The Lover From an Icy Sea (21 page)

“
Well, I just didn’t … I couldn’t … I wasn’t prepared to make any assumptions.”

“
Assumptions?” Daneka’s eyebrows arched up. “What might you have assumed, or not, about my reading habits?”

“
Granta isn’t every man’s choice of a journal, Daneka. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

“
And so I’m every man, Kit?”

The moonlight was just bright enough for Kit to see the steel in Daneka’s eyes, and he suddenly realized why it was that Ron was chauffeuring Daneka—and not the other way around … why she lived on East Ninety-sixth Street, while he lived where he did … why she walked or didn’t walk, ate or didn’t eat, traveled or didn’t travel, when she wanted to do these things—and not when others ordered her to do them.

Daneka, too, understood the meaning of silence—especially when it came back to her, head hung low, in answer to a reprimand. She could let someone swim indefinitely in a pool of it, let them thrash about, let them eventually drown if she so chose. But that wasn’t her choice now—not here, not with Kit. She let the steel melt. She’d wanted to put him on guard, and she’d succeeded. He’d clearly felt the sting of his error, and he clearly wouldn’t forget it for a long time to come—if ever. It was, she felt, time to offer a truce.

“
Darling,” she cooed as she sidled up to him and took his arm in both of hers. “I read lots of things. It’s my job. Not necessarily cover to cover. For that, I hire readers. I have a roomful of them, and they do nothing all day but leaf through magazines and journals and surf the ‘Net looking for good stories. They bring me those stories, maybe four, five, six a week. I read a few paragraphs to see if the story is right for us. If it is, I buy it. Sometimes, if I like it a lot, I may read the whole thing—just for kicks. That was the case with Jennie Erdal’s ‘
Tiger’s Ghost
’. Besides, I’d just read it the evening before we left New York and had called the next morning to make her an offer. It was still fresh in my mind—especially her wordplay with ‘discretion’ and ‘ardor.’ I liked it. And it proved useful to me, as I was sure it one day would.”

Kit knew she expected him so say something back, and yet he was frozen. The steel in her eyes had shackled him, had gone straight through his flesh and clamped onto his bones. He marveled at the power of this woman—apparently over all things and people in her life, and now over him. She had him in thrall because she now owned the power to make him lie—or at least bend the truth—so as not to jeopardize this fragile thing between them.

There was no way around it. A lie had entered their relationship, and no matter how piddling, how trivial, how “white,” it was there like an indelible spot. He couldn’t remove it because he couldn’t tell her the truth. He wondered whether this white lie would spawn other little white lies. They always did. Lies were like viruses. Once they’d found a willing host, they invariably multiplied. Let one little vector through the back door, and soon they’d own every corner and every niche, where they’d quietly propagate themselves into great, hoary multitudes. Soon, what had started out as one little white lie would become a grey mass, squeezing out of corners and niches by virtue of its sheer volume until even the air took on a grey hue. And then, ultimately, the grey would convert to black, and the entire relationship would become one black lie.

Only moments earlier, Kit had been deliriously happy and confident of his future, of their future together. Now, however, he felt the first prick of sadness, as if this stranger entering through the back door of his conscience had just slipped up behind him and put the tip of a knife against his back. There was no blood; it was just a pin prick. But the knife was there, and the stranger had no intention of removing it. Ever. And so the pin prick would eventually, through force of lie upon lie, become a gash. From that gash, blood would flow—first in a trickle, then in a torrent. What had started out as a pin prick of sadness would become a torrent of sorrow until, he feared, his body and their love would become a bloodless, lifeless, bootless corpse.

As he’d learned early on in life, Kit knew his only recourse now lay in action—the consequences be damned. He stopped, faced Daneka, looked into her eyes, and spoke the three words neither of them had dared speak to one another until this moment.

“
I love you.”

He’d broken the dam. He’d set mad fire to a forest of emotions. Flames flared and water poured through; he no longer cared whether he might be consumed by the one or drowned by the other. At this moment, he cared nothing about the fate of the planet; about wars or famine; about melting polar caps; about Portugal; about a full moon over the Atlantic; about
fados
or mandolins; nothing about photography even. If he’d had a wife and children, even they would’ve meant nothing to him at this instant. Only one thing in all of his known universe meant anything to him right here and now, and that thing was this woman.

Kit couldn’t see Daneka’s upturned face as it perched on his shoulder, her cheek hard against his, her eyes looking not at the guileless gaze of stars peeking out from under the black comfort of heaven, but rather looking out over the western horizon in the direction of New York, where they sought electricity and neon, streetlamps, headlights, marquees—and the cold, self-reflecting adulation of eyeballs acting like mirrors.

Love was complicated. She could speak of it easily enough to her housekeeper, to a neighbor’s dog; could say it about a symphony or a painting, about a new purse or another woman’s hairdo. But to declare it to a man to whom she was actually making love? To say it with real emotion and reciprocal obligations attached? That had consequences.

And so, the smile she might otherwise have willed in this instant struggled with years of suppression, of keeping this one, single sentiment under strict lock and key in the deepest, darkest dungeon she could find. The result was not tears or even a sigh of happiness at liberation. No attendant
cri d’amour
—still less, a
cri du coeur
—climbed back up out of that dungeon to meet Kit’s declaration. Instead, she answered with a voice like a carapace.

“
I love you, too, darling.”

The vectors were already abuzz in warm and sticky propagation.

Chapter 28

Kit and Daneka, his arm about her waist and hers about his, continued walking once again in silence until they reached their villa. In the hours since they’d first gone out to dinner, the temperature might’ve fallen by a degree or two at most.

“
Kit, what would you say to a little moonlit dip?” Daneka asked as she walked through the front door.

“
Dip, did you say, or dollop?” Kit was feeling coy—kittenish, really—and Daneka was clearly up for the game.

“
Wisp or wallop, what shall it be?”

“
No hanky-panky—okay, Spanky?”

“
I’ll race you to the pool!” Daneka challenged, shedding most of her clothes en route, but momentarily delayed as she attempted to hop out of her jeans.

“
A place where I can drool,” Kit growled as he bounded across the living room and lunged out at Daneka from behind. He attempted to grab her where he knew her to be most amply padded, but instead came up with only a handful of panty. Kit’s lunge had more behind it than either of them might’ve expected. Something like a little girl’s scream escaped from her throat as Daneka fell to the floor neither in pain nor in fear, but in sheer delight. Her panties tore loose in Kit’s hand. She lay on her back, mouth open, legs and arms akimbo.

“
Some like it rough,” she said, her eyes like tiny flames and her tongue moving slug-like over her upper lip. Kit crawled up on hands and knees between her legs.

“
Some lack the stuff,” he answered as soon as he’d determined that Daneka had not been hurt by the fall. As he bent his head to let his tongue find hers, Kit felt both of her hands reach down between his legs, unzip his zipper and unbuckle his belt, then reach for his shorts, out of which another part of him was already peeking. She caressed him once, then moved her hands to the material on either side and yanked hard. His boxers tore easily.

“
Tit for tat, darling,” she smiled up at him.

“
Tits for that,” Kit said and put his mouth on one her breasts, licked the nipple a degree or two past ennui, then moved immediately to the other.

Daneka yelped as she scurried out from underneath him, jumped to her feet, and ran out the back door. Kit stood up, stepped out of his jeans and former boxer shorts—now, at best, a dustcloth—and walked to the back door, where he stood for a moment to admire Daneka in the moonlight.

“
Some like it clean,” she said in a hoarse whisper as she descended slowly into the pool. He walked over to the same set of steps she’d just used to enter, stepped in to find the water at a temperature equal to that of the night air, and slipped into the pool behind her.

“
I see what you mean,” Kit whispered back.

She’d already drifted off to the middle of the pool. From the position of a semi-crouch she’d taken to immerse everything but her head, she stood up and turned around to face Kit. The water reached just above her navel. Drops ran down from her shoulders to her breasts, which she grasped from below and pushed in his direction. The moonlight bounced off the fleeting drops of water and back into his eyes as he walked slowly across the pool.

“
Tits for that,” she said, indicating with a downward glance in his direction something just below the surface of the water—and of which Kit, himself, was not entirely unaware—if also not entirely in control.

As their bodies met, Kit put his hands under Daneka’s armpits and lifted her easily so that her face was on a level with his. She dropped her breasts and put her arms around his neck, pressed her mouth against his and pried open his lips with her own. At the same time, and without need of a prompt, she spread her legs and raised her knees to rest on his haunches. With Daneka willing and able to support her own diminished weight with her arms around his neck and her legs riding on his hips, Kit’s hands were free to slip back down under water and find her buttocks. He gently pulled them apart as he brought her lower abdomen into position. The water gave Daneka’s body a kind of artificial buoyancy, which allowed Kit to hold her in suspension. With her legs spread to encircle his hips, Kit found Daneka easily and entered her. At the same instant, Daneka pushed her tongue into his mouth. As he let her slide down until he was completely inside her, she just as completely filled his mouth with her tongue.

They remained that way, he in her and she in him, without the merest tease of a motion, for a full minute. Then, as if the wish had been announced by both, to both, and at the same instant—though not even a whisper passed between them—Daneka hoisted herself up, then let herself slide back down in one easy motion. Kit lent the strength of his arms and hands to raise her up and then to brake her slide back down, but this natural rhythm they’d just found seemed to require very little exertion for either of them.

*  *  *

While good arguments can be made for making love on dry land, the most melodious sounds of sex are, even there, all wet ones. It’s in water—or in its bodily equivalent—that we conceive. Without a constant supply of water, we die in short order. At death, our private reservoirs begin to drain and run to other livelier, needier bodies. Death—however else it may be described—is, ultimately, about the absence of water.

Kit and Daneka were at this moment more of water than of flesh. Kit was gloriously surrounded, enveloped, by the warm wetness of Daneka’s womb. In almost stylized syncopation, Daneka’s tongue poked, prodded and lolled in the warm, wet recesses of his mouth. Their bodies were surrounded by the tepid wetness of the pool water. At a short distance, they could hear waves quietly surging, breaking, then washing up onto the beach. Overhead, stars seemed to swim in a sea of blank ink. All was wet, all warm, all life.

*  *  *

Daneka suddenly pulled her tongue from Kit’s mouth and put her own mouth next to his ear. Her hands moved from around his neck in a frantic, almost spasmodic dance through his hair. She pushed her belly hard against his and gripped his hips with her legs. Kit first felt her contractions, then heard her long, low sigh of affirmation in his ear. It was enough. His own contractions began to replicate hers; his own sigh to echo her sigh. They were both now swimming in a sea of watery sensation.

Chapter 29

When Kit awoke the following morning, it was not to a warm body next to his, but rather only to the souvenir of it. He loved that the residual warmth and smell of Daneka had remained behind to greet his first waking moment. But a pillow was no substitute for a head, warm sheets no adequate compensation for warmer skin, the familiar perfume of her more intimate parts no acceptable facsimile for the parts themselves. Whatever legerdemain had taken her off and left mere tokens of her behind was an artfulness for which Kit had not the slightest appreciation or understanding.

The shock of it brought him immediately to rude consciousness.