The Lover From An Icy Sea Read online

  Tiny waves broke in muted applause along the shore, sending up their silver spray like handfuls of pocket-change. Who would wear the crown at this particular cotillion ball was clearly not in dispute.

  Kit easily found the elevator in the moonlight, stepped inside and ascended to the level of the hotel. He walked out across the pool deck—deserted except for one couple stretched out on one of the chaises longues and in the throes of something he preferred not to know anything more about—then proceeded through the hotel lobby and out. When he reached their room, he unlocked the door, then closed it and walked across to the bedroom. As he was about to enter, Daneka put down her make-up and stood up from her vanity table.

  “Good evening, darling. Nice walk?” She had addressed him directly with her voice. Her eyes, however, presently looked everywhere else but at him.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “And thank you, by the way, for the note.” Kit looked at Daneka in the hope that she would at least reciprocate with a glance. She didn’t. His stare, however, brought him tangential rewards: he noticed her dress—one he’d not seen before—as sheer a material and subtle a pattern as any he could recall on the models in the innumerable high-fashion shows he’d shot over the years. To say she was stunning in it, Kit thought, would simply concede the poverty of his own vocabulary; to describe her using any English word, he imagined, would simply highlight the poverty of the language. The moon he’d just seen might well be the belle of the ball, but even that moon, he felt, would run for cloud-cover if Daneka were to appear before it.

  She was beyond beautiful, beyond regal, beyond—if possible—even perfection. Hyperbole as homage in this case was no better than chump change. What nature and a bit of science had given this woman was, Kit decided in that instant, a singular endowment and only to be repeated at the risk of impoverishing the gene pool for the rest of the species. Do other men see her as I do? he wondered. If not, why not? If so, how can they get on with their lives, their work, their wives, their mistresses—and not thrash about in the night, at least in their dreams, in search of this extra-ordinary thing that I possess in the flesh, but which for them is destined to remain an unattainable Cockaigne for carnivores?

  “I believe I’ll go up to the terrace for a cocktail and wait for you there, darling. Is that okay with you?”

  It wasn’t. The last thing Kit wanted was to allow her out of his sight. But he knew bondage was not his prerogative. Risk. He would have to learn to live with it if he wanted this woman to remain in his life, and he in hers.

  “Of course. I’ll be up shortly.”

  As Daneka made her way out of the bedroom and across to the front door of their hotel room without so much as a wave, Kit thought the best he could hope for would be low light on the terrace—too low to reveal to the other guests the body and face of the goddess who was now sitting among them. He put the unpleasant thought out of his mind, took his clothes off and jumped into the shower; followed the shower with a shave; put on a clean set of clothes; brushed his hair and teeth; then left the room.

  When he arrived at the terrace, his eyes easily found Daneka seated at the end of a line of tables, just next to the balcony. The choice had clearly been hers, as there were a number of other, empty tables between her own and the next occupied table. She sat—Kit noted briefly and thankfully—absorbed in a quiet contemplation of the moon rather than busied in some effort to broadcast her presence. In a kind of lunar noblesse oblige, the moon’s reflected rays—together with the light of one candle on the table in front of her—seemed to pick out Daneka’s face for particular encomium. The re-reflected light played charitably on lines she might otherwise not have wished to reveal in public had she not been so self-absorbed.

  He approached her table and she looked up.

  “Hello, darling. Hungry?”

  “Not terribly, though I can certainly eat something. You?”

  “Famished!” At that same instant, a waiter who’d apparently taken note of Kit’s arrival approached their table.

  “É arrivato,” he said to Daneka, as if to confirm the obvious. And then, looking at Kit, “Buona sera, Signore.”

  “Buona sera,” Kit returned. “Portici, per piacere—” but the waiter had already anticipated Kit’s request and presented both him and Daneka with a menu, laid a wine list down on the table, then launched into a recitation of that evening’s specials. He subsequently bowed in proper, waiterly fashion and withdrew for a few minutes to give them an opportunity to decide.

  “What are you in the mood for, darling?”

  “I’m in the mood for love,” Kit intoned—but his attempt at levity floundered like a singed moth to the ground. “If I understood him correctly, they have a number of seafood specials. I think I’ll get the frutti di mare. And you?”

  “I’m feeling like meat tonight. I think I could eat a whole cow if they brought me one.” At that moment, the waiter returned to their table.

  “Signora, Signore, avete fatto una scelta?”

  Kit ordered the seafood platter for himself, a steak for Daneka. “Al sangue” she offered in anticipation of the waiter’s question as to how she wanted it cooked.

  “Va bene. E da bere?”

  Daneka ordered a glass of one of the local reds for herself while Kit looked through the wine list. He ultimately opted for a white from Sardinia and ordered an entire bottle. The waiter nodded, collected the menus and wine list and retired to the kitchen.

  Kit may well have felt the need for conversation, but Daneka apparently did not. She continued to stare at the moon, interrupting her contemplation only occasionally to take a sip from her cocktail of white wine.

  The waiter returned to their table several minutes later with Daneka’s glass of red and Kit’s bottle of white, which he opened and poured for Kit to sample. He did and nodded his approval, at which point the waiter filled his glass and withdrew once again. Kit picked it up and held it out midway across the table.

  “To you.” Daneka picked up her own, brought it out to meet his, and clinked.

  “And to you.” She took a sip, set it back down on the table, then returned her gaze to the moon. Kit took out a cigarette and lit it up.

  “So—” he ventured, but without having first considered what other little bejeweled parts of speech he might pack into this treasure chest of a sentence that would pique the pleasure of her curiosity. Kit’s poor planning left Daneka demonstrably unmoved. She’d been staring at the moon for twenty minutes in stone-cold silence; she might be quite willing and able, Kit realized with some chagrin, to stare at it in silence for another twenty—even if slightly stonier, slightly colder. At one point, she waved her hand in front of her face, suggesting that the smoke from Kit’s cigarette was getting to where it was decidedly unwanted. Kit quickly re-positioned his hand so as to send the smoke off in some other direction. Unfortunately, his cigarette seemed to have a will of its own, and that will took the smoke directly back into Daneka’s face. She waved again. He stubbed his cigarette out and moved the ashtray to the next table.

  The silence that ensued between them suggested to his mind that they might as well have been put into invisible, adjoining, soundproof cabins. Kit emptied his glass and poured himself another. He wanted a second cigarette, but the memory and small comfort of the last discouraged him from risking what he feared might be taken as effrontery. He was almost certain she’d used the word ‘sexy’ not ten days earlier to describe the habit—at least where he was the habitué—but maybe she’d been speaking contextually. And yes, a thing or two had occurred since then to measurably alter the contextual landscape.

  Or maybe he’d heard ‘smoking’ when she’d really meant ‘drinking.’ He emptied his second glass and poured himself a third, hoping to ingratiate himself with her maybe just enough to trade comments on the weather. She turned towards him and looked not into his eyes, but at his wineglass as Kit poured the guilt-ridden contents of the bottle into it. No, he surmised from the icicles gathe
ring under her stare: ‘drinking’ was apparently also not what she’d meant to say.

  As the wine bottle was already somewhere between half- and dangerously close to empty, Kit considered taking a break until dinner arrived. He might as well join Daneka in her admiration of the moon—wolves, after all, stared at the moon. Wolves were also monogamous. They and he might have a lot in common. He could try howling. But he was afraid the gesture might be lost on the locals.

  Kit was just beginning to consider how subtle and sublime a thing like solitary confinement must be—at least to the mind of a prison warden—when the waiter arrived with their dinners and interrupted Kit’s reverie. Food! he thought. She’d admitted, after all, to being famished. Maybe food will restore her energy and their camaraderie….

  “Buon appetito!” the waiter offered as he set their plates down in front of them.

  “Grazie, Signore,” Kit answered.

  “L’appetito vien mangiando,” Daneka suggested with a wink.

  “Eh, sì. Certo, Signora!” their waiter offered together with a belly-laugh. Famished? Kit reconsidered. So famished she had no problem turning a proverb into a pun in someone else’s language. Perhaps food wasn’t the answer either.

  The waiter retired from their table once again as Kit and Daneka set about the business of eating. She ate with gusto, Kit noticed, almost as if red meat were an exotic, foreign dish. He wondered where the appetite came from, then remembered the afternoon’s singular maritime exercises. The memory and the sight of the unbridled carnivore in Daneka slowly produced an unpleasant surfeit in Kit as he began to put the two together. He retired his knife and fork and reached for his wineglass. Maybe alcohol would help him forget.

  Daneka continued to eat in silence.

  At long last, she finished, looked up, and noticed that Kit’s plate was still half full.

  “Darling, you didn’t like what you ordered?”

  “I liked it all right. I just—. Well, I guess I wasn’t really that hungry.” It was a sort of conversation, he thought—or, at least, the start of one.

  “Don’t you want to finish?” she asked. The tone of her question was genuinely solicitous, Kit thought, if also a bit condescending. She asked it as if she were speaking to a young child at home in bed with the flu.

  “No, Daneka. I think I’ve had enough.” Daneka signaled to their waiter that they were finished, then ordered a couple of espressi.

  “E una grappa, per favore,” Kit quickly added.

  “Solamente una?” the waiter looked first at Kit, then at Daneka.

  “None for me,” she answered with a dismissive wave, sufficient to make her will known with or without the English accompaniment.

  Their table cleared and the waiter gone, Daneka reached across and took both of Kit’s hands into hers as if they hadn’t just spent an hour together in almost total silence; as if nothing of that afternoon had happened to put her to sleep, alone, and him in desperate need of separation, distance, and a long walk to find both. Kit was nonplussed, absolutely flummoxed by the turnabout. At the same time, he was grateful for the contact and didn’t dare risk putting any of it to the test of a simple question: Why?

  “Darling, what would you say to amending our travel plans somewhat?” Kit wondered with a sharp pang whether she intended to abort their trip, call it quits, head home.

  “What did you have in mind?” he asked tentatively. She caressed his hands with hers and moved in closer. At that moment, the waiter reappeared with their coffee and Kit’s Grappa. Daneka removed her hands from Kit’s and settled back into her chair. The waiter set tiny cups down in front of each, a single pousse-café glass in front of Kit. Daneka waited until he’d finished, then leaned back in, put her hands once again on Kit’s and continued.

  “Would you mind terribly if we skipped the Alps altogether and went straight to Denmark?” she asked. “I want so much to show you my little place in Svaneke.”

  If it wouldn’t have been altogether inappropriate and unbefitting—and probably, to boot, shocked Daneka right out of her sandals—Kit would’ve howled. He would’ve howled at the moon for its beauty; he would’ve howled for the release of tension and mystery and incertitude; he would’ve howled out of gratitude for the splinter she’d just removed from his heart and for the implicit suggestion of monogamy she’d put in its place; he would’ve howled out of pure joy for the fact of life, here and now, with this woman. But he didn’t. Instead, he kept it all inside and did the best he knew how to keep the euphoria out of his voice and eyes when he answered, though not without first having to look away and clear his throat: “Of course we can, darling.”

  Kit called for the check. While they waited for it to arrive, Daneka explained once again, in animated detail, and exactly as she’d once done on a certain park bench in Central Park, how they’d first fly to Copenhagen; would then take the train to the coast and, from there, a ferry to the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea where they could rent a car and drive to her little cottage in the village of Svaneke on the eastern coast and just across the island from Rønne, her birthplace, where her mother still lived and whom they could visit the next day if they weren’t too tired; but if they were too tired, they could sleep in and visit her only the following day… it was a very short drive, and her mother spoke excellent English… Rønne, too, was a charming village as Kit would see with his own eyes—if only he’d brought along his camera!—and then they could return to Svaneke and sleep and make love and sleep some more and then make love some more… she would even bake some of her favorite Danish pastries for their afternoon teas—they would, of course, have tea every afternoon, and it was so much better than English tea, as he would shortly find out for himself—and although she might have to make daily trips across the island to see her mother, Kit could stay behind and garden or read or take long walks or just sleep, if he wanted to—until she returned—when she’d then crawl back into bed with him and make some more love.

  As their waiter approached to give Kit the check, Daneka intercepted it; laid her credit card on top; handed it back. Did this sound like a reasonable plan?—she wanted to know—and asked the question with the guilelessness of one child asking another would he mind terribly a bit of chocolate sauce with his vanilla ice cream.

  Kit looked at her and wondered whether there were natural limits to how much one person could love another without simply exploding. He was considering that he might be on the brink when their waiter re-appeared with the check and Daneka’s credit card. She made a quick calculation and signed the receipt. From the look on the waiter’s face as he picked it up, she’d calculated very generously on his behalf.

  “Mille grazie, Signora,” he said and bowed as Kit and Daneka pushed back their chairs.

  “A Lei, Signore,” they answered together.

  They walked back to their room in silence, but it was once again the silence of bliss, harmony and fully requited love. Kit unlocked the door, shut and locked it behind them while Daneka went to the bedroom and opened the curtains. The moon, now much higher in the sky, was still round and bright and poured its rays in through the window like a silver dust storm. When Kit finally stood in front of her, having already stepped out of his shoes and socks, she unbuttoned his shirt and threw it to the floor, promptly followed by his pants and shorts. She then reached in, found the two tiny hooks that held her dress together, and unlatched them. Kit stared in amazement as her dress fell open and he realized that it—and her sandals—had been the only thing between her and another possible riot in yet another restaurant. She dropped it to the floor without a further thought.

  They climbed into bed together. Within seconds, and at her bidding, Kit was inside her. He pushed her legs back down until they lay flat on the bed, then gripped them from the outside with his own two. In this position, and with their arms tightly around each other, they fell asleep. Nothing of this full-body embrace would change for the next eight hours.

  Chapter 46

  Whe
n Kit awakened the next morning and found Daneka beneath him and still fast asleep, the sight of her came to him as if in a dream. He realized he’d lain atop and inside her the entire night; that she’d supported his weight without so much as a sigh; that she, like a velvet vice-grip, had held and kept him erect for eight hours; and that he wanted nothing more in the world at this instant than to come. It wasn’t love—that, even he would’ve conceded. It was lust. Pure lust. From the inertia of a sustained, but unspent physical excitement he would derive impetus; from impetus, energy; from energy, thrust; at the peak of his thrust, release—and then, once again, quiet inertia.

  He twitched once, twice, inside her. The second call was briefly answered with a contraction. He twitched three more times in quick succession. The answer this time was immediate and unmistakable. Daneka’s brain might still be asleep, but another part of her was wide awake thanks to Kit’s reveille. He felt her muscles seize him. At the same time, he felt the first liquid tendrils of a warm bath wash over him, suggestive of a tentative, mounting excitement. He raised himself up on elbows and toes and began, slowly, to back out of her. In response, her muscles attempted to grasp him tighter in order to deny him an exit. Whatever unconscious desire might be motivating one part of her to contract, to grasp, to clamp down on this thing she sought for comfort or for partnership, that same part couldn’t escape the machinations of an endocrine system that seemed to be waging something of a counter-insurgency.

  Kit was all but out of her when Daneka’s head, atop a pillow, finally reconnoitered with her vagina—a desert away by tactical calculations. Her eyes opened wide and sent word of a losing position back to a still-dosing brain. Sleepy synapses sprang to attention and dispatched a message to the muscles of her legs, which in turn called for reinforcement from hip and knee joints. Her legs shot out and scaled Kit’s back in one bound, where they locked in tight defense just above his waist.