Under the Same Sun (Stone Trilogy) (22 page)

“Don’t change the subject, you miserable man!” Furiously, Naomi slapped the sheet. “You sat there and chatted as if he was your oldest friend, as if nothing ever happened! I felt as stupid as a schoolgirl!”

Jon dropped the shirt on a chair, grinning. “You looked the part too. There was steam coming out of your ears!”

She looked ready to throw something at him, so he raised his hand in capitulation and sat down next to her on the edge of the bed. “God, if there was ever a night I wanted to go differently, it was this one. But here we are, discussing your father. Again, again, when we should be making love, when you should be in my arms, sighing, sobbing with longing, yielding to me, mine.”

Her lips parted in a soft invitation. Jon reached out to touch them, tracing the fine curve with the tips of his fingers. “Since I woke up this morning I have thought of nothing but tonight, of reliving that night when I first loved you, right here in this room. My miracle, my love.”

Gently, with a small smile, Naomi laid her hand over his mouth. “We have to talk about this first, Jon. I’m spooked, both by my father and by you, sitting over the manicotti as if you were Mafia dons, chatting like old friends. You had a restraining order placed against him only a few months ago, and now this?”

Jon took her hand in his and kissed the palm. “If it was me, I’d never face the old bastard again, believe me, Naomi. There’s no one in the whole world I care for less than your father. But baby…” That slipped strap was badly distracting. He wanted to slide his finger under it and pull it down, feel the warm, silken skin, lay his head on her chest and listen to her heartbeat. “You even wanted to go to their house, meet them; you told me they were your parents after all was said and done, and they only meant well. Okay, so they showed up when and where you never expected them. But honestly, I think Olaf really, really went out of his way to be nice tonight.”

It took her a moment to respond, her voice sad and small. “Jon, he knows he won’t get anywhere by fighting you and so he’s trying to charm you. Nothing has changed. He will never change. All he cares about are his bloody hotels.”

“Maybe.” He caught her around the waist and picked her up, settling her on his lap, facing him. “Maybe, I don’t care. The food was great, the restaurant was nice, and I’m quite taken with your mother. I wonder if you’ll look like her in thirty years? I wouldn’t mind that one bit.”

“You didn’t do this the last time we were here.” Her arms came up around his neck.

“Because you were an innocent young thing; you had no idea what sex would be like.” The long mane tangled around his hands like seaweed. “You had no idea what was in store for you, did you? Did you get from me what you’d expected that first night?”

“Oh yes.” Whispered against his lips, her body a sweet curve against his. “Yes, you were everything I had dreamed of seeing those photos of you in the magazines. How I used to stare at them, at that centerfold; how I wished to take off your shirt and touch you.”

“You were in love with my voice on the radio, with my picture in the magazines; you really fell in love with the rock star?” He cupped her buttocks to pull her closer. “You really are a groupie. Your father was right for once; you are my groupie. How I love it. All right then, let me love you, my sweet little fan.”

I
n the last dark hour before dawn Naomi was woken by the sound of the street cleaner passing below their open balcony door. She rose quietly from the bed to step outside. It was quite cool now, the wind bringing chilly air from the mountains and mixing it with the spray from the big fountain out on the lake.

Naomi stood, her arms wrapped around herself, listening to the sounds of night. There was a café not too far away, one that served breakfast very early in the day, where they were even now setting out the chairs and opening the blinds. She thought she could smell coffee, fresh French bread, even cinnamon rolls.

The scent made her long for Halmar, for the still, peaceful life that passed in small, orderly steps, for the life that she had been able to control and direct.

There, nothing had touched her, no one had been close enough to hurt her, and she had always been able to retreat into the solitude of her apartment. She had never been exposed, never threatened.

There had been one man, only one she had ever allowed to get to know her a little. He had been a doctor from Bergen who had stayed at her hotel over a weekend to, as he had told her, rest. His unassuming, friendly manner had drawn her toward him. At first it had only been a cup of coffee, taken together outside the hotel door in the sunshine sitting on the low wall of the quay, then a dinner, then a visit to the theater in Bergen. She had broken off the budding affair after that, telling him she loved someone else, an American songwriter, and actually she was committed to him. The doctor had been bitter, accusing her of using her adoration for some rock star to break it off, telling her she was being childish and naive. He had abandoned her at the restaurant where they had been having dinner. She had caught the last ferry back to Halmar and stood out on the deck in the blustery wind, listening to the seagulls and the song of the ocean and imagined hearing Jon’s voice in it, calling to her.

Naomi turned around to look at him where he lay sleeping, sprawled out as always, his arms flung across the bed. No curling up for Jon, no hiding under covers.

A wave of bitter sadness threatened to drown her. Her body was still humming from their lovemaking, her lips tingling from his kisses. She let her hand glide over her scar and come to rest on her lower belly, feeling for life, wishing for it with every fiber of her soul. A girl, a little baby girl with Jon’s eyes, his love for music, his easy sense of humor. She could see them together: Jon at the piano with his daughter on his knee, teaching her a few first, simple melodies, teaching her to sing, while outside the snow fell on the Promenade. Naomi had no idea why, but she saw them in that parlor of the Brooklyn house, the big room with the bay windows looking out on the river where she placed the Steinway grand. That was the place she had picked for him. Just like in LA where she put his studio below her bedroom so she could listen to him when he chose to work late at night, listen to the soft, hesitant playing as a new song grew. His voice when he tried the lyrics. She would, she decided, buy a very comfortable, very cozy couch to put in the bedroom and put it right in front of the balcony door so she could sit there and look out at the skyline of Manhattan and the bridge. And
again she envisioned snow, the peacefulness of a winter afternoon, the
quiet of the white blanket muting the traffic, mellowing the contours of New York.

Carefully she crept back into bed. Jon didn’t wake but turned and put his arms around her, muttering in his sleep, burying his face in her hair.

Naomi pulled up the covers and drifted off, the image of falling snow following her into her dreams.

chapter 20

I
n a strange way, Hamburg reminded her of New York. Naomi thought it was the weather. They had last been in Brooklyn for Christmas, and it had been gray and dark too. She recalled walking along the Promenade with Jon, a day after they had arrived from Halmar, to buy a Christmas tree for his mother’s house. It had been so miserable that her love for the place had considerably weakened for a moment.

Getting off the plane and standing on the tarmac of the small airport, she glanced up at the gray sky. Fine, misty rain settled on her face like a thin veil and made her hair instantly spring into curls.

A line of limousines and vans was waiting for them right next to the hangar, all of them with tinted panes, all of them in discreet, sober black, their drivers in immaculate uniforms.

She hadn’t been to Germany often. Her mother loved opera, and she loved Placido Domingo. They had come to Hamburg to see him a number of times, and her father had even debated acquiring a hotel here, stating that he kind of liked the town: it had the charm of an English place combined with the typical cleanliness and efficiency of Germany, and it was quite pretty. They had always stayed at a hotel overlooking the lake in the center of town. It had reminded her of Geneva, with the fountain and the panorama of the city surrounding the water; but there were no mountains in the distance, no landscape at all worth mentioning, only the big harbor with the huge overseas container ships. She remembered the narrow shopping streets fondly, similar to Bond Street in London or the old part of Geneva, but there were no outdoor restaurants and cafés; everything was turned inward, hiding from the cold.

It was July, and it still was cold and drizzly.

Shivering a little in her thin jacket, still used to the milder climate of Zürich and Munich, where they had stopped after Geneva, Naomi watched as the instruments were loaded carefully into the vans, Sal himself supervising the handling of Jon’s guitars, while Jon and Art greeted the
local promoter and a couple of people from the record company who had come out to welcome him and the band.

T
hey had parted from her parents in the lobby of the Geneva hotel while the bus was waiting for them, Sal standing in the door, nervously glancing at his watch.

“So when will you return to New York?” Olaf had asked, turned more toward Jon than her. “When will we see you there?” Jon, in a pleasant, easy tone, had replied that it would be another couple of weeks or maybe more, he could not tell. It depended on what Naomi wanted. Perhaps her heart was set on visiting some other places in Europe? Smiling at her, he had slung his arm around her shoulders. “Naples, babe? I haven’t been that far south in Italy yet. What do you think; would you like to go there? See your roots? We could take a vacation in the sun; I’d learn how to order my food in Italian from you. We could even hire a yacht to sail to Capri. We have some time before the US leg of the tour starts; we could take a vacation and get some rest.”

To which Lucia—a fine smile on her lips—added, “Or visit your family in Positano. Your uncles and aunts would be delighted to see you.”

Blushing, Naomi had mumbled that she’d been there, thank you, and yes, it was pretty, but no, not right now, and waved after her parents halfheartedly when they got into their cab. The thought of living in the same town with them seemed dire beyond all imagination.

Now, on the rainy Hamburg tarmac, Naomi thought that Naples would be just fine. It would be blistering hot, stinking of garbage, noisy, and filled with the exhaust fumes of Vespas; but it would also be full of flowers, sunshine, and good spirits. A wild, romantic longing for Ischia gripped her, for the narrow, winding roads around the island and the beach of Sant‘Angelo, for a dinner of mussels in one of the little trattorias along the pier in Porto. She even thought she could hear a silly, Italian song playing somewhere in the back of her mind.

Or Positano, and how long since she had been there. The scent of gorse and bougainvillea crept into her memory, the soft sound of the Mediterranean breeze rustling in the wisteria canopy of the patio, the whisper of the surf.

“We used to pick figs from the tree on the patio,” she said when Jon came over to her, “and eat them for breakfast. Then we climbed down those long, long stone steps to the beach and lazed away the day. There was a small restaurant right on the water, barely more than a deck and a kitchen; and two old women would cook whatever the fishermen brought home in their boats—shrimps, mussels, tiny fish—and toss them on a plate of pasta doused in olive oil, parsley, and garlic.”

He waited, his hands in his pockets, the collar of his leather jacket turned up to keep the rain away, wind blowing his hair into his eyes.

“I was as brown as a nut. And in the evening my uncles grilled fish for us, and there would be salad and fresh bread and lots of red wine.” Thoughtfully, she paused and tapped the tip of her shoe into the puddle that had formed at her feet. “It was really nice. We used to spend the summers there before I ran away with you.”

“Where? In Naples?”

She shook her head. “In Positano, on the other side of the Sorrento peninsula. Most of my mother’s family lives there. They only say they are from Naples because people overseas don’t know Positano.”

“Do you want to go?” Jon felt a crazy, wild impulse to see this place, to stand on that patio and look down at the gentle Mediterranean in the dusk of a warm summer night. He wondered if the stars looked different down there too, until he realized that Naples and DC were almost on the same latitude.

“We should go. I think we should go, Naomi. It would be lovely to see where your mother comes from.” He drew her into his arms. “And you. I’d finally find out if there are more girls with your looks and temper. Is it pretty down there, in… Positano?”

“Pretty?” Naomi drew a deep breath and slowly let it out. “It’s not pretty, Jon. It’s stunning, beautiful. If you drive there from Naples you have to cross the mountains, the peninsula, and then, well below, you see the little town, the colorful houses clinging to the hillside, all the way down to the shore. There’s only a small beach—the rest is steep cliffs and stone—and there are flowers everywhere, wonderful, wild flowers, and the scent mingles with the aroma of the sea; and at dusk you can watch the swallows flit along the rocks, hear their calls…” She sighed. “The water is so warm and soft, so gentle, dark blue, much darker than the Pacific, totally different from the North Atlantic. Everything is… kind, gentle, soft, just, lovely.”

“You’re homesick!” Surprised, Jon let go of her and took a step back so he could look at her. “You’re homesick for that place! Why in the world is this another secret I have to pry out of you, and again after a confrontation with your parents? Why do you make life so hard for yourself, my love? Why do you deny yourself all this: your family, your home? What is wrong with all that, Naomi?” He raised his hands in a gesture of supplication. “You come with me to see my family, you even buy a house in Brooklyn so we can live close to my mother and sister and brother, and yet you refuse your own, even those in Italy?”