The Lover From an Icy Sea (20 page)

Se considero

Que um dia hei-de morrer

No desepero

Que tenho de te não ver

Estendo o meu xaile

Estendo o meu xaile no chão

Estendo o meu xaile

E deixo-me adormecer.

“
When I think that one day I, too, will have to die, I do so without regret, never to see you again. I lay my shawl upon the ground, and fall asleep upon it.”

Se eu soubesse

Se eu soubesse que morrendo

Tu me havias

Tu me havias de chorrar

Por uma lágrima

Por uma lágrima tua

Que alegría

Me deixaria matar.

“
If I knew that you would take me in exchange for a single tear, how happily I would give you that tear—and then die.”

No tears of sorrow between them—ever! was the supplication he’d uttered just minutes earlier—to which she’d responded with an affirmation. “Never,” she’d said. And already, there was a flood of them.

Whatever the grounds, whatever the justification, however reasonable her reaction to the music and to the singer, Daneka had been moved to tears. Kit, too, was moved, though not to tears. He was simply moved by the beauty of the sounds emanating from instruments and from one woman’s throat.

However troubled by Daneka’s tears, he preferred not to read more into this reaction than what he, himself, was feeling: a general melancholy.

He leaned over and softly kissed both of Daneka’s eyes in an attempt to lift some of the burden of her private melancholy. Instead, his effort resulted in the opposite. Between the music and Kit’s gesture, it was as if someone, finally, had given her permission to do what she’d been aching to do all of her adult life—to cry once again like a child. She took Kit’s hands into hers as if they were a well into which she could pour the contents of her eyes and heart, into which those same eyes and heart could scream their open-mouthed, but long-silent anguish. Still soundless, her tears nevertheless started to flow not in isolated droplets, but in rivulets.

Kit put his arms around her. She moved her head from his hands to his chest so as to muffle the sounds of her weeping. He tightened his embrace so as to quiet her convulsions. He realized these were merely stopgap measures—that the source of her pain was something he couldn’t possibly touch this night, the next day, maybe ever. But he’d try. If necessary, he’d dedicate his life to finding that source and to helping her through and out of it. He’d already learned to love her in sex and in fun. Now, he realized, he was learning to love her in pain. And this was to him the most delicious love of all.

Chapter 26

The embrace helped—to give her the shoulder she craved at that moment, and also to provide her with a shirt to absorb the flow of tears. When she finally looked up at him with wet eyes and a red nose after several minutes, she managed to squeeze out a smile. He squeezed one of his own back out in return.

“
Daneka, darling, can we talk about this?” he asked. She allowed herself a couple of last sniffles. He put his hand inside his shirt, bunched some of the material together between thumb and index finger, then put fingers and material to her nose and nodded. “Go ahead. Blow.” With nose firmly buried in his shirt, Daneka lifted her eyes and looked up into Kit’s. He nodded again. She blew.

“
Yes and no.” Daneka chuckled self-mockingly. “What’s that line from
Amazing Grace
? ‘
I was lost, but now I’m found
’?” Kit put out a hand and began to caress the knuckle of one of her fingers with the tip of his own index finger.

“
Tell me about the ‘lost’,” he urged, though with more of request in his voice than of command.

Daneka sighed. “I’m not a little girl anymore, Kit. You and I both know that. I’ve been around the horn a few times. You and I know that, too. I figured up until a few weeks ago that the last love boat had left port, that I’d missed my chance. Nature’s fairly ruthless, you know, where women are concerned. We can keep on in the work world, of course. Or as mothers. At the very least, as providers of some kind of hearth and home to someone. But as viable and desirable egg-donors? As candidates for love and romance? Well, that’s another story. Love and romance belong to young women. To women who carry fresh eggs, whose fertility is defined and on display in curves that rise and fall in all the right places.

“
Men don’t look at women my age except for a raise or a hand-out—or sometimes, just a hand-job.” Daneka chuckled again, but it was bile rather than boastfulness that drove the sound from her throat. Kit winced.

“
I don’t feel old. My desires are every bit as real as they were twenty years ago—maybe more so. But I can’t speak about them. I can’t put them on a T-shirt and then walk around braless like some rude matinee marquee. Not at my age. I have to get my needs taken care of in some other way.” Daneka paused and looked Kit in the eye. “At least I did until a few days ago. Now—?”

Her question, like her glance, hung in the air—as did the second half of the lyric: ‘ …
but now I’m found
.’ Kit wondered whether this was the moment to risk it all and pronounce the three words he’d been thinking almost since the moment they’d first sat knee to knee on two adjoining sofas. He decided it was. “Daneka, I—”

She missed the signal. “
Da quando amo, riesco ad indossare i miei anni: non sono piu' vecchia
,” she murmered, seemingly out of some parallel universe in which she was traveling quite alone.

“
Excuse me?” Kit ducked his head low.

“
Nothing. Just something I read a couple of weeks ago inside the wrapper of a
Perugina Baci
.”

“
Bacio
.”

“
Huh?”

“
You read it on the wrapper of a
Perugina
‘kiss,’ right?”

“
Right.”

“
Then it’s one
Perugina bacio
.”

“
No. Actually, Kit, it would be one ‘
bacio perugino
’ if we wanted to be grammatically correct. But I was talking bonbons.” She looked at him and it suddenly seemed as if the stars had lost all of their former luster.

Oh, fuck—?
Kit floundered for a moment, then resorted to the only pair of words that had, historically, proved redemptive. “Forgive me,” he said.

Daneka looked back at him, and the stars—at least in her eyes—slowly began to twinkle once again. “It all happened so fast—. I just don’t know. You frighten me. It frightens me. I want it. I want you. But I don’t know how much longer I can keep you.”

It was once again Kit’s turn to be knocked off balance. Was she being intentionally ambiguous? Did she mean “keep him” in the sense of hold on to him, maintain his interest and his exclusive attention? Did she mean “keep him” as a pet, as a plaything, as a kept man? Or did she mean “keep him” until her own interest necessarily dissipated, her own eye began to wander?

He knew the answer to the first and would’ve been only too eager to make a declaration of love, now and forever. The second possibility was one that had occurred to him and that had already begun to trouble him. He didn’t know how he was going to be able to maintain a life-style that came naturally to her—and yet, he wasn’t prepared to be kept by any woman, by any human being for that matter. It was simply not in his constitution to be kept.

The third possibility was the one that most troubled him—not just then, but from the start of their relationship, when he’d first seen how easily she could disappear for long stretches at a time. The same if he acted spontaneously—as he had once when he’d arrived at her apartment without appointment and, so far as he knew, with only a few seconds’ prior announcement. There was, of course, also the matter of the telephone declaration he’d overheard the afternoon he came to get her for their trip out to JFK. What did it mean? To whom was it addressed? Who now, in his place, was sitting at home in front of a computer screen or walking the streets of New York in a daze, obsessing over this same woman? Whoever it was was competition. And yet, Kit didn’t wish his same former predicament on anyone—even on a competitor.

“
Darling, can we go?” Her question suggested he wouldn’t get an answer—at least not now, not at this table. “
Garçom
,” she said just loud enough to be heard over the music of another
fado
. Their waiter promptly arrived, and Daneka, this time, addressed him in what sounded to Kit’s ears like flawless Portuguese.

“
Sim, Senhora?
”

“
Podia-nos trazer a conta, por favor?
” she asked, handing over her credit card at the same time.

“
Pois não, Senhora.
”

*  *  *

“
You could have told me, you know,” Kit said sheepishly. You could have spared both of us the embarrassment.”

“‘
Embarrassment?’” she asked. “What ‘embarrassment?’ You were doing just fine. I was very proud of you,” she said as she reached out and gave Kit’s cheek an affectionate pinch. “Nothing you do could ever embarrass me. Trust me. I know.”

When their waiter returned with the check, she glanced at it, signed the credit card receipt, then handed the lot of pen, check and receipt back to him after having first torn off her copy and taken back her card. “
Muito obrigado, Senhor. Foi um prazer
.”

“
Nós vê-los-emos outra vez, Senhores?
”

“
Naturalmente. Talvez já amanhã à noite
.” Kit and Daneka stood up at the same time. “
Boa noite, Senhor
.”

“
Boa noite, Senhores. Até amanhã
.”

They made their way to the front door and past the hostess, who likewise wished them a pleasant evening. When they walked out of the restaurant, they were greeted by an unobstructed canopy of stars, the equivalent of which Kit, at least, had never seen. He offered his hand and Daneka took it. They then walked off into darkness, their footpath made clear to them only by moonlight, while their other path, Kit thought to himself—the path of their future—was illuminated by much weaker starlight.

Chapter 27

They walked for a long while in silence. Silence, to Kit’s way of thinking, was the real reward of confidence. When two people had a firm enough foundation—whether as lovers or even just as friends—the luxury of walking, eating, standing, or sitting in silence was their just reward. He felt it here under the stars. He wondered if she did, too, and if their separate desires to economize on dialogue were a reflection of that same confidence. Yet he didn’t dare ask. To ask would have suggested doubt, and doubt was a thing he wanted none of just now. If they didn’t say another word to each other between this moment and their last goodnight kiss, that, to Kit, would be just fine.

As he was about to discover, however, Daneka’s train of thought during their walk back to the villa had been running along a quite different track, had been gaining steam along the way, and was about to enter a long, dark tunnel—the first of many tunnels in the coming months until, it would seem to Kit, there were only tunnels—long, dark and silent, though none of them suggesting the silence of confidence.

She dropped his hand, and he suddenly felt the weight of it at the end of his arm. At the same time, and although there was nothing in the night air to even hint at an arresting chill, she crossed her arms tightly across her chest as if to ward one off.

“
The other day, Kit, when I mentioned Granta to you—”

“
Yes, I remember. It was during the fli—.”

“
Precisely,” Daneka cut in. “Your memory for detail never ceases to amaze me, darling.” From the tone, Kit surmised that the next words out of her mouth were not going to comprise a compliment, and that ‘darling’ was not intended as a term of endearment. She stopped walking and turned to him. “It seemed to surprise you somehow. That I would read it—or even know of it, for that matter.”

Whatever morning lark of confidence Kit had felt moments earlier fled from him like a bat from a cave. He became uneasy. The memory of his sleuthing about her living room and bookcases the first time he’d visited her apartment was poking around like an unwelcome stranger. It rattled the back door of his conscience, pulled insistently from without as he held tight to the knob from within.

The knob broke apart. The door sprang open. The stranger leered at him. This stranger, Kit discovered, was no stranger at all. He, of necessity, had done commerce with this stranger many times in his adult life—though never, until now, where Daneka was concerned. The stranger was a thing Kit hated in principle, and would never have allowed to share even the same air he breathed with Daneka. The stranger was a lie.