The Lover From an Icy Sea (13 page)

Five or ten seconds later, it was there on his screen. While the translated document was largely Pidgin English, one fact was unmistakable in its brutal clarity: Daneka’s father had committed suicide, leaving behind a wife, also aged thirty-five, and a single child—a daughter, aged sixteen.

Kit sat back in his chair and reached for another cigarette. This was disturbing news, as suicides always are. But the most disturbing aspect of it, at least to Kit, was Daneka’s clear omission of the fact. They didn’t yet know each other well—even Kit would admit that. But they knew each other well enough, Kit felt, for her not to have omitted something as significant as the suicide of a parent at an age when she would have been particularly vulnerable and impressionable.

Far from solving the mystery of Daneka Sørensen, this new information only compounded it. He needed to get to the bottom of it, and he needed to get there now.

Kit scrambled around among the papers and bits of paper on his worktable until he found Daneka’s phone number. In spite of the lateness of the hour, he dialed the number, only to get her answering machine at the other end. He waited out the length of her greeting, hoping she might pick up the receiver—but his hope was in vain.

“
Daneka, it’s me. Kit. I’m coming up. Now.” Kit glanced at his watch. “I don’t care what time it is, I’m coming.”

Kit hung up the receiver, threw on his jacket and ran out of his apartment, not even bothering to lock the door. As he arrived downstairs at the entrance to his apartment building, he noticed that the three transient squatters had left. He was thankful there’d be no need to negotiate passage once again up or down his own front stoop.

A cab was dropping off a pair of haggard-looking passengers directly in front of his building. Kit held the door open as they climbed out. He stepped in, closed the door, and gave the driver Daneka’s address. He then rolled down his window to clear out the residual stench of alcohol.

As the cab started up along Park Avenue South, Kit noticed a few stragglers hanging out on street corners, apparently negotiating with some of the hookers for one last snack before dawn and the start of a dumb, domestic weekend. Other than these few pedestrians, the avenue at this hour was largely owned by other taxis and an occasional garbage truck. This was the only hour of every twenty-four that could be called a true friend to deep sleep, the only break between nighttime bluster and daytime commotion, the last hour before dawn and the start of that thing for which New York existed and which, over the years, was turning its slabs of granite into bars of gold. The thing, in short, for which the city was always open, even on weekends: business.

Chapter 17

Kit arrived at Daneka’s apartment building on Ninety-sixth Street; paid the fare, jumped out of the cab and entered the building. As he started to make his way directly to the elevator to ascend to Daneka’s apartment, the doorman stopped him.

Kit knew that doormen who worked the night shift were not paid for their graciousness or charm. They were paid to do a simple job: to stand between rude intruders from the outside and comfortable, sound sleepers on the inside. The likelihood that someone from the outside would rudely intrude on a sound sleeper on the inside was negligible at best—but more for want of sound sleepers than of would-be intruders. Still, those who worked the night shift knew their purpose: they represented, to the one, an obstacle; to the other, the pretense of security. And so they maintained that delicate sense of equilibrium on which New York’s more privileged population depended in order to maintain all of its privileges—even if one of those privileges was not sound sleep.

As Kit now learned when he announced his errand, doormen who work the night shift were also compensated for another thing—namely, to know precisely the night-time habits of the residents of those buildings whose security they were paid to maintain, and to keep that knowledge to themselves. In this case, the doorman had no choice but to inform Kit that Daneka was just then not at home, as Kit was already present in the lobby of her building and within striking distance of the elevator to her apartment. That, however, was as much information as he felt compelled to offer.

Momentarily struck dumb by the news, Kit resolved nevertheless to hold his ground. He found a seat in the lobby that he intended to occupy for as long as it might take to unravel this newest mystery—yet one more in an ever-lengthening string of mysteries.

“
Would you happen to know at what time she stepped out?” he asked after an appropriate length of time had elapsed.

“
I didn’t say she stepped out,” the doorman replied, but without so much as a glance in Kit’s direction to acknowledge his continued presence.

“
Would you then happen to know at what time she’s due back?” Kit next tried.

“
Did I say she was due back?” This time, the question to his question came back to him like some unannounced—and necessarily unwelcome—offering from a pigeon perched overhead. Kit decided to let it slide.

“
No, I don’t suppose you did.” Kit opted once again for silence and resolved to keep it, painfully if necessary, for as long as it might take to make this doorman uneasy with the awkwardness of it. He didn’t have long to wait.

“
Look, Mister. I don’t know what your business is with Miss Sorensen. Never mind the hour. Most people—at least those who work for a living—are in bed right about this time,” he said with a distinct sneer.

“
I see,” Kit said. “Well, now, since I know for a fact that Ms. Sorensen has a job, that fact would suggest to me that she is indeed in bed.” Then, however, and quite out of character: “And since you’re obviously still up at this hour, I guess you don’t. Have a real job, that is.”

It was cheap. and Kit knew it, but the man in the doorman fell for it.

“
I make it my business to know who’s in bed and who isn’t in bed. I make it my business to know who comes and who goes after a certain hour. I can usually tell, if they come back before I clock out, whether they’ve been out to walk the dog, or—” and here the doorman’s sneer put on its best Sunday smile “—whether they’ve been out to walk the dog. Miss Sorensen has a dog. He’s a very old dog. Old dogs don’t move as fast as young dogs. Sometimes, he just takes a little longer. And so does she. Am I making myself clear?”

“
Crystal,” Kit answered. “In that case, I’m sure you and she won’t mind if I just wait here until her old dog finishes his business.”

“
Not in the least. We do everything we can to make our guests feel comfortable. Are you feeling comfortable, Mr.—?”

“
Addison. Very.”

They had arrived at an impasse, and Kit knew better than to try to improve upon his position. The only option left to him was to wait it out. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Before he could extract one and light it up, however, the doorman checked him.

“
Smoking’s not allowed in the building. Ms. Sorenson’s—, uh, management’s orders.” Kit put the pack back in his pocket and responded with an uncharacteristically forced smile.

“
In that case, I believe I’ll go for a walk. You wouldn’t have a problem with my walking and smoking in the park, would you?”

“
Park’s public space. So far as I know, you’re free to do what you like in the park.”

Kit stood up and walked out the front door without a further word. He headed a block and a half west to Fifth Avenue, crossed, and walked up past a children’s playground. At that hour, there wasn’t so much as a squirrel in sight, though Kit knew it would all shortly change. Dawn was about to break—and with it, the solitary and occasional threads of nighttime stirrings would begin to weave themselves into a solid carpet of noise.

*  *  *

This was quiet time—the time of day when the city was not a block as hard as the granite on which it had been built, but was—to a receptive ear, at least—soft, vulnerable, given over to cats on the prowl, a stubborn hack or cough, an isolated siren, the sound of a cab door slamming, a couple grinding, a woman moaning alone. Uptown or downtown, East Side or West Side, it made no difference. This was the weeping hour—the hour at which one might listen and take in the entirety of the human condition in the only way one could reasonably expect to observe and understand it: in small bits and pieces and in the agonies or ecstasies thought to be most private—but which, by the mere fact of an absence of competition for one’s attention—were most public.

*  *  *

Between the faint promise of dawn’s rose and the consistent Con-Ed glow of lamps that lit his walkway at regular intervals, Kit decided he would wander into the park. To him, at this hour, the opportunity to walk and think in near silence was worth the risk others might judge incautious, even foolhardy. He smiled to himself as he recalled, out of nowhere, what Aldous Huxley had once written: “The problem of the twentieth century will be the problem of silence.” How sadly true, he thought—at least for those who “chose” to live in cities. He knew the same could be said of most peoples’ “choices.” His livelihood depended upon it; and so he accepted the necessity of living in a place that occasionally thrilled him, but too often found him indifferent, frustrated, or angry. His escape was photography—sometimes no noisier than the click of a shutter. But too often, at least in the background, it was filled with the noise of people. Of nervous people. Of nervous, obsessive, chattering people who felt compelled to fill the void with talk—or, at the very least, with horns.

Whenever human noise became unbearable, Kit would take his camera and flee to the country. If professional obligations kept him city-bound for any length of time, he’d merely escape to one of its parks. It wasn’t so much the beauty of rocks, trees and flowers that captivated him as their willingness to model in silence. He was human—and a man—and so hardly indifferent to the beauty of humans, particularly that of women. But he adored the silence of landscapes. What’s more, the older he got, the more he preferred landscapes and seascapes and anything that could relieve him of the chatter, the senseless noise, the burdensome monotony of human social intercourse.

Now, however, there was this woman. Nothing she said even remotely resembled chatter. Her speech to his ears was like nothing he’d ever heard. Indeed, her silences were more precious than any silence he’d found in the country, or even in the park. What did it mean to find a “soul mate”? Was it merely an accident that he’d found her—and she, him—as it had occurred, or was there really something called “destiny” or “fate”? Their physical compatibility certainly had something to do with it. But Kit was not so naïve as to think that the sexual desire he felt for her would maintain, over the long term, anything like its present intensity. Sooner or later, it would wane—as those things were wont to do. What, then, were the other components of his obsession? Kit stopped dead in his tracks, took out a second cigarette, then chuckled to himself as he finally acknowledged the thing for what it was.

“
Yes,” he said—completely unaware that he was talking to himself: he was obsessed.

He continued to walk, though more slowly, as he pondered the singular state in which he now found himself and to which he’d just given a mental acknowledgement. He came upon a stone park bench. In the thin light of dawn, he could just barely make out the message of a Latin inscription:
Alteri vivas oportet si vis tibi vivere
. “
Live for another if you want to live for yourself
,” he translated to himself, though no longer quite in command of either his Virgil or his Ovid. An omen? he wondered.

*  *  *

The sun was just clearing the horizon as Daneka looked east out her rear car window. “‘Looks as if we’re going to have a lovely day, wouldn’t you say, Ron?” she asked her driver.

Ron glanced back through the rearview mirror. “Yes, ma’am. It would appear that way.”

They continued in silence as Ron drove up the West Side Highway towards home. When they reached the Ninety-sixth Street exit, he took the off-ramp and headed east across Riverside Drive, West End, Broadway, Amsterdam, Columbus and Central Park West—then through Central Park. Just short of Park Avenue on the other side of the park, he made a U-turn and pulled up in front of The Fitzgerald. The doorman had spotted her car even before Ron made his U-turn, and had timed his arrival curbside to coincide with the car’s arrival. As soon as the car stopped, he opened Daneka’s door. She stepped out and nodded. He noted she was wearing an evening dress that had lost some of its crease. He noted, too, that she looked tired, worn down in some almost imperceptible way, older than when he’d last seen her only a few nights earlier. He knew that she often came home at this hour looking far from rested, but that she could emerge forty-five minutes later dressed in a business suit and looking as sharp and fit as any woman half her age.

He kept his thoughts to himself as he preceded her to the front door and opened it so that she might not have to be inconvenienced by a pause. As she stepped out of the car, but before shutting her door, she leaned in towards her driver.

“
Have a wonderful weekend, Ron. Hugs to your wife and kids.”