The Lover From an Icy Sea (36 page)

The silence that ensued between them suggested to his mind that they might as well have been put into invisible, adjoining, soundproof cabins. Kit emptied his glass and poured himself another. He wanted a second cigarette, but the memory and small comfort of the last discouraged him from risking what he feared might be taken as effrontery. He was almost certain she’d used the word ‘sexy’ not ten days earlier to describe the habit—at least where he was the habitué—but maybe she’d been speaking contextually. And yes, a thing or two had occurred since then to measurably alter the contextual landscape.

Or maybe he’d heard ‘smoking’ when she’d really meant ‘drinking.’ He emptied his second glass and poured himself a third, hoping to ingratiate himself with her maybe just enough to trade comments on the weather. She turned towards him and looked not into his eyes, but at his wineglass as Kit poured the guilt-ridden contents of the bottle into it. No, he surmised from the icicles gathering under her stare: ‘drinking’ was apparently also not what she’d meant to say.

As the wine bottle was already somewhere between half- and dangerously close to empty, Kit considered taking a break until dinner arrived. He might as well join Daneka in her admiration of the moon—wolves, after all, stared at the moon. Wolves were also monogamous. They and he might have a lot in common. He could try howling. But he was afraid the gesture might be lost on the locals.

Kit was just beginning to consider how subtle and sublime a thing like solitary confinement must be—at least to the mind of a prison warden—when the waiter arrived with their dinners and interrupted Kit’s reverie. Food! he thought. She’d admitted, after all, to being famished. Maybe food will restore her energy and their camaraderie….

“
Buon appetito!
” the waiter offered as he set their plates down in front of them.

“
Grazie, Signore
,” Kit answered.

“
L’appetito vien mangiando
,” Daneka suggested with a wink.

“
Eh, sì. Certo, Signora!
” their waiter offered together with a belly-laugh. Famished? Kit reconsidered. So famished she had no problem turning a proverb into a pun in someone else’s language. Perhaps food wasn’t the answer either.

The waiter retired from their table once again as Kit and Daneka set about the business of eating. She ate with gusto, Kit noticed, almost as if red meat were an exotic, foreign dish. He wondered where the appetite came from, then remembered the afternoon’s singular maritime exercises. The memory and the sight of the unbridled carnivore in Daneka slowly produced an unpleasant surfeit in Kit as he began to put the two together. He retired his knife and fork and reached for his wineglass. Maybe alcohol would help him forget.

Daneka continued to eat in silence.

At long last, she finished, looked up, and noticed that Kit’s plate was still half full.

“
Darling, you didn’t like what you ordered?”

“
I liked it all right. I just—. Well, I guess I wasn’t really that hungry.” It was a sort of conversation, he thought—or, at least, the start of one.

“
Don’t you want to finish?” she asked. The tone of her question was genuinely solicitous, Kit thought, if also a bit condescending. She asked it as if she were speaking to a young child at home in bed with the flu.

“
No, Daneka. I think I’ve had enough.” Daneka signaled to their waiter that they were finished, then ordered a couple of
espressi
.

“
E una grappa, per favore
,” Kit quickly added.

“
Solamente una?
” the waiter looked first at Kit, then at Daneka.

“
None for me,” she answered with a dismissive wave, sufficient to make her will known with or without the English accompaniment.

Their table cleared and the waiter gone, Daneka reached across and took both of Kit’s hands into hers as if they hadn’t just spent an hour together in almost total silence; as if nothing of that afternoon had happened to put her to sleep, alone, and him in desperate need of separation, distance, and a long walk to find both. Kit was nonplussed, absolutely flummoxed by the turnabout. At the same time, he was grateful for the contact and didn’t dare risk putting any of it to the test of a simple question: Why?

“
Darling, what would you say to amending our travel plans somewhat?” Kit wondered with a sharp pang whether she intended to abort their trip, call it quits, head home.

“
What did you have in mind?” he asked tentatively. She caressed his hands with hers and moved in closer. At that moment, the waiter reappeared with their coffee and Kit’s Grappa. Daneka removed her hands from Kit’s and settled back into her chair. The waiter set tiny cups down in front of each, a single pousse-café glass in front of Kit. Daneka waited until he’d finished, then leaned back in, put her hands once again on Kit’s and continued.

“
Would you mind terribly if we skipped the Alps altogether and went straight to Denmark?” she asked. “I want so much to show you my little place in Svaneke.”

If it wouldn’t have been altogether inappropriate and unbefitting—and probably, to boot, shocked Daneka right out of her sandals—Kit would’ve howled. He would’ve howled at the moon for its beauty; he would’ve howled for the release of tension and mystery and incertitude; he would’ve howled out of gratitude for the splinter she’d just removed from his heart and for the implicit suggestion of monogamy she’d put in its place; he would’ve howled out of pure joy for the fact of life, here and now, with this woman. But he didn’t. Instead, he kept it all inside and did the best he knew how to keep the euphoria out of his voice and eyes when he answered, though not without first having to look away and clear his throat: “Of course we can, darling.”

Kit called for the check. While they waited for it to arrive, Daneka explained once again, in animated detail, and exactly as she’d once done on a certain park bench in Central Park, how they’d first fly to Copenhagen; would then take the train to the coast and, from there, a ferry to the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea where they could rent a car and drive to her little cottage in the village of Svaneke on the eastern coast and just across the island from Rønne, her birthplace, where her mother still lived and whom they could visit the next day if they weren’t too tired; but if they were too tired, they could sleep in and visit her only the following day… it was a very short drive, and her mother spoke excellent English… Rønne, too, was a charming village as Kit would see with his own eyes—if only he’d brought along his camera!—and then they could return to Svaneke and sleep and make love and sleep some more and then make love some more… she would even bake some of her favorite Danish pastries for their afternoon teas—they would, of course, have tea every afternoon, and it was so much better than English tea, as he would shortly find out for himself—and although she might have to make daily trips across the island to see her mother, Kit could stay behind and garden or read or take long walks or just sleep, if he wanted to—until she returned—when she’d then crawl back into bed with him and make some more love.

As their waiter approached to give Kit the check, Daneka intercepted it; laid her credit card on top; handed it back. Did this sound like a reasonable plan?—she wanted to know—and asked the question with the guilelessness of one child asking another would he mind terribly a bit of chocolate sauce with his vanilla ice cream.

Kit looked at her and wondered whether there were natural limits to how much one person could love another without simply exploding. He was considering that he might be on the brink when their waiter re-appeared with the check and Daneka’s credit card. She made a quick calculation and signed the receipt. From the look on the waiter’s face as he picked it up, she’d calculated very generously on his behalf.

“
Mille grazie, Signora
,” he said and bowed as Kit and Daneka pushed back their chairs.

“
A Lei, Signore
,” they answered together.

They walked back to their room in silence, but it was once again the silence of bliss, harmony and fully requited love. Kit unlocked the door, shut and locked it behind them while Daneka went to the bedroom and opened the curtains. The moon, now much higher in the sky, was still round and bright and poured its rays in through the window like a silver dust storm. When Kit finally stood in front of her, having already stepped out of his shoes and socks, she unbuttoned his shirt and threw it to the floor, promptly followed by his pants and shorts. She then reached in, found the two tiny hooks that held her dress together, and unlatched them. Kit stared in amazement as her dress fell open and he realized that it—and her sandals—had been the only thing between her and another possible riot in yet another restaurant. She dropped it to the floor without a further thought.

They climbed into bed together. Within seconds, and at her bidding, Kit was inside her. He pushed her legs back down until they lay flat on the bed, then gripped them from the outside with his own two. In this position, and with their arms tightly around each other, they fell asleep. Nothing of this full-body embrace would change for the next eight hours.

Chapter 46

When Kit awakened the next morning and found Daneka beneath him and still fast asleep, the sight of her came to him as if in a dream. He realized he’d lain atop and inside her the entire night; that she’d supported his weight without so much as a sigh; that she, like a velvet vice-grip, had held and kept him erect for eight hours; and that he wanted nothing more in the world at this instant than to come. It wasn’t love—that, even he would’ve conceded. It was lust. Pure lust. From the inertia of a sustained, but unspent physical excitement he would derive impetus; from impetus, energy; from energy, thrust; at the peak of his thrust, release—and then, once again, quiet inertia.

He twitched once, twice, inside her. The second call was briefly answered with a contraction. He twitched three more times in quick succession. The answer this time was immediate and unmistakable. Daneka’s brain might still be asleep, but another part of her was wide awake thanks to Kit’s reveille. He felt her muscles seize him. At the same time, he felt the first liquid tendrils of a warm bath wash over him, suggestive of a tentative, mounting excitement. He raised himself up on elbows and toes and began, slowly, to back out of her. In response, her muscles attempted to grasp him tighter in order to deny him an exit. Whatever unconscious desire might be motivating one part of her to contract, to grasp, to clamp down on this thing she sought for comfort or for partnership, that same part couldn’t escape the machinations of an endocrine system that seemed to be waging something of a counter-insurgency.

Kit was all but out of her when Daneka’s head, atop a pillow, finally reconnoitered with her vagina—a desert away by tactical calculations. Her eyes opened wide and sent word of a losing position back to a still-dosing brain. Sleepy synapses sprang to attention and dispatched a message to the muscles of her legs, which in turn called for reinforcement from hip and knee joints. Her legs shot out and scaled Kit’s back in one bound, where they locked in tight defense just above his waist.

Daneka recruited her vaginal muscles in an all-out, last-ditch effort to hold her ground. Kit called a halt to his retreat. Front lines eyeballed front lines. And then Kit’s synapses bugled a thirsty charge. He lunged forward until he was stopped by her cervix. Daneka’s reaction was a sharp intake of breath, followed by an equally thirsty counter-charge.

For the next five minutes, juggernaut met juggernaut under an already broiling southern Italian sun whose rays streamed in through the window as if conspiring to do both armies in. The previous night’s wine poured out of them and onto the bed sheets like the blood of battle. Above the waist, mouths and hands traded attack for counter-attack in well-coordinated kisses, gropes, squeezes, scratches, pounding, kneading and pleading. Below the waist, grunts on the front lines did bare-knuckled combat in a salty swamp.

Just as the battle was about to be decided in delirious favor of both combatants, Kit pushed himself up on his hands so as to bring his pelvis up tightly against Daneka’s. She, in turn, arched her back, grasped both legs just below the knees and pulled them up against her chest. They met in a silent scream of rapture, like two pieces of marble at odd angles to one other, yet indistinguishably, inseparably joined at midpoint.

A few seconds later, they did separate—then collapsed. What “Elysium” best describes—the few minutes before, the seconds of, or the few minutes thereafter—is something that neither was in any humor to debate. They were spent, deliciously spent, and that was all that mattered. After an interlude, Kit was the first to speak.

“
Veni. Vidi. Vici
—though not necessarily in that order,” he pronounced to the ceiling in lame grandeur. At that instant, and out of his peripheral vision, he caught sight of a single index finger. Its wag in mid-air suggested that unilateral victory was not precisely his to claim.

“
Venimus. Vidimus. Vicimus
.” Daneka corrected with a woman’s willingness to include even the adversary in victory. Kit chuckled. Daneka took his chuckle as a bugle call, sprang up and straddled him.