The Lover From An Icy Sea Read online

  As if his thoughts had entered some forbidden realm and bumped noisily up against her own, Daneka stirred, then opened her eyes.

  “Do you think maybe we could start sometime today?” she asked.

  “Yes. Today. Now, as a matter of fact.”

  “Good. I was beginning to wonder whether you might have lost interest.”

  Kit didn’t answer. He simply made one last adjustment to his backlight, took the cover off his lens, and set his options and focus. He then stepped away from the camera, knelt down next to Daneka, and began to talk “the talk.”

  “Try to forget I’m even here. Ignore both me and the camera, if you can.”

  “I’ve had tougher challenges.”

  “And I’ll try to compensate with shudder speed for the brightness of your congeniality.”

  “Kit, it’s just a shoot. I mean, it’s not as if we’re creating art here. Or making love.”

  “True. But it wouldn’t hurt for you to warm up a bit to the camera, if not to me. That’s what makes for the magic, you know.”

  “All right,” she sighed heavily, making no pretense of an effort to hide her annoyance. “Let me put on my happy face.” Daneka fluttered her eyelashes half a dozen times, pinched her cheeks, and pasted on a smile.

  Kit snapped his first shot. “Are you always this gracious, or is it just the spring that brings out your robin?” he asked in a monotone.

  “Chirp-chirp.”

  Kit took a second. “Nice!”

  She tried hard to suppress a smile. “I’m glad you think so.”

  “Maybe you’re a natural.”

  “Posing for a picture, Kit, is not poetry.” He took a third and fourth shot.

  “No? What is it, then?” Daneka arched her eyebrows, and Kit took three more shots in quick succession. “Nice,” he said again.

  “Posing, Kit. Just posing.”

  “Hung up on phonics, are we?” Kit muttered dryly into the lens. He snapped again. Daneka paused for an instant, then rolled on her back and threw her arms and legs into the air. Her laugh was like a whimsical spring breeze as it rolled over him, and he stepped back from the camera to bask in its warmth.

  The humor of their exchange exhausted, Daneka lowered her limbs back to the sofa-bed, from where she turned her head and looked straight at him. Kit returned her stare. He thought he could decipher, for the first time, a kind of appreciation—and it delighted him.

  “You know what Schadenfreude is, Kit?”

  “I have a notion,” he answered.

  “Something tells me it’s your stock in trade—as much as that camera.”

  “Nah. I’m a curmudgeon of the first order, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not others’ pain and suffering I get a kick out of. It’s my own. My own irreconcilability with the world.”

  “I like curmudgeons,” she said simply. “I try to take one to bed every chance I get. They’re restful.”

  “Be a bane to a Dane,” Kit stated flatly.

  Irony settled on Daneka’s lips. “Don’t be disdaneful.”

  “What are you talking about? It would never occur to me to be disdainful of you, a possibly rich, beautiful and topaz-tipsy client.”

  “No, I said disdaneful. I’m a Dane. Don’t dis me.” They shared a moment of silence during which Kit registered the pun, and then they both laughed. “You’re good for my word power, Kit. I haven’t been this charged since my freshman year in college.”

  “Nor I since I took my first Polaroid.”

  “Do you sometimes like to play, Kit?”

  “Never when I’m working.”

  “And do you ever not work?” she asked.

  “Only when I’m playing,” he answered. Daneka’s hair had fallen over her face once again, but she made no effort to put it back in place. Kit stepped around in front of his camera and reached out to tuck it back behind her ear. As he did so, she grabbed his wrist and looked directly at him.

  “Are we playing or working now, Kit?” she asked him.

  Kit turned serious. “I believe we’re still working.”

  “I’m tired of working.”

  Kit looked hard into her eyes. “Then tell me what it is you want. I can be everything you want. Or nothing. It’s up to you. But you have to tell me.”

  Daneka had been under the lights and in a battle of wits for almost half an hour and had, she noticed as she brushed her finger over her upper lip, begun to perspire.

  “Excuse me.” She stood up and went directly to the bathroom. When he heard the shower, Kit decided to lie down for a moment and simply breathe in the smell she’d left behind. He stripped down to his boxers and threw his clothes into a pile next to the worktable, then shut his eyes momentarily to rest them. Unfortunately, the stress of preparing for her arrival and trying to keep up with her had taken a toll on him, too. He was fast asleep within seconds.

  When Daneka eventually emerged from the bathroom, patting herself with a towel, she saw Kit in the spot she’d vacated only moments earlier. She took a few minutes to study him, then went to his camera. She took it off the tripod; exposed the remaining frames in the roll; removed the roll and put it on Kit’s worktable; inserted a new roll and then approached the sofa-bed. Looking through the lens into his face, Daneka made a few adjustments to the focus, then put the camera back down. She next went around behind Kit and adjusted the backlight to give his face better visibility, then came back to the camera, picked up his light meter, and held it just in front of his face. She made one last adjustment for exposure, moved to within a couple of feet of her subject, and took the shot.

  Daneka then exposed the remaining frames as she went back to the bathroom to get her clothes. She dressed, came back out to his worktable with the camera, removed the film, dropped it into her purse, and put the camera back down. She then took one last long look at Kit and left his apartment.

  Chapter 7

  It was already dusk when Kit awoke from a sleep that had carried him over the precipice and deep into a ravine of no dreams. The first thing he noticed when he awoke was the smell of Daneka on the sofa-bed. The next thing he noticed was her absence.

  He jumped up and went to the bathroom: nothing. He walked around his apartment looking for some evidence of her, some remnant, however fleeting or illusory: nothing. He went to the front door; opened it; looked down the hall; stepped out and peered down the stairwell: nothing. It was as if she’d never been present.

  Had she been present?

  He went to his worktable. His stomach growled, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours. He saw his clothes in a heap on the floor next to the worktable and realized for the first time that he wasn’t even dressed. He stood at his worktable fumbling around in the near dark for something—he wasn’t sure for what, exactly—until it occurred to him that he simply couldn’t see. He turned on a light and saw, on the table, a single roll of film.

  He picked up the roll and went to his darkroom where he loaded it onto a reel, then poured chemical baths out into three tanks. He first submerged the roll into the developer, next into the stop, and finally into the fixer. He then put the film under running water for thirty minutes, ran it through a pair of squeegee tongs, attached it to weighted metal clips, and hung it up to dry.

  He now had cat’s eyes, a cat’s fever, and a cat’s night-time touch—and so decided to forego making contact prints or a test strip as he was simply too eager to get directly to his enlargements.

  One by one, Kit withdrew the finished prints, shook off the last bits of chemical, and immersed them in his washing tank where they sat for an hour under running water. He then set to work drying them one by one under a flatbed drier. He calculated he wouldn’t have enough tabletop space to lay them all out, and that he’d have to restore the clothesline he sometimes ran across his apartment for just this purpose. He walked to his closet, fingered around frantically, found nothing. He then went to the kitchen, looked under the sink, and rummaged some more. Finally, he fo
und what he was looking for, took the clothesline out to his living room, and strung it up—then returned to his dark room and picked up the stack of prints.

  As he hung the photos up, he began to see something he hadn’t seen face to face with Daneka, nor even through his lens. Yes, there was beauty, poise and confidence—even command. But the camera, or the black and white film—he wasn’t sure which—revealed darker caverns behind eyes that were in some frames, coy; in others, boisterous. It was as if he were looking down through a pool into a cave: in one moment the water serene; in the next, stirred, troubled and raucous. At the far end of it, a den of horrors, a bone yard, a reliquary in which lay the battered and broken remains of other lives, possibly of former lovers. Hers were not peaceful eyes. Rather, they were anxious, solicitous, imploring even, though apparently fighting the impulse to implore, as if she might desire to share some burden, but were too proud—or at least too jealous of her privacy—to grant space to a confidant. If eyes were a window on the soul, then her soul was a ship going down, and whose captain would more willingly sacrifice vessel, cargo and crew than admit to a miscalculation.

  Kit extended an index finger and touched the eyes one print at a time. Slowly, gently, like a child dabbling in finger paint, he probed the contours of each socket, looking to shape the darker hues and shadows into some language that would speak to him and divulge certain secrets. But prints were dumb, two-dimensional things and would reveal nothing.

  Had they been corporeal, he would’ve wanted in that instant to sooth and give them comfort, to extract whatever private agony lay behind them. But these were prints, photographs, a mere recording of a bit of anatomy belonging to someone he still believed had been in his apartment not even two hours earlier, yet about whom he knew nothing except the topography of her body.

  What are the mathematics of love? Who can guess at a calculus of attraction? What theory can begin to explain how and why the seeds of a self-destructive obsession are dispersed, take root, and prosper? What science or logic can ever make clear why one body is drawn to another, is slowly taken captive by another, is ultimately enslaved by another, and consequently cedes the entire privilege of its existence to the other?

  In the few minutes Kit stood before the various black and white images of Daneka that hung from a simple clothesline strung from one corner of his apartment to the other, it was as if his body chemistry were undergoing an alteration that was far more than merely hormonal. The transformation was in fact fundamental, primordial, primal.

  Chapter 8

  Kit dressed, opened the door to his apartment, slammed it shut and bolted down the stairs, then ran out into the street and hailed the first available taxi. Five minutes later, he entered his studio, walked past the elevator, climbed the stairs, opened the door and headed in the direction of his cubicle. It then occurred to him that navigation might be easier with an overhead light, and he turned one on.

  Halfway down the hallway, he heard grunts and giggles from one of the sets, peeked in and saw a colleague with a pair of the previous workweek’s models. They were not, he noticed, playing Parcheesi.

  Once at his cubicle, Kit booted up his computer and silently cursed the seconds it took to laboriously push digits and code through its circuitry. When the desktop screen finally came into view, he located his electronic address book, double-clicked to open it, then waited a few more impatient seconds for it to appear. In this era of lightening-fast digital communications, it seemed that each time he needed something elementary—something simple like a telephone number—he had to slog through mud to get to it.

  When his address book finally appeared on the screen, he located Daneka’s number, dialed it, and waited what seemed like another long minute for the connection. Finally, it came. The phone, he assumed at her end, was ringing. Once, twice, three times, four times—then came an answering machine with her voice. Fuck! Where could she be? The voice was courteous, if standoffish. No name; just a number and a brief instruction. “Leave a message. I’ll get back.”

  Kit talked into the receiver as if he were trying to reach across the connection, through her answering machine, and back out the other end to grab somebody, some body, and make it respond. “Daneka, please pick up. We need to talk.” Pause. No, she didn’t necessarily need to talk. He did. What he needed in this instant was to bring her to his same level of urgency, to his same need. “Daneka, please. Can we talk? I have your pictures. But I need to show you. I need to know—.” Electronic beeps interrupted his message. The conversation was at an end. He’d had his say. And that say was his last—at least for now.

  Meanwhile, Daneka had listened passively to the ring, had glanced at the Caller ID screen on her telephone, had vaguely recognized the number as one she’d seen on a previous occasion, and had continued dressing. When she heard the end of her own greeting, she turned up the volume and listened to Kit’s voice.

  And how did it strike her? As impassioned? As plaintive? Or merely as desperate? She wasn’t sure. She sat down on the edge of the bed to listen more carefully, to decipher and decode the voice behind the voice, as she knew only too well how to do. It was a voice she recognized, already grown slightly sweet to her ear, and nicely masculine. Almost commanding, but still containing too much desperation to be truly attractive. Yes, she decided: it sounded desperate. And desperate people were simply not the company she wished to keep—at least not now. She listened to the remainder of the message and decided not to touch the receiver.

  As she heard “I need to know—” she stood up from the bed and smoothed down the tiny wrinkle in her lap. Silk was so amenable to suggestion, she thought. Especially if it was cut properly and sat on curves that allowed it to fall in just that way the woman within might want it to fall.

  The message ended. She picked up the receiver and dialed a number. The phone rang twice at the other end. She said one word in Danish as cue, then continued in English. “Yes, darling. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Of course I’m bringing dinner.”

  She hung up, walked slowly to the front of the apartment, paused and glanced around in quiet admiration of her material accomplishment, then opened the door and turned out the light. She closed the self-locking door—no need to double-bolt as this was a building with a twenty-four-hour doorman and tight security—and called the elevator. When it arrived, she entered, pushed “G,” and descended. As the door opened at ground level a few seconds later, she inhaled and let her breasts swell against the soft material. She walked out of the elevator and past the doorman, who rushed to the front door and opened it in time for her to pass through without having to break stride.

  Daneka walked unescorted the few steps to her always waiting, always obedient, never desperate or grumbling car and driver. Ron held the rear door open and tipped his imaginary cap. “Evening, ma’am.”

  A brilliant spring evening spilled over Manhattan—a rare combination of setting sun, Canadian air, absence of most of the island’s population—consequently, an absence of traffic and horns and trundles and general dyspepsia—leading one to think there could be no better place on earth. Let them have their corn fields or their olive groves! To sit and glide down Park Avenue in a limousine towards Grand Central; to view a succession of traffic lights clip on, clip off like so many smart soldiers saluting; to hear the occasional rumble of the subway beneath the pavement; to watch young couples unpacking their weekend haul of newly-acquired antiques from Westchester or Bucks along with their bored, tired, ornery progeny—already quislings-in-waiting to the cause of their parents’ supercilious claim of old money—this was poetry to Daneka.

  Unfortunately, there was one lesson she hadn’t learned in all the years she’d lived in New York. Nothing in old fishy Denmark could’ve prepared her for old, established New York. Not so old, certainly, as her old Denmark. But jealously old and established enough to spot an overly ambitious upstart—a pretender whose only purchase on this particular piece of real estate lay in the easy money that could be ma
de in the manic nineties.

  Money in Manhattan in the nineties was, for many, as fluid as the rivers that surrounded it. Almost anyone could make money—bundles of it, in fact. Quick wealth was not an accomplishment; still less, a true indicator of achievement. Real achievement, at least in the eyes of established New York, was measured by what one could accomplish without money; also, by dredging oneself up from the subway tunnel, from the garment district, from the Bowery even—but then only if one were willing to dredge, drag and haul others up. Achievement in New York was a communal affair. This was not old York. This was new York. And established New York was still about extending a helping hand—even if a very gentile, often white-gloved and comfortable hand—to a less privileged world.

  The sun might set over Manhattan as it might set over Mt. Kilimanjaro, over Lake Titicacca, or over the Khyber Pass. But only over Manhattan did it set in reflections of gold for which there were capital assets to match. Only in Manhattan could one feel that gliding down rain-splashed, garlanded Park Avenue in a service car was no more exceptional than pounding dry earth into dust from the back of an elephant or throwing a hand-sewn fishnet from the back of a hand-made skiff. And while the tenant of each might feel entitled to passage in his or her own chosen vessel, Daneka would shortly learn that she was the least entitled of all.

  Kit was almost ten years younger than she. In a culture that gave a genteel nod to money, but that ultimately paid servile homage only to youth, she was at a serious disadvantage. Moreover, Kit was old-world America, while Daneka, even if old-world Europe, was only very new-world America. Kit’s modest means were an elective, a course chosen already in youth when he’d looked around and realized that wealth exacted an enormous price of its own. Daneka’s claim to wealth was borrowed from a new world still willing to be tutored by a more knowledgeable old world—though for how much longer, no one was really willing to say.