The Lover From an Icy Sea (60 page)

He got a confirmation of his assumption when the buzzer on the inside of the front door sounded and the door sprang loose from its electronic latch. Daneka pushed it open and they ascended three flights of stairs to the top floor. A single, bare, fluorescent bulb illuminated each floor except the top one, which might’ve been entirely dark but for the light leaking out from under an apartment door.

The door opened just wide enough for one curious eye to peer out. Satisfied that that visitor was the same one who’d just sent an encoded signal from downstairs, the door opened further. Kit saw a face and heard a voice.

“
Mama!” the voice said. Kit thought it was the loneliest sound he’d ever heard.

The girl whose voice he’d just heard opened the door wide enough for the two of them to walk through. In the dim light, Kit looked hard at her and decided that she was, in fact, no girl at all, but a woman not too much younger than he.
How is that possible?
he wondered.

He made a quick survey of the room before he sat down. It was bare except for the essentials: one table; two chairs; one sofa more the size of a loveseat, but clearly not serving that purpose; a single bed in the corner of the room—a single pillow upon it—a single lamp standing next to the bed and serving as the only source of light for the entire room. Windows which might otherwise look out onto a street and therefore offer some source of light—at least during daylight hours—were boarded up with cardboard.

Before he could think too hard or long about any of this, his attention was arrested by the sounds coming out of the mouth of this girl-woman: slow; deliberate; barely audible. Daneka’s answers were also slow and deliberate, though clearly audible. Kit realized with a start that this girl-woman—this daughter of Daneka, this long-withheld secret, this “Margarette” to one, and “Annemette” to the only other women remaining in the Sørensen family—was profoundly handicapped.

Kit collapsed onto one of the two available chairs and listened to the labored way in which Daneka explained to Annemette-Margarette that she and Kit would return the next morning without fail, bright and early, to take her to his place in order to take her picture. Upon hearing the mention of Kit’s name, the girl looked up and noticed his presence for the first time. It was just a brief acknowledgement, however, before she ducked again behind her mother and grabbed her around the waist.

The girl implored her mother not to leave—not yet. Daneka continued to comfort her—but with words and gestures, Kit thought, more suitable to a small animal. The petting eventually achieved its desired result: she calmed down. But not before Kit, taking advantage of Daneka’s distraction, was able to slip the picture of Dagmar out of his wallet and put it, face down, on the table. Daneka then managed to walk her daughter to the bed and get her to lie down. Once supine and so no longer quite able to keep her arms around Daneka’s waist, she put the thumb of one hand into her mouth and the other hand between her legs. Daneka continued to stroke her hair until she eventually fell asleep.

Daneka signaled wordlessly to Kit that they could now leave. They slipped quietly out the door, and she tested the knob to make sure it had locked from the inside.

Once back outside, and as if by mutual consent, they walked. Ron followed at a distance and drove at a pace mimicking their own, with only parking lights illuminating the car’s forward motion and an occasional street lamp illuminating their path. Daneka announced she wanted some supper, and they stopped in at a small restaurant off Bleeker Street. She ordered a hamburger, very rare, with raw onions. Kit ordered a glass of wine—white. They didn’t talk.

At the conclusion of their meal, Daneka was the first to speak. “Shall we go?”

“
Yes, let’s.”

She got up from the table, handed Kit her credit card and walked out the front door. Kit paid the bill and signed the credit card receipt, then followed her out to where Ron had parked the car. Daneka sat in the back seat, her door open. Kit ducked down and stuck his head in, but found himself at a loss for words. Instead, he returned her credit card and added the receipt.

“
Aren’t you getting in?” she asked.

“
No. I think I’ll walk.”

“
All the way to Ninety-sixth Street? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“
No. All the way to St. Marks Place. It’s just a few blocks across town. I’m going home.”

Daneka looked at Kit with a kind of dumb curiosity for a few seconds, then closed the door. “The Fitzgerald, Ron,” he saw rather than heard her say just before the door bolted shut.

Chapter 73

Kit walked—lost once again in this newer miasma of contradictions, all stinking even worse than the offal of the meat district he’d just left behind. That there was no way back for her was now clear. If she could treat her own daughter this way, how much worse could she treat him? The answer wasn’t something he even cared to contemplate. Only one thing drove him now: self-preservation. He was in deeper than he’d ever been; deeper, he considered, than he’d likely ever be again. One didn’t just dismiss a love affair like this—unless one happened to be a woman named ‘Daneka.’

He crossed Fourth Avenue onto Astor Place, then walked on across Third Avenue to the brief expanse of Cooper Square and on to St. Marks Place. Once home again in the East Village, he picked up his pace as he walked past familiar brownstones, and eventually arrived at his own. He bounded up the stoop past the same three squatters he’d seen there roughly three weeks earlier. The stoop to his building had apparently become their favorite hang-out. The same sweet-smelling Goth of a girl gave him the same sweet smile; he gave her his own in return. Maybe one day, after all … just not today.

He bounded up the stairs to the fifth floor, opened the door to his apartment, stepped in and turned on a light. If he was going to brood, Kit decided, he’d brood constructively. Straightening up—hardly one of his favorite activities—was long overdue; he’d barely touched the place in almost a month.

He first checked to see whether there was anything rotting in the refrigerator or bathroom. There wasn’t. He then took down the only photo of Daneka still hanging from the clothesline and put it on a pile of things he wanted to take to work the next day. This subtraction was followed in short order by the clothesline itself. A few other odds and ends and—an hour later—he was ready for a shower and bed.

Just before turning in, he opened the window to a full moon. It wasn’t the Northern Lights. And moonbeams over Manhattan were not powdered sugar. But they would do for now.

*  *  *

Daneka, in the meantime, had long since arrived home. Finally spared the distraction of a constant lover, she could be diligent in preparing for her first day back to work. There’d be lots of things to attend to, and she wanted to get them all organized as quickly as possible. In her bedroom, she first made a list of tasks—each one of which she intended to check off just as soon as she’d accomplished it. Cleaning or straightening up was not on the list; Estrella had already seen to that. She looked around to determine whether there might be some item Estrella had overlooked, noticed two and wrote them down. She read the list over to herself. When she finished, she stood up, clapped her hands once, then commenced with her first task.

She walked to her nightstand and picked up the picture of Kit. As she started to disassemble the frame, intent upon removing and then shredding the picture, she dismissed the activity as too time-consuming. Instead, she simply dropped picture and frame into the trash, then went back and checked the item off.

She next went into the living room, picked up the lichen and took it into the kitchen. She opened the door beneath the kitchen sink to pull out a garbage bag, reconsidered, then turned on both the water and the garbage disposal. The ten-thousand-year growth of lichen was ground up and gone within seconds. She washed and rinsed her hands, dried them on a dish towel, then returned to her bedroom to check off the second item. “Done!” she pronounced to herself with evident satisfaction.

Within a couple of hours, Daneka had accomplished her tasks, had checked them all off, had then shredded the list. She showered, took her terrycloth robe off the hanger, thought again, walked over to her computer and booted it up as she arranged the robe like a seat cushion. A little playtime before bedtime was in order, and the robe would absorb any effluent.

Twenty recreational minutes later—all submissions responded to, all emissions evanesced—she logged off, crawled in under the covers and went immediately and soundly to sleep.

*  *  *

Further down the island, Kit couldn’t find his way to sleep quite so easily. He glanced at his alarm clock for confirmation as he heard church bells chime out four o’clock. The necessity of self-preservation was one thing; the accomplishment of something as simple as sleep, quite another.

Chapter 74

Daneka rose early—and at the precise instant Kit finally managed to fall asleep. Moments after showering, she called Ron and asked him to be waiting outside in thirty minutes. Yes, she explained, she was getting an early start—her first day back to work after an absence of a little over two weeks.

When she walked out the front door of The Fitzgerald, the car was already waiting curbside. So was Mr. Kelly’s replacement—another Michael—with a smile, a salute and an open back door. Daneka nodded a greeting to The Fitzgerald’s newest employee and glided into the back seat without breaking stride. Ron put the car into gear, crossed Madison and then turned left into Fifth Avenue. At that early hour, there was bustle, certainly, but the traffic lights on Fifth were all synchronized to keep a fleet of chauffered limos moving without interruption. The power brokers of New York needed just enough time to peruse the major stories in The Wall Street Journal. They didn’t require the inconvenience of extra stops and starts to catch up on the rest of the world in the Post or Daily News. Daneka was in the publishing business, so her paper of record was of course the paper of record. At the same hour, the readers of esoterica could be counted on to have their news-hunting noses in The Observer—and the readers of exotica, to have theirs in The Voice.

She looked over the front page of
The Times
as her car sped southward the fifty-four short blocks to Forty-second Street—short indeed, she thought, but marble- and granite-hard in cash, convertibles, and other cash equivalents. She looked up ten minutes later as her car passed the Pierre on the left, then the Plaza on the right. Front doors were still shut tight on Bergdorf’s and Tiffany’s as those two monuments to commerce also passed by seconds later in a blur. One day soon, she thought to herself, she really should arrange to have breakfast at Tiffany’s—and she’d make sure it was accompanied by a brisk bottle of Veuve Cliquot.

At Forty-second Street, Ron turned right—leaving Grand Central behind and passing under the peripheral gaze of stone lions in front of the New York Public Library, followed by Bryant Park on the left. Up past the granite sweep of the W. R. Grace building, followed by the now Disney-kitschified stretch of Forty-second Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, she could already begin to smell the approach of Times Square and her home away from home.

Ron pulled the car up in front of her building. As Daneka opened the door and was about to step out, she noticed an outstretched hand, then looked up into a familiar face. Robert, her always ready and reliable Art Director, assisted her out and up in one smooth motion.

“
Welcome back! We’ve missed you,” he said, all chivalry and smiles.

“
Oh, but it’s nice to be back!” She ducked once again into the car. “Usual time, Ron?”

“
Yes, ma’am,” he said. She was gone—leaving Robert to close her car door and then catch up to her in time to open the building’s front door. She glided through as unimpeded by glass as her car had glided unimpeded by traffic or traffic lights, then paused only long enough at the elevator to let Robert catch up once again.

“
Going my way?” she asked, bending her neck at just such an angle. It was—Robert now thought to himself—one of the many things he adored about her.

“
Yes, ma’am, I do believe I am,” he said, extending a gallant arm, which she took before the two of them crossed the threshold. As the elevator ascended—stopping now and again to allow other passengers to get off—she questioned him about work. He knew better than to ask her anything about personal matters—especially in such a public place—and waited until they’d stepped off at the top floor.

“
So, how was the trip?”

“
The first week was mostly business-related. Then I spent a week with my mother, and of course that was delightful. We’re such a pair, she and I. More like sisters, really.”

“
Don’t we wish we could all say that about our parents!” Robert replied with a groan.

“
Believe me. I know how fortunate I am.”

“
Well, it’s certainly nice to have you back!”

“
Thank you, Robert. Let’s try to have lunch again this week or next. I never did find that photographer I was looking for, so maybe you can help me after all.”