The Lover From an Icy Sea (25 page)

He didn’t know—really couldn’t distinguish—whether it was these memories, or the music, or some premonition that now saddened him. In any case, when he opened his eyes again several minutes later during a short intermission, he felt dampness on his cheeks and knew that he, like Daneka the night before, had succumbed. When he looked at her, he noted that her eyes, too, were misty, though he saw no evidence of what he’d seen the night before. She’d simply grown inured to the sadness and had let it become a part of her as it had long ago become a part of all of the others seated around them.

“
Shall we go, darling?” she asked as she put her hands on his.

“
Yes. Let’s.

“
And shall we leave tomorrow if the fog hasn’t lifted?”

Kit nodded. “If that’s your wish.”

“
It is, my darling. I love it here. And I love being here with you. I could be anywhere with you and be happy. But right now, I also desperately need to feel the sun again. There’ll be more than enough fog and mist and dreariness in Denmark—trust me.”

“
Then let’s go find that sun. Let’s leave tomorrow for Italy.”

Daneka bent down and kissed Kit’s hands. With eyes closed, she then brought her head back up and kissed him softly on the lips. She opened her eyes, reached up and touched him once on the tip of his nose, then smiled.

“
Thank you, darling. I’ll never forget you for this.”

He hoped she never would. But that was a question only time could answer—and would answer, one day, much sooner than either of them might have anticipated.

Chapter 33

Daneka signaled to their headwaiter, who promptly came to the table.

“
Sim, Senhora?
” he asked.

“
A conta, por favor
.” The waiter looked at Daneka, then at Kit.

“
Com sua permissão, Senhor
,” he asked, but without waiting for Kit to give his permission or withhold it. He bowed his head, picked up Daneka’s hand, and put his lips to it. The gesture was pure chivalry. “
Este é o único pagamento que exijo, Senhora
.”

Because Daneka was European and knew instinctively how to react, Kit’s intercession would’ve been entirely superfluous. His own mother, he was certain, would’ve blushed, mumbled something girlishly incoherent, taken out her traveler’s cheques or credit card to hide her embarrassment and, in the process, would likely have insulted her host.

Daneka, however, took the headwaiter’s hands in hers and kissed him once on each cheek. She then walked up to each of the other attending waiters and did the same. Finally, she repeated the gesture with the wine steward, paused an instant, reached down to the tâte-vin at the end of its silver chain, and brought it to her lips as a parting gesture of respect both for the steward and for the wine.

Kit realized the room had grown respectfully silent during this impromptu ceremony. Without knowing why she was doing what she was doing, those present nevertheless seemed to have a profound admiration for what she did—and for how she did it. As Kit and Daneka walked to the front of the restaurant, Daneka paused once more face to face with the singer and, as she had with the wait staff, took both of the singer’s hands in her own.

“
Você tem a voz de um anjo, Sinhorita
,” she said.

“
Muitíssimo obrigado
,” the singer said. “
E você tem um anjo, tem a cara, Senhora.
”

The two women stood looking at each other for an instant longer, a pair of hands in a pair of hands. Then Daneka disengaged, and Kit and Daneka walked through the reception area and out the front door.

The fog still hung on the night air like a slightly out-of-season winter coat. Daneka, without benefit of an outer garment, huddled down under Kit’s protective arm as they walked back to their villa. Just there, where the night sky’s foggy fabric had worn momentarily thin, a full moon broke through and illuminated the villa, now within eyesight. A thin trail of blue smoke rose from the chimney and appeared to pay homage to a moon that beamed benevolently back down.

As they arrived at the front door, Daneka reached out to open it. Kit, instead, took her hand in his.

“
Have I ever told you how much I love you?” he asked. “Not just love, but admire, respect, adore, yes—even worship you.” The last was said not in the tone of a lingering question, but with the self-assurance of a full-scale declaration.

Daneka’s eyes did not rise to meet Kit’s. Anonymous admiration—the stares of strangers and of people who made no claim to her heart, who had no chance of ever entering in, who remained, simply and categorically, admirers—was something Daneka could easily accommodate. The adoration of one man, however, was another matter entirely. Worship from the same man was like a bit of foreign matter in the eye, and she reached up unconsciously to find and flush it out before tears might find a way to do the same.

There was, of course, nothing in her eye to remove. The gesture had no purpose and no result other than to put an end to Kit’s declaration. “What is it, darling?” he asked solicitously, hiding as he did so his disappointment.

“
Oh, it’s nothing, Kit. Just a little something—at least it feels like something—in my eye.” She looked up at him and blinked. “Can you see anything there?” The fact that she’d finally said his name once again in as long as he could remember was like a bandage to the wound she’d just unknowingly—or perhaps knowingly—re-opened.

“
Yes, I think I see—.” And here, he peered down into her eyes, brought his hand up and pinched thumb and forefinger together as if to pluck something out. “A thorn. Or maybe an entire thorn bush. Or maybe even an entire forest of thorn bushes.”

Daneka laughed. “A forest of thorny, horny bushes?” she asked coquettishly.

“
Scornfully thorny bushes,” Kit answered, then sighed. “Or maybe mournfully horny bushes. It’s a little hard to see the horny for the trees in this case. The forest gets lost in the thick-thistled understory.” Kit’s metaphor was not lost on Daneka. She, after all, had brought him to it. She chose not to offer a rejoinder, but instead let it hang in the air as she opened the front door.

And there it hung, all night long, the occasional crackle from the fireplace incapable of doing anything to lighten or puncture or scare it loose from its lurking place. Kit slept fitfully; Daneka, soundly.

At the first sign of dawn, Kit rose and walked out the back door. He figured he had a good hour or two before Daneka would awaken. He descended through the rocks to the beach below. The sky, still grey and fog-laden, joined the sea at the waistline. Further down below the western horizon, Kit knew, if his eyes could’ve seen far enough and somehow magically followed the curvature of the earth, he would find—just below ankle-level—New York.

New York on its faster, take-no-prisoners, shit-kicking pair of feet.

He and Daneka could fly halfway around the world. They could find a paradise in Paris, another in Portugal, a third—he was certain—in Italy. And in Denmark? He had no idea—only an inkling, really—that Denmark, too, would prove to be a paradise, even if filled with ‘fog and mist and dreariness.’ He would take any and all of it now and for the rest of his life—if only he could have her with it. But now he knew. However much of a paradise it might seem to him, it remained too small a pleasure for her.

He knew she loved him. To the extent she was capable of loving—and it was becoming increasingly, painfully apparent that this was very little—she loved him. But there was something, some thing that made it impossible for her to love—him, or probably anyone else for that matter. Of this, he was becoming increasingly certain.

Europe was a continent too small, too intimate, too quiet and full of fog for her to rest easy and remain content on with but one man and only the plangent refrain of her own thoughts. She needed the bang, the dash, the glare and glitter of New York to distract her. She needed New York’s constant noise, the non-stop assault on ears and eyes, nose and fingers—on every known sense and then on the other unknown, unknowable ones—to distract her from her thoughts, from some long-suppressed memory, from some cosmic collision in a brief history on earth that had left her caught in a perpetual, emotional winter.

For all of her grace and beauty and superlative performance, Kit finally recognized Daneka for who she was: a
trompe-l’œil
. An illusion. A diamond of no carats. Or maybe a diamond of countless carats, brilliant in its unremitting radiance, but ultimately dead.

He remembered his gift to her of a lichen and felt suddenly foolish. What could she know, or care, of a thing that might require half a century to grow to the size of a shirt button? Of a thing that would endure any hardship, that existed for the mere sake of existence and without need of anything but the minerals it could squeeze from a rock through the secretion of its own, beggarly supply of chemical? And now it sat on her coffee table, pointless in its persistence, most likely looking to her and to all those who traveled through her living room like a locker-room fungus, the product of bad circulation and a negligent housekeeper, a hairy bit of mildew.

What he’d seen with a clearer vision the first time he’d visited her apartment in New York was no accident: the sterile, museum-like, picture-perfect quality of the rooms where photographs and tableaux had been hung for show, but not with love; the books standing on bookshelves like an impeccably dressed Vatican Swiss Guard, their bindings no more stressed by the fly-weight of the material within than by the non-existent threat of a curious-fingered assault from without.

Yes, he now had to concede: she was an Echo to his Narcissus, and reflected back to him only the idealized version of himself he had, until now, blindly, gratefully embraced. He was a photographer and should know better. He should know even better than a therapist how to read his subject’s exterior in order to understand what was just below the surface. And yet, he’d never trained his camera on himself—and that was the problem. Instead, he’d looked at Daneka through it; had taken at face value what his camera told him; had pronounced it, and her, beautiful. She was an exquisite
trompe-l‘œil
—no mistake about it. And now, he realized, he’d fallen in love, deeply in love, obsessively in love, with an illusion.

He felt like an old man climbing the rocks back up to the villa. When he arrived, the error of his earlier conjecture struck him dumb. Daneka was up, showered, dressed, made-up and packed. Even his own suitcase was laid out on the bed with all of his things neatly folded and lying next to it. She smiled at him as he came in through the back door. He made what he believed to be an entirely successful attempt to rid his face of any expression that might reveal his struggle of the last hour.

“
Good morning, darling. Have a nice walk?”

“
I did indeed.” And as he looked at her now, possessing all of the radiant beauty of the diamond he’d dismissed only minutes earlier, his thoughts left the lichen behind as if it were a thoroughly expendable piece of frozen tundra.

Chapter 34

Except for the occasional swish of the windshield wipers, they drove north in silence—though by no means an uncomfortable one. Daneka sat directly beside Kit, her head on his shoulder, one hand inside his shirt and resting comfortably against his chest. Their car was greeted now and again by pairs of amber fog lights on cars traveling in the opposite direction. Still less often, Kit had to maneuver his vehicle around a slow-moving tractor. There were no service roads in this area of the country. Everyone—big or small, slow or fast, tourist or farmer—made do with the national road.

When they arrived at the airport, Kit dropped Daneka and their luggage off just outside the international departure lounge, then drove down and around to return the rental car. He found her twenty minutes later at the check-in counter for Alitalia, explaining to the clerk in what seemed to Kit’s ear to be fluent Italian the reason for their early departure. The clerk in this case was another woman, and Daneka’s charm didn’t seem to be working its usual magic. Finally, in exasperation, she asked to speak with the clerk’s supervisor.

“
What’s the problem, Daneka?” Kit asked.

“
Oh, she wants us to pay a penalty for early departure. I just refuse, on principle, to pay penalty fees. Either the goddamned plane’s got seats or it hasn’t. It costs them no more to fly us today than it will tomorrow.”

When a smartly dressed, middle-aged man came into view, Daneka’s demeanor shifted abruptly from annoyed customer to woman-in-need-of-a-helping-hand. She was all pained smile and droopy eyelashes when he stepped up to the counter.

“
Buongiorno, Signora. Ci sono problemi?
”

Daneka’s subsequent spiel left Kit dazzled. Her eyes and eyelashes spoke in fluttered phrases; her hands spoke in fistfuls of anguish and disappointment; her mouth merely gave sounds and punctuation to both. Finally, she paused and, in summation, put both hands together as if in prayer.