Naomi was thinking much the same thing, and she gazed at him expectantly as he took his time in answering.
“I needed to be there. I couldn’t move away. It was unbearable, but still…”
“No!” Naomi knew what he was going to say before he drew his next breath. “No, Jon! Don’t say it, please. Please. Please don’t lay this burden on me, or on yourself. Come on, let’s clear the table.”
She began piling the dishes into stacks, the plates ringing dangerously with her abrupt movements.
Jon gripped her wrist. “Put that down. You have a terrible habit of dropping things when you’re agitated. I’ll do it. Sit.”
Silently, the others watched as he carried the tray inside, his tall figure moving carefully through the door.
“What was that all about?” Helen asked, “I’ve never seen him like that.”
Here it comes. She knew she would have to supply the answer sooner or later, so it might as well be now.
“He was going to say…” Naomi tasted the painful words on her lips, trying to put it in such a way that it would not sound too pathetic. “He was going to say he had hoped I would show up again at some point.”
She swallowed the bitterness in her throat and took another sip of champagne. “I went to see his concert in London last year.”
“Oh.” There was relief in Helen’s tone. “So you did go to him, in the end.”
Naomi chewed on that for a while.
“No,” she admitted. “I stood with a group of fans and watched him walk by. But I didn’t try to reach out to him.”
This was greeted by another lengthy stretch of silence. Kevin, eyeing her thoughtfully, opened another bottle of beer.
“So…are you getting married because of the boy? It doesn’t seem necessary; I know Jon would take care of him anyway.”
It felt like a knife, this sensible and sober question, and she drew back into herself, probing the pain, a sharp, searing thing driven right into her center.
“Kevin,” Valerie said.
Naomi rose and moved away from the table, her arms wrapped tightly around her waist. “I’m sorry, I’m so tired. It must be jet-lag. Please excuse me.”
She met Jon on her way into the house and went right past him. “Baby?” he asked, but she only shook her head.
“I think I’m going to retire. I’m truly exhausted. Will you stay here? I’ll take a cab back to the hotel.”
He stopped her. “Hey! Wait! Why are you running this time?”
“Nothing, love.” She tried to evade him, but he only held her closer. “I’m tired.”
“There’s something wrong here, and I want to know what happened. I’m not letting you go that easily, and you know it.”
“Jon.” She laid her arms around him. “Why, exactly, am I marrying you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because I’m good at making you write? Or because you like a certain stupidity in your men? Perhaps because you love me beyond all reason?” His body moved into hers suggestively. “Or maybe because I’m the only one you really want all the time, and you just can’t do without me? Are you getting weak right now, little beast? Do you want to get ready for me when I come to you later? Will you put on your diamonds and lie there and give me that outrageous, inviting look of yours, so tempting, so sweet?”
He kissed her in earnest then, right there in the hallway of his mother’s house, unconcerned that his family might see them. Holding her very tightly against him, he savored how she melted into his embrace.
“Well,” Helen remarked from the garden door. “This certainly doesn’t look like a business arrangement to me. Or at least it’s not the kind of arrangement Kevin had in mind. Stop it, you two, or at least find a more private place.”
They returned for breakfast, at Helen’s insistence. Jon grumbled all the way over the bridge, saying it was way too early to think about eating pancakes when they should still be in their nice, big hotel bed together. Naomi gazed out the car window at the Hudson below, and the mesmerizing skyline of the city in the early morning with a strange, new feeling of belonging, and for once, she did not respond to his ribald words. It was a rainy, windy morning, the water choppy and capped with white foam. A couple of barges made their way upriver, gulls in their wake, the men on them as small as toys.
A crowd of words danced in her mind, all of them striving to catch her attention, lining themselves up into rhymes like little soldiers ready for her inspection, and for an open-mouthed moment she even thought she could hear a melody weaving itself around their neat rows.
She turned to Jon just in time to see his amused gaze before he leaned back again and said, “Anyway, my mom’s coffee is so bad it tastes like old dishwater.”
It wasn’t true of course, as she had suspected. Joshua sat between his cousins in pajamas he proudly announced had been his father’s, and he had slept well in his old room too, and could he please stay here a while longer? After all, he was on summer break, and anyway he felt he wanted to attend Juilliard if they would have him, and not go on in Oxford. And live with his grand-mom, who was so much more fun than the family in Geneva and Toronto.
Naomi shot him a brief, sharp glance, and he shut up for a moment before adding, much in the same tone Jon had used in the car, “Besides, the bed at Oxford really sucked.”
Valerie suggested a walk to the Promenade to stretch their legs when it stopped raining. She wanted to chat without Jon sitting on Naomi’s shoulder all the time. Jon shot her a glare and took a breath to reply, but Naomi swiftly planted a kiss on his lips and pulled Val away.
“I’m going out with Joshua then!” he called after her. He made it sound like a threat, but she ignored him.
Walking beside the tall, sturdy woman she felt insignificant and exposed, all the more so since Val, in her outspoken manner picked up her harangue about the lost family as soon as they had left the house.
Naomi didn’t even try to argue. Val’s hurt was hidden well under her brisk voice and the glasses she pushed up on her nose until they almost looked like goggles, but it was still visible enough.
“A boy,” she said, leaning on the railing of the promenade, “a son of Jon’s. Our superstar, and here he is, with a grown son and an almost-wife. And a normal, simple woman too, not one of those wealthy, made-up ladies that normally swarm around him. How did you do it?”
“I didn’t do anything.” Valerie’s vehemence made her smile; it was a brisker version of Jon’s. “It just happened. We ran into each other…”
“You don’t run into Jon Stone,” Valerie interrupted. “No woman runs into him and gets to stay. There must be something different about you. He obsesses about you like crazy.”
This felt a little uncomfortable and she let it pass.
They had turned back to the street where Helen lived when Naomi stopped dead in her tracks. Val stopped to see what Naomi was looking at.
“Oh, you’ve discovered the Miller house. Pretty, isn’t it?”
It was. Naomi had a vision of them living there, right on the promenade, with the spectacular vista of Manhattan skyline from her bedroom, so close to his family, so near to the city, she felt it had been waiting for her. It was huge, set well back, with a yard of its own, surrounded by an old cast-iron fence overgrown with ivy and wild rose vines, a white three-story building from the last century.
“There would certainly be plenty of room there for everything you creative people need,” she heard Valerie say. “And even though it’s right here on the corner, it could be secured easily enough.”
“Is it for sale?” Naomi asked.
Valerie pushed up her glasses. “How the hell should I know? But does it matter? Jon always gets whatever he wants.”
Jon cooked dinner for them just to prove he could do it.
He announced that he had booked a box at the Met for the following night so Kevin could see his La Boheme after all.
“And it wasn’t easy, let me tell you. But I had the office take care of
it. What good is it being a star if you don’t get any of the benefits?”
“I bet you paid a fortune.” Valerie took the bowl of pasta from Joshua to carry it outside. “The thing has been sold out for months.”
Jon cut the bread into neat little diamonds with care. “You just need the right contacts. Whatever. We’ll be going to the Met tomorrow. And I’ll take you all out for dinner afterward. We’ll practice celebrating. Get out the nice clothes.”
Watching Naomi while they sat down for dinner, with Kevin home from work and the kids finally pried away from the piano, Jon was pleased. She fit in with his family as if she had known them all her life, and the mild derisiveness his mother and sister treated him with was like a natural habitat for her, a way to deal with the life and circumstances he had to offer. Sitting in his mother’s garden, chilled white wine in their glasses and plates heaped with food, he felt a deep satisfaction settle in his heart.
“So did you get to see the Statue of Liberty? Did you go all the way up?” Naomi was asking Joshua.
“No.” He shot Jon a glance. “I changed my mind. I wanted to go to Juilliard once more. They gave me a private audition. I played for the masters.”
Naomi almost knocked over the wine bottle in her excitement. “How did it go? What did they say?”
She saw Jon’s small, satisfied grin and knew.
“You got accepted! Juilliard accepted you!”
“In a manner of speaking.” Joshua squirmed a little in his seat. “They want to see more of my compositions, but yes.” “You could live here,” Helen suggested. “Your father’s old room is yours, if you like. There’s the piano, and I would be so happy.”
Joshua glanced at his mother. “If I had my choice, I would go to Juilliard. But it is even farther from home than Oxford.”
It didn’t hurt as much as she thought it would. “Not that much farther. And I would feel good knowing you would be with family and not alone on a campus. But how did you do it? They don’t give private auditions just like that, do they?”
He said that he didn’t know, but somehow it had helped to have Jon along, because the head of the school had welcomed them himself and been exceedingly friendly.
Kevin gave Jon a knowing look, but got no reaction.
Joshua preferred staying at the house to the hotel, which gave them the kind of liberty they had not been granted since they were in London on their own.
It had turned warm again, with many tourists out for a stroll, just like them.
“I like it a lot better here than in Los Angeles,” Naomi stated. “People here are interesting, and somehow it seems more…more European? They don’t seem to be so shallow and self-centered. There’s more of an intellectual depth. And the music scene! Will you show me the places where you started out?” Something else occurred to her. “You never told me how you came to work with Sean. Where did you meet? Was it here in New York? Or after you moved to LA?”
He motioned her into a bar, where they sat in a quiet corner and ordered some wine. “Funny you should ask that. Just the other day I was thinking that really, besides the band, I don’t have any friends at all. It’s a lonely business.” He paused, toying with his glass, deep in thought. “Sean and I met when I was just starting out. He was playing a nightclub, sitting in a corner tinkling away on a battered piano while the people around him talked and drank and paid no attention to him at all. I had one of my very first public appearances there, God, I remember I was so nervous and hadn’t the faintest idea what I was supposed to do. There was a tiny little stage with barely enough room for the stool and the mike and me, and I had only a handful of songs in my bag. And there was Sean, with long hair and a ragged shirt, a cigarette hanging from his lips, and he said, ‘Hey, you look as if you’ve never sung to an audience before. Let me tell you, they won’t listen, no matter what you do.’ But they listened alright, at least after the first song.” Jon grinned in reminiscence. “Then Sean came up to me and said, ‘Give me that music.’ And he played along with me and it worked beautifully. When I went to Pittsburgh for my first real gig, I asked him to come along. One day we were doing a stint in a club in Greenwich Village, right here in New York, and during the intermission Sal walked up and offered to manage us. God, we were so young.”
He sat in silence for a while, watching the other customers. It seemed like an enchanted moment. Either he was not recognized at all or the other people had collectively chosen to ignore him.
“From then on, we rapidly climbed the ladder to success, and a few years later, with the band complete, we had our first European tour, after doing two huge rounds through the States. I will never know why, but Sal had the idea of including Geneva. Everything was settled and the dates fixed, and then he calls me one day from the office, very excited, to tell me about an envelope he just received.” A small, thoughtful smile appeared on his lips.
“He ordered me to come down right away because he had something to show me, and he thought I would enjoy it. So I went, even though I had other things on my mind. I wanted to go out and hang in a Hollywood bar and maybe find a date.”
Naomi raised her eyebrows at him. “Really. Trying to find a date. You? Having trouble finding a date?”
“Don’t interrupt. Now I’m getting to the best part.” A small wave of his hand brought the waitress over. Jon asked for another bottle of wine and some snacks. “I walk into the office, and there’s Sal, and he makes me sit down and hands over those fateful pages. Suddenly my stomach was tied up in knots, my heart skipped a beat, my palms were sweaty, and I think I stopped breathing for a moment.”
“Jon.” She laughed a little, embarrassed by his tale. He had never told her about that day before.
“Well, that’s how it was. I recall it as clearly as if it happened yesterday. Sal hovered over my shoulder, asking what do you think, what do you think, I can just hear your music here, oh, whoever she is, she has plunged right into your heart and found you. And that was the truth of it.”
Their wine arrived in a silver cooler.
“I took those lyrics home, the need for a date forgotten. Every time I had to stop at a red light I looked at them. The melody was right there, I could hear it so clearly. The song was ready by the time we were on the plane, the band was toying with it even then, on the flight. Sal had set up an appointment with the author and wanted to meet her but I said no; I wanted to do it myself, and alone. There was some magic here, and I didn’t want to ruin it by having my manager around. So I sat in that lobby, not knowing what to expect, and then, through the sunshine, comes this wonderful vision, this girl in jeans and her silly little white blouse. That’s when I realize those lyrics were written from the soul, from one that reaches out to mine and touches me in a way I had never thought anyone could. Yes, and I knew I would have to hold on, even at the price of my life. Hold on to that beauty, that lovely, graceful beauty, with my soul residing within. Mine, my very own, made for me.”
His recital made Naomi shift uncomfortably on the leather couch.
“I called Sal,” she said, changing the subject. “There’s something I need done before we get married, and I need him for it. He’s coming here tomorrow. And Jon?”
He curiously looked up at her tone.
“No more sex before the wedding. I want to feel like a bride when I come to our marriage bed.”
Jon laughed.
Naomi was less than happy when Jon informed her that Russ had called and needed him back in Los Angeles for some changes to the recordings, but there was little that could be done. Jon offered to take her back with him, but she firmly refused. She had spent enough time gallivanting around the world, and it was high time she found her way home. Joshua was not ready to leave New York yet, and Helen had a few appointments to keep before she could travel, so two days later they went back to the airport, where they boarded separate jets and flew off in different directions. She watched the Gulf Stream with him aboard taxi onto the runway and take off, turn in the air, and spe
ed off to the West, then boarded her own and settled down for the flight across the Atlantic.
The air was so different in Norway. Even the sky felt lower. It was a rainy and cool afternoon, and Naomi stood at the entrance to the Seaside, trying to imagine how Jon must have felt that day before he stepped inside for the first time. She tried to capture the sentiment that had driven him to make that lonely trip across oceans and time and seek her out. The magnitude of his act washed over her, unfathomable and utterly driven as it had been.
Christi came out to meet her, a wide smile on her face, followed closely by Andrea. It felt good to see their faces again and to be welcomed back to the place she had come to think of as her home.
The apartment was clean and airy. Someone had put flowers and fruit on the table and opened the door to the deck. For the first time in a long while, she was alone again here in Halmar, back in the timeless quiet and solitude of her former life, and she let the feeling of peace wash over her, the stillness settling around her after the turmoil of the past few weeks.
With a sigh she dropped down on the couch and sat for a while, purse still in hand, and stared out over the bay and the mountains, hung now with low, grey clouds that were drizzling a fine, misty rain down onto the landscape. The slate grey water, capped with little white breakers, sloshed under the deck, making a rhythmic, sucking sound.
The certainty that she was in the one place where the world could not touch her made her relax, and even though she had slept on the plane for quite a while, drowsiness overwhelmed her.
When she sank into her bed, tired from jet-lag and the excitement of the past days and weeks, she stretched out her hand to the empty side of the bed where she had come to expect warmth and comfort and tried to figure out what time of day it was in LA now. This going back and forth across continents confused her, and she fell asleep while mulling over time zones.
The Distant Shore (Stone Trilogy) Page 19