heft of wrought-iron shackles and reduced Daneka’s own occasional expenditure of energy to an occasional upstart movement that swelled with momentary ambition, only to be pulled back down as if beholden to chains. Is she dreaming? Kit wondered. Was Daneka in fact hinged to some nightmare whose lurid scenes she was frantically trying to cut and discard like so many outtakes, only to fall back defeated by the hammer of the sun’s rays? Her spasmodic gestures and fluttering eyelids suggested as much to Kit’s reckoning.

  In the meantime, Kit’s clothes had begun to feel as welcome to his skin as clotted cream. He secured the oars in their sockets and let them drop slowly through the water until they reached an almost vertical position. At the same time, he unbuttoned and took off his shirt, then stood up and did the same with his jeans. He looked around, discovered they were well out of sight of any curious eyes not in possession of a pair of binoculars, and considered doing the same with his swimsuit. Was it not less than a month earlier he’d risked even more in plain sight of God-knows-how-many onlookers in and around Central Park? Funny, he thought, how lust could so cavalierly remove all obstacles, all caution, in a body’s headlong pursuit of it—while here and now, only a few weeks later, ‘headlong’ easily catered to the consideration of consequences. For the time being, he decided, he could live with this swimsuit.

  He looked at Daneka and thought back to the woman he’d seen lying before him in a very similar rowboat, under a willow, on the edge of the Rumble. It was the same person. Or was it? The same body. Or was it? The same heart and mind in the same body of the same person. Or were they? Whatever changes that body, heart and mind might’ve undergone in the space of a few short weeks would be subtle enough to elude detection. Or would they? He wondered whether she’d still feel the same desire; whether she’d react to his kiss, here and now, as she’d reacted that first night; whether, if he abruptly invaded her sleep, her dreams—her nightmares even—by taking her without warning, she’d welcome that spontaneous penetration as she’d welcomed the others.

  He looked down and marveled at how something as silent as a rumination—like a traffic cop of the senses—could direct the flow of blood in his body to a part that now commanded it. He dropped his swimsuit to his ankles and stepped out. As he stood over Daneka’s outstretched body wondering how he could remove—without disturbing her sleep at the same time—the little bit of cloth remaining between his questions and the answer to those questions, her lids receded—as if on cue—just enough to let him catch a glimpse of some of the white of her eyeballs. Was she awake, then, after all? Or had some strange telepathy allowed her to see into his mind, all the while maintaining the newsreel of her thoughts, memories—fantasies?—running on a different energy source than that which fed her REM sleep?

  He smiled down at her to check her response: nothing. It occurred to him that the brief movement of her eyelids more closely resembled those of a lizard or a snake—or of any reptile whose occasional need for sleep would still not defeat an instinctive circumspection of every thing and every body in its immediate vicinity. Perhaps he, too, fell into that category where Daneka was concerned. Perhaps, to her, he was ultimately nothing more than prey or predator. And yes—perhaps, to him, there was some scintilla of the reptilian that lurked behind all of the other more obviously mammalian aspects of her. It was something he hadn’t wanted to consider. It was something he’d always preferred not to consider where any human being was concerned. And yet, experience had taught him over the years that many of his species were in fact more like reptiles than like mammals. It was the thing that gave New York—unique among the cities he’d known throughout his life—the feel of the desert at night. No matter how well lit, no matter how full of bustle and obvious life, fangs or a quick, lethal sting might lurk beneath any rock, around any corner, at the end of the block, in the next cubicle.

  As Kit was about to rouse her from whatever half-stupor she apparently still languished in, her next gesture hit him with the force of a coil and quick strike, and then slowly injected its venom into his mind. With one hand, Daneka reached up and pushed her bikini top off; with the other, she reached down into the thin thread of material covering her pubis. The one hand was roughly squeezing her own nipples, its fingernails clawing her breasts and leaving the evidence behind in clearly delineated red streaks. The rough and greedy ministrations of the second hand in almost no time became rougher, greedier and faster under the cloth of her bikini bottom. A grimace crossed Daneka’s face. Whether it was from the self-inflicted pain or from the self-induced pleasure was a distinction Kit preferred not to consider. What was obvious to him, painfully obvious to him in a way that no erotic experience in his life had ever quite prepared him for, was that he was not a player in any part of this scenario. The fantasy or memory—he had to concede the possibility—that was driving Daneka inexorably towards frenzy was empty of his participation, except as a sorry spectator. He had never felt more pathetic, more redundant, more alone—more lonely in his life.

  If there was still any doubt in Kit’s mind whether she was flying entirely without him in the trapeze of this autoerotic act, Daneka promptly put an end to his speculation. As the tempo and violence of her masturbation increased, she consciously or unconsciously added language and an imperative voice to it. What he’d heard out of her mouth the first time they’d made love in her apartment, he realized, was no hallucination. If she’d been speaking in tongues at the time, this particular patois was yet another language in which she was clearly quite fluent.

  She delivered, seemingly to the air, hard-edged commands in a particular version of Anglo-Saxon Kit thought the preserve of porn. Her consonants were all percussion, no melody, and she bit off and spit out each imprecation as if it were a piece of gristle. Her climax to come was one he had no desire to witness. The traffic cop of his senses had long since redirected the blood-flow elsewhere—mostly, Kit realized, to a brain on fire and in desperate need of a dousing, of a drenching, of total submersion.

  He jumped into the water with no thought for how cold it might be or for what he might find—or for what might find him—swimming around down below. He closed his eyes and tried to block out the memory of what he’d just witnessed—as if, by shutting them tightly enough, he might simply squeeze the memory out and let it merge with the salty darkness surrounding him. He remained in this state of suspended agitation for what might’ve been close to a full minute. Then, however, his lungs suggested to him that enough was enough.

  He broke the surface of the water and inhaled sharply. The boat had drifted only a few yards off from where he was now treading water. He paddled his way over to it and hoisted himself up. Daneka, he noted, was stern-faced as she gripped both oars.

  “Let’s go back.” It was as much oral communication as he would receive from her for the next several hours.

  She rowed them to the beach. Together, they hauled the boat back up to its former landing; turned it over; placed the oars underneath; then re-inserted the anchor into its former nest after having first removed the tin can, which Kit handed to Daneka.

  She removed the lire notes and stuffed them back into her bikini bottom, then threw the tin can in the general direction of where she’d originally found it.

  They walked back to the hotel in silence; ascended by elevator in silence; walked through the hotel lobby to their room in silence; opened the door in silence.

  “I believe I’ll lie down for a while,” Daneka finally announced. Then, without waiting for Kit’s acknowledgement, she walked to the bedroom, took off her bikini and slipped in under the covers. Kit remained dressed, followed her into the bedroom and climbed in next to her. In answer to his fully-clothed proximity, Daneka turned on her side and towards the wall, brought her knees up against her belly, dragged a pillow down to her chest and hugged it. Her neck, he noted from his position behind her, was bent over the pillow. The slenderness of it, the gorgeous white expanse of it, lay before him like an altar. He bent his head down and kissed it gently�
�once, twice, three times.

  Daneka moved away from Kit’s kisses and in the direction of the wall.

  After a moment of further silence and a distance—he felt—that was growing inexorably between them at a speed Kit didn’t even care to consider, he got up off the bed, walked out of the bedroom, quietly closed the door behind him and sat down to write Daneka a note, less salutation: “I’ve gone for a walk. I’ll be back before dark. Kit.”

  He left their hotel room, then walked back through the lobby and out through the pool area. This time, he took no notice of whether those lying around the pool were male or female, pre- or post-pubescent, with or without a top. He found the elevator to the beach and descended, then began a walk along the shore that would take him several miles around the perimeter of the gulf, all of the remaining daylight hours, and—in his head—three thousand miles across the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to a tiny island off the coast of New Jersey.

  Chapter 45

  By the time Kit returned to the stretch of beach just below the albergo, the moon had risen up over the gulf. Until that moment, he’d never seen a larger and more beautiful moon than that over Manhattan in late September or early October. Each year, as if en route to an annual cotillion ball, it would rise towards sunset, towards summerset, in a pale orange of such sensuality that no camera could capture it, no set of eyes see enough of it, no set of words describe it more honorably than to call it by its given name: harvest moon.

  This evening, however, Manhattan’s moon would find a tough competitor and a real contender for the crown. The color of this moon was not pale orange, but roseate, and it was every bit as shapely as the competition three thousand miles to the west. Moreover, it was the gossamer gown of this moon high-stepping in reflection off the Gulf of Salerno—rather than pushing, shoving, kicking its way out from behind the roughneck silhouette of Queens—that imbued it with a grace no ragged harvest moon of Manhattan could hope to contend with.