The Lover From An Icy Sea Page 6

  “Evening, Ron. Downtown, please.”

  Chapter 9

  Early next morning, Kit rolled over and looked at the clock, blinked his eyes a few times and looked again. It was already 10:50 a.m. Jesus! Monday morning, and he’d overslept. In the same instant, he realized he had a shoot scheduled to start in fifteen minutes. As he quickly dressed, he picked up the phone, dialed his work number, got Rachel on the phone and explained his predicament. She told him everything was set. No problem. They’d wait.

  “But please hurry, Kit. You know she’s already on the clock. And what this one gets paid by the hour would pay my rent for a month.”

  Even as Kit tried frantically to pull on pants, shirt and shoes all at once, his eyes fell upon the photographs of Daneka. He went rigid; could no longer find his shoelaces or his buttons. Against the clock and against his will, his fingers reached out for the prints. Every second counted now if he were to have any chance of getting to his studio on time, yet he couldn’t pull his hands or eyes away. He looked at the prints slowly, one at a time, over and over again as if mesmerized. The trance was broken only when he heard, through the window, the ringing of church bells somewhere in the neighborhood to remind him eleven times over that the hour of his appointment had arrived, that he was already at some time and distance from keeping it, and that he was still not moving in the right direction.

  He laid the prints down and ran the few feet to his apartment door, opened and slammed it shut in one motion. Down the stairs, out onto the sidewalk, up to the Fourteenth Street subway entrance and through the turnstile. As he leaped down the staircase to the waiting cross-town “L,” he heard the warning bell and saw the doors begin to close. He took the last five steps in one bound and sprinted off in the direction of a closing door. A young woman of Daneka’s approximate height and build, with hair of the same cut and color, had apparently just realized this was her stop. She jumped up from where she sat and pried the doors open to squeeze herself out. At the same time, her action allowed Kit to slip in at the last second.

  The woman walked off hurriedly in the direction of the exit. As she started up the staircase, the conductor released the brakes and the train moved forward. Kit stared at the back of the woman’s head, moving his face from window to window as the train moved, trying to identify her. Of course it couldn’t be Daneka—and yet, the resemblance was uncanny.

  The “L” arrived at the transfer station. He was the first out, ran to meet the approaching uptown train, and walked in as soon as the doors opened. He was lucky today; the connections were perfect; trains seemed to be running without their usual delays. One quick subway sprint up the West Side to the Twenty-third Street station, and he was out, up the stairs to street level, half a block west, and up another set of stairs.

  He opened the door of the studio to Rachel’s smirk. Slightly ironic, slightly scolding, her look greeted him with notice that he was late. But she liked Kit; he was one of the good ones—and so she’d taken pains to cover for him. Too bad he was—. What was it? Oh yeah. He was old.

  “I’m sorry. I—.”

  “Don’t be,” she answered. “Britney doesn’t know the difference. I told her you were, like, all caught up in her book and couldn’t tear yourself away. Like, that you’re normally all business and right on time, ya know? But, like, with you—and here I think to myself ‘Britney!’ And so I said to her, ‘One look at your book and he gets, like, all weak in the knees. Britney looks back at me and, like, gets all doe-eyed.”

  Kit looked at Rachel in utter confusion. “Guess you had to be there,” she said.

  Sometimes, he thought, the shift between his generation and this one was truly tectonic. “Britney,” he said. “Is that her name?”

  “Ohmygod! You old people! Like, you really don’t know who Britney Spears is?”

  “Oh, that Britney. Yeah, sure. I know who she is. Listen. Do me another favor, will you, please?”

  “Is there pizza at the end of that ‘please’?”

  “Sure. With pepperonis?” Kit smiled. GenXers might appear to be nomads even to his generation, he thought. But they somehow hadn’t lost the talents of all the generations of camel-traders before them. “Would you buy me five more minutes of, uh, Britney’s indulgence?”

  “Yup. Pepperonis. I’m not really sure what you mean by ‘indulgence.’ But if you, like, need to jerk off or something, I’ll buy you some time.”

  Although he sometimes found it rude even to his own ears, Kit liked the mock-ghetto bluntness of white-skinned Xers. Their identification with their black peers was some kind of new democracy in the making. Of course, he knew it was only a matter of time and years before it would be bleached out of all but the most hardcore of them by the reality of children, credit card bills, and the life-style to which they would ultimately come to believe they were entitled.

  The same had happened with the sixties generation—he knew that from having eavesdropped on some of his parents’ conversations. Revolutions and emancipations were great while you were a comfortably well-off college kid. But when college was over, so was the party. Meanwhile, most of your black boy- and girl-toys of a season all went back into the box, back to the real ghetto. Had anything fundamentally changed in the U. S. in the last half of the twentieth century? Well, the rich had certainly gotten richer and more powerful, the poor clearly poorer and more disenfranchised. There was micro-brewed beer and Starbuck’s for the elite; PBR and the same old Maxwell House for the poor. Their only common ground was tattoos, though the body parts and parlors remained on very different, very separate maps.

  “Thanks. Tell me later what you want on your pizza if it’s more than just pepperonis.”

  Kit went to his cubicle, picked up the phone and dialed Daneka’s number. It rang once, twice. He frowned and prepared himself for her machine. Instead, a voice answered.

  “Daneka! When can I see you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What is it?” Kit sensed distance.

  “Well, darling, I’m on my way to the airport. I’m off to Europe.”

  “Excuse me?” Kit’s ear momentarily registered the ‘darling,’ but it was the rest of her message that stunned him when he heard the sound of a suitcase being snapped shut somewhere behind the voice. “To the airport?” Where are you going?” He’d vaguely registered the “Europe,” but the distance it suggested had bounced off his brain like a bead of water off a red-hot skillet. “When will you be back? What is it you do for a living, anyway?” The questions were falling out of him like spilled coffee beans in spite of his best efforts to sound merely curious.

  She heard the tone of panic and decided she liked it. “I travel,” she laughed—and hung up.

  Once downstairs and with her luggage already piled into the trunk, Daneka gave instructions. “To JFK, Ron, but first, a quick trip to Carnegie Hill Photo to drop off a roll of film.

  He drove her around the corner and two short blocks up Madison Avenue to the photo shop. She opened the door as soon as he’d pulled up to the curb. Out stepped a sheer, black-stockinged leg—exposed almost to the crotch as the flap of her dress fell away for not more than a second—that terminated in a good two and a half inches of black spike heel. Daneka never dressed for comfort when she flew internationally. She dressed for opportunity, for adventure, maybe even for attack. Transatlantic flights in the direction of Europe—except when she took the Concorde—always included an abbreviated night. Just long enough, just anonymous enough, to realize a fantasy or two if the right candidate presented him- or herself. And even the Concorde had a deliciously roomy and comfortable tabletop in its W.C. She knew; she’d tried it a time or two—and not to change diapers. She sometimes wondered whether some of those who’d shared that high-wire act with her—tycoons and power brokers from downtown, maybe a Hollywood star or two—ever contemplated those same electric moments as they now lay domestically, routinely, boringly beside their Annettes or Mary Janes discussing the kids, their careers, and t
axes.

  She walked up to the clerk, smiled perfunctorily, and placed the roll on the counter. “One frame only. The rest are blanks. Matte finish. And give me an eight-by-ten enlargement with borders, will you?” The clerk was pleased. This customer clearly knew what she wanted, and it seemed to him that she probably also got it more often than not.

  “Thursday all right with you, ma’am?” he asked as he tore off and handed her the order stub.

  “I’ll pick it up in ten days or so. Thanks.” She dropped the stub into her purse, turned, and walked back out to where Ron was waiting beside an open door.

  “Which airline today, Miss Sorenson?” he asked.

  “BA.”

  Ron made a half-hearted gesture to tip the cap he wasn’t wearing.

  Chapter 10

  That evening, Kit finished work later than usual and decided to take a walk. Instead of heading out to the East Village, he turned north. He didn’t know exactly why; nor did he know where he was going. But he knew that only one thing awaited him at home, and that he could no longer be content with a two-dimensional facsimile. It wasn’t excitement or diversion he wanted; it wasn’t even sex. Sex he could’ve had easily and with only minor prompting following that day’s shoot. This particular “Britney”—as Rachel had so aptly called her—was clearly as ready, willing and entitled as any model he’d ever shot. But he was not. He was caught—and, once caught, his affections leaned in only one direction.

  Presently, the object of those affections was literally sky-high somewhere out over the Atlantic.

  Kit looked up from where he stood. Walking north up Sixth Avenue and still only in the twenties, his view was unobstructed by skyscrapers. The surrounding buildings were uninteresting—many of them sweatshops or wholesale houses to the fashion or interior design industry, none over four or five stories, and not one having anything to distinguish itself from the next in line.

  A lifetime contains perhaps eighty springs. For reasons that have nothing to do with the season itself, the first twenty-five and the last twenty-five don’t really count. The mind is either too innocent or too feeble—in any case, too preoccupied—to notice. That leaves only thirty that really matter.

  A warm spring evening in any urban setting transforms many women in the same way that estrus transforms other female mammals on the plain, on the steppe, in the swamp, even in the sea. In the case of urban mammals, the most obvious signal is in their dress. And while one might easily attribute this to the change in temperature, it’s not the case that all women change their signals with the arrival of spring. Only those who are receptive do.

  In the case of a New York urban setting, skirts generally shoot up like kites while blouses forget buttons like yesterday’s news.

  Kit wondered for a moment how Daneka would’ve chosen to dress before heading out to the airport. He decided that—like her temperament—she would’ve dressed conservatively.

  Chapter 11

  The next ten days in Kit’s life were indistinguishable from any other ten days except in one respect: his daily call to Daneka’s answering machine. This machine always picked up after the same four rings and always delivered the same message, followed by the same four beeps. Kit felt each time as if he were shouting down into a crypt.

  As he returned home each evening after the same mundane work with the same stunningly beautiful women and with nothing more than the spare, clinking change of a camera shutter in his mental purse, he suspected he’d become merely another urban drone. Day succeeded day with an identical call to the same machine, message and beeps.

  The photographs of Daneka provided the only relief to his routine. At the end of every day, at the conclusion of his last session of dozens if not hundreds of takes of faces and bodies he knew would capture the fantasies of millions of men—if not immediately in print, then in virtually unlimited digital variation—Kit returned to his apartment to gaze at a string of simple black and white photographs hanging from a clothesline.

  As he walked the length of that clothesline, he couldn’t honestly say whether it was Daneka he admired or his own work. One thing, however, was certain: a certain pair of eyes had captured and caged him, and there was no getting out or past them.

  Kit recognized that his obsession and most of Daneka’s allure lay in her eyes—or rather, hidden in caverns behind those eyes. To find that allure, then uncover it, he’d first have to gain her trust. Once uncovered, he’d have to maintain that trust and mine it, bit by bit. It would no doubt be a painful excavation. She’d have to expose herself, her motives, her ambition, her history in order to convince him—if she even cared to convince him—that she was worth the effort. The question remained, of course: Was he worth the effort?

  Kit bumped up against his worktable, saw the boxes of two-day old Chinese take-out food and chop sticks with bits of two-day old rice still clinging to the tips, and served himself dinner.

  The following day, for a change, he had a gig in California. Some super chick who went by the name of ‘Alise’ (which rhymed, according to the tabloids, with ‘bee’s knees’—which she clearly thought she was). He’d seen pictures, even video, of the famous tattoo: the Kanji-and-flowers body art that sashayed across her lower back each time she’d flex first one, then the other buttock—teasing but also mocking the conventions of the modeling world. Yeah, nice gluteals—and rounder than those of most of the gamin-hipped models he’d photographed. It was a good gig, all expenses paid. A couple of hours in the studio, then free time. No doubt she’d offer him a blowjob—California lite fare—but he wouldn’t be interested. What he wanted was elsewhere—a five- or six-hour sunrise before his own. A sun that rose three hours after that—even if on a nicely rounded ass attached at the other end to puckered lips—was of no particular interest.

  Chapter 12

  He flew to California as scheduled, did the shoot, saw the famous tattoo. So much Japanese hullabaloo about nothing. So typically Californian.

  They finished up before noon, local time—no time, as far as Kit was concerned. His time was Eastern Standard. And just now, also Greenwich Mean. He took his rental car and drove north. He had the rest of the day to kill before his red-eye back home. ‘Might as well shoot something worthwhile,' he thought—and the Redwoods were, to his way of thinking, worthwhile.

  Just outside of Sebastopol, he found them. But with them, he also found trailers, junk-heaps, the refuse of a civilization run amuck. Thousand-year-old Redwoods—living shrines as far as he was concerned—and in their midst, Bubba and his collection of heap, his rusted-out Camaro on blocks, his out-of-control dogs. What a fucked-up state!

  He spotted a clearing and braked. Almost storybook. Trunks like giants’ thighs. Moss-covered turf beneath like so many montis veneris covered in emerald pubic hair. Here was something he couldn’t find back east—not anywhere, not anyhow, not in the thousand years or more it would take to replicate it. Here was a small piece of paradise.

  He pulled over to the shoulder, parked, grabbed his camera and got out. Nothing but silence, the Redwoods and the moss. He walked in reverently, as if approaching a shrine, found the angle, and shot. Light and shadow. Green upon green upon green.

  This is perfection, he thought. He could never sell it. Sell it? Fuck! He could never even begin to convey to anyone else—back East, out West, anywhere in between—what it was all about. These shots were for him alone, or maybe for his grandchildren. Scrapbook material—when, most likely, Redwoods would already be a thing of memory.

  He moved in close to the base of one in particular—moss and mushrooms making quiet music—and then he looked up. A swath of lichen caught the bit of sunlight able to penetrate the heavy shoulders of Redwood boughs and push on through. It reflected back the stubborn light like a pale lover’s plea—weak, plaintive, yet persistent.

  Kit dropped his camera and looked at the lichen. This is it! This was the thing he could bring back to her. This was the one thing that would mean—at least to him—what words
couldn’t possibly convey.

  “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend” was a jingle he knew well enough—as was “diamonds are forever.” But to Kit, diamonds were just old, dead things. And far from being ‘forever,’ they frequently found their way into the dusty jaws of jewelry boxes; through the last-prayer doors of pawn shops; down without grace into toilet bowls; out and down, thoroughly down, to the bottom-muck of some indifferent river where ‘forever’ meant truly forever.

  Lichens, on the other hand, were both old—ancient, really—and alive. To give a woman a lichen was to give her the promise of forever and life. This was what a lichen meant to Kit: “love for as long as the two of us are alive.” And when they were no longer, the lichen would still continue on in someone else’s life as a reminder.

  He peeled off the piece of bark with its lichen blanket and bagged it. Whatever else he might’ve found through his lens, he had his prize for Daneka. He wanted desperately to call her, pulled out his cell phone and dialed her number. It would, he knew, already be early evening on the East Coast.

  * * *

  Back in New York, Daneka had returned from Europe only moments earlier. The front door still stood open. Her luggage stood around her like so many impatient minions. But she was more interested in something else: a picture. It was the first thought she’d had coming off the plane. Actually, it was something she’d anticipated and thought about for the duration of her trip back over the Atlantic. She was coming home to someone, to some one, for the first time in years, and the thought of it had made her almost giddy with anticipation.

  She’d already bought a frame in Europe, and retrieved the picture on the way home from the airport. Unpacking her bags was not the first thing that occurred to her when she stepped into her apartment. Instead, she took the picture out of its envelope and gazed at it. This black and white facsimile of Kit corresponded perfectly with the mental image she’d carried around in her head for the ten long days she’d been away. This, she realized, was a man she could fall in love with—head over heels in love. She laughed out loud as she thought of the hundreds of hackneyed stories she’d allowed her magazine to publish over the years. And now she, herself, was about to become one of those clichés. She took a deep breath: Not so fast, girl. Not so easy.